Who Is Amy Bennett McIntosh, Jeffrey Toobin’s Wife?

Amy Bennett McIntosh has spent more than three decades in American education policy, with senior roles at the New York State Education Department, the U.S. Department of Education, and the City University of New York. She is also widely known as the wife of CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.

At a Glance

Harvard and a Marriage That Predates Her Policy Career

McIntosh graduated from Harvard College in 1980 with a degree in economics. She met Jeffrey Toobin while both worked at The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, though they were never classmates. Toobin graduated two years after she did, in 1982, so their time at the paper only overlapped for about two years. She went on to earn an MBA from Harvard Business School, and the two married on May 31, 1986, a Saturday. The New York Times ran its wedding announcement the following day, in its regular Sunday weddings section. They have two children, a daughter born in 1991 and a son born in 1992.

Two Decades in Corporate Marketing

McIntosh spent the next two decades in corporate marketing and management. At American Express, she finished her time there as senior vice president of marketing for the Consumer Card Group. She later became president and general manager of the Consumer Internet Business at Verizon, then chief executive of Zagat Survey, and finally a senior vice president at Dun and Bradstreet.

She left the private sector in 2004. What she did immediately afterward is thin in the public record. CUNY’s own announcement of her later appointment credits her, in general terms, with management experience at the New York City Department of Education alongside her state and federal work, though it does not give specific dates or titles for that period. The record becomes clear again in October 2010, when she joined the New York State Education Department.

New York’s Teacher Evaluation Fight

McIntosh joined the state education department as a senior fellow with the Regents Research Fund, a fellowship paid for privately rather than by the state, working under education commissioner John King. New York had recently won a federal Race to the Top grant, and the teacher evaluation system built around that grant was already facing real difficulties. Her job was to help run it. A grant program she oversaw for differentiated teacher pay and career ladders eventually reached 221 school districts and 42,000 teachers.

She left for a job in Washington in December 2013. King told his staff in an email that the department was losing her talent and wise counsel.

Managing a Federal Education Budget

By January 2014, McIntosh had moved to the U.S. Department of Education as principal deputy assistant secretary for P-12 policy, later rising to acting assistant secretary in the Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development. She oversaw a share of an annual discretionary education budget of roughly $78 billion and helped shape policy around the Every Student Succeeds Act, the law that replaced No Child Left Behind in December 2015. Her office also built a teacher equity planning requirement covering all 50 states and helped 18 states expand access to publicly funded preschool.

CUNY and Her Current Work

In June 2017, CUNY named McIntosh associate vice chancellor for academic strategy. Chancellor James B. Milliken pointed to her background across the federal, state, and city education systems in announcing the appointment.

She has since taken on a range of board and advisory roles. These include EAB, an education research and technology firm; PowerSchool Group, an education software company; Education Trust New York, an education equity nonprofit; and the Macaulay Honors College Foundation at CUNY. She is also part of Extraordinary Women on Boards, a network for corporate board members, serves as board secretary of an off-Broadway theater company, and chaired the founding New York board of a selective national program that places college graduates as teachers in high-need public schools.

Jeffrey Toobin’s Own Career, and the Scandals Attached to It

Toobin, born in 1960, wrote for The New Yorker from 1993 to 2020 and served as CNN’s chief legal analyst from 2002 to 2022. His books on the O.J. Simpson trial and the Clinton Lewinsky scandal were later adapted into seasons of FX’s American Crime Story.

He also had an affair with attorney Casey Greenfield that continued on and off for years. Greenfield gave birth to his son in March 2009, and Toobin did not initially acknowledge paternity. A court ordered DNA test later confirmed he was the father, and the custody case that followed played out in Manhattan Family Court, reaching a resolution by around 2012.

In October 2020, The New Yorker suspended and then fired Toobin after he exposed himself during a Zoom call with colleagues. He apologized publicly and said he believed his camera was off at the time. He returned to CNN in 2021 and left the network in August 2022. No public statement from McIntosh appears anywhere in the coverage of either event.

Common Questions About Amy Bennett McIntosh