Since 1995, viewers have watched Deborah Norville deliver a unique blend of news and entertainment
as anchor of Inside Edition.
Through sheer talent and tenacity, she was able to overcome the obstacles fate threw in her path.
This is the untold true story of Deborah Norville.
Deborah Norville's big break came in 1989 when she was brought onto NBC's Today show.
Norville's addition to the show was controversial from the get-go, with press reports claiming
she was pushing out beloved anchor Jane Pauley.
In a 1989 column, Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales wrote that watching Norville sitting
on the set with Pauley and co-anchor Bryant Gumbel was the equivalent of looking at a
broken marriage with, quote, "the homewrecker right there."
Norville told the Chicago Tribune that simply wasn't true, that Gumbel and Pauley had been,
quote, "absolutely supportive" and her refusal to comment on the rumors was at the behest
of NBC brass.
When Pauley eventually did leave Today later that year, she said,
"It has hurt to see two of my friends, Bryant and Deborah, assigned roles in this that they did not play."
But the narrative was set.
Norville was thought to have engineered Pauley's exit in a coup, and as the Los Angeles Times put it:
"[Jane Pauley] was taking the fall day after day as ratings dropped."
Just 14 months after Norville joined the show, she was gone.
After Norville welcomed her first child in March 1991, Katie Couric was brought in as
a temporary replacement until Norville's return, scheduled for April 29, 1991.
On April 5, however, The New York Times reported that NBC had changed its tune.
Norville was not returning, and Couric was now her permanent replacement.
Following her brief and controversial tenure on Today, new mom Deborah Norville feared
her broadcasting career was kaput.
After NBC announced she wasn't coming back, The New York Times reported that she said
she was not sure if she'd ever work at NBC News again.
Her agent told the Times he was reluctant to define Norville's situation as a "leave,"
saying he, quote, "wouldn't categorize it as anything."
Looking back at that painful period in her life, Norville told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
"At the age of 31 - that's how young I was - my career was over.
Tie a string around it and put it up in the attic because it's done."
However, she wasn't done.
Soon after, she landed a job at ABC Radio and then, in 1993, became a correspondent
for the CBS newsmagazine Street Stories.
Norville told the Hartford Courant,
"I knew I'd be back.
A lot of people didn't.
Never dreamed.
But I'm back and I'm strong.
Stronger than I ever was."
In that interview, she also defiantly fired back at those who had criticized her, telling the paper,
"They threw the best they had at me.
They took their best shots, their most powerful punches, and I'm still standing."
Norville jumped ship from CBS in 1995 to pursue a new opportunity outside the realm of network television.
When Inside Edition host Bill O'Reilly departed for a primetime show at Fox News, the anchor
slot at the syndicated weekday show was vacant.
As the Los Angeles Times reported, Norville was tapped to fill it.
She fired back at claims that Inside Edition was nothing but tabloid television.
Norville told the Times,
"We are a legitimate news program.
People attach the label tabloid to Inside Edition and the others.
That we'll all just throw anything on television.
But that isn't true."
Speaking with the South Florida Sun Sentinel, Norville admitted that her past difficulties
led her to an epiphany:
"When your career blows up in your face, you take the blinders off."
The business of broadcast news was changing, she explained, with stories once considered
"tabloid" now seen as mainstream.
In the same interview, Norville had this to say:
"Some people say I'm throwing away my credibility.
But my credibility doesn't come from being on NBC or CBS.
It comes from the work I do.
If I continue to do honest, fair work, which is not prejudicial, where's the risk?"
In 2006, Norville spoke with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about her move to Inside Edition.
By that time, she'd been with the show for just over a decade.
She joked about the show's tabloid-style stories, revealing she'd learned not to take herself too seriously.
Norville told the outlet,
"When Katie Holmes had the baby, I jokingly said to my producer, 'Would it be inappropriate
for my lead to be, "Our long national nightmare is over?"'
He said, 'No, save that for Brangelina.'"
However, Norville had become circumspect about the somewhat unique role that she and Inside
Edition fulfill for television viewers.
She told the newspaper,
"But that's the way I feel about it.
I guess we have to tell the people, but do we have to dwell on it?
The answer apparently is yes, we do."
While she admitted she'd, quote, "never say never" if a network news gig was offered to
her, she pointed out that the two key factors in getting hired for those jobs are, quote,
"recognizability and likability."
In her case, she joked,
"[T]hey all knew who I was, and they hated me deeply [...] I never thought I'd work in the business again."
Deborah Norville is so passionate about sewing, knitting, and needlepoint that she even has
her own branded line of yarn.
However, her hobby was once something she had to keep on the down-low.
As Norville told Woman's Day, she recalled being told by her bosses:
"[B]eing a mom was a 'career negative' for a broadcast journalist.
It wasn't something the brass wanted me to talk about.
You can imagine how thrilled they would have been to have me discussing knitting, sewing and crocheting."
As a result, she spent years keeping her "passion for needle arts" under wraps.
However, Norville had come to a point when she declared,
"[T]he heck with that.
I'm going to be who I am, and that's someone who loves doing crafty things."
For Norville, needlework is therapeutic.
It's also her way of letting go of all the, quote, "insanity of life in the big city."
"In three, two, one, let's crochet!"
Deborah Norville isn't embarrassed to admit her obsession with knitting and crocheting
can sometimes spill over into her work.
In 2012, Norville joked to The Hill,
"You'll see some red thread on me on the show and be like, 'That's what Deb's working on."
So keen was Norville to spread her gospel of the healing power of needlework that she
offered to share her knowledge of knitting with some other famous folks.
She even singled out a few celebrities.
Norville told The Hill,
"I'd love to give the Obama girls [lessons].
And probably Michelle, too.
And I'll tell you why - because when you knit, you totally de-stress.
I would imagine Michelle Obama has a somewhat stressful life."
A sharp-eyed viewer of Inside Edition may have saved Deborah Norville's life.
In a video shared on the show's YouTube channel, Norville explained that a viewer noticed something
abnormal on the side of the anchor's neck.
Noville said it was a lump, and admitted to never having noticed it before.
She then had a doctor examine it.
When the diagnosis came in, Norville revealed,
"It was nothing, a thyroid nodule."
For a few years, it remained nothing - until it wasn't.
When she had it checked out subsequently, her doctor revealed the lump was "a very localized
form of cancer" that had to be surgically removed.
In a later video, she detailed the surgery, revealing that most of her thyroid glands
were removed as a result.
As Norville explained, the procedure was "routine" but contained an element of risk, given that
the area where the thyroid is located is also where the nerves that control your voice box are.
"And let's face it, I talk for a living, so it was very, very scary for me."
Luckily, everything went well.
After the surgery, she told CBS This Morning she sounded, quote, "more or less like me."
Plenty of celebrities, including everyone from Kim Kardashian to Bill Nye the Science
Guy, have appeared on Dancing With the Stars.
And according to Deborarh Norville, she's long been on the show's wish list.
In a 2006 interview with The Ledger, Norvilled admitted,
"They asked me twice and twice I turned them down.
I don't think it's something that someone who works in what's supposed to be the credibility
business ought to be doing."
The real crime, she implied, was that viewers wouldn't get to watch her strut her stuff
as she foxtrotted and quickstepped her way to the mirrorball trophy.
The way Norville saw it, she worried that anyone would take her seriously as a journalist
if they saw her dancing the merengue on TV.
Norville told The Ledger,
"[Turning down Dancing With the Stars] was saying no to potentially millions of extra
viewers, but you have to sleep with yourself at night."
Count Deborah Norville among the celebrities to have spent time in the slammer.
However, the circumstances involved in Norville going to jail were not typical.
Back in 2000, she spent a week incarcerated in a North Carolina jail - not because she
committed a crime, but for an Inside Edition segment.
Recalling the women she encountered during her stint in jail, Norville had this to say,
"There was nothing happening while these women were behind bars that was going to help them
make better decisions going forward."
Norville then added:
"What they really needed were decision-making classes that would enable them to not choose
the wrong path repeatedly."
Norville admitted that spending a week in jail was physically harder than she ever could have anticipated.
However, she also said her jail experience was, quote, "emotionally more fulfilling"
than she ever could have expected.
March 2020 marked a special occasion for Deborah Norville: It was her 25th anniversary as anchor
of Inside Edition.
When she took the job back in 1995, many expressed skepticism about what was viewed as her descent
into trashy tabloid TV after her plunge from the lofty heights of the Today show.
Evidently, this career shift has worked out, and her days of morning TV drama are long behind her.
In speaking about her anniversary, Norville told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
"I'm feeling happy and good with this lovely celebration."
After a quarter-century, she had clearly become comfortable with Inside Edition and where
it fits in the television firmament.
In her interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Norville explained,
"We don't pretend we're telling you everything that happened.
[...] We provide stuff that is new and different and fun and uplifting.
A big part of the secret sauce is that final story.
We want you to feel better about your day."
The show had also given her the kind of work-life balance that's tough to come by in the world
of network news.
Norville told the newspaper,
"I could drop the kids off at school.
I couldn't pick them up but I could get home, cook dinner and put them to bed."
Norville's career has certainly experienced its ups and downs over the years, but she's
made some pretty solid cash along the way.
Back when she parted ways with Today in 1991, a New York Times report cited her annual salary
as being somewhere in the $1 million range.
Since then, Norville has apparently done quite well for herself, with the Celebrity Net Worth
site estimating her Inside Edition salary to be $4 million per year.
In addition, the site estimates that Norville's total net worth is $18 million.
In any case, it's a safe bet that money probably isn't an issue in Norville's household, given
that her husband, Karl Wellner, appears to be pretty wealthy in his own right.
In a 2009 interview with Elite Traveler, Wellner discussed his role as president and CEO of
Papamarkou Wellner Asset Management Inc., which has been described as a "highly regarded
wealth management firm for the elite."
As Wellner explained, the firm represents about 120 clients, advising them on "several
billion dollars of assets."
And while Wellner's net worth doesn't appear to be public knowledge, helping rich people
turn their money into even more money has typically been a vocation that pays pretty well.
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