On Monday the New York Times reported that Kamala Harris’s husband, lawyer Douglas Emhoff, would be taking a leave of absence from law firm DLA Piper. The decision is both ethical and strategic, allowing Emhoff to support Harris as she and Joe Biden fight to win the 2020 election. The campaign means more eyeballs than ever will be trained on Emhoff, an entertainment lawyer whose relationship with Harris has surprisingly deep Hollywood roots.
So who is Emhoff? In the late 1990s, prior to meeting Harris, he was an entertainment lawyer for Belin Rawlings & Badal, working on cases like defending rental chain Hollywood Video in an accounting dispute with Fox. He represented studios and production companies before cofounding his own firm with lawyer Ben Whitwell in Beverly Hills, per the Hollywood Reporter. The firm was acquired by Veneble in 2006. Among Emhoff’s more notable clients during this period? Ad agency TBWA, which developed Taco Bell’s Chihuahua mascot and created the tagline “Yo Quiero Taco Bell” for the fast-food giant.
“With all this other stuff that’s happening in my life right now, it’s great to have [my practice,] because it’s something that I love and I’m good at,” he told THR in 2019, while Harris was running for president.
But even beyond Emhoff’s work dealings, their relationship has an even stronger tie to Hollywood. He and Harris first met in 2013, on a blind date set up by Chrisette Hudlin. Chrisette is the longtime wife of director, screenwriter, and producer Reginald Hudlin, who helmed classics like House Party and Boomerang, in addition to producing blockbusters like Django Unchained. Chrisette, Harris’s best friend, had the idea to pair the duo after she and Reginald had a business meeting with Emhoff in Los Angeles. As the Washington Post reports, Harris wrote in her 2019 book, The Truths We Hold, that Chrisette instructed her not to Google Emhoff before meeting him.
“Don’t overthink it,” Harris recalled. “Just meet him.”
The two instantly hit it off, so much so that the next day Emhoff sent her a frank email confession: “I’m too old to play games or hide the ball,” he wrote. “I really like you, and I want to see if we can make this work.” They were married the following year in a ceremony at the Santa Barbara courthouse. Harris also reportedly felt an instant kinship with Emhoff’s two kids, Cole and Ella, from a previous marriage to Kerstin Emhoff. The kids call her “Momala.”
As the Post notes, Emhoff immediately began splitting his time between Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., after Harris was elected to the Senate in 2016. When Harris’s presidential campaign began last year, her Hollywood ties generated instant high-profile support. J.J. Abrams and Shonda Rhimes hosted an event for her at Abrams’s house, while other stars like Ben Affleck, Steven Spielberg, and Reese Witherspoon donated to her campaign. This was unsurprising; over the last decade, Harris has raised more than $1.7 million from the entertainment industry. But due to an increasingly competitive and fractured race (Biden and Pete Buttigieg, for example, began drawing more ardent celebrity support), that wasn’t enough to keep Harris’s presidential campaign afloat.
Now that Harris is Biden’s vice presidential pick, those relationships with Hollywood figures will likely be renewed as her profile rises higher than ever and her career takes on a new shape. But it’s not just Harris who will see her career transform—Emhoff, too, will face new responsibilities if Biden wins the 2020 election. As the Times notes, he would likely spend more time in D.C.—and would also have to reconsider the practical and moral contours of his job. Considering his firm has clients with government interests, there could be concerns that Emhoff’s continued practice would cross ethical boundaries. Of course, all that remains to be seen as the campaign pushes on, barreling toward Election Day this November.
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