Gavin Newsom: Man of His Time
From the middle schoolers cheering a fight to the spectators cheering a football game to the man reading a history book about the Battle of Stalingrad, humans, particularly men, find ourselves attracted to combat, fighting, war. We also know violence has a horrific toll on society, so we try to deny, repress, or silo this desire away. Professional wrestling, with its embrace of that violent instinct, is unsophisticated. Football is a bit more sophisticated; there’s a game going on, it’s not completely staged and mindless. More sophisticated is something like The Wire, where the violence is connected with important social issues, crime, racial discrimination, unions, deindustrialization, and corruption in government.
There’s a similar phenomenon with drama. People want to watch it, but then they think, maybe I shouldn’t be watching it. Is it not cruel to laugh and feel glee at watching someone else’s marriage implode? You don’t want to send the signal that you’re the type who would enjoy behaving like that. As with violence, the least sophisticated embrace garish, over-the-top drama. The Jerry Springer Show, which isn’t on the air anymore but has spawned many copycats. More sophisticated people want something else mixed in with the drama. Yeah, the movie’s a love triangle, but it’s also a commentary on social class in America. The rare smart person who will admit to watching Springer will say he does so to keep in tune with “real America.” He doesn’t want to be in an upper-middle-class bubble.
The unsophisticated person watches play-acted violence from fake professional wrestling personalities, then reads a tabloid magazine about celebrities who, like those fake professional wrestling personalities, have no significance beyond entertaining their fans. The sophisticated person watches a documentary about the Syrian Civil War and then reads about the sex scandals of politicians. Remember those moral panicky articles about hookup culture on college campuses? I suspect they were popular because they fed into the same salacious impulse as Springer and Animal House.
I enjoyed writing this post which explores the trailer park behavior of Gavin Newsom and his ex-wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle. Part of it was the natural attraction to drama. But there was a deeper, populist element to it. Delight in the humiliation of the elites, which is another reason people like to read about politician and celebrity sex scandals. But this post shouldn’t feed into the populist idiocy that has overtaken the American Right. It’s not a call to overthrow the corrupt, degenerate elite and replace them with rule by the morally superior heartland masses.
In a country that is increasingly fat and non-white, where fertility rates are dropping and many children are born out of wedlock or in marriages that will eventually dissolve, the Online Right valorizes the increasingly few who live the old lifestyle. Yet it enrages them to learn that the white man with a white wife he’s been married to for thirty years and more than two children and who isn’t fat is more likely to be found among the professional-middle and upper class than the working-class they claim to speak for. The sex lives of many politicians are quite boring and old-fashioned. George W. Bush married Laura in 1977. They’re still married today. Barack Obama married Michelle in 1992. Still married. Mitt Romney married Ann in 1969. Still married. That kind of decades-long, harmonious marriage is increasingly rare in many communities today, fueling an inferiority complex that, in extreme cases, results in QAnon. Others, more grounded in reality, prefer to read true accounts of the sex scandals of the rich and famous to learn that no, they’re not some superior breed of human, they’re just like us. And, indeed, some are.
Men of Their Time
When we think about what it was like to live through history, we tend to think about the big things that happened in the most important places. The New York Stock Exchange in 1929. The rapid growth of Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s. Los Alamos, New Mexico, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Levittown, New York. Even when we tell ourselves to think about ordinary people, we think about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. The ordinary family homesteading in the Wild West. The ordinary soldier landing on the beaches of Normandy. The ordinary men of the great GM sit-down strike of 36-37. The ordinary workers who built the sets for those early Hollywood films.
Many people were neither important players nor background characters in the great events of their time. In 1900, 41 percent of American workers were still employed in agriculture. In 1950, 63% of American men had never served in the military. At the height of unionization in America, 65% of nonfarm workers were not members of a labor union. In 2000, when around 50 million each lined up behind George W. Bush and Al Gore, the two quarreling camps were dwarfed by the 46% of eligible voters who didn’t even vote.
The world of the rural, the provincial, the disengaged, is not a world frozen in the past. In 1960, just 7 percent of babies in America were born out of wedlock; no part of America is remotely like that today. Rather, the disengaged see history passively acting upon them, as they are suddenly affected by decisions made years or decades ago without their input, events they paid little attention to at the time.
If you were born into the British royal family, you were destined to be in history. Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were born well-equipped to get there. But even those of common origin can decide they want to be part of history. One brother joins the navy while the other stays home and works in the factory. One brother moves out to the Wild West while the other stays on the farm in Ohio.
Millions are trying to break into history right now. The Asian tiger cub spends hours every night studying to get a 4.0 GPA and a perfect SAT score. The woman from Iowa moves to LA and crams into an apartment with five other people, hoping she’ll be able to become a Hollywood movie star. The politician knocks on doors and tells people he’s running for the state legislature, which he hopes to use as a springboard to the governor’s mansion and then the Presidency. The reporter lives in New York City on a five-figure salary but goes to sleep gratified because he knows millions of people look to him to tell them what to think. The AI student hopes to move to the Bay Area or Austin and work on humanity’s final invention.
Some try to get themselves in the pages of history in less time-consuming and more sinister ways. One man moves to LA to stalk movie stars. Another caresses his gun as he psychs himself up to commit an assassination or mass shooting. Two friends go around videotaping their “pranks” for YouTube. A man launches into a racist rant on an airplane.
Gavin Newsom grew up in and became the mayor of San Francisco, one of America’s wealthiest and most innovative places. He grew up around the rich and famous, who fueled his business and political career. He was on the ground floor of the gay revolution, which, despite recent setbacks, appears here to stay. His ex-wife was a TV personality, who later became a Fox News TV personality, who later became engaged to Donald Trump Jr., and who had a personal feud with Kamala Harris while both worked as prosecutors in San Francisco. His current wife was allegedly raped by Harvey Weinstein and would testify at his trial. He’s lived through history, the good and the bad.
Steve Sailer has described American politics as pitting “the core” against “the fringe.” In 2012, he wrote:
Obama`s most fervent slices of the electorate are the marginalia: black single mothers, blacks, Muslims, gays/lesbians, single Jewish women, Hindus, single Hispanics, people who don’t actually expect to be part of the electorate, single women, single other races.
American politics has realigned quite a bit since then. Much of the Democratic Party remains animated by fringiness, the transgender raging that society won’t accept their new identity, the black activist making martyrs out of common criminals, the 38-year-old woman angry she can’t find a husband. But the Democrats have gained much ground among married, high-income whites, people like Gavin Newsom, who look at the Republicans with aristocratic contempt. To them, the Democrats are the party of vitality and upward mobility, the party of Manhattan, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood, the party of good-looking people with money and education, the party of people who matter and places where important things are getting done. The GOP is the party of the left-behind rural areas where nothing ever happens, of fat people blaming their obesity on the FDA, of teenage pregnancy, rusting factories, and towns where the average age is 50.
Sailer has personally felt the force pushing such people Leftward. When the mainstream media discusses him, he’s defined by his “far-right” views on race and immigration, views that make him radioactive in “polite” society. But he’s also a college graduate who owns a home in metro LA. His dispute with the establishment is over policy, he doesn’t share the inferiority complex of many of his rural uneducated fans, who want to hear about how the elites are pedophiles and how they, “purebloods,” are better than people who got the COVID vaccine. After 2020, when, like many of his demographic, he got vaccinated against COVID and told his readers to do so, he lost most of his readership. Replacing him have been people more demographically appropriate, like Alex Jones, Tim Pool, Jake Shields, and Matt Walsh.
Gavin Newsom is a rich, famous, straight white man who’s married and has four children, who’s handsome and not fat. That puts him in a good place to be the return-to-normality candidate, who can appeal to people like Steve, the new swing voters, as the man who will rescue them from the chaos of Trumpism and, though he’ll never allow this message to become explicit, is not a senile old man or a childless diversity hire.
Fortunately for Republicans, there’s an opportunity to disarm this appeal by attacking Newsom on his personal life. Such attacks could backfire if the tone is not right. Newsom is an adulterer, but responding with raging moralistic vitriol would be a turnoff to the average swing voter. Instead, Newsom should be a figure of ridicule, the guy who f***** his friend’s wife and then blamed the bottle, who has a crazy ex-wife who’s always going around embarrassing him, who’s always asking an older family friend for money and then gets in fights with that man’s daughter-in-law, who got in hot water with his liberal friends for dating a woman who was half his age. You can imagine a six-episode comedy miniseries highlighting these incidents, the subtext of which will be that Newsom is not an ubermensch. He’s the guy who lives down the street named Bill.
This is the story of Gavin Newsom, a story of wine, real estate deals, mansions, weddings, adultery, divorce, drug overdoses, sexual harassment law, homosexuality, and the Jan 6 goon march.
The WASP
Here’s how Wikipedia describes Newsom’s family background:
Newsom was born on October 10th, 1967, the son of Tessa Thomas (née Menzies) and William Alfred Newsom III, a state appeals court judge and attorney for Getty Oil. He is a fourth-generation San Franciscan. One of Newsom’s maternal great-grandfathers, Scotsman Thomas Addis, was a pioneer scientist in the field of nephrology and a professor of medicine at Stanford University. Newsom is the second cousin, twice removed, of musician Joanna Newsom. Newsom’s aunt was married to Ron Pelosi, the brother-in-law of former speaker of the United States House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi.
Given Newsom’s Northwest European appearance, wealthy background, ancestors with Wikipedia pages, and dad with a number in his name, one can see why some have called Newsom a WASP. He is actually an Irish Catholic. Perhaps he is a “WASP” in the current meaning of the word; the Protestant-Catholic divide means little to anyone except for a bunch of Extremely Online Tradcaths and maybe President Biden.
One could describe Newsom’s upbringing as aristocratic but poor:
Gavin’s father, connected, but not wealthy, lived in Placer County after he and Tessa divorced. He would take his son to North Beach Restaurant to see the likes of Jerry Brown, state senator and retired judge Quentin Kopp, former San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, ex-Supervisor Ron Pelosi (House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi’s brother-in-law; and Gavin’s uncle) and Burton and Brown. Gavin Newsom vacationed with the Gettys to places like Africa and Hudson Bay, giving him glimpses of the world he wouldn’t have accessed otherwise.
Struggling with severe dyslexia, he grew up mostly with his mother in San Francisco, holding down a paper route, putting in time as a busboy and later working construction, his sister recalled. Their mother took in foster children and rented a bedroom to boarders (Hilary [Gavin’s sister] recalled the “creepy guitar-playing guy” and the single mom with her son). Tessa worked many jobs, often several at once: as a waitress at Ramona’s, a secretary, bookkeeper and assistant buyer at I. Magnin department store.
Gordon Getty in particular is a man who keeps popping up in the story of Gavin Newsom. One of the heirs to the Getty Oil fortune, he was listed in 1983 by Forbes Magazine as the richest man in America, with a net worth of 2.2 billion dollars. At the age of 90, Getty is still alive today, with Forbes listing his net worth as 5 billion dollars, a reduction in inflation-adjusted terms.
Gordon Getty provided some of the money that allowed Newsom, a 23-year-old graduate of Santa Clara University, to create the PlumpJack Winery in 1991. PlumpJack was named after an opera Getty wrote “based on the portly, wine-drinking Shakespeare character Sir John Falstaff.”
When libertarians try to explain why economic inequality is not unjust, they often bring up the inventor who creates much new value for society. Others, more realistically, will explain that the very wealthy are those whose talents lie in providing the environment for others to innovate, bringing together experts in science, engineering, finance, and law. Many CEOs were doing this in the Bay Area in the 1990s, creating the tech industry that would fuel America’s later growth. But libertarians forget a second way to get rich. Instead of taking something and making it better, take something and create the perception that it’s better. It doesn’t matter if blind taste testers can’t tell the difference between your wine and the mass-produced stuff that costs seven fifty. So long as the perception is there, the dollars will flow.
Who bought Newsom’s wine? What follows is purely conjecture, but I assume that many of the buyers were people like the Gettys, old money. Newsom’s knowledge of that culture helped him appeal to such people. Many others were new money, the tech company founder with a bad haircut, the Texas oilman, the son of a dictator who whips up the masses with anticolonial fervor as he sends his son to study and party in the West. There’s also the so-called 30K millionaire, who puts a $500 bottle of wine on a credit card and then goes home to his mother’s basement. Selling wine is, I would think, good preparation for a life in politics. Fake the elite signals until you can make the elite signals.
It’s hard to tell how successful PlumpJack was in its early days. It was a private company, not a public one with a trackable stock price. However successful it was, someone in the Getty family either thought he knew what he was talking about or wanted to direct some money his way. A Getty family trust paid him $169,000 for investment advice from 1997-2000.
In 1996, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown appointed Newsom to a vacant seat on the San Francisco Parking and Traffic Commission. The following year, Brown appointed Newsom to another vacant seat, this time on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. In a surprisingly candid interview, Newsom acknowledged the importance of his connection to his father’s friend, prominent California Democrat John Burton:
In the interview above the wine shop, Newsom conceded he wouldn’t be in politics without Burton and Brown.
“I hopefully would be with the Wine Spectator today; not you,” he said in a reference to the lifestyle magazine with an affluent and influential readership. “I would never be in politics. But they took a risk on me. And I know Willie wouldn’t have done it unless John [Burton] encouraged him.”
Another possible factor in Newsom’s appointment was a question that would come up more and more in the decades to come. Is “diversity” still valuable if the underrepresented group is straight white men?
Asked about the choice of Newsom to fill the post vacated by Assemblyman Kevin Shelley last December, Brown’s quick response was flippant.
“He’s tall, articulate and from that side of town,” Brown said. “He is young, male and appears to be straight,” a reference to how Shelley’s departure left the board without any white male heterosexuals.
San Francisco was the future, in good and bad ways.
Even with his wine business, Newsom didn’t have much cash on hand. Perhaps the business was struggling. Or maybe the business was booming but all the wealth was tied up in it. This led to a feud between Newsom and Billy Getty, one of Gordon Getty’s sons, reported in the San Francisco press in August 2000:
Because soon after the wedding, Vanessa [Billy’s wife] started questioning some of Billy and Gavin’s joint financial dealings.
The rumblings came to a head a few months back when Newsom, struggling to pay the mortgage on his own Marina home, temporarily moved into a Pacific Heights house that he and young Getty had been jointly remodeling as a business investment.
But young Getty and his wife had other ideas, and insisted that Newsom move out, so the property could be sold in what was becoming a very hot market.
Newsom implored his buddy to let him stay in the house long enough to build a third-story addition -- or short of that, at least until he got through his busy re-election this November.
The answer was no dice.
The Gettys apparently wanted Newsom out, and now the two sides have stopped talking altogether.
One person taking Newsom’s side was the patriarch, Gordon Getty:
But if anyone is raising questions about how Gavin has managed the businesses, the senior Getty isn’t one of them.
“I believe 100 percent in Gavin, and when he is accused of wrongdoing, I’m on his side,” Gordon Getty told us from Squaw Valley this week.
Whatever the case, Gavin and Billy wound up selling the Pacific Heights house for a tidy profit (sources say it went for upwards of $4 million).
That means Gavin will be moving out within the next couple of weeks -- and like a lot of folks, trying to find a place to live in one of the most-expensive cities in America.
Gavin says he hopes the move puts an end to the fighting, so that the friendship can be repaired.
“I have a lot of respect for Vanessa, and I believe she cares deeply about Billy and my relationship,” he said. “Unfortunately, we’re going through this ridiculous bump in the road, which is a waste of everyone’s time.”
Behind this fight, friends say, there are a few other strains in the mix.
Like the fact that the senior Getty reportedly offered to buy out his son’s interest in the Pacific Heights house so Gavin could stay there.
{snip}
As for where Gavin might move?
Well, apparently he hasn’t found a house or apartment yet in his tony neighborhood.
But if all else fails, word is Newsom does have one standing offer to move in . . . with Billy Getty’s parents.
A year later, in 2001, Gordon Getty would pay $116,708 for Newsom’s wedding reception.
Why is Gordon Getty directing so much money to Gavin Newsom? It’s especially odd since he has seven kids of his own. At this point, I could construct a conspiracy theory about how Gavin Newsom and his daddy were blackmailing Gordon Getty. There’s even a secret he could have used. Gordon Getty, who lived in San Francisco, had a second family in Los Angeles. The timing doesn’t exactly fit; Newsom continued receiving money from the Gettys after the secret was revealed and it was already widely known among the San Francisco elite before that point. But maybe there was some other sexual impropriety by Getty that was never revealed.
There’s a theory that Jeffery Epstein was using his so-called sex trafficking operation to blackmail prominent people, either to force them to invest with him or to get them to do other things like support Israel. I’ve long thought such theories are motivated by a revenge fantasy. The conspiracy theorist feels inferior to people like Gavin Newsom and Gordon Getty. They’ve got the money, they’ve got the power, quite often they’ve got the looks, too. Their families are, in general, more stable than those of the proles. But if you tell yourself that they’re being blackmailed by shadowy figures who are really in charge, well, then they’re just as powerless as you.
Blackmail almost certainly did not motivate Gordon Getty to spend money on Newsom. What did? Some rich men spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a fancy sports car. Others spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a prize stallion, which is the best by whatever standard horse breeders use, I don’t know. Others build the best wine cellar. But what’s even cooler than a machine, an animal, or a wine cellar? A person. Particularly a young, ambitious, physically attractive, intelligent man. An alpha male. Someone who can become a politician. You don’t need to choose between him and your children. When you’re that rich, spend 100k on the man’s wedding, it ain’t that much, and then you get to enjoy that swanky party.
In antiquity, the will to power meant conquering states and putting cities to the fire. Now, people imagine a young ambitious man founding a startup. One underrated way to power is through befriending an old man with a lot of money. Be the son he doesn’t have, or be better than the sons he does. One of Gordon Getty’s sons, Andrew Getty, died from “an intestinal hemorrhage and acute methamphetamine intoxication” in 2015 at the age of 47. Another Getty son, John Gilbert Getty, died of “cardiomyopathy and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease complicated by fentanyl toxicity” in 2021 at the age of 52.
Gavin Newsom had the talent to be the man Gordon Getty wanted to spend money on. You could interpret this as Gavin being a talented manipulator. Or you could see it as Gavin being a good friend, a stand-up guy.
The Power Couple
In 2001, the average at first marriage for men was 27. In 2022, it’s 30.5, and even higher for college graduates. Gavin Newsom was 34 years old when he married Kimberly Guilfoyle (pronounced gill-foil) in December of 2001.
Guilfoyle was born in 1969 in San Francisco to a Puerto Rican mother and an Irish immigrant father. Her mother’s name is Mercedes, a stripper name in America but an ordinary female name in Puerto Rico. Her mother was a special education teacher and her father was a construction worker who later became a real estate investor. Wikipedia describes her education and early career:
Guilfoyle graduated from San Francisco’s Mercy High School, and then the University of California, Davis. She received her Juris Doctor from the University of San Francisco School of Law in 1994. While in law school, she interned at the San Francisco district attorney’s office. She also was a lingerie and fashion model, being featured in local department stores advertising campaigns (including for Macy’s) and modeling Victoria’s Secret lingerie for a bridal magazine. She later studied at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. While there, Guilfoyle published research in international children’s rights and European Economic Community law.
Remember that feud Newsom had with Billy Getty? Gavin’s friends speculated that it had something to do with Guilfoyle:
Behind this fight, friends say, there are a few other strains in the mix.
Like the fact that the senior Getty reportedly offered to buy out his son's interest in the Pacific Heights house so Gavin could stay there.
Or the fact that the younger Getty once dated Newsom’s girlfriend, who just moved here from Los Angeles to take a job as a deputy in the San Francisco district attorney’s office.
Gavin’s friends are convinced that Vanessa and cohorts inside the D.A.’s office tried to sabotage the hiring.
Given his later behavior, it would be hilarious if Newsom stole his girlfriend from Billy, but that’s just speculation.
From 2000 to 2004, Guilfoyle worked as an assistant district attorney in San Francisco. During this period, she worked with Kamala Harris. Like many who worked with Harris over the years, she did not get along with her, which was the subject of a 2003 article in SFGATE.
On January 8th, 2004, Gavin Newsom was sworn in as mayor of San Francisco. Three days later, Guilfoyle moved to New York City to start a new job at Court TV and as a legal analyst on Anderson Cooper’s 360. Later, Newsom and Guilfoyle would explain that their divorce was caused by their different careers on different coasts. I wonder if, instead, it was marital breakdown that caused the move.
In September of 2004, Harper’s Baazar published an article about the Newsoms entitled “The New Kennedys.”
The background for the photo is, you guessed it, the Getty mansion. The photo would come back to haunt Newsom:
Two decades later, the image is firmly a part of Newsom’s political story. When some Democrats openly speculated that he should replace President Biden on the 2024 ballot, “the rug photo” popped up in political-gossip circles. Some Democratic operatives believe it is still a looming issue for Newsom’s future as the scion of a wealthy family tries to tilt populist.
I initially wondered if Newsom and Guilfoyle were trying to fake the status of an aristocratic family, posing in someone else’s mansion. But what Guilfoyle said to the reporter is inconsistent with that theory:
Indeed, she continues, even when married, “we didn’t move in together for three months” - she was forced to live in Los Angeles during the dog-mauling trial. Their first mayoral digs, meanwhile, a six-bedroom investment property, “never got furnished. My dad said, ‘If people could see how you two really live,”’ she says. “We had a bed, a TV, one thing to sit on and takeout from boxes.” Their current Russian Hill apartment is being decorated by Ann Getty, “who has been like a mother to me,” says Guilfoyle Newsom. “Ann’s good at working with Gavin, who’s into modern minimalist, but I like warmth, so she’s on my side.”
The article mentions the fact that Newsom and Guilfoyle lived on opposite coasts and Guilfoyle had this to say about one Kennedy-like thing the couple lacked:
“I’m fascinated by hard news, especially morning television, but children are definitely on the agenda. Maybe six, maybe one; who knows? I’m a very fertile Puerto Rican,” she laughs. “Of course, we’ve got to be in the same place at the same time.”
In October 2004, Guilfoyle took to the stage at the Empire State Pride Agenda. SFGate described what happened next:
Guilfoyle Newsom was a last-minute sub for her husband at the gay rights event, which drew 1,100 guests. By all accounts, Guilfoyle Newsom -- who lives in New York and is a regular on Court TV -- gave an inspired speech.
But what really brought the house down was when she started talking about her hubby.
“I know that many of you wanted to see my husband and some of you had questions out there,” Guilfoyle Newsom said.
“Is he hot? Yeah.
“Is he hung? Yeah.
“Is he (she waved her hand to suggest bisexual)? Not unless you can give a better (she mimicked eating a banana) than me,” Guilfoyle Newsom said.
The mayoral bride’s remarks have become the talk of San Francisco City Hall.
“You know we believe in open government and we support full disclosure,” said Newsom press aide Peter Ragone, tongue firmly in cheek.
Others within the inner circle, however, were mortified by Mrs. Mayor’s remarks and fear this is one cute moment that could come back to haunt the ambitious Newsom down the line.
“It was funny, but it’s not something that Jackie would ever have said,” former Police Commissioner Wayne Friday quipped, referring to the Kennedyesque image the mayor has been cultivating.
Newsom himself did his best to put a positive face on it all.
“She gave a great speech,” the mayor said.
He says he’s assured her she isn’t in the doghouse.
As a rather vulgar person, I can’t exactly criticize her for the vulgarity per se, but I can’t help but wonder if she felt the need to brag about having sex with her husband because she was living on the opposite coast from him. This foreshadows Guilfoyle’s future behavior.
A few months later, on January 5th, 2005, the couple announced they were getting divorced. In a joint statement issued by the mayor’s office, the couple said:
“It is with great sadness that we announce today that we have decided to end our marriage. Unfortunately, the demands of our respective careers have made it too difficult for us to continue as a married couple,” they wrote. “Over the past 10 years we have developed a tremendous bond of love and respect for each other. That will never change. We will remain close friends.”
The divorce was not finalized until over a year later, on February 28th, 2006. Guilfoyle claimed they shared the same lawyer, a claim I found dubious. I wondered whether that was even possible, and while ChatGPT and many websites claimed it wasn’t, I found a California case in 2002 where such a divorce was granted with a single lawyer representing both parties, though the settlement was later overturned on the basis that the lawyer failed to properly represent the wife. (See In re MARRIAGE of Flora Linda and Werner George DEFFNER. Flora Linda Deffner, Respondent, v. Werner George Deffner, Appellant.)
In the worldview of the low-class Right, the professional middle and upper classes are full of women spurning the traditional family in favor of their careers. There is some truth in this, as the pressure of careers in different areas pulls people apart, prevents family formation, or delays (which often means ultimately preventing) conception. While Guilfoyle told Harper’s Bazaar in 2004 that she wanted as many as six children, she’d ultimately wind up with just one. With this, as with much else, Newsom and Guilfoyle were living in the future.
What the low-class Right can’t or won’t see is that despite these issues, middle and upper class people are more likely to marry and less likely to divorce than low-class people. The woman most likely to get an abortion is not a middle-class careergal, she’s low-income and non-white. But up to this point, Newsom and Guilfoyle’s behavior makes them good hate figures for the low-class Right, putting careers ahead of family as they jetted from San Francisco to New York, literally looking down on flyover country.
Their Separate Ways
On May 27th, 2006, Kimberly Guilfoyle, then 37 years old, married Eric Villency, age 30, the President and CEO of a furniture chain his grandfather founded. On October 4th, 2006, Guilfoyle gave birth to a son. The child was conceived before their marriage and likely when Guilfoyle was still technically married to Gavin. That kind of thing happens rarely among that class of people but more often in the trailer park. As with many marriages that began in such circumstances, it did not last; the pair divorced in November of 2009.
Gavin was also dating younger. In 2006, he, 38 years old, briefly dated a 19-year-old, the model and hostess Brittanie Mountz. Around that time, Mountz’s MySpace page went from listing her as 19 to 26. In an illustration of how much things have and haven’t changed, this relationship was likened to Newsom’s support for gay marriage as a political liability:
But is the city bothered by the mayor’s May-October relationship? Not exactly. Some longtime observers expressed concern that the romance, along with his support for gay marriage, could prove to be a political liability for Newsom, who’s considered one of the young stars of the Democratic Party and is expected to run for national office in a few years. (His approval ratings hover above 80 percent, and he appears to be cruising to re-election in next year’s mayoral race.)
“Everyone expects him to have this big political career, but he makes a lot of bad choices,” says one editor at a local paper. “[Newsom’s ex-wife] Kim was always putting her foot in her mouth and now he’s dating this girl who’s barely out of college. He lets his hormones take over.”
The 2028 election may well hinge on how many liberal women will be enraged by that. Certainly, there’s a very loud contingent online who consider such relationships “pedophilia.”
Earlier that year, he got in hot water for dating a Scientologist:
Mayor Gavin Newsom has a message for people concerned about his romantic relationship with a television actress and high-profile member of the Church of Scientology: relax.
“I think the only thing to be concerned about is the absurdity of the whole thing and the fact that people would be taking these things so seriously,” Newsom told reporters Thursday.
“My gosh, folks,” he said. “Relax. I’m a practicing Irish Catholic. I’m not a Scientologist, and I couldn’t tell you two things about it.’”
The practicing Catholic found himself in hot water with his church two years ago when he sanctioned same-sex weddings. He has said in the past that some priests in San Francisco have even banned him from their parish premises.
{snip}
But when Chronicle columnists Phil Matier and Andy Ross reported Wednesday that Newsom accompanied “CSI: Miami” star Sofia Milos to the annual dinner of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights -- a group co-founded by the Church of Scientology and claiming to be dedicated to “investigating and exposing psychiatric violations of human rights” -- the mayor had little choice but to address the issue.
{snip}
Newsom said he didn’t hear any talk about Scientology at the dinner he attended with Milos. The focus, he said, was on psychiatry. And, he made clear, he didn’t want to talk about the matter anymore.
“I think,” Newsom said, “everyone needs to take a deep breath and get back to focus on things that matter in this world, like homelessness, housing and poverty.”
In 2007, it was revealed that Gavin Newsom, while separated from but still technically married to Guilfoyle, porked his friend’s wife:
On January 31, 2007, Newsom’s close friend, campaign manager, and former chief of staff Alex Tourk confronted Newsom after learning from his wife, Ruby Rippey-Tourk, that she and Newsom had an affair in 2005, when she was Newsom’s appointments secretary. Tourk immediately resigned. Newsom admitted to the affair the next day and apologized to the public, saying he was “deeply sorry” for his “personal lapse of judgment.”
In 2018, Rippey-Tourk commented on the affair:
“I fully support the #metoo movement. In this particular instance, however, I am doubtful that it applies,” Rippey Gibney wrote on her Facebook page. “Yes, I was a subordinate, but I was also a free-thinking, 33-yr old adult married woman & mother. (I also happened to have an unfortunate inclination towards drinking-to-excess & self-destruction.)”
Rather funny that in the bizarre new morality, the fact that Newsom slept with his subordinate is worse than the adultery, to the extent that the fact she was married and had a child is actually a mitigating factor. Nobody cares about the cucked husband and as for the kids, well, whadaya gonna do?
In something that will surprise nobody, Newsom blamed the bottle:
A shaken Newsom subsequently admitted that the relationship had taken place, apologized to all parties and announced that he had “come to the conclusion that I will be a better person without alcohol in my life.” Since then, he has entered into a treatment program supervised by Mimi Silbert, head of the Delancey Street Foundation.
What does “treatment” actually mean? For years, uncorrected media reports claimed he entered rehab. In 2018, Newsom “clarified” such reports:
In an interview with the Bee, Newsom says that he sought counseling from Mimi Silbert, president of the Delancey Street Foundation, a rehabilitation center Silbert confirmed requires participants to abstain from drugs and alcohol.
Newsom, however, clarified he did not check in for treatment as outlets reported and says he resumed drinking after a period of time under Silbert’s watch.
“No, there’s no rehab. I just stopped,” he said, according to the Bee. “There was no treatment, no nothing related to any of that stuff. I stopped because I thought it was a good thing to stop.”
Why didn’t Newsom correct such reports earlier? I doubt “went to rehab” is a look he wanted. Often, “treatment” is something people do when they want to convince their wife not to leave them or their parents not to cut off their money or a judge not to send them to jail. The public humiliation is the point, more so than any actual treatment. Maybe Newsom wanted to keep in good graces with the Gettys, with other political allies, or with his new girlfriend, Jennifer Siebel.
Siebel and Newsom met in October of 2006, months before Newsom’s adultery was revealed. At the time, she was an actress who was still “waiting for her big break.” SFGATE described her background:
Being true to herself, despite others’ opinions, Siebel followed her acting dreams.
She says her parents -- Ken, an investment manager (second cousin of Siebel Systems founder Tom Siebel), and Judy, co-founder of the Bay Area Discovery Museum in Sausalito -- were initially skeptical of show business and discouraged their eldest daughter from getting into it.
Siebel was born in San Francisco and raised in Ross, where she attended the Branson School with Olympic skier Jonny Moseley, a good friend. She grew up immersed in the sports world: tennis, basketball, horseback riding, skiing, dance and playing on the U.S. Women’s Junior National Soccer Team. She attended Stanford University, earning a bachelor’s and postgraduate degree there. She traveled around the world, living in Africa, Europe and Latin America with Conservation International, an environmental organization that works in more than 40 countries on four continents.
The actress acknowledges that she’s at a disadvantage trying out for the same parts as people who have been in the business since they were 12. But she says she’s up for the challenge, noting that Naomi Watts, whom she resembles, became a breakout star at 34 for her role in “Mulholland Dr.”
That last line is the kind of thing I expect to hear from Penny on The Big Bang Theory. Despite this rather ditzy-sounding comment, Siebel, unlike Penny, has a college degree from Stanford. In this, she’s much like Guilfoyle, the lingerie model with a law degree. Whether driven by an attraction to high intelligence, a desire not to be raped in divorce court, or fear of being judged negatively by other members of their class, men like Newsom do not want to marry women who’ve never gone to college.
Siebel, in March of 2007, defended her boyfriend after news of his adultery went public:
Apart from his public apology, Newsom has remained silent on the matter. But Siebel, fiercely protective of the man she loves, is willing to voice her opinions.
“I shouldn’t say this, but there are two sides to every story,” she said in an exhausted tone. “If people did research into the scandal ... the woman is the culprit. Alex Tourk is a nice man and it saddens me that his wife did that to him.
“This ‘scandal’ is selling papers -- sensationalized tabloid papers,” she added. “Gavin’s a wonderful human being, and I wouldn’t be here (continuing the relationship) if he wasn’t.
“All of this stuff that happened and came out was in a darker period of Gavin’s life: going through a divorce, losing his mother, being under all the pressure he is under. The supervisors and The Chronicle have not made things any easier. It’s amazing that he’s as sane and healthy and down-to-earth as he is.”
The affair took place sometime in 2005. Newsom’s mother, who had cancer, died by suicide in May 2002. Gavin Newsom apparently gave her the drugs she used to end her life.
The same article said this about a low-budget film Siebel was recently in:
The actress said she was attracted to the racy role (she is scantily clad in parts of the vignette) because it scared her, joking that Newsom and her mother, Judy, were “traumatized” when they first saw clips of the revealing scene in which she hooks up in a hotel room with Jack, played by Kip Pardue.
Perhaps Siebel and Newsom had such a happy relationship that they could publicly joke about cucking the other. Or maybe Siebel was talking to the reporter and thought, “hey, I’m gonna give Gavin a bit of the humiliation his scandal is giving me.” I was reminded of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle:
In his newly released memoir, Spare, Prince Harry revealed he watched a few steamy scenes of Meghan Markle from her hit show, Suits. But as the Duke of Sussex noted, it may not have been the best decision.
“I’d made the mistake of googling and watching some of her love scenes online,” he wrote in his book released January 10th. Referring to her co-star Patrick J. Adams, Harry added, “I’d witnessed her and a castmate mauling each other in some sort of office or conference room...It would take electric shock therapy to get those images out of my head. I didn’t need to see such things live.”
Though it’s safe to say it’s all water under the London Bridge, since Patrick was front and center for Meghan and Harry’s wedding in May 2018. In fact, the night before the big day, Patrick shared his heartfelt wishes for the couple.
In October of 2007, Gavin Newsom turned 40. Like many alpha males, he was unmarried and childless. The more sexual partners a man reports having, the fewer children he has. But Gavin got to enjoy the quiet life of domesticity in his forties as he and Siebel married in 2008 and now have four children. His ex-wife, however, would provide a new series of headaches.
The Alpha Female
Sometimes, men will speak braggingly about their “crazy ex-girlfriend.” They’ll look nostalgically back on them the way they look back on a childhood video game: not something they want to engage with now, but a really good time back then. There’s no shame in it. Young men want to have sex and sometimes the craziest are the easiest to get it from.
Nobody brags about or looks nostalgically back on their crazy ex-wife. To have a crazy ex-wife is to admit you made a massive mistake at one point in your life. It’s especially jarring if she becomes something you consider to be horrifying and disgusting. The guy whose first wife is a fentanyl whore in San Francisco wants to forget she ever existed. People around him know to never bring her up. For some, the horror is political. For the white nationalist, it’s their ex-wife having a child with a black man. For the Democratic governor, it’s their ex-wife becoming a Trump-supporting Fox News host who’s accused of sexually harassing other women and who’s engaged to Donald Trump Jr. Yes, all those are true for Kimberly Guilfoyle.
For years on the internet, liberals have been telling their enemies they wish their kids turn out transgender. What charming people, wishing what is still technically classified as mental illness on a child. In recent years, the tables have started to turn. Suddenly, liberal parents find themselves complaining that their sons have fallen down the “alt-Right pipeline.” Here’s a new one. You, liberal politician, imagine coming home one day and walking into your kitchen to find in horror that your wife is now a Fox News host. The stuff of nightmares.
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Now onto the sexual harassment allegations, which occurred while she was working at Fox. The accuser received a payout of “upward of four million dollars.” As annoyed as I am with the low-class, conspiratorial nature of the modern American Right, one reason I can never feel comfortable on the Left is that they demand I pretend I can’t see why a woman would make up a false accusation when the incentive for doing so is four million dollars. But there is substantial evidence of Guilfoyle’s guilt if you believe the New Yorker: (bold added for the funniest part)
The woman was hired in 2015, just out of college, to work as an assistant for Guilfoyle and another former Fox host, Eric Bolling. According to a dozen well-informed sources familiar with her complaints, the assistant alleged that Guilfoyle, her direct supervisor, subjected her frequently to degrading, abusive, and sexually inappropriate behavior; among other things, she said that she was frequently required to work at Guilfoyle’s New York apartment while the Fox host displayed herself naked, and was shown photographs of the genitalia of men with whom Guilfoyle had had sexual relations. The draft complaint also alleged that Guilfoyle spoke incessantly and luridly about her sex life, and on one occasion demanded a massage of her bare thighs; other times, she said, Guilfoyle told her to submit to a Fox employee’s demands for sexual favors, encouraged her to sleep with wealthy and powerful men, asked her to critique her naked body, demanded that she share a room with her on business trips, required her to sleep over at her apartment, and exposed herself to her, making her feel deeply uncomfortable.
{snip}
The New Yorker, however, was able to independently confirm several of the assistant’s accusations. The allegation that she was required to work at Guilfoyle’s apartment while Guilfoyle was barely clothed or naked was substantiated by several of the assistant’s confidants, including an eyewitness, who recalls being surprised by the sight. “It was provocative in a way that made you want to get away from this person,” the eyewitness told me.
One current and one former Fox employee confirmed the assistant’s allegation that Guilfoyle had often shared lewd images, noting that she had shown photographs of male genitalia to them, too—some of romantic partners, others of fans. Another former employee described Guilfoyle showing pornographic videos in the office. Guilfoyle’s graphic sexual talk so upset hair-and-makeup artists at Fox that they lodged an internal complaint, triggering an investigation by the company.
A former Fox colleague who had been friendly with Guilfoyle said, “It was worse than gross—it put other women at Fox in such a terrible position.” She explained that, as someone at a junior level, she felt afraid to criticize Guilfoyle, who was a powerful star with high-ranking friends at the network. At the same time, the former colleague didn’t want to be complicit in behavior that she regarded as crude, unprofessional, and legally troubling. “It created an environment that was detrimental to young women,” the former colleague said.
The current Fox employee, who has socialized with Guilfoyle, defended Guilfoyle’s right to take whatever pictures she wanted, and to share them outside of work with her friends, but argued, “You can’t expose an assistant to that.” A confidant of the former assistant—who also knows Guilfoyle well—agreed, saying of her, “They really put her through a wringer. It was a justifiable complaint. She’s a very nice kid. She’s not a nefarious person. It was a hostile workplace.” Another former Fox colleague who observed the dynamic between Guilfoyle and the assistant said, “It was an insane, abusive relationship,” adding, “Rather than being a mentor, she was an afflictor.” And yet another close observer who still works at Fox told me that the assistant was “one of the nicest, hard-working people—she was young and full of ambition, but by the time she left she was just broken.”
There’s a man with an IQ of 75 who lives with his mother and just sent a d*** pic to a famous woman he’s obsessed with. He goes and proudly tells Mom what he did. She berates him and tells him the famous woman obviously doesn’t want to receive d*** pics from random losers. Well, maybe she does. On the other hand, perhaps the outlandishness of the story is a sign the New Yorker made it up or severely mischaracterized what happened. One paragraph in particular makes me wonder whether its author interpreted all evidence to fit with a preconceived conclusion of Guilfoyle’s guilt:
When the assistant declined the offer of money, Guilfoyle warned—in a manner that the assistant regarded as threatening—that, if she spoke candidly to the lawyers, some aspects of the assistant’s private life that Guilfoyle knew about might be exposed. In fact, as I reported on this story, associates of Guilfoyle’s contacted me, offering personal details about the assistant, evidently in hopes of damaging her credibility and leading me not to publish this report.
What were these details? We don’t know, just like we don’t know the identities of the witnesses and can't assess their credibility. Evidence is not available to us, so it comes down to how much trust you put in the New Yorker.
One insidious thing about sexual harassment law is that you might be thinking, “hey, I’ve never sexually harassed anyone. That joke I told two years ago? Everyone laughed. Nobody complained to HR.” Well, maybe someone was afraid to complain to HR. And they’ll become braver the next time sexual harassment becomes the media’s current thing.
What can’t be denied is that Guilfoyle has a talent for attracting younger wealthy men. In July 2018, Guilfoyle, then 49, began dating Donald Trump Jr., then 40. The two got engaged on December 31st, 2020, and have yet to wed. There are presently rumors in the media that they have basically split up.
We tend to think of the highly attractive woman as the passive recipient of male admiration. Perhaps Guilfoyle’s success owes itself to skipping the line and behaving in the same aggressive manner we associate with alpha males. MeToo makes prominent men especially susceptible to the charms of the alpha female. The average guy can’t just sit back and wait for women to come to him. The rich and famous guy can.
Someone should go to one of Newsom’s rallies and ask him the following:
Mr. Newsom, it’s humiliating to have your spouse cheat on you. I’m sure you understand that, given you f***ed your friend’s wife. Do you ever think about how your now ex-wife is getting ravaged by Donald Trump Jr.?
Guilfoyle worked on Trump’s 2020 campaign, during which she was accused of more vulgarity:
Appearing together at fundraisers, Guilfoyle and her boyfriend, Donald Trump Jr., would banter in sexually suggestive ways that made some donors uncomfortable.
During a December donor event at Trump Hotel in Washington, Guilfoyle offered to give a lap dance to whoever raised the most money, according to two people who were present and another person who was familiar with the episode.
And at an event in Jackson Hole, Wyo. earlier this year, Guilfoyle and the younger Trump joked about how she raised money while in hot tubs. Another attendee presented a slightly different version, saying that whoever in the audience raised the most money would be offered a hot tub party with Guilfoyle.
And at a fall 2018 fundraiser headlined by country star Toby Keith, Guilfoyle cracked that her boyfriend liked it when she dressed up as a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, according to an attendee.
Unlike with her job at Fox, these allegedly offensive comments did not lead to any lawsuit. I’m unsure of how that would fare under the First Amendment. Can the government regulate the content of speeches given at political fundraisers because donors or campaign employees don’t want to hear certain things? I would argue that the same principle should protect the offensive things she allegedly said at Fox News. If you don’t want to hear about religion, don’t work for a church. If you don’t want to see pronography, don’t go and work at a p0rn studio. You don’t want to hear offensive speech, don’t go working for Fox News. Perhaps Guilfoyle’s ideological evolution should not be surprising. She wants to be who she is, be around the many others like Donald Trump Jr. who are fine with it, and be left alone by people who don’t like it. In 2004, that put her on the Left and made her sympathetic to gay men. Now, it puts her somewhere else.
Of course, that kind of reasoned defense of freedom of association isn’t the message people like Guilfoyle are making. Instead, she made a clown out of herself by lying about the 2020 election and participating in the Jan 6 goon march.
Guilfoyle gave a speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention, during which she introduced herself as “a single mother, a former prosecutor, a Latina and a proud American!” In today’s Republican party, politicos feel the need to highlight their low-class traits. Thus she couldn’t be a “mother,” she had to be a “single mother.” This may surprise online “trads,” who I’ve found are often out of touch with what modern conservatism is. They don’t watch Fox News, they don’t even watch RNC speeches.
The First Partner and the Woke Tightrope
After marrying Gavin, Jennifer Siebel Newsom co-founded The Representation Project, a feminist organization. The organization paid her a salary and was funded in part by donations from companies that did business with the state while her husband was governor. While ethical questions were raised about this, don’t expect an indictment anytime soon. Such behavior is common and rarely leads to corruption cases, which are hard to prove.
As the governor’s wife, Siebel Newsom took the title “First Partner” instead of “First Lady.” It’s rather funny, a movement that began with a demand for gays to assimilate into straight society with its husbands and wives ends up with straight people assimilating into gay culture. There was a DSL thread about this phenomenon.
While “First Partner” will have many voters rolling their eyes or scratching their heads, Newsom is careful not to take the wokeness too far. Take a look at his family:
You’ll see there are no tattoos, no piercings, Siebel Newsom didn’t shave her head bald to protest the patriarchy, nobody dyed their hair a weird color. The males are dressed like males and the females are dressed like females. They look like the Trad American family, the family people want. People on Twitter have trolled by tweeting the Newsom family along with the 14 words. You could say that’s no act, it’s just the way they are, but I’d bet it’s occurred to Newsom that it’s a good thing that’s the way they are.
Contrast Newsom’s family with Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter, Ella Emhoff:
Many Democrats, particularly older ones, are not exactly overflowing with positive feelings toward gay and transgender people. They see them as people afflicted with a gross sex fetish, but one that doesn’t harm anyone else and that they think it’s a mark of civilization to tolerate. They look at Newsom and are reassured. Civilization has not been overthrown. The same people as before are still in charge, they’re just trying to be nice to these unfortunate sexual minorities.
These same people look at the GOP and see a clown show. Pete Hegseth, the man Trump wants to be Secretary of Defense, is very similar to Newsom. He’s been accused of having a drinking problem and his marriage imploded after he cheated on his wife. In Hegseth’s case, he knocked up his mistress. (Many high-class men have cheated on their wives, but knocking up the mistress is low-class.) People look around and say, “there’s no party of sexual morality, but at least the Democrats aren’t low-class.” Here’s how Hegseth portrays himself on the Amazon page for his book:
From the cover, you’d think he works on an oil rig. You’d be wrong; he went to Princeton and Harvard. But the GOP is the party of downward mobility, where those who aren’t low-class find it necessary to portray themselves as such.
Back in the 1990s, there were many people who wanted their children to not be fat, get vaccinated, not believe in ridiculous conspiracy theories, not be gay, not come home from high school pregnant, give them grandchildren who are born within marriage, have money and not be low-class. They didn’t often say any of that because there was no need to, everyone wanted that. The 2028 election may hinge on how such swing voters vote.
In February of 2020, Siebel Newsom flirted with endorsing anti-vax idiocy:
In a video taken Monday, Siebel Newsom is seen talking with the protesters about the vaccine laws signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year before she asks that they not post the video online.
“I think there needs to be more conversation around spreading out vaccines, around only giving children the vaccines that are most essential,” Siebel Newsom says in a portion of the short video posted on the Facebook page of one of the protesters.
This should hardly be surprising. Marin County, North of San Francisco, was once an epicenter of antivaxx nonsense before antivaxx shifted to being a movement of brain-wormed red-tribers.
In 2005, before she met Gavin, Siebel Newsom was allegedly raped by Harvey Weinstein. An attorney for Weinstein claimed what happened was “consensual, transactional sex.” Siebel Newsom did not come public with the accusation or tell her husband until 2017. The Guardian described the trial:
On Tuesday, she faced hours of grueling cross-examination, with Weinstein’s defense attorney Mark Werksman first hammering on details of her story, trying to cast doubt on her memory and what had changed in her account over time. He then spent hours reading aloud dozens of friendly professional emails she had sent Weinstein in the months and years after the alleged assault – emails that Siebel Newsom testified she largely had not remembered sending.
In question after question, Werksman switched rapidly between different angles of attack. He presented Siebel Newsom as a Hollywood mean girl, who had described Weinstein as weird and gross, while simultaneously sending him cordial business emails that said she had enjoyed seeing him. He painted her as a drama queen and a liar, contrasting Siebel Newsom’s testimony that she had been distressed and afraid when she ran into Weinstein in the years after the attack with emails in which she sought his advice and asked him for business meetings.
{snip}
Siebel Newsom, who appeared tired but mostly composed during the cross-examination, often pushed back. When Werksman suggested that when she testified she dissociated when writing warm business emails to Weinstein, she meant a Hollywood habit of saying one thing and meaning another, she corrected him: “No, I think it’s trauma, actually.”
Before coming forward, Siebel Newsom told Gavin to request a donation from Weinstein, which he provided and Newsom later returned:
Jennifer Siebel Newsom acknowledged from the stand Monday that she asked Harvey Weinstein for a political donation for now-California Gov. Gavin Newsom – but said her husband gave the money back after the #MeToo movement took hold.
{snip}
Before the prosecution turned Newsom over to cross-examination, Deputy District Attorney Marlene Martinez sought to get ahead of the political-donations question, asking whether any such request came after the alleged assault.
“I believe I did once,” Newsom said. “And I believe my husband gave the money back later.”
“Why did you ask him?” asked Martinez.
“He was affiliated with the Democratic party and had given major donations to Democrats,” Newsom replied. “At the time, my husband was running for office and I wanted to be helpful to my husband.”
When Weinstein defense attorney Mark Werksman took over, he picked up right where Martinez left off. Newsom clarified early on that it was Gavin Newsom’s people who asked Weinstein for donations at her suggestion.
“And you had told [your husband] that Harvey Weinstein had sexually assaulted you?”
She replied that she had not.
“When did you tell Gavin Newsom about this allegation of sexual assault?”
“I told him that Harvey was sketchy at different times,” she replied, “and he picked up on it himself when he met him.”
{snip}
Werksman then asked if Newsom returned Weinstein’s donations after the #MeToo movement. She agreed that was the moment.
“Right away,” she said. “He’s very ethical.”
Werksman again asked outright when Newsom told her husband about the alleged assault.
“Sir, I dropped hints along the way,” she said. “He knew something was off when we were at the SAG Awards and the way Harvey looked at me.”
She said it was around October 2017.
“It was his 50th birthday, and I was having an emotional meltdown” – a statement that raised a prosecution objection which the judge sustained, instructing Newsom to just answer the questions directly.
Ultimately, the jury deadlocked and could not reach a verdict.
The Twilight of the Alpha Male
In response to the personal scandals of Pete Hegseth, some in the Online Right have responded by declaring Hegseth a victim of a “feminized” society that “pathologizes” normal male sexuality. Most of this is just tribalism by people who will support Donald Trump no matter what he does. But some is sincere, reflecting the common misinterpretation of Nietzsche summed up by Sheldon Cooper:
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche believed that morality is just a fiction used by the herd of inferior human beings to hold back the few superior men.
The problem with this pseudo-Nietzscheanism is this. What happens when the pool boy decides he wants to be a Nietzschean superman, kill Mr. Moneybags in his sleep, and rape Mrs. Moneybags? The alpha male who goes around sleeping with people’s wives will quickly find his head blown off in a truly amoral society. Here’s how SFGATE described the reaction of Alex Tourk to learning Newsom was porking his wife:
Alex Tourk “confronted the mayor on the issue this afternoon, expressed his feeling about the situation in an honest and pointed way, and resigned,” said one source close to Tourk and his wife.
The very same trend toward society becoming more pacified, egalitarian, some would even say feminized, which permitted much of this behavior in the first place, is now, alpha males complain, being turned against them.
Will there be more accusations of sexual impropriety against Newsom? It’s not like his affair with Rippey-Tourk was revealed because he decided to come clean because he felt guilty. Rippey-Tourk was the one who admitted to the affair while undergoing substance abuse treatment. Newsom had managed to keep it a secret for over a year. I’m sure he intended to take it to the grave. What else is he hiding?
I made a Manifold Market.