The best was not yet to come in the marriage of Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom and Greek Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle, who were married for about three years, more than a decade before her relationship with Donald Trump Jr. In Newsom’s new book, Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery – likely a precursor for a 2028 presidential bid – he wrote about the early warning signs that the couple was doomed. And he also revealed when he knew it was over. It came as he defied both state and federal law to allow the practice of marrying same-gender couples in San Francisco during his early tenure as mayor of the city in 2004. ‘I saw something in those marriages that I did not see in my own,’ he wrote.
From San Francisco to Fox News
Among those couples who were married during San Francisco’s ‘winter of love’ were several of Newsom’s aides and Rosie O’Donnell to Kelli Carpenter, who have since divorced. Newsom attributed much of the demise of his relationship with Guilfoyle to their phoning it in while on independent, ambitious career tracks. ‘Three days after I had been sworn in as mayor, Kimberly flew to New York to start a new job as a host for Court TV,’ he recalled. ‘She was on a career path that would take her to Fox News and into circles of right-wing politics that could not have contrasted more with the world in which we were raised,’ he added, as they both grew up in liberal San Francisco. Early on, Newsom’s family members thought the coupling might not work out. He wrote that his sister Hilary had reservations but kept them to herself until years later. ‘She was smart, quite smart, but not my type of gal,’ Hilary is quoted as saying in the book. ‘She was a little over-the-top. Overdone style. She was never not put together, but understatement was not one of her attributes.’
A Mother’s last word
The more recent, MAGAfied version of Guilfoyle is one of the chief examples of the so-called ‘Mar-a-Lago face’ trend, with heavy makeup, big hair and clear surgical enhancements. ‘She needed to command a room. She needed to own a room. All eyes on her,’ his sister continued, adding that ‘her need for attention and love could not be met.’ Newsom’s mother Tessa ‘put on a good smile’ during the couple’s wedding in December 2001, which included a ceremony at St. Ignatius Church and then a reception at the Getty mansion. The governor’s father, William, was a close friend and the administrator of the Getty family’s trust. ‘My mother was of the mind that the marriage between Kimberly and me would not last, but she chose to hide those feelings from me,’ Newsom wrote. She didn’t hide those feelings from Guilfoyle. As Newsom recounts, Guilfoyle was not with the family when his mother, then just 55, decided to end her life in 2002 via doctor-assisted suicide after battling aggressive metastatic breast cancer. ‘She had visited a day earlier, only to have my mother scold her about things she’d seen in our marriage. Kimberly left in tears,’ he recalled. ‘Mom had finally found a voice, it seemed.’
But even Newsom’s family didn’t believe the relationship problems were one-sided. ‘I saw a lot of adoration from her to you, Gavin. But less from you to her,’ Newsom’s sister Hilary pointed out. His mother, he wrote, ‘was worried that I had brought a kind of passivity into the relationship, a “go along to get along,” that was itself a devil’s bargain.’ He said that tendency is what led to the embarrassing 2004 Harper’s Bizarre photo shoot where he and Guilfoyle were sprawled out on a rug in formalwear at the Getty mansion, where they were labeled the ‘new Kennedys.’ ‘I gave only a little of myself to Kimberly. Instead of regretting this, I kept wishing I could have given a lot more to my dying mother,’ Newsom wrote.
‘The fairy tale of the new Kennedys was not to be. The distance between Kimberly and me became a breach, and the breach widened into a chasm that could not be repaired,’ he continued. ‘When it was time to part after four years of marriage, we parted about as amicably as two people could,’ he said. They announced their divorce in January 2005. Guilfoyle dated Trump Jr from 2018 to 2024, and the couple was eventually engaged.
President Donald Trump named Guilfoyle ambassador to Greece as news of Trump Jr’s new relationship with Palm Beach socialite Bettina Anderson was becoming public. Trump Jr and Anderson are now set to be wed. After a bout of bachelorhood, which Newsom admits he ‘did not handle with discernment,’ he married Jennifer Siebel Newsom, an actress and documentary film director, in 2008, and the couple has four children.
