Anne Robinson reveals biggest regret over losing custody of daughter Emma

Anne Robinson has shared her life’s big regret over losing custody of her daughter, Emma, after battling an ‘appalling drink problem.’

The Weakest Link presenter, 81, lost custody of her daughter, Emma Wilson, when she was just two years old in 1973.

Anne has now revealed that she ‘slowly’ rebuilt her relationship with her daughter after realising she had to give up alcohol, calling losing custody of Emma ‘the most shameful thing of her life.’

Emma, who is now a television and radio producer, has a close relationship with her mother, with the pair even living together during the Covid lockdown.

Anne said: ‘ My mother was amazing, but she was also a very bad drinker. And if you grow up with someone with a drink problem, the one thing you’re absolutely determined is that you won’t do the same.

‘And of course I did. I developed the most appalling drink problem in my 20s. It was so bad that when I was divorcing my husband, he fought and won custody of Emma, which was the most shameful, and remains the most shameful thing, in my life. 

‘I really had to pick myself up from that and somehow start again from quite a low rate.’

Speaking to Lorraine Kelly on Saga’s Experience is Everything podcast, Anne shared: ‘I think the shame is quite heavy. And I realised I had to stop drinking, which I did in the next couple of years.

‘Slowly she was mine again, but it was quite a tough start… we had to start again when she was five or six, to really build a relationship which is untouchable now and has been for years and years and years.’

In July, Anne shared that she’d moved out of her countryside home in the Cotswolds, to an apartment in London that was just a few streets away from Emma and her family.