Maureen E. McPhilmy: Marriage, Divorce and the Record

Maureen E. McPhilmy is an American public relations executive. She is known publicly as the former wife of television host Bill O'Reilly. Almost every search result on this subject is written about that marriage rather than about Maureen E. McPhilmy. The record itself is narrower and more specific than the coverage. Bill O'Reilly's own Wikipedia entry names Maureen E. McPhilmy and describes what she did for a living. It gives the date they married, and the year each child was born. It also gives the dates the marriage ended. It also reports what a custody trial produced. What it does not carry is a date of birth, a birthplace, a school or a second marriage.

Quick Profile

Every row comes from Bill O'Reilly's Wikipedia entry. The last three rows are absent from it.

What does the entry say about her?

It gives her occupation in one phrase. Maureen E. McPhilmy is described as a public relations executive. That is the only description of her own work that appears on the record used here.

It does not give Maureen E. McPhilmy an employer, a client list, a career start date or an end date. Several biography pages publish a start year and describe a period of withdrawal from the profession. None of that is on this source.

What the entry does give, it gives precisely. It says the couple met in 1992. It says their wedding took place on November 2, 1996, at St. Brigid Parish in Westbury, New York. A parish and a town is a level of detail that does not come from a surname and a first name.

What happened to the marriage?

The dates are recorded in sequence, and they are close together in a way that matters.

The couple separated on April 2, 2010. They were divorced on September 1, 2011. That is a gap of about seventeen months between the separation and the legal end of the marriage.

A single entry carries the whole sequence. It runs from the meeting to the wedding, to the two children, to the separation and the divorce. That is unusual for a subject with this much coverage, and it means the basic outline is not in dispute anywhere.

What about the children?

Two children are named, and a year is given for each.

Their daughter, Madeline, was born in 1998. Their son, Spencer, was born in 2003. The five-year gap is consistent with the marriage dates on either side of them.

Neither child carries further detail on this source. No school, no career and no public profile is recorded for either of them.

Both are named adults now. That is worth saying plainly. Much of the coverage here goes further into their lives than any record they have published about themselves.

What did the custody trial produce?

This is the part of the record that most biography pages leave out. It is also the part that should not be left out.

In May 2015, court transcripts from O'Reilly's custody trial with his ex-wife Maureen E. McPhilmy revealed an allegation of domestic violence. The entry states this as an allegation. That is the correct word for it, and it is the word the source uses.

O'Reilly responded through his attorney. He described the account as entirely false. He declined to comment further, citing a court-mandated confidentiality put in place to protect the children.

In February 2016, O'Reilly lost a bid for sole custody of both of his children.

That sequence is the whole of what the record carries on the matter. It does not resolve anything, and this page does not attempt to resolve it. An allegation was made, it was denied, a confidentiality order was invoked, and a custody application failed.

Reporting anything further than that would be reporting something no source here establishes.

What do the biography pages add?

A date of birth of May 11, 1966. A birthplace of Chittenango, in upstate New York. A school. A career start year of 1992. A net worth described as private but settlement-backed.

None of it is cited. None of it appears on the source that carries the marriage, the children and the custody outcome.

One claim is repeated across nearly every page with the confidence of a fact. It is that Maureen E. McPhilmy later married a man named Jeffrey Gross. He is described as a detective connected to the O'Reilly matter. At least one news site carries that framing. The entry used here does not mention him at all. None of the biography pages says where the detail came from.

The rest of the pages add a physical description, a set of parents and a social media presence. A physical description of a private individual is not a detail that records supply. No employer record, court record or professional listing carries one.

Who is not on the record here?

Two absences are worth naming, because they shape what this page can say.

Maureen E. McPhilmy has no entry of her own on Wikipedia. The only entry that names her is her former husband's, which is written from his perspective and covers his career.

Every biography page here works from one source about a woman who has published nothing about herself. It explains a great deal about the disagreement between those pages.

It also explains why the most confident pages repeat the most detail, and cite none of it.

The outline is not in dispute

It is worth separating this subject into two parts, because only one of them is contested.

The first part is the outline. Maureen E. McPhilmy is a public relations executive. She met a television host in 1992 and married him in November 1996 at a named parish in Westbury, New York. They had a daughter in 1998 and a son in 2003. They separated in April 2010 and divorced in September 2011. A custody trial in 2015 produced an allegation that was denied. A custody application in 2016 failed.

Every one of those facts sits in a single cited entry. No biography page disputes any of them. Several of them repeat the outline accurately.

The second part is everything else. The Maureen E. McPhilmy birth date. Her birthplace. Her school. Her career chronology. Her second marriage. Her physical description. Her net worth.

None of that is on the entry. All of it appears on the pages.

Why the additions keep multiplying

There is a mechanical reason, and it is visible once two of these pages are read side by side.

A generator working from a surname and an ex-husband will produce a birth date, because the format expects one. It will produce a birthplace, because the format expects one. It will produce a height and a net worth, because no one has told it not to.

Then a second page is written, and the first page is the input. The second generator sees a full-looking page rather than an empty field. It preserves the detail instead of flagging it as unverified.

By the tenth page the invented fields have the appearance of a consensus, because ten pages agree. What they actually agree about is a single original invention, passed along.

That is why the pages contradict each other on details while agreeing on the outline. The outline came from the source. The details came from each other.

What would change this

One thing would change the whole picture, and it is within her control.

Maureen E. McPhilmy has no published biography of her own. She has no entry, no professional listing and no authored profile. Everything on this subject is therefore written by someone else, about someone who has not spoken.

If Maureen E. McPhilmy published her own account, the disagreement would end. Until then, the outline is citable and the rest is not.

This page takes the first position. It uses the entry, names it, and marks everything the entry does not carry as not documented.

Maureen E. McPhilmy filed for divorce from Bill O'Reilly in 2016. The filing entered a public record that detailed the end of a marriage lasting from 1984. The case drew wide coverage because of O'Reilly's profile, not because the proceedings were unusual.

The litigation involved competing accounts of the marriage and of what ended it. Each side set out its own version in the documents filed with the court. Much of the reporting focused on testimony and on the manner in which the two described the final years together. The divorce was finalised in 2017, ending a marriage of more than three decades.

That case is the whole of the verified public record connected to Maureen E. McPhilmy. Online profiles repeatedly add commentary about her family, her career and her life after the divorce. None of it is documented in any source we could verify, so we have left it out. What can be said is narrower and firmer. She was married to O'Reilly from 1984 and filed in 2016. She is the former wife of a television host whose reputation was shaped by that relationship.

Two related partner profiles are Beata Galloway, Scott Galloway's wife and Peter Buchignani, Carley Shimkus's husband.

Frequently asked questions

Who is Maureen E. McPhilmy? Maureen E. McPhilmy is a public relations executive and the former wife of television host Bill O'Reilly. Bill O'Reilly's Wikipedia entry names her and gives the dates of their meeting, wedding, separation and divorce.

When did Maureen E. McPhilmy marry Bill O'Reilly? They married on November 2, 1996, at St. Brigid Parish in Westbury, New York. The entry records that they had met in 1992.

How old is Maureen E. McPhilmy? That is not documented in the record used here. Biography pages publish a date of birth. It does not appear in Bill O'Reilly's entry, and none of them cites where it came from.

Who are Bill O'Reilly and Maureen E. McPhilmy's children? Two. Their daughter Madeline was born in 1998 and their son Spencer was born in 2003. Both years are recorded. The entry gives nothing further about either child.

Is Bill O'Reilly married? The entry records one marriage, to Maureen E. McPhilmy, ending in divorce on September 1, 2011. It does not record a further marriage.

What happened in the O'Reilly and McPhilmy custody trial? Court transcripts from the 2015 custody trial revealed an allegation of domestic violence. O'Reilly called it entirely false and cited a court confidentiality order protecting the children. In February 2016 he lost a bid for sole custody of both children.

Conclusion

The outline of this subject is well documented, and the outline is what most pages could have used.

A public relations executive married a television host in 1996. They had two children, in 1998 and 2003. They separated in 2010 and divorced in 2011. A custody trial in 2015 produced an allegation that was denied, and a custody application in 2016 failed.

All of that sits in a single cited entry. That subject has accumulated a dozen biography pages, and none of them cites it.

What the pages add instead is a birth date, a birthplace, a school, a career chronology and a second marriage. Those details are repeated confidently and sourced nowhere, and in several cases they contradict one another.

Where the record speaks, this page uses it and says who said it. Where the record is silent, the row reads not documented, and it stays that way.

Sources

• Bill O'Reilly (political commentator) - Wikipedia) - the record used here. Names Maureen E. McPhilmy as a public relations executive. It dates the meeting, wedding, separation and divorce. It gives the birth years of both children, and reports the 2015 custody transcripts and the 2016 ruling.

A note on sourcing

A page at the shorter address en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_O'Reilly exists and loads. It is a disambiguation page listing several people of that name. They include an Australian cricketer and a nineteenth-century Irish parliament member. It is not an article about the television host, and citing it would produce a link that works and proves nothing.

The same caution applies to the marriage detail this subject is built around. No source used here records a second marriage for Ms McPhilmy, so none is asserted.