Sen. Dianne Feinstein's Husband, Richard Blum, Dies At 86

Sarah Ruiz-Grossman
·2 min read

Richard Blum, the husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), died on Sunday at age 86 after living with cancer for years.

“My heart is broken today,” the Democratic senator, 88, said in a statement Monday, calling her husband her “partner and best friend for more than 40 years.”

“He was by my side for the good times and for the challenges,” she said. “I am going to miss him terribly.”

Blum was a philanthropist and chairman of investment firm Blum Capital Partners in San Francisco.

He was friends with the Dalai Lama and founded the American Himalayan Foundation in 1981, a nonprofit that worked on issues of human trafficking and health care in the region. Feinstein called it “one of his proudest achievements.”

He was also a member of the University of California Board of Regents for the past 20 years.

In his statement on Blum’s death, Gov. Gavin Newsom called Blum a “model Californian” who “lived an extraordinary life, [and] he left this world better than he found it.”

Amid a 2020 scandal over favoritism in some UC college admissions, Blum told The San Francisco Chronicle that he had written recommendation letters to chancellors to boost students’ applications “a bunch of times,” even as he held the powerful position of regent.

Feinstein lost her second husband, Bertram Feinstein, to cancer in 1978, after 16 years together, the Chronicle reported. Her first husband, Jack Berman, whom she divorced in 1960, died in 2002.

Blum grew up in San Francisco and attended the city’s elite public high school Lowell and then went to college across the bay, at UC Berkeley.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

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