A Tragic Story and a Crazy Lesson

A video was circulating on X today in which Jennifer Siebel Newsom, who is Gov. Gavin Newsom’s second wife, described talking to prisoners at San Quentin about a tragedy in her past. This is a lot to take in so just watch the clip if you haven’t seen it.

Gavin Newsom’s wife recalls telling prisoners at San Quentin about running over and killing her sister with a golf cart.

She said that she wasn’t punished because it was an accident but that the prisoners are doing life even though theirs was “probably an accident too.” pic.twitter.com/24HqCHXSZh

— MAZE (@mazemoore) April 7, 2026

First off, I’d never heard the story about her sister but apparently she revealed this during an interview with the LA Times back in 2023:

A few days before her 7th birthday, she and her older sister, Stacey, were playing on golf carts with several other children during a family vacation in Hawaii. Siebel Newsom didn’t see her sister hiding behind her cart when it went backwards, killing the 8-year-old, she said.

Siebel Newsom wrapped her arms around her upper body as she told the story, pausing to collect herself.

Siebel Newsom said her sister’s death had inspired her to push herself academically, in the arts and in sports…

“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 with a laugh.

That’s a pretty traumatic thing to happen to any family and to any child at that age. And if that were the end of the clip above, she’d have my sympathy. Unfortunately, she goes on to talk about telling this story to a bunch of inmates at San Quentin.

I looked this up and apparently she did speak to San Quentin inmates back in 2016 when she was showing her film “The Mask You Live In” which is about masculinity. Parts of the film had been filmed at San Quentin two years earlier, which is why she wanted it shown there. After the screening there was a Q&A:

At the invitation of Insight Prison Project, Siebel Newsom came back to screen the finished product for an eager audience that consisted of outside guests and prisoners of San Quentin, the “Men in Blue.”

Newsom wrote, directed and produced the film, which “follows boys and men as they struggle to stay true to themselves while negotiating America’s narrow definition of masculinity.” Experts in neuroscience, psychology, sociology, sports, education, and media are also interviewed and provide empirical evidence of the negative consequences of gender stereotypes and how increased hyper-masculinity is impacting society at large…

The film screening at San Quentin was followed by a Q&A panel that was moderated by Mizell, and included Siebel Newsom and several of San Quentin’s prisoners. Each Man in Blue stood and introduced himself, named his crime, and stated how long he had been incarcerated and how old he was when he came to prison.  All of the panelists had arrived at prison before they were old enough to legally buy a beer—one had been incarcerated since he was 14 years old.

There’s no metion of the story about her sister being told during the Q&A in 2016. Listening closely to her statement in the clip above, she suggests she told this story when she was interviewing people. If so, she may have told it back in 2014 when she was doing interviews for the film. Even if some of those inmates had been incarcerated since they were teens, I’m really not sure how what she says in the clip above is defensible at all:

They ultimately were accused of committing these violent crimes and sentenced for life. And I think it shocked them that this blonde lady who was interviewing them had a similar story, was perhaps in the wrong place at the wrong time but wasn’t punished the way they were because clearly it was an accident but there’s was probably an accident too.

Really? Was there case an accident too?

I don’t know the stories of every person at San Quentin but I do know it’s a prison known for housing the state’s most dangerous inmates. It was the home of California’s death row inmates (until recently) and where the state kept serial killers like Charles Manson and Richard Ramirez aka the Night Stalker. The people who wind up in San Quentin have been some of the worst of the worst. 

Again, I’m not trying to mock the tragedy that happened to Jennifer Newsom. But I do wonder how she got to the point where she thinks the convicted killers serving time in the state’s most notorious prison were somehow similar to her own experience. They were not. They were likely there because they intentionally murdered someone, maybe as part of a gang and maybe not. I’m confident none of them were convicted for an accident that happened when they were six.

Newsom’s film was apparently about toxic masculinity, but I think what this clip shows is something like toxic empathy, i.e. when you feel so much for people who don’t deserve it and so little for the victims who do. We see this a lot in California. Just yesterday the NY Times had an opinion piece about how difficult it is to convict a drug dealer in the state. Someone has to be arrested multiple times before they wind up in jail. But the addicts who die of overdoses or wind up on the street don’t get the same amount of concern from the judges who attended some of the state’s best schools. 

The same is true for the army of thieves who run rampant through the private sector, forcing grocery stores, malls and businesses of all kind to shut down because no one holds the thieves accountable. Frequently, they are out the same day and back to stealing the next day. The tent camps that mark city sidewalks and the homeless that clog the city’s public transportation are the same. Voters in blue cities seem to feel more sorry for the people turning the city into a hellhole than they do for the residents trying to live their lives without breaking the law.

All that to say, I think the clip above sort of summarizes a lot of what is wrong with the west coast in general and California in particular. The people at San Quentin aren’t victims. They are literally the worst offenders who were put there for the safety of everyone else.

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