White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has admitted the hardest part of dating a man more than three decades older came long before the news headlines.
Leavitt, 28, has described how she had to tell her parents that her love was closer in age to them than her.
“It’s definitely a challenging conversation to have at first,” she said during an appearance on Miranda Devine’s Pod Force One podcast.
Her husband, real estate magnate Nicholas Riccio, was born in 1965—making him about five years older than Leavitt’s mother, born in 1970, and about five years younger than her father, who is 65.
Riccio, now 60, runs Riccio Enterprises, which manages beachfront properties in New Hampshire.
The two began dating when Leavitt was 25 and running for Congress in 2022. That gap initially rattled her parents, she admits. However, the shock faded.
“Once they got to know him and saw who he is as a man and his character and how much he adores me, I think it became quite easy for them, and now we’re all friends,” she said.
Their relationship developed alongside Leavitt’s rapid political rise. Appointed by President Donald Trump, she became the youngest ever White House press secretary.
The couple has weathered the job’s pressure, she said, and even grown through it. They welcomed their son, Niko, in July 2024. They married in January 2025, just two days before Trump’s second swearing-in, according to People.
“I mean, it’s a typical family relationship, and my husband has such respect for my parents in the way that they raised me,” Leavitt said. “We all have a lot of fun together when they come to visit.”
Leavitt has spoken publicly about the relationship before. On The Megyn Kelly Show in March, she called their dynamic “a very atypical love story, but he’s incredible.”
She also described their first meeting, “A mutual friend of ours hosted an event at a restaurant that he owns up in New Hampshire and invited my husband,” she told Devine.
“I was speaking. We met and we were acquainted as friends. And then we fell in love.” Leavitt ultimately lost her congressional race to Representative Chris Pappas.
Riccio’s own story is rooted in New Hampshire. He grew up in Hudson as one of four children.
After high school, he attended Plymouth State University and endured periods of financial insecurity, he told the Sunday Herald in 2005.
A real estate course after college set him on the career path that would define his life. Riccio went on to build Riccio Enterprises into a major player in Hampton Beach, where he now owns more than 15 buildings rented to vacationing families.
