In 2004, Kimberly Guilfoyle told Harper’s Bazaar, in a piece that ran with a now infamous photo of her and then-husband Gov. Gavin Newsom on a carpet in the Getty family mansion, that Newsom worried “his political career is over any minute.”

But, she also told the magazine, she could “absolutely” see the then-San Francisco mayor one day being elected as president of the United States.

“I’d gladly vote for him,” said the 35-year-old legal analyst and prosecutor then known as Kimberly Guilfoyle Newsom.

This week, it is Guilfoyle staring down the possible end of her political career, as Newsom prepares to leave the governor’s office and will likely launch that long-envisioned run for president.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Guilfoyle, now the U.S. ambassador to Greece, asked Eric Deters, a former Kentucky congressional candidate and donor to President Donald Trump, to pay her $100,000 American Express bill in exchange for access to White House officials. She also accepted luxury business travel trips paid for by Greek business leaders who were lobbying the U.S. for contracts.

Guilfoyle resigned Tuesday morning after the White House asked her to step down, calling her a “wonderful asset to the team.”

“Serving as the United States Ambassador to Greece has been the honor of a lifetime. I will forever be grateful to President Donald J. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio for entrusting me with the extraordinary privilege of representing the greatest country in the history of the world,” she said in an X post. “While my time as ambassador may be coming to an end, my commitment to President Trump, the America First movement, and the country I love will never end.”

She also said the allegations against her were false, and that she intended to “vigorously defend my name, my reputation, and my integrity.”

Guilfoyle, who divorced Newsom in 2006 and was previously engaged to Donald Trump Jr., simultaneously promised to lobby officials on Deters’ behalf, while scolding him for putting his requests in writing, according to the almost 300 pages of messages, memos and emails Deters shared with The Sacramento Bee.

“Kimberly Guilfoyle is a wicked, nasty human being. There is not a sincere bone in her body,” Deters said in an interview with The Bee. “She treated me like I was an idiot.”

Deters said he connected with Guilfoyle, 57, during the first Trump administration, when she was engaged to Donald Trump Jr. She introduced him to both Eric Trump and Trump Jr. Both Guilfoyle and Trump Jr. also spoke at Freedom Fest, an annual conservative event Deters hosted in northern Kentucky.

On one occasion, while they were backstage, Deters said he chided Guilfoyle for once being married to the liberal Newsom, and joked about his plans to run for president.

“She said she still had a good relationship with him,” Deters said. “She also said, ‘We have to admit, he is handsome.’”

Guilfoyle, who has since ended her relationship with Trump Jr., reportedly introduced Newsom to the MAGA youth influencer Charlie Kirk.

Kirk, who was assassinated on a Utah college campus in September 2025, appeared on the governor’s inaugural podcast episode in March the same year, where the two agreed that transgender athletes should not be allowed to participate in girls’ sports.

Newsom’s office declined to comment. The governor, who has since remarried and has four children, has not publicly commented on the allegations about his former wife.

‘Not some cupcake’

Before she became first lady of San Francisco, Guilfoyle grew up in the city as the only daughter of Anthony Guilfoyle, an Irish contractor and PG&E inspector turned Democratic political adviser, and Mercedes Gerena, a Puerto Rican-born special education teacher who died of leukemia when Guilfoyle was 11.

The self-described tomboy first earned her bachelor’s degree at the University of California, Davis, then paid her way through law school at the University of San Francisco by working as a lingerie model.

Following a stint as a public school teacher, she was admitted to practice law in California in 1994 and joined the San Francisco district attorney’s office under Arlo Smith, the father of Ace Smith, Newsom’s longtime political strategist.

She and Newsom met that year while she was dating Billy Getty, Newsom’s former business partner, according to Newsom’s memoir.

In 1996, Terence Hallinan — Smith’s successor — fired Guilfoyle and 14 other prosecutors for supporting Smith’s reelection, after which she decamped to Los Angeles. There, she maintained a 97% conviction rate trying juvenile cases like homicides, sexual assaults and armed robberies, and became an expert on animal abuse.

She returned to the San Francisco DA’s office in 2000, joining a fellow ambitious young attorney, Kamala Harris, who reportedly tried to discourage Hallinan from hiring her. Harris denied Guilfoyle’s account to The New York Times, saying she merely offered Guilfoyle career advice.

Newsom and Guilfoyle reconnected around that time ahead of a group vacation to Hawaii with Getty and his now-wife.

In December 2001, the couple married in a 500-guest ceremony funded by the Getty family at St. Ignatius Catholic Church in San Francisco.

Bomb-sniffing dogs first swept the church due to the death threats Guilfoyle was receiving at the time for prosecuting the death of Diane Whipple, who was fatally mauled by two dogs in the hallway of her Pacific Heights apartment building. A judge moved the case to Los Angeles to ensure a fair trial due to the media attention it received in the Bay Area.

According to a profile in the San Francisco Chronicle, Guilfoyle inspired a local juice shop to name a strawberry, blueberries, apples and frozen yogurt drink after her called “the Krazy Kimba.”

She told the newspaper she wanted people to know she was “not some cupcake” as she tried husband and wife Marjorie Knoller and Robert Noel. The attorney duo had kept the dogs that attacked Whipple on behalf of their client, a high-ranking Aryan Brotherhood gang member who was serving a sentence in Pelican Bay at the time.

“I think about Diane Whipple every day. I think what resounds the most ... is her death could have been prevented,” Guilfoyle told the Chronicle. “That’s the bottom line. It could have and should have been prevented.”

A jury later convicted Knoller of second degree murder, and Noel — who was not home at the time of the attack — of involuntary manslaughter. Knoller, who is serving her sentence at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, was denied parole for a fourth time in February. Noel died in 2018 of heart failure after being paroled in 2003.

After Newsom won election as mayor in late 2003, Guilfoyle became a political surrogate for her husband, despite being a Republican. She split her time between San Francisco and New York, where she parlayed her prosecutor background into a media career as a legal analyst for CourtTV.

Newsom said in his memoir their relationship was unraveling at the time, and he had doubts even ahead of their 2001 nuptials: “I was better when I was alone. She’d fly back and we’d go into pretend mode for a week or two, the mayor and the first lady.”

In 2004, Guilfoyle appeared at the Empire State Pride Agenda in New York on Newsom’s behalf, where she joked about the size of his genitals and mimed giving oral sex to address rumors about his sexuality.

“Is he hot? Yeah. Is he hung? Yeah,” she said, according to the Chronicle. “Is he (waved her hand to suggest bisexual)? Not unless you can give a better (she mimicked eating a banana) than me.”

‘A devil’s bargain’

After their 2005 divorce, Newsom said his sister told him, “I saw a lot of adoration from her to you, Gavin. But less from you to her.” His mother, as she was dying of cancer in 2002, said that she was “worried (Newsom) brought a kind of passivity into the relationship, a ‘go along to get along’ that was itself a devil’s bargain.”

Newsom said he also never spoke about his divorce with his father-in-law, Anthony Guilfoyle, who had become one of his most trusted political advisers: “(He) must have wondered what had gotten into his girl. ... He would have been right to blame (the divorce) on the striving that consumed the both of us, but the mismatch of our marriage went far deeper than that.”

Anthony Guilfoyle died in 2008, leaving behind Guilfoyle and her brother Tony Jr., who is an executive at the Celsius energy drink company and is married to the daughter of a conservative TV personality.

A person involved in California Republican politics said due to her position as first lady to the Democratic Newsom, Guilfoyle had little involvement in the conservative scene of San Francisco, which has not elected a Republican to public office in decades.

“She was toxic, frankly,” said the conservative strategist, who declined to be named to preserve their business relationships. “On the national level, she doesn’t really have any impact. I think what happened with the Trump thing was, it started like all these things do — with really good intentions. And then the grifters descended on Mar-a-Lago and she got caught up in that.”

Both that person and Deters said they suspected President Trump was considering how to fire her without angering her.

“She was in the inner circle, so you know she might know something that is embarrassing or something,” Deters said. “However, President Trump is really, really shrewd. My guess is he ain’t got nothing to worry about. The question is, maybe (Donald Trump) Junior.”

In dueling podcast interviews in 2023, Guilfoyle and Newsom each said the other fell victim to the more extreme tendencies of their respective parties.

Newsom said on a CNN podcast that his ex-wife was a “different person” when they first met, who later “fell prey” to the culture of Fox News when she began working there in 2006.

The network let her go in 2018 due to sexual harassment allegations. Guilfoyle later led Trump’s fundraising efforts. In a speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention, she railed against Democrats for turning California “into a land of discarded heroin needles in parks, riots in streets and blackouts in homes.”

Months after Newsom’s 2023 CNN appearance, Guilfoyle told Kirk that her ex-husband was initially a pro-business moderate who took a “far-left turn” in the years since their divorce and he was elected to higher office.

“Sadly, now that he’s not under my tutelage and influence, he’s strayed,” she said.

That influence would resurge two years later, when Newsom reportedly asked Guilfoyle to introduce him to Kirk to invite him on the inaugural episode of “This Is Gavin Newsom.”

On that episode, Newsom said he agreed it was unfair for transgender athletes to compete in girls’ sports, leading Kirk to claim a cultural victory in a reaction episode on his own podcast: “Even the governor of California has come in our direction.”

Christina Grose, a University of Southern California political science professor, said it was unlikely that his past relationship with Guilfoyle would haunt Newsom on the campaign trail.

“It’s marginally negative. I think it’s really good for Gavin Newsom that he was involved with her a long time ago. I think that’s like voters might actually look and say, ‘you know, we’ve all made poor personal choices,’” Grose said. “People in politics who are successful always keep relationships open with people that they maybe don’t see eye to eye on everything.”

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