EXCLUSIVE: 'I had to be rescued from two predators when I passed out drunk on a park bench. I didn't know I almost died.' ABC star Elizabeth Vargas reveals decade-long battle with alcohol

• e-mail

In a stunning new memoir, ABC news anchor Elizabeth Vargas reveals how a passing motorist rescued her drunk in Riverside Park as two predators circled.

In 'Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction', Vargas recalls dashing into a liquor store that summer's day in July 2012 before showing up at the ABC studios to do a late-morning interview for her show, '20/20'.

The minute the interview wrapped, Vargas bolted for a room off to the side and filled a water glass to the brim with white wine. She drained it and poured another.

Hours later the motorist spotted Vargas 'someplace along the park' with 'two sketchy-looking men hanging around me'. She fell into the woman's car, just managing to share her address before passing out.

SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO 

Recovering: Elizabeth Vargas walks a red carpet at a celebration of Hispanic achievement in the media in May of this year. She has now been sober for two years

Trouble ahead: Mac Cohn and Elizabeth Vargas with their first son, Zach. But after their second son, Sam, was born, their marriage, and her career, began to come apart and she turned to drink

When the woman dropped Vargas off at her building, Vargas was unconscious. Marc kept her in the lobby waiting for the ambulance to arrive.

He watched closely over her breathing, terrified. The nanny kept the children upstairs away from the scene.

Vargas was admitted to hospital with a lethal blood alcohol level of 0.4. She'd only just escaped death.

When she woke up in St. Luke’s hospital, she had no idea of what had happened. She borrowed an orderly’s phone to call home. 

Marc told her to stay where she was, he wasn’t coming in the middle of the night to pick her up. She considered walking fifty blocks home in heels but decided to wait out the four hours.

In the memoir, Vargas reveals how close she came to being fired after repeatedly relapsing. She also writes about the cruel disintegration of her marriage to singer-songwriter Marc Cohn, whose hits include 'Walking in Memphis'.

Vargas, 54, sober for two years now, writes that it was both the stress of the job and an unhappy marriage that launched her alcoholic spiral.

But she admits she was always looking for a solution in a bottle. Vargas didn't know how else to medicate her lifelong severe anxiety any other way. 

 The start of the spiral was the birth of their second son, Sam.  She gave birth on August 16, 2006, intensely anxious. They had to wait hours for a scheduled c-section.

Marc sat oblivious doing a crossword puzzle. It was left to her doctor to talk her through.

On her return home with the baby, he started sleeping in the den.

Crisis: ABC's running crisis began with the death from lung cancer of Peter Jennings. Vargas and Woodruff replaced him on World News Tonight

Vargas says her husband revealed his gnawing resentment that she hadn't been more attentive when he'd been shot in an attempted car jacking in Denver, Col., the year before.

Vargas had flown to his side but the wound, just above his cheekbone, was more painful than life-threatening, Vargas hurried back to work. ABC was in crisis. Peter Jennings had died of lung cancer on August 7.

Vargas and Bob Woodruff took over 'World News Tonight' as co-anchors. At the time, she was the only woman anchoring an evening news program and the first Latina to ever to occupy the chair.

On January 29, 2006, Woodruff suffered a severe brain injury from an IED explosion in Iraq. Vargas continued on with Charles Gibson until the day she was humiliating fired from the anchor position.

She was seven months pregnant when ABC news chief, David Westin, brutally informed her that Gibson was being named sole anchor, saying, 'If you wish to leave the network you can.'

Other news outlets reported that Gibson had muscled her out of the anchor spot. She retreated to '20/20,' co-anchoring with David Muir, a job she had wisely not relinquished.

But when Vargas returned to work after maternity leave, she was confronted time and again by her changed status. .

'My tenure at the top of the list for big interviews was over,' she writes, 'I wasn't even on the list anymore.'

'I personalized it.'

One night home alone with her two sons, Zachary and Sam, she drank so much she had to be hospitalized to detox.

Co-anchor: Elziabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff took over 'World News Tonight' as co-anchors. At the time, she was the only woman anchoring an evening news program and the first Latina to ever to occupy the chair. But it was not to be: she was moved out after his IED injury in Iraq

Crisis: ABC lurched from crisis to crisis, with the death of Peter Jennings, and Bob Woodruff suffering a severe brain injury from an IED in Iraq, along with cameraman Doug Vogt

Under strain: Marc Cohn and Elizabeth Vargas' marriage was in difficulty in January 2013 when they were photographed together. Later that year she lost out on an interview to Diane Sawyer, and spiraled into drink again.

Vargas said she started slipping into bars after work and secretly drinking at home. When she traveled overseas on assignment, she drank nonstop.

On a family vacation in West Palm Beach, a nurse had to re-hydrate her in the hotel room.

Her first stint in rehab was a quick two-weeks at treatment center, Cirque Lodge, in Utah, in 2012. Then came the disastrous afternoon in the park that resulted in another month's stay at rehab.

In 2013, Vargas was filling in for Robin Roberts, who was then battling cancer, on 'Good Morning America,' when she was informed that an important interview she'd been chasing for '20/20' had gone to Diane Sawyer.

Vargas had closely reported on the trial of Amanda Knox, convicted of murder in Italy for months and when Knox was cleared, believed she would be the first to interview her. Even so, Knox's lawyer insisted the interview go to Sawyer.

A slow burning resentment led her to reach for the bottle again. When she showed up for a location shoot for '20/20' drunk, she landed back in rehab. This time in rural Tennessee, roughly treated under lockdown.

Even her electric toothbrush was confiscated. When Vargas demanded to know why, she was told other female patients would use it to masturbate.

Known as the Center, her stay wouldn't be easy. Even a therapist told her, 'I'm not sure this is the best place for you. I would have chosen a different place.'

Her husband refused contact with her. 'He did not come for family weekend at the Center, when all my other housemates' husbands and loved ones arrived and took part in the family recovery process.

'I felt utterly and completely alone.'

Meanwhile, she felt the stress of supporting her household. Vargas returned home.

'I f***ed up,' she writes of her return. 'There really is no other way to put it.'

When she was released from the Center in Tennessee, Marc was touring and wouldn’t let her come home for eleven days.

'I was paying for all this myself, along with the bills in our household, while I was away. The financial burden was becoming a strain.'

She left and stayed with a friend. When she was finally at home, she started to drink again. Four days later she was back at the center. 

Elbowed out:  ABC News president David Westin (left), told Elizabeth Vargas that she was out of World News Tonight which she had co-anchored with Bob Woodruff until he was injured in Iraq.

On the job: Elizabeth Vargas interviews then president George W Bush in the White House in February 2006.

Coming clean: In January 2014 George Stephanopolous sat down with Elizabeth Vargas. She told him she was an alcoholic. But she was to relapse again in August of that year

After a family get-together 2011, Vargas confessed to her sister, Aimie, she was worried about her drinking. Then passed out.

Amy confronted Marc who said the drinking had been going on for a few years. Aimie demanded to know why he hadn’t reached to Vargas’s side of the family for help.

Marc said: 'I didn’t think it was my story to tell.'

Vargas writes: 'I don’t know why he didn’t reach out to my side of the family. He was certainly telling his own family and friends about my drinking.'

He first called her on her drinking after they’d been dating for two years.

At home after dinner, he refused to pour another Remy. 'I think maybe you’ve had enough. I think you drink too much.'

Vargas says she worked hard at getting at the source of her lifelong anxiety. She attributes it to the trauma the family suffered when her father was sent to serve in Vietnam in 1969.

Vargas was six at the time and the family was stationed in Okinawa. As an army brat stationed overseas through much of her childhood, she says she presented a composed exterior that hid a great deal of fear and pain.

On New Year's Eve, she called home to learn from her children that 'Daddy's going out'.

When she demanded to know from Cohn, where he was going and with whom he snapped, 'This is none of your business.'

On January 23, she sat down with George Stephanopoulos on 'Good Morning America,' for an interview where she admitted publicly, for the first time: 'I am an alcoholic.'

Though she had returned home strongly advised not to make any big changes in her life that would put her fragile sobriety at risk, Vargas was given no choice when Cohn told her it had met someone else.

'I have feelings for someone else,' he told her, 'We want to explore being together.'

Vargas recalls reeling with shock. By summer, she was falling apart.

'I don't know what it was that pushed me over the edge, sent me tumbling back into the swamp of addiction.

'Was it another long weekend without the boys? News from my divorce lawyer that as the "money spouse" I would have to pay for Marc's lawyer, too?'

Vargas knows that hearing a report that Cohn was seen strolling on Broadway holding hands with 'another brunette' didn't help.

'I felt like I was dying of grief. I would do anything not to feel like that.'

That August, she rented an expensive house in Malibu for a vacation with her boys. Instead, Vargas ended locked up in a detox center, Las Encinas, in Pasadena.

She had been a horrific drunk and now there was not going to be a reprieve.

'My bosses at ABC had had it. This time I had nearly lost my job.'

She returned to New York with for a month of at home recovery, without pay, with a counselor named 'Polly.' She slept every night at a sober house.

Polly directed her toward a strengthening belief in God.

'Today, when I feel anxiety start to overtake me, I pray, ' she writes. 'And now I pray when times are good.

'Every single day, I thank God for my family, my health, my home, and a job that I still love.'

Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction is published on September 13 and is available for pre-order on Amazon.