Viral post revives questions about money flowing to Newsom's wife and her nonprofits

A video posted Oct. 7 on X by the account @DeepLeaksHQ has put the Newsom family's finances back in front of voters a month before the election. By Thursday it had been viewed about 795,000 times and shared more than 7,000 times.

The post says Gov. Gavin Newsom's wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, paid herself so much from her nonprofit that she ranked in the top 5% for pay among charities nationwide, and it accuses the couple of "laundering" money. "They need to go to jail," it says.

San Diego Newsline checked the post's main claims against IRS filings, state disclosure records and published reporting. Much of the money trail is real and on the public record. No prosecutor, court or regulator has accused either Newsom of a crime.

The charity and the $3.7 million

Siebel Newsom founded The Representation Project in 2011. The Sacramento nonprofit makes and promotes her documentaries on gender, including "Miss Representation" and "The Mask You Live In."

Its IRS Form 990 filings, available through ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, show the group's revenue has run between about $1 million and $2.4 million a year. In the fiscal year ending March 2024 it reported $1.25 million in revenue and $427,213 in compensation to officers and key employees.

According to those filings, Siebel Newsom has drawn a salary of about $150,000 a year as founder and chief creative officer, rising to $161,250 in the most recent year. A second payment of about $150,000 a year has gone to Girls Club Entertainment LLC, her for-profit company, which holds the copyrights to her films. The charity lists those payments as fees for licensing and for writer, producer and director work.

Added up since 2012, salary and company payments total about $3.7 million, a figure first reported by the Daily Mail in March and checked by Snopes against the same filings. The "top 5%" ranking in the viral post comes from that Daily Mail analysis comparing her pay with charities of similar size. San Diego Newsline did not independently reproduce the ranking.

Payments from a nonprofit to a company owned by its founder are legal if they are disclosed and the charity's board approves them as fair value. The Representation Project reports them on its 990s as related-party transactions.

Corporate donors with business before the state

The charity has also taken money from companies that lobby the state. A 2021 Sacramento Bee investigation, carried by the Associated Press, found PG&E gave The Representation Project $290,000 from 2016 to 2018 and AT&T gave $185,000 starting in 2017. In all, corporations that lobby Sacramento gave at least $800,000.

Asked then whether the gifts created a conflict, the governor said: "There's no correlation, period, full stop. Absolutely none."

The second nonprofit and the casino tribe

A second Siebel Newsom group, the California Partners Project, has collected millions through "behested payments," donations a politician asks a person or company to make to a charity. California law puts no limit on them; officials only have to report them.

State records show the governor asked for about $5.1 million in donations to the California Partners Project since 2020. The largest donor is the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, which runs a casino in Rohnert Park. The tribe has given the group about $2.3 million since April 2022, in payments made around tax time each year, the Press Democrat reported. Graton also gave $450,000 toward Newsom's 2019 and 2023 inaugurations.

In August 2024, Newsom's office urged the U.S. Interior Department to reject the Koi Nation's proposed casino near Windsor, about 15 miles from Graton's casino. Graton also opposed the project. Interior approved it in the last days of the Biden administration, and the state later sued to overturn that decision.

That timeline is what the viral post calls "$1 million to block a casino project." The governor's office says behested payments are "a longstanding, legal, and transparent practice" used by officials of both parties.

In June, the state Fair Political Practices Commission fined Newsom $31,500 for reporting 36 behested payments late.

The 'office for his wife'

The post also says Newsom gave "$5 million to an office for his wife." In 2019 he created the Office of the First Partner inside the governor's office. State budget documents show it has received about $7.2 million from 2019-20 through 2025-26, growing from $791,000 a year to $1.23 million. The governor's office says the money pays state employees' salaries. The office is a public agency, not a payment to Siebel Newsom.

The house and the tax returns

The video also questions the family's $3.7 million estate in Fair Oaks outside Sacramento. Records show an LLC controlled by Newsom's cousin and business partner, Jeremy Scherer, bought the home for cash in December 2018 and transferred it to the Newsoms in 2019. The Newsoms then took out a mortgage of about $2.7 million on it.

The California Republican Party filed a complaint over the deal in 2021. The Fair Political Practices Commission said it had already reviewed the arrangement and found no violation.

The speaker in the video says the couple's spending on mortgages and living costs "just doesn't add up" against income of $1.2 million to $1.4 million a year. Tax returns the Newsoms released in July for 2021 through 2024, reported by the New York Times, show joint taxable income of roughly $1.4 million to $1.6 million in recent years. San Diego Newsline could not verify the video's expense figures.

A federal investigation, and no charges

The questions are not only coming from social media. In June, Newsom disclosed that the U.S. Justice Department was investigating, and that the inquiry had widened to include Siebel Newsom. The Associated Press has reported a tax-related federal inquiry involving her, opened after whistleblower complaints to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Sacramento.

The Justice Department has not commented and has charged no one. Newsom calls the probe political. "Donald Trump's Department of Justice has been conducting a fishing expedition in search of a crime that does not exist," he said.

What the record shows

The public record confirms that Siebel Newsom and her company were paid about $3.7 million by the charity she founded. It confirms that companies and a casino tribe with business before the state gave millions to her nonprofits, much of it at the governor's request, and that Newsom took positions those donors favored. It also confirms that a federal investigation is under way.

Whether any of it is illegal has not been decided. "Laundering" is a crime with a specific legal meaning, and no official body has made that accusation. For now, the money trail is a question for voters, and for federal investigators, to weigh.