Jenny McCarthy is once again speaking out about the emotional and professional toll she endured after her son was diagnosed with autism—and why sharing her story, she says, came with serious consequences.
This time, she pulled back the curtain on a private conversation so disturbing, it changed the way she saw everything.
Appearing on Maria Menounos’s podcast, McCarthy revisited the painful journey that changed her life forever—a horrifying health crisis involving her 2½-year-old son.
Before Evan, her son, was diagnosed with autism, McCarthy said the signs started with something far more terrifying—seizures that came out of nowhere and escalated fast.
“He started having seizures,” she said, “and they were life-threatening seizures. Like cardiac arrest.” They weren’t the kind of thing you expect in a toddler, and the severity made it clear something was deeply wrong.
She recalled one of the worst days of her life, when Evan went into cardiac arrest and turned blue. “At one point, my heart sank into my toes,” she said, describing the panic as she waited for paramedics to arrive. “There’s nothing worse,” she added. “He’s two and a half years old, he’s turning blue.”
Calling 911, she screamed for help, but time felt like it stood still. She compared herself to a mother in Terms of Endearment, pleading and shouting with everything she had.
Evan was revived not once but twice—first in the house, then again in the ambulance. During that chaos, McCarthy said she was bargaining with God. “Bring back my boy first… or I’ll kill myself,” she admitted. “He had to survive.”
He did. But what followed shortly after, she said, was an autism diagnosis. The emotional toll was crushing. “I hit such a low,” she said, remembering how she broke down in the shower, crying uncontrollably and feeling completely helpless.
What shook her most was the suddenness of it all. Evan had been a typical child—smiling, talking, hitting all his milestones. “How did my son get diagnosed,” she asked, “when he was a normal, typical child?” Though he had a few minor signs like eczema, she believed the real change came after his MMR shot.
McCarthy is convinced the vaccine triggered encephalitis, a type of brain inflammation, which she notes has been “clinically in published science” linked to autism. “And my son was one of them,” she said. “Because it was after his MMR, when his encephalitis… leads to autism.”
She first shared her story publicly on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007 during the release of her book, Louder Than Words: A Mother’s Journey in Healing Autism.
“That’s when I really outed myself,” she said. Oprah had long been pressed by parents to cover the link between vaccines and autism. “So, so many… were pounding Oprah to do a story on the association.”
Though the network initially resisted, Oprah eventually gave Jenny a live platform, insisting that recording it in advance would risk censorship. “She told me I had to go on live… so we had to go live.” Even then, Oprah had to read what Jenny called a “giant long page disclaimer.”
But despite the warning label, McCarthy said her message got through. “People heard me… parents heard me.”
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