As Kamala Harris aggressively tacks to the center in her run for the presidency, back in her notoriously progressive birthplace of Oakland, one of her closest associates is also seeking national office.
Lateefah Simon, Harris’s longtime protégé, close friend, and early proponent of the "defund the police" movement, is running for Congress. But unlike Harris, Simon is proud of her progressive views. That might be why Harris, who once officiated Simon’s wedding, has not endorsed her mentee. And when Harris does speak of Simon, it's not in public but rather at private fundraisers, like the San Francisco soirée she held in August. Harris went "off-script" at the fundraiser—cameras were not allowed in—to thank Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.), Simon, and other California officials, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
But before she first ran for president in 2019, Harris, 59, maintained close—and public—ties to Simon, 47, for a time period spanning 20 years. The future vice president pushed Simon to finish college, gave her a government job, introduced her to her late husband, officiated their wedding, and eulogized him at his funeral. She also campaigned for Simon’s successful 2016 race to join the board of directors for the Bay Area’s crime-ridden BART public train system, where Simon would try to defund its police force by $2 million.
Simon has also spent years working for liberal billionaires, bankrolling efforts at left-leaning criminal justice reform and anti-police projects while—in her most recent job working for the wife of Netflix billionaire Reed Hastings—earning a salary of almost $558,000 a year.
And while the congressional candidate was selected to praise Harris at the Democratic National Convention, Simon spoke during the opening hour of the night’s programming, well before Oprah Winfrey and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz took the stage. In her speech, during which the vice president was nowhere to be seen, Simon said that during the four years she served under Harris, her mentor and then-San Francisco district attorney, the pair worked together "day in and day out."
"She saw my potential, my commitment, and the good work that we could do together," Simon said of her time in Harris’s office.
When an interviewer for San Francisco’s KQED this summer suggested that Harris and Simon’s relationship was "a little bit mentor and a little bit family," Simon said Harris "is auntie status, she is mentor status."
But the family-like relationship between the two women has become a one-way street as Harris runs for president. Simon continues to gush about Harris publicly, while her mentor has been largely silent. Indeed, by tying her own political history so closely to Harris, Simon could undercut the vice president’s attempts to appeal to moderate voters. Harris has touted her prosecutorial record, describing herself as "tough" and "fearless." (In 2020, she supported slashing police budgets, ending cash bail, and eliminating "mass incarceration.") The presidential nominee has also withdrawn her support for progressive causes like a fracking ban and Medicare for All, and repeatedly failed to explain her change of heart.
Harris, meanwhile, publicly ignored Simon's convention speech, which Simon said was moved or canceled several times before she took the stage. Harris and her campaign did not send out clips of the speech on social media, as it did for other speakers. And while the San Francisco Chronicle reported, without attribution, "that Harris personally asked Simon to introduce her to the world" at the convention, Harris did not attend proceedings the night Simon spoke.
Harris has also refrained from endorsing Simon, even as a who's who of California Democrats have, including former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sen. Alex Padilla, Rep. Barbara Lee (whom Simon is running to succeed), and Attorney General Rob Bonta. Simon nonetheless told the Chronicle in September that " I’m going to be telling the story about how Kamala transformed my life for the rest of my life."
Critics argue that the radical criminal justice reforms Simon played a key role in supporting while working for wealthy progressives sowed the seeds of the Oakland crime wave that led businesses to shutter and caused the governor to send in back-up prosecutors and police this year. Nevertheless, Simon is favored to win the Oakland congressional seat of longtime progressive Lee, who is leaving Congress after losing her Senate primary to Donald Trump nemesis Adam Schiff.
"Do we want another leader who has been the architect and funder of the national defund the police movement? I would say no," said Jennifer Tran, a Democrat and ethnic studies professor running against Simon. Despite her extensive progressive credentials, Tran is to the right of her opponent on crime. "Everyone can see how much these failed policies are harming our communities," she said.
Tran sees Simon’s campaign as simply "riding the coattails of Kamala Harris." Simon has refused to debate her opponents and, like Harris, offers few policy details.
Campaign representatives for Harris and Simon did not respond to requests for comment.
Harris, as San Francisco’s top cop, hired Simon in 2005 to run a program that scrubbed some first-time drug dealers’ criminal records if they went through school or job training. The move was unusual at the time, as it expanded the district attorney’s role beyond that of prosecutor. Both Harris and Simon have touted the program for cutting recidivism. Harris went on to become California’s attorney general, overseeing a 10 percent increase in violent crime statewide.
In 2011, Simon became the program director of the left-wing Rosenberg Foundation, which teamed up with Soros’s Open Society Foundations and California progressives to push a successful 2014 voter ballot initiative decriminalizing retail theft and drug dealing. Harris, then California’s attorney general, predicted on the ballot that it would send hundreds of millions in "criminal justice system savings" into school truancy prevention, addiction treatment, and victim help. Prosecutors across the state have blamed the measure for California’s rampant drug, homelessness, and crime problems—not to mention retailers such as Walgreens and CVS having to lock up many of their products due to a shoplifting epidemic—and California voters are on track to repeal most of it in November through a referendum supported by San Francisco's sitting Democratic mayor.
From 2016 until 2022, Simon served as president of the Akonadi Foundation, founded by progressive donors Quinn Delaney and Wayne Jordan, to remove police from Oakland schools and fund other anti-incarceration, anti-law enforcement endeavors. In that role, she collected some $2 million in salary, tax filings show. Jordan and Delaney together gave $1.5 million to Harris’s campaign in May and June, before she became the Democratic presidential nominee. They are also major backers of Simon’s campaign.
As Akonadi chief, Simon funneled money to radical Bay Area groups, including the Anti Police-Terror Project, which advocates for police abolition while reportedly enriching family and friends. She also directed funds to left-wing dark money powerhouses like the New Venture Fund and the Tides Foundation.
She left her post at the Akonadi Foundation in 2022 to lead the donor-advised fund of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’s wife Patty Quillin, who gave $1.5 million to progressive Los Angeles district attorney George Gascon and, like Delaney and Jordan, is an anti-police political donor. Donor-advised funds are favorite vehicles for the wealthy, since they offer immediate tax benefits as well as anonymity for donations. Quillin has paid Simon nearly $741,627 in salary over a year and a half, according to Simon’s campaign disclosures.
With Harris’s campaigning help, Simon was elected to the BART public rail system’s board of directors in 2016. There, she unsuccessfully tried to defund the transit police and supported a bill to decriminalize fare evasion.