Veteran news reporter Barbara Walters definitely has a headline-making story on her hands. The View host's daughter, Jacqueline Walters Danforth, was arrested for a DUI in Naples, Fla. on Sunday, May 19, TMZ reports — and it didn't appear to be an easy arrest to make.
According to police documents, Danforth was in the driver's seat of a Honda Pilot with a male passenger when officers approached her vehicle around 1:24 a.m. after receiving reports that an SUV was pulled over to the side of the road without its headlights on. Both Danforth and her friend — believed to be her boyfriend — were reportedly intoxicated, the officers reported, and the trouble really started when they attempted to handcuff Danforth's passenger.
According to the police report, Danforth, 44, "began shouting" and tussling with the officers.
"I was afraid that the suspect may run into traffic on the highway, so she was taken to the ground due to her unpredictable behavior, then secured in handcuffs," the arresting officer wrote in the report.
After Danforth finally agreed to take a breathalyzer test (she blew a .218, nearly twice the legal limit), she was arrested for a DUI and taken into custody before being released several hours on a $1,000 bond.
Both Walters and Danforth have spoken out about Danforth's troubled childhood growing up. Walters adopted her only daughter in 1968 when she was married to her second husband, Lee Guber. The pair divorced eight years later in 1976.
In an interview with NBC News back in 2003, Danforth admitted to abusing drugs in her youth, including marijuana and meth, which she recognized as a possible reaction to her own frustrations growing up as an adopted child.
"I think that somewhere inside you think, 'Why did people give me up?'" she said in the interview. Her famous mother intervened, insisting that she go to a sober boot camp. "I'm lucky I didn't die," she said at the time.
