In 2016, she wanted Hillary Clinton to win. Soto was excited that a woman was running for president, and thought that Trump, then a cartoonish New York businessman mostly known for his reality TV show The Apprentice, didn’t have enough political experience for the job, a friend of hers from that time tells me. (Like many people I spoke to for this story, the friend did not want to be named.) They were both horrified by what they saw as Trump’s misogynistic treatment of women.
Soto’s drift from the Democrats solidified during the pandemic, following what she described online as the “George Floyd riots,” the Democratic Party’s “aggressive and authoritarian response to COVID,” and the realization she had been “manipulated and lied to by the mainstream media about Donald Trump.”
Like Trump, Soto gravitated toward celebrity. In 2015, she got a job working as an intern and then as a personal assistant at Kris Jenner’s communications firm. In late 2017, she was hired as an assistant to Corinne Olympios, a popular reality star who had become known as the villain on the 21st season of The Bachelor. According to Olympios, Soto was “very intense” and was “outspoken” about her views. The relationship quickly soured. Olympios tells me she cut ties with Soto after only a few months, following an incident in Aspen, which Olympios declined to elaborate on.
After leaving LA for San Francisco in 2018, Soto got a health-coach certification from an online training provider called the Institute for Integrative Nutrition; she started posting wellness content online and launched a business offering health advice. In 2022, she attended a retreat in Costa Rica called “La Luna,” which was designed to help women find energetic balance. When I spoke to someone who was also there, she told me the process involved unpacking how society has stripped women of their “feminine energy” and encouraged them to adopt “masculine energy,” which she says meant things like prioritizing their careers and delaying motherhood.
In March 2024, Brin was fresh off his second divorce when he was photographed with Soto at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in Beverly Hills. The pair had started dating in 2023 after meeting at a mutual friend’s house in San Francisco. Brin’s first wife, Anne Wojcicki, the cofounder of genetics testing company 23andMe, was also at the Vanity Fair event, and posed with the couple on the red carpet. Brin had met Wojcicki in the early days of Google, when he and his cofounder, Larry Page, rented a garage belonging to Wojcicki’s sister to use as office space. After the couple divorced in 2015, Brin married Nicole Shanahan, a lawyer, and they had a daughter together. But the marriage was short lived. Shanahan allegedly had a brief affair with Elon Musk, a claim Shanahan and Musk both publicly denied, and she and Brin separated in 2021 after about three years of marriage. (Shanahan and Wojcicki did not respond to requests for comment.)