Rachel Campos-Duffy (born October 22, 1971) is a conservative American television personality. She first appeared on television in 1994 as a cast member on the MTV reality television series The Real World: San Francisco, before moving on to work as a television host. She was a guest host on the ABC talk show The View, before moving to Fox News, where she has guest-hosted the show Outnumbered before being hired as a permanent co-host on Fox & Friends Weekend in May 2021.
Early life
Rachel Campos was born and raised in Tempe, Arizona, to Miguel Campos and Maria del Pilar, junior-high school teachers in Chandler, Arizona. She has two brothers, Patrick Campos and Joseph Campos. Her sister, Leah Campos Schandlbauer, is a former CIA operations officer who ran for the U.S. Congress in Arizona in 2012. Campos and her siblings were raised in a strict Catholic home. Campos-Duffy graduated from Seton Catholic Preparatory High School. Campos' grandparents immigrated to the United States from Mexico. Campos graduated from Arizona State University in December 1993, with a degree in economics. She was awarded the Woodrow Wilson Graduate Fellowship, which she had planned to use to attend graduate school, with the goal of being a college professor. Campos earned a master's degree in international affairs from the University of California, San Diego.
Career
The Real World: San Francisco
Campos was cast on The Real World: San Francisco in January 1994, and lived in the house on Russian Hill in San Francisco with her six housemates from February 12 to June 19. The season premiered on July 6, 1994.
Although the castmates were informed ahead of time that they would be living with someone who was HIV-positive, they were not informed which housemate it would be. On the cast's first night in the house, Campos’ housemate, AIDS educator Pedro Zamora, informed the housemates that he had AIDS by showing them his scrapbook of his career as an HIV educator. Campos felt uncomfortable and initially distanced herself from Zamora, stating that she wanted to know how his health status would affect her. However, she said nothing to the other housemates for fear of appearing homophobic. Although Zamora took this as an act of rejection on her part, the two eventually became friends, with Zamora traveling to Arizona with Campos to visit her family. During her time on the series, she had both a romantic relationship and tumultuous friendship with housemate David "Puck" Rainey. Fellow cast member Judd Winick attributed this attraction on her part to her taste for rebellious men, or "bad boys". Campos conceded this, and admitted that she was sometimes an initial bad judge of character, and too trusting. Campos' friendship with Rainey eventually dissolved, as did Rainey's friendship with the rest of the cast, resulting in his eviction. Campos subsequently became best friends with Rainey's replacement, Joanna Rhodes, and the two of them were referred to by Winick as "high maintenance twins".
On the show and in MTV's promotional materials for the show, Campos was depicted as a passionate Republican, whose heroes included Jack Kemp, and as a Catholic, though she conceded her strict religious upbringing fostered within her a rebellious streak that sometimes brought her into conflict with her parents. Her political viewpoints led to conflict with her housemates on more than one occasion, as when Mohammed Bilal ridiculed the Republican housing ideas that she expressed in Episode 3. In Episode 18, after Campos invited her housemates to a College Republicans function, self-described liberal Winick opined that the speakers at the function were sexist, homophobic, and racist, a view which Campos objected to as unfair.
In 1998 Campos taped Road Rules: All Stars, along with alumni of other past Real World seasons, such as Sean Duffy of the Real World: Boston cast, whom she would later marry.
Campos-Duffy was one of ten Real World alumni who starred in the 2003 film The Wedding Video, a Real World parody centered on the wedding of first season alumnus Norman Korpi.