Danuta Pfeiffer (née Rylko, formerly Soderman) (born February 22, 1949)[1] is a retired journalist, broadcaster, and author, best known for co-hosting The 700 Club from 1983 to 1988 with Pat Robertson and Ben Kinchlow.
Born in England after World War II to a father who was a Polish emigre and sculptor and an English mother who was a nurse, Danuta Rylko moved to the United States as a child, with her family, shortly after her birth. She grew up in northern Michigan, near Bellaire.
She began her career in San Diego, California as a newsreader on radio, and co-host of SunUp San Diego on KFMB-TV from 1976 to 1983.[2]
Rylko was hired by the Christian Broadcasting Network after becoming a born again Christian.[3] Initially hired to be CBN's foreign correspondent in Jerusalem, she was instead made co-host of The 700 Club days after arriving at CBN's headquarters in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Reflecting on her experiences in her memoirs, she wrote: "But no one ever asked me about my politics. I was converted by association from my liberal democratic feminism to conservative Republican fundamentalism. I felt like a wolf in sheep’s clothing adapting somewhat awkwardly to becoming one of the sheep."
In 1985, she broke the story of the John Anthony Walker spy ring when she interviewed Walker's daughter, Laura Walker Snyder, for CBN. During the interview, Snyder detailed how her father had allegedly intimidated and manipulated his children into becoming spies.[4]
She was fired by Robertson in 1988 after he learned that her then-husband, Kai Soderman, had previously been twice married and divorced.
She married Swedish businessman Kai Soderberg in 1983,[2] six months after joining The 700 Club.[1] Soderman was a suicidal alcoholic and the two eventually divorced after she moved back to California.[3] [5]
She ceased being a Christian as a result of her experiences at CBN and returned to San Diego where she hosted Danuta Time, on KSDO radio in the late 1980s and was also a news commentator on KUSI-TV in the early 1990s.[6] She moved to Colorado, where she was a columnist for the Colorado Eagle,[7] before moving to Oregon in 1994 to be closer to her family. There she met and married her second husband, Robin Pfeiffer, a winery owner, in 1994.[3] Since 1994, she has been co-owner, with her husband, of Pfeiffer Winery in Oregon.[8] In 2016, she supported Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign.[3]
Pfeiffer has written a memoir called Chiseled: A Memoir of Identity, Duplicity, and Divine Wine (2015) about her life in general as well as her experiences with CBN.[3] [8]