Jeri Ryan

There is more behind-the-scenes drama with Voyager than any other Star Trek I know of. Which is impressive, given the drama on the original series. But I’ve actually rearranged the schedule and taken someone out of it because of her personal history. Imagine how bad it has to be for me to do that given some of the people we’ve covered. Now, I don’t know anything bad about Jeri Ryan as a person. Even after doing a bit of research. But it’s also true that her wild personal life has further reaching implications than anyone else in the history of Star Trek.

Ryan herself started out having an ordinary, even wholesome life. She was an Army brat, born in Munich. She traveled around until she was eleven, at which point her father retired and the family settled in Paducah, Kentucky. She went to Northwestern, majoring in theatre. While she was there, she competed in the Miss Illinois pageant, which she won. She then became third runner up (in other words, came in fourth place) in the Miss America pageant. She moved to Los Angeles after graduation.

Her first role on TV was within a year of graduation, on Who’s the Boss? From there, she launched into a pretty standard ‘90s TV career—Matlock, Melrose Place, and Murder, She Wrote. She did eight episodes of Dark Skies, an X-Files rip-off that lasted a season on NBC. She poked around the way a ton of other actresses do. Some of whom did better in the Miss America pageant than she did. And then, in 1997, she joined the cast of Star Trek: Voyager as Seven of Nine and secured her place in the Nerd Culture Pantheon for all time.

Yeah, okay, a lot of what was expected of her was slinking around in tight clothes. But she’s still a talented actress regardless of the expectations. She was hired to fill in for Gina Bellman when Bellman went on maternity leave from Leverage. As the grifter of the crew, she had to play a number of roles; she was a friend of Bellman’s Sophie, but she was intended to be considerably more mysterious. It’s a fun character, and Ryan clearly gave it her all. She didn’t need to; she can coast on royalties and cons until the end of time. But obviously she did not.

In 1990, then-Jeri Zimmerman met Jack Ryan, nine years her senior. They were married for eight years and had a son together. They divorced in 1999. In 2003, Jack decided to run for the US Senate. The couple agreed to release their divorce records but not their custody records, saying it would be against their son’s best interests. A judge disagreed and unsealed the records, revealing her allegations that he had taken her to sex clubs and required her to perform sex acts in public. With the records public, Ryan dropped out of the Illinois Senate race, eventually being replaced by Alan Keyes. Now, Ryan’s Democratic opponent was already leading in the polls, but with Ryan out of the race, Barack Obama won with some ninety percent of the vote. Of course, he only served for four years.