Candace Owens was born Candace Amber Owens on April 29, 1989, in White Plains, New York, and spent most of her childhood in Stamford, Connecticut, after her parents divorced while she was still in elementary school. Raised largely by her paternal grandparents in a predominantly white neighborhood, she grew up listening to stories of her grandfather’s journey from picking cotton in North Carolina to running his own business, a narrative she would later invoke to argue that individual determination can overcome systemic barriers. At Stamford High she ran track, cheered, and looked forward to studying journalism at the University of Rhode Island, but money troubles forced her to leave during junior year; the truncated education still left her with enough polish and drive to land an internship at Vogue and, by 2012, a position as vice president of administration at a Manhattan private-equity firm.
The pivot that would redefine her life came from pain. In 2007, during her senior year, a group of classmates left a string of racially charged, threatening voice mails; when the school system, in her view, failed to protect her, she and her family sued and eventually accepted a thirty-seven-thousand-dollar settlement. The experience seeded two contradictory impulses: a loathing for what she later called liberal condescension and a fascination with the power of public storytelling. She first tried to address online cruelty in 2016 by launching a start-up called SocialAutopsy that would expose anonymous bullies, but the project was savaged from both left and right for privacy overreach, and the backlash became her political education. Watching commentators she had once admired line up against her, she concluded that conservatives were the only people willing to defend her right to speak, and overnight, as she later told an interviewer, she became “a conservative who realized that liberals were actually the racists”.
The conversion coincided with the rise of Donald Trump, and Owens rode the same populist wave. Adopting the YouTube handle RedPillBlack, she posted viral videos deriding identity politics, Black Lives Matter, and what she termed the “Democrat plantation,” quickly attracting millions of views and the admiration of far-right influencers. Charlie Kirk’s student activist group Turning Point USA hired her first as director of urban engagement and then as communications director, sending her to lecture campuses about free markets, personal responsibility, and the moral bankruptcy of welfare. In 2018 she founded the BLEXIT Foundation, urging African Americans to abandon the Democratic Party; within a few years the group claimed more than thirty state chapters and tens of thousands of event attendees. Her first book, Blackout, became a New York Times bestseller in 2020 by arguing that Democratic policies have spiritually and economically crippled Black America, and the success of the book helped her secure her own show at the Daily Wire, simply titled Candace.
Offstage, her life took on fairy-tale contours. In 2018 she met George Farmer, a British businessman active in the UK branch of Turning Point USA and the son of Conservative peer Lord Michael Farmer; the two married the following year at Trump Winery in Virginia, with Nigel Farage looking on. They now live in Nashville, where they are raising four small children born in quick succession, the latest arriving in July 2025. The household income, generated mainly from her broadcast company, is reported to reach ten million dollars a year, a dizzying distance from the months in 2017 when she faced eviction from a luxury Stamford apartment over unpaid rent.
Yet the same bluntness that built her empire keeps her at the center of controversy. She has called George Floyd “not a good person,” suggested that white supremacy is over-hyped, and repeatedly flirted with anti-Semitic tropes while defending Kanye West’s most incendiary remarks. In mid-2025 French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte sued her for defamation after she promoted the baseless claim that Brigitte had been born male; Owens replied that she is “fully prepared to take on this battle,” signaling that confrontation itself is part of the brand she intends to protect as she moves into the next phase of a life defined by reinvention and revolt.
From a quiet Connecticut girl negotiating the aftermath of divorce and racial trauma to a multimillionaire media powerhouse courted and condemned in equal measure, Candace Owens has fashioned a career out of the argument that the most authentic form of resistance is to walk away from the expectations placed on you—whether those expectations come from high-school tormentors, political parties, or the broader culture that assumes a young Black woman will vote, speak, and think a certain way. Where that argument will carry her next is, by design, impossible to predict; unpredictability has become both her method and her message.
