The bizarre saga of Kamala Harris's early-aughts romance with Montel Williams took a new twist on Monday when the faded personality, who was once one of the biggest stars on daytime TV, took a swipe at Trump spokesman Steve Cheung, calling him "weird."
It's the latest sign of how far the lives of Harris and Williams have diverged: After their breakup, Harris, as California's attorney general, would aggressively go after the very payday lenders that Williams made a fortune promoting.
Perhaps that's why Williams has barely endorsed Harris, if at all, since she emerged as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. On the same day President Joe Biden announced he was withdrawing from the race, Williams tweeted his endorsement of Maryland governor Wes Moore. The next day, however, he retweeted Moore's endorsement of Harris, and later in the day, he tweeted about his retweet, all the while making no direct comments about Harris.
Then, on Monday, Cheung tweeted a blurry photo of "Montel Williams and his couch," to which Williams replied, "A very weird tweet from an even weirder guy. Good morning y'all!"
A few hours later, Wiliams added, "It's really weird that the spokesman for a major presidential candidate would go to my social media to grab a copyrighted photo of me sitting on a couch, projecting calmness, love for life, and passion for respecting the man I am today. I would think an official campaign spokesman would have more important things to do, but weirdos normally don't."
Wililams dated Harris in 2001, when she was photographed with him and his then-teenage daughter, Ashley, at a charity event. A few years later, with his eponymous (and lucrative) daytime TV show canceled, Williams increasingly began making money as a celebrity endorser, including for MoneyMutual, a controversial payday lending service, whose services he began hawking in 2009.
For her part, Harris, as California's top prosecutor, for years went after payday lenders, which she accused of trapping poor people in a "destructive and unaffordable" debt trap.
MoneyMutual was accused of pushing loans with interest rates as high as 1,300 percent on low-income borrowers. In May 2015, New York regulators fined the company $2.1 million and ordered it to cease a television ad campaign that "prominently" featured Williams hawking its services "to help [people] live better physically, spiritually, financially, and emotionally."
That language is redolent of the words Williams used Monday to fire back at the Trump campaign, when he referred to himself as "projecting calmness, love for life, and passion for respecting the man I am today."
It was in December 2015, only a few months after MoneyMutual was fined by the State of New York, that Harris set her sights on the payday loan industry. As California's attorney general, she urged the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to beef up regulation of the payday loan industry. She said the industry preyed on low-income borrowers, forcing them into a cycle of taking out "repeat high-interest loans that they cannot afford to repay." She reiterated the request in October 2016 for the bureau to regulate "predatory" loans.
Concerns about MoneyMutual, and about Williams's role as its salesman, were no secret at the time, though Harris never mentioned her ex's endeavors. New York State regulators had begun investigating MoneyMutual and Williams in 2013, and a group of California borrowers filed a class-action lawsuit against them that same year. The borrowers said Williams "personally vouched" for the company's network of lenders "as the only source consumers could trust to find payday loans." Since 2009, Williams had been receiving a "fixed fee" for leads stemming from his TV ads, according to the New York investigation.
The company agreed to a $2 million settlement with the California borrowers in 2020, according to court records. Williams was not held financially liable in the settlement.
Williams has bristled over the years about his relationship with Harris, refusing to discuss it, even in the days after she took the Democratic presidential mantle from Biden.
Harris has also declined to comment on her relationship with Williams. Former president Donald Trump has, on the other hand, repeatedly mentioned at rallies that Harris dated former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown (D.). That relationship, in the late 1990s, involved a 30-year age difference and took place before Harris paired up with Williams. Since 2014, Harris has been married to corporate lawyer Doug Emhoff.
Harris has made consumer protections for "the little guy" a focal point throughout her legal career. In her vice-presidential acceptance speech before the Democratic National Convention in 2020, Harris touted her takedown of Corinthian College, a for-profit university that used false advertising to rip off students.
"I know a predator when I see one," Harris said.
As senator, Harris accused the Trump administration of enabling "predatory industries like payday lenders" by rolling back federal regulations.
Harris isn't the only thing that Emhoff and Williams have in common. Emhoff was a partner at Venable LLC when the white-shoe law firm represented payday lenders Zero Parallel and Four Oaks in civil cases with the federal government.