June Baranco is Bryant Gumbel’s first wife, and she works professionally as June Gumbel. She was born in Baton Rouge and trained as a painter at Louisiana State University. She married the future Today host on December 1, 1973, and they divorced in August 2001 after a long, public court fight. The couple have two children, Bradley and Jillian. A decade after the divorce, she started Geaux Chapeaux, a hat-making business in Westchester County, New York, and she still paints.
Most people who search her name come from coverage of her former husband. The documented record also shows a Louisiana-raised artist who learned to sew as a child, studied fine art, and turned to millinery in her sixties.
Key takeaways
- June Baranco, known professionally as June Gumbel, was married to broadcaster Bryant Gumbel from December 1, 1973, until their divorce was finalized in a Westchester County, N.Y., court in August 2001. The settlement terms were sealed.
- The divorce followed what the Deseret News called a “bitter four-year dispute.” It included adultery allegations made by her side and a public argument between both lawyers over financial support.
- She grew up in Baton Rouge and graduated from LSU in 1971 with a fine-art degree, according to a 2014 profile in The Advocate.
- She began designing hats after her daughter Jillian’s 2011 wedding, and that work grew into Geaux Chapeaux.
- She and Bryant Gumbel have two adult children, Bradley and Jillian. Bryant Gumbel married Hilary Quinlan in 2002.
June Baranco profile summary
| Field | Details |
|---|---|
| Professional name | June Gumbel |
| Hometown | Baton Rouge, Louisiana |
| Parents | Jeannie Baranco and the late Joseph Baranco (The Advocate, 2014) |
| Education | Bachelor’s degree in fine art, Louisiana State University, 1971 |
| Known for | First wife of broadcaster Bryant Gumbel (married December 1, 1973; divorced August 2001) |
| Children | Bradley and Jillian |
| Work | Painter; milliner and owner of Geaux Chapeaux, Westchester County, N.Y. |
A Baton Rouge childhood built around sewing
June Baranco’s creative life started in Louisiana long before her marriage made her name familiar. In a 2014 Advocate profile by Pam Bordelon, she described learning to sew by hand at about age 8 or 9 from her aunt Eura, a seamstress. Her parents, Jeannie Baranco and the late Joseph Baranco, gave her a sewing machine for her 10th birthday. “I still have it,” she told the paper.
Hats were part of everyday life where she grew up. “We wore hats all the time,” she said in the same interview. Decades later, that detail matters, because hat-making became the work she called her calling.
She went on to LSU, graduating in 1971 with a bachelor’s degree in fine art. Her studio biography calls it a BFA in painting and drawing. The same biography lists a wide range of media: oil, pastels, printmaking, drawing, pottery, stained glass and clothing design. She has continued painting since then. The Advocate reported in 2014 that she still worked mainly in pastel and oil, even though hats had become her main focus.
How June Baranco met Bryant Gumbel
The best-known account of how the couple met comes from Rick Reilly’s 1988 Sports Illustrated profile of Bryant Gumbel, “The Mourning Anchor.” According to that piece, June Baranco was an LSU student when she visited a friend in Chicago in 1968. While she was there, Bryant’s father, Richard Gumbel, a Chicago probate judge, spent a day showing her around the city. The same profile says she would later become a Delta stewardess. It is a single magazine account from 1988 and shouldn’t be read as anything more.
The Gumbel family’s reference biography in Contemporary Black Biography notes that Reilly’s profile was highly critical of Bryant. It focused heavily on his relationship with his late father and “even suggested that Gumbel proposed to his wife because his father spoke of her so highly.” That framing belonged to Reilly. Bryant Gumbel is reported to have disliked the article, so it should be treated as one writer’s interpretation rather than an established motive. Richard Gumbel died in 1972, a year before the wedding.
The Encyclopedia.com entry on Bryant Gumbel gives the wedding date as December 1, 1973, and names the couple’s children as Jillian and Bradley. At the time, Bryant was a young sportscaster at KNBC-TV in Los Angeles. His national profile came later: he joined NBC Sports in 1975 and became a host of Today in January 1982. Over those years, the family made its home in Westchester County, north of New York City.
Why did June Baranco and Bryant Gumbel divorce?
June Baranco and Bryant Gumbel divorced after a long, contested separation. Allegations of infidelity from her side and a public dispute over money played out in the press. The final agreement was sealed, so the full terms were never made public. Most of what is known comes from claims each side’s lawyers made publicly, and those claims should be read as positions in a legal fight, not findings by a court.
The case drew wide attention in early 2000. A Tampa Bay Times report dated January 28, 2000, ran under the headline “Lawyer: Bryant Gumbel an ‘adulterer’.” A week later, Newsweek’s February 2000 item “Gumbel v. Gumbel” reported that June Gumbel was suing for a “permanent separation.” Newsweek said the two had been estranged for years and that Bryant, by then co-host of CBS’s The Early Show, was living with Hilary Quinlan.
Newsweek gave one reason she pursued separation rather than divorce at that stage. It described her as devoutly Roman Catholic and reported that she had refused to divorce him and had sought an annulment after 26 years of marriage. She was asking the court for emergency financial relief, saying the support she received was far too low for a man earning millions a year.
Both lawyers spoke publicly. Her attorney, Barry Slotnick, told Newsweek: “He shouldn’t be as low as his ratings.” Bryant’s lawyer, Stanley Arkin, disputed her account, saying she had been treated “sumptuously” and adding, “June has cars, trainers, hairdressers, vacations.” The dispute also spilled into talk radio. Newsweek reported that shock jock Don Imus launched “Gumbel Aid” on her behalf and staged a “demonstration” outside The Early Show set.
ABC News reported at the time that in January 2001, Bryant Gumbel agreed to let adultery serve as the grounds for divorce. The case ended months later. The Deseret News reported on August 23, 2001 that the couple had finalized their divorce “on Tuesday” in a Westchester County courtroom, which places it on August 21, 2001. The paper said the case ended a “bitter four-year dispute.” It included charges that Bryant had cheated with a series of mistresses and her allegation that the “$5 million-a-year television star had left her destitute.” It added that “details of the agreement were sealed.”
After the ruling, Slotnick said: “Mrs. Gumbel was satisfied that this part of her life is over and she can go on without the concerns she had before.”
Sealed terms haven’t stopped figures from spreading. Celebrity biographies often say she received half of an estimated $20 million fortune, plus the couple’s Westchester estate and a Manhattan apartment. That claim traces back to a New York Post report cited by ABC News at the time. It has never been confirmed, because the agreement itself was never released.
Clearing up the divorce year
Some recent coverage gets the end date wrong. A 2025 Us Weekly piece, syndicated on Yahoo, said Baranco and Bryant “were married from 1973 to 2002.” The contemporaneous reporting doesn’t support that. The Deseret News reported the divorce as finalized in August 2001, and Wikipedia’s entry on Bryant Gumbel, citing an August 22, 2001, New York Post story, also gives 2001. The likely source of confusion is Bryant’s second marriage: according to the same Us Weekly article, he and Hilary Quinlan got engaged in December 2001 and married in August 2002 at the Breakers in Palm Beach, Florida.
The length of the marriage is described in different ways, but the figures agree. Newsweek’s “26 years” was written in early 2000, when they were still legally married. Counting to August 2001 gives nearly 28 years.
June Baranco’s children: Bradley and Jillian
June Baranco and Bryant Gumbel have two children, a son, Bradley, and a daughter, Jillian. The Deseret News described both as grown by the time the divorce was finalized in 2001. Neither has pursued a public career like their father’s. Jillian appears in her mother’s public story for one reason: her 2011 wedding is what led June to start making hats.
Life after the divorce: building Geaux Chapeaux
June Baranco kept the name June Gumbel after the divorce, and she has worked under it since. Her second career began with a family occasion. When her daughter Jillian married in 2011, she went looking for headwear. Her studio biography says she visited an upscale New York City bridal salon and came away disappointed by the lack of original pieces. The Advocate reported that she was also frustrated by the prices. So she decided to make her own.
She taught herself the craft from existing hats. “So, I started taking them apart, studying how they were made,” she told The Advocate. Her sewing background and fine-art training gave her a base to build on. The business she founded, Geaux Chapeaux, makes hats, headpieces and bridal millinery from a studio in Westchester County. The name joins the Louisiana spelling “geaux” with the French word for hats. According to her studio’s biography, it reflects her Louisiana Creole and Cajun roots. The same biography quotes a line she often uses: “When you see a woman wearing a hat … you can usually tell what’s in her heart.”
By 2014 the work had taken her back to Louisiana. On February 15, 2014, she showed her hats at a “Tea, Fashion & Fancies” event at the LSU Rural Life Museum. The event was co-sponsored by the Friends of the LSU Textile & Costume Museum and raised money for both museums. In the Advocate interview that accompanied it, she described what the new work meant to her: “This is my calling. I’ve found out what I’m supposed to do.” She also spoke about living between two places: “New York feels like home,” she said, “but I have to have a steady dose of Baton Rouge … my culture.”
Her studio biography lists memberships in the Pastel Society, the Portrait Society, the Salmagundi Club and Artist Fellowship. It also says she serves on the board of the Katonah Museum Artist Association in Katonah, N.Y. These affiliations come from her own published biography.
What isn’t reliably known about June Baranco
Many online biographies give a precise birthday, a height, a net-worth figure and a list of art commissions for June Baranco. None of these details appears in the newspaper interviews or contemporaneous reports about her, and they shouldn’t be treated as fact. The closest dated reference to her age is Newsweek’s February 2000 item, which described June Gumbel as 51. That would place her birth in 1948 or early 1949 and make her in her late 70s as of November 2026.
She is also often confused with Juanita Powell Baranco, an Atlanta businesswoman born in 1949. Juanita co-founded Baranco Automotive Group with her husband, Gregory Baranco, in 1978. The Georgia Historical Society named her a Georgia Trustee in 2021. The two women share a surname and a Louisiana connection through LSU, but nothing links them as relatives, and Juanita Baranco is not Bryant Gumbel’s former wife.
FAQ
Did June Baranco get half of Bryant Gumbel’s fortune?
There’s no confirmed answer. The Deseret News reported in August 2001 that the details of the divorce agreement were sealed. The often-repeated figure of half of an estimated $20 million comes from a New York Post report at the time and has never been confirmed.
How many times has Bryant Gumbel been married?
Twice. He was married to June Baranco from 1973 until the divorce was finalized in August 2001. He then married Hilary Quinlan in August 2002, and they remain married, according to a 2025 Us Weekly report.
Is June Baranco related to Juanita Baranco?
No family connection between them has been documented. Juanita Powell Baranco is an Atlanta auto-dealership executive and civic leader. June Baranco is a Baton Rouge-born artist and milliner who works as June Gumbel.
Final Thoughts
June Baranco’s name first reached a wide audience through her marriage to one of television’s best-known morning hosts and the sealed, highly publicized divorce that ended it in 2001. Her own account, though, follows a different line. It begins with an aunt teaching her to sew in Baton Rouge, continues through a 1971 fine-art degree at LSU, and leads to a hat business she started after her daughter’s 2011 wedding.
Her most recent detailed public interview dates to February 2014, when she brought her hats back to an LSU museum. Today her work is presented through Geaux Chapeaux and its Westchester County studio. For readers trying to understand who she is, that body of work under the name June Gumbel is the most accurate place to start, more than the figures and dates copied between celebrity biographies.
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