It was a splashy arrival. Kimberly Guilfoyle, the new United States ambassador to Greece, landed in Athens on the private jet of a multimillionaire Greek American businessman. She caused a sensation at a Thanksgiving week dinner in a partly sheer black evening dress. When she presented her diplomatic credentials to the Greek president, Constantine Tassoulas, she told him she had previously been to Greece on a “fabulous honeymoon, but …” and then trailed off.
“Honeymoon was fabulous, the marriage?” Mr. Tassoulas said lightly.
“We’ll work on a new husband,” Ms. Guilfoyle replied with a small laugh.
Recently, she turned up at an Athens nightclub for the 1:30 a.m. premiere show of her friend, one of the country’s most famous pop singers, Konstantinos Argiros, in a prime seat between her own personal stylist and a Greek businesswoman from a powerful shipping family. She got home in the very small hours of the morning.
“Oh, I wasn’t late, it was like before 3,” Ms. Guilfoyle, the former fiancée of President Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., as well as the former wife of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, said in a recent interview at Jefferson House, her sprawling, Mediterranean-style official residence in Athens.
Weeks after taking on her post, Ms. Guilfoyle, 56, has become the talk of Athens, followed by paparazzi, featured with smoky eyes on the cover of Vogue Greece and much discussed, at least initially, as the woman jilted by the president’s son. Greece was more used to U.S. ambassadors who were traditional foreign service officers, and some Greeks wondered if the Trump administration was disrespecting them with her appointment.
But Ms. Guilfoyle, 56, a former prosecutor in San Francisco and Los Angeles who is also a former Fox News host, has worked as hard as she plays, many Greeks say. By the nature of her position, her relentlessness and what her allies say is an open line to the Oval Office, she has become one of the most important people in the country.
“Everybody wants to meet her,” said Adonis Georgiadis, Greece’s health minister and a vice president of the governing conservative party, who worked with Ms. Guilfoyle on a collaboration to bring U.S. technology into Greece’s health care system. “When she came here, all my friends called me to ask me how she was in real life. I mean, even people who have never called me for anything.”
Ms. Guilfoyle has also become involved in business deals involving American interests — the development of a U.S.-backed port near Athens and the exploration for natural gas off the island of Corfu. Not everyone is pleased about that. Some members of the political opposition say she is too aggressively pushing an American agenda. And some Greek intellectuals cringe at all the fawning over her.
Still, mostly forgotten are her words on Fox during the Greek financial crisis in 2015, when she called Greeks “freeloaders” who should be punished like a dog that “pees on the rug.”
Five days after Ms. Guilfoyle’s arrival, she stood alongside Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum as Greece signed an agreement with Exxon Mobil to begin exploring for natural gas northwest of Corfu. Ms. Guilfoyle hailed the deal, part of the Trump administration’s efforts to counteract the European battle against climate change, as a victory for fossil fuels.
“America is back and drilling in the Ionian Sea,” she said.
Ten days later, she stood between Greece’s prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine for the announcement of a deal to import U.S. liquefied natural gas through Greece to Ukraine to help with the country’s energy needs this winter. Much of the gas will be transported across the Atlantic on Greek tankers and is to flow north to Ukraine by pipeline.
Both agreements were in the works long before Ms. Guilfoyle arrived in Athens, but Greek officials said she had jumped into the plans months earlier and wanted them announced on her watch. In September, a week after she was confirmed, she discussed the deals at the United Nations with Greece’s energy minister, Stavros Papastavrou, who said she got back to him in 24 hours with details on what the United States was committed to do, and then was what he called “a driving force” to get them completed.
“Usually you meet someone, and you introduce yourself, you say a few nice words,” Mr. Papastavrou said. Ms. Guilfoyle, he said, “is not about nice talk. She’s about doing things.” She often calls him at midnight, he added. “When we need to finish something, she’s someone who doesn’t have office hours.”
On another front, Ms. Guilfoyle set off a minor uproar when she called China’s effective control of Greece’s largest port, Piraeus, through a Chinese state company’s majority stake, as “unfortunate.” The Chinese Embassy in Athens denounced her remark as “malicious defamation,” and Greece made clear it was not about to put the port back on the market.
But the Greek government is now moving ahead with Ms. Guilfoyle on an American project to develop a new port in nearby Elefsina, which the Trump administration sees as a counterweight to China. “This is part of the president’s overall agenda for jumping back into the game,” Ms. Guilfoyle said in the interview.
She has not impressed George Katrougalos, the Greek foreign minister under the previous leftist government. Ms. Guilfoyle’s actions, he said, sometimes give “the impression that the United States is co-governing the country.”
Another skeptic is Constantinos Filis, a prominent commenter on U.S.-Greek relations and the director of the Institute of Global Affairs at the American College of Greece.
“Gossip shows talk about her every day, about her outfits, about her stylist, about her appearances,” he said, a reference to Ms. Guilfoyle’s embrace of the Trump style for women — Rapunzel hair, false eyelashes, plumped lips, figure-hugging sheath dresses and high heels.
“In terms of public relations, she has done an excellent job,” Mr. Filis said. But the “submissiveness” of so many Greeks lining up to meet her, he said, “makes us look like a Third World country.”
Mr. Georgiadis, the health minister, shrugged off the buzz. “When she was first named, the people were, ‘What’s that?’” he said. But the early energy deals, he said, have proved that she has substance.
“If she delivers,” he said, “who cares if she has a see-through dress?”
No Apologies
Ms. Guilfoyle was animated and intense in the interview, held in the residence’s library before a holiday party.
For 20 minutes, as an adjoining room grew noisy with arriving Greek government officials and business people, and with embassy diplomats, Ms. Guilfoyle spoke emphatically about Mr. Trump, the Ukraine deal, how she got the ambassadorship, Mr. Newsom and Donald Trump Jr., 48, who days before the interview had announced his engagement to Bettina Anderson, a socialite from Palm Beach, Fla.
“I’m happy for Don,” Ms. Guilfoyle said quickly. “I wish him, of course, all the best.”
She was engaged to the president’s son in late 2020, but in December 2024, the British tabloid The Daily Mail published photographs of Mr. Trump and Ms. Anderson holding hands in Palm Beach. Hours later, the president-elect announced Ms. Guilfoyle as his pick for ambassador to Greece.
The timing suggested it was a way to get Ms. Guilfoyle out of the country at an awkward time. Not so, at least according to Ms. Guilfoyle’s friend Stephen K. Bannon, one of the president’s top political allies.
“I don’t buy that at all,” Mr. Bannon said. “She had a bunch of options.”
As Ms. Guilfoyle tells it, the president-elect called her and said that he knew she was interested in becoming ambassador to Greece and that the job was hers. Ms. Guilfoyle’s interest in Greece, she said, came from courses she took in ancient history at the University of California, Davis.
Speaking about the Ukraine energy deal, and why she considers it so important, Ms. Guilfoyle invoked her 19-year-old son, Ronan, who lives with her in Athens.
“Imagine one day he walks in the room, and the next minute he walks out, and he has to go to war, and I never see him again,” she said. “It matters. We can’t get fatigued about it. We have to actually think and care. And in order to help facilitate peace, it is necessary for the Ukrainians to be able to have energy and power throughout the winter.”
She has no apologies about her active social life in Athens. “If it brings enthusiasm and interest in America and the economy and commerce and trade and our bilateral relationship, I’m all for that,” she said.
Her 1:30 a.m. appearance at the nightclub was an act of loyalty, she said. “It’s important to show up for your friends, for the people that are there for you. I think anyone that you talk to is going to tell you that I’m an incredibly loyal person. I have tremendous stamina.”
“That’s one of the things the president loves about me,” Ms. Guilfoyle added, “that I’m loyal, I’m smart, that I’m effective. And I’ll do whatever it takes to get the job done.”
Ms. Guilfoyle was last in Greece in the summer of 2004, when she went on the “fabulous” honeymoon with Mr. Newsom. They had married in 2001, and Ms. Guilfoyle described the 2004 trip as a “second honeymoon.” She also said that Mr. Newsom was “one thousand percent” running for president in 2028.
A Driven Child
Ms. Guilfoyle never imagined she would be an ambassador. Born and raised in San Francisco, she was 11 when her mother, from Puerto Rico, died of leukemia. Her father, an Irish immigrant, worked in construction.
She was by her own account a focused child, with ambitions that eventually took her to the University of San Francisco School of Law, where she helped pay her tuition by modeling clothing and lingerie.
She met Mr. Newsom in San Francisco’s political circles while working as an assistant district attorney. She married him when he was a city supervisor and became the eye-catching first lady of San Francisco when he was elected mayor in 2003.
“When they walked into a room, you would see her first,” said Mark Buell, a prominent San Francisco Democratic donor and a longtime friend of Mr. Newsom.
By September 2004, Harper’s Bazaar said the marriage “promises to be one of the most glamorous political unions since Jack and Jackie.” But by then Ms. Guilfoyle was living in New York as a legal analyst for CNN and ABC, and by 2006, she and Mr. Newsom were divorced.
That same year, she married a furniture heir, Eric Villency; gave birth to Ronan; and joined Fox News. She and Mr. Villency divorced in 2009.
Ms. Guilfoyle left Fox in 2018, when two people familiar with her exit told The New York Times on the condition of anonymity that she was forced to leave over questions about inappropriate workplace behavior. Two years later, Jane Mayer in The New Yorker reported that Ms. Guilfoyle was forced out because of sexual harassment allegations brought by a female assistant, including that Ms. Guilfoyle showed the assistant photographs of genitalia of men with whom Ms. Guilfoyle had had sexual relations, and told her to submit to a Fox employee’s demands for sexual favors.
The magazine reported that the assistant received a settlement of upward of $4 million. Ms. Guilfoyle denied the allegations through her lawyer at the time.
“I don’t have anything to say about that,” she said in the interview at Jefferson House. “It’s not relevant to my job.”
By 2018, Ms. Guilfoyle was dating the president’s son, whom she had met in New York, and growing closer to the Trump political operation. Mr. Trump put her in charge of major donor fund-raising for his 2020 re-election campaign. That summer, she delivered an unforgettable, high-decibel speech at the Republican National Convention. Mr. Bannon said he liked it.
“People needed a little screaming,” he said.
Ms. Guilfoyle ended the interview to tend to her party guests but took a moment to point out a framed document near the entrance that listed all the American ambassadors to Greece since 1948. Every one until Ms. Guilfoyle was a man.
“Here I am,” she said, pointing to her name. “I almost cried.”
Niki Kitsantonis contributed reporting.
Elisabeth Bumiller writes about the people, politics and culture of the nation’s capital, and how decisions made there affect lives across the country and the world.
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