What Gavin Newsom Really Blames For His Split From Kimberly Guilfoyle

In 2005, Gavin Newsom and Kimberly Guilfoyle ended their well-documented era of power coupling with an announcement of their separation. The ex-spouses' romance reportedly dates back to the mid-1990s, when Newsom was just a rising charismatic politician, and Guilfoyle was a prosecuting attorney. Quickly garnering attention in political and media circles, their relationship flourished in the public eye, with their 2001 wedding tapped as the "social event of the year" by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Understandably, some were stunned when Newsom and Guilfoyle made their breakup public. After all, they had just been hailed as "the new Kennedys" in a September 2004 feature in Harper's Bazaar. In their January 2005 joint statement about the separation, the duo only alluded to the strain placed upon them by their bi-coastal relationship (Guilfoyle relocated to New York in January 2004 to work on Court TV). "Unfortunately, the demands of our respective careers have made it too difficult for us to continue as a married couple," the pair said at the time.

Both exes have gone on to lead highly different public lives. Newsom became California Governor on the Democrat ticket in 2018, while Guilfoyle cemented herself as a popular conservative political pundit. A Fox News personality from 2006 to 2018, she acted as a senior advisor on Donald Trump's 2020 re-election campaign (and got engaged to his son, Donald Trump Jr., in 2020). Decades after their split, Newsom finally shed light on why he and Guilfoyle couldn't work it out. 

Two decades after it ended, Gavin Newsom blamed Kimberly Guilfoyle for the collapse of their marriage. On a February 9,2023, episode of CNN's "The Axe Files" podcast, Newsom, a Democrat, claimed that Guilfoyle's ambition changed her as a person, especially after she joined Fox News as a political pundit in 2006. "She was a different person," the California governor said of Guilfoyle during their relationship's earlier years. "She was working for a progressive district attorney ... We were close to Kamala [Harris], she knew her well, and she was spending a lot of time in Democratic circles," he noted. 

Things quickly changed, in Newsom's recollection, after he became mayor of San Francisco in 2003. "Days after I was elected mayor, she moved to New York for a Court TV gig, and then eventually Fox," he told CNN. "She had her ambition ... She fell prey, I think, to the culture at Fox in a deep way," he said. Newsom also jokingly acknowledged that Guilfoyle would counter "that she found the light." 

Guilfoyle did indeed rebut Newsom one week later on "The Charlie Kirk Show." Waving away Newsom's comments as "absurd," the former first lady of San Francisco said, "I didn't change. He did. He used to be so proud to fight for small businesses, for entrepreneurs." Guilfoyle claimed, in turn, that it was Newsom who had "fallen prey to the radical left," becoming a person wholly unrecognizable to her.

In addition to Kimberly Guilfoyle's 2004 move to the opposite coast, there seemingly were other clues hinting at her and Gavin Newsom's impending divorce. During the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays before their separation, Guilfoyle's family members were reportedly already telling close friends the truth about her and Newsom's broken marriage. Although they celebrated the festivities that holiday season together, a friend present for one gathering told the San Francisco Chronicle that their faux-happy facade was "the most bizarre thing I've seen." In December 2004, Newsom admitted to the SF Chronicle, "This living on different sides of the continent has taken a huge toll personally. ... The only godsend is that we don't have kids."

Following Newsom's successful mayoral campaign in 2003 and Guilfoyle's move to New York, inside sources revealed that the two gradually saw less and less of one another. Reportedly, Guilfoyle even bought Newsom new luggage for his birthday, hoping he would fly East more often. The duo's ambitions simply caused their stars to be irrevocably crossed, with Guilfoyle reportedly confiding in 2004 to loved ones that she had "never signed on" to be a mayoral wife. As another friend predicted to the Chronicle at the time, "They are going to totally blame her because she moves away, instead of looking at her as an independent person whose career happened to take her to the East Coast."