Lindsay De Marco’s marriage to Sir Nick Faldo, the six-time major champion, was her seventh. She met Faldo in 2018 and married him in December 2020.
Her public profile goes back further than that marriage. She won a conservative pageant title years earlier under a different name, and this year she took on a more public role again, speaking openly about her husband’s recovery from heart surgery.
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A long line of married names
De Marco’s first marriage was to a Navy corpsman named William Smith in 1982. She married Florida businessman Randy Heine twice after that, in 1985 and again in 1988. In 1990, federal agents raided one of Heine’s businesses, a Florida tobacco shop chain where De Marco worked, as part of a three-year drug investigation. De Marco pleaded no contest to a state charge that year. Two years later, in federal court, she pleaded guilty to a charge tied to shipping drug paraphernalia and received six months of house detention.
She married an Air Force officer, Colonel Nicholas De Marco, around the time that case was resolved. That marriage is where her current surname comes from. Two more marriages followed. She married a media executive in the early 2000s, then, by the end of that decade, Scott Sangalli, a wealthy Republican donor with ties to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. By the time she met Faldo, De Marco was still the name she used.
It was under the Sangalli name that she competed for, and won, the Mrs Conservative USA pageant title in 2012, telling reporters at the time that being a conservative woman was a choice worth defending publicly.
Reporting by the Daily Mirror, which first detailed her marriage history, found she had used eighteen different names and lived at more than forty addresses. One other claim from that period has followed her since. An ex-husband and one other named source have said she worked as a topless dancer in Florida during the 1980s. De Marco has denied it on the record.
How Lindsay De Marco became Lady Faldo
De Marco, who was born in New York, met Faldo in 2018, when he was in his early sixties and she was in her late fifties. Both had been married multiple times before, and Faldo later told HELLO! magazine this one felt different, calling De Marco “the one.” Their original wedding plan was a formal event at Kensington Palace, but the pandemic ruled that out. They married instead on a beach in the Florida Keys with sixteen guests. Faldo has said the date, December 18, mattered to him personally, since 18 has been a lucky number throughout his golf career.
Lindsay De Marco’s political life with Trump
The public conservative image she built in 2012 carried into her marriage to Faldo. In August 2024, she and Faldo attended a Trump rally in Bozeman, Montana, where Trump praised Faldo from the stage and joked about bringing him into government. Faldo rejected the idea publicly within days, saying he had no interest in a political role. De Marco has generally been the more visibly political half of the couple. She posted support for Trump after the assassination attempt on his life in July 2024. By October, she and Faldo said they were leaving X for good, calling the platform unhealthy, though they stayed active on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
A different kind of public moment
The pageant title and the political rallies came in public, campaign-style settings. What De Marco wrote in early 2026 came from a different kind of moment. Faldo underwent open heart surgery at the Cleveland Clinic in January to repair an enlarged aorta. Dr. Lars Svensson, who chairs the clinic’s heart and vascular institute, performed the procedure. De Marco posted updates through his recovery, including that the surgery followed nearly sixteen years of monitoring.
“The days leading up to surgery carried their share of fear.”
Lindsay De Marco, in a post on X, February 2026
By March, Faldo posted a video update, ten weeks after the operation, saying he had started cardio rehab and was doing well.
Where Lindsay De Marco and Nick Faldo stand now
Faldo’s recovery appears to have held. This week, he’s working the Open Championship at Royal Birkdale for Sky Sports, including a public back-and-forth with Bryson DeChambeau over golf course strategy. Today is also his 69th birthday. He was born the same day in 1957, in Welwyn Garden City, England. De Marco, reported as 61 in 2024, is around 63 now, and hasn’t posted a public update since the spring. The two still split time between Montana, where they live on a 125-acre ranch outside Bozeman, and Faldo’s ongoing broadcast and course-design work.
