For years, the name Noelle Watters circulated in entertainment and media coverage almost exclusively in connection to her ex-husband, Fox News host Jesse Watters. But reducing her to a footnote in someone else’s biography misses a far more interesting story: a woman who built a genuine career behind the camera at one of America’s biggest news networks, went through a very public divorce, and then quietly reinvented herself in an entirely different field. This post pulls together what’s publicly known about Noelle Watters, her background, her time at Fox News, her marriage and divorce, and her more recent work as a licensed mental health counselor, while being mindful that she has largely chosen a private life outside of the spotlight.
Noelle Watters: Early Life and Education
Noelle Watters was born Noelle Inguagiato in New York City, the daughter of Peter and Rosemary Inguagiato. Growing up in one of the most media-saturated cities in the world seems to have shaped her early interests in style, communication, and storytelling, all threads that would later show up in her professional life.
Noelle Watters pursued a broad liberal arts education at Fairfield University in Connecticut, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree with coursework spanning English writing, art history, and international studies. That kind of interdisciplinary foundation is fairly common among people who end up in media and content production, where the job often requires equal parts writing ability, visual sensibility, and an understanding of audience and culture.
What’s notable is what came much later in her academic life. Long after her television career was established, and after her marriage had ended, Noelle went back to school. She completed a Master’s degree in Mental Health Counseling at Long Island University, studying there from roughly 2019 to 2022. That’s a significant pivot: from producing lifestyle content for a cable news audience to training as a clinical counselor, with a specific focus on children and adolescents. It’s the kind of career change that suggests a deliberate, considered decision rather than a passing interest, since counseling licensure requires supervised clinical hours, coursework, and examinations on top of the degree itself.
Noelle Watters’s Career at Fox News
Before her name became linked to headlines about marriage and divorce, Noelle Watters had already built a substantial career of her own inside Fox News. She worked for close to a decade at the network, primarily on the production and content side rather than as an on-air news anchor. Her professional identity centered on being a lifestyle video producer, writer, editor, and online content creator, the kind of role that blends journalism with fashion, design, and digital media savvy.
She’s specifically associated with Fox News Magazine, where she worked as a senior editor and producer. Fox News Magazine functioned as a lifestyle-oriented offshoot of the network’s digital presence, covering fashion, entertainment, home, and culture topics that sat outside the network’s hard-news programming. Within that space, Noelle became known for hosting and producing a web series called iMag Style, which focused on fashion and style content, a natural extension of her academic background in art history and her evident interest in design.
This is worth underscoring because public narratives about women married to prominent media figures often flatten their professional identities into wife of. Noelle Watters, by most accounts, had an established career in media production well before, and independent of, her marriage. Colleagues and industry descriptions of her work point to someone experienced in producing promotional and lifestyle content, managing on-air segments, and shaping a specific corner of Fox’s digital output.
Noelle Watters and Her Marriage to Jesse Watters
Noelle Inguagiato married Jesse Watters, who was then a rising correspondent and commentator at Fox News, in 2009. The two had met at the network, where both worked, and their marriage kept them connected to the same professional world for years. Jesse Watters would go on to become one of Fox News’s most visible personalities, eventually hosting his own primetime program and becoming a co-host of The Five.
During the marriage, the couple had twin daughters, and their family life occasionally intersected with the public-facing parts of Jesse’s career, since spouses of well-known television hosts inevitably draw some degree of public curiosity even when they aren’t the ones on camera themselves.
Noelle stepped back from her day-to-day production work at points during this period to focus on raising her children, a decision plenty of working parents make regardless of their industry, though it’s one that gets more public scrutiny when a spouse is a recognizable media figure.
Noelle Watters’s Divorce and Its Aftermath
The marriage between Noelle and Jesse Watters ended in divorce, finalized in 2019, after ten years together. Reporting at the time connected the split to Jesse Watters’s relationship with a younger colleague at Fox News, Emma DiGiovine, who worked as an associate producer on his show. Jesse and Emma later married.
The divorce received notable media attention, in part because it involved two people who both worked in television, and in part because workplace relationships between colleagues at a major news network tend to draw scrutiny, both from entertainment press and from commentators interested in questions about power dynamics and workplace conduct in media organizations. It’s fair to say the story generated more headlines about Jesse’s next relationship and career than it did substantive reporting on Noelle’s own perspective or life afterward, which is a common pattern in how divorces involving public figures get covered: the more famous, more camera-facing spouse tends to dominate the narrative, while the other party’s experience gets far less attention or is left to speculation.
What’s notable is how Noelle Watters responded to that attention. Rather than engaging publicly with the coverage, giving interviews about the split, or building any kind of public persona around the divorce, she largely withdrew from the spotlight. She kept her post-divorce life, her custody arrangements, and her personal relationships out of public view, a choice that stands in contrast to how some people in similar situations use tabloid attention as a platform. That decision to step back is consistent with someone prioritizing privacy and stability, particularly given that she was raising young children through the transition.
Noelle Watters’s Second Act: From Media Producer to Mental Health Counselor
Perhaps the most interesting part of Noelle Watters’s story is the one that gets the least attention: her transition into mental health counseling. Sometime after her divorce, she decided to leave media production behind and pursue graduate education in a clinical field.
She earned her master’s degree in mental health counseling from Long Island University, with coursework and training oriented specifically toward children and adolescents. Professional directories now list her as Noelle Katherine Watters, a licensed mental health counselor practicing in New York, associated with a counseling practice on Long Island. Her professional profile describes a focus on helping children and families, and reviews from the practice describe her as a warm, compassionate clinician who connects well with patients across age groups.
This is a genuinely significant career change. Moving from lifestyle media production into licensed clinical counseling isn’t a lateral move; it requires an entirely new body of knowledge, supervised clinical experience, state licensure, and a fundamentally different day-to-day professional life. Producing style segments for a cable news website and sitting with a child working through anxiety or a family navigating a difficult transition require different skill sets, even if both draw on the same underlying qualities of communication and empathy that seem to run through her career choices.
It also says something about how she chose to handle a very public personal upheaval. Instead of leaning into the visibility that came from her divorce, something plenty of people in her position might have done, whether through media appearances, books, or social platforms, Noelle Watters used the years afterward to retrain and pursue work explicitly centered on helping other people, particularly kids, work through their own difficulties. Whether or not her own experience directly informed that choice is something only she could speak to, but the pattern of the timeline, divorce in 2019, graduate counseling program starting shortly after, focus on childhood and adolescent mental health, suggests a deliberate redirection of her professional life toward something rooted in care rather than visibility.
Where Noelle Watters Stands Professionally Today
What is verifiable about Noelle Watters’s life today centers on her clinical work rather than her past marriage. Professional directories list her under the name Noelle Katherine Watters, a licensed mental health counselor in the state of New York, practicing with a counseling group on Long Island. Her listed credentials reflect the graduate training she completed at Long Island University, and her practice profile describes a specific focus on children, adolescents, and their families.
That kind of licensure is a matter of public record and requires meeting state requirements around education, supervised clinical hours, and examinations, a useful reminder that this is an established second career, not an informal pivot. It also means that, unlike the thinner and sometimes speculative content written about her personal history, the professional facts about who she is now are grounded in verifiable credentials rather than tabloid-style guesswork.
Beyond her clinical practice, Noelle Watters has kept a low public profile, declining to build a media presence around her past marriage or divorce. Much of what circulates online about her current relationships or family life beyond her professional credentials is unconfirmed and should be treated accordingly, since she has not made those details public herself.
Conclusion
Noelle Watters’s story is a useful reminder that the people who orbit famous figures often have full, complicated professional lives of their own that get flattened by the way tabloid coverage works. She spent close to a decade building real production and editorial experience at one of the country’s most-watched media companies, went through a divorce that played out partly in public view through no real choice of her own, and then made a deliberate, demanding career change into a field centered on helping children and families navigate their own hard moments.
That arc, media professional, public divorce, quiet reinvention as a licensed counselor, doesn’t fit neatly into the ex-wife of a Fox News host framing that so much online content defaults to. It’s a more grounded story about someone choosing, twice, to build something substantive with her career: first in television production, and then in clinical mental health work. Whatever curiosity remains about her personal life, the clearest and best-documented part of her story is the professional one, a woman who reinvented her career on her own terms, out of the spotlight, after it had been thrust into public view.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Noelle Watters?
Noelle Watters is a former Fox News lifestyle producer and on-air host, born Noelle Inguagiato, who is best known publicly as the first wife of Fox News host Jesse Watters. She later retrained as a licensed mental health counselor.
What did Noelle Watters do at Fox News?
She worked for nearly a decade at Fox News, primarily as a senior editor and producer for Fox News Magazine, and she hosted a fashion and style web series called iMag Style.
Why did Noelle Watters and Jesse Watters divorce?
Their marriage ended in 2019 after ten years. Reporting at the time linked the split to Jesse Watters’s relationship with Fox News colleague Emma DiGiovine, whom he later married.
What is Noelle Watters doing now?
Noelle Watters is now a licensed mental health counselor in New York, practicing under the name Noelle Katherine Watters and focusing on work with children, adolescents, and families.
Does Noelle Watters have children?
Yes. Noelle Watters and Jesse Watters have twin daughters together from their marriage.
