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The night Kamala Harris met Sharon Stone's ex husband Phil Bronstein in a back-room San Francisco bar - and what happened after that
Is Sharon Stone’s ex-husband one of Kamala Harris’s former flames? That question is suddenly consuming political circles as the vice president looks increasingly likely to be the next Commander-in-Chief.
The rumors have been around for years but, unlike her flings with Willie Brown and Montel Williams, they have never been proven one way or the other.
And Phil Bronstein, the one man who should be able to state definitively one way or the other, is just adding fuel to the flames.
‘I understand you’re only doing your job,’ Bronstein, 79, told a DailyMail.com reporter. ‘But I’m not going to comment at all.'
Then he added: ‘That’s not to be misconstrued as anything other than I’m just not going to comment. I will not comment.’
Phil Bronstein and Kamala Harris had a look that said it all when they shared the stage at a benefit for the nonprofit Project Avary in San Francisco in 2013
Bronstein, the former husband of actress Sharon Stone, is rumored to have one-time been an item with presidential hopeful Kamala Harris
Kamala Harris's past relationships have fallen under the spotlight in recent weeks as she emerged as the Democratic nominee for president
Others are not so evasive. One former San Francisco official, who served when Harris was District Attorney, told DailyMail.com: ‘They were seen out together on numerous occasions.
‘I know for a fact they were dating.’
Certainly Bronstein, who was executive editor of the San Francisco Chronicle at the time Harris was DA, have long been close.
He has said he has known her since 2003 – the year he and Stone split after five years, one adopted son and a terrifying bite from a Komodo dragon.
The Tosca Café in San Francisco, where Bronstein observed Harris nursing a glass of wine while watching Sean Penn and Bruce Springsteen play pool
He found himself in the future vice president’s presence in the backroom of the San Francisco bohemian bar Tosca Café in 2004, he wrote in an article in Alta Magazine.
Bruce Springsteen and Sean Penn were playing a manly game of pool as Metallica’s Lars Ulrich slouched in, grieving a crumbling marriage.
‘Practically hidden in the choking pall of tobacco and celebrity, a young woman was perched on a bar stool watching the game, waiting, calculating,’ Bronstein recalled, breathlessly.
‘She was almost sedated, nursing a glass of wine and smoking cigarettes.
‘The quiet observer was Kamala Harris, the woman whom many now think is an odds-on favorite to be President of the United States,’ he gushed in the 2018 article – a time when she was briefly leading in the polls for the Democrat nomination.
‘I know for a fact they were dating,’ a former San Francisco official, who served when Harris was District Attorney, told DailyMail.com
Harris's past affair with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who began dating in 1994, has been alleged to have catapulted her political career
Harris also briefly dated former talk show host Montel Williams in 2001, who recently said that he has 'great respect' for the vice-president
‘But on this night, she was a political rookie, barely a year into her first term as San Francisco district attorney: focused, reserved, undistracted, emotions in check. And mysterious.’
‘As the game went on, I watched Kamala quietly observing and analyzing, trying to decide if she wanted to challenge the winner.
‘Finally, I imagine, she made her decision. Not the right time, not the right players. She left the room.’
Bronstein’s dramatic depiction left out one key detail – just why he, one of the most powerful figures in the City by the Bay was so keenly studying the prosecutor rather than mixing it with Penn or Springsteen.
Those who knew Bronstein say that, before and after his marriage to Stone, he fancied himself as a ladies’ man.
‘Phil was single for a good part of his time here, and he liked to get around,’ one insider who worked for Bronstein told DailyMail.com. ‘He had a reputation as a horndog and was linked to lots of women.’
One staffer who worked with Harris in the DA’s office told DailyMail.com that he’d heard the rumor about her dating Bronstein, but said she never spoke about it herself.
‘We talked about her dating and stuff, and we’ve had conversations about who she’s dating,’ the source said. ‘And she never mentioned him.
‘I’ve heard it, but I don’t know,’ the source added. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised. She could have had one or two dates with him.
‘But I am positive it wasn’t a serious relationship and that they weren’t dating for any period of time.’
Bronstein, the former executive editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, was a strong advocate for Harris to get Joe Biden's VP nod, saying she has 'the power and the strength and the conviction that I think a lot of people feel he doesn’t have'
And Amelia Ashley-Ward, a close friend and supporter of Harris since 2002, raised doubts about the Bronstein rumor.
‘I don’t know anything about any relationship she had with Phil Bronstein, and I talk to her frequently,’ Ashley-Ward, publisher of Sun-Reporter, San Francisco’s oldest black newspaper, told DailyMail.com.
‘We’ve been in the ‘Ooh girl, let me tell you’ mode for years. That never entered the realm, and I think she would have told me.’
Bronstein was famously bitten by a Komodo dragon during a private tour of Los Angeles Zoo with then-wife Sharon Stone
A veteran journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist who had also been a war correspondent, Bronstein was far from a typical news executive.
He married Stone, then one of the hottest actresses in Hollywood thanks to her flashing scene in Basic Instinct, in 1998.
‘I saw them in action, showing up at events and stuff,’ the newspaper source told DailyMail.com.
‘It was clear early on that it was a difficult marriage. She could be demanding of him and his time, and it got to be pretty stressful and contentious.’
It was through Stone that he met a Komodo dragon – a 300lb. 10-ft long carnivorous lizard on a private trip of the Los Angeles Zoo. Keepers told him to remove his white shoes and socks as the near-sighted dragon might mistake them for its diet of white rats.
But the monster bit anyway, severing several tendons in his foot and leaving him in fear of his life as many victims of the monster die hours or days after an attack, laid low by its infected saliva.
Sharon Stone found fame thanks to the infamous flashing scene in the 1992 movie Basic Instinct
Harris, now 59, had her own ill-fated romance with another California power broker when she was an upstart assistant district attorney in Oakland in the mid-1990s: Willie Brown, 90, the former speaker of the California State Assembly and San Francisco mayor.
Their romance was no secret. Nor was the fact Brown helped champion her early rise in politics, appointing her to two state commissions while prompting media scrutiny of their relationship and the impact on her career.
Frustrated by the chatter, Harris would later describe Brown as an ‘albatross around my neck.’
Her dating life again hit the spotlight in 2001, when she went out with former talk show host Montel Williams, now 68.
Any relationship with Bronstein was certainly kept well out of the press even though they were seen together at various events over the years, including in 2008 when Bronstein interviewed Harris on stage for the annual dinner of Project Avary, a nonprofit that assists children of incarcerated parents.
Bronstein went on to marry Christine Borders – of the bookstore family. They now live in Hawaii and have two children.
Harris met her future husband entertainment lawyer Doug Emhoff on a blind date in 2013, tying the knot the following year. He has been in the news over the weekend after DailyMail.com exclusively reported his first marriage ended after he got his daughter's nanny pregnant.
Harris has been married to lawyer Doug Emhoff since 2014 after they met the year prior on a blind date in California
Harris and Bronstein kept in contact even after he left the Chronicle in 2021, which benefitted both when then-Senator Harris declared her first presidential bid.
‘While a source in her office says she has not been doing many journalistic interviews – despite requests ranging from Vanity Fair to The View – she agreed to two 30-minute phone interviews with me for this story because she knows me and knows she can use this magazine to speak to California,’ Bronstein wrote in the magazine article.
His flattering profile continued.
‘According to the British betting site Betfair, Harris leads all her potential rivals for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president. At 5-to-1 odds, she leaves in her dust Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Joe Biden and The Rock.
‘And then there are her recent speeches. My, oh my,’ he gasped.
‘As someone who’s known her for 15 years, I think things beyond simply maturity and experience have stirred in her,’ he continued.
Long after Harris dropped out before the first primary, the magazine did a Q&A with Bronstein in August 2020 advocating for her to be selected VP.
‘I would pick her if I were Joe Biden, because she’s got the power and the strength and the conviction that I think a lot of people feel he doesn’t have,’ he gushed.
‘She’s built up this persona of someone who has integrity and believes in social justice, and she’s a Black, Asian, Indian woman, which I think, in this day and age, is a great thing to have on the ticket.’
But he also alluded to Harris’s ruthlessness. ‘I also think that, if I were Biden, I’d probably get a food tester,’ he said.