Jeanine Ferris Pirro (born June 2, 1951) is an American television host, lawyer, and author who has been serving as the United States attorney for the District of Columbia since May 2025. Pirro is a former judge, prosecutor, and politician in the state of New York.
Pirro was elected as a judge of the Westchester County (New York) Court in 1990. In 1993, she was elected to the position of Westchester County district attorney. She is the first woman to be elected to either of those positions. As district attorney, she gained visibility in cases of domestic abuse and crimes against the elderly. Pirro was re-elected district attorney in 1997 and 2001. She briefly sought the Republican nomination for United States Senate to run against Hillary Clinton in 2006, but dropped out to run as the Republican candidate for New York Attorney General; she lost the general election to Democrat Andrew Cuomo.
From 2008 to 2011, Pirro hosted a weekday television show entitled Judge Jeanine Pirro on The CW. From 2011 to 2022, she hosted Justice with Judge Jeanine on Fox News Channel. She has authored seven books, including Liars, Leakers, and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy (2018). Following the 2020 presidential election, Pirro made false claims of voting machine fraud. In 2022, she became a co-host of The Five, a position she held until May 2025. She was also a frequent contributor to NBC News, including regular appearances on The Today Show.
Pirro was named as a defendant in a February 2021 defamation lawsuit by Smartmatic. She was among the Fox News hosts named in the Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network defamation lawsuit for broadcasting false statements about the plaintiff company's voting machines. Fox News settled the case for $787.5 million and was required to acknowledge that the broadcast statements were false.
On May 8, 2025, President Trump named her as the interim United States attorney for the District of Columbia to succeed Ed Martin. She was sworn in on May 28, and confirmed to the full position on August 2, 2025.
Early life Jeanine Ferris was born and raised in Elmira, New York, the daughter of Lebanese-American parents. Both her parents were born in Bsalim in Lebanon before emigrating to the United States. Her father was a mobile-home salesman, and her mother was a department-store model in New York City who spent much of her childhood in Beirut. Her parents were Maronite Catholics. Pirro knew she wanted to be an attorney from the age of six.
She graduated from Notre Dame High School in Elmira in three years, interning in the Chemung County District Attorney's office during her time in high school. Pirro then graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the University at Buffalo. She received her Juris Doctor degree from Albany Law School in 1975, where she had been an editor of the Albany Law Review.
Westchester County law career Assistant District Attorney In 1975, District Attorney Carl Vergari appointed Pirro to the position of Assistant District Attorney of Westchester County in New York State, where she began her career by writing appeals and handling minor cases. In 1977, Pirro approached Vergari and requested that he apply for a federal grant for local district attorney's offices to establish bureaus that specialized in domestic violence. She hoped that Vergari would take advantage of potential funding, as well as a 1977 change in New York law that moved many domestic violence cases from family court to criminal court. Vergari agreed to apply for the grant, and his office became one of four in the nation to win the grant. In 1978, he appointed Pirro to be the first chief of the new Domestic Violence and Child Abuse Bureau. Pirro was known to be an aggressive bureau chief. Due to possible coercion, she had a strict policy against dropping cases at a victim's request.
On June 1, 1990, just five months prior to Pirro's first appearance on the ballot for County Court Judge, she attracted widespread attention for rushing to conduct a bedside investigation of Maria Amaya at the Intensive Care Unit of United Hospital in Port Chester. Amaya had been charged with four counts of second-degree murder for the deaths of her four children. She was a 36-year-old immigrant from El Salvador who had a history of being hospitalized for mental issues. Amaya had killed the four children and attempted suicide, believing that they were being corrupted by drugs and sex.
While recognized for her prosecution of domestic violence, Pirro was criticized for her relative prosecutorial absence in bringing charges involving major public corruption or organized crime. These criticisms intensified when Pirro's husband was later convicted of several felonies tied to organized crime, including tax evasion and conspiracy. "One would have to believe that there's no organized crime in Westchester County, not a single corrupt official, and every union in this county is as clean as the driven snow," according to William I. Aronwald, who headed the Federal Organized Crime Strike Force during the 1970s.Mob Figure Admits Roles In Murders, Including Judge's The New York Times August 14, 2004, Retrieved December 18, 2019.
During an abortive 1986 campaign for Lieutenant Governor of New York, Pirro boasted to have never lost a case in "about 50 trials." This number was disputed when presented in 2005 to colleagues, who said that the real number of trials personally handled by Pirro "wasn't more than 10." Pirro's then-spokesman, Anne Marie Corbalis, contended only that Pirro had a "100% felony conviction rate" as an Assistant District Attorney.
County court judge Pirro left the District Attorney's office after her November 1990 election as a judge of the Westchester County Court. She had successfully run on the Republican and Conservative party lines against Democratic nominee and New Castle Town Justice Lawrence D. Lenihan and Right to Life Party nominee August C. Nimphius, Jr. Pirro is the first woman to serve as a judge of the Westchester County Court.
District Attorney In November 1993, Pirro was elected Westchester County District Attorney; she is the first woman to hold that position. She was re-elected in 1997 and 2001. On May 23, 2005, Pirro announced that she would not seek re-election to a fourth term as Westchester County District Attorney.
On December 31, 1993—within hours of Pirro's midnight inauguration as District Attorney—Scripps newspaper heiress Anne Scripps Douglas was savagely bludgeoned in the head with a hammer by her estranged husband, Scott Douglas, as she slept in their Bronxville, New York, home. By the time police arrived, Scott Douglas had fled the scene. Anne Scripps Douglas died in the hospital on January 6. Scott Douglas subsequently committed suicide by jumping off the Tappan Zee Bridge. Pirro, already known as a passionate prosecutor of domestic violence cases, was a frequent presence in the media during the period between the murder and when Scott Douglas's body washed ashore in Riverdale in early March 1994. This increase in Pirro's national profile led to her surfacing as a frequent contributor on network and cable television news in June 1994, when O.J. Simpson was arrested for the murder of his ex-wife, appearing frequently as an analyst on Nightline, Larry King Live, and Geraldo.
Within months of taking office, Pirro undertook a costly renovation to the district attorney's facilities and expanded to an additional floor of the county courthouse. The largest expenses were a new kitchenette and a media room, costing $20,000, to assist Pirro's growing profile; additional expenditures were made to remodel her personal office with mahogany.
Pirro was the first female president of the New York State District Attorneys Association. Also while district attorney, she was appointed by then-Governor George Pataki to chair the New York State Commission on Domestic Violence Fatalities. Its report and recommendations resulted in legislation passing that enhanced protections of, and safeguards for, the victims of domestic abuse.
During her tenure as district attorney, she repeatedly refused to reopen the case of the murder of Angela Correa by Jeffrey Deskovic. In 1990, Deskovic was falsely convicted of killing the then-15-year-old Correa, and spent 16 years in prison before he was exonerated by DNA evidence; the real killer eventually confessed to the crime. Deskovic later won a $41.6 million lawsuit against Daniel Stephens and Westchester County for his wrongful conviction.
Statewide political career
1986 lieutenant gubernatorial candidacy On May 26, 1986, Pirro, then an assistant district attorney, was announced as the running mate of Westchester County Executive and presumptive Republican gubernatorial nominee Andrew O'Rourke. Pirro was selected by O'Rourke and New York State Republican Committee Chairman Anthony J. Colavita after nearly a dozen individuals declined the position. Assembly Minority Leader Clarence D. Rappleyea Jr. traveled to the first night of the Republican Committee's nominating convention in Syracuse to tell O'Rourke and Colavita that his conference was concerned about the selection of Pirro. On May 28, 1986, Pirro announced her withdrawal from the race, saying that her husband could not disclose his legal clients or the couple's business interests (later revealed to have been her husband's partial ownership of a Connecticut garbage hauling company with alleged mafia connections),She's a Politician. He Avoided Attention. Not Anymore, New York Times, Joseph Berger, April 17, 1997. Retrieved December 18, 2019. and that many of his clients did business with the state, which would make it "virtually impossible" for her to serve as Lieutenant Governor.
2006 U.S. Senate campaign On August 10, 2005, Pirro announced that she would seek the Republican nomination to challenge first-term incumbent senator Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, in the 2006 election for U.S. Senator from New York. Other Republicans who announced campaigns for the nomination were John Spencer, a former mayor of Yonkers, William Brenner, an attorney in Sullivan County, and attorney Edward Cox, the son-in-law of former president Richard Nixon. In a widely publicized moment when she was declaring her candidacy, Pirro misplaced page 10 of her speech and went silent for 32 seconds, something that was widely considered to have damaged her campaign before it even started.
During an appearance at the Crime Victims Resource Center, Pirro described herself this way: "I am red on fiscal policy. I am conservative and I support the Bush tax cut... I have broad blue stripes when it comes to social issues... I am a woman who is a moderate in New York." Republican governor George Pataki's endorsement of Pirro caused Cox to withdraw from the race, leaving Pirro as the likely nominee. Donors to Pirro's political campaign included designer Tommy Hilfiger (also a native of Elmira) and Donald Trump, as well as contractors and real estate executives who had done business with her husband. Trump spoke highly of her husband at the time, saying: "Al has a good sense of the law and what's practical and a lot of common sense."
On December 21, 2005, Pirro dropped out of the Senate race after continuing pressure from party chiefs. This decision was reached after a lagging fundraising effort, and polls that showed she would be easily defeated by Clinton (a Quinnipiac University poll forecast Pirro would lose to Clinton 62 percent to 30 percent). In a statement, she said, "I have decided that my law enforcement background better qualifies me for a race for New York State attorney general than a race for the United States Senate." Spencer was eventually chosen as the Republican Party's nominee for the U.S. Senate.
During her four-month campaign, the Pirro campaign racked up $600,000 in debt to campaign vendors. By 2019, debts to vendors remained unpaid.
2006 state attorney general campaign