Jenna Bush Hager Recalls Sneaking Away From Secret Service to See a Boyfriend
What To Know
- Jenna Bush Hager revealed how she once secretly snuck away from her Secret Service detail during college to visit a boyfriend.
- She shared this story on Today With Jenna & Friends while discussing “walks of shame,” also recalling her now-husband Henry Hager’s awkward exit from the White House early in their relationship.
- Jenna, daughter of former President George W. Bush, attended the University of Texas at Austin during her father’s presidency and is now married with three children.
Jenna Bush Hager once went to great lengths to sneak away from the Secret Service during her college days.
“I dated a football player [in] Texas for a brief time, and I was embarrassed that the Secret Service would know that,” Bush Hager shared on the Thursday, October 23, episode of Today With Jenna & Friends. “I don’t know why, but I was — not [by] the football player at all. I just didn’t want them to know I had a new boyfriend ‘cause senior year was active for me.”
Joking that she had “lots and lots” of walks of shame, Bush Hager revealed she once recruited her friends to help her visit her athlete boyfriend. “I had my friends sneak me — I was in the back of the car, and they snuck me past the Secret Service,” she stated. “I know, I’ve never admitted this.”
Her cohost for the week, Savannah Guthrie, was shocked by the story. “Wait a minute. You snuck out from the Secret Service?” she questioned Bush Hager. “So, they thought you were home, in bed, reading the Bible, or whatever, and you were at the football player’s house?”
After Bush Hager replied, “Yes, I was,” Guthrie congratulated her with a high five. “Put it right here. That’s my girl,” the Today anchor quipped.
Bush Hager went on to clarify, “It was the only time I escaped them, and then we broke up soon after.”
Jamie McCarthy / Getty Images
Bush Hager and her twin sister, Barbara Bush, are the daughters of former President George W. Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush. Bush Hager’s studies at the University of Texas at Austin overlapped with her father’s presidency.
Bush Hager shared the memory while discussing walks of shame with Guthrie, who brought up another story from Bush Hager’s past. “We all know about the most famous walk of shame in history, when Henry [Hager] had to walk of shame out of the White House in the early days of the Jenna and Henry relationship,” Guthrie said of Bush Hager’s husband.
Bush Hager opened up about Hager’s White House walk of shame on a November 2022 episode of Today With Hoda & Jenna. “Henry and I met when we were in our 20s. We were very young. … At one point, my parents were traveling, and I was staying there, and we’d gone out to the bars,” she told Hoda Kotb at the time. “And like all relationships do, they reached a certain level. And Henry said he looked up and he looked around, and he was like, ‘Ahh!’ Because he worked for my dad.”
While Bush Hager wished her now-husband a fond farewell, she says he went into a total panic. “And then, he said to get out of the White House was as hard to get in because [the guards] are looking that way. … Usually, people don’t run out. So, he ran down the thing in his clothes from the night before, and then pulling on the gate [like], ‘Sir!’”
Bush Hager and Hager went on to wed in 2008 and have since become parents to three kids — Mila, 12, Poppy, 10, and Hal, 6.
Today With Jenna & Friends, Weekdays, 10 a.m. ET, NBC
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