Kamala Harris and Dana Walden, close friends who star in America’s biggest succession dramas
The 20-year-long friendship between Kamala Harris and Disney executive Dana Walden has become a minefield of partisan politics.
Around 2004, a rising TV executive named Dana Walden began calling politically connected friends to let them know about a hot new prospect.
She wasn’t talking about a star or script. She was talking about a little-known district attorney in San Francisco, her friend Kamala Harris.
When Walden asked her Hollywood pals to donate to Harris’s political campaign, some asked why they should care about a DA race nearly 250km away.
You may not think you care, she told them, but she is going to be a national figure someday.
Over the next two decades, the two friends rose to the upper echelons of their careers while staying close during million-dollar fundraisers, a life-changing blind date and New Year’s Eve parties. Now the two women, both 60 years old, born seven days apart, find themselves in remarkably similar situations amid two high-stakes succession dramas.
Both are auditioning for big promotions – Harris for president of the United States and Walden for chief executive of Disney. Both would be the first women to serve in those roles, and both of their trajectories have been complicated by older bosses reluctant to leave the stage.
Harris is barnstorming through swing states in the home stretch of her truncated campaign to replace President Biden, while Disney said last week it wouldn’t name a replacement for Walden’s boss, CEO Bob Iger, until early 2026.
Friendships between high-powered business executives and politicians are a mainstay of elections, where influence and deep pockets can help attract critical votes. Donald Trump has grown close with Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of one of the world’s most powerful social-media platforms. Musk recently took the stage at a Trump rally and has started giving away $1 million a day to registered voters in swing states.
Still, the long friendship between Harris and Walden has turned into a minefield of partisan politics.
Walden spoke with Disney’s legal department in 2022 after a promotion put her in charge of Disney’s general entertainment, including ABC News, and she disclosed that the families were close. She stopped hosting fundraisers for Harris when the news division came under her purview, and suspected their friendship would draw unwanted attention during ABC News’s coverage of the 2024 campaign, even though she isn’t involved in editorial decisions.
She was right. In an August post on Truth Social, Donald Trump asked whether “Kamala’s best friend, who heads up ABC,” would leak questions to the Harris campaign ahead of their September debate. Trump earlier this year had sued ABC, ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos for defamation, a case that a judge allowed to proceed in July. ABC has denied publishing any false and defamatory statements and said it did not act maliciously.
Opinions on the network’s coverage continued to be split after the debate, which some critics said featured a disproportionate amount of fact-checking for Trump while others applauded the moderators’ pushback.
Disney said that while Walden – co-chair of Disney’s entertainment division, which includes all of its TV and streaming operations – has oversight of executives who run ABC News, she is only involved in corporate matters, not coverage decisions. She has never sat in on editorial meetings and leaves others to manage ABC News’ day-to-day operations, the company said. Those close to Walden were infuriated by Trump’s suggestion of impropriety, describing her as a rule follower with integrity, and see such attacks on the women as gendered.
Amelia Ashley-Ward, publisher of African-American news publication the Sun-Reporter, said Harris’s critics are throwing any barbs they can. “She wouldn’t be where she is now if she wasn’t able to weather the storms of criticism,” Ashley-Ward said.
Republican critics have decried Walden as further evidence of a left-leaning agenda at Disney that included fights with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and LGBT characters in its cartoons.
“It feeds into this ongoing grievance that Trump and the campaign have with all things mainstream media,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University.
Other media executives with business oversight of news networks have also given money to political candidates, defenders say, and Iger in the past explored a run for president as a Democrat. Iger has mostly donated to Democratic politicians such as New York Sen. Chuck Schumer and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, though he has stepped back from political donations this year.
Early friends
Harris’s and Walden’s husbands, Doug Emhoff and Matt Walden, were friends for several years before their wives met in 1994 as up-and-comers breaking into their respective industries.
The two women met through Chrisette Hudlin, who works in public relations and whom Harris has described as her best friend. (She led a group of the candidate’s Los Angeles friends to help campaign in Arizona this month.) For many years, Harris and Walden joined other women for group vacations. The Waldens live not far from the home Harris shares with Emhoff in Los Angeles’s Brentwood neighbourhood, a wealthy enclave popular with show-business executives and movie stars.
Walden was among a select group of Harris’s early friends in Los Angeles that included “Star Trek” director J.J. Abrams and his wife, Katie McGrath, and Lionsgate Vice Chairman Michael Burns.
By the time she announced plans to run for president in 2019, Harris was a party star, and won the backing of dozens of Hollywood actors and executives, a raft of support that flooded her effort with cash.
Harris’s campaign failed to gain traction, however, and folded before the Iowa caucus and ran out of money. The day after the announcement, the Waldens joined a small gathering of Harris’s friends, donors and sorority sisters at a home in Brentwood.
Their friend’s presidential campaign had gone from an early favourite to a footnote. The couple sat with other guests in a living room while Harris approached each one to talk about the decision, one visitor remembered. As everyone headed to their cars afterward, the conversation shifted to a recurring question: Would she be the vice presidential nominee?
Walden and her husband donated more than $20,000 to the Friends of Kamala Harris PAC in the first quarter of 2020 and gave more than $200,000 to the Biden Victory Fund in 2020, Federal Election Commission records show.
While in office, Harris and Walden have had many occasions to see – and support – one another. In April 2022, Walden and her husband hosted a DNC fundraiser at their home in Brentwood that featured the vice president and about two dozen guests.
“Dana and I have been friends for decades,” Harris told the crowd. “And that’s all I will say,” she added before laughing.
Harris joked that the Waldens were “responsible for my marriage” since their mutual friends Chrisette and Reggie Hudlin had in 2013 set Harris up on a blind date with Emhoff. (Reggie Hudlin is a producer and director who has worked on films such as “Django Unchained” and shows like the Emmy Awards.) In late 2022, Walden was one of several Hollywood executives invited to a state dinner for French President Emmanuel Macron, striding down an evergreen-lined hallway toward the White House’s South Lawn with her husband. Hours earlier, the pair had visited Emhoff.
Walden’s name has come up in other ways around D.C. Biden named Walden as one of 25 appointees to his Export Council, the White House’s primary advisory committee on international trade, in early 2023. The CEOs of Citi, Qualcomm and Land O’Lakes were among the other members. The White House had wanted a Disney representative on the Council, which Iger had served on, and the company’s government relations team suggested Walden.
She is the Council’s only representative from Hollywood, and at a June 2024 meeting she touted Disney shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” and “The Bear” and extolled the soft power impact of American entertainment.
“Through these stories, we communicate what it is to live here, who the people are in this country and how we want to be perceived around the world,” she said.
Though she has kept her distance from political events, Walden has maintained a social life with the vice president. She and her husband spent last New Year’s Eve with Harris and Emhoff, along with TV producer Ryan Murphy and his husband. (Murphy has created several hit shows for Walden at Fox and Disney, including “Glee” and the “Feud” anthology.) She also makes occasional trips to Washington, including a stop at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April, where she was a guest of Chrisette Hudlin’s and socialised with Emhoff.
Last November, Dana Walden gave $20,000 to support Biden, and her husband donated $250,000 to what was then the Biden Victory Fund in April of this year.
Matt Walden introduced “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane at a Biden Victory Fund event at the star’s Los Angeles home this spring that was also attended by Harris and Emhoff. The event raised $1.5 million.
But when Harris took over the top of the ticket in July, Walden’s oversight of ABC News became the political liability she’d feared.
With a spotlight on their friendship, Walden is well aware of the optics of her family’s ties to the Harris household and has kept her distance.
Matt Walden, however, has been described as an enthusiastic member of the second gentleman’s entourage. He is among the small group of Emhoff pals known as “Doug’s friends” who help organise events and rally support, according to acquaintances. In August, Matt Walden celebrated with Emhoff in Chicago at the DNC Convention, mingling with other donors and friends.
The evening Harris formally accepted her party’s nomination, attendees saw Matt Walden sitting in the middle of the action. Dana Walden spent the evening back in Los Angeles, at a premiere for Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building.”
Risky moves
When Walden and Harris met in 1994, they were young professionals who would soon take on much bigger challenges.
In her first years out of college, Walden worked in entertainment publicity, managing press for “The Arsenio Hall Show” and other clients.
In 1995, early in her time in the publicity department at Twentieth Century Fox and soon after she’d met Harris, Walden gave a presentation at a company retreat in which she told her bosses that they had been risk-averse and lost opportunities to produce the kinds of shows that run for years and throw off cash in syndication. It was a risky move itself, considering Walden was a recent hire in the publicity department, but it put her on the path toward climbing the corporate ladder at Fox and later at Disney.
Walden became known as the executive hand behind several hits, including “Ally McBeal,” “24” and “Modern Family.” Disney completed its $71.3 billion purchase of most of 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets in 2019, setting in motion Walden’s ascent from a well-regarded TV executive to a future contender in the race for Hollywood’s top job: Disney CEO.
Harris’s entrance to California society also came in the mid-1990s, when she was a deputy district attorney for Alameda County, where she’d earned a reputation for prosecuting child sexual assault cases. She was the girlfriend of Willie Brown, a longtime California politician then serving as the Assembly Speaker.
A 60th birthday party for Brown afforded Harris an early mention in the San Francisco Chronicle. The party was hosted in Los Angeles by the supermarket magnate Ron Burkle and attended by Barbra Streisand and Clint Eastwood, and guests feasted on a cake “roughly the size of Glendale.” The March 1994 column noted: “Eastwood spilled champagne on the Speaker’s new steady, Kamala Harris, an Alameda Co. deputy D.A.” In the summer of 1994, Harris left the district attorney’s office when Brown appointed her first to the state’s Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, then the California Medical Assistance Commission, jobs that paid tens of thousands of dollars. Critics decried both appointments as patronage jobs handed to the speaker’s girlfriend.
Harris soon introduced herself as the tough prosecutor of grisly crimes in northern California, such as a 1996 case in which a 33-year-old man was sentenced to life in prison for scalping his girlfriend with a kitchen knife.
“Incredibly sadistic,” Harris said at the time.
In 2003, she was elected as San Francisco district attorney – the first woman to hold the role – and increased the city’s conviction rate, particularly for serious and violent crime. She became the state’s attorney general in 2010. Once an unfamiliar name to Walden’s friends, she earned national attention in 2012 for her role forging a multibillion-dollar deal with big banks over their mortgage foreclosure practices. In 2016, she succeeded Barbara Boxer as U.S. Senator.
For the past four years, both Harris and Walden have weathered their own succession dramas.
In 2020, after 15 years in the job and several contract extensions, Iger named Bob Chapek as Disney CEO. Chapek’s tenure was marked by internal dissent – Walden was among his top critics – while Iger, on the outside, disparaged his successor to friends around Hollywood. Harris was named Biden’s vice presidential pick that same year.
The Disney board fired Chapek in late 2022 and brought Iger back for another stint as CEO. His return immediately set off a new succession race, with Walden established as an early internal front-runner.
Several months later, Biden and Harris formally announced their re-election bid —one that was derailed after the president’s debate performance over the summer.
Harris was left to quietly support her running mate even as major donors and party leaders urged him to step aside. When he finally did, Harris had just over three months to convince voters to stick with their ticket.
Walden has watched her friend sprint toward the finish line while she faces the opposite problem. With Disney announcing last week it had pushed back its decision on Iger’s successor, she has to wait.
The Wall St Journal
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