Lynn Greenfield has been married to the CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer since 1973. For much of that time she worked as a stylist at Saks Fifth Avenue, a few miles from the couple’s home in Bethesda, Maryland.
What sits on the record about her comes from photo agency captions, a wedding announcement, her own LinkedIn page and two sentences her husband gave a reporter in 2009. No interview with her appears in the published record.
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Buffalo, and a wedding in 1973
People puts their first meeting in Buffalo in the early 1970s. Blitzer grew up there, went to Kenmore West Senior High School and then to the University at Buffalo, and he still goes back. He flew up in July for a school reunion and wrote afterwards that he had enjoyed the Saturday dinner with old classmates more than the correspondents’ dinner in Washington the night before.
They married in 1973. Blitzer was in his mid twenties, a year out of Johns Hopkins and working in Washington for the Jerusalem Post. CNN did not launch until 1980 and he joined it in 1990. He is 78 now, and since 2025 he has co-anchored the morning edition of The Situation Room with Pamela Brown, after nearly twenty years anchoring it alone.
The job at Saks
Her LinkedIn profile lists her as a wardrobe stylist at Saks Fifth Avenue, full time, based in Bethesda. The account carries no posts and no followers.
A 2008 wedding announcement for the couple’s daughter described her as a personal shopper at the Saks store in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a short drive from the house.
The fullest account of the work in print runs to two sentences. In August 2009 a contributor to HuffPost interviewed Blitzer for a series about personal style, and most of the piece covers his beard. Partway through, the interviewer asked how he chose his neckties.
“I have an excellent personal shopper: my wife Lynn. She is a professional shopper at Saks.”
The clothes were not a small matter to him. He told the same interviewer that strangers had been stopping him in supermarkets since the early 1990s to talk about his ties rather than his reporting, and that he took his wardrobe seriously because he was representing the network every time he went on air.
Family
The couple have one child, Ilana, born in 1981. People reported that she studied at Emory University and worked as a beauty editor at several American magazines. A 2008 announcement recorded her marriage to Joseph Gendelman, which is where the surname in Ilana Blitzer Gendelman comes from. Entertainment outlets have since reported that she married again in 2015 and that the Blitzers have a grandson born the following year, though that reporting is thinner than the rest.
Her age, and a name that keeps changing
No date of birth for Lynn Greenfield appears in any reliable public record, and no verified age has been published. Several biography sites give an exact date and birthplace, none of it carrying a source, and the same wording shows up on sites that have nothing else in common.
The name moves around as well. Wikipedia uses Greenfield. Her LinkedIn account uses Blitzer. A 2016 Getty caption has her as Wolf Blitzer’s wife Lynn Greenfield, while a 2025 caption from the same agency has her as Lynn Blitzer.
She is not the Lynne Greenfeld who worked at Frito-Lay, a different woman with a different spelling who developed and named Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in 1989 and whose complaint to the company in 2018 prompted the investigation that disputed Richard Montaรฑez’s claim to have invented them.
Where she has been photographed
Getty, Shutterstock and Alamy hold pictures of the couple together going back twenty years, most of them taken in Washington at events tied to his work.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2006 | Opening of The Collection at Chevy Chase, Maryland |
| 2010 | White House Correspondents’ Dinner after party |
| 2012 | BET Honors after party, Smithsonian American Art Museum |
| 2014 | National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington |
| 2016 | Arriving at Jimmy Kimmel Live, Los Angeles |
| 2022 | White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Washington Hilton |
| 2023 | News and Documentary Emmy Awards, New York |
| 2024 | Screening of “A Real Pain”, Motion Picture Association, Washington |
| 2025 | Correspondents’ weekend kickoff party and Garden Brunch, Washington |
The Washington press weekend accounts for several of them. In 2025 the couple were photographed twice inside the same two days, at a kickoff party hosted by CAA and Condรฉ Nast and then on the red carpet at the Garden Brunch. Their daughter joined them at the News Emmys in New York in 2023, and they turned up at the CNN Correspondents’ Brunch in 2016.
Two of the appearances connect to Blitzer’s family history. He was born in Augsburg to Polish Jewish parents who survived the Holocaust, and his grandparents were killed at Auschwitz. In 2024 and again in 2025 the couple were honorary co-chairs of the annual gala held by Moment, the Jewish magazine co-founded by Elie Wiesel, the second of those marking its 50th year. They were also photographed in 2024 with Jesse Eisenberg at a Washington screening of his film “A Real Pain”, about two American cousins who travel to Poland to honour a grandmother who survived the camps.
One picture of her was not taken by an agency at all. Blitzer has posted more than 2,000 times on Instagram, and one of those posts shows five members of the family, his wife among them, crowded into a living room in Bills hats and hoodies, put up before a playoff game in January 2024 that Buffalo went on to lose.
