Early in adulthood, Elizabeth Vargas developed an addiction to alcohol. According to ABC News, her husband confronted her about her drinking, and she cut back, but by 2009, she started drinking heavily again, secretly visiting bars, consuming two bottles of wine a night, and hiding alcohol around the house. On a 2012 family vacation, Vargas recalled raiding the hotel minibar and "drinking everything in it," and then needing IV rehydration. Afterward, Vargas enrolled in a month-long rehab program but departed halfway through.
According to ABC News, a few weeks later, Vargas relapsed, falling into a habit of using alcohol to calm herself before an interview in New York. She remembers drinking on the way to and after the meeting, and getting into a car. And then she woke up in the hospital. "I don't know what I did. I don't know what I drank," Vargas told the outlet. The journalist figured out that she'd wandered to a park where a good Samaritan helped her out. "She said she saw some men nearby that she didn't like the look of who might have been, at that point, probably seeing me as a vulnerable person," Vargas recalled, adding that after her release, she returned to rehab, for a full month this time. When she relapsed again in 2014, her news colleagues and her siblings converged to help her enter a detox center.
