Laura Coates is on the rise at CNN, hosting a new 11pm show called Laura Coates live and serves as the main legal analyst of the network — along with hosting The Laura Coates Show on SiriusXM.
Coates, 43, switched to journalism after a successful legal career that led her to serve as a federal prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the Bush and Obama administrations. Now she’s a mother of two, a wife and a self-proclaimed adventurer – and lives her life as taught by her exciting and sometimes unusual upbringing.
Below are five things to know about CNN anchor Laura Coates.
Her family moved to Minnesota because The Mary Tyler Moore Show
Coates didn’t always identify as a Minnesotan. As a young child, she lived in Worcester, Massachusetts, where her father grew up and settled down with her mother. But when Coates was in fourth grade, she tells PEOPLE, her father decided he was tired of Worcester and wanted a change.
Her mom, open to the idea of moving, asked where they should go. “He said, ‘Well, how about this? We’ll turn on the television and wherever that show is, we’ll go there,'” Coates recalls. “And my mom says, ‘Okay, let’s try.'”
They turned on the TV and The Mary Tyler Moore Show was playing. Before the school year ended, the Coates family packed up their belongings and headed to the Twin Cities. “That tells you a lot about my childhood,” she says. “We were very adventurous in the sense that we were always open to new experiences, no matter how crazy they sounded.”
Coates, who came to be considered born in St. Paul, says she was raised to believe in leaps of faith and still sees each day as an adventure – a mindset she’s tried to pass on to her own children. When the going gets tough, she looks at the sign in her office that reads, “You’ll make it, though,” she says Mary Tyler Moore theme tune.
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Laura Coates with husband Dale Gordon.
Courtesy of Laura Coates
She worked as a theater actress while working as a prosecutor for the Department of Justice
For part of her legal career – both in private practice and as a Justice Department prosecutor – Coates filled her spare time with theater. “It was often the secret side,” she says. – People knew that I was involved in theater, but most of them did not believe me.
Coates — who likes to sing but says it’s not one of her strengths — has starred in productions like Doubt, Little shop of horrorsand a completely female version Reservoir Dogs.
“It was a really great escape from sometimes the most difficult and stressful cases or topics, to have a moment to see the world through someone else’s eyes and realize, What would I do in those shoes? And you can walk in them,” she explains.
Coates left her sideline career behind when she started raising her children and working for CNN, but she still admires theater acting from afar. “I love stories and I love being completely wrapped up in stories,” she tells PEOPLE, “and theater provided that opportunity.”
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Her two older sisters also became lawyers
Coates is the youngest of three sisters, all of whom later became lawyers. She is the tallest of the group — she’s 5’3″ — and is often mistaken for the oldest.
“It’s so weird that we’re all lawyers, because my sisters and I, we’re so similar, but we have such different personalities,” Coates says, adding that none of them originally planned to go into the profession — but that they all love to argue.
“I remember my parents saying, ‘Couldn’t one of you have been an artist? Couldn’t one of you have been a dentist?’ It almost became a disappointment,” she adds. “It tells you a lot about the law and how broad it is that our different personalities can draw us into the same area and each thrive in our own way.”
She is a proud over-involved mom
Coates and her husband, Dale Gordon, are the proud parents of son Adrian, 10, and daughter Sydney, 9 — and when it comes to motherhood, Coates says she gets involved as much as she can. She has served as leader of her daughter’s Girl Scout troop, attends (and cries at) their recitals, and talks openly about the time she almost got kicked out of her son’s basketball game for “so kindly encouraging” the referee to “take off the blindfold.”
Once a week, she stops by the school canteen to have lunch with them. “My son is now at the stage where he’s asking, ‘Can you leave lunch?'” she says. “He’s almost like the Godfather — instead of ‘put the gun down, get the cannoli,’ he’s like, ‘Mom, get the kiss, put down the Chick-fil-A.'”
“I just love listening to their conversations. I love putting a face to the stories they come home and tell me about,” Coates says of the excitement of joining his kids for a meal in the cafeteria. “Food flies and close conversations and nothing beats hearing what the future thinks and feels. I love it.”
She met her husband during orientation at a law firm – and with only one eyebrow
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Dale Gordon and Laura Coates.
Courtesy of Laura Coates
Coates was having a bad week when she met Dale Gordon, her future husband, in 2007.
She says she just arrived in New York for a new job, that the mover hasn’t arrived with her clothes yet, and the beautician accidentally took off one of her eyebrows. With no time to feel defeated, she bought a last-minute suit at TJ Maxx, combed her hair to cover her missing eyebrow, and took the unfamiliar New York subways to get to her first day at the law firm—where she met Gordon , who agreed to replace the sick colleague and implement her new employment.
“The first day I was nervous and this incredibly handsome man walked in,” she recalls. – I didn’t stop laughing.
She remembers showing Gordon her missing eyebrow and says it was still love at first sight, setting the tone for an “authentic” relationship. The two got married in 2010.
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Source: HIS Education