Meredith Vieira’s husband Richard Cohen dies after living with multiple sclerosis for more than 50 years
Richard Cohen and Meredith Vieira are pictured together in 2012. Cohen
By Lisa Respers France, CNN
(CNN) — Richard Cohen, a journalist who was married to former “The View” co-host Meredith Vieira for 38 years, has died after living with multiple sclerosis for decades, it was announced Tuesday on “Today.”
He was 76.
Cohen passed away on Christmas Eve and “Today’ co-host Hoda Kotb said that he was “surrounded by his family and love.”
He and Vieira shared three children: sons Benjamin, 36 and Gabriel, 34, and daughter Lily, 32.
According to Hotb, the family had gathered around Cohen at Thanksgiving with concern he was in ill health, but “instead they got a glorious month with their dad.”
“Today’s” Savannah Guthrie said Vieira is “in really good spirits.”
“She was such a beautiful and devoted wife to Richard and he adored Meredith,” Guthrie said. “And hanging out with them, they were like the most fun and entertaining, irreverent, cool couple you could hang out with.”
Cohen told Yahoo Life in 2019 that both his father and his father’s mother both had multiple sclerosis. He himself was diagnosed at the age of 25, he said.
“I dropped a coffeepot for no reason. I fell off a curb for no reason. I noticed a little numbness in my leg,” he said at the time. “It hit my eyesight fairly quickly, but other than that, I was very active physically and I thought I was really beating it. I was living in denial.”
He had been living with the condition for a decade when he first met Vieira, and he said he told her about his diagnosis soon after they started dating.
“I sort of learned the hard way to get it on the table,” he said. “She didn’t blink.”
Vieira explained why that was to Yahoo Life.
“I’ve always been of the school of thought that you could get hit by a bus the next day, any one of us could,” she said. “It certainly wasn’t enough to scare me off.”
She was supportive of him during his longtime career with CBS News, as well as two cancer diagnoses.
Cohen wrote several books about his health and also advocated for those living with chronic illness.
“I think too many people stay closed and don’t tell the truth,” he said on “Today” in 2014.
CNN has reached out to representatives for Vieira for comment.
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