Meet Dana Perino's Husband Peter McMahon

Dana Perino underwent a stunning transformation from White House press secretary to Fox News commentator and host, with a quick stop off as editorial director at Crown Publishing. But through all of the career changes, her personal life — namely her marriage to Peter McMahon, a British businessman — has remained stable. 

McMahon and Perino met on an airplane flying from Denver, Colorado, to Chicago, Illinois. That was in August 1997, when she was 25 and he was 43. Despite the large age gap and the fact that they lived on different continents, neither party could stop the fireworks. "All week I'd been thinking about Dana, couldn't stop thinking about her. I wrote Dana an e-mail telling her how I felt," McMahon told Yahoo Life! From there they started talking on the phone, after which an off-the-cuff comment led to Perino flying to New Orleans — where McMahon was headed — for their first date. They married only 11 months after meeting, eloping in England in front of only two strangers who served as witnesses. 

McMahon has two children from a previous marriage, but he and Perino have none together. Instead, they have devoted themselves to the dogs. They currently have Percy — before him was Jasper and before that was Henry, all of them Hungarian vizslas. McMahon is such a dog lover that he even once went to jail for it, after walking Henry without a leash and then failing to pay his fine in the allotted amount of time. Here are some other things to know about Dana Perino's husband Peter McMahon.

Peter McMahon hails from Blackpool, a town in Lancashire, England with a population of slightly more than 140,000. He went to secondary school at St. Joseph's College in Dumfries, Scotland, which was back then an all-boys boarding school, and earned a marketing degree from the University of Brighton. McMahon has worked in the medical field since the 1980s, when he began doing sales for Therakos and later DePuy Healthcare and Promedics. In 1999, McMahon founded Icon Medical, a consultancy firm for start-ups in the medical industry. He closed that down in 2016 and, in 2019, became president of GreenSleeve Medical.

Details about McMahon's personal life have also slipped out over the years. It is known that he was married two times prior to meeting his current wife Dana Perino, and that he has two children from one of these marriages — a son named Barry, and a daughter named Kelly. McMahon is also grandfather to Rachel and Sebastian, who Perino once introduced during a television segment and who grew up in Scotland. It is not known if he has other grandkids. McMahon moved to the United States full-time in 2000 and became an American citizen in 2006, eight years after marrying Perino. Perino has said her hubby is extremely patriotic and that he has even fallen in love with American football.

Much of the information known about Peter McMahon comes from tidbits dropped by his wife Dana Perino, former White House press secretary. Since beginning at Fox News, Perino has become more forthcoming about her personal life, which means dropping the occasional comment about her hubby. McMahon's Facebook profile also provides a bit of information about him, like that he speaks German. Publicly accessible Facebook photos offer other details that point to McMahon's interests. For example, McMahon enjoys riding horses and owns a Harley Davidson motorcycle with a little sidecar. The whole profile is also incredibly dog-focused, with over 100 photos of his pups — and very few photos of other humans (Perino is in maybe a handful). The Brit is clearly an adventure-seeker, too, considering the photos posted of him flying a plane, whitewater rafting, and petting an elephant. 

Airplanes and elephants aside, McMahon's daily life seems rather serene. He and Perino own a home in New Jersey, in the borough of Bay Head. A 2020 New York Post article on anchors working from home during COVID divulged that McMahon and Perino keep a game table in the living room, where they solve puzzles and listen to music. The couple also rents a place in New York City, but Perino has said New Jersey is where they enjoy themselves the most. "New York City we adore, but this is where we live," Perino said to app.com in 2020. "This is the place we reconnect."

For more, check out these facts you likely never knew about Dana Perino.