Details About Laura Ingraham's Messy Relationship With Her Brother
Even though Laura Ingraham has wavered on whether she'd support Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, she's still a conservative firebrand regardless. Laura's built a career at Fox News that has involved her using her show, "The Ingraham Angle," to voice strong opinions on various culture war issues and repeat far-right talking points, including conspiracy theories, like the "great replacement" theory that Democrats are trying to replace white people with people of color, specifically immigrants, in the U.S.
The TV star has also frequently promoted the idea that the 2020 presidential election was stolen — an ongoing talking point of Trump himself, who has even called for a total do-over.. Laura was named in the defamation lawsuit against Fox News filed by Dominion Voting Systems. Fox ultimately settled for $787.5 million to avoid a trial, but Laura didn't address the settlement on her show and her rhetoric remains as strong and unyielding as ever. She's even spoken derogatorily about members of the LGBTQ+ community on both "The Ingraham Angle" and her podcast.
All of this is to say that Laura clearly supports or at least publicly promotes several aggressive far-right positions and has for some time now, which puts her in direct conflict with her brother, Curtis Ingraham. And Curtis, who is gay, has frequently, publicly, and unapologetically called out his sister for years. Plenty of siblings disagree, but the Ingrahams seem to be on a whole other level with their disdain for each other.
Curtis Ingraham has used social media to call out his sister's hypocrisy
One instance of many in which Curtis Ingraham publicly voiced his disgust for his sister, Laura Ingraham, and the harmful things that she says was when he called her a "monster" on X, formerly known as Twitter (his account is currently private but the tweet was reported by several outlets). In 2022, Laura had a segment on her show called "Doom & Groom," during which she argued that schools and the left were inappropriately teaching kids about gender identity.
Curtis, who is both gay and a teacher, posted a quick clip to X from that segment, and he didn't mince words with what he thought of her claims about what the left was supposedly doing to children. "This is rich coming from my Putin-loving sister who seems okay with children being killed in Ukraine. Looks like she has a new trope in hand to further rile and anger her followers. What a monster!" he railed, as reported by HuffPo.
That's not even the first time he's called her a monster either. Curtis used that word to describe Laura in a conversation with the Daily Beast in 2018, during the Donald Trump presidency. He elaborated, "She's very smart, she's well-spoken, but her emotional heart is just kind of dead. And you see it in her face when you see her on TV. She's ready to destroy." There's no guesswork needed to see the sibling split with comments like that.
Laura and Curtis Ingraham had a very difficult upbringing
In an interview with the "MeidasTouch" podcast, Curtis Ingraham broke down how he thinks their family life likely had an influence on his younger sister, Laura Ingraham, and how he consciously chose to go another direction than she did. Curtis revealed that their father "was a Nazi sympathizer [...] He was abusive. He was an alcoholic." As a result, he thinks that Laura has leaned into expressing the kind of anger that they experienced in their childhood because it's consistently being positively reinforced by the people around her.
It hasn't always been like this between the Ingraham siblings, though. Curtis claimed to the Daily Beast that they used to be close, even holidaying together, despite their political disagreements. In 1997, Laura even described Curtis and his partner, Richard, as living a life of "dignity, fidelity and courage" as Richard battled AIDS, in a piece for The Washington Post, and noted that she'd been to San Francisco to visit them both and provide support to Curtis.
But since the late '90s, Laura has moved farther to the religious right with her opinions on gay marriage, which is a large part of what began to drive a wedge between the two. In 2018, Laura confirmed that they have long been estranged from each other. Given how much has happened in the world since then, particularly when it comes to politics and Laura's part in promoting anti-LGBTQ+ ideas on Fox News, it seems unlikely that the two have reconnected.