Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre revealed Tuesday that she kept her mother’s cancer battle a secret to almost everyone – except former President Joe Biden — because as a black woman, she felt she wasn’t allowed to be “vulnerable at work.”
Jean-Pierre, in a piece for Vanity Fair, cited her mother’s intense privacy and her own belief that sharing the diagnosis would have been seen “as an excuse” as the reason she kept her “second full-time job” of coordinating her mother’s care close to the vest.
“[S]ociety doesn’t allow women of color to be vulnerable at work,” the former White House spokeswoman argued. “When you’re a first, you don’t get the benefit of the doubt.”
“I’m the first Black press secretary. The first person of color press secretary. The first openly queer press secretary. The first Haitian American immigrant press secretary. The first press secretary to be all of the above. Being a first meant that my responsibilities were beyond those in the job description, the load heavier. I bear a certain responsibility to the communities I represent,” Jean-Pierre wrote.
Jean-Pierre, 50, said her mother was diagnosed with stage II colon cancer diagnosis just a couple months after the pair attended Biden’s first state dinner in December 2022.
Her mother told her that attending the event marked “the happiest day of my life,” but the evening would sadly be the last time Jean-Pierre “recognized my mother as the woman I grew up with,” she said.
The former Biden staffer said she found out about the cancer diagnosis while on a trip with the president to Poland.
“Don’t tell anyone. Do not tell the president I have cancer,” Jean-Pierre recalled her mother telling her.
However, Jean-Pierre acknowledged that Biden was “one of only a few people at the White House” who knew about it.
She said the then president “showed up for me” during the ordeal.
Jean-Pierre said she would drive from Washington to New York “every weekend I could to see my mom,” which resulted in her getting only “a few hours of sleep” before showing up for work at the White House.
Jean-Pierre’s tenure as White House press secretary was marked by internal power struggles and several infamous public moments.
As questions about Biden’s mental acuity mounted, Jean-Pierre accused the media of making and reporting on“cheap fakes” where the 82-year-old former president appeared “especially frail or mentally confused.”
She routinely dismissed questions about Biden’s fitness for office and re-election as “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
In one of her more eyebrow-raising exchanges as press secretary, Jean-Pierre claimed that “high turnout and voter suppression can take place at the same time” as a result of Georgia’s voting laws – which she described as “Jim Crow 2.0.”
Last April, The Post reported that top Biden aides, unsatisfied with the press secretary’s job performance, secretly hatched a plan in the fall of 2023 to replace her by recruiting prominent Democrats to encourage her to seek a different career. The plot failed – and at her final White House briefing earlier this month, Jean-Pierre refused to let a national security expert discuss the Israel-Hamas cease-fire over fear that it would distract from her “goodbye party.”
