Kirsten Gillibrand is a United States attorney who currently serves as U.S. Senator for the State of New York. She was formerly the U.S. representative for New York until Barack Obama appointed Hilary Clinton Secretary of State and vacated the seat in the New York Senate. Kirsten was then appointed and sworn in by the New York Governor and has since performed quite impressively in the Senate.
As a member of the Democratic Party and junior senator in the US, she was a strong voice against sexual harassment in the military and is considered a potential presidential candidate for her party.
Kirsten Gillibrand Bio
Kirsten Gillibrand was born on December 9, 1966, in Albany, New York, as Kirsten Elizabeth Rutnik. She was born to Douglas Paul Rutnik and Polly Edwina Noonan, who are both attorneys. Her father also worked as a lobbyist and divorced her mother in the late 1980s.
She has an older brother named Douglas Rutnik and a younger sister named Erin Rutnik Tschantret. Interestingly, she has a mixture of English, Austrian, Scottish, German and Irish descent. Her grandmother was also a political heavyweight in Albany.
In 1984 she graduated from the private Emma Willard School for Women in Troy, New York, and then began an education at Dartmouth College. After meeting all the requirements for college, she graduated magna cum laude in 1988. She then completed an internship in the office of U.S. Republican Senator Alfonse D’Amato in Albany, while receiving her doctorate from UCLA School of Law.
Kirsten Gillibrand wrote and passed the bar exam in 1991. Fortunately, in the same year, she joined Davis Polk and Wardwell, a Manhattan-based law firm.
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Kirsten Gillibrand Career
At Davis Polk, she became Philip Morris’s defense attorney during the major disputes, including civil suits and evidence of civil extortion. She did so well that she became a senior associate while working on the case. During this time Kirsten participated in a National Democratic Committee program, which was a women’s leadership forum that she would later lead. It was here that she first met with Hilary Clinton.
She soon left Davis Polk to work as Special Advisor to the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Andrew Cuomo, during Clinton’s term. Kirsten then began working on Hillary Clinton’s Y2K campaign for the U.S. Senate, where she focused on reaching young women and encouraging them to join the campaign.
During this time the bond between Kirsten Gillibrand and Hilary grew so strong that Hilary became her mentor. In 2006, she started her own campaign for the U.S. Representative for the 20th New York Congressional District, and with the support of Bill and Hilary Clinton, and several other Democratic heavyweights, she won the election. In 2008, after a fierce battle with the Republican Party, she continued in office.
She was the first member of Congress to publish her entire official calendar. She also supported civil unions for same-sex couples and joined a group of moderate to conservative Democrats called the “Bluedog Coalition. She also served on several subcommittees for agriculture and armed forces. In 2009, after Hilary Clinton left the seat as junior commissioner, Kirsten was appointed in her place, an appointment that came as a bit of a surprise as no one expected her to be the one to be elected.
She was sworn in on January 26, 2009, and became the youngest senator in the 111th Congress. In 2010 she had to defend her position in an election because of her appointment, but the heavyweights of her party decided to support her and in the end, she won the elections and kept her seat.
In 2012 she ran for office again and won again, carrying all but two New York boroughs. Her winning margin made her the nationwide candidate with the largest voting advantage in New York history. After her victory, she switched from the moderate and conservative side to a more liberal and progressive senator. In 2018 she announced that she wanted to retain her office.
Husband And Family
Kirsten met Jonathan Gillibrand, a British citizen, and venture capitalist, on a blind date, and just like that, a spark was ignited. Without much fuss, the two of them arranged to meet in a Catholic church in Manhattan in 2001 and entered into a marriage. Together as a couple, they have two cute sons, Theodore Gillibrand, born in 2003, and Henry Gillibrand, born in 2008. As a family, they all live in Braunschweig.
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Net Worth
Kirsten deserves a good sum as the author of the book “Off the Sidelines”: raise your voice, change the world. She has also found the website she calls offthesidelines.org. As she is a strong advocate for women’s equality and transparency in government, she is also paid to speak on various platforms. With all this, coupled with her income as a senator, Kirsten Gillibrand is worth over $500,000.
Weight Loss Journey
Despite Kirsten’s growing political appeal to society, she lacked physical appearance in some ways. She was known to be slightly overweight. This was even used against her by her colleagues in Congress, who usually made certain remarks or jokes about her appearance. After a while, Kirsten began to see her weight as a serious challenge and sought advice.
Then she developed a training plan and kept a food diary. Part of her training plan was to run a few miles almost every day, and she also started playing squash and table tennis, the two games she loved to play during her studies. Then she joined the women’s softball team at Congress and within a few months, she lost a staggering 40 pounds and worked hard to keep it that way. So far she looks healthier and happier and has since published her memoirs about her training plans and diet.