Jennifer Siebel Newsom Is Ready to “Fight the Good Fight”

Jennifer Siebel Newsom standing in a field in a photograph by Marie Claire — (Image credit: Maria del Rio)

Jennifer Siebel Newsom leads me through her Sacramento home on a gray mid-December morning, replaying the first few years as California’s first family in quick, vivid scenes: This is where her son used to sprint to the backyard. That’s where her daughters played with their ever- expanding menagerie of cats, ducks, sheep and chickens. Here’s the bedroom where Koa, their Australian shepherd, darted out, a surprise on the carpet in his wake. We’re inside, then out, the house giving way to the yard, the yard folding back into the house.

Newsom, 51, is a filmmaker, and she moves like one. She’s light on her feet—talking fast, laughing easily—guiding me from room to room like she’s cutting between takes on set. For Newsom, the house is less a place than it is a feeling. “We had incredible memories here; we raised our children here,” she says. The family moved to the Fair Oaks home in 2019, a few months after Gavin Newsom was sworn in as California’s governor. But as the kids got older and school pulled them toward the Bay Area, they moved to Marin County—a two-hour drive away—and the Fair Oaks house turned quiet, becoming little more than a crash pad for work and events.

“The past seven years have been full of so many challenges,” she says. “This was sort of an oasis that really nurtured us and gave us the energy and the clarity of what really matters, what’s really important, and then refueled us so that we could go back out into the world and fight the good fight.”

Jennifer Siebel Newsom holds one hand up to her face in a close up photograph by Marie Claire — Newsom at home in Fair Oaks, California.

The good fight has reached a turning point. Outside these walls, the country is louder and more volatile than it was when Newsom first stepped into public life. There have been wildfires and protests, a pandemic and a recall campaign, a hostile political climate, and a White House that casts her home state as hostile territory and her husband as Public Enemy Number One. Governor Newsom has responded by suing the administration, challenging executive orders, and trolling President Donald Trump with a gleeful precision.

That kind of spotlight comes with a price—one that follows you home, tests your marriage, and seeps into your children’s memories. But talking to Jennifer Siebel Newsom, you get the sense she’s been training for this moment her whole life.

As a filmmaker in her early thirties, making her case to a room full of strangers, Newsom had heard it all: “This film has been done before.” “Who are you to make this film?”

She’s sitting across from me in an armchair, in a bright open space off the living room, describing what it took to make her first documentary, Miss Representation. At the time, Newsom was a Stanford-educated MBA who’d spent the past few years as an actress—a career she’d stumbled into at business school, of all places. She was one of few women in her class, and when a statistics professor kept cold-calling her, she’d freeze, then blush, then turn “bright red,” ashamed of the blushing. So she started slipping into the drama building next door at night for acting classes, “just as a way to face my fear.”

Eventually, she picked up small roles on shows like Mad Men and Numb3rs, with a longer run on the crime drama Life—but something kept nagging at her. Hollywood kept sending her out for the same parts: “the trophy wife, or the girlfriend, or the victim, or the kind of seductress.” She saw powerful women everywhere in the real world, and almost none of it reflected on screen.

That’s when the idea for Miss Representation, a film interrogating sexism in the media industry and its impact on women and girls, took shape. Newsom had already been putting her MBA to work on the side, fundraising and managing crews on indie productions while she acted. She started reaching out to documentary filmmakers to direct. “They thought it was such a great concept, but they all said nobody would hire them afterwards,” she says. “And I think that just lit a fire in me. I was like, Are you kidding? Okay, well then I have to do this myself.”

Jennifer Siebel Newsom sits on a wooden chair wearing a dark jacket and black boots in a photograph by Marie Claire — Newsom in the yard.

The subject matter had a way of following her off screen. “I went through all these trials and tribulations of fundraising, of asking for $2,500, $25,000, whatever you would,” she says, recalling the blunt put-downs that came with that process in 2008. Even after she managed to secure the funding, the scrutiny followed her into production. At one point, a man she hired for the project “tried to take over and laughed at me when I gave him feedback,” she says. “I literally almost couldn’t finish the film.”

But she kept going, powered by “this stubbornness and this knowingness.” When Miss Representation finally premiered at Sundance in 2011—and went on to earn major festival recognition and awards—a woman she’d interviewed for the film asked what the experience had taught her. “I discovered my voice,” she recalls telling her. “And I think the feminine voice is really important right now. I was sort of late to the game of realizing I had a voice.”

Her grit had deeper roots than most people realized at the time. In 2022, she took the stand in an L.A. courtroom to testify against Harvey Weinstein about an assault that took place 17 years earlier, when she was still working as an actress. Her case was already outside the statute of limitations, but prosecutors believed her account was credible and could help bolster other women’s, so she chose to take the stand anyway.

It wasn’t only the assault, she explains, but everything wrapped around the trial. “I couldn’t believe what the defense attorneys got away with. I couldn’t believe the way they treated me. I couldn’t believe what they called me in the courtroom,” she says, her voice steady but heavy. She describes what it revealed to her in plain terms: “the myriad of ways we silence women’s voices.” “In different forms, I’ve experienced various traumas in my life,” she says. “But I refused—refused to be suffocated by it.”

While she admits she’s not fully healed, not entirely at peace with any of it, she has kept that promise to herself. “I really believe things don’t happen to us, things happen for us,” she says, describing how those experiences deepened her empathy and compassion. Those instincts, she adds, have fueled her larger purpose: to “create policies and a culture that can hear women, that can believe women.”

&ldquo;What gives me hope, though, is the sisterhood&mdash;all the angel women around me who are in this with me.&rdquo;

And so, she’s continued to tell stories. Her second documentary, The Mask You Live In, examined how toxic masculinity warp boys before they become men, with ripple effects for the women around them. A third, The Great American Lie, traces how the U.S. economy sets families up to fail, hitting women—especially women of color—the hardest.

Newsom brought that same lens into policy as First Partner. She convened a working group on sexual assault after testifying against Weinstein, aimed at strengthening the system for survivors and stopping repeat perpetrators from skating by. Her nonprofit, The Representation Project, uses film, campaigns, and advocacy to push back against gender stereotypes in the media. And through California for All Women, a gender-equity initiative launched by Newsom, she has pushed for changes on issues like closing the pay gap and expanding paid family leave. All of this work circles back to the same premise: that women are “the backbones of their families, their communities, and the American economy.”

Newsom grew up in Marin County, one of five girls in a wealthy conservative family that valued propriety and composure, where “presentation matters.”

At times, those values felt empowering. “Because my dad didn’t have sons—and he was a college athlete and drafted to be an NBA player, but ultimately ended up veering into business instead—we were all athletes,” she says. “I grew up thinking I could do anything boys could do, and I could compete with them, whether it was tennis, soccer, or basketball, horseback riding, skiing, dancing—you name it. I felt like I could do it. I wasn’t afraid.”

But alongside that message was another one: that certain things weren’t meant to be talked about. “My parents were very private. Even talking to you right now, I’m like, Oooh, they’re not going to like that,” she says, laughing softly like she can already hear them. Then her smile fades. “After my sister died,” she adds, “very private.”

When Newsom talks about her sister, her voice drops into a whisper. Stacey Siebel was eight when she passed away, just days before Newsom turned seven, in a golf cart accident on a family trip to Hawaii. The loss pulled the family inward. “I think my mom and dad were in so much pain,” she says, her eyes filling, “and they couldn’t be there for me.”

Jennifer Siebel Newsom holding a chicken outside a chicken coop — Newsom at the family’s chicken coop.

And so she learned early on how quickly a life can tilt, how little control you sometimes have over the ones you love, and how to find anchors when the people you rely on most are breaking too.

Animals were one of those anchors. Newsom’s mother had experience with horses, and her father had a ranch in Montana. After Stacey died, her parents bought Newsom a white pony named Sugar, and a trainer named Marian Nelson taught her to jump hay bales and “to be fearless.” Nelson is still teaching, and years later, when one of Newsom’s daughters was struggling emotionally, she brought her out to ride too. “I was so excited. I was like: Oh, Marian is going to help my daughter be brave!” Newsom says.

Another lifeline was the women around her, who simply filled in where they could. “When we lost Stacey, I somehow was held by all these women,” Newsom says, listing off the women in her community who kept her close. “I think that’s what trauma does, and sexual assault does, and losing my sister did, is you feel very alone,” she says. “What gives me hope, though, is the sisterhood—all the angel women around me who are in this with me.”

On a call in mid-January, Governor Gavin Newsom can’t resist returning to the blind date where he met his wife. The date was set up by a friend, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, in the fall of 2006, and Jennifer arrived “an hour, two, three late.” He was freshly divorced from Kimberly Guilfoyle, the former California prosecutor turned Trump-world fixture, and the whole premise felt like a nonstarter.

“There’s a reason it’s a cliché—because it’s true and it’s so universal—but it was at a time when the last thing I was really thinking about was finding someone I would end up with, or even someone that I would date,” he tells me.

All that resistance vanished soon after she arrived. “It’s one of those curious things where it was just so comfortable and conversational,” he says. They started tracing their “concentric circles of friends,” realizing they’d run parallel for years without colliding. Then fate added one more practical joke at the end of the night: she walked back to the parking garage and found it closed. “So she was forced to spend—a very platonic night, for the record—with this stranger,” he says, “the mayor, at the time, of San Francisco.”

What struck him first was her kindness, a sense of genuine warmth and empathy. He now understands those qualities were shaped by her own “personal history,” and that they carried more weight than he realized on that first date. For the governor, that was “more precious for me, because those were more challenging times.” Beyond the divorce, his mom had recently passed away, and he was about to head into a reelection. “I mean, there was so much going on, so much transition in my own life, that Jen just fell into place—and was able to receive all of that with a grace that marked a real sense of comfort.”

Newsom, too, talks about that connection like she still can’t quite explain it. “We had so much in common, I felt like he was my best friend,” she says. “It was weird.” Beyond the obvious attraction, what stood out to her was how quickly they seemed to recognize each other, the feeling that they spoke the same emotional language, the kind you learn when you’ve been through it at a young age. She points to the instability he grew up with: a single mother working multiple jobs, dyslexia, bullying, a boy who learned early on how to take care of himself. “His heart. His soul. He’s a really, really kind, gentle human being.”

The couple got engaged in December 2007 and were married by the following July. The wedding was pointedly un-Washington, held on Newsom’s family ranch in Montana under open sky, with horses nearby. Before they met, she’d never been in a rush to have kids—she’d imagined adopting from around the world someday—but that soon changed, with the couple eventually welcoming four children: Montana, now 16; Hunter, 14; Brooklynn, 12; and Dutch, 9. Newsom had moved from L.A. to San Francisco, but kept fundraising, producing, and championing the causes she’d been exploring in her films.

Jennifer Siebel Newsom holding a white chicken outside — Newsom holding her chicken, Sugar.

Looking back on the move, the marriage, the kids, the speed of it all, Newsom frames it as a kind of leap of faith. At the time, she was still deep in Miss Representation, with no plans for a life in government. Both Hollywood and politics were “men’s worlds,” she’d come to learn. “In some ways, I was in one only to end up in another.”

Spend a morning with Newsom, and you realize warm memories are often woven with darker ones. She tells me about Sugar, a fluffy white chicken with the same name as her childhood pony. Then she’s pointing to the road at the edge of the property, where an armed man once lingered in a van. Standing at a wall of family photos, she mentions the time far-right provocateur Laura Loomer broke into the Governor’s Mansion grounds.

None of that is lost on her husband, who puts it bluntly: “Our politics have changed. Trump, 1.0, 2.0, makes people feel free to shove again. And California’s been on the receiving end of a lot of that. I certainly have, and she has. She’s had to absorb a lot of it. This hasn’t been a quiet six, seven years,” he says. The renewed focus on him, his family, and the state has only “raised the stakes and the scrutiny.”

In the past year, California’s standoff with the Trump administration has snowballed into a near-constant legal and political brawl: a first-in-the- nation lawsuit challenging Trump’s sweeping tariffs; litigation after Trump federalized California’s National Guard in L.A., and a multistate suit over efforts to cut off Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood.

Although Governor Newsom tells me he has never doubted his wife’s “grit and resiliency,” there’s a muted sadness in the way he describes how his work follows her into the most ordinary parts of the day, from figuring out “novel ways” to leave the house because “we couldn’t go through the back, couldn’t go through the front,” to “people confronting her when she’s walking the dog—because of me, my policies.”

There’s also the issue of raising kids in this environment. “They don’t love the security around them, but sadly they need it,” he says. “They don’t like having other kids know that they’re the governor’s son or daughter, and that people are whispering behind their backs, or that they’re friends of theirs for the wrong reason or hate them for the wrong reason.” What haunted him most was not the kids, but the adults. “We infamously had to homeschool my oldest because it got totally out of hand. Some of the parents that met with the principal basically said, ‘I’m glad my kid’s going after your kid.’”

When I ask Newsom about the impact on her kids, she pauses to collect herself before she answers. “I think being the children of politicians is hard. They don’t choose this,” she says. “My kids are tough. They’re super sensitive, they’re super kind. They’ve been through more than they deserve to have been through.” She calls it a dance—being present without hovering, setting expectations without enabling. “I’m far from perfect. I make mistakes all the time,” she says. “But they know how loved they are.”

For Newsom, there are the personal stakes that the circus of politics brings, but also larger cultural ones. “I am disturbed by the fact that we have a president who is not only a predator and has gotten away with it, has not only bankrupted company after company and has gotten away with it, but now is the most corrupt president in our nation’s history,” she says. “What is this teaching our kids?”

It’s a question she returns to often. And it leads her, again and again, to the same conclusion: that today’s battles about media, gender, power, and technology are already materially shaping the lives of the next generation, and adults who view those as abstract policy issues are late to the conversation. It’s why her agenda stretches from child online safety and tech accountability—through the California Partners Project—to farm-to-school efforts, and other work that shapes the foundation of family life.

It’s a conviction Newsom carries so deeply that Lily Riesenfeld—a close friend of hers for more than a decade—tells me she’s had to physically stop her from giving her cell phone number to strangers on the street who mention a problem. Any problem. “Because she just wants to fix and solve everything. And we’re like, ‘Can you not do that?!’” Riesenfeld laughs. She describes Newsom as the kind of friend who shows up in sweatpants and clears your dishes before you notice, and the kind of mother who’s on top of four kids’ schedules, moods, and injuries.

That instinct is also how she’s pushed her husband. “On many occasions, she’s been very critical” of the way their operation defaulted to a policy-only posture, especially on social media, the governor told me. He admits that he used to fight it—until he saw what she was getting at: people understood their agenda faster when it was explained in real-life terms, with faces, consequences, and the family and partnership front and center.

That said, there’s never been daylight between them when it comes to the current administration. Newsom describes her husband as fair-minded to a fault—“it takes a lot for him to cut you off”—someone who will keep trying to find common ground until the ground drops out beneath you. With the president, it did. “Trump screwed us in California. Trump got super personal and lied and lied and lied and lied and lied,” she says, repeating the word lied eight times in one breath, like a tally she’s been waiting to deliver. “And so it was like, I’m with my husband—enough is enough. Knock it off.”

The night before our December interview, Newsom stood under the dome of the State Capitol rotunda alongside her husband and their children, ushering in the holiday season with speeches and lights. There they were: a glittering portrait of an American family, radiating an old-school glamour that drew the room toward them, constituents leaning in as if to take in the whole picture at once. It was hard not to see a preview.

The question hovering over the Newsoms now—inside Sacramento, inside Washington, inside every group chat where political obsessives play armchair strategist—is whether Gavin Newsom is heading for the White House in 2028. If he is, it will put Newsom’s model of the political spouse to the test.

Ask her husband to picture it, and he doesn’t hesitate. “Look, she doesn’t suffer fools,” he says. “She’s not a fly on the wall. She is not passive.” What makes her “formidable,” he adds, are her sharp instincts and a deeper grasp of the country’s challenges than most people in politics ever develop. That’s why, he says, “I think she’d be extraordinary in that role, even if she married someone else and they ran for that office. So forget me is all I’m saying.”

Ask the women in her life, and they light up like they’ve been waiting for someone to ask. Riesenfeld will have you know that “she’s not going to just be decorating the hallways with Christmas trees.” Michele Jawando, a philanthropy executive and seasoned Washington operator who’s worked with Newsom on policy initiatives, says, “What I tell people is politics is actually just people, and what I think Jennifer understands innately is people and how to be a storyteller and ways to bridge gaps across difference. I don’t know if she gets enough credit for that.”

Jennifer Siebel Newsom standing next to a tree-filled landscape with her hands in her coat pockets — Newsom on the grounds of her family home.

Nancy Pelosi, who has seen every kind of political spouse, views the First Partner as a strategic mind. When I meet with her in her Washington office, the Speaker Emerita—a longtime friend of the Newsoms—points to how Newsom has used film to change how people absorb truths about power and representation. “I have to give her so much credit for that, because she understood that if this is your goal, there’s a creative path to go down to get it done. She’s made a very special contribution to this whole subject. And it’s a real challenge. So she’s the full package.”

For her part, Newsom is candid about the urgency of the moment. “It feels really early, but it also feels important to stand up to what’s happening in our country. And so obviously I’m supportive of that,” she says. She’s also clear-eyed about the influence that role could bring, calling it “an incredible platform” to push her agenda around women as power brokers in American life, at home and far beyond it. Still, she stresses that it’s “ultimately a family decision”—and speculative for now.

Weeks later, in the course of my reporting, I stumbled on an archival online listing for Newsom’s high school yearbook, offered in “very fine used condition.” It includes a scan of her senior page: a teenage Jennifer L. Siebel, smiling in snapshots, a pony in one frame. The seller’s description, seemingly posted before Newsom was even California’s First Partner, offers a small but strangely confident prophecy: “Mrs. Gavin Newsom may very well be our First Lady either in Sacramento or Washington.”

One down.

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Noor Ibrahim is the deputy editor at Marie Claire, where she commissions, edits, and writes features across politics, career, and money in all their modern forms. She’s always on the hunt for bold, unexpected stories about the power structures that shape women’s lives—and the audacious ways they push back. Previously, Noor was the managing editor at The Daily Beast, where she helped steer the newsroom’s signature mix of scoops, features, and breaking news. Her reporting has appeared in The Guardian, TIME, and Foreign Policy, among other outlets. She holds a master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School.