Vice President Kamala Harris’ husband is being accused of slapping his ex-girlfriend for flirting with a valet worker at a ritzy gala in 2012, a new report claims.
Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, 59, supposedly struck his then-girlfriend — described as a successful New York attorney — in the face so hard she spun around while in a valet line after an event at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2012, the three unnamed friends of the woman reportedly told the Daily Mail.
All three sources requested not to be named due to fear of retaliation from Emhoff – who frequently positions himself as an ally for women.
On Sunday, the Second Gentleman made headlines for his interview with Jen Psaki, who credited him with reshaping “the perception of masculinity.”
“To me, it’s the right thing to do,” Emhoff said of his role as a supportive spouse.
But the three friends who spoke to the Daily Mail provided photos of Emhoff posing with the woman he supposedly slapped in 2012, as well as other documents corroborating the trip they took to the south of France around the time of the alleged incident.
The woman declined to comment on the story, the outlet said.
The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
The alleged incident came just a year before Emhoff, a successful entertainment lawyer, and Harris met on a blind date.
The Vice President, then California’s attorney general, started dating Emhoff in 2013, and then married him in August 2014.
After the alleged slap, the New York lawyer – who was not identified — called one of the friends, a male businessman, sobbing in her cab immediately after the incident, the outlet said.
Emhoff, the friend said, had forced his way into the cab and was with the woman when she made the call.
“It was very clear what she was telling me,” the source told the Daily Mail. “She said she was with a guy, her date, she was at the Cannes Film Festival, and he hit her. She was in the car with the guy at the time.
The woman allegedly told him, “I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know whether to call the French police. I couldn’t get a hold of her after calling back.”
The friend claimed that he got more details about what happened later on.
“It was something like 3 a.m. They were trying to get out of there and they both had been drinking. There was a gigantic line for taxis,” the source said.
“She went up to one of the valet guys, offered him 100 Euros or whatever, to get to the head of the line. She told me she put her hand on his shoulder. Doug apparently thought that she was flirting, and came over and slapped her in the face.”
She slapped Emhoff back, the businessman said.
“My impression is that he had a lot to drink…. she wasn’t slurring her words,” he said of the woman’s conversation with him right after the alleged incident.
“She told me that she broke up with him that night.”
The pair had been dating for about three months, the Daily Mail said.
The woman called her businessman friend because she wanted, “Doug to see her on the phone, telling somebody,” her friends told the outlet. “She felt that would afford her some protection.”
A second friend – another New York-based female attorney said that the woman also told her about the incident, the Daily Mail claimed.
“They had dinner. She said Doug was very charming, and it was lovely. Then I believe it was between 2-3am, it was still raging, but she was wearing four-inch heels and a floor-length gown, so it was time to depart,” the lawyer said.
“She said there’d been no fight before he hit her. You would have thought it was this fairytale trip.”
She was “completely caught off guard” by Emhoff’s sudden attack, the woman alleged.
“He hauled up and slapped her so hard she spun around. She said she was in utter shock,” she told the Daily Mail. “She was so furious, she slapped him on one side, and then on the other cheek with the other hand.”
All three friends said that the woman tried to leave following the assault, but that Emhoff forced his way into the cab with her, according to the Daily Mail.
“She said she wanted to go back to the hotel without him. But while she was shutting the door, he forced himself into the car, which she did not want.
“I think she asked him ‘what the f–k was that all about?’ in the car, and the only thing she could really get out of him was that he thought she was hitting on the valet.”
One source added: “She couldn’t believe he is the person that he is, and that it turned into this trailer trash moment,” she lamented.
“She realized he was bad news. This was the first time she saw his ugly side.”
The third friend – described as a female executive at a top company – said the woman told her about what happened in 2018, when then-Sen. Harris was in the news for grilling Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh over sexual assault allegations, according to the Mail.
“[She] is a gorgeous, strong woman and you would never expect somebody to hit her,” she told the Daily Mail.
Emhoff was allegedly unapologetic, she added.
“When he hit her she hit him back, like, ‘Don’t you ever do that again,’ she said.
“I asked her if he ever apologized. She said no, but he commented about the hit she gave him. It was a tennis metaphor. But no apology at all.
The source added: “All he said to her was, ‘Don’t worry about it, you got one across the court and down the line.’”
The woman found Emhoff’s reaction “hurtful,” but “she didn’t want to feel like a victim,” the executive explained.
Emhoff allegedly ended the trip early to return to Los Angeles for his daughter Ella’s 13th birthday – and he and the woman never saw each other again, the three friends said.
The trio shared a copy of the couple’s itinerary from the fateful trip, which showed a layover flight from Newark, NJ, to Nice, France on May 22, 2012.
A return flight from Milan was originally booked for May 29.
In a May 17, 2012, email, the woman explained that she and Doug were leaving early so Emhoff could jet back to LA.
She and Emhoff’s relationship started after they connected on Match.com, the friends said.
It got serious in just three months, and the woman had already met Emhoff’s kids and parents.
Emhoff even supposedly included his son Cole in their first date in March 2012, the sources said.
“She went to a hotel bar to meet Doug after work. It was a typical Match.com date where you only commit to a drink,” the attorney friend told the Daily Mail.
“They were there an hour, and he told her his son was in the city walking around. I think he had just started college.
Cole later met the pair on the woman’s porch and smoked cigarettes with his dad and his father’s date, according to the Daily Mail sources.
The shocking allegations came just two months after Emhoff admitted to cheating on his first wife following a bombshell report that alleged he once got their nanny pregnant.
“During my first marriage, Kerstin and I went through some tough times on account of my actions. I took responsibility, and in the years since, we worked through things as a family and have come out stronger on the other side,” Emhoff told CNN in August.
The affair was disclosed to President Biden’s vetting committee four years ago, before he chose Harris as his running mate for the 2020 ticket, a source familiar with the situation told the outlet.
Emhoff was accused of betraying his wife over 15 years ago with Najen Naylor, a nanny who worked at the private school their two children attended.
Naylor supposedly became pregnant as a result of the relationship, but did not keep the baby, a close friend with knowledge of the predicament told the Daily Mail.
It was not clear exactly what the friend meant.
While Emhoff never named Naylor in his statement, he allegedly told his girlfriend in 2012 about both the relationship and pregnancy, the three friends told the Daily Mail.
He came clean about the situation when she questioned him about his divorce from his first wife, which was still ongoing when they were dating, the sources said.
“She felt for some reason his wife had the upper hand, and she couldn’t understand why that was,” the executive said.
“He told her that he had gotten the kid’s teacher pregnant, and that had been the cause for the divorce.”
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According to Emhoff, Naylor had a miscarriage, which she blamed him for, the sources claimed.
Los Angeles Police Department records obtained by Daily Mail under the showed that police were called to a house where Naylor lived around the time she was allegedly pregnant, on the night of June 28, 2009, the outlet said.
The callout was given priority level three, which is a “life threatening emergency, lights and sirens on,” but the LAPD declined to give more information.
Emohoff denied that he caused Naylor to lose the pregnancy, but told the girlfriend that he paid her around $80,000 and had her sign a non-disclosure agreement, the Daily Mail reported.
“He did it rather matter-of-factly, not apologizing or saying he screwed up, but just like it was any other conversation,” the executive said.
The confession was a “serious red flag,” but the couple flew to Cannes later in the spring anyway, the friends noted to the publication.
After the relationship imploded, the now-Second Gentleman quickly moved on with Harris, whom he started seeing in 2013.
In her 2019 book “The Truths We Hold,” Harris described meeting Emhoff’s children just two months into the romance.
The couple married in August 2014.
The woman never thought about sharing her story until she witnessed Harris’ rise to power – with Emhoff at her elbow, the friends said.
‘He’s holding himself out to be something he absolutely is not. And that’s bulls–t,’ said the executive of Emhoff, who frequently positions himself as an outspoken ally of women.
“I feel like people should know who their leaders really are.”
