How Kamala Harris (29 years) took advantage of dating a 60-year-old San Francisco politician with pics

For roughly one year in the mid-1990s when Kamala Harris was 29 years old, she dated 60-year-old San Francisco politician Willie Brown, who was technically married but had been separated from his wife since the early ’80s. Harris and Brown broke up in 1995, and in 1996, Brown was elected mayor of San Francisco, a position he would hold until 2004. Around the time they were dating, and when Brown was speaker of the California State Assembly, Brown appointed Harris to the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the Medical Assistance Commission.

Harris was 30 years old and a prosecutor in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office when she became linked to the then-60-year-old Brown. “He is like the godfather of San Francisco politics and very well known,”. And sure enough, that relationship paid dividends for Harris in more ways than one.

Spiering, whose book offers a deep dive into Harris’ rocky tenure as vice president, agreed that the relationship between Harris and Brown is “completely fair game” to talk about because “it is how Kamala Harris went from a relatively unknown Alameda County prosecutor to the forefront of San Francisco social life and politics.”

As he explained, Brown was “the most powerful politician in California” when the two started dating. He was married at the time but reports indicate that he and his wife were separated. “He also gave Harris a number of positions that paid her lucratively,” he said. “He gave her the keys to a BMW, and he went around the most powerful and wealthiest circles of San Francisco and California politics with her on his arm, opening up the doors to her professional and political future.”

In a 2019 op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle titled “Willie Brown: Sure, I Dated Kamala Harris. So What?”, Brown acknowledged that he “may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly speaker.” And he is also on the record saying he helped her get elected to her position as district attorney of San Francisco.

When Harris ran for San Francisco DA in 2004, Spiering said Brown played a role in her campaign. “He was there quietly nudging all of his wealthy donors and powerful connections to help her out,” he explained. “So, Willie Brown was definitely there behind the scenes, but Kamala Harris did as much as she could before the election to distance herself from him.”

In March 1994, San Francisco Chronicle’s legendary columnist Herb Caen described the scene at Brown’s surprise 60th birthday party. Clint Eastwood was there, wrote Caen, and he “spilled champagne on the Speaker’s new steady, Kamala Harris.” Brown had a reputation for dating much younger women. In his column, Caen described Harris, then a deputy district attorney of Alameda County, as “something new in Willie’s love life. She’s a woman, not a girl.”

“I would think it’s fair to say that most of the people in San Francisco met her through Willie,” John Burton, who used to be president pro tem of the state Senate, former chair of the California Democratic Party and a San Francisco political powerhouse in his own right, told Politico. The relationship ended after one year, but her connection to Brown, three decades her senior, did have an outsized effect on her career.