The retired accountant married Vanessa Williams in his home city in 2015, married her again eleven months later, and divorced her in 2021 without either of them saying so.
Jim Skrip is the retired accountant from Depew, a suburb of Buffalo, New York, who became Vanessa Williams’ third husband on 4 July 2015 and divorced her six years later. The divorce was never announced. It stayed out of print until Williams told PEOPLE about it in July 2024, three years after the fact.
In between, he gave almost no interviews. The closest thing to a record of him talking comes from a phone call the Buffalo News made to the couple’s hotel suite the day after the wedding. Williams was taking the reporter through the weekend and stopped, unable to remember what sauce had been on the hot dogs at Friday night’s dinner. She called across the room to ask her husband.
“Texas Red Hot Sauce,” Skrip said.
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How Vanessa Williams met Jim Skrip
They met in 2012 on a Nile cruise in Egypt. Williams was travelling with one of her daughters. Skrip was on his own and, by her account, knew who she was without being especially impressed by it.
What she noticed was his Buffalo Sabres shirt. Her mother, Helen Tinch Williams, had grown up in the city, so that became the opening line. “Are you from Buffalo? My mom’s from Buffalo,” she told PEOPLE she asked him. Dinner that evening ran three hours.
Skrip had worked in accounting and, Williams said on The Queen Latifah Show, in real estate. He had no connection to the entertainment industry, which she described to ABC News in December 2014 as the thing that let the relationship grow without anyone watching it. Her first marriage, to her manager Ramon Hervey II, lasted from 1987 to 1997 and produced three of her four children. Her second, to the basketball player Rick Fox, ran from 1999 to 2004 and produced her youngest daughter, Sasha.
She announced the engagement on The Queen Latifah Show in September 2014, two years after the cruise. The ring came from Bomi Jewelers in the Buffalo suburb of Snyder, and Skrip had designed it.
The Buffalo wedding
They married on 4 July 2015 in Skrip’s home city, in front of close to 400 guests. Most of the coverage led on the Egyptian theme, chosen as a reference to the Nile cruise, with gold and ivory tents and Moroccan lanterns filling the ballroom at Statler City. Williams wore two Carmen Marc Valvo dresses. Her Ugly Betty co-stars Ana Ortiz and Christopher Gorham were there, along with Teri Hatcher from Desperate Housewives, who caused a small stir when she turned up for lunch at a bar on Elmwood Avenue.
The Buffalo News interview, given the day after, is the only account that records how much of the weekend was arranged around the two families.
- The Saturday service was held at St Stanislaus Bishop and Martyr Church, where Skrip’s late parents had married.
- That church holds the angel statues rescued from St Mary’s Redemptorist, where Williams’ parents married, before it burned down in 1986.
- Williams was walked down the aisle by her uncle, Fred Tinch, who lived in Buffalo.
- Skrip’s wedding band had belonged to his grandfather and had been kept for years by his mother. He wore an ivory suit, chosen in a nod to Williams’ late father, who had worn something similar at his own wedding.
Guests at the reception were given postcards showing both sets of parents on their wedding days. Friday night had been a Buffalo menu for the out-of-towners at Pearl Street Grill and Brewery, with wings, beef on weck and fish fries, and the reception ran to a polka band and shots of Krupnik.
Skrip was 52 at the time, the same age as his bride. He gave PEOPLE a few lines about watching her come down the aisle. “We locked eyes, and I got caught up in the moment,” he said.
Why they married twice
Skrip had been married once before. His first wife has never been named publicly, and by the July date his annulment had not come through, which changed the shape of the wedding.
Instead of a nuptial Mass, the couple held a Mass of Thanksgiving at St Stanislaus. The vows themselves were exchanged afterwards at the reception venue and were officiated not by a priest but by Williams’ brother, the actor Chris Williams. Williams explained the reason on a US talk show the following year, when asked why they were doing it all again.
Once the annulment cleared, they married a second time on 30 May 2016, at Williams’ own parish in Westchester County. She wore a Pamella Roland gown and posted a picture of the two of them afterwards. “Officially wedded Catholic. Amen!” she wrote.
The end of the marriage
The couple were photographed together at the US Open in August 2015 and at a Nevada Ballet Theatre gala in Las Vegas in January 2017, where Williams was named woman of the year.
They divorced in 2021. No statement went out and no filing was picked up. Three years later Williams told PEOPLE the marriage had ended amicably, without giving a reason, and she has not discussed him since.
“I’m doing what I love, and I’m in love with life,” she said in that interview, when asked whether there was anyone in her life now.
Skrip’s date of birth has never been published, and no reliable figure has been reported for his finances.
Where Vanessa Williams is now
Williams, crowned Miss America in 1984 as the first Black woman to win the title, has spent the last two years working in London. She has played Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada at the Dominion Theatre since the musical opened in December 2024, and leaves the production on 17 October, next month. The show runs on into 2027 without her.
Her mother died in London in December 2024, aged 85, having travelled over for the opening. Helen Williams was the reason her daughter knew anything about Buffalo at all.
Skrip has given no interviews since 2015. The last photograph of him was taken at a Broadway opening night in New York in November 2018, three years before the marriage ended and nearly six before anyone reported it.
