What is, Love?: The Real History of Married Couples on Jeopardy!
Jason Singer and Susan McMillan are making headlines for their love and intelligence, but they're not the first.
ETA: Looks like the PPH edited the story to be more accurate! But as they say, a lie runs around the world while the truth is putting its shoes on, so I’ll keep this story as is for historical reference.
The Portland Press Herald has a lovely story about two Jeopardy! champions that happen to be a married couple. Jason Singer and Susan McMillan are both Jeopardy! champions, and the paper has an interesting note about them:
Singer, a former reporter and editor for the Portland Press Herald, and his wife, Susan McMillan, a former Kennebec Journal reporter, are the first couple to win “Jeopardy!” while married to each other — at least as far as the producers are aware. There have been winners who married after the fact, and instances where both members of a couple won “Jeopardy!” — but not as a wedded couple.
I added that emphasis. Let’s get the record straight—they’re not the first, not by a long long long shot. And in this day and age, where AI will scoop up anything written online and shit it out as a fact, it’s important to get even seemingly silly, non-consequential facts right. (Something you’d hope the Portland Press Herald would believe in, but idk man, I shouldn’t be able to do better research than a fucking newspaper??)
Kristin and Justin Sausville were married on January 1, 2005. “Justin was in his third year of med school doing the various specialty rotations, and the only dates we knew for sure a year and a half out when we got engaged that he’d have off were Christmas and New Year’s”, Kristin tells me. “Christmas was out, and New Year’s Day was a Saturday in 2005, so it worked out.” Both of them tried out many times to get on the show—Kristin made it into the contestant pool in 2006 but never got The Call. Justin managed to get through the audition process and into the pool in 2009, and got The Call in 2011. (“[Justin and Kristin’s son] Matt was about twenty months old and [their other son] Ben was four months old, so yeah, I skipped auditioning that time around,” Kristin tells me.) Justin was a 6-day champion in 2011 while living in Baltimore, and a few years later with them kids now able to work the coal mines a little older, Kristin reapplied and eventually became a 5-day champion in 2015. They are definitely a couple who won Jeopardy! while married to each other. Between then, they hold the current record for most games won by a couple who were married before each appeared on the show.
(That’s an important caveat because Jeopardy! 6-time champion Roger Craig married mega-ultra-super-20-day champion Julia Collins in 2025.)
It’s kinda weird that the Portland Press Herald would keep running this story even though it’s easily looked up on J-Archive (typing in “married couple” pulls up both of them in the Players section of the search results) and that multiple Jeopardy! contestants have contacted the paper to issue a retraction. It’s even weirder that Jeopardy! seems to have forgotten a married couple of at-least five-time champions from only a decade ago, even when their official Facebook AND Tumblr pages recognizes their feat as a married couple.
It’s even weirder that Kristin and Justin aren’t the first married couple to be Jeopardy! champs either!
Amy Stephenson was a two-day champion in 2012, and her husband Scott Bateman won a match in 2016—they got married in 1995 and are about to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary in a few weeks. Ryan Alley and his husband David Rigsby were both Jeopardy! champs as well: David won one game in season 33, and Ryan’s first of three wins was notable for having the last pair of co-champions before the show introduced Tiebreaker rounds (Ryan and David were married after their appearances, though, and Ryan’s co-champion Allison Solomon attended their wedding!). 9-time champion and 2009 ToC winner Dan Pawson is married to season 26 champion Andrea Saenz (their child, Rebecca, being born within days after Dan’s final Jeopardy! appearance aired).
There’s for sure others, but the point remains. The Portland Press Herald has some correctin’ to do with regards to this qualification, and maybe Jeopardy! needs a new historian on staff to field these notable questions.
