| Patricia Duff | |
|---|---|
| Born | April 12, 1954 [57 years old] Los Angeles, California |
Patricia Duff (born Patricia Michelle Hoar) is an American actress, political activist and a United States Democratic Party fundraiser.
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Duff studied international economics at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and served on the House Select Committee on Assassinations as a researcher, Special Assistant to the Chief Counsel and Public Information Officer.
After producing a series of brief biographies on great American women for KTTV, she helped former Presidential speech writer, John McLaughlin, launch a live political talk radio show. She left to work for the re-election campaign of President Jimmy Carter at the Democratic National Committee and, because of her research on the Ronald Reagan and John B. Anderson backgrounds, was eventually hired to work with presidential pollster Pat Caddell. Following her work on that campaign, she was made Vice President of Caddell's firm and worked on many political statewide campaigns and corporate marketing campaigns until she was hired to join the Squier-Eskew consulting firm.
After working on numerous senate and gubernatorial campaigns, Duff moved in 1984 to Los Angeles to work with the Gary Hart Presidential campaign. While married to Medavoy, Duff was an activist in Democratic Party politics and other environmental and political issues. She was regularly cited in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Social Diary called her "the most high profile entertainment industry-related female political figure in Los Angeles" after Jane Fonda.
In the late 1980s, Duff started an entertainment industry-related non-partisan political organization called Show Coalition, which soon became an important element in the nexus between Washington politics and Hollywood. Duff was instrumental in introducing then-Governor Bill Clinton to entertainment industry and business leaders. Clinton was relatively unknown in national party politics and was only one of many potential candidates and party leaders whom Duff presented to Southern California Democrats.
While with Ronald Perelman, Duff became the Chair of the Women's Vote Campaign and co-chaired the New York finance efforts for the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign.
In 1976, she married Thomas O. Zabrodsky. The marriage lasted about a year. She then married a Washington attorney by the name of Daniel Duff. She has kept that name and excised her marriage to Zabrodsky even going so far as telling people that they were never married.
In 1984 she met Orion Pictures' head of film production, Mike Medavoy. They were married from May 1986 to 1994. It was reported in Vanity Fair that at a dinner party at a producer's home, which took place after she and then-husband Medavoy had slept in the Lincoln Bedroom, she told the gathering that Clinton was "a full-service president." [1]
Duff was wooed by billionaire businessman Ronald Perelman to New York City. The couple aggressively attempted in vitro fertilisation and they had a daughter, Caleigh, in late 1994. Duff converted to Judaism.[2] The couple married, but filed for divorce after 18 months.
This marriage to Perelman turned into rancorous notoriety for the couple, whose divorce and custody proceedings drew extensive media attention in the late 1990s. During the high-profile, costly, and contentious divorce, Perelman allegedly told Duff, "I will destroy you, and I will enjoy it".[3] Duff was ultimately awarded about $150,000 a year. Perelman claimed in court that a child could survive "on three dollars a day," and was branded by one tabloid as "the meanest dad in America” . The total settlement in their divorce was estimated at $30 million. Thirteen year old daughter Caleigh Perelman went to court June 23, 2008, to obtain an order of protection from Duff. It was denied. Duff claimed Perelman was behind this.[4]