Usha Vance, the wife of Ohio Sen. JD Vance was thrust into the national spotlight after former President Donald Trump chose her husband as his running mate Monday.
Usha Vance, née Chilukuri, born in 1986, was raised in San Diego, California, and attended Yale Law School, where she met the future Ohio senator, according to a report from the New York Times.
‘We were friends, and I liked that he was very diligent,’ she told NBC News about how she met her husband in a 2017 interview. ‘He would show up at 9 a.m. appointments that I would set up for us to start working on the brief together.’
‘The thing that I remember most about Usha is just how completely forward and comfortable with herself she was,’ the Ohio senator said of his wife during the interview. ‘(She was) so defensive about the things that she really cared about.’
Before law school, Vance received a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale and a master’s in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge.
The pair married in 2014 and have three children together: sons, Ewan, 6, and Vivek, 4, and a daughter, Mirabel, 2.
Vance completed multiple clerkships after her graduation from Yale, according to an Axios report, including for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he was serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
She would later work for Munger, Tolles & Olson, a California law firm that described its culture as ‘radically progressive,’ the report notes.
Vance has also worked to defend the University of California against allegations it violated Title IX and the Walt Disney Company against claims of copyright infringement.
The wife and mother of three has in the past expressed skepticism of the possibility that her husband could be Trump’s vice presidential pick, telling Fox News last month such a decision would change the couple’s lives.
‘I’m not raring to change anything about our lives right now,’ she said while noting she is ‘open’ to whatever happens.
