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 jump-started 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 State 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’s 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 eight years old and her sister, Maya, was six.
“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 of 1973 detail 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.
The documents reveal other minutiae of the split, including the division of property. In one instance, Gopalan got to keep the family slide projector and “20 phonograph records” while Donald kept three metal bookshelves, a filing cabinet and $750 in cash.
A later filing from February 1976 indicates Donald had been served with a contempt citation, which was lifted after he paid $32.50 for dental x-rays for Maya, thus reinstating his visitation privileges.
At this time his child support payments had also increased to $160 per child per month, filings show.
The available court papers do not list when the divorce was finalized, but in 1977, Gopalan moved to Montreal with the two girls to take up a position at McGill University.
They arrived during a bone-chilling winter in February, and the girls briefly attended Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, a French primary school, before moving to Fine Arts Core Education (FACE), a bilingual school located in downtown Montreal.
Harris took drama classes and learned violin, French horn and kettle drum, according to reports.
Classmate Vicky Compton, now a primary school teacher in Ottawa, told The Post Harris was “a warm and spunky classmate” when they both attended FACE, in grades 7 and 8, and at Westmount High School in grades 10 and 11. By the last year of high school, the young women had lost touch, Compton said.
Westmount High School, with alumni including musician Leonard Cohen and Oscar-winning actress Norma Shearer, was “multicultural,” according to Dean Smith, a classmate who runs a basketball academy in Montreal.
“She fit right in because there were people of different colors, backgrounds – that’s where she wanted to be,” said Smith in an interview with The Post. “She was pretty, but never dated anybody.”
Smith told The Post that he saw Harris perform in variety shows at Westmount as part of an all-female disco-charged dance troupe originally called “Super Six” and later renamed “Midnight Magic,” which she established with her best friend, Wanda Kagan.
“She was super-cool,” said Smith, who remembered Harris for her “good sense of humor” and said she was popular in school.
Following her graduation from Westmount in 1981, Harris attended Montreal’s Vanier College for one pre-university year before enrolling at Howard University in Washington DC, from which she graduated in 1986 with a degree in political science and economics. She later went on to the University of California, Hastings, College of the Law before starting her career as a prosecutor.
