Pete Rose Wife: Meet His Spouses and Learn About His Family Life

The thing that no one wants to express clearly is this: Pete Rose did not have three marriages.He was married twice. That distinction matters because the entire internet has decided Kiana Kim was his third wife, built dozens of biography pages around that claim, and is simply wrong. She was his fiancée for over a decade — they got engaged, they did a TLC reality show, they were still together when he died on September 30, 2024 at age 83 — and they never walked down an aisle. Not once.

Meanwhile, the women who actually married Pete Rose — a Cincinnati girl who spent sixteen years building a home with him, and a Philadelphia Eagles cheerleader who endured twenty-seven — get flattened into two paragraphs between the gambling headlines.

That’s the story. Let me try to tell it more honestly.

Quick Bio

Detail	Info
Pete Rose	Born April 14, 1941, Cincinnati, Ohio; died September 30, 2024, age 83
Wife #1	Karolyn Ann Englehardt was wed on January 25, 1964, and divorced in 1980.
Children with Karolyn	Pete Rose Jr. and Fawn Rose
Wife #2	Carol J. Woliung — married April 11, 1984; divorced March 2011
Children with Carol	Tyler Rose and Cara Rose
How Pete met Carol	She was an Eagles cheerleader; he was playing for the Phillies
Fiancée (never wife)	Kiana Kim: they were together since 2009, engaged between 2011 and 2012, but never got married.
Pete’s admission	In 2004 book My Prison Without Bars, admitted to starting affair with Carol while still married to Karolyn
Pete’s quote on women	“Most folks know about my reputation with the ladies”
Times Pete Rose was legally married	Two. Not three.
Marriage count in farm articles	Routinely listed as three — incorrect
Reality show	One season of Pete Rose: Hits & Mrs. on TLC debuted on January 13, 2013.

The Error That Ate the Whole Story

It colours everything, so let’s get this out of the way now.

Go search “Pete Rose wife” and you’ll find pages that list Kiana Kim as his “third wife” or “current wife” or the woman he “married” in 2011. Some of them are emphatic about it.As recently as 2024, one website stated, “Pete Rose is currently married to Kiana Kim.” Another calls Kim “his third spouse.” A third says he married her “in 2011, marking a new chapter.”

None of this is true. Pete Rose and Kiana Kim got engaged — probably around 2011 or 2012 — and never legally married. They appeared together on a TLC reality show in 2013. When he passed away, they were still a couple.But they did not exchange legal vows. The AP reported it clearly at his death: he was “not married at the time of his death.” CNN’s Fast Facts, which they maintain meticulously, lists exactly two marriages.

The reason this matters isn’t some technicality. It matters because the “three wives” framing completely erases something interesting: that Pete Rose, who had 4,256 career hits and spent decades hustling and lying and fighting and signing autographs for cash, could never quite close the deal with the third woman he wanted to commit to. He was engaged for over a decade and stayed that way. Make of that what you will.

Karolyn Englehardt: Sixteen Years of Getting It Done While He Got Famous

They were kids from Cincinnati who found each other. That’s about the most romantic thing you can say about the start of Pete Rose’s first marriage, and I mean that as a genuine compliment rather than an insult. He was 22 when they married on January 25, 1964, in the same city where he grew up, at the start of what would become the most celebrated hitting career in baseball history.

Karolyn Englehardt was also from Cincinnati, raised in the same basic world as Pete. They had a daughter, Fawn, and a son, Pete Rose Jr., who would later get his own brief cup of coffee in the major leagues. She was present and functional during the years when Pete was building his reputation as Charlie Hustle, the guy who sprinted to first base on walks and slid headfirst into everything.

Let’s be honest about what being married to that person actually meant. The Big Red Machine years of the 1970s — Reds winning World Series in 1975 and 1976, Pete becoming a national figure — also meant constant road trips, celebrity attention, and by Pete’s own later admission, a libido that he treated as a spectator sport. “Most folks know about my reputation with the ladies,” he wrote in his 2004 autobiography, My Prison Without Bars. He said this matter-of-factly. No apology, no elaboration.

What he also admitted in that same book was that he had already started a relationship with Carol Woliung — his future second wife — while still legally married to Karolyn. He did not frame this as a confession so much as a biographical note. The story was already written when he divorced Karolyn in 1980. He was a married guy who had an affair with a Philadelphia Eagles cheerleader while he was a player for the Phillies.

Sixteen years. Two children. And then she stepped back from any public life so completely that even now, the most frequently asked questions about her are whether she’s still alive.

To the best of my knowledge, she has not participated in any interviews regarding the marriage.No memoir. No tell-all. She rebuilt whatever she rebuilt in total private. The content farms have responded by inventing a narrative arc for her — “showing strength and quiet dignity” — while admitting they have nothing to actually report.

The Seven-Year Overlap Nobody Wants to Calculate

Here’s a timeline problem most sources miss.

Pete and Karolyn divorced in 1980. Pete married Carol in April 1984 — a four-year gap on paper. But Encyclopedia.com, citing multiple primary sources, puts the second marriage beginning in 1979, while Pete was still officially married to Karolyn. CNN and AP report April 1984. The discrepancy is real and I can’t fully resolve it.

What is not disputed: Pete himself wrote that he started seeing Carol while still married to Karolyn. Whatever the precise legal timeline, the overlap was real and he admitted it without apparent regret.

Carol Woliung: Twenty-seven Years and a Divorce Declaration That Disclosed Everything

She was an Eagles cheerleader. He was a Phillie. This is how they met, in Philadelphia, sometime before 1984. Carol J. Woliung was a former model who had worked in professional sports as a cheerleader, and Pete Rose was Pete Rose — already a two-time World Series champion, already one of the most recognizable players in the game.

They married April 11, 1984. They had two children together: Tyler and Cara. And then they spent twenty-seven years in what appears to have been a marriage that ran on inertia for at least half of it.

Think about what Carol Woliung signed up for. She married Pete Rose in 1984, the same year he was hired as player-manager of the Cincinnati Reds. By 1989, Pete’s gambling investigation was in full swing. By August 1989, he accepted a lifetime ban from baseball. He pleaded guilty to tax evasion and served five months in federal prison in Marion, Illinois, from August 1990 to January 1991. The entryway to the Hall of Fame remained closed. The autograph circuit became his income stream. The bitterness about his exile became the dominant feature of his public personality.

Carol was beside him for all of it.

By 2009, while still legally married to Carol, Pete entered an “open relationship” with Kiana Kim, according to The Sun’s reporting. In interviews, he boasted about it. He filed for divorce from Carol in March 2011.

Here’s what the divorce filings revealed, per TMZ’s reporting on Carol’s counter-filings: she alleged Pete was making over a million dollars annually from autograph signings. She also alleged he was spending significant portions of that income on gambling debts and back taxes owed to the IRS.The image that surfaced was of a man who, despite being able to hustle signatures, continued to feed the same obsession that had ruined his baseball career decades later.

Some farm sites claim Carol made domestic abuse allegations against Pete and filed for a restraining order.I searched the AP, ESPN, NBC Sports, and CBS News coverage of the divorce, but I was unable to discover this. These allegations appear either fabricated or seriously confused. What is documented is the financial picture, which was damaging enough on its own.

Twenty-seven years. Two children. The divorce filing asked Pete to reveal his full financial situation. In his filing, he requested that Carol pay her own legal bills while he would provide spousal support, and he asked to preserve all jewelry and mementos that she had collected prior to the marriage.That’s a man who was counting his assets carefully.

Kiana Kim: The Fiancée, the Reality Show, and the Thirteen-Year Engagement That Ended at His Death

When Kiana Kim posed for Playboy in 2010, the accompanying interview was the first time she discussed her relationship with Pete Rose. She was 29 at the time. Pete was 68. She said she hadn’t even known who Pete Rose was when they met.

That last detail tells you something about the architecture of this relationship. Kiana Kim came from a world where Pete Rose’s achievements didn’t register as cultural signifiers. She wasn’t drawn to the baseball legend. She was drawn to whoever Pete Rose was in a room in 2009 — and apparently that was enough.

They became an engaged couple around 2011 or 2012 and premiered a TLC reality show called Pete Rose: Hits & Mrs. on January 13, 2013. One season. The show featured Pete, Kiana, and her two children from a previous relationship, Cassie and Ashton.

Then they kept going. Engaged through the Hall of Fame denial in December 2015A sworn affidavit from an unidentified lady claimed that Pete had sex with her when she was involved in the statutory rape allegation that surfaced in 2017 court documents was under 16 in the early 1970s, during his marriage to Karolyn. in 2021 through Pete’s podcast about sports betting.Engaged through the HBO documentary in 2024.

They were still engaged when Pete Rose died on September 30, 2024. A family member found him. The Clark County Coroner’s Office listed natural causes. He was 83 years old.

Kim had been with him for fifteen years and was not his wife. She survived him as his fiancée. Whatever that means emotionally, it meant something legally significant — she had no automatic marital claim to his estate, his memorabilia, any of it. Pete died having been removed from baseball’s permanently ineligible list in May 2025, which finally opened his path to Hall of Fame consideration, but he didn’t live to see it.

The Question of Karolyn’s Quiet Dignity — And Whether That’s Our Business

Karolyn Englehardt is commended on several websites for her “quiet dignity” in the face of Pete’s acknowledged adultery. This framing is interesting. It’s also based on nothing, because she hasn’t said anything publicly.

Here’s the thing about praising someone’s silence as dignity: you’re doing it on their behalf without permission. Karolyn may be deeply at peace with how her life turned out. She may be furious.She published a memoir that sold well and is still cited, but it’s possible that she had conflicted sentiments about a man who cheated on her.

We don’t know. She hasn’t told us. And most coverage treats that silence as confirmation of sainthood rather than as the choice of a private person who decided she had nothing to say publicly about a marriage that ended over forty years ago.

What I will say: raising Pete Jr. and Fawn Rose, watching Pete Jr. briefly make the majors and build his own baseball career — that’s a life. Not a footnote. But because she never appeared on TLC, the record reduces her to a three-sentence origin story for someone else’s chapter.

My Final Read

You want an honest summary? Pete Rose had one addiction that baseball knows about and another one that followed him through every relationship he was in. The gambling ban is the official story. However, he was also unable to maintain a stable financial life while married to Carol, remain true to Karolyn, and bridge the gap between being engaged and getting married to Kiana despite fifteen years of trying.

Whether that’s tragedy or just character is up to you to decide. I lean toward the view that Pete Rose was exactly the same man in his personal life as he was in his public one: relentlessly in motion, supremely confident in his own assessment of every situation, and consistently unwilling to let any standard he didn’t like apply to him.

Karolyn Englehardt lived with that for sixteen years. Carol Woliung lived with it for twenty-seven. Kiana Kim chose it voluntarily as an adult who knew the full picture, and stayed until he died.

None of them got the version of Pete Rose that baseball got — the one who ran out every ground ball and turned himself into a verb for effort. They got the version that came home. I’m not sure anyone outside those rooms knows what that was actually like. And I’m skeptical of anyone who claims otherwise based on what’s in a content-farm article.

FAQs

1. Who was Pete Rose’s wife?

He had two legal wives. Karolyn Englehardt, married January 25, 1964, divorced 1980. Carol J. Woliung, married April 11, 1984, divorced March 2011. He was never married again after Carol. His long-term fiancée Kiana Kim was with him from 2009 until his death in September 2024, but they never legally married.

2. Did Pete Rose have three wives?

No. Two. The “third wife” label gets applied to Kiana Kim constantly, but she and Pete were engaged — not married. The AP and CNN’s fact sheet both confirm only two marriages. This is one of the most consistently wrong “facts” circulating about Pete Rose’s personal life.

3. Who is Karolyn Englehardt?

Pete Rose’s first wife, born March 14, 1942 in Cincinnati. She married Pete in 1964 at the start of his career, had two children with him (Pete Jr. and Fawn), and divorced him in 1980. She has maintained near-total privacy since. Pete admitted in his 2004 memoir that he had already started seeing Carol Woliung while still married to Karolyn.

4. Who is Carol Woliung?

Pete Rose’s second wife. Former Philadelphia Eagles cheerleader and model. She met Pete when he was playing for the Phillies. They married in April 1984 and divorced in March 2011 after twenty-seven years. She said during the divorce process that although Pete was earning over a million dollars annually from autograph signings, he was heavily squandering it on gambling debts and IRS liabilities.

5. Was Pete Rose married when he died?

No. He had been divorced from Carol since 2011. He had been engaged to Kiana Kim since approximately 2011-2012 but never legally married her. He died on September 30, 2024, at age 83, as a twice-divorced man with a long-term fiancée.

6. Who is Kiana Kim?

A Korean-American model and reality TV personality, approximately 40 years younger than Pete Rose. She and Pete entered a relationship in 2009 while he was still technically married to Carol. She posed for Playboy in 2010 and discussed the relationship in the accompanying interview. They got engaged around 2011-2012, starred in a TLC reality show in 2013, and were still together at Pete’s death. They did not marry.

7. How many children did Pete Rose have?

Four confirmed children from his two marriages: Pete Rose Jr. and Fawn Rose (with Karolyn), and Tyler Rose and Cara Rose (with Carol). A 1996 settlement confirmed a fifth child, a daughter named Rubio, from outside his marriages. Pete Jr. had his own brief professional baseball career and has worked in the game since.

8. Why did Pete Rose and Karolyn Englehardt divorce?

The official reason was not publicly stated.In his 2004 memoir, Pete acknowledged that he had a “reputation with the ladies” and that he was already seeing Carol Woliung while he was still married to Karolyn. The underlying cause seems to have been the affairs.

9. Why did Pete Rose and Carol Woliung divorce?

Pete filed for divorce in March 2011 citing irreconcilable differences, offering no further details. He had already begun an open relationship with Kiana Kim in 2009, while still legally married to Carol. Carol’s counter-filings alleged significant gambling debts and IRS obligations despite substantial autograph income.

10. What was the TLC show with Pete Rose’s fiancée?

Pete Rose: Hits & Mrs., which premiered on TLC on January 13, 2013. It followed Pete and Kiana Kim as an engaged couple, along with Kiana’s two children from a previous relationship. It ran for one season.

11. Was Pete Rose ever reinstated from his baseball ban?

He was removed from baseball’s permanently ineligible list in May 2025, which made him eligible for Hall of Fame consideration. He did not live to see this — he died September 30, 2024.About eight months after his passing, he was reinstated.

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