Rivals at the DA’s Office, San Francisco, Y2K

When Kamala Harris was running for District Attorney in 2003, Phil Matier and Andy Ross of the San Francisco Chronicle got a column out of an alleged rift between her and Kimberly Guilfoyle. It was Guilfoyle who did the alleging. A wicked drawing by the late, great Don Asmussen depicted the situation as described by Guilfoyle to Matier & Ross, who wrote:

They both have glamour, brains and determination — they even travel in the same tight-knit San Francisco social circle—but don’t look for district attorney hopeful Kamala Harris to get a job reference from former office mate Kimberly Guilfoyle Newsom anytime soon. Because behind the smiles, Guilfoyle Newsom — the network TV analyst and wife of mayoral front-runner Gavin Newsom — is still smarting from what she says was the frosty and underhanded treatment she got from Harris when she was making a bid to return to the D.A.’s office a couple of years back.

“The bottom line is she didn’t want me there,” Guilfoyle Newsom tells us. The back story — as they say in Hollywood — begins in 1996 when freshly elected District Attorney Terence Hallinan swept house at the Hall of Justice, and in the process sent the young and green Guilfoyle packing. She landed in the Los Angeles D.A.’s office.

A short while later, Hallinan’s chief assistant Richard Iglehart, who had worked with Harris in Alameda County, recruited the young up-and-comer (who had been dating Mayor Willie Brown) to supervise the D.A.’s career criminal unit. In time, Iglehart landed a judgeship and exited. Darrell Salomon, a local attorney with his own political connections, became chief assistant in January 2000. Guilfoyle — who by this time was dating the politically ambitious Supervisor Newsom — started making overtures to Salomon and others about returning to San Francisco.

Just what happened next is open to interpretation. Some office insiders say Harris caught wind of Guilfoyle’s plan and got her resumé from the secretarial staff. Next, Guilfoyle Newsom says, Harris was on the phone to her in L.A.:

“She called me and said basically that she was on the hiring committee and in charge of the budget for the D.A.’s office, and that I should have gone through her if I wanted to return to the D.A.’s office and that there was no money to hire me.”

Guilfoyle Newsom — who already had met with Salomon about coming back — says she called the office to find out what was going on and was told that that there was no such hiring committee and that Harris had no say in the matter. ”You have to understand, I came with an excellent resume,” Guilfoyle Newsom said, “and talented women should support other talented women.”

Harris recalled the conversation differently. ”I never discouraged her from joining the office,” she said. “I never suggested to her there wasn’t a job for her in the San Francisco D.A.’s office. Of that, I’m very clear.”

So why did Harris call her? ”To see if she needed any help —to let her know I was there to help her,” Harris said.

She says she’s at a loss to explain Guilfoyle Newsom’s version of events. “I’ve seen Kimberly a number of times over the last few months,” Harris said. “We have great rapport and have great respect for each other.

 “I think she is a great lawyer,” Harris added, “and I look forward to working with her.”

Terence had once corrected me when I said Kimberly had been “rehired.” He wrote me a note –which he didn’t often do– clarifying how things had gone down.

 I inferred from the Matier & Ross piece, which ran a year after I left the office, that Kayo had re-hired Kimberly at the urging of Darrel Saloman. Which meant that his handwritten “Timing is everything” note had been an attempt to shine me on! Kayo didn’t want to admit that he’d been pushed into a hiring decision by his Chief Assistant, didn’t want to discuss it. Long afterwards he confided that, according to Salomon, Kimberly Guilfoyle’s presence at SFDA would guarantee support from her father’s politically potent in-crowd at the Irish Cultural Center.

I didn’t often see Kayo after I left his employ. We moved to the East Bay and in 2003 I began producing O’Shaughnessy’s, a journal of sorts for pro-cannabis doctors and their patients. I had post position on a major story of our time –the medical marijuana movement in all its interconnected scientific and political aspects.

I was glad Kayo didn’t ask me to endorse him when he ran for re-election in 2003. I would have advised him to bury the hatchet with Kamala and withdraw. As far back as 2000 he used to duck into my office to ask the name of so-and-so. Then he would smack his forehead with a flat hand and say, in sincere anguish, “My memory!”  He was 63 –not that old, but as a fighter he had taken many more powerful blows to the head (including a few from Cassius Clay). 

Although he remained physically fit, Kayo would spend his last decade in a residential care facility. 

By the time Matier & Ross ran Kimberly’s put-down of Kamala, she was on leave from SFDA and pursuing a career as a TV pundit. She never returned to work as a prosecutor. Her new career would take her to New York, where she soon married an investment broker, had a kid, and got divorced. I don’t know when she met Donald Trump, Jr.

Kimberly’s handsome father had been born in Ireland. Her mother came from Puerto Rico. Kimberly used to make much of her Puerto Rican heritage (to me and Marine of the Chronicle, whom she made for a lib-lab); but in 2017, when Puerto Rico was leveled by a hurricane, the Trump Administration withheld reconstruction funding, and if Kimberly Guilfoyle pleaded for her people, it was discreetly and in vain. 

The last bit of advice I gave her before I departed SFDA went something like this: “I don’t really notice these things, but my wife, who sees you on TV, says she can tell that you’ve had a little work done on your lips. You’re a very beautiful woman, Kimberly. Don’t let them do anything more to your face!”  

Some people tell me that was “rude,” but burnishing her image was part of my job. And she knew I was sincere.

As I send this off to the Anderson Valley Advertiser on August 10, 2022, Kamala’s photo is on the front page of the New York Times accompanying a story by a trio of reporters under the headline, “Is ‘Top Cop’ Now a Reformer? Wrestling with Harris’s Record.” According to the Times, “Ms. Harris also created a ‘re-entry’ program called ‘Back on Track’ that aimed to keep young low-level offenders out of jail if they went to school and kept a job.” To re-enforce the claim that Kamala had created the program, they quote the police chief of East Palo Alto: ‘Re-entry was not a prevailing thought in law enforcement,’ he said. ‘She said this is a unique opportunity to reduce recidivism.’“ (Kamala’s staff just might have steered the Times to that quote.)

The claim that Harris “created a ‘re-entry’ program called ‘Back on Track'” is technically accurate. But it was a replica of Hallinan’s ‘Streets to School’ program. 

The Times reporters also gave Hallinan short shrift by writing, “He was seen as one of the nation’s most progressive district attorneys.” On the issue underlying mass incarceration — the War on Drugs — Terence was the most progressive DA in the nation as of 1996, the lone advocate within law enforcement  of legalizing marijuana for medical use. And he was the nation’s first progressive DA, says Susan Breall, a veteran prosecutor who is now a Superior Court judge. “Before Terence, nobody had ever heard of ‘a progressive district attorney.’ And no DA’s office that I know of had put significant resources into prosecuting domestic violence cases.” 

In the 2003 election, San Francisco’s rightwing police union had endorsed Bill Fazio, who would be a three-time loser in November. they then endorsed Kamala over Kayo in the December run-off. As recounted in the New York Times, “Barely three months into the job, Ms. Harris found herself at odds with the police after a gang member gunned down an officer named Isaac Espinoza. During her campaign, Ms. Harris had opposed the death penalty, in part, as being discriminatory toward people of color, and she did not seek it for Officer Espinoza’s killer… Then, at the funeral, Ms. Harris was blindsided when Senator Dianne Feinstein called for the death penalty. 

“The blowback ‘totally traumatized her,’ said Peter Keane, a former member of the Police Commission, which oversees the city’s Police Department. Throughout her tenure, he said, Ms. Harris had ‘traditional prosecution, pro-police, instincts. She has always tried not to be a target of the police.’ In 2007, she stayed quiet as police unions opposed legislation granting public access to disciplinary hearings…’“

As for Kimberly Guilfoyle, the best was yet to come.