INSIDE EDITION's Jim Moret talks to Deborah Norville about his memoir, The Last Day of My Life written about a time in his life when money troubles made him believe he was worth more dead than alive.
INSIDE EDITION's Jim Moret has covered everything from major trials to natural disasters to the red carpet. But behind the glamour and excitement, he faced a crisis that would push him to the brink of suicide.
"I had no idea that my friend was going through this very private hell," says INSIDE EDITION anchor Deborah Norville.
"I had this overwhelming feeling of hopelessness, and it really took me down a dark path, so that I actually thought, 'I'm worth more dead than alive,' because I knew that I had $3 million in life insurance and if anything happened to me, my wife and kids would be taken care of," Moret admits.
Before joining INSIDE EDITION, Moret, who once hosted CNN's Showbiz Tonight, was out of work for more than two years. To help pay the bills he borrowed money against his home.
"It was something that millions of Americans are dealing with right now, you got overextended on your house," Norville observes.
"The shame and the humiliation was so overwhelming that I couldn't sleep and I would think about death," he says.
Those thoughts took a dark turn in April 2008, when Moret was driving on the Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu.
"You drove the Pacific Coast Highway, you found the stretch of road, you saw where it dropped 100 feet," prompts Norville.
"And that's where I turned down this dark path in my mind and I thought, 'All I have to do is turn that wheel a little bit and I'll go right over the cliff, it'll look like an accident and everything will be fine,' " Moret says. "On that road I really was Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life, I was on that bridge, ready to jump. It was really a turning point in my life, I stopped the car and it was a scared straight moment because it was a true wakeup call, where I thought, 'Do I really want to do this?' And I thought first of my family, and they saved my life, they really did. The image passed and I saw my children and my wife and the pain that I would cause them."
Moret says the experience re-defined his life: "We often value ourselves based upon our bank accounts. And that's not really our value at all."
"Nobody knew, your wife Keri didn't know, your kids didn't have any sense?" asks Norville.
Moret says, "When I wrote the first two chapters, I showed them to my wife and she cried, and it was the first time she ever realized the depths of the pain."
At his wife's urging, Moret turned his near tragedy into a book titled The Last Day of My Life. "Even though the premise seems dark, the book itself is one of hope and one of inspiration and empowerment," he explains.
Moret says writing The Last Day of My Life has given him something he didn't have before: hope that he can get through any of life's problems.