Doug Emhoff’s ex-girlfriend has spoken exclusively to DailyMail.com claiming that he slapped her in the face so hard she spun around at a 2012 celebrity event in France.
The woman, a successful New York attorney, is remaining anonymous, but decided to speak out after Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s husband, denied the claims through a spokesman.
Emhoff’s accuser, who DailyMail.com is naming only as ‘Jane’, initially declined to comment on the record. But Emhoff’s denial, and his alleged hypocrisy by claiming to be a feminist in media interviews, finally became too much for her.
‘What’s frightening for a woman that’s been on the other end of it, is watching this completely fabricated persona being portrayed,’ Jane said.
‘He’s being held out to be the antithesis of who he actually is. And that is utterly shocking.’
DailyMail.com broke the story about the alleged unprovoked attack on October 2, by reporting accounts from two friends she told immediately after the incident, a third she told in 2018, and documents evidencing her relationship and trip to France with Emhoff.
The bombshell allegations, which followed DailyMail.com’s revelation in August that Emhoff cheated on his first wife with his daughter’s nanny Najen Naylor, received little or no coverage from politically center-left major news outlets.
Emhoff admitted the affair in a statement in August but his spokesman gave only a short denial of the alleged violence to a politics news site a day after we exclusively reported the slap allegation.
In a statement to Semafor published October 3, a spokesperson said ‘this report is untrue,’ and that ‘any suggestion that he would or has ever hit a woman is false.’
Emhoff, the Harris campaign, and the White House have failed to respond to DailyMail.com and other outlets’ repeated requests for comment.
But the second gentleman has since continued to brag about his long-held feminist values in softball media interviews arranged by the Harris presidential campaign.
‘Every time I see Doug on TV portraying the persona of a perfect spouse and non-toxic man, I wonder if Najen is watching too and feeling as disgusted as I am,’ Jane said.
Last week, ‘Jane’ recounted her story to DailyMail.com – including that Emhoff ‘slapped me so hard I spun around,’ and that Emhoff told her he was accused by his mistress of causing her to miscarry their baby.
Emhoff and Jane got together in 2012 before he met Harris, who he married in 2014.
‘I was living in New York, and Doug was living in Los Angeles,’ Jane said. ‘I met him on Match.com.
‘After work one night I met him for drinks at a hotel near Times Square.’
She said Emhoff’s odd behavior began immediately, when he invited his son Cole to join them about an hour into their first date in March 2012.
‘It was an odd request for a first date, but I also felt bad that his son was walking around the city waiting for his dad to finish his Match.com date. So I agreed. In retrospect, it should have been a red flag.’
Jane said their relationship consisted of ‘an intense few months’, with Emhoff discussing marriage and children after just weeks.
‘He flew me to Los Angeles in April [2012]. I stayed in his home for a week. The entire time, he was alluding to marriage and having children with me,’ she told DailyMail.com.
‘He was totally love-bombing me. He grabbed me round the stomach and talked about wanting more babies.’
Jane said that less than a month into her relationship she got a lucrative job opportunity in the UK, and Emhoff gave her the impression he was willing to leave his family behind.
‘He was really pushing me to pursue it, and he seemed like he was willing to come with me to London,’ she said. ‘He was ready to uproot, even though he had a family, and he had a child still in junior high school.’
Emhoff’s first wife and mother of his two kids, Kerstin, had filed to end their marriage three years earlier in June 2009, after splitting with him the month before, according to LA court documents.
But Jane said she got the impression Emhoff still felt a debt to his ex, and decided to ask him about it during her LA trip in April 2012.
‘We were in Santa Monica. He was driving his fancy car. And so I just straight out asked him: ‘I feel like you’re on the back foot in the divorce, like you’re trying to make up for something?’ she said.
‘All I did was ask him one question, and he told me the whole story. Without skipping a beat, and staring straight ahead at the road, he tells me he had an affair with his daughter’s teacher and that subsequently she claimed that she was pregnant. He’s telling me this very casually like it’s no big deal.
‘He yelled at her. He never said he hit her, but he said he got really angry with her, and she subsequently claimed that whatever he did caused her to lose the pregnancy.
‘He said she got a lawyer and was threatening litigation. I was flabbergasted. And I was taken aback by how matter of fact he could talk about it.
‘He tried to minimize it. He said there was no proof that the woman had become pregnant. He tried to make it seem like she was scamming him.
‘To be honest, I wanted to believe him at the time, because by all appearances this was turning into a serious relationship.
‘I had just met both his children, his parents and many people he worked with at Venable. But I did harbor reservations after this.’
Jane added that Emhoff told her he settled with Naylor for about $80,000, and had her sign an NDA.
Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) records obtained by DailyMail.com under the California Public Records Act show that police were called to a house where Naylor was living around the time she was allegedly pregnant, at 8:14pm on June 28, 2009.
The callout was given priority level three, which is a ‘life threatening emergency, lights and sirens on’.
LAPD refused to give further information or the names of the individuals involved in the incident, and Najen declined to comment.
Hours after DailyMail.com published a story on August 3 revealing claims that Emhoff impregnated his daughter’s grade school teacher and part-time nanny, the second gentleman gave a statement to CNN admitting the affair, but not mentioning any pregnancy, miscarriage, or legal agreement.
Jane said Emhoff’s alleged disclosure to her in April 2012 about his affair gave her pause about their relationship.
But she had already booked tickets for the two of them to attend the star-studded amfAR gala dinner in the south of France the following month, held alongside Cannes Film Festival.
‘I had already planned and paid to go to this event, and he was already invited, so I went ahead and brought him,’ she said.
She described the trip as a ‘fairytale’ at first. She mingled with A-list celebrities at the May 24 event, dressed in a red ball gown with Emhoff in a dapper tuxedo.
But she said it turned into a nightmare at around 3am when they joined a long and chaotic line for a taxi outside the Hotel du Cap event venue in Antibes to return to their lodgings in a neighboring town.
‘I decided I’m going to go up to the valet and give them 100 bucks, to get out of this line,’ Jane said.
‘I put my hand on the valet’s shoulder and tell him, with my $100, could you please get me a car as soon as possible.
‘As I’m talking to him, Doug got out of the line, comes up, turns me around by my right shoulder. I’m completely caught off guard, I’m not bracing, I’m in four inch heels, wearing a full-length gown and it’s between 2-3am.
‘He slaps me so hard I spin around, and I’m in utter shock.
‘There had been no fight, no argument. It had been a completely fantastic event. I am so furious. The only thing I could think to do was slap him back. I slapped him on one side, and on the other cheek with the other hand.
‘In that moment, his mask had dropped and I saw his dark side,’ she added.
‘All of a sudden the car is there, the valet is ushering me in.
‘I intended to go back to the hotel without him. So I was shutting the car door, but he forced his way into the car, which I did not want.
‘It’s dark. I don’t speak French, my friends we’re with are off having an amazing time. I’m embarrassed and humiliated that, this amazing experienced turned into this violent spectacle.
‘I can’t believe he just slapped me. I think I said to him in the car, ‘What the hell is wrong with you? Why did you do that?’ And the only thing I could get out of him was he thought I was hitting on the valet.’
Jane said she called a businessman friend in New York from the cab to tell him what just happened. The friend confirmed the call to DailyMail.com.
‘This was the first time I saw Doug’s ugly side,’ Jane said. ‘I was in shock. I wanted somebody to know where I was, and what happened. I was freaked out because I thought I knew this person. But I don’t, and he’s in the car with me.
‘I also wanted Doug to see me on the phone telling somebody.’
Jane said the next day Emhoff was unapologetic, telling her in a casual manner that they were ‘even’ and referencing her returned slaps using a tennis metaphor: ‘Don’t worry about it, you got one across the court and down the line.’
The New York attorney told DailyMail.com that after the shocking alleged attack, she began to see past behavior by Emhoff in a new light.
As well as questioning his alleged version of his affair with Naylor, she also recalled a ‘weird’ incident at their hotel in Nice before the amfAR dinner.
‘We went outside and sat on the loungers,’ Jane said. ‘I’m in a bikini. He wanted to take a picture of me. I didn’t think anything of it.
‘Later on he sent me a couple of pictures. The picture he took of me did not include my head. I was like, ‘Where’s my head?’ And he was just giggling about it like a pubescent boy.
‘It was gross and I felt so humiliated. In retrospect I believe he was intentionally objectifying me to diminish me. That’s the kind of person he is.’
Earlier this month, DailyMail.com revealed claims from Emhoff’s former colleagues at his ex-law firm Venable that he was ‘misogynistic’ and ‘inappropriate’ with women at the firm, including bragging to top firm partners that he yelled at a woman and ‘put her in her place’.
Jane said that the alleged behavior fit with the Emhoff that she knew – but not the one that he presents in media interviews.
She said that the week after the slapping incident, she told a friend who worked with Emhoff at Venable about it, and the woman responded that Emhoff had a ‘bad reputation’ with women in the law firm’s LA office.
Jane said that long ago she moved on emotionally from Emhoff’s alleged violent attack, and she doesn’t want to be seen as a ‘victim’.
‘It was very hurtful at the time. But I am proud of how I responded in real time to this unexpected assault,’ the attorney said.
‘I had never really wanted to talk about Doug slapping me, to be honest with you, because I was with him for a few months, it was this one moment. And it was enough to wake me up and leave.
‘In retrospect, it was the best thing that could possibly have happened, because his mask dropped, and I realized I shouldn’t waste another moment with him.’
The two never spoke after the French trip, Jane said, save for two texts where she requested he paid her money he owed, and he requested a suit he left behind – which she promptly threw in the trash.
But when she read Emhoff was dating then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris in 2014, it all came flooding back.
‘I just got this sinking feeling, like, oh my god, she’s engaged to this guy. My first thought was she clearly has not done due diligence on him. And I thought, he’s putting the hard sell on her, like he did with me.
‘I was wondering, does she know?’
Jane said she felt compelled to tell her best friend, a female top executive, her story about Emhoff in 2018 after they watched Harris grill Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh about alleged sexual assault in his 2018 confirmation hearing.
The friend recounted to DailyMail.com the same story Jane told.
DailyMail.com also obtained a copy of Jane and Emoff’s flight itinerary to France, an email to a friend and fellow attendee at the 2012 amfAR gala mentioning Emhoff’s attendance, and pictures of the former couple with metadata showing the date and location of the photo.
Footage obtained by DailyMail.com from the red carpet at the event shows Emhoff walking in the background.
The material helped confirm key aspects of Jane’s story.
Jane dismissed any claims that her allegations against Emhoff were politically motivated, adding that she and her husband have been registered Democrats, voted for Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary and 2020 election, and donated over $10,000 to Biden’s campaigns.
DailyMail.com obtained Federal Election Commission records evidencing the donations, and voter registrations showing the couple’s previous registration as Democrats.
‘I’ve recounted the same story for years, and I’ve been telling this story before he became famous,’ she said.
Jane added that after reading DailyMail.com’s story about Emhoff’s affair with his daughter’s nanny, she felt ‘validated’ – but also angry at a lackluster response among some mainstream media.
‘I’ve been telling this story to my friends. And I kept saying, this is a big deal, why doesn’t anybody in the media care? And apparently nobody did,’ she said.
‘Not a single reporter has directly asked Doug about these allegations.
‘When some news organizations re-reported your reporting, they even left out the claim that the teacher had become pregnant. I was livid. It’s just so clear what’s happening. I’m so disgusted.’
Jane said she hopes coming forward now, albeit anonymously, will help set the record straight, and prompt a thorough investigation of the hopeful POTUS’s husband.