Who is Nicole Shanahan, the philanthropist picked by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his running mate?

By Meg Kinnard, Associated Press

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has picked Nicole Shanahan, a California lawyer and philanthropist who’s never held elected office, to be his running mate in his independent bid for president, he announced on Tuesday.

An unconventional choice, Shanahan, who is 38, brings youth and considerable wealth to Kennedy’s long-shot campaign but is little known outside Silicon Valley.

Shanahan leads the Bia-Echo Foundation, an organization she founded to direct money toward issues including women’s reproductive science, criminal justice reform and environmental causes. She also is a Stanford University fellow and was the founder and chief executive of ClearAccessIP, a patent management firm that was sold in 2020.

Shanahan was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin from 2018 to 2023, and they have a young daughter. She was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Kennedy made his announcement.

On Tuesday, Shanahan talked about her hardscrabble upbringing in Oakland, the daughter of a mother who immigrated from China and an Irish and German-American father “plagued by substance abuse” who “struggled to keep a job.” Touching on her family’s reliance on government assistance, Shanahan said that, although she had become “very wealthy later on in life,” she felt she could relate to Americans being “just one misfortune away from disaster.”

“The purpose of wealth is to help those in need. That’s what it’s for,” Shanahan said. “And I want to bring that back to politics, too. That is the purpose of privilege.”

Before the announcement, Kennedy’s campaign manager and daughter-in-law, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, praised Shanahan’s work on behalf of “honest governance, racial equity, regenerative agriculture and children’s and maternal health.” She said the work “reflects many of our country’s most urgent needs.”

Kennedy, who said in an interview Monday with “The State of California” on KCBS radio that his VP search placed a priority on ”somebody who could represent young people,” said Tuesday that Shanahan — who he said, like him, has “left the Democratic Party” — also shares his concerns about government overreach and his distrust in major political parties’ abilities to make lasting change.

“She’ll tell you that she now understands at the defense agencies work for the military industrial complex, that health agencies work for big pharma and the USDA works for big ag and the processed food cartels,” Kennedy said at his Oakland rally. “The EPA is in cahoots with the polluters, that the scientists can be mercenaries, that government officials sometimes act as sensors, and that the Fed works for Wall Street and allows millionaire bankers to prey upon on Main Street and the American worker.”

Kennedy also said that, in part, Shanahan’s heritage played at least some role in his selection of her.

“I wanted someone who would honor the traditions our nation, as a nation of immigrants, but who also understands that to be a nation, we need to secure borders,” he said.