Jeanine Pirro’s Parents Eloped after Meeting: Who Are Esther Leo Ferris?

Judge Jeanine Pirro’s parents, Esther Ferris and Leo Ferris, significantly impacted her worldview and her eventual career path. Her father died young, but her mom lived a long full life.

Esther Ferris was sent away from their birth country as a toddler and overcame adversity due to her gender and ethnicity. She instilled a fighting spirit in her daughter Judge Jeanine Pirro, which served her well in her work as the District Attorney.

The “Justice with Judge Jeanine” host has written about her parents in her memoir and on social media and did a heart-wrenching tribute to her mother on her show after she passed away. She grew up in upstate New York.

While serving in the Navy during the Second World War, Leo met the man who would change the course of his life. The elder Navy serviceman told him about his beautiful daughter, who lived in Lebanon.

Her dad divorced her mom after she only bore him four daughters.

After the war, the young sailor traveled to Lebanon to meet the serviceman’s daughter, Esther, and they fell in love. The couple eloped and relocated back to America. They settled down in the rural town of Elmira in upstate New York, where they raised their two daughters, Mary Louise Gershowitz and Judge Jeanine.

A second-generation Lebanese American raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Leo is remembered by his daughter as the “epitome of a good man with a great sense of humor.”

Judge Jeanine loves to keep him close by wearing his gold ring. In an appreciation post for veterans in 2020 with a photo of her father in his Navy uniform, she wrote:

“My dad Leo Ferris was on the first Navy ship to Nagasaki and saw the plume from the bomb and died at a very young age because of it.”

Esther was born to a Lebanese immigrant father and a first-generation Lebanese American mother in Cortland, New York. Her dad divorced her mom after she only bore him four daughters instead of sons. When Esther was five, he sent the kids to live with his influential, affluent brother in Beruit, Lebanon.

Esther died of pancreatic cancer at 90 in April 2019. In a tribute set to Bette Midler‘s “Wind Beneath My Wings,” the presenter remembered her mom and best friend as a “very beautiful person, both inside and out.” She had called her every Saturday night after her show.

She wrote in the manuscript, “She impressed upon me throughout my childhood that I had to fight for myself, and I had to help those who were not strong enough to fight for themselves. It was the main reason I became a lawyer.”