A woman claiming to be an ex-girlfriend of Doug Emhoff who accused the second gentleman of slapping her face so hard that she spun around has criticized the mainstream media for ignoring her allegations.
The New York attorney, named only as “Jane,” spoke out in an interview with the Daily Mail about the alleged attack, which was dismissed as “untrue” by a spokesman for Kamala Harris’ husband.
The incident, first reported in the Mail on Oct. 2, reportedly happened in 2012 during a drunken fight while the couple was attending the Cannes Film Festival in France.
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In the interview, the woman alleges that she met Emhoff through the dating app Match.com in 2012, a year before he started his relationship with Harris. At the time, she says, he was living in Los Angeles, and she was in New York.
She described a “fairytale” trip to Cannes for the star-studded festival but alleged it took an aggressive turn while the couple lined up for a taxi outside the Hotel du Cap in Antibes to return to their lodgings at around 3 a.m.
“I decided I’m going to go up to the valet and give them 100 bucks, to get out of this line,” the woman told the Mail. “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,” she alleged. “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.
In the Mail report, “Jane” also claimed that Emhoff told her his marriage to first wife Kerstin ended after he had “an affair with his daughter’s teacher and that subsequently she claimed that she was pregnant.”
The woman continued: “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 there was no proof that the woman had become pregnant. He tried to make it seem like she was scamming him,” she added.
The Mail wrote that the woman decided to speak out because Emhoff denied the original report and continued to represent himself as a feminist in interviews.
She insisted in the report that her motives were not political and that both she and her husband were registered Democrats, voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election, and donated $10,000 to his campaigns.
She was reportedly angered by the mainstream media’s apathy toward her story.
“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 told the Mail. “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,” she added.
The Daily Beast has contacted the Harris campaign and the White House for comment.
After the Mail’s Oct. 2 report alleging the woman was slapped by Emhoff, a spokesman said: “This report is untrue. Any suggestion that he would or has ever hit a woman is false.”
Harris, 60, and Emhoff, 59, met in 2013 and married the following year. As the first second gentleman in U.S. history, Emhoff has been widely praised for taking a backseat to his wife’s political ambitions and quitting his successful legal career.
