Paula Deen

Name at birth: Paula Ann Hiers

Paula Deen is a restaurateur from Savannah, Georgia who hosts the cable TV cooking shows Paula's Home Cooking and Paula's Party. Hers is a rags-to-riches kind of story -- right out of high school she married and had two kids. After her husband left her, she started a business in Savannah that sold sack-lunches to office workers. That led to a restaurant in early 1990, and by the end of the decade her home-style southern cooking had gained national attention. With an assist from Food Network's Gordon Elliot, she landed her own show on the cable network in 2003, followed by a more relaxed (and flirtatious) addition, Paula's Party in 2006. She's the anti-chef of the Food Network, a self-taught cook and advocate of the butter-n-bacon approach, with an empire that includes her Savannah restaurant (The Lady & Sons), a magazine (Cooking With Paula Deen), several cookbooks and a memoir (It Ain't All About the Cookin'). Paula Deen announced in January of 2012 that she had type 2 diabetes, saying she had gotten the diagnosis three years earlier. She said she would be a paid spokesperson for Novo Nordisk, a Danish pharmaceutical company that makes the diabetes medication Victoza. Things got worse for Deen in 2013, when she admitted in a legal deposition on May 17th that she had used racial epithets in the past. The story hit the news in June, and within a week the Food Network announced that it would not renew Deen's contract, and Wal-Mart and Caesar's Entertainment casinos both said they were cutting ties with her. Deen made a public apology and begged her fans for forgiveness in a tearful YouTube video.