Shawn Killinger

Shawn Elizabeth Killinger was born on November 2, 1979, in Detroit, Michigan. As a child, she danced and acted in the community theatre. Due to her father’s work, the family moved to Mexico City when she was only 11 years old. She became fluent in Spanish during her four-year stay there, and enrolled into the International American School Foundation. She later graduated from Penn State University in State College with a degree in Marketing. A self-proclaimed ‘obsessed wanderlust traveler’, she travelled to Geneva, Switzerland to work with the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) while doing her matriculation.

She is married to consultant Joe Carettta, whom she met via a dating site. She is usually very open about her life and experiences with her fans, including the couple’s struggle to conceive a child. However, after she failed to communicate the reason behind her absence from her shows for a long time in 2014, rumors started to spread. She eventually came out with a heartfelt Facebook post detailing her unfortunate miscarriage while five months pregnant with a daughter. She has two stepsons from Joe’s first marriage, and the couple adopted a baby girl named Jagger Jude in June 2017. Killinger, whose Facebook page says that domestic matters are not her strong suit, apparently had a challenging time as a new mother as she took a long time to share her excitement with her fans, adding that she has not showered in 3 days and smelt like baby detergent.

In 1997, after completing her college studies, Shawn Killinger moved to New York City and was one of the few applicants selected to join the prestigious CBS Page Program. For two years, she worked as a set assistant, running scripts for Dan Rather for the 'CBS Evening News', and later helped seating audience members at the ‘Late Show with David Letterman’. Gradually, she became the Assistant Producer on the CBS News ‘Foreign Desk’ program. She eventually made the decision to come in front of the camera as an anchor-reporter and worked on both Fox and CBS stations in Florida and New York. For a decade, she was a newscaster in local and network news, and then as the morning anchor and entertainment host for an affiliate in Orlando, Florida. She was a cast member on Martha Stewart’s version of ‘Apprentice’, in which she was the third member to be fired, as the host did not like her catchphrase ‘Fake it till you make it’, which eventually became a rage in popular culture. However, she later joined Martha Stewart in promoting her QVC apparel line. She joined QVC as a program host in 2007, and has been entertaining millions of viewers ever since, boosting sales of the company by millions of dollars.

In January 2015, QVC host Shawn Killinger and designer Isaac Mizrahi became the laughing stock of the internet community after they argued on whether the Moon is a planet or a star during a segment promoting a cardigan line. After arguing for a few minutes, they got off-camera information that the Moon is a natural satellite, to which Killinger wondered if that is what Google says about the Moon, while Mizrahi went on to express his disagreement stating that it must be a planet as "things live on it".

On June 27, 2016, a petition was filed on the consumer advocacy website ‘Pissed Consumer’ requesting the removal of ‘egomaniacal’ 'Shawnie Sue' persona as the host of the show. The petition got 24k views and almost two hundred comments, even though not everyone agreed with the original poster.