Kimberly Guilfoyle & Gavin Newsom's Wedding Was A Wildly Lavish Event

Following the end of their marriage in 2006, Gavin Newsom and Kimberly Guilfoyle also went their separate ways politically. Nevertheless, both have certainly come up in the world since. Newsom, a prominent member of the Democratic Party, was elected governor of California in 2018 and subsequently won re-election in 2022. Meanwhile, Republican Donald Trump nominated Guilfoyle as the U.S. ambassador to Greece in 2024. Back when they tied the knot in 2001, however, Newsom and Guilfoyle not only looked unrecognizable from how they do today — Newsom without his gray hair, and Guilfoyle before her rumored plastic surgery — but they also had nowhere near their current level of national notoriety. After all, Newsom was still a few years out from even becoming mayor of San Francisco at that point. But that didn't stop his and Guilfoyle's wedding from being a wildly lavish event regardless.

As SFGATE reported at the time, Newsom (a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors at the time) and Guilfoyle initially planned to have a small, intimate wedding ceremony in Mexico, but ultimately opted for a much larger affair in their own backyard...so to speak. Roughly 500 guests packed St. Ignatius Church in San Francisco before making their way to the reception at the home of businessman and music composer Gordon Getty (a friend of Newsom's father), where they were able to indulge in a feast consisting of champagne, lobster, and much more. The wedding even had at least one major Hollywood guest in the form of legendary actor Ed Asner, who was married to Newsom's aunt, Cindy Gilmore, at the time.

Of course, you may be wondering why exactly Gavin Newsom and Kimberly Guilfoyle ended up settling their own divorce after only five years of marriage. After all, their wedding was, by all accounts, the social event of the winter in San Francisco back in late 2001. Plus, it seemed like the couple just couldn't stop winning, with Newsom being elected as the city's mayor exactly two years later. Well, for starters, the fact that their wedding was so lavish (and likely very expensive) may have been an early indicator that things weren't going to work out. According to a study conducted at Emory University in 2014, couples who spend excessively on their wedding are known to experience higher-than-average rates of divorce.

That being said, Newsom and Guilfoyle themselves actually blamed their divorce on the fact that their relationship was forced to become a long-distance one. In early 2004, shortly after Newsom won the 2003 mayoral election in San Francisco, Guilfoyle moved to the opposite side of the country to become a television personality in New York. In a January 2005 joint statement announcing their split, the former couple wrote, "Unfortunately, the demands of our respective careers have made it too difficult for us to continue as a married couple," adding that they intended to remain friends. Around that same time, an anonymous friend of the couple told SFGATE, "It's no secret that they have been leading separate lives. She's on one coast, he's on the other — how can you make a marriage work like that?" Evidently, you can't.