According to Rehm's autobiography, Finding My Voice, her father's family were Eastern Orthodox Christians from Ottoman Mersin, a city on the southern coast of Anatolia.

[7] Rehm attended William B. Powell Elementary and Roosevelt High School in Washington, D.C.[1] Upon graduation, she was employed by the city's highways department, where she became a radio dispatcher.

[citation needed] After his death, Rehm became a staunch advocate for medical aid in dying, arguing that no one should suffer needlessly in the way that her husband did.

Eventually, she was treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital and was diagnosed with spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological condition that affects the quality of her voice.

Rehm has interviewed many political and cultural figures, including John McCain, Barack Obama, and Madeleine Albright.

The study was criticized as a politicized attempt to, in Rehm's word, "scare" journalists with the accusation of liberal bias.

One criticism of the study concerned its criteria of what constituted "liberal" – a category which included seemingly moderate Republicans such as Senator Chuck Hagel and former Representative Bob Barr.

[20] The study was commissioned by Kenneth Tomlinson, whose appointment to the chairmanship of the CPB by George W. Bush had been criticized by liberals as politically motivated.

[25][26] Sophia Tesfaye of Salon pointed out that Rehm apparently fell for an antisemitic canard and did not successfully fact-check her information before she conducted her interview with Sanders.

[26] In The Times of Israel, Gedalyah Reback stated that the interview was controversial because Rehm seemed to have accused a Jewish U.S. presidential candidate of maintaining secret Israeli citizenship.

Rather than asking if Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders whether he had dual U.S./Israeli citizenship, as I had read in a comment on Facebook, I stated it as fact.

"[29] Jewish Law professor David Bernstein found it strange that both Rehm and her producer fell for what he felt was an obvious anti-Semitic hoax.

[32] In February 2020 she published a book containing 40 interviews with people involved in and holding different views on questions related to the end-of-life care and the right-to-die movement.

Titled When My Time Comes: Conversations About Whether Those Who Are Dying Should Have the Right to Determine When Life Should End, its foreword was contributed by John Grisham.