Kristen Browde | |
---|---|
Born | Kristen Prata Browde 1950 (age 73–74) |
Nationality | American |
Education | Cornell University Fordham University School of Law |
Occupations |
|
Political party | Democratic |
Website | browdelaw |
Kristen Prata Browde (born 1950) is an American attorney, politician, and former journalist. She has been involved in local politics in New York and Florida and has advocated for the LGBTQ+ community since leaving journalism in 2013.
Browde worked in television and radio journalism, with a stint at the recently established CNN in the 1980s and 30 years as a reporter at NBC 4 News and CBS News in New York. [1] She began concurrently working as an attorney after graduating from law school in 2000.
Since leaving news media, Browde has continued to practice law and has been active in local politics as a member of the Democratic Party. She has held various positions in New Castle, New York, and countywide positions in Westchester County. She was narrowly defeated in the 2017 election for town supervisor of New Castle (a position equivalent to mayor) and the 2020 Democratic primary election for New York's 93rd State Assembly district. Her candidacy for town supervisor made her the first transgender person to run for office on a major party ticket in New York. [1] [2]
Kristen Prata Browde is one of three children of Anatole Browde (d. 2012) and Frances Buchman Browde (d. 1980). [3] [4] [5] Anatole Browde, of St. Louis, Missouri, was vice president of McDonnell Douglas Electronic Systems and Micro-Electronic CTR, and he later taught at Maryville University in Missouri. [5] [6] [7]
Kristen Browde attended Country Day high school in St. Louis in the late 1960s. [8] [9] She graduated from Cornell University in New York in 1972. [10] [7] At Cornell, she was a radio presenter on the university's radio station, WVBR-FM, and she played intramural hockey. [11] [12]
Browde joined the New York station WNBC after graduating from college. [13] She worked for the Independent Television News Association (ITNA), a satellite news cooperative, and then joined the fledgling CNN as a Washington and Pentagon correspondent by 1980. [14] [15] [16] She was also the network's first Supreme Court correspondent. [17]
Browde later joined WNYW-TV (then known as WNEW-TV when owned by Metromedia). In 1984, she was reporting for the station when she recorded remarks by vice-presidential candidate George H. W. Bush at a Republican Party rally boasting about his performance in the presidential debates earlier that week, not aware that he was being recorded by a television crew. [13] [18] [19] In 1986, Browde and two other reporters were summoned by police to a Bronx building that Larry Davis was holding out in. [20] In a six-hour telephone exchange with the police, Davis negotiated that news reporters be present at the scene so he would not be shot. [20] [21] Davis surrendered to police after he was assured of the presence of his girlfriend and given the press credentials of the reporters. [20] [21] Browde left WNYW three years later, in 1989, and later that year joined the syndicated news magazine Hard Copy in the role of segment producer. [22] [23] In 1993, Browde and three colleagues won the "Single Breaking News Story" award at the New York Emmy Awards for the news story "Watermain Break, Grand Central" for the CBS-owned station WPIX-TV. [24] [25] She worked as a freelance reporter for NBC 4 News (WNBC) for 8 months in 1993 before she was appointed to a full reporter position there. [13] [26]
In 1996, while working at WNBC, Browde started attending the night school program at Fordham University School of Law, initially motivated by the desire to become a better reporter. [17] Executives at NBC decided not to renew Browde's contract because they felt she could not handle the stresses of working as a journalist while attending law school. [17] She left WNBC in late 1996, after three years at the station. [27] She later began freelance work for CBS News, where she was a weekend news anchor and a correspondent. [17] She graduated from Fordham Law in 2000, just before she turned 50 years old. [17] [28] She chose to continue working as a journalist, while personally selecting what legal cases she would work on as an attorney: "I knew that I could truly have my cake and eat it too—without taking a big pay cut by becoming a first-year associate. Thus, it wasn't a really tough call." [28]
Browde was a member of the national board of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) from 1983 to 2012 (when the union was merged with the Screen Actors Guild). [29] [30]
In 2006, Browde was elected as a trustee to the AFTRA Health & Retirement Funds. [31] In 2010, TheWrap and The Hollywood Reporter reported that several Screen Actors Guild (SAG) members had accused Browde of running a union news website, SAGWatch, and abusing her access to SAG's confidential information as an AFTRA trustee. [30] [32] Browde told The Hollywood Reporter that the allegations were false. [32] A two-month investigation by AFTRA led the union to conclude that there was "no evidence suggesting any infractions took place". [33] [34] In 1999 and 2003, Browde publicly expressed her opposition to the merger of SAG and AFTRA. [32] When the unions were merged in 2012 to create SAG-AFTRA, she was appointed one of the 24 members of the initial SAG-AFTRA national executive committee. [29] [35]
By 2013, Browde was practicing as a divorce attorney in Chappaqua, a hamlet in New Castle. [36] Browde left CBS News around that time; in an interview, she said that by that time her law practice had been "going strong, completely blossomed". [28] She came out as a transgender woman to the public at the Inner Circle's gala of New York journalists in April 2016. [37] [38] The New York Post 's gossip section, Page Six, ran a print article on Browde's announcement with the headline "Journo Says He's a She". [38] Browde said her practice was unaffected after she came out. [28]
Browde has served on the board of the LGBT Bar Association of New York (LeGaL), a bar association serving the LGBTQ community, [39] [40] and she was elected president of its board in 2019. [41] She is the first transgender person to hold the position. [41] She is also a founding member of the National Trans Bar Association, and she was elected a co-chair of the organization in 2019. [29] [39] [42] In 2019, she was among at least a dozen transgender attorneys present for oral arguments before the Supreme Court for R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission , a landmark case for the rights of transgender people. [43]
Browde became active in politics after she left the news industry in 2013 with the desire to "break free from the restraint of public neutrality." [44] [45] She served as secretary of the ethics board of New Castle, New York, from 2014 until she resigned in 2017 to run for town supervisor. [38] [39] [46] She also served on the Financial Advisory Committee for the Chappaqua Central School District starting in 2013, [29] [39] and she was appointed to the town diversity committee in 2016. [38]
Browde supported the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign, [37] [39] [46] and campaigned in North Carolina in support of the Clinton campaign and in opposition to the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act (House Bill 2), a bathroom bill. [39] [37] Browde participated in the Women's March in Washington, D.C. after the inauguration of Donald Trump, during which she marched with the National Center for Transgender Equality. [45] [47]
In April 2017, Browde announced she would be running as a Democratic Party candidate for town supervisor of New Castle, [lower-alpha 1] making her the first transgender person in New York to run for office on a major party ticket. [1] [2] [48] Browde and the other Democratic Party candidates for New Castle Town Board were members of Up2Us, a group which rose from the Chappaqua Friends of Hillary (a group supporting presidential candidate and Chappaqua resident Hillary Clinton). [2] Hillary Clinton herself endorsed the Democratic Party town board candidates, including Browde. [49] Robert Greenstein, the incumbent town supervisor and the Republican Party candidate, led by a 300-vote margin over Browde in unofficial vote counts late in the November election and narrowly defeated Browde. [50] [51]
From 2017 to 2018, Browde served on the transition team of county executive of Westchester County, George Latimer. [29] In 2018, she was one of 15 nominations to the Westchester Women's Advisory Board, a board which advises the government of Westchester County on women's issues, with her term lasting through 2019. [52] Also in 2018, state governor Andrew Cuomo appointed her to the steering committee of New York State Council on Women and Girls. [29] [53] In 2019, she sat alongside the governor at an event during which the governor signaled his support for the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act and for changes to the state's gestational surrogacy laws. [37] [53]
In the 2020 New York State Assembly election, Browde was one of five candidates in the Democratic Party primary for New York's 93rd State Assembly district, a seat held by David Buchwald. [54] Browde said that frustration around issues such as gun control motivated her to run for the assembly. [37] [53] Bedford town supervisor Chris Burdick narrowly defeated Browde in the primary; unofficial tallies counted 4,879 votes for Burdick compared to 4,532 votes for Browde (a difference of 347 votes). [54] [55] Later that year, Browde was appointed as one of 12 vice chairs of the Westchester County Democratic Party. [56]
Gay City News of New York City named Browde one of their 2020 Impact Award Honorees, describing her as "a change-maker who has made a difference on numerous fronts." [37]
In 2023, Browde was reported to be vice president of the Florida Democratic Party LGBTQ+ Caucus. [57] Early that year, Browde began to publish weekly videos on TikTok highlighting people who have been arrested on charges of child sexual abuse that week in an effort to prove that drag queens are not threats to children (a notion associated with the ongoing drag panic). [58] [59] Browde's videos have been featured by LGBT media outlets PinkNews and Them . [58] [59] Her inspiration for the video series came from a speech by the outgoing president of the caucus, during which he read a list of people arrested or charged for child sexual abuse in the past week. [59] [60] By March 2023, Browde's first video on the subject had been viewed 1.4 million times, and her TikTok account had amassed more than 300,000 followers. [60]
In 1980, Browde was engaged to Bettina Gregory, an ABC News correspondent. [16] They were married by the following year. [61] In 1988, Browde was engaged to Elizabeth J. Hellawell. [3] Their marriage later ended in a divorce. [10] In 1999, Browde married film director Elizabeth Schub in Long Island, New York. [10] [11] The couple was living on the east side of Broadway in New York City when the nearby World Trade Center was destroyed in the September 11 attacks in 2001. [7] They told Cornell Alumni Magazine that they were "lucky to be alive." [7] Browde moved to New Castle, New York in 2004. [46]
Browde has two sons. [39] [62] Her son Maximilian Browde and Maximilian's mother, Elizabeth Schub Kamir, were living in Paris at the time of the November 2015 terrorist attacks in the city. [63] Maximilian wrote about his experience in an article published by The Journal News (LoHud.com). [64]
Browde took the middle name Prata after her friend and coach, Monica Prata, a feminine image consultant based in Greenwich Village. [65]
Westchester County is located in the U.S. state of New York. It is the seventh most populous county in the State of New York and the most populous north of New York City. According to the 2020 United States Census, the county had a population of 1,004,456, its highest decennial count ever and an increase of 55,344 (5.8%) from the 949,113 counted in 2010. Westchester covers an area of 450 square miles (1,200 km2), consisting of six cities, 19 towns, and 23 villages. Established in 1683, Westchester was named after the city of Chester, England. The county seat is the city of White Plains, while the most populous municipality in the county is the city of Yonkers, with 211,569 residents per the 2020 census. The county is part of the Hudson Valley region of the state.
Corey Scott Feldman is an American actor and musician. As a youth, he became well known for roles in the 1980s in films such as Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984), Gremlins (1984), The Goonies (1985), and Stand by Me (1986). Feldman collaborated with Corey Haim starring in numerous films such as the comedy horror The Lost Boys (1987), the teen comedy License to Drive (1988) and the romantic comedy Dream a Little Dream (1989). They reunited for the A&E reality series The Two Coreys, which ran from 2007 to 2008.
Chappaqua is a hamlet and census-designated place in the town of New Castle, in northern Westchester County, New York. It is approximately 30 miles (50 km) north of New York City. The hamlet is served by the Chappaqua station of the Metro-North Railroad's Harlem Line. In the New York State Legislature it is within the New York State Assembly's 93rd district and the New York Senate's 40th district. In Congress the village is in New York's 17th District.
New Castle is a town in Westchester County, New York, United States. The population was 18,311 in the 2020 United States census, an increase over 17,569 at the 2010 census. It includes the named hamlets of Chappaqua and Millwood, but residents and businesses in the Town of New Castle can also have a designated city address of Ossining, or Millwood as well as Chappaqua or even Mt. Kisco.
The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) was an American labor union which represented over 100,000 film and television principal and background performers worldwide. On March 30, 2012, the union leadership announced that the SAG membership voted to merge with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) to create SAG-AFTRA.
Frances Louise Fisher is an American actress. She began her career in theater and later starred as Detective Deborah Saxon in the CBS daytime soap opera The Edge of Night (1955). In film, she is known for her roles in Unforgiven (1992), Titanic (1997), True Crime (1999), House of Sand and Fog (2003), Laws of Attraction (2004), The Kingdom (2007), In the Valley of Elah (2007), Jolene (2008), The Lincoln Lawyer (2011), and The Host (2013). From 2014 to 2015, Fisher starred in the ABC drama series Resurrection. In 2019, she starred in the HBO television series Watchmen, a sequel to the graphic novel of the same name.
Chappaqua station is a commuter rail stop on the Metro-North Railroad's Harlem Line, located in Chappaqua, New York, United States, within the town of New Castle.
Jane Skinner is an American former daytime news anchor who worked for Fox News, co-hosting Happening Now with Jon Scott from 11 am to 1 pm ET. On June 24, 2010, she announced on-air her retirement from her daytime news anchor position at the end of her usual Happening Now segment, citing a desire to spend more time with her family. She is married to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
Kristen Jaymes Stewart is an American actress. She has received various accolades, including a British Academy Film Award and a César Award, in addition to nominations for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award.
The Journal News is a newspaper in New York State serving the New York counties of Westchester, Rockland, and Putnam, a region known as the Lower Hudson Valley. It is owned by Gannett.
New York State Route 120 (NY 120) is a state highway in southern Westchester County, New York, in the United States. It begins in the city of Rye at an intersection with U.S. Route 1 (US 1) and runs for about 18 miles (29 km) north to the hamlet of Millwood, where it ends at a junction with NY 100. The route intersects with Interstate 684 (I-684) and the Saw Mill River Parkway, and serves the Westchester County Airport in North Castle. Portions of the route have been signed ceremonially in remembrance of American serviceman killed in the 2000s and 2010s during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The 1904 Chappaqua tornado was an intense tornado that struck northern Westchester County, New York during the afternoon of Saturday, July 16, 1904. As of 2019, this tornado ranks as the strongest tornado to touch down in the county, ranking as F3 on the modern-day Fujita Scale. The tornado formed around 3:30 pm EST within a severe thunderstorm near Chappaqua, New York. The tornado quickly began to produce damage in the hamlet, destroying several structures and killing two people. Homes were knocked off their foundations and rolled over along the tornado's path. By 4:00 pm EST, the tornado dissipated and left $100,000 worth of damage in its wake. Hail associated with the same storm cell also inflicted damage upon a few structures. The tornado is known as the worst disaster in the history of Chappaqua.
Millwood was a railroad station on the New York and Putnam Railroad in the hamlet of Millwood in New Castle, New York. It was located on Station Road just south of the southeast corner of the west end of the NY 120/133 overlap. Originally built by the New York and Putnam Railroad in 1881, this later became the Putnam Division of the New York Central Railroad. The original station house was built in 1888 but burnt to the ground soon after. The station was replaced in 1910 when the old Briarcliff Manor station was moved by flat car to the current location. The Putnam Line ended passenger service in 1958; the line was abandoned and now serves as the North County Trailway rail trail.
Althea Garrison is an American politician from Boston, Massachusetts who previously served a single term in the Massachusetts House of Representatives (1993–1995) and a partial term as an at-large councilor on the Boston City Council (2019–2020). She is considered the earliest transgender person known to have been elected to a state legislature in the United States. She was outed against her will by the Boston Herald after her 1992 election. She is a perennial candidate, having been an unsuccessful candidate for political office more than forty times.
The Greeley House is located at King and Senter streets in downtown Chappaqua, New York, United States. It was built about 1820 and served as the home of newspaper editor and later presidential candidate Horace Greeley from 1864 to his death in 1872. In 1979 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places along with several other properties nearby related to Greeley and his family.
The 2018 New York gubernatorial election occurred on November 6, 2018. Incumbent Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo won re-election to a third term, defeating Republican Marc Molinaro and several minor party candidates. Cuomo received 59.6% of the vote to Molinaro's 36.2%.
From October 2016, to November 2017, SAG-AFTRA, representing voice actors went on strike against 11 American video game companies over failed contract renegotiation terms of the Interactive Media Agreements that had been in discussion since February 2015. Principally, the union sought to have actors and voice and motion capture performers that contribute to video games be better compensated with residuals based on video game sales atop their existing recording payments, while the industry companies asserted that the industry as a whole eschews the use of residuals, and by giving the actors these, they would trivialize the efforts of the developers that are most responsible for the development of the games. In exchange, the companies had offered a fixed increase in rates and a sliding-scale upfront bonus for multiple recording sessions, which the union had rejected. Other issues highlighted by the strike action include better transparency in what roles and conditions actors would perform, more safety precautions and oversight to avoid vocal stress for certain roles, and better safety assurances for actors while on set.
Michaela Antonia Jaé Rodriguez, formerly known as Mj Rodriguez, is an American actress and singer. Born in Newark, New Jersey, Rodriguez attended several performing arts schools in her youth before being cast in a theater production of Rent as Angel Dumott Schunard, winning the 2011 Clive Barnes Award for her performance.
The 1980 actors strike was a labor strike held in July–October 1980 by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), two labor unions representing actors in the American film industry. The strike was caused by a breakdown in labor contract negotiations between the two unions and representatives of film studios, television networks, and other independent producers. The primary point of contention regarded residuals from home media, such as videocassettes and pay television. Specifically, the union was seeking a form of profit sharing wherein they would receive a percentage of the revenue made from home media releases. Additionally, the unions wanted a 35 percent salary increase across the board for their members. By mid-July, the union and industry representatives were at an impasse, and the strike started on July 21. Several days later, the American Federation of Musicians also went on strike for similar reasons.
...said former correspondent [Kristen Browde], now a producer for the syndicated newsmagazine "Hard Copy"