The Most Tragic Things About Rachael Ray's Life

Relentlessly positive and with an uncanny ability to relate to viewers on an immediate and familiar level, Rachael Ray understandably became one of the biggest television stars of the 21st century. One of the biggest success stories and breakout stars in the history of Food Network, Ray instructed Americans on the lost art of weeknight dinner preparation on the long-running "30 Minute Meals" before expanding her empire into travelogues, other cooking programs, cookbooks, a magazine, and the general-interest "Rachael Ray" talk show, which ran for 16 years on broadcast television. 

It's all a very "yummo" and "delish" world for Ray, who finally opened her own restaurant in 2019, amidst bringing much entertainment, knowledge, and friendliness to her millions of acolytes, undoubtedly inspired to prepare a recipe they saw on TV. And that's in spite of the immense and overwhelming bad luck and loss that Ray has suffered throughout her lifetime. A larger-than-life star, she's still human, and she's endured a number of unspeakable hindrances, heartbreaks, and living nightmares. Cooking on TV is really tough, but the off-stage life of Rachael Ray is even tougher.

Rachael Ray found her niche in the crowded television food landscape, and she differentiated herself from the competition with a down-to-earth personality and a distinctive raspy and gravelly voice. That's no vocal affectation, as it's the lasting result of a series of illnesses from which Ray suffered in her youth. "I had a lot of croup as a kid so I don't have the strongest vocal cords to begin with," Ray told People. 

Often misdiagnosed as a common cold in infants and young kids, croup is an irritation of the upper airway passages. That leads to symptoms including swelling, breathing difficulty, and a vocal raspiness. It's a painful sickness, and it's made all the worse by crying, a common reaction considering it most often affects children under the age of three. Sometimes it results in a rough cough as well. Ray contracted croup so many times in early childhood that it permanently altered her speaking voice.

Heading into adulthood, Ray's vocal cords were already weakened by numerous bouts of croup from when she was very young. After her career as a TV personality took off in the early 2000s, she had to use her voice to an excessive degree, which sometimes triggered a temporary loss of that facility. "I lose my voice a lot," she told People in 2006, explaining that she sought out the help of a voice doctor, from whom she learned exercises to help manage her throat health.

Nevertheless, Ray's voice still presented as strained and difficult, and in 2008 the National Enquirer purported to know why. The tabloid reported that Ray had told close associates that she thought that she might have throat cancer. That's a treatable disease, but the TV food personality was dismayed that surgery and recovery would mean she'd had to take months off from her television shooting schedule. The truth: The cancer speculation was a rumor. Ray didn't have that disease, but she did have a non-cancerous cyst on a vocal cord, which required a surgical removal. Doctors placed Ray on vocal rest for a week. "It's just something she needs to take care of," a source close to Ray told People.

Lawyer and musician John Cusimano has been a near-constant presence at the side of his wife, TV cook and talk show host Rachael Ray, for two decades. After years as a couple, Cusimano and Ray made it official with a wedding in Italy in 2005. Despite all internal indications that the relationship is stable and without much strife, Ray and her spouse have faced accusations and reports of infidelity.

In late 2006, the National Enquirer reported that Cusimano had engaged in a five-year-long romantic relationship with a woman who lived in Florida, both before and after his wedding to Ray. The tabloid also claimed that a second woman said Cusimano had paid her for sexual services of a sordid and debased nature. Ray and Cusimano dismissed the stories as false, which they did again in 2013, when the National Enquirer said that Cusimano was a highly active member of a New York City sex club. Ray has repeatedly addressed the rumors in interviews. "I've known where he is every night since we've been married," Ray told People. "We listen to music, pour a glass of wine, and watch 'Law and Order.'"

Like millions of others during the 2020 COVD-19 pandemic, Rachael Ray spent months in lockdown at home, in her case a house in Lake Luzerne, New York. The home also became the temporary shooting location for her talk show, "Rachael Ray," and Ray and husband John Cusiamno were inside of the residence when it caught fire in August 2020. A neighbor walked by, saw that the roof was aflame, and quickly informed the couple. Fire rapidly engulfed the house as Ray and Cusimano made their hasty retreat, avoiding injury or worse but losing a great deal of their collective possessions, including photographs, artwork, correspondence, and gifts. "We lost a huge part of the physical evidence that we exist," Ray lamented to The Hollywood Reporter. 

"Rachael Ray" was forced to move production again, from the uninhabitable main home to the adjacent guest house untouched by the fire. Those smaller digs served as the studio for the talk show for the remainder of the 2020-2021 season. It took more than a year for construction crews to complete the tall order of rebuilding Ray's primary home. "The house was a total loss," Ray told "Entertainment Tonight."

Just over a year after a fire completely destroyed her home in Lake Luzerne, New York, Rachael Ray lost her secondary residence, an apartment in New York City, to the effects of a natural disaster. Hurricane Ida hit the metropolitan New York area hard, with the related rainstorms flooding the apartment and causing extensive water damage. "We had finally just finished the work on making the apartment over. And then, Ida took it out. And I mean, out. Down hard," Ray told People. "Like, literally every speaker in the ceiling, the fireplace, every seam in the wall, it was like the apartment just literally melted."

The damage wrought by Hurricane Ida was so pronounced and widespread that Ray and husband John Cusimano waited a week for a crew to visit their apartment and determine just how much of the residence had been destroyed. And then when that group of remediation groups got down to work, they made an error and cracked the main water line. That flooded many other apartments throughout the rest of the already hurricane-affected building. 

Rachael Ray made a name for herself helping humans feed themselves, and in 2008 she expanded her commercial empire to include dogs and cats. Teaming up with Ainsworth Pet Nutrition, Ray helped create and market Rachael Ray Nutrish, a line of packaged pet food and treats purported to be made with whole foods and ingredients of a natural origin. It was a controversial move at the time for a still-rising food star. "People were like, you can't put your head on dog food. That's insane," Ray told the New York Times in 2018. "I was like, 'Who cares? It's not like I have a stellar reputation as one of the world's great chefs."

Publicly associating herself with a line of pet food meant that Ray would shoulder a lot of the blame and suffer blows to her reputation should anything ever go wrong with Nutrish, and that's exactly what happened, on multiple occasions. In 2015, several varieties of Nutrish cat food were recalled due to dangerously high amounts of vitamin D. Four years later, the Food and Drug Administration called out Nutrish as one of 16 pet food brands that could lead to heart disease in cats and dogs. In 2023, a New Yorker named Markeith Parks filed suit against Nutrish's parent company, alleging that the food's claims of being all-natural were false, and that they contained glyphosate, a toxic herbicide.

Rachael Ray and partner-then-husband John Cusimano mourned the loss of their dog, a Pit Bull named Boo, in 2005. Later that year, the couple adopted another dog of the same breed and named her Isaboo, deriving the name from Ray's favorite female name (Isabella) with that of her deceased pet, in tribute. A major dog lover who established the Rachael Ray Foundation, funded by profits from her Nutrish brand dog food, Ray took it hard when Isaboo died during the deadly, early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdowns in the spring of 2020.

"⁣Our beloved Isaboo passed today in her backyard in the sun in the Adirondack Mountains in New York. In our arms. Peacefully," Ray wrote on her eponymous talk show's Instagram account. "⁣To my fellow Americans, we've lost more than 90,000 human lives and over 300,000 of our global citizens. We all feel disconnected and so many are suffering right now." Ray went on to encourage pet adoption from nonprofit organizations and later donated $4 million to feed humans and pets during the pandemic.

In the 1990s, before she was a famous television star, Rachael Ray worked at Agata and Valentina, a gourmet grocery store in Manhattan, and lived in an apartment in Queens. During this time of her life, a mugger stopped Ray outside her home and jabbed a gun into her back. Ray yelled and used mace to fend off the attacker. "I think I scared him more than he scared me," Ray told the New York Post years after the attack, and she still felt guilty about defending herself against the unknown figure, a very young man. "I don't think that child would have hurt me," she said.

Ray was mugged again, just a few days later, in the same location, and by the same man. This time, she avoided physical harm because of her dog, Liza. After the attacker forced Ray into an alley, the dog gave chase. "And she scared him away. He was petrified of the dog." Following the second attack, and a breakup with a temperamental boyfriend that included her biting his thumb until it bled profusely, Ray moved out of Queens and back to her hometown of Glens Falls, New York.

In November 2013, Geraldine Dominica Scuderi was housesitting in Queensbury, New York, near Lake George, for her sister, Elsa — the mother of Rachael Ray. According to a local investigation, Geraldine Scuderi had apparently gone outdoors to feed birds on a very cold day, when the temperature peaked at just 28 degrees Fahrenheit. After she headed outdoors, the door closed and locked behind Scuderi, leaving her no way back into the house. 

Security camera footage showed a desperate Scuderi break a window to regain entry, but she failed to do so. Unable to re-enter Ray's mother's home, Scuderi, who had a history of heart and lung issues, officially died from a heart attack, outside, in sub-freezing temperatures. Ray's maternal aunt was 77 years old.

Geraldine's daughter places the blame for her mother's untimely and tragically accidental death on Ray and her mother. "My mother is dead today because Ray family neglected her," Gina Mesnick, Ray's cousin, told the National Enquirer (via the New York Post). "I want the world to know the truth about them and just how they treat their own family." More familial resentment developed when neither Ray nor her husband attended Scuderi's funeral, citing taping commitments for the "Rachael Ray" talk show. "I doubt that Rachael shed a single tear over my mom's death," Mesnick accused.

While many people adore Rachael Ray, the cook and her brand of unpretentious, catchphrase-driven television food prep are not for everyone. As her celebrity grew in the 2000s, a vicious backlash developed. A blog called Rachael Ray Sucks attracted a substantial following, and among what Anthony Bourdain gave us and what he left us: acerbic and pointed criticisms of Ray. According to The Guardian, the chef and TV host insultingly wrote off Ray as a "bobblehead" and a "freakazoid." 

After Ray complimented Bourdain on "Nightline" in 2009 (per the New York Daily News), Bourdain wrote on Facebook that the praise invited "confusion, panic, and misery," and that he couldn't reconcile in his mind that he and Ray both liked the proto-punk band the New York Dolls. In 2007, Bourdain harshly criticized Ray's decision to act as a paid spokesperson for Dunkin' Donuts. "She's got a magazine, a TV empire, all these bestselling books — I'm guessing she's not hurting for money," he told Page Six (via Today). "She's hugely influential, particularly with children. And she's endorsing Dunkin' Donuts. It's like endorsing crack for kids."

Martha Stewart, so upscale and classy that even her favorite pizza topping is bougie, publicly declared her dislike of Ray's food. "Not good enough for me" is how Stewart described Ray's cookery on "Nightline" (via HuffPost), later explaining, "She's more of an entertainer." In response, Ray, an untrained cook and self-professed inept baker, said, "I'd rather eat Martha's than mine, too."