Dr. Ruth's Rags-to-Riches Story Is Both Inspiring and Heartbreaking

Sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer was one of the first in her field to break boundaries and stigmas about sex. Sadly, however, she passed away on July 12, 2024, in her home at 96 years old, leaving behind her two children and four grandchildren.

But what did she leave behind for them? She was a household name in the ‘80s and ‘90s after she rose to radio fame on WYNY-FM with her show, Sexually Speaking, which ran from 1980–1990 and became one of the most popular radio shows in the country. So what was Dr. Ruth’s net worth when she died?

Dr. Ruth is a true rags-to-riches story. She grew up in a Jewish family in Germany at the height of antisemitism leading to the Holocaust. After her father was arrested by the Nazis and taken to the Dachau concentration camp in 1938, her mother and paternal grandmother decided to keep Ruth safe by sending her on a train to Switzerland.

The train, named the Kindertransport, was an effort to save Jewish children from the Holocaust, by bringing them to an orphanage run by a Jewish charity in Heiden, Switzerland. Ruth lived alongside 300 other Jewish children and has said that after she tearfully left her family behind, she was never hugged again as a child. All of her relatives died during the Holocaust, leaving Ruth with a mixture of “irrational guilt” and “admiration” for her parents.

In the orphanage, Ruth helped clean and nurture the younger children until she emigrated to the British-controlled Mandatory Palestine, where she joined a Kibbutz. It was the Jewish community and Ruth’s involvement in the IDF that helped her figure out she wanted to work in the psychology of sex. When her first husband, David Bar-Haim, was accepted to medical school in Paris, she joined him and studied psychology under Jean Piaget at the University of Paris.

When Ruth emigrated to the United States with her second husband, a Frenchman named Dan Bommer, they had one daughter, Miriam. Despite her psychology degree, Ruth had to work as a maid to put herself through graduate school at the New School, where she got an M.A. in sociology. She was 42 years old by the time she received her Doctor of Education degree from Columbia University, after which she became a working sex therapist in New York City.

As Ruth worked her way up the chain training women at Planned Parenthood to teach sex education and therapy, she partnered with several medical and educational organizations to further her research and education in the field while working within her private practice. At this time, her net worth was still very likely lower-middle class as a single mother.

But in 1980, she began rising “from obscurity to instant stardom,” according to the New York Times. It all started with her midnight Sunday radio show, a seemingly challenging time slot she eventually made popular. By the following year, Dr. Ruth had over 250,000 listeners just by word of mouth. The show was eventually picked up by 90 radio stations and lasted a decade, catapulting Dr. Ruth to fame and wealth.

She started making more and more public appearances to answer questions about sex — she hosted television shows on the Lifetime TV network, appeared on popular magazine covers, made appearances on network shows like Late Night With David Letterman, went on German and Israeli television, did commercial advertisements, and authored almost 50 books.

With plays and documentaries made about her, speeches and lectures, and many more appearances throughout her decades-long career, Dr. Ruth was easily one of the most influential and early advocates for sex positivity … and she became a wealthy one at that.