(New York Post) As a young prosecutor, Kamala Harris was gifted a BMW and lavished with trips to Paris and the Oscars by a much older lover who also jumpstarted her meteoric rise in California politics, according to reports.
The current vice president famously had a relationship with Democratic Party kingmaker Willie Brown in 1994 when she was 29 and he was 60, and when he was serving as speaker of the California Assembly.
“Over the course of the relationship, Brown gave Harris a BMW, she traveled with him to Paris, attended the Academy Awards,” and he even took her on a business trip to Boston where he was meeting Donald Trump, according to the 2021 book “Kamala’s Way: An American Life” by journalist Dean Morain.
Their relationship was well known in San Francisco, with the Chronicle describing Harris as “the speaker’s new steady,” and the Los Angeles Times calling Harris Brown’s “frequent companion.”
In November 1994, as his term as speaker was ending, Brown appointed Harris — who was then working in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office — to the California Medical Assistance Commission, a job which paid $72,000 a year and required attending monthly meetings.
Spokespeople for Harris and Brown did not return requests for comment Tuesday.
Brown, 90, has also taken credit for helping in Harris’ meteoric political rise. Last week, he joined the chorus of prominent Democratic Party members who have already endorsed her for president before next month’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
“Yes, we dated,” said Brown, who was also a two-term mayor of San Francisco, in a 2019 opinion piece.“Yes, I may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly speaker. And I certainly helped with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco.”
Harris, 59, was elected as the city’s top cop in 2003. Seven years later, in 2010, she was elected state attorney general. She was re-elected to the post in 2014, before taking office as the US junior senator from California in 2017.
It was a crowning achievement for the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants who grew up in a broken home with her younger sister, Maya.
Harris’ parents, who moved between California and the Midwest, were locked in a bitter, three-year divorce war which tore their young family apart.
Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, filed for divorce from her father, Donald, a leftist economist from Jamaica, in 1973 when she was 8 years old and her sister, Maya, was 6.
“This early phase of interaction with my children came to an abrupt halt … when, after a hard-fought custody battle … the context of the relationship was placed within arbitrary limits imposed by a court-ordered divorce settlement based on the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting,” wrote Donald Harris in Jamaica Global Online in 2019.
Gopalan, a breast cancer researcher from India who died in 2009, had filed for divorce in 1973 but was still fighting with Donald over arrangements for their children three years later, court records show.
Although most of the court filings from the protracted divorce have been lost, 10 documents were found by The Post at the Alameda County Superior Court archives last week.
The first set of pages from February 1973 details arrangements for Kamala and Maya to spend summers and every other Christmas and Easter with their father, while their mother retained full custody.
Donald, now 85, was also ordered to pay $25 per child per month for Kamala and her sister and to maintain their life insurance.
