California Gov. Gavin Newsom shared disturbing details about his grandfather holding a gun to his mother’s head — using the awful anecdote to say it helped make him the man he is today.
Speaking to an audience in New Hampshire while promoting his new memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry,” Newsom recounted how he learned about his mom’s tragic experience as a child.
“[M]y mom, when she was a kid, her dad put a gun to her head in a raging fireplace threatening to kill her,” he said, describing his grandfather as a military veteran who “spent almost three and a half years as a prisoner of war.”
“And he came back broken. Raging alcoholic,” Newsom continued. “Ultimately, [he] committed suicide himself. Threatened my mom as a young child. All this stuff, I didn’t know any of this.
“And it explains so many things in so many ways of who I am today. And how this echoes generation. How everything has shape-shifted. And so again it’s been a powerful and cathartic process.”
The comments echoed ones Newsom made toCNN’s Anderson Cooperon Monday while discussing his book and situations that shaped his family.
“She [his mom] had all these struggles. I never, she never revealed them,” he said. “I lacked the curiosity to really push her on it. I didn’t want to engage.”
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“But when she was a kid, her father, my grandfather, was drunk, which was a daily occurrence,” he added. “And had a gun, and put the two girls, my mom and her twin, up against the mantle of the fireplace and said he was going to kill them.
“Put a gun right to their head, until my grandmother, Jean, came in, and calmly put him down. And then he passed out. She never told me that. I learned about that.”
Source: California Post – Breaking California News, Photos & Videos
