Margarita Simonyan, head of the Russian state-controlled broadcaster RT and its parent media group Rossiya Segodnya, announced Monday that she’s being treated for cancer.
“I’d love to write that everything’s fine, but I try never to lie,” she wrote on Telegram. “[My husband] Tigran is still in a coma, and I’m undergoing cancer treatment. What’s good about that?”
Simonyan also mentioned that she’s undergoing or will undergo chemotherapy, saying, “Soon you’ll see me wearing wigs.”
In early September, on the talk show Evening with Vladimir Solovyov, Simonyan revealed that she had been diagnosed with a “terrible, serious” illness. The conversation suggested she had breast cancer and would need a mastectomy, but she did not explicitly mention cancer. A media industry source told The Moscow Times that it hasn’t yet been decided whether she will continue working at RT or step down.
Simonyan’s husband, Russian filmmaker and TV presenter Tigran Keosayan, has been in a coma for the past nine months following a long-standing heart condition.