December 09, 1966
Kirsten Elizabeth Gillibrand (née Rutnik; /ˈkɪərstən ˈdʒɪlɪbrænd/ KEER-stən JIL-ib-rand; born December 9, 1966) is an American lawyer and politician serving as the junior United States senator from New York since 2009. A member of the Democratic Party, she served as member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2007 to 2009.
December 09, 1966
Kirsten Elizabeth Rutnik was born on December 9, 1966, in Albany, New York, the daughter of Polly Edwina (Noonan) and Douglas Paul Rutnik. Both her parents are attorneys, and her father has also worked as a lobbyist. Her parents divorced in the late 1980s. Douglas Rutnik is an associate of former U.S. Senator Al D'Amato. Gillibrand has an older brother and a younger sister. Her maternal grandparents were businessman Peter Noonan and Dorothea "Polly" Noonan, a founder of the Albany Democratic Women's Club and a leader of the city's Democratic political machine. Gillibrand has English, Austrian, Scottish, German, and Irish ancestry.
1971
The response to the appointment in New York was mixed. Upstate New York media was generally optimistic about the appointment of an upstate senator, as none had been elected since Charles Goodell left office in 1971. Many downstaters were disappointed with the selection, with some media outlets stating that Paterson had ignored the electoral influence of New York City and downstate on state politics. One questioned whether Paterson's administration was aware of "[where] statewide elections are won and lost". Gillibrand was relatively unknown statewide, and many voters found the choice surprising. One source stated, "With every Democrat in New York ... angling for the appointment, there was a sense of bafflement, belittlement, and bruised egos when Paterson tapped the junior legislator unknown outside of Albany."
1984
During her childhood and college years, Gillibrand used the nickname "Tina"; she began using her birth name a few years after law school. In 1984, she graduated from Emma Willard School, an all-girls' private school in Troy, New York, and then enrolled at Dartmouth College. Gillibrand majored in Asian Studies, studying in both Beijing and Taiwan. In Beijing, she studied and lived with actress Connie Britton at Beijing Normal University. Gillibrand graduated magna cum laude in 1988. At Dartmouth, she was a member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. During college, Gillibrand interned at Senator Al D'Amato's Albany office. She received her Juris Doctor from the UCLA School of Law and passed the bar exam in 1991.
1991
In 1991, Gillibrand joined the Manhattan-based law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell as an associate. In 1992, she took a leave from Davis Polk to serve as a law clerk to Judge Roger Miner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Albany.
1993
During the lame duck session of the 111th Congress, Gillibrand scored a substantial legislative victory with the passage of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010. The military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, which barred openly gay and lesbian people from service, was responsible for the discharge of an estimated 14,500 service members since its creation in 1993. Gillibrand was at the forefront of the effort to repeal the ban and her advocacy was recognized as a major force behind the repeal's passage.
1999
In 1999, Gillibrand began working on Hillary Clinton's 2000 U.S. Senate campaign, focusing on campaigning to young women and encouraging them to join the effort. Many of those women later worked on Gillibrand's campaigns. She and Clinton became close during the election, with Clinton becoming something of a mentor to her. Gillibrand donated more than $12,000 to Clinton's Senate campaigns.
2001
Gillibrand met Jonathan Gillibrand, a British venture capitalist who later became a senior adviser for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs at the U.S. State Department, on a blind date; he was planning to be in the U.S. for only a year while studying for his MBA at Columbia University, but stayed because of their developing relationship. They married in a Catholic church in Manhattan in 2001, and have two sons.
2001
In 2001, Gillibrand became a partner in the Manhattan office of Boies, Schiller & Flexner. In 2002 she informed Boies of her interest in running for office and was permitted to transfer to the firm's Albany office. She left Boies in 2005 to begin her 2006 campaign for Congress.
2004
Gillibrand considered running for office in 2004, in New York's 20th congressional district, against four-term Republican incumbent John E. Sweeney, but Hillary Clinton believed circumstances would be more favorable in 2006 and advised her to wait until then. Traditionally conservative, the district and its electoral offices had been in Republican hands for all but four years since 1913, and as of November 2006, 197,473 voters in the district were registered Republicans and 82,737 were registered Democrats. Sweeney said in 2006 that "no Republican can ever lose [the district]". Using New York's electoral fusion election laws, Gillibrand ran in 2006 on both the Democratic and Working Families lines; in addition to having the Republican nomination, Sweeney was endorsed by the Conservative and Independence parties.
2004
Gillibrand's special election victory gave her the right to serve the rest of Clinton's second term, which ended in January 2013. Gillibrand ran for a full six-year term in November 2012. In the general election, she faced Wendy E. Long, an attorney running on both the Republican Party and Conservative Party lines. Gillibrand was endorsed by The New York Times and the Democrat and Chronicle. She won the election with 72.2% of the vote; in so doing, she surpassed Schumer's 71.2% victory in 2004 and achieved the largest victory margin for a statewide candidate in New York history. She carried all counties except for two in western New York.
December 2005
The probable turning point in the election was the November 1 release of a December 2005 police report detailing a 9-1-1 call by Sweeney's wife, in which she claimed Sweeney was "knocking her around the house". The Sweeney campaign claimed the police report was false and promised to have the official report released by state police, but did not do so. The Sweeney campaign did release an ad in which Sweeney's wife called Gillibrand's campaign "a disgrace". Several months later, Sweeney's wife said her "disgrace" statement was coerced, and that her husband was physically abusive.
2006
Born and raised in upstate New York, Gillibrand graduated from Dartmouth College and from the UCLA School of Law. After holding positions in government and private practice and working on Hillary Clinton's 2000 U.S. Senate campaign, Gillibrand was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 2006. She represented New York's 20th congressional district and was reelected in 2008. During her House tenure, Gillibrand was a Blue Dog Democrat noted for voting against the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008.
2006
On social issues, Gillibrand is generally liberal, supporting the legalization of cannabis, abortion rights, and helping to lead the successful repeal effort of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". A supporter of Medicare-for-all since her first House run in 2006, she co-sponsored a 2017 Medicare-for-all bill introduced by Sanders and said that health care should be a right. Gillibrand also supports a federal jobs guarantee. Although she used to be one of the top recipients of corporate campaign donations, in 2018 she supported rejecting corporate PAC funds and invested heavily in online fundraising. Ninety-seven percent of donations to her 2018 campaign totaled $100 or less. She advocates government transparency, being one of a few members of Congress who release much personal and scheduling information.
December 2006
After taking office, Gillibrand became the first member of Congress to publish her official schedule, listing everyone she met with on a given day. She also published earmark requests she received and her personal financial statement. This "Sunlight Report", as her office termed it, was praised by in a December 2006 New York Times editorial as a "quiet touch of revolution" in a non-transparent system. Of the earmarking process, Gillibrand said she wanted whatever was best for her district and would require every project to pass a "greatest-need, greatest-good" test.
2008
After Gillibrand's win, Republicans quickly began speculating about possible 2008 candidates. Len Cutler, director of the Center for the Study of Government and Politics at Siena College, said that the seat would be difficult for Gillibrand to hold in 2008, with Republicans substantially outnumbering Democrats in the district.
2008
Gillibrand was reelected in 2008 over former New York Secretary of State Sandy Treadwell, 62% to 38%. Treadwell lost despite significantly outspending Gillibrand and promising never to vote to raise taxes, not to accept a federal salary, and to limit himself to three terms in office. Campaign expenditures were the second highest in the nation for a House race. Democrats generally saw major successes during the 2008 congressional elections, credited in part to a coattail effect from Barack Obama's presidential campaign.
December 01, 2008
On December 1, 2008, President-elect Barack Obama announced his choice of Hillary Clinton, the junior U.S. senator from New York, as Secretary of State. Clinton was confirmed by a vote of 94–2 on January 21, 2009. Just hours before being sworn in as Secretary of State, Clinton resigned her Senate seat, effective immediately. Obama's December announcement began a two-month search to fill her Senate seat. Under New York law, the governor appoints a replacement. A special election would then be held in November 2010 for the remainder of her term, which ended in January 2013.
2009
After Clinton was appointed U.S. Secretary of State in 2009, Governor David Paterson selected Gillibrand to fill the Senate seat Clinton had vacated, making her New York's second female senator. She won a special election in 2010 to keep the seat, and was reelected to full terms in 2012, 2018, and 2024. During her Senate tenure, Gillibrand has promoted legislation relating to sexual assault in the military, gun trafficking, 9/11 health care, toxic burn pit exposure, stock trading by members of Congress, and the repeal of Don't ask, don't tell. She also supports paid family leave. Gillibrand serves on the Senate Appropriations Committee, the Armed Services Committee, and the Select Committee on Intelligence, and is the ranking member on the Special Committee on Aging.
2009
In June 2022, after more than a decade of advocacy, Gillibrand succeeded in passing legislation to make gun trafficking a federal crime. She first introduced the Gun Trafficking Prevention Act in 2009 after meeting the mother of Nyasia Pryear-Yard, a 17-year-old from Brooklyn who was killed by a stray bullet, and pledging to take action on guns. Gillibrand reintroduced the bill in every subsequent Congress after it failed to pass, ultimately renaming it the Hadiya Pendleton and Nyasia Pryear-Yard Gun Trafficking and Crime Prevention Act. In the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Gillibrand helped craft bipartisan anti-gun trafficking legislation similar to her own, but it failed to pass the Senate after receiving 58 votes—not enough to overcome the 60-vote threshold. The core of Gillibrand's legislation passed in 2022 as part of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA).
January 23, 2009
Governor David Paterson's selection process began with a number of prominent names and high-profile New York Democrats, including Andrew Cuomo, Fran Drescher and Caroline Kennedy, vying for the spot. Gillibrand quietly campaigned for the position, meeting secretly with Paterson on at least one occasion. She said that she made an effort to underscore her successful House elections in a largely conservative district, adding that she could be a good complement to Chuck Schumer. Gillibrand was presumed a likely choice in the days before the official announcement. On January 23, 2009, Paterson held a press conference to announce Gillibrand as his choice.
January 26, 2009
Gillibrand was sworn in as a U.S. senator on January 26, 2009; at 42, she entered the chamber as the youngest senator in the 111th Congress. In February, she endorsed Scott Murphy, whom New York Democrats chose as their nominee for her former seat in the House of Representatives. In April, Murphy won the seat against Republican Jim Tedisco by 399 votes and succeeded Gillibrand in the House until 2011.
February 2009
Gillibrand made national headlines in February 2009 for stating that she and her husband kept two guns under their bed. Her staff later indicated that Gillibrand no longer stored guns under her bed.
March 2009
Gillibrand had numerous potential challengers in the September 14, 2010, Democratic primary election. Some were obvious at the time of her appointment. Most notably, Representative Carolyn McCarthy was unhappy with Gillibrand's stance on gun control, but McCarthy decided not to run. Harold Ford, Jr., a former Congressman from Tennessee, considered a run but decided against it in March 2009.
April 09, 2009
On April 9, 2009, a combined Schumer–Gillibrand press release said that the two strongly supported a Latino being nominated to the Supreme Court at the time of the next vacancy. Their first choice was Sonia Sotomayor. The two introduced her at Sotomayor's Senate confirmation hearing in July 2009.
2011
Gillibrand continued working until the day of her first son's birth and received a standing ovation from her House colleagues for doing so. Due to her job requirements, she and her family live primarily in Washington, D.C. In 2011, to be closer to her family in Albany, New York, they sold their house in Hudson and purchased one in Brunswick. Gillibrand currently lives in Albany.
January 2011
In January 2011, Gillibrand secured another significant win with the passage of the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act. The Zadroga Act reopened the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund (VCF) and established the World Trade Center Health Program (WTCHP), which provides health benefits and medical monitoring to 9/11 first responders and survivors. After these legislative accomplishments, Gillibrand gained a more prominent national profile. In 2015, Gillibrand was the Senate lead on the successful reauthorization of the Zadroga Act, which effectively made the WTCHP permanent by renewing it for 75 years and extended the VCF for 5 years. In 2019, Gillibrand helped lead the effort to pass the Never Forget the Heroes: James Zadroga, Ray Pfeifer, and Luis Alvarez Permanent Authorization of the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund Act. The bill permanently funded the VCF, allowing individuals and families of individuals who were injured, sickened, or killed at a 9/11 crash site to file claims for compensation through 2090. President Trump signed the bill into law in July 2019. In the following years, the WTCHP faced growing costs due to medical inflation and increased participation by 9/11 responders and survivors, leaving the program with a projected shortfall of roughly $3 billion. Between 2022 and 2023, Gillibrand helped secure over $1.6 billion to narrow the WTCHP funding gap, as well as extend enrollment to previously excluded 9/11 first responders at the Pentagon and Shanksville crash sites.
2012
Gillibrand was inducted into Omicron Delta Kappa, a national leadership honor society, as an honoris causa initiate at SUNY Plattsburgh in 2012.
2012
In 2012, Gillibrand authored part of the STOCK Act, which extended limitations on insider trading by members of Congress. A version of the bill, merged by Senator Joe Lieberman with content from another bill by Senator Scott Brown, was passed by Congress and signed into law by Obama in April. In July 2023, Gillibrand introduced bipartisan legislation with Senator Josh Hawley to ban stock ownership outright for members of Congress, senior members of the executive branch, and their spouses and dependents.
2013
In 2013, Gillibrand began a nearly decade-long fight to reform and professionalize the military justice system. She proposed bipartisan legislation to remove the prosecution of sexual assault cases from the military chain of command and give that responsibility to independent military prosecutors. The bill failed to gain enough votes to break a filibuster in March 2014, but after years of advocacy with her colleagues, Gillibrand's bill garnered the support of a bipartisan, filibuster-proof majority of senators. In 2022, Gillibrand successfully secured provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act to shift the authority for prosecuting sexual assault and certain other serious, non-military crimes from commanders to independent, trained military prosecutors called special trial counsels.
December 2013
In December 2013, Gillibrand introduced the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (FAMILY) Act. This bill would have established a national paid family and medical leave program, allowing workers to take 12 weeks of paid time off to care for a newborn, recover from a serious illness, or care for a sick family member. After it failed to pass, Gillibrand reintroduced it multiple times over the following years, earning recognition as one of the Senate's most fervent advocates for paid family leave. In December 2023, she and Bill Cassidy co-founded the Senate Bipartisan Paid Family Leave Working Group, aiming to develop bipartisan proposals for a federal paid leave policy.
2014
In 2014, Gillibrand published her first book, Off the Sidelines: Raise Your Voice, Change the World. The candid memoir was notable in the media upon release due to whisperings of a future presidential run as well as Gillibrand's claims of sexism in the Senate, including specific comments made to her by other members of Congress about her weight and appearance. Off the Sidelines debuted at number 8 on The New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover nonfiction.
2014
In 2014, Gillibrand was included in the annual Time 100, Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
November 2017
Declaring a "zero tolerance" doctrine regarding accusations of sexual misconduct by members of Congress, Gillibrand was the first in her caucus to call on Senator Al Franken to resign. In November 2017, amid the MeToo movement, Gillibrand became the first high-profile Democrat to say that Bill Clinton should have resigned when his affair with Monica Lewinsky was revealed. In 2018, Clinton expressed disagreement with Gillibrand's opinion.
2018
In 2018, Politico named Gillibrand part of the "Hell-No Caucus", along with Senators Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, for voting "overwhelmingly to thwart [Trump's] nominees for administration jobs", such as Rex Tillerson, Betsy DeVos, and Mike Pompeo; all the senators were considered potential 2020 presidential contenders at the time, and all five ran for president in 2020.
May 2018
In May 2018, City & State reported that Gillibrand had "moved sharply leftward on economic issues, embracing a number of proposals to expand the social safety net and bolster lower-income families". In July 2018, The New York Times wrote that Gillibrand had "spent recent months injecting her portfolio with a dose of the kind of economic populism that infused Senator Bernie Sanders's campaign in the 2016 presidential primary".
June 2018
During her tenure in the House of Representatives, Gillibrand was known as a centrist Democrat and was a member of the Blue Dog Coalition. Since she became a member of the Senate, her political positions have moved leftward. In July 2018, Newsday wrote that Gillibrand "formerly held more conservative views on guns and immigration, but, in her nine years as New York's junior senator, [has] swung steadily to the left on those and other issues". After being appointed to the Senate, she expressed support for same-sex marriage. A supporter of gun rights while in the House, Gillibrand has since moved in the direction of gun control. She has said that a conversation with a family who had lost a daughter to gun violence made her realize that she was "wrong" to oppose gun control measures. In June 2018, Gillibrand called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, a "deportation force" and became the first sitting senator to support the call to abolish ICE. She said, "I believe you should get rid of it, start over, reimagine it and build something that actually works" and "I think you should reimagine ICE under a new agency with a very different mission".
2019
In 2019, a female former aide to Gillibrand criticized her for retaining a male staffer despite the aide's sexual harassment complaint against him. After a Politico inquiry brought new evidence to light, the aide was fired.
March 17, 2019
Gillibrand ran for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States in 2020, officially announcing her candidacy on March 17, 2019. After failing to qualify for the third debate, she withdrew from the race on August 28, 2019.
August 28, 2019
Gillibrand suspended her campaign on August 28, 2019, citing her failure to qualify for the third round of Democratic primary debates. She neither met the polling threshold nor sustained the fundraising quota set as debate qualifications.
2020
In August 2022, Gillibrand helped secure the passage of the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring Our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act, which included her bill to extend presumptive health benefits to veterans who were exposed to toxic burn pits. She initially introduced the legislation in 2020 to provide care and benefits to veterans who were present at burn pit sites during their military service and subsequently developed certain serious illnesses, removing the need for them to prove that their conditions were definitively burn pit-related.
2021
On June 26, 2025, two days after New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani won the 2025 Democratic primary election for New York City mayor, Gillibrand appeared on Brian Lehrer's radio call-in show on WNYC. Responding to a caller who felt that Mamdani threatened the Jewish community, Gillibrand condemned Mamdani's defense of some pro-Palestine advocates using the term "intifada". She also complained about "past positions—particularly references to global jihad", prompting Lehrer to issue an on-air disclaimer that "we can find no evidence that [Mamdani] has supported Hamas or supported violent jihad". Gillibrand dismissed the disclaimer and continued to attack Mamdani's defense of the term "intifada" in the context of pro-Palestinian advocacy. When asked whether she would endorse Mamdani for mayor, Gillibrand declined, saying she did not know whether she had previously endorsed Democratic nominees for mayor and that it was not something she typically did. In 2021, Gillibrand had endorsed Eric Adams, the Democratic nominee for mayor.
August 2021
In 2025, Kirsten Gillibrand drew criticism for her comments on former New York Governor and then-Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo had resigned from his post as governor in disgrace after allegations of sexual harassment by dozens of women surfaced in August 2021. Gillibrand commented that she was troubled by the accusations, but did not call for his resignation, as she had for Franken. When Cuomo announced his candidacy for mayor, Gillibrand praised him, saying, "He has a lot of talent as an executive, he's been a very strong governor and done very good things for New York."
2022
In 2022, Gillibrand shepherded two pieces of legislation through Congress that enacted significant workplace reforms. The first, the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act, voided forced arbitration clauses in cases of sexual assault and sexual harassment, allowing workplace sexual misconduct survivors to bring their cases to court rather than be forced into the often secretive and employer-friendly arbitration process. The second, the Speak Out Act, prohibits companies from enforcing non-disclosure agreements in cases of sexual harassment or sexual assault if those agreements were signed before the incident occurred, giving victims the ability to speak publicly about any alleged misconduct. Both bills passed the Senate unanimously and received broad bipartisan support in the House.
2022
Since the return of congressional earmarks in 2022, Gillibrand has ranked among the top members of Congress in terms of earmark funds secured. She obtained $230.6 million in earmarks for New York-based projects in 2022 and $267 million in 2023.
2024
In 2024, Gillibrand introduced a new bill to address traumatic brain injuries in military veterans and service members. She has been critical of the second Trump administration, particularly its firing of federal employees and proposed budget cuts.
Early 2025
In early 2019, on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Gillibrand announced the formation of an exploratory committee to consider running for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 United States presidential election. During her January 15 appearance, she said, "I am going to run", and the same day paperwork filed with the Federal Election Commission established the Gillibrand 2020 Exploratory Committee. Gillibrand had frequently been mentioned as a possible 2020 contender by the media before her announcement.
2030
After her remarks, progressive New York politicians including New York City Councilman Chi Ossé called for Gillibrand to face a primary challenge in 2030. Gillibrand has also faced calls to resign, including from journalist Mehdi Hasan, who said she "should resign for falsely smearing Zohran Mamdani as a terrorist". When asked about Gillibrand's comments, Governor Kathy Hochul said she condemned any denigration of a person's religion or ethnicity. Gillibrand's office initially issued a statement saying she "misspoke" in the interview. On June 30, she called Mamdani to apologize for her remarks.
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