US vice-president’s niece fends off ‘nepo baby’ claims

In the years before her aunt rose from the relative obscurity of California’s legislature to the White House, Meena Harris was selling T-shirts with feminist slogans to a small but dedicated customer base.
It wasn’t until 2020 — when her mother’s sister, Kamala Harris, made history as the first woman to become vice-president — that Harris’s brand was catapulted to national recognition.
America loves a political dynasty, and the Harris family is no different. However, Harris’s sudden success has left her fending off accusations of being a “nepo baby” profiting from her aunt’s office.
Now that Kamala Harris is carving a path to the Oval Office as the Democratic nominee for president, her entrepreneur niece has come under renewed scrutiny as she continues to build up her sprawling, multi-million dollar business empire.
Harris, 39, has since branched out into children’s books and invested in an “anti-patriarchal” personal finance app, as well as a media production company. One of her latest ventures has seen her co-produce Suffs, a Broadway musical about women’s suffrage.
“Went to work, ended up at the first Kamala rally,” she posted on her Instagram page alongside a video of a Suffs audience chanting the vice-president’s name, the day after Joe Biden stepped aside.
Harris has long been “fun aunty Kamala’s” biggest champion. Born Meenakshi Ashley Harris in 1984 to her teenage mother, Maya, two years Kamala’s junior, she grew up in a single-parent household. Harris has described Kamala Harris as being like a second mother to her.
When Harris was 14, Maya Harris married Tony West, a lawyer active in Democratic politics. West would serve as the third highest-ranking official in Barack Obama’s Justice Department, under Eric Holder.
Maya Harris, who had gone back to school to study law after dropping out of high school to raise her daughter, would serve as executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, and later as an adviser to Hillary Clinton.
After graduating from Stanford in 2006, Harris went to work at Facebook, where she would meet her future husband, Nikolas Ajagu.
She then took a change of direction, enrolling at Harvard to study law. She was a clerk at the DC Circuit Court of Appeals before finding work at Holder’s law firm, Covington & Burling. With her aunt and both parents involved in Democratic Party politics, it was perhaps inevitable that Harris would join them.
She worked in San Francisco as a senior adviser on policy and communications for Kamala Harris’s Senate campaign in 2016, using her experience at Facebook to boost her online profile.
Harris married Ajagu that same year and the couple had two children. She said in an interview that she was trying to raise her own daughters, Amara, seven, and Leela, five, the same way her mother raised her. “I think I’m borrowing and replicating, and trying to carry on that legacy of how I was raised,” she said.
She took on a side gig printing and selling a run of T-shirts emblazoned with phrases such as “I’m an entrepreneur, bitch”. Amid the outpouring of feminist sentiment following Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, she launched a brand, Phenomenal, and a social justice organisation, Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign.
Harris explained her burgeoning fashion brand in an interview by saying: “Women in charge — and powerful women making a difference — as a kid, that’s all I knew!”
Partly as a result of the T-shirt series and its ties to famous women backing Kamala Harris, Harris was approached by Uber, where her stepfather, Tony West, works as the chief legal officer.
One consultant told Politico that the hiring of the daughter of a powerful Democratic family was a “logical move” for a company whose business model depended on political leverage. It did not always work out that way, however.
“There were a few uncomfortable moments, like when Proposition 22 came up,” one former Uber employee told The Times, referring to a California ballot measure allowing rideshare companies such as Uber to continue operating. “Kamala was dead against it, while Tony was working pretty hard to get it passed.”
Harris left Uber in the months leading up to the 2020 election to concentrate on Phenomenal, which had begun attracting celebrity attention. Stars from Serena Williams to Naomi Campbell began wearing her “Phenomenally Black” T-shirt as Black Lives Matter protests took hold across the country.
Harris said that the brand was “not something that I want to be using to promote the candidacy of a family member”. However, after Joe Biden selected Kamala Harris as his running mate, Phenomenal launched a line of “Vice President Aunty” and “MVP” — madam vice-president — sweatshirts.
Several of the children’s books she wrote in the months after, including Kamala and Maya’s Big Idea, were inspired by her mother and aunt. Another, Ambitious Girl, was conceived, Harris said, in response to criticisms that her aunt was “too ambitious”.
“There was a particular moment when someone called one of my family members ‘too ambitious’ and it was amplified by the media,” Harris told The Cut website in 2021. The interview about what inspired the book was published the day before Kamala Harris was sworn into office.
“It sends a signal to women: this is how the world views female ambition, and as a consequence we hide it,” she said.
Harris did a series of interviews that year to promote her various brands, with British Vogue, The New York Times and Business Insider, among others. Her increasing public profile helped her amass millions of followers on Instagram, TikTok and other platforms.
She partnered with Beats by Dre to release a line of headphones engraved with the phrase “The First but Not the Last”, in homage to Kamala Harris’s status as the first black or Indian vice-president.
Harris represents a unique challenge for public servants in the internet influencer era. Issue One, a government ethics watchdog, has warned against lines between personal relationships, public service and “cashing in” becoming blurred.
Relatives capitalising on their proximity to power is nothing new. In the 1970s, Billy Carter launched “Billy Beer” shortly after his brother, Jimmy Carter, was sworn in as president. More recently, Ivanka Trump had an eponymous clothes line.
Concerned with the optics for the Democrats, who had criticised Ivanka’s fashion brand for being emblematic of the nepotism rife within the Trump administration, the Biden White House issued a statement on Phenomenal at the time, saying, “some things can’t be undone, but that being said, behaviour needs to change”.
White House lawyers reportedly told Harris after Kamala Harris took office that she could no longer produce any products that used the vice-president’s name or likeness. “It was always our plan to remove the likeness of the vice-president from the website before the inauguration, and refrain from using her likeness in any products or campaigns going forward,” Harris said in a statement.
However, she later told the New York Times: “I’m not an elected official. I’m not formally accountable as a public servant, and I think sometimes, people do kind of treat you that way if you have a public profile.”
A Democratic strategist who worked with the Biden administration said they felt Harris piggy-backing off the family name was “unsavoury”. “I mean, we can’t be calling Ivanka a grifter for using the Trump name when our own is doing the same thing,” they said. “It wasn’t a great look then and definitely wouldn’t be now.”
• How the 2024 US election became a battle of the sexes
Although Harris no longer overtly uses her aunt’s name and face, her stock is only set to rise, with Kamala Harris on course to take up the highest office in the land — which pundits dubbed a “once-in-a-lifetime branding opportunity”.
“The vice-president’s family members have independent, professional careers,” Ernie Apreza, the vice-president’s government press secretary, said.
“There is no involvement between the vice-president and any of the professional endeavours her family members pursue, nor do any of the vice-president’s family members use her name in connection with any commercial activities that could reasonably be understood to imply an endorsement or support.”