Jennifer Siebel Newsom's charity has distributed lesson plans to thousands of schools that direct students to publicly reveal whether they are straight, with no opt-out, while the California governor's wife and her nonprofit face a widening federal criminal probe.
The curriculum materials, produced by Siebel Newsom's Representation Project and distributed alongside her gender-focused documentary films, include a "Privilege Walk Activity" that lines high school students up shoulder-to-shoulder and instructs them to "step forward if you identify as straight." Students who identify as LGBT are to remain in place. The instructions stress the exercise works "best if students/participants take large steps so the differences are obvious," the Washington Free Beacon reported. The lesson plan offers students no option to decline.
The exercise is not a one-off worksheet buried in a filing cabinet. Siebel Newsom's own impact report claims the lessons have reached more than 2.5 million students through 11,200 teachers in over 5,000 schools across all 50 states. The California Department of Education, whose members are appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom, recommended in 2019 that public schools screen his wife's documentaries to teach students how to "question the examples of gender and sexuality they see in media."
That recommendation came the same year Newsom took office.
The Privilege Walk is not the only exercise raising alarms. A separate activity called "The Box Activity" instructs students to list traits of stereotypical men, "strong, tough, in control", and stereotypical women, "emotional, soft, submissive." Students are then told to write "offensive words" society assigns to men and women who act "outside the box." The suggested terms for men include "wimp," "f**," and "p****." For women: "butch," "nasty," and "angry."
After writing those terms, students discuss as a group which of their classmates act inside their respective gender boxes "all the time." The lesson plan also tells students that some women who remain "inside the box" will be raped and abused by their partners, then asks students to consider whether stereotypical female traits "really bring them safety or power."
Both the ACLU and Lambda Legal hold that public school students have a First Amendment right to privacy regarding personal identity. The Privilege Walk Activity appears to run directly against that consensus by compelling disclosure in front of peers.
Rhyen Staley, research director at the conservative watchdog group Defending Education, told the Free Beacon the exercises cross a clear line:
"These lessons have absolutely no place in a K-12 classroom. The radical far-left ideologies at the core of these activities will cause irreparable psychological and emotional harm to young students and will foment animosity between them and their peers."
The lesson plans are paired with Siebel Newsom's documentary films, which have drawn their own complaints. In Patterson, California, a public junior high classroom screened one of the films, The Mask You Live In, to students as young as 11. One father told the Modesto Bee that his 12-year-old daughter was traumatized by the screening.
"It is the worst thing my daughter has been exposed to," the father said. "When I send her to school, I don't want her to see porn. That is what this is."
He described content that included "a clear picture of sexual bondage and acts of violence against nude or thinly dressed young women." Open The Books founder Adam Andrzejewski, reviewing the broader film library, told Fox News that "Newsom's films and curricula are saturated with images lifted directly from pornographic websites, their URLs visible onscreen."
The films feature commentary from a roster of almost entirely Democratic figures: Hillary Clinton, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Cory Booker, activist Dolores Huerta, the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is a notable exception. Governor Newsom himself appears in several films, delivering talking points on government budgets and lecturing viewers on their obligation to tap into their "political will" and "step up and solve big problems."
Andrzejewski argued the political content is the point. "When paired with calls to organize and spread the films more widely, it's clear that Siebel Newsom seeks to activate students politically and in accordance with some radical ideologies about gender, identity, race and privilege," he said.
The financial architecture behind the films raises its own set of questions. Siebel Newsom runs two entities: the Representation Project, a nonprofit charity, and Girls Club Entertainment LLC, a for-profit production company she owns. The charity licenses and distributes the films to schools and corporations, charging between $49 and $1,500 per screening. Girls Club Entertainment produces the films.
Since Newsom took office in 2019, the Representation Project has paid Siebel Newsom upward of $1.8 million, $913,000 in direct salary and another $923,000 routed through Girls Club Entertainment for her writing, producing, and directing work. The charity reported $2.4 million in total film production expenses over the same period and earned $956,000 from film sales. Total revenue raised by the Representation Project since 2019 tops $7.7 million.
The nonprofit empire has drawn mounting legal scrutiny as investigators examine how money moved between the charity, the for-profit company, and Siebel Newsom personally.
Corporate donors to the Representation Project include Comcast, Kaiser Permanente, AT&T, and PG&E, all of which received millions from the Newsom administration. PG&E alone took in more than $323 million in California taxpayer funds in 2021. Other contributors include oil heiress Aileen Getty, Anne Wojcicki (former wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin), and Planned Parenthood. Executive producers on the films include Walt Disney heiress Abigail Disney, Kennedy heiress Maria Shriver, actress Reese Witherspoon, Melinda Gates, and Wendy Schmidt, wife of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
The New York Post reported that Newsom steered $4.4 million in "behested payments", donations solicited by a public official, to his wife's California Partners Project from donors including Silicon Valley Bank, the Pritzker family, Native American tribes, and Blue Shield of California, some of whom benefited from his gubernatorial decisions. Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of Americans for Public Trust, said the Newsoms "continue to launder their progressive ideas through their various nonprofit associations and in turn use the Governor's Office as a conduit for supplementary income."
The Newsoms now face a federal criminal investigation that focuses in part on Siebel Newsom's taxes, her charities, and her for-profit documentary company. The probe began when former President Joe Biden was still in office, a detail that complicates Governor Newsom's public claim that the investigation is "a baseless Trump-driven political prosecution."
On July 16, Politico reported the couple hired attorney Abbe Lowell, who also represents several other Democratic figures facing criminal investigations or charges from the Trump Justice Department. Days later, Siebel Newsom appeared on MSNBC with Stephanie Ruhle and called the probe "a fishing expedition" carried out "in typical Trump fashion," insisting she and her husband have "nothing to hide."
The governor's retaliation claims have become a recurring theme. But the Biden-era origins of the investigation make the "Trump vendetta" defense harder to sustain.
The Washington Examiner noted that initiatives linked to Siebel Newsom's advocacy contributed to over $9 billion in state spending, including a $4.4 billion Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative and a $4.7 billion Master Plan for Kids' Mental Health. Adam Andrzejewski observed: "Intentionally or not, when public spending flows toward these priorities, it also likely flows back to her."
Meanwhile, the broader federal investigation has already reached deep into Newsom's orbit. A Newsom appointee secretly wore an FBI wire during the corruption probe, and a separate ethics probe tied to the same FBI informant has touched former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra's gubernatorial campaign.
Siebel Newsom's documentary work has produced its own share of unusual moments. While filming at San Quentin prison, she told convicts she related to them because at age six she had accidentally killed her eight-year-old sister with a golf cart. She has also accused the press of fighting a "war on women." The Representation Project did not return the Free Beacon's request for comment.
Siebel Newsom says she developed the lesson plans with the help of a team of professors, teachers, and film experts, including "social systems" scientist Dr. Riane Eisler, political scientist Dr. Caroline Heldman, and Latina high school teacher Annie Delgado. Delgado herself sparked a #MeToo controversy in 2019 when she reported being sexually harassed by a basketball coach at her school.
The curricula teach, in Siebel Newsom's framing, that "gendered values" are the root cause of economic inequality and other societal problems. In practice, the lesson plans ask children to stand in front of their peers and disclose private information about their identity, or be outed by their silence.
When a state education department controlled by the governor recommends his wife's films, her charity collects the screening fees, her for-profit company cashes the production checks, and the donors writing those checks also hold state contracts, the word for that is not empowerment. It is a racket dressed up in a curriculum guide.
