Jackie Speier

Karen Lorraine Jacqueline Speier ( ; born May 14, 1950) is an American lawyer and politician who served as the U.S. representative for , serving in Congress from 2008 to 2023. A member of the Democratic Party, Speier represented much of the territory that her political mentor, Leo Ryan, represented. In 1978, while working as his aide, Speier survived five gunshot wounds when Ryan was assassinated during the Jonestown massacre. Speier was a member of the California State Senate, representing parts of San Francisco and San Mateo counties. On April 8, 2008, she won the special election for the vacated United States House of Representatives seat of the late Congressman Tom Lantos. In 2021, she announced that she would not seek reelection in the 2022 midterm elections. Early life and education Speier was born in 1950 in San Francisco, and grew up in an apolitical family, the daughter of Nancy (née Kanchelian) and Manfred "Fred" Speier. Her mother, who was born in Fresno of Armenian descent, lost most of her extended family in the Armenian genocide, while her father was an immigrant from Germany. He was the son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. Speier took Jacqueline as her confirmation name after Jackie Kennedy. She is a graduate of Mercy High School in Burlingame. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Davis, and a Juris Doctor from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in 1976. Marriage and family Speier's first marriage was to Steven Sierra, an emergency-room doctor, in 1987. In 1988, they had a son, Jackson Kent, while she was a member of the California State Assembly. Sierra died in a car crash in 1994 at age 53. At the time, Speier was two months pregnant with their second child, a daughter she named Stephanie.