Jennifer Siebel Newsom Knows Exactly How Murderers Feel

It’s becoming a weekly ritual: California’s First Lady opens her mouth, inserts her foot, and the rest of the country winces.

In a resurfaced interview, Jennifer Siebel Newsom recounts telling prisoners at San Quentin State Prison that she could relate to them. Why? Because at age six, she accidentally struck and killed her eight-year-old sister with a golf cart during a family vacation in Hawaii. She wasn’t punished, she explained, because it was clearly an accident, and she wanted those inmates to know their crimes were “probably an accident too.”

To call that comparison a stretch would be the understatement of the century.

Here’s the silver lining: if she keeps this up, she will single-handedly torch whatever remains of Gavin Newsom’s presidential ambitions. But there’s a larger point that cannot be glossed over. Democrats have long acted like they care more about criminals than their victims. Now they’re just saying the quiet part out loud.

The prison known as “The Q” has become the Newsoms’ progressive playground. The couple has poured millions into rebranding the facility as a “rehabilitation center” for wayward souls, even though the vast majority of its 3,500 to 4,000 inmates are Level II and Level IV prisoners with rap sheets containing murder, assault, armed robbery, and rape. This is the same prison that once housed the largest death row in America — until Gavin Newsom imposed a moratorium on executions in 2019. At least 650 condemned inmates were then quietly integrated into the general population. Empathy, apparently, has no room for such inconvenient details.

And who exactly are these “wronged individuals” the Newsoms are so eager to coddle? Scott Peterson, who murdered his pregnant wife Laci and their unborn son Connor, and Richard Allen Davis, who kidnapped and strangled 12-year-old Polly Klaas, for starters. The prison has also held Charles Manson, Robert F. Kennedy assassin Sirhan Sirhan, and a rogues’ gallery of serial killers. But still — ‘accidents happen’ the First Partner assures us! The bleeding-heart Newsoms just feel too strongly for these poor souls. They want to ease their sentences and — one suspects eventually — set them free.

This is not an isolated gaffe. Progressives are increasingly defending the perpetrator over the victim, and they’re doing it with brazen clarity. Remember the State of the Union, when Democrats refused to stand for the simple proposition: “The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens. If you agree with this statement, stand up and show your support.”

That moment crystallized the divide. Democrats care about “them,” not you. It doesn’t matter that 18-year-old Sheridan Gorman was allegedly murdered by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela, or that 15-year-old Amber Paris was allegedly killed by a Guatemalan illegal immigrant speeding through North Carolina, or that 7-year-old Delilah Coleman will never walk again after an illegal immigrant from India crashed into her family’s car. The progressive catechism demands solidarity with the “oppressed” (i.e., criminal) over the “oppressor” — no matter the facts.

Despite a $3 billion state deficit in the 2026-27 budget and a total price tag for the “California Model” prison overhaul now reaching $14.2 billion, the Newsom administration carved out $78.5 million specifically for San Quentin’s physical makeover into a feel-good “rehabilitation center.” Compare that architectural largesse to the relative crumbs tossed at victim-services programs in the neighborhoods these criminals terrorized.

Violent crime in California remains nearly 10 percent higher than pre-pandemic 2019 levels. Aggravated assaults are still roughly 22 percent higher. The state’s overall recidivism rate hovers between 45 and 50 percent, even as boutique programs brag about single-digit success stories for a tiny slice of participants. This is an expensive experiment with other people’s safety.

Which brings us back to Jennifer Siebel Newsom and the story she told those inmates.

She was six years old, playing with her eight-year-old sister Stacey and other children on golf carts during a family vacation in Hawaii in 1981. The cart she was driving slipped into reverse. She did not see her sister behind it. The tragedy that followed was, by any measure, a genuine accident — the kind of event that would leave any child scarred.

“I felt the pressure to be perfect,” she later told the Los Angeles Times, “to make my parents forget, by being two daughters instead of one.” She described the survivor’s guilt, the compulsion to compensate, to improve other people’s lives, to do double the good. It’s no wonder she’s the way she is.

But sympathy does not require the eradication of judgment. The men Jennifer Siebel Newsom addressed at San Quentin were not involved in golf cart accidents. They were convicted killers, rapists, and predators. Projecting her childhood trauma onto their deliberate acts of violence is not empathy. It is a category error with consequences, and those consequences are carried not by the Newsoms but by the families of Laci Peterson, Polly Klaas, and every other victim whose killer now enjoys a governor’s reprieve and a First “Partner’s” suicidal empathy.

Soft on crime, hard on victims: If this is the compassion the progressive left wants to export to the rest of America, voters would be wise to decline the invitation. Some accidents, after all, are entirely avoidable.