Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s accidental killing of her sister fueled “pressure to be perfect,” the wife of California Gov. Gavin Newsom revealed in a rare interview about the horrific freak accident decades ago.
Siebel Newsom’s family tragedy made headlines this week after she described bonding with San Quentin prisoners in a resurfaced video by sharing details of her sister’s death in 1981.
On vacation in Hawaii, a golf cart that 6-year-old Siebel Newsom was sitting in went into reverse, fatally striking her older sister Stacia, who was 8 years old.
“I felt the pressure to be perfect, to make my parents forget, by being two daughters instead of one,” Siebel Newsom told the Los Angeles Times about the death in 2023.
She told the paper the untimely death caused her to become a perfectionist.
Siebel Newsom, who grew up in a wealthy family in Marin County, Calif., the posh Branson boarding school before attending Stanford University.
She was a small-time Hollywood actress before launching a career as an activist filmmaker focused on gender.
Siebel Newsom later testified against film producer Harvey Weinstein at his sexual assault trial.
“I’m sure there was survivor’s guilt, and I’m sure, in my subconscious, it’s like I have to make up for that loss, and I have to do something to improve other people’s lives or have an impact, double my own, which is a little crazy,” she said in the Los Angeles Times interview, reportedly hugging herself while recounting the shocking death.
“I don’t use the word ‘crazy.’ But you know, it’s aspirational.”
Siebel Newsom has been dragged for cringeworthy lectures on gender politics.
She took to Instagram last weekend to link President Donald Trump’s firings of former Department of Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi to a “straitjacket of femininity that is only in service of men.”
Siebel Newsom was widely panned in February for bombing the podium at a press conference to deliver a self-righteous lecture to reporters on the importance of asking “on-topic” questions.
She has paid herself up to $300,000 annually through her activist nonprofit, The Representation Project, which has produced three films linking gender to societal problems: “Miss Representation,” “The Mask You Live In,” and “Fair Play.”
Her comments about her sister’s death, which resurfaced this week, raised eyebrows after she linked it to crimes that may have been the result of “wrong place, wrong time.”
She recounted having a “similar story” as the inmates, adding that she wasn’t punished “because clearly it was an accident, but there’s was probably an accident, too.”