Vice President Kamala Harris made an awkward appearance in an ABC News segment from nearly three decades ago that went viral on Tuesday. In the 1995 “PrimeTime Live” video package, Harris is asked if she is future San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown’s daughter. At the time, the two were dating.
The video clip shows an unidentified woman asking Kamala Harris, who was standing next to a distracted Brown, “Excuse me, are you his daughter?” After a moment of stunned silence, Harris responded, “No, I’m not.
Harris, now 59, had been romantically involved with the now-90-year-old Brown in the mid-1990s. She was a young prosecutor in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office at the time, while Brown was a married man and speaker of the California state Assembly. Their relationship reportedly began in 1994 and ended sometime in 1995, the year Brown was elected mayor of San Francisco.
The video package, which focused on Brown, includes a segment with Harris standing by his side during his victory speech in the mayoral election. Brown has been credited with boosting her career while they were dating, as he appointed her to two state commissions when he was Assembly speaker. He acknowledged his influence in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2019.
Brown also supported Harris in her successful 2003 run for San Francisco District Attorney, which investigative journalist Peter Schweizer has argued was for “corrupt” purposes. In a July article, Schweitzer claimed that Brown helped get Harris elected as District Attorney because the then-District Attorney, Terence Hallinan, was pursuing legal cases against his friends and donors. When Harris won, she dropped those cases or plead them out for reduced sentences.
Former President Donald Trump also weighed in on the matter during a press conference last month, claiming that he “knows Willie Brown very well” and that Brown had a big part in what happened with Kamala.
