Women's sports happened by accident, and could be taken apart on purpose: https://t.co/BrEbKuP9P5
— Defector (@DefectorMedia) March 6, 2025
Something to pick at, besides the fresh scab. The always interesting Diana Moskovitz, at Defector — “Women’s Sports Happened By Accident, And Could Be Taken Apart On Purpose”:
… Women’s sports has always hung on by the thinnest of threads. They are not mentioned even once in the law that created them, and once the powers that be realized what that law had done, they went all the way up to the presidency to try and undo it. The NCAA objected to supporting women’s sports, and searched for years to find a way out of that obligation. Even President Gerald R. Ford’s office seemed concerned about those “women’s organizations.” Our country’s perch atop global women’s sports happened not because our leadership desired it, or even cared all that much about it, or held strong feelings about the place of women in society in general. It happened due to a collection of random factors all happening in a specific time and space.
That matters now because one of the many aspects of our federal government currently being torn apart includes the department that oversaw the law that made women’s sports possible. Title IX, which once forced schools and universities to do everything from provide a girls soccer team to investigate reports of sexual harassment to provide fair pay, is being revised before our eyes, most prominently in the form of legislation endorsing state surveillance of women’s bodies under the guise of “protecting” women from men in sports.
The reactionary movement behind this might be coming for vulnerable pieces of women’s sports at the moment. But because of the tenuous foundation upon which officially sanctioned scholastic sports for women and girls was created, and because there is nothing in Title IX’s original language that says women’s sports specifically must exist, nothing is protecting women’s sports as a whole from dismantling or destruction. What was created by accident can absolutely be undone by fiat…
There is an entire history of women’s sports that stretches back well over 100 years, and it intertwines with the creation and rise of modern sports itself. There’s Dick, Kerr Ladies F.C. There’s Babe Didrikson Zaharias. There’s Alice Milliat. There’s Louise Stokes and Tidye Pickett. How so many women were so systemically erased from popular history is a discussion for another day. What matters in our present moment is that for most people, recent women’s sports history begins in the 1970s when Congress passed Title IX. The law is just 37 words: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
You will notice that this says nothing about sports.
Those who worked on it knew that Title IX had the power to open up women’s sports; leaving it out of the text was very much a strategic move. It wasn’t quite subterfuge, but the possibility sure was undersold. The first version, introduced by Rep. Edith Green of Oregon, made no mention of sports. Rep. Patsy Matsu Takemoto Mink of Hawaii, the first woman of color and woman of Asian ancestry elected to Congress, did not bring up sports when she testified in 1970 in the House of Representatives in support of the legislation. Over in the Senate, the office of Indiana Sen. Birch Bayh Jr. purposely downplayed how influential Title IX would be. Jay Berman, then the director of legislative affairs for Bayh, admitted as much to the Indianapolis Star in 2022, saying that doing so “would only work against us.” A memorandum drafted years later for Ford would acknowledge this, saying the law passed “with little legislative history, debate or, I’m afraid, thought.”
Title IX wasn’t major news when it passed. The headlines came later, when people began asking what equal rights for women in education actually meant. In a country where sports is deeply embedded within academics—from physical education classes to team sports, from elementary school all the way through college, and with valuable scholarships in the mix—equal access to education necessarily meant equal access to sports. This immediately became controversial. When the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare proposed its regulations, which included physical education and more sports opportunities for women and girls, a Feb. 28, 1975 memo to President Ford said the proposal received more than 9,700 comments. The same memo said that athletics for women and girls was the topic that “raised the most public controversy and involves some of the most difficult policy and legal points.”…
That we have women’s sports, and so much women’s sports, is in a sense because of federal bureaucracy—all its rules, all its management, and all those legal precedents. As Victoria Jackson and Andrés Martinez wrote in 2023 for New America about the U.S. Women’s National Team’s dominance in soccer, one of the most masculine-coded sports on the planet, “Title IX forced a level of investment in women’s sports without precedent in this or any other country.”
That investment, and the dominance that it helped produce, is not because of the NCAA, which still doesn’t support women’s sports to the level that it supports men. A 2021 review of the men’s and women’s March Madness tournaments, done by a law firm commissioned by the NCAA, found that “with respect to women’s basketball, the NCAA has not lived up to its stated commitment to ‘diversity, inclusion and gender equity among its student-athletes, coaches and administrators.'” That investigation also found that this was entirely the NCAA’s own fault, because it had created a system “designed to maximize the value of and support to the Division I Men’s Basketball Championship.” The impact of that was “cumulative, not only fostering skepticism and distrust about the sincerity of the NCAA’s commitment to gender equity, but also limiting the growth of women’s basketball and perpetuating a mistaken narrative that women’s basketball is destined to be a ‘money loser’ year after year…
Republicans have campaigned against the U.S. Department of Education since its creation under President Jimmy Carter. Though any threat to completely dismantle it currently remains unlikely, if only because conservative power players benefit too much from some of its key programs, President Donald Trump’s latest appointment to head up and ultimately wind down the agency is WWE co-founder Linda McMahon. As Josephine Riesman, author of the book Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America, put it on the NPR podcast It’s Been A Minute, “Linda has long been a master of this mask—this mask of, I’m a kindly grandmother who wants to be nice to you; I’ll be a mother figure; I’m a good administrator; I run businesses well, when in reality, the fact is she’s the hatchet woman and will do what Trump, who she’s known since 1981, tells her to do.” In case there were any doubts about McMahon’s assignment, Trump told her, “Linda, I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job.”…
Steve in the ATL
And they had to get a German company to sponsor those shirts? Where is Nike?!
sentient ai from the future
@Steve in the ATL: probably too busy funding a republican and a third party spoiler in the OR Gov race in search of another tax cut, at the expense of women’s rights.
The Audacity of Krope
I don’t understand why there is a conflict between allowing trans folk to participate in sports and fairness in women’s sports.
There’s an obvious solution. Design leagues based on size and physicality, not gender. This allows fairness and full participation.
And Gavin Newsom accepting the transphobic framing of the issue without considering solutions…tut…tut…
Brent
@The Audacity of Krope: Frankly, that doesn’t really strike me as a particularly practical solution. Among a whole bunch of issues, the first thing that jumps out to me is that I am not even sure how one would measure physicality exactly. And size is not even a particular good measure of one’s capability in most sports. In fact, I can probably think of 100 tricky questions for such a schema without even racking my brain.
SpaceUnit
Also the recent house NCAA settlement means that athletic departments are going to be cutting back funding for less profitable sports right and left. It’s already happening. Cal Poly just eliminated their swimming program altogether.
The Audacity of Krope
@Brent: So, what, we just have to choose between the unpopular presumed position generally held by Democrats and full exclusion?
Things don’t need to be perfect, we’re still talking about a competitive endeavor, and the sports organizations making the relevant decisions have a lot of physiological understanding at their disposal.
As usual, the political class is trying to impose a false choice on us, one bound to lead toward trans exclusion.
Trans exclusion is the real goal of all this.
NotMax
Title IX was renamed the Patsy Takemoto Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act by Congress in 2002 in recognition of Hawaii Rep. Mink’s contribution in guiding it through passage in the House in 1972.
HinTN
@The Audacity of Krope: And Montana just showed why, even though they are ruby red, they are really about minimal gummint interference versus the Christianist policy of maximal interference to ensure their belief system is enforced as ascendant in the public polity.
Brent
@The Audacity of Krope: I don’t know that those are the only two options but I certainly agree that the question of sports participation, like the underlying questions of sex and gender themselves, is politically complicated. I think we also need to keep in mind that we are talking about very few athletes in the larger scheme of things and the reason this is an issue is not because there is some widespread crisis but because the right sees it as a wedge that they want to shove as hard as possible.
I certainly want to advocate for as much inclusivity as possible but completely redoing the way we think about sports grouping, even if we had a practical way to do that which I don’t think we do, is not really a proportional response to the actual problem as opposed to the manufactured political perception of the problem.
sentient ai from the future
@Brent: sports should not be prestige engines for academia. there i said it.
Ohio Mom
@The Audacity of Krope: The Olympics has worked out a policy on trans athletes, you’d think that could be a model others can use.
I am not a sports person but it seems to me sports is full of rules. What’s a few more?
Brent
@sentient ai from the future: Sorry if I am being obtuse but I don’t think I understand why this is relevant to anything I said. Can you please elaborate?
frosty
My Aunt Jean, a Michigan lawyer, was instrumental in getting Title IX written and passed, and I didn’t know anything about it until I read her obituary. Among other things, she was a delegate at the 1968 convention in Chicago.
https://www.freep.com/story/news/obituary/2021/10/12/jean-ledwith-king-obituary-death-attorney-gender-equality/6102090001/
The Audacity of Krope
@Brent:
Well, it may not be proportional the scale of the issue if only looking at trans people, but it could create more opportunities for, say for example, cis women.
My proposed solution mainly leaves it to sports governing bodies. Solutions don’t need to derive fully from the government, but we do need the government not to codify discrimination.
And I’m not married to my particular solution. But there is no way in hell I’m voting for someone whose position is anywhere in the ballpark of Newsom’s “of course it’s not fair, we should stop it.” Political leaders are raised up supposedly to solve problems, not advance spurious lines of thinking in service of simple solutions to satisfy a bigoted majority.
Ohio Mom
@HinTN: Montana has long had a strong libertarian streak, as in, You mind your own business and I’ll mind mine. Lots of newcomers who are very Red are diluting that though.
I should admit I don’t know what vote you are referring to.
The Audacity of Krope
@Ohio Mom: I don’t know the particulars, but the Montana legislature is making life miserable for their new trans legislator.
Ohio Mom
@frosty: That’s why I love funerals, you always find out something interesting.
sentient ai from the future
@Brent: this is all collegiate sports. you want to make an all-trangender tackle quiddich league? you can do that, privately.
all the sturm and drang is about how we hitch the sports wagon to education.
Brent
@Ohio Mom: They do have such rules and I can’t look it up at the moment but I believe the NCAA rules are not too different. They have to do with measuring hormonal levels.
They honestly seem pretty reasonable to me but the problem is that a lot of the right do no accept those rules which is why we are having this ongoing political argument. I just want to underline again that whatever the underlying actual conflict, the right is not really interested in solving it or coming up with some reasonable compromise.
sentient ai from the future
@Ohio Mom: https://youtu.be/BxZgMBX-Ii8
Ohio Mom
@The Audacity of Krope: At the next cousins’ Zoom I’ll ask my cousin who married a man who grew up in Big Sky Country who couldn’t bear to live anywhere else, what that is about.
Ohio Mom
@sentient ai from the future: That was inspiring.
dc
@sentient ai from the future: Completely agree, but that horse left the barn ages ago.
Brent
@sentient ai from the future: ah. I see. Well I would say this particular iteration of the issue concerns the NCAA but we have seen it rear its head at every level from the Olympics and professional sports all the way down to elementary school.
Delicate Butterfly
Thread topic of the precarious position of women’s sports gets shoved aside in the comments to focus on transgender issues.
That’s almost like a metaphor or something.
Betty
@Ohio Mom: It could be that they recently voted down a law to take children from transgender couples after a very good speech by the transgender rep. Maybe?
Splitting Image
@The Audacity of Krope:
I disagree actually, meaning no disrepect to any trans people. Undoing women’s rights was always a major goal of this movement and attacking trans people, for many of them, was just a means of getting there.
Not to say that Republicans weren’t happy to have a few more heads to kick in on the way there, but Title IX would have been a target even if there were no trans people participating in sports at all.
I wouldn’t be shocked if they move on to blocking women from attending college completely.
trollhattan
Sent the article to the kid, who knows more about Title IX than any five people I can name, for any feedback.
Lucky for women’s sports, they’re becoming a money-maker and that is probably the best defense against dismantlement.
WaterGirl
@Brent: I think sometimes something another person has written leads us to have a thought we want to share, and since it came from reading the original comment, we “reply”.
I don’t know if that is what happened here, but I do that a lot because it feels like a conversation.
Betty
@frosty: Wow! Thanks for sharing Jean’s story. What a powerhouse. We sure could use her in this mess we’re in now.
WaterGirl
@frosty: How cool is that?!!
There’s more than one Balloon Juice Angel who has said they are Angel-ing in honor of their mom or their grandmother who was inspirational and would surely be proud of them for fighting for the same things.
I wonder how many of us here have someone like that in our past.
VeniceRiley
@frosty: RUP and thank you, Aunt Jean!
WaterGirl
I think women in sports is a genie they will not be able to put back in the bottle, no matter how much the patriarchy probably hates that uppity role model Megan Rapinoe who doesn’t know her place. How dare she be a role model for strong women?
The Audacity of Krope
Undoubtedly. Unfortunately, the open argument is about trans participation in various facets of public life. The meta-goals of those pushing for more restrictions don’t matter to me as much. Fighting for full, equal participation will benefit cis and trans women alike.
My real issue is with Democrats, as they often do, accepting the Republican framing of the issue and using it as an excuse to jump on the “let’s trash transfolk” bandwagon.
sentient ai from the future
@Brent: it’s an issue in the olympics, sure. but there are enough other countries with trans inclusive policies that we arent setting policy unilaterally as we are here.
everything else you mentioned is an outgrowth of how we have integrated sports (nonessential, in my view) into publicly funded education (which is).
id go further and say that the reason we integrated sports into public education in the first place was as a way of promoting patriarchal/misogynist white supremacist ideals that were more prevalent at the time public schools were emerging as a responsibility of the government.
so if we are in a period of destruction of the social fabric, i am pretty ok with jettisoning the binding of sport and education entirely, if that sort of thing is necessary.
trollhattan
@Splitting Image:
Similar. Trans “shock and horror” offers a convenient backdoor attack on girls-women’s sports in general and Title IX in particular. The kid has been to Capitol Hill three times now to testify as advocate for Fair Play for Women Act, which in part is intended to buttress and expand Title IX. She helped author it, Chris Murphy is the Senate sponsor.
https://www.murphy.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/murphy-adams-reintroduce-legislation-to-promote-gender-equity-in-sports
Last graf of the press release cites two other complementary bills.
HinTN
@Ohio Mom: The lege, R and D, shot down a trans ban.
Darkrose
@The Audacity of Krope: Actually, this session is the opposite. Last session they made life miserable—or tried to—for Zooey Zephyr, but she refused to be silenced. This session, they’ve defeated multiple transphobic bills in no small part because of her fierce advocacy. After one bill failed, a Republican legislator called out her colleague who introduced the bill for wasting everyone’s time constantly going after trans people.
Zooey Zephyr is awesome, as is her wife, journalist Erin Reed.
Sloane Ranger
@sentient ai from the future: I agree. From the point of view of the UK, US educational establishments seem to be sports teams with educational opportunities tacked on.
HinTN
@Ohio Mom: Yes, indeed!
sab
@Sloane Ranger: The educational opportunities are just an added sideline. Most alumns don’t care about that. GO TEAM!
The Audacity of Krope
@Darkrose: Glad to hear things are going better for her in there. Honestly, I’m terrible at time. My memories from her first session in the MT legislature are still “recent” in my mind.
Goes to show that nothing beats bigotry like getting to know someone.
trollhattan
@Sloane Ranger:
Once you get past football (the other football) and basketball, most college athletes toil in obscurity. The VAST # of football scholarships needed for each program mean a lot of women’s sports get funding to balance out the hundred or so players, plus the expenses to ship them somewhere every other weekend.
Which frankly is a compelling reason to ditch Title IX, in a lot of folk’s minds.
trollhattan
Canada humour, eh? How about a big Canuck welcome to little Marco!
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/people-laughing-red-carpet-marco-192427464.html
NaijaGal
Off topic but not sure where else to vent about this. I canceled my NYT subscription last year but my brother kept his. He just sent me an article about an Indian Columbia University doctoral student, Ranjani Srinivasan, who fled to Canada on Thursday (March 13) after ICE came knocking on her door. Columbia’s international student office told her to leave the US ASAP. Her visa was revoked for involvement in the Palestinian protests on campus last year. She would have received her PhD in May. She’s just 37. She’s the first person without Palestinian ancestry targeted for visa revocation and deportation (the others targeted so far are Mahmoud Khalil, who had a green card and Leqaa Kordia, who was on an F-1 visa and hails from the West Bank). She’ll probably start over her doctoral work in Canada but man, what a blow. She doesn’t seem to be a protest organizer, just a participant.
Darkrose
Ever wonder why there’s no women’s professional baseball in the US?
When baseball began, the idea of (white) women engaging in physical activity, especially outdoors, was the worst thing imaginable: unladylike and unfeminine, and possibly damaging to your womb. Some women wanted to play, though, and they did, and not surprisingly, the men were furious when they were good. In 1931, noted racist and all-around asshole Kenesaw Mountain Landis voided the contract of 17-year -old Jackie Mitchell after she struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game. In 1952, after the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League proved that women could play at high levels, MLB officially banned signing women to contracts.
Today, there are no women’s baseball teams in the NCAA; if you want to play after Little League, you’re SOL. You can play softball, but that’s a very different game: 7 innings instead of 9, bases are 60 feet apart instead of 90, and most of all, the pitching is underhanded, a completely different motion.
TL;DR: Women playing sports has always been seen as unfeminine and a threat to male dominance.
Jackie
@trollhattan: That red carpet greeting is perfect! LOL!
Jackie
@Darkrose:
That’s it in a nutshell.
Baud
@NaijaGal:
There will be no shortage of awfulness for a long time.
schrodingers_cat
@NaijaGal: Indian newspapers are buzzing with this story. She wants to return to India and has asked the Indian government to intervene on her behalf so that she can defend her thesis. Prior to being a PhD student she was a Fulbright scholar at Harvard
Jay
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-alien-enemies-act-of-1798-tren-de-aragua-venezuela-gang-1.7484892
Baud
@Jay:
Temporarily stayed by a court.
https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1jc4qos/trump_to_invoke_wartime_alien_enemies_act_of_1798/
TS
@sentient ai from the future:
100% agree. Universities/colleges were supposedly for academic achievement not to provide massive salaries for sports’ coaches and free tuition because one is good at a sport.
Darkrose
Okay, so I have Things To Say about women in sports.
One of the things that infuriates me about the current wave of anti-trans bullshit in sports is that the cis women who are stoking the fires are trading in the stereotypes that were used to exclude women from sports. I’m sure that being hit in the face with a spiked ball in volleyball hurts, but that has nothing to do with the gender of anyone involved. My favorite Giants player’s career was derailed by the multiple concussions he had, because when you’re trying to hit a ball thrown at 90+ miles an hour, there’s a chance you might get hit in the head. People get hurt playing sports; it happens. But when a women gets hurt, you can make it someone else’s fault by blaming the evil trans people who may only exist in your head.
Take Imane Khelif. She was villified because she hit her opponent in the face…in BOXING. Literally the entire point of the sport is to hit the other person in the face. But the visual of the tall (dark-skinned, and that’s a whole other rant) woman hitting the smaller, feminine-looking (white) woman who cried took off, stoked by hateful bigots like JK Rowling who claim to be “supporting women” while reinforcing the idea that women are too fragile and delicate to be able to compete.
This is why the TERFs and the Christofascists have been able to join forces: both believe in gender essentialism. Rowling and UK anti-trans activist think that being a mother is a woman’s highest calling; the Christian nationalists think that being a mother is a woman’s only duty. The latter is happy to use the feminist claims of the former to both eliminate trans people and to restrict all women in public life.
Jay
full thread here,
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1901043903656001913.html#google_vignette
Jay
https://nitter.poast.org/NewsWire_US/status/1901008282845933795#m
Harrison Wesley
@Jay: O Christ. Merka has never before had to confront Wankenwaffen.
hotshoe
Yes, this is the same problem which Dem/liberal/progressive folks have with almost all the rightwing shit. The redhat media and politics can gin up a “perception” of a problem to the point where enough people are convinced that it’s a real crisis — then we somehow end up obliged to solve their manufactured problem by twisting policies in the real world.
We don’t need to “solve” the problem of transwomen in womens’ sports because it absolutely is NOT a problem. The NCAA testifies that there are less than 10 transgender athletes out of 530,000 student athletes amongst more than 1,000 colleges/universities in US. Goddammit, 10 people are not a “problem” which justify rewriting college sports rules and inventing new sports leagues. We don’t need panty sniffers and we don’t need the panty-sniffer alternative of chromosome testing of any athlete who looks too boyish or too girlish or whatever. Convincing the ReThugs of that … after they’ve convinced themselves in their manufactured panics … I don’t know what the political answer is, but the answer most certainly is not jackwads like Newsome agreeing with the worst of the Thugs.
sentient ai from the future
@hotshoe: the Hairdo sees that 10ish actual examples translating to hundreds or thousands of votes (or subscriptions) is just good ROI.
he’s married to a niece of oracle/ellison, btw. that’s after having a publicly exposed affair with his best friend and campaign manager’s wife, while (IIRC) still married to kimberly guilfoyle.
the guy knows how to pick up the easy public wins, and that’s important, but his internal moral compass is fucking garbage.
BellyCat
@sentient ai from the future: This. College sports should not be televised. See them in person or listen on the radio. That’s the proper line between Pro and Collegiate athletics. (And, yes, all in favor of gender inclusivity at both levels)
artem1s
sports wasn’t mentioned because the access was about scholarships – which were almost exclusively reserved for white men. Athletic scholarships became a way for black men to afford higher ed once desegregation in college and professional sports took hold. Title IX became a legal avenue for women to push for a portion of those scholarships at federally funded schools. Women’s admittance into college rose something like 700% after Title IX, not just for sports but for all professional degrees normally reserved for men. Making it all about sports is how conservatives attacked it so they could dismantle it.
Darkrose
@sentient ai from the future: I loathe Newsom, but I’m not sure what his current wife being related to Larry Ellison has to do with anything.
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
I know a couple, neither of whom are still with us. Now their fight was not gloves in a ring, but they did break a number of the concepts that existed when they were born, one in the late 1800’s and one in the early 1900’s. My dad’s mother and my mom. Dad’s mom did it quietly, but in her time she made steps. My mom was more of a steamroller type and getting in her way was not a recommended course of action.
Ruckus
@Darkrose:
As a CA resident can you embellish the loathing Newsom part?
I have a concept of why but I wouldn’t mind hearing more.
And, given the population of CA I would suspect that we will rarely elect an actually rather left sided gov. By that I mean that sure we in total are a liberal state but given the size of our population there will be people on the opposite side of the aisle. Now I am an old who worked on elections before I could vote (the 18 voting thing happened after I turned 21)
sentient ai from the future
@Darkrose: it’s the social circles that you both swim in and choose a partner from, and then that you are tied to indefinitely because of the marriage.
do you think his nonsense at the French Laundry was unconnected to his tie to a silly valley oligarch?
Darkrose
@Ruckus: I voted for Newsom for governor three times: twice in regular elections and once in the recall. It’s always been clear that he’s ambitious, and I didn’t see that as a problem when he still seemed interested in actually, you know, doing the job he was elected to do.
Now, though, in service to his ambition, he’s decided to do a full face-heel turn. He’d pledged to solve the homelessness problem in his first term, but that proved difficult, and his rich donors just want the unhoused to disappear, so he’s doing photo ops where he throws people’s stuff in the trash. CA is a trans sanctuary state, but the GOP is successfully using trans rights as a wedge issue, so he tried to get the Lege to stop passing LGBTQ+ rights bills to sign, and he suddenly agrees that trans kids should be restricted when it comes to sports.
He vocally opposed Trump in his first term, but now that Trump’s been re-elected and is going full fascist, Newsom is silent. His current budget is an absolute trainwreck that is devastating to public education in this state, and he’s doing a podcast instead of his fucking job.
The podcast has turned out to be a real mask off moment. It shows that he no longer has any interest in actually being governor. It shows that he has no actual principles other than “I, Gavin Newsom, should be President.” If he has to throw a vulnerable community under the bus, well, that’s just the cost of doing business. Never mind that for most of the country outside of California, he will always be considered a extreme leftist because they think California is all hippies, stoners, and weirdos.
And not to harp on the podcast too much, but Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon are fascists. If you choose to platform a fascist and have a friendly chat with them, odds are good that you’re at least fash-curious and do not get my vote.
Darkrose
@sentient ai from the future: I don’t believe in blaming children–or nieces and nephews–for the sins of their parents, aunts and uncles. Especially not since Jennifer Siebel Newsom is not, in fact, Larry Ellison’s niece. Her second cousin once removed is Thomas Siebel, a right-wing, Trump-supporting former Oracle executive.
Her Hollywood connections had much more to do with her relationship with Newsom than her second cousin working at Oracle. She was an actress and filmmaker when she met Newsom. She was also one of Harvey Weinstein’s victims. In court in 2022, Weinstein’s lawyer tried to insist that it was “consensual, transactional, sex,” In general, I think it’s bullshit to blame men’s behavior on their wives, but especially when she was accused of lying about being raped in court.