Gov. Newsom’s wife collected $3.7 million from gender nonprofit

March 9, 2026

Jennifer Siebel Newsom and Gavin Newsom

By JOSH FRIEDMAN

California First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom, along with her LLC, has collected a combined $3.7 million over the last decade from a nonprofit activist organization she founded. Corporations that receive millions of dollars from the California taxpayer are behind hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to the nonprofit that Gov. Gavin Newsom’s wife runs. [Daily Mail]

Siebel Newsom created a string of documentaries about gender, including Miss Representation and The Mask You Live In. Her nonprofit, The Representation Project, promotes her documentaries and engages in activism battling “intersectional gender stereotypes” and “harmful gender norms.”

The nonprofit brings in between $1 million and $1.7 million a year in grants and donations, from which about $300,000 has been going directly to Siebel Newsom and her company. 

The most recent IRS filings up to March 2024 show Siebel Newsom received a $150,000 salary from The Representation Project. Her company, Girls Club LLC, received another $150,000 from The Representation Project.

Siebel Newsom and her nonprofit colleagues earn above 95% more than workers at similarly sized nonprofits, according to an analysis conducted by the Daily Mail.

There are about 23,000 charities in the IRS database of nonprofits with revenues between $1 million and $2 million. The salary for the median executive at a nonprofit the size of Siebel Newsom’s is $31,945.

In 2023-2024, Siebel Newsom and her LLC received $300,000 out of the $1,704,981 gross receipts. That year, The Representation Project paid a total of nearly $1 million in compensation and spent $153,691 on fundraising.

Including the money paid to Siebel Newsom and her LLC, the nonprofit paid a total of $581,942 to its executives in 2023-2024. By comparison, the median nonprofit of similar size paid its executives a total of $132,640, or less than a quarter of The Representation Project’s total executive pay.

IRS filings show the $150,000 paid annually to Sibiel Newsom’s Girls Club LLC is for a writer/director/producer fee. Girls Club LLC owns the copyright to Siebel Newsom’s documentary Miss Representation and has licensed the film to The Representation Project for a minimum seven-year period to provide distribution rights and public performance rights to screening hosts, according to the nonprofit’s latest filing.

Siebel Newsom may not bank all the funds that her nonprofit pays her LLC, as the company may have overhead and production costs.

The most recent filings for Siebel Newsom’s nonprofit show it spent $216,274 on its annual gala ‘Flip the Script’ in 2023, and The Representation Project earned $598,948 from the event.

Critics have raised numerous ethics questions over the hundreds of thousands of dollars donated to the nonprofit by companies that later received millions of dollars in California taxpayer funds.

AT&T donated $185,000 to The Representation Project from 2017 through 2020. The telecom firm received $260.4 million from the state of California in 2021. AT&T also contributed $100,000 to Gov. Newsom’s inauguration fund in 2019.

Comcast donated $15,000 to The Representation Project over the same period and received $20.6 million from California. Kaiser Permanente donated $20,000 to Siebel Newsom’s nonprofit in 2018 and 2019 and received $172.2 million from the state.

Additionally, PG&E, via its corporate foundation, donated $358,000 to Siebel Newsom’s nonprofit between 2011 and 2018. PG&E received $323.8 million from the state in 2021. A couple years prior, amid the fallout over PG&E’s ties to California wildfires, the Recreation Project said it would no longer accept donations from the utility.

Last November, the California Fair Political Practices Commission fined Gov. Newsom $13,000 for failing to timely report over $14.3 million of payments made by companies and organizations to nonprofits at his behest between 2019 and 2024.