To say Renee Baldwin was my makeup artist is incorrect. To say she was the makeup artist feels downright disrespectful. The truth is that for everyone who ever sat down in her chair at Newsmax, Rising, ESPN, or any of the other studios she graced with her beauty and kindness, Renee Baldwin was our friend.
I debated even writing this, but since finding out the horrific details of our friend Renee’s murder on Sunday morning, I can’t really think about anything else. For all that the local and now national media have and will continue to (correctly) report on the brutality of her murder, I would be remiss if I did not share some of the loveliness of her life.
For the last year and a half, I have spent a minimum of an hour every week in Renee’s chair, mostly as a cohost of Newmax‘s prime time hour, The Right Squad. The first time we met, we bonded immediately over both being Southern California girls who had decamped for Northern Virginia later in life and, as we joked, “exotic” girls with just a little bit of Chinese heritage. She loved wine and whiskey almost as much as being a mother. When she wasn’t posting lengthy hours making us all look camera-ready, she worked on a picturesque Leesburg winery on the weekend. She rarely discussed just how much of this effort was to support her adult family, but we all knew that despite living in Winchester, a two-hour trek from Newsmax’s downtown Washington, D.C., studio, she still managed to hit a 5 a.m. Orangetheory class before working a full day on her feet.
And Renee looked damn good doing it, and she helped us all look a little better in the process. Renee was 57 and had the skin of a woman 20 years younger, which I know she wouldn’t be mad about me saying, because she was proud of it. Her last text message to me was for one of those at-home LED/laser masks that sort of make you look like Bane from Batman, but help you freeze time and regenerate collagen in the process.
To work full-time at any news network, you have to be among the best, but even here, Renee was unusual. She always had the script for our prime-time show early to know whether I was sitting in “the leg chair” or in Mercedes Schlapp’s chair because the lighting was ever-so-slightly different, and she would style me differently depending on where I was sitting. She fixed what we were too busy to miss: sneakers hastily replaced with dress shoes, shiny noses powdered, a single lash out of place.
And another thing: Renee did not discuss politics, meaning that everyone from the Schlapps to me to our resident liberal troopers on our show absolutely loved her. Sitting in a stylist’s chair for at least an hour every week is almost therapeutic that way. Renee gave me better travel advice than I could have paid for after she came back from the Scottish highlands a couple of months before my husband and I were supposed to go. She gave love and life advice, and (especially to a woman who has had incredibly limited female mentorship outside of my own beloved mother and mother-in-law in my adult life), Renee felt downright maternal doing it.
According to last year’s American Time Use Survey, the average American spends four hours socializing each week. This is a statistic that she laughed at when I told her it, but it also means that most weeks, I spent about half as much time talking to Renee as the average person spent talking to anyone. Renee was doing her job, but for those of us lucky to sit in her chair every week, she was also our friend.
When our producer called me on Monday morning to forewarn me, after I (probably rudely) hung up on her in disbelief, I had about three hours to cry in my office and get myself together for Monday night’s show. I called my mother to tell her how much I loved her — the mother whom Renee correctly told me I should call more.
I thought I had myself mostly together by the time I walked into the Newsmax building, and I knew Renee would not want me to have red eyes before filming. It took about two and a half seconds to see Renee’s empty seat in the newsroom, where she usually sat waiting for us, for me to break down in tears. Monday night was probably the worst show I ever did, but the only consolation prize is that all five of us and basically everyone at the Washington, D.C. bureau also felt like crap. The fact that Matthew Foldi and I did not actually vomit or sob during filming is probably as big a win as we would get.
Considering Renee’s joie de vivre and then the sheer number of pundits who rotated through her chair, I was not even remotely one of Renee’s closest work friends; she simply had too many of them. But we all loved her.
Nobody deserved the horrific circumstances of her murder, and frankly, every new detail confirms that there is no consolation. Her end in this life was forced by a sinful and depraved perversion of natural order, and in part, the fact that no one was less deserving of such a brutal end is why I haven’t been able to think of anything else for 48 hours.
So let our comfort be this. I have no doubt that for whatever hell she experienced in her final moments here in this life, the Lord has welcomed her as an angel for her eternal life. Here on Earth, none of her friends will forget her love, her dedication, or her genuine beauty, inside and out.
Rest easy, our friend. We will all miss you, our dear friend Renee.
