"I'm the poster child," she said. "Any time there is an article on plastic surgery, my name will appear. Having plastic surgery is not shoplifting. People have treated it like, 'Oh, my God! She got plastic surgery!' But I say, if people don't notice it, you are wasting your money."
Cosmetic surgery may, indeed, obliterate wrinkles and bags, but the result almost always creates an odd juxtaposition of 25-year-old parts peering out from a frozen expression on a decades-older body. Even as surgeons are better able to cover their tracks with less invasive techniques, the increased awareness of cosmetic surgery has made it easier to spot. We don't buy the old white lies and excuses for swelling, bruises and, weeks later, a strangely different countenance.
So perhaps Van Susteren was forced to show her hand--or rather, the handiwork of her doctor. The anchor looks startlingly different than she did at her previous job at CNN, partly because her face is still quite swollen. Since her surgery has "become the public spectacle," she has mostly given up trying to mitigate the swelling.
She denies that having, or admitting to, the surgery was a publicity ploy. "I'm not that clever," she said. And while it's tempting to paint the anchor as another aging woman desperate to stay competitive in the ageist and sexist world of TV news, Van Susteren insists she had the surgery on a whim while waiting to start her new show.
"It's not this thing that I sat around debating," she said. "Had CNN or Fox told me to do it, I would never have done it." She added that her decision didn't derive from insecurity. "At 47, I've been happily married for 15 years. I intend to spend the rest of my life with my husband. I have another career I can fall back on," said the former defense attorney, who earned credibility as an analyst during the O.J. Simpson trial. "And I'm not out looking for men."
Though Van Susteren may have been free of the typical pressures to have surgery, some observers said her actions add to the incentive for other women.
"It's a bad indicator," said Dana Adams, a former network correspondent who coached other newscasters through her Adams Broadcast Consulting business. "I think it's kind of sad that women continue to have to prostitute ourselves and share our innermost secrets." Cosmetic surgery has become a fact of life in television news. "You not only have to get it,'' Adams said, "you have to admit it. As we age, women become hags and men become seasoned."
