Kristen Browde

Kristen Prata Browde 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 helping start CNN in the 1980s and 30 years as a reporter at NBC 4 News and CBS News in New York. 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. 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. She graduated from Cornell University in New York in 1972. At Cornell, she was a radio presenter on the university's radio station, WVBR-FM, and she played intramural hockey.

Career Journalism career and foray into law Browde first worked in radio new after graduating college, and first moved to television at station WNEW-TV (now WNYW-TV) in 1976. 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. She was also the network's first Supreme Court correspondent. In 1986, Browde and two other reporters were summoned by police to a Bronx building that Larry Davis was holding out in. 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. Davis surrendered to police after he was assured of the presence of his girlfriend and given the press credentials of the reporters. 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 Tribune-owned station WPIX-TV. 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.

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. 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. She later began freelance work for CBS News, where she was a weekend news anchor and a correspondent. 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." 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. Browde told The Hollywood Reporter that the allegations were false. In 1999 and 2003, Browde publicly expressed her opposition to the merger of SAG and AFTRA.

Legal career By 2013, Browde was practicing as a divorce attorney in Chappaqua, a hamlet in New Castle. 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". The New York Posts gossip section, Page Six, ran a print article on Browde's announcement with the headline "Journo Says He's a She". and she was elected president of its board in 2019. She was the first transgender person to hold the position. 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.

Political activities and activism Early activities (2013–2017) 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." 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.

New Castle supervisor campaign and other activities (2017–2019) In April 2017, Browde announced she would be running as a Democratic Party candidate for town supervisor of New Castle, (The position of New Castle town supervisor is equivalent to mayor.) 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). 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.

From 2017 to 2018, Browde served on the transition team of county executive of Westchester County, George Latimer. Also in 2018, state governor Andrew Cuomo appointed her to the steering committee of New York State Council on Women and Girls. Browde said that frustration around issues such as gun control motivated her to run for the assembly. 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). Later that year, Browde was appointed as one of 12 vice chairs of the Westchester County Democratic Party.

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." 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). Browde's videos have been featured by LGBT media outlets PinkNews and Them. 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. In 1988, Browde was engaged to Elizabeth J. Hellawell.

Browde has two children. 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. Maximilian wrote about his experience in an article published by The Journal News (LoHud.com).

Browde took the middle name Prata after her friend and coach, Monica Prata, a feminine image consultant based in Greenwich Village.