Star Jones Shares Health Update 15 Years After Heart Surgery

Martin Holmes May 9, 2025, 10:08 am

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Star Jones is getting candid about her heart disease diagnosis in 2010 and undergoing open-heart surgery, which she said “made me face my mortality.”

Speaking to People, the former View co-host admitted she was “severely overweight” before working with doctors over 20 years ago to change her lifestyle and eating habits. After changing her diet and exercising regularly, Jones said, “I was feeling really great.”

However, she still experienced “weird symptoms,” such as being short of breath, feeling dizzy when she stood up, and having “intense” heart palpitations. “It unnerved me. It made me know something was wrong,” she shared, noting how she decided to visit her cardiologist.

After a series of tests, she was diagnosed with heart disease in 2010 and told that she would need to undergo open-heart surgery. “Anybody that says getting a diagnosis of heart disease doesn’t frighten them, is not telling the truth. I was scared,” Jones confessed.

She continued, “The doctor said ‘We have to crack your chest and we will disconnect your heart and you’ll be on the heart and lung machine.’ So it made me face my mortality.”

While the surgery saved Jones’ life, she remembers the procedure being “terrifying,” especially as her heart was “disconnected for 22 minutes” on the operating table. However, once she left the hospital as a “heart-healthy person,” Jones vowed not to take her health for granted.

“Once I kind of took my head out of the sand, after two weeks of eyes-wide-open scared, I became Star Jones again,” she explained. “And I’m a voracious reader. I wanted to know everything about heart disease, and I discovered that I had been living in a bubble, which I think a lot of women are.”

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Jones, a former lawyer who currently serves as the host of Divorce Court, has spent the past 15 years being an advocate for heart health, including working as a national volunteer for the American Heart Association. She wants women to take heart health more seriously, urging them to check for signs and symptoms of heart disease the way they would get mammograms and breast exams for cancer.

“Open-heart surgery saved my life, but me knowing more about my heart risk and focusing on my health is what gave me my life back,” Jones stated.

The former Celebrity Apprentice contestant is now teaming up with Medtronic for their “Letter to My Mother” campaign, which aims to encourage women to have conversations with their mothers, or other women in the livers, about the risks of heart disease.

“You can have these conversations with your family so that you can be well-armed. I always say being well-armed is ready for battle and we’re battling heart disease as a nation,” Jones said. “I’m leading this ‘Letter to My Mother’ campaign to really start the conversation with other women — the conversations that I wish I had earlier on and the conversations that quite frankly have saved my life.”