Is David Muir Married? Only to the Job, One Reporter Wrote

David Muir has never been married. The ABC World News Tonight anchor has no children, has never confirmed a girlfriend or a boyfriend, and has not discussed his dating life in an interview in more than two decades at the network.

He has anchored ABC’s evening newscast since September 2014. Earlier this month he was in Lower Manhattan alongside Diane Sawyer and Robin Roberts for the network’s live special marking 25 years since the September 11 attacks. He turns 53 in November.

The closest thing to an answer on the record

In 2011, Muir was 37 and anchoring the weekend edition of ABC’s evening news. Donnie Webb spent time with him in the newsroom for a profile in Central New York Magazine, and Muir told him he often worked seven days a week, joking that his office stayed neat because he was never in it. Webb dealt with the rest in half a sentence. Muir was single, he wrote, and “wears all the appearances of being married to his job.” Fifteen years and two promotions later, nothing reported since has changed that picture.

The focus on the job goes back a long way. Growing up on Onondaga Hill outside Syracuse, Muir wrote to Ron Curtis, an anchor at the local station, at around 12 to ask how a person got a job like his. Curtis wrote back that the field was competitive and that there was room for the right person. Muir kept the typed reply and still has it in a folder at home. A childhood friend, Heather Rich Puchta, told the same magazine that he used to say he was going to be the next Dan Rather.

Who has David Muir been linked to?

Three names have circulated over the years, plus one rumor that never came with a name attached. None of them holds up.

In September 2015, Kate Dries, then deputy editor at Jezebel, published a post written as though she were Muir’s girlfriend. It ran the day after Page Six reported that he had returned from Rome short-tempered with his crew, and Dries wrote hers as a joke at that item’s expense. The two were never a couple.

Photographs of Muir out with ABC correspondent Gio Benitez around the same period set off speculation that they were together. Benitez proposed to Tommy DiDario in Paris that September and married him in Miami the following April.

Kelly Ripa is the friend most often mistaken for something more. She has told the story of how it began, when she looked up Muir’s work email and wrote to compliment his reporting. Ripa has been married to Mark Consuelos since 1996.

The unnamed one is a 2022 rumor connecting Muir to an Australian swimwear executive. No outlet with reporting behind it has ever supported it.

Muir has never publicly discussed his sexual orientation, and no one close to him has spoken about it on the record.

Does David Muir have children?

No. The family he talks about is his sister’s. Rebecca Muir runs a farm near Skaneateles Lake with her husband, and they have four children. In 2017 Muir posted a photo with two of his nieces and a nephew after sending them back to school, called them his squad, and asked for the fourth next time.

The dogs and the house upstate

He has had two dogs. The first, a schnauzer named Pryor, lasted about a week in a Manhattan apartment before Muir called his sister and the two met halfway so the dog could live on the farm instead. The second is a German shorthaired pointer named Axel, who has had the same walker for six years. Muir told People last year that strangers stop the walker to ask whether that is David Muir’s dog, and that between the two of them the dog is the more famous, which he thinks is fair.

He bought a house on Skaneateles Lake in 2019. His mother had moved to the town after his parents divorced and his sister farms nearby, so the purchase set him down among family rather than away from it.

Why reporters keep coming up empty

The people around him do not talk. When the Daily Mail went to Skaneateles last year and asked neighbors about his life, one of them, Cheryl Foster, confirmed that he has a dog and declined the rest, saying his private life is “no one’s business.”

Muir notices the interest without adding to it. His Instagram bio lists his job and nothing else. He has said friends forward him the TikTok edits calling him Daddy and that he takes it as a compliment.

One of the few glimpses he has offered of life at home came in that same conversation with People. His best recent hours, he said, were spent on the dock at the lake house at nightfall in the rain, waiting with Axel for a beaver that had moved into the boathouse.

Quick answers