Vanna White posted a New Year's Day photo on Instagram that most people never get to see: her, her partner John Donaldson, and her two adult children, all together. For someone who's been a fixture on television for four decades, these glimpses into her actual life feel genuinely private.
The caption was simple: "Happy New Year from my family to yours."
White shares her children—Giovanna (Gigi), 28, and Nicholas (Nikko), 31—with her ex-husband George Santo Pietro, whom she divorced in 2002. She's been with Donaldson, a real estate broker, since 2012. The fact that she chose to share this moment with her blended family speaks to something that often gets overlooked in celebrity culture: the ordinary contentment of people who've built lives that actually work.
What her kids are up to now
Nikko studied agricultural sciences at Oregon State University and eventually shifted into real estate, where he works as an agent. Gigi took a different path—she studied photography at NYU and now works as a tattoo artist at Lincoln Tattoo Company in Los Angeles. Earlier this year, she gave her mother her first tattoo, which is the kind of detail that suggests a genuinely close relationship.
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Start Your News DetoxWhite and Donaldson met through a mutual friend at a barbecue Vanna was hosting. "I remember looking at him and thinking, 'He's really cute,'" she told PEOPLE in 2019. "We ended up talking for a long time that night." When asked what makes it work between them, her answer was refreshingly unsentimental: "It just works. He lets me be me, I let him be him. There is no drama."
That's not the kind of thing you see in Instagram captions very often—the quiet acknowledgment that sometimes the best relationships are the ones where people simply let each other exist as they are. The photo itself is unremarkable by any standard other than the fact that it exists at all. For someone whose professional life has been so visible for so long, keeping her family life genuinely private, and then choosing to share it on her own terms, feels like its own kind of choice.
