Diana Taylor, a former New York banking superintendent, has been the longtime girlfriend of former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg since 2000.
Bloomberg’s presidential candidacy has recently raised questions about alleged sexist comments he’s made in the past and the way he has treated women who worked at his company.
So who is the woman who has been by his side for the last 20 years?
After Bloomberg was attacked by Sen. Elizabeth Warren during a Feb. 19 presidential debate in Las Vegas for misogynistic remarks and holding women at his company to non-disclosure agreements, Taylor defended the accusations at “not who he is.”
“Those NDAs were signed 30 years ago,” she said after speaking at a Bloomberg campaign event on Feb. 24. “They have come up in every single solitary election he has ever been in. And in none of them was he accused of doing anything, saying something nasty to a woman. That is not who he is. Life has changed. I grew up in that world. It was a bro culture.”
Bloomberg said in February that he would allow women who made “complaints about comments they said I had made” to be released from their NDAs.
MIKE BLOOMBERG’S WALL STREET EXEC GIRLFRIEND ON NDAS: ‘GET OVER IT’
Taylor, once known as the First Lady of New York, met Bloomberg at a Citizens Budget Commission luncheon in 2000, two years before the divorced father of two assumed the office of mayor, according to The New York Observer.
Her resume includes working as an aide to former New York Gov. George E. Pataki, a Republican, being superintendent of banking for the State of New York and being the managing director at Wall Street firm Wolfensohn, according to Heavy.
She was once described by The New York Times as Bloomberg’s “quietly glamorous sidekick” and is well-known for sporting couture from designers like Oscar de la Renta, Carolina Herrera, Ralph Rucci and Ralph Lauren, according to The Observer.
She was also once asked by Senate Republicans in New York to run against Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and said former President Barack Obama was presiding over a more divided nation, adding his “hopey-changey stuff … hasn’t worked very well,” according to Heavy.
Taylor was born in Greenwich, Conn., in 1995 to a schoolteacher and a biochemist.
She graduated from Dartmouth University with a master’s degree in business administration and has a degree in public health from Columbia University.
She was among the second class of women at Dartmouth to get a four-year degree from the university.
“There were 200 of us, or maybe 300 [women] and 3,000 [men] at the time,” she told The Observer in 2011. “It was so much fun. I had a blast; I loved it. And my best friends to this day are people I met my first week at Dartmouth.”
During the Women for Mike event in February, Taylor stressed the accusations against Bloomberg were “30 years ago. Get over it,” coloring her comments with her decades in the financial industry, which included birthday parties with strippers and meetings at men-only clubs where she had to arrive via the back stairs.
“That was the culture back then,” she added. “It takes time to change a culture. We have come a very, very long way and Michael Bloomberg has been at the forefront of that change.”
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The campaign pushed against Taylor’s words, calling them her “personal view” and not that of the campaign.
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