The vice president and Don Jr.’s fiancée have very different versions of what went down.
Vice President Kamala Harris tried to block Kimberly Guilfoyle—the former prosecutor turned Fox News host turned MAGA beau to Donald Trump Jr.—from getting a job in the San Francisco district attorney’s office over 20 years ago, even going so far as to falsely pose as a member of the hiring committee, according to allegations in a New York Times report.
While Harris says she never suggested Guilfoyle couldn’t have a job, former District Attorney Terence Hallinan, their boss at the time, largely backed Guilfoyle’s version of events, the newspaper reported. Hallinan died in 2020.
The contested incident between the two happened around 2000, the Times said. Harris phoned up Guilfoyle—then a lawyer at the Los Angeles district attorney’s office who was in talks to come back to San Francisco, where she used to work—and, Guilfoyle alleges, told her there was no job for her.
“She pretended to be a member of the hiring committee, which didn’t exist,” Guilfoyle told the Times. “She was threatened. Most things in life make sense—jealousy, envy.”
The Times reported that Hallinan, the DA, said Harris “forbade” him from hiring Guilfoyle despite the fact that he was her boss. He didn’t listen to her and hired Guilfoyle anyway, writing “Timing is everything!” in a note to an aide explaining her return.
“If she ever did do that, she was smart,” Stanlee Gatti, a close friend of Harris and the best man at Guilfoyle’s 2001 wedding to now California Gov. Gavin Newsom, told the Times.
While Harris is now the Democratic standard-bearer in this year’s presidential election and Guilfoyle is a MAGA zealot crisscrossing the country as one of former President Donald Trump’s most vociferous surrogates thanks to her engagement to Don Jr., the Times reported that those around the two in 2000 didn’t see their clash back then as political.
Rather, it seemed like there was some kind of “personal conflict in their social circles,” according to the Times. (“She wasn’t supportive about lifting women up,” Guilfoyle claimed, speaking to the newspaper).
They didn’t work together for long, but briefly they formed two parts of a triumvirate that was seen as the future of Democratic politics in California. Harris left the DA’s office by the end of the year and eventually mounted a successful campaign to unseat Hallinan in 2003.
Newsom, Guilfoyle’s spouse at the time, was the third member of the trio, winning the San Francisco mayor’s office that same year. “Forget ‘Kennedyesque.’ I think we need a new word—Newsomly,” wrote Rob Morse of the San Francisco Chronicle in 2001. “And Julia Roberts only wishes she was played by Kimberly in a wedding flick.”
Guilfoyle, meanwhile, became a television fixture because of her media-savvy as a prosecutor, in particular drawing attention for a sensational case where a woman was killed by a dog whose owner had ties to the Aryan Brotherhood.
She apparently wore a bulletproof vest under her evening gowns when it was reported that a hit had been put out on her, the Times reported. Network executives noticed and she became an anchor on Court TV in 2004, the start of a burgeoning career.
However, before she got the TV gig, Guilfoyle also lashed out at Harris in the Chronicle over her alleged attempt to keep her out of a job, just before she and Newsom were set to take office in 2003. “Talented women should support other talented women,” she told the newspaper.
Newsom and Guilfoyle divorced in 2006. As California governor, he is now campaigning for Harris, albeit in a scaled-back role compared to his star status on the Biden campaign. Guilfoyle, meanwhile, is a de-facto member of the Trump clan.