Greta Conway Van Susteren (born June 11, 1954) is an American commentator and television news anchor for NBC News, anchoring a program on the network's cable news channel, MSNBC. Van Susteren was formerly employed at Fox News Channel, where she hosted On the Record w/ Greta Van Susteren. A former criminal defense and civil trial lawyer, she appeared as a legal analyst on CNN co-hosting Burden of Proof with Roger Cossack from 1994 to 2002, playing defense attorney to Cossack's prosecutor. In 2016, she was listed as the 94th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes, up from 99th in 2015.Van Susteren married tort lawyer John P. Coale in 1988. Coale, a self-described "ambulance chaser," became known as "Bhopal Coale" for his solicitation of clients among victims of the Bhopal disaster. He has served as an adviser for Sarah Palin. Van Susteren and her husband are members of the Church of Scientology. From August 2006 until January 2014, she was a co-owner of the Old Mill Inn, a restaurant in Mattituck, New York, on the North Fork of Long Island. During coverage of the O. J. Simpson murder trial, she appeared regularly on CNN as a legal analyst. This led to her stint as co-host of CNN's Burden of Proof and The Point.
Van Susteren made a special celebrity guest appearance on the Cartoon Network original series Space Ghost Coast to Coast in 1998. In 2002, Van Susteren switched to the Fox News Channel after a highly publicized contract-bidding war. She hosted the current affairs show On the Record w/ Greta Van Susteren. In 2012, an orphanage and school opened in Haiti called The Greta Home and Academy, which Greta and her husband helped found alongside Samaritan's Purse. In 2014, Van Susteren criticized a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Texas, Dwayne Stovall, who was challenging two-term incumbent John Cornyn in the primary election on March 4, 2014, after Stovall ran an advertisement calling Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Cornyn's superior in the Senate leadership, an ineffective "Beltway turtle". On September 6, 2016, she resigned from Fox News. She was not able to say goodbye on-air, as the network immediately filled the On the Record anchor spot with Brit Hume. In early 2017, Van Susteren signed on with NBC News to anchor the 6 P.M. ET program on its 24-hour cable news channel, MSNBC. The program, entitled For the Record, will launch January 9.
