Democrats hope Gavin Newsom can replace Biden - but do they know about the sleazy California Governor's infidelities, addiction, TEENAGE lover... and why allies say he 'doesn't have real friends'?
Sprawled languidly on an ornate silk rug in the palatial home of oil-heiress Ann Getty for a 2004 magazine shoot, San Francisco's new Mayor and his glamorous wife looked entirely deserving of the Harper's Bazaar headline: 'The New Kennedys'.
Clearly, the couple thought the glossy fashion mag's Camelot comparison fitting, too.
'Do I think he could be President?' San Francisco's First Lady wondered aloud. 'Absolutely, I'd gladly vote for him.'
Whether she still might two decades later seems distinctly unlikely even if the question is, ironically, suddenly more relevant than ever.
For she is Kimberly Guilfoyle, now fiancée of Donald Trump Jr and a MAGA campaign stalwart. And he is Gavin Newsom, now the uber-progressive Governor of California and looking all the more likely to be the man who may yet run against Trump in this year's presidential election.
For while Newsom publicly insists he is nothing more than an articulate surrogate for Joe Biden – readily telling reporters in Atlanta after the president's disastrous debate performance on Thursday night that, 'I will never turn my back on [him]' – his private ambitions are no secret.
Newsom with his wife, Jennifer Siebel, and President Biden in California, in 2021.
Newsom with then-Senator Kamala Harris in 2018.
And as the Democratic party is gripped by an existential crisis over the clear ineptitude of their commander-in-chief, with left-wing voices finally questioning openly the suitability of Biden's candidacy, Newsom's name is among the first to be raised in conversations about a potential replacement ahead of the November 5 election.
Some polling suggests swapping out Biden for another candidate at the eleventh hour would be even worse than keeping him. But after Thursday night and the ensuing Democrat 'freak out' – with even the usually loyal New York Times now calling for Biden to resign – there might not be much choice.
At a youthful 56, Newsom has risen smoothly up the ranks to the top of California politics, making him on paper an obvious candidate for the White House.
But, as that toe-curling 20-year-old magazine shoot illustrates, the political capital Republicans have made out of Biden's troubled son Hunter would pale in significance to the mileage to be had from Newsom.
For while he's handsomely telegenic, the perma-tanned Californian is an undeniably oleaginous and sleazy character whose playboy past includes more than its fair share of infidelity, alcohol abuse and questionable business behavior.
And let's not forget the complete mess he and his championing of hard-left policies has made of California, the luster of the Golden State endlessly tarnished by bad news: from crime, drugs and homelessness to high taxes, electricity and water shortages, and a sky-high deficit that has led to an exodus of businesses and citizens.
At the center of it all is a man who hails from California aristocracy.
At least Joe Biden can say he wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Newsom had the biggest spoon in the cutlery drawer – the Getty family.
Although his mother struggled financially after divorcing his father – a state appeals court judge – when Gavin was just three, the family had powerful connections to the ultra-liberal Gettys (his father was also the Getty family lawyer) as well as the clan of Democrat powerbroker Nancy Pelosi.
Gordon Getty, son of oil tycoon Jean Paul – for many years, the world's richest man – effectively adopted Gavin, publicly admitting that he treated him like a son, after his real father retreated from the picture.
Getty personally bankrolled Newsom's early business career, starting in 1991 with a wine company which proved extremely lucrative. (Newsom obligingly named the business 'PlumpJack Associates' after an opera that his rich benefactor had written.)
Newsom's first wife Kimberly Guilfoyle (pictured, left, in 2004) is now engaged to Donald Trump Jr.
Newsom with Gordon Getty, center, and then Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown in 2004, at a Napa Valley 'PlumpJack Winery' event.
Newsom and his father Judge William Newsom in 2012.
By the time he won the California governorship in 2019, the Getty family had sunk at least $500,000 into funding Newsom's political campaigns.
For all his outward bonhomie, energy and apparently boundless human compassion, insiders say Newsom is insular and prickly, his undoubted charisma only skin-deep.
As surely befits a man who looks like a corporate villain from a Hollywood thriller, he's painfully superficial, critics have long whispered.
'Gavin is always around pretty people. But he doesn't seem to have many real friends,' Katherine Munson, a childhood friend of Newsom, told the New Yorker magazine in 2018.
And a lot of those 'pretty people' have been women.
Newsom married the equally ambitious Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former lingerie model turned prosecutor and cable-news legal analyst, in 2001. They'd met at a political fundraiser seven years earlier.
Despite Guilfoyle telling Harper's Bazaar in 2004 that she wanted as many as six children, the marriage was over by January 2005, when they jointly filed for divorce citing 'difficulties due to their careers on opposite coasts'.
Certainly, Guilfoyle hadn't helped Newsom's image with a string of embarrassing public gaffes.
Newsom first made national headlines in early support for same-sex marriage, just weeks after becoming mayor, prompting speculation that he was gay himself.
Addressing an audience at a gay-rights awards dinner in 2004, Guilfoyle admitted there had been considerable speculation in that area, before taking a very smutty turn.
'Is he hot? Yeah,' she told the crowd. 'Is he hung? Yeah.'
She went on: 'Is he [waving her hand to suggest homosexuality]? Not unless you can give a better [mimicking eating a banana] than me.'
Guilfoyle later insisted she had not been referring to oral sex but members of Newsom's inner circle were reportedly incandescent.
Their divorce was finalized in 2006 and six months later, Newsom – then 39 – raised eyebrows when he started dating a teenager half his age, the 19-year-old model and restaurant hostess Brittanie Mountz.
It emerged Mountz had changed her age on her 'MySpace' social-media page from 19 to 26, and her mayor lover faced further embarrassment when she was pictured with him at a gala holding a glass of wine - despite being under California's legal drinking age.
'If she was drinking, the Mayor didn't notice,' a spokesman was forced to say.
Newsom and then wife Kimberly Guilfoyle at an election night party in San Francisco, 2003.
In 2007, Newsom admitted to having an affair with the wife of his campaign manager Alex Tourk, Ruby Rippey-Tourk (pictured) who was also employed by him as a secretary.
But Newsom was soon embroiled in a far bigger scandal over his romantic life.
In January 2007, Newsom's best friend and campaign manager, Alex Tourk, publicly confronted him after his wife, Ruby Rippey-Tourk, apparently in rehab for substance abuse at the time, admitted she and Gavin had an affair in 2005 when she was also employed by him as a secretary.
The following day Newsom openly admitted the affair, which destroyed the Tourk marriage, blaming a 'personal lapse of judgement' and saying: 'I am deeply sorry.'
Days later, Newsom also announced he had stopped drinking and said he would seek professional help for 'problems with alcohol'.
A 'close personal friend and counselor' told one local newspaper that Newsom had spiraled out of control and was 'self-sabotaging'.
The New York Times called it a 'scandal with all the sex and betrayal of a tawdry novel'.
For many observers, it was proof that Newsom had demonstrated a level of stunningly poor judgement that should prevent him from climbing much further up the political tree.
In October 2006, Newsom struck up a relationship with Jennifer Siebel, a blonde documentary director and investment manager's daughter after they met on a blind date arranged by a mutual friend.
Siebel had previously dated George Clooney and had suffered an infinitely less pleasant brush with another Hollywood superstar, mogul Harvey Weinstein, who she has alleged raped her.
At trial in 2022, she said the convicted sex predator had lured her to a hotel room in 2005 under the pretense of wanting to discuss film projects.
Weinstein insisted the sex had been 'consensual, transactional' and the jury was unable to reach a verdict.
Newsom with his second wife Jennifer Siebel and their three children on election night, November 6, 2018, after being elected California governor.
Newsom and Siebel with their three children, 2018.
Newsom posted an Instagram celebrating Thanksgiving and dedicated to his wife, who he called 'my love'.
Siebel has another cross to bear – the tragic death, when she was six, of her eight-year-old sister Stacy.
The little girls had been driving golf carts on holiday in Hawaii and Siebel hadn't seen Stacy hiding behind her cart as she put it in reverse.
'I felt the pressure to be perfect, to make my parents forget, by being two daughters instead of one,' she told the Los Angeles Times last year.
She and Newsom married in July 2008.
They now have four children and a clutch of multi-million dollar homes in California. And, naturally, when he became Governor, they mutually decided that, true to their impeccable liberal values, she should become 'First Partner' not 'First Lady'.
But if Newsom appears to have finally got his once rocky personal life under control, he hasn't managed to do the same with his political career.
His deeply flawed judgement reared its head once again in November 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 lockdown, when it emerged he and Siebel had attended a fancy dinner party at Napa Valley's super-smart French Laundry restaurant.
Newsom – who had just told ordinary Californians not to even sit down with friends for Thanksgiving dinner – initially insisted the party had been outdoors, but photo evidence quickly proved otherwise.
'We're all human. We all fall short sometimes,' Newsom – whose lockdown measures were among the strictest in the country – blubbered to the LA Times.
But it wasn't his only Covid scandal.
In December that year, it also emerged his wine and hospitality company 'PlumpJack' had received almost $3 million in low-interest federal loans, designed to help small businesses struggling with pandemic losses to pay their employees.
While there was no illegality, critics questioned the ethics of such a large taxpayer-funded windfall.
In 2018, the LA Times had reported that Newsom's partial ownership of PlumpJack 'raises the same conflict-of-interest red flags that continue to surround Donald Trump's presidency'.
Post-Covid, California lurches from crisis to crisis under Newsom's watch.
His approval rating recently sank to an all-time low (with 49 percent of Californians disapproving, and only 44 percent approving of him). This might be to do with the perception that he is putting his national ambitions ahead of his state's growing troubles, jetting off to meet Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel or Xi Jinping in China.
Not many years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine anyone even wanting to leave the sunny climes of California.
Newsom with VP Kamala Harris in Oakland, California, in 2021.
Newsom is shown, left, sitting with ten others at The French Laundry on November 6, 2020, without a mask. The photos were obtained by Fox 11 LA via a Twitter user.
Now the state is increasingly a byword for disaster and even the locals have had enough. Between 2019 and 2022, more than a million Californians left.
Big names include Elon Musk and his Tesla electric car empire that de-camped from Silicon Valley to Texas in 2021.
Meanwhile, the state now has the highest unemployment rate in the nation, while poverty has rocketed and violent crime has grown over 6 percent in just three years.
His policies, say critics, are simply not thought through.
For instance, last year's worthy decision to hike the minimum wage for fast-food workers by 25 percent to $20-an-hour was billed as a great silver-bullet to alleviate poverty. But not only has the move already raised food prices for poor people, it's prompted many restaurants to close, unable to now pay their employees.
Meanwhile, Newsom has allowed homelessness to flourish as he pursues progressive initiatives to reduce sentences for criminals. And not just non-violent ones: Newsom has caused widespread anger by pardoning a string of convicted murderers.
And he's not just soft on crime. Newsom has overseen the disastrous roll-out of a legal cannabis market in California, and is now looking to find ways of opening up psychedelic drug-usage to the public.
Newsom has also pursued some of the most aggressively pro-trans policies in the country.
He has signed bills that force schools to have 'gender-neutral' bathrooms for trans-identifying students, and has ardently defended controversial 'drag queen story hours' for children.
The rest of America has taken notice.
A recent LA Times poll found that 50 percent of US adults — including 30 percent of Democrats — believe California is too liberal.
He may look toned and trim on TV (or in magazine fashion shoots) but, as voters would soon be reminded if he got his party’s presidential ticket, Gavin Newsom comes with a lot of baggage.
