Candace Owens

Candace Amber Owens was born in White Plains, New York in 1989, but grew up in Stamford, Connecticut. She was raised mostly by her mother and grandparents from around the age of 11 or 12, after her parents divorced. She is the third of four children. Her paternal grandfather was Robert Owens, a black American who was born in North Carolina. Owens is also of Caribbean American heritage through her grandmother, who is originally from Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. She is a graduate of Stamford High School in Connecticut. In 2007, while a 17-year-old senior at Stamford High School, Owens received three racist death threat voicemail messages, totaling two minutes, from a group of white male classmates which included the son of then-mayor and future Democratic governor Dannel Malloy. Joshua Starr, the city's superintendent of schools, listened to the voicemail messages and said that they were "horrendous". Owens's family sued the Stamford Board of Education in federal court, alleging that the city did not protect her rights, resulting in a $37,500 settlement in January 2008. Owens pursued an undergraduate degree in journalism at the University of Rhode Island. She dropped out after her junior year because of an issue with her student loan. Afterwards, she worked as an intern for Vogue magazine in New York. In 2012, Owens took a job as an administrative assistant for a private equity firm in Manhattan, later moving up to become its vice president of administration.