Opinion: The Kimberly Guilfoyle I Used to Know
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/Reuters I’ve known Kimberly Guilfoyle longer than most people in the news business: We go back to the Bay Area in the 1990s, where we both went to law school and practiced criminal law, though on opposite sides of the bar.
She was always a kind, if not the smartest, district attorney at the Hall of Justice.
I admired her scrappy ambition—Guilfoyle had worked as a lingerie model to pay her way through college and law school, and later married the handsome, ambitious Gavin Newsom . (At the time, Kimberly said she was ready to have Gavin’s children, calling herself “a very fertile Puerto Rican.” But she never would.) She was already on the rise from local to national fame thanks to her prosecution of a San Francisco couple over the “dog-mauling death” of lacrosse coach Diane Whipple.
The sensational case garnered nationwide attention—members of the Aryan Nation had bred the two Presa Canarios from prison as part of a dog-fighting ring; by the time they attacked Whipple, each weighed over 100 pounds—and though Guilfoyle had technically served as a second chair prosecutor, she walked away with most of the acclaim.
She subsequently turned up in New York City to host Both Sides on Court TV—she’d left everything, including Gavin, behind to move cross-country. (She called herself his “sugar mama,” which I found funny and, dare I say, feminist.) I was also at Court TV, and happy to see Kimberly; our San Francisco acquaintanceship morphed to friendship in the heady early days of our television careers .
We shared a makeup artist and personal shopper.
We stood together in stilettos on red carpets, and took town cars to and from events.
On one of those rides, she told me about losing her mother to leukemia as a child.
This endeared her to me, but I didn’t fully appreciate the hole it had left in her life—and what the lack of a strong female role model in her childhood home might mean.
On another ride, she announced her intention to leave Gavin .
I gave my unsolicited protestation—he was going places, could be president someday, she could be first lady.
To her credit, Kimberly was introspective: “There is only room for one big ego in any marriage,” she explained.
They were divorced soon after.
Kimberly left Court TV for Fox News in 2006.
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