Suzanne Ircha has been married to New York Jets owner Woody Johnson since 2009 and now goes by Suzanne Johnson. Before that, she sold stocks on Wall Street and took time off to try to become an actress in Los Angeles.
On Sept. 11, 2001, she worked for Sandler O’Neill & Partners, an investment bank on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center’s south tower. She had not reached the office when the attack began. Of the 24 people on the firm’s stock desk, 20 died, and she was its only surviving salesperson.
These days she is a quieter presence. She has not posted on Instagram or X since September 2022, and many of the comments under her old posts now come from Jets fans asking the family to sell the team. Sunday’s loss in Kansas City dropped coach Aaron Glenn’s record with the Jets to 5-21.
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Woody Johnson’s wife at a glance
| Fact | Details |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Suzanne Ircha |
| Married name | Suzanne Johnson, also listed as Suzanne Ircha Johnson |
| Husband | Woody Johnson, Jets owner and former U.S. ambassador to Britain |
| Children | Robert Wood “Brick” Johnson V (born 2006) and Jack Johnson (born 2008) |
| Age | Not confirmed, likely 59 to 63 |
Growing up in Manhattan’s Ukrainian community
Her father, Stefan Ircha, came to the United States alone in 1947, a 21-year-old refugee from Ternopil in western Ukraine with $5 and no English, she told NFL.com’s Judy Battista in 2022. He went on to run a small construction business. At a Ukrainian dance he met Marie, the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants. Suzanne grew up inside the city’s Ukrainian community and had no American friends until high school.
Money was tight, and her father pushed her to succeed. When she was 17 or 18, he sat her down with advice she repeated to Avenue magazine in 2012:
“You won’t have any trouble finding boyfriends, but just in case your Prince Charming doesn’t show up, make sure you have a back-up plan.”
At Cornell she started in engineering, switched to business and graduated in 1985. “With that kind of background,” she said in a 2017 Telegraph profile, “you don’t expect to just get things handed to you.”
Bear Stearns, then a try at acting
Summer jobs cold-calling for Bear Stearns led to a full-time offer after college. By 26 she had made her first million selling stocks to institutional investors.
According to the Telegraph profile, her real ambition was show business, and she persuaded her firm to give her a year off to try to become an actress and talk-show host in Los Angeles. Her few roles date from the mid-1990s:
- a waitress in Pontiac Moon (1994)
- a “woman assistant” in Return to Two Moon Junction (1995)
- an uncredited go-go dancer in a 1995 episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- a Confederation pilot in the live-action scenes of the video game Wing Commander IV, released in 1996
None of it became steady work, and her former boss and mentor, Herman Sandler, later brought her back to New York to join Sandler O’Neill, the bank he had co-founded.
What happened to her desk on 9/11
She has given two versions of that morning. Speaking to Fortune in November 2001, she said a client breakfast kept her away and saved her life, and that she saw the towers burning from a taxi on the FDR Drive. In 2012 she told Avenue she was running late after a night out with clients and was on the phone with Sandler when she heard the explosion. The last thing she remembers him saying, she told the Telegraph, was “Goddamn terrorists” before the line went dead.
Sandler O’Neill lost 66 people that day, about 40% of the firm, including Sandler. Fortune’s Katrina Brooker caught up with her in mid-November, when four people were working the rebuilt stock desk from one small room on 48th Street. Suzanne was upbeat until Brooker asked about the old trading floor.
She had been one of the few women on it, she said, and the men treated her like a little sister. They teased her about boyfriends and messed up her pencils because they knew she liked them arranged just so.
“I used to laugh so much at work. That desk was my family. Tom Crotty will be the hardest for me to get over. He sat next to me.”
She looked at the empty space beside her and whispered, “I miss them.” Then she covered her face and began to sob.
Leaving Wall Street and meeting Woody Johnson
Of the months that followed, she said in 2012, “I worked through it all. I just went into ‘fix’ mode.” Wall Street lost its appeal for her after that, the Telegraph reported, and she left finance.
In 2004 she met Woody Johnson, an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune who had owned the Jets since 2000. Her 2012 account places the introduction at a Michael Milken conference in Beverly Hills. “A girlfriend told me that Woody Johnson is single. Woody called me two days later,” she told Avenue.
Their first son, Robert Wood Johnson V, was born in March 2006. He goes by Brick, after Jets offensive tackle D’Brickashaw Ferguson. Jack followed in October 2008. The couple married at the Brick Church in Manhattan the next year, with Donald and Melania Trump among the guests.
“I really miss the relationships,” she told New York Family magazine in 2014, looking back on finance. Of marriage and motherhood, she said, “It’s just different, it was time.”
Gang Green’s first lady
The New York Post called her the “Gang Green first lady” in 2012. On game days she played host in the owner’s box at MetLife Stadium, where her guests ranged from society friends to Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon. “I try to create interesting mixes,” she said.
Female fans were her other project. In November 2011 she hosted a women’s apparel pop-up before a Jets game against the Patriots, telling WWD she had wanted a Jets jersey and had “been wearing little boys’ small for too many years.”
Four years in London
Suzanne is close to Melania Trump, who told the Telegraph in 2017 that she is “a powerhouse.” That year President Trump named Woody his ambassador to the United Kingdom, and in November 2017 Suzanne was beside him when he presented his credentials to Queen Elizabeth II.
The family lived at Winfield House, the ambassador’s residence in Regent’s Park, until 2021. When the Queen died in September 2022, Suzanne posted that it had been “a true honor” to serve and to spend time with her.
Leading the Jets’ Ukraine relief
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, three years after her father’s death, she told The Associated Press that he “must be turning in his grave right now. This would’ve killed him.”
She led the team’s response. The Jets pledged $1 million, paid out in $100,000 donations to Ukrainian causes including Razom for Ukraine and the scouting group Plast. In July 2022 the family visited an orphanage and refugee shelters in Krakow, Poland. She told NFL.com that for the first time on a family trip, her sons hugged her at the end and said, “Thank you for bringing me.”
The 2024 locker room report
In December 2024, The Athletic reported that current and former players and coaches said Woody, Suzanne and their sons had criticized players in the locker room. The incidents it described in detail involved Woody and the boys. After a Halloween win over Houston, Brick handed a game ball to receiver Garrett Wilson before Aaron Rodgers could give one to interim coach Jeff Ulbrich. The report also said Woody cited Madden video game ratings in personnel talks, which employees believed reflected his sons’ influence. The Jets disputed the claims about the sons, and Woody later called the story a “smear piece.”
Where she is now
Her Instagram bio still calls her an “Owner of New York Jets with Woody Johnson.” The franchise belongs to Woody and his brother Christopher, and Woody has been back in charge as chairman since 2021.
This summer the couple hosted guests for the World Cup final in a MetLife Stadium suite named for both of them, and on Sept. 29 she was photographed with Woody at a Manhattan party for Sylvester Stallone’s new book.
Why is her name linked to Jeffrey Epstein?
In July 2021, Business Insider reported that a 1997 address book belonging to Jeffrey Epstein listed her under her maiden name, Suzanne Ircha, along with contact details for her and her siblings. Appearing among its hundreds of names is not evidence of wrongdoing. She declined to comment through a spokesperson.
How old is Woody Johnson’s wife?
She has never made her birth date public. Fortune described her as being in her mid-30s in late 2001, and the New York Post gave her age as 45 in October 2012. A typical Cornell graduate of 1985 was born around 1963. Together, those clues put her at about 59 to 63. The July 21, 1964, birth date that circulates online comes from Memory Alpha, a fan-edited Star Trek wiki, and she has never confirmed it.
