With Robert Menendez Indicted, His Children Feel Spotlight’s Glare

It was the night before federal prosecutors would reveal explosive bribery charges against Senator Robert Menendez, and his adult children appeared unaware of the news storm that was about to hit the family.

Alicia and Rob Menendez seemed to be in great spirits at a glitzy political gala celebrating a new generation of Latino leaders.

Ms. Menendez, an increasingly high-profile anchor on the cable news network MSNBC, stood before a room filled with Latino politicians, media executives and entertainment figures, as the emcee of the annual Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute party in Washington.

Among those in attendance was her brother, a Democratic congressman from New Jersey who is in his first term representing a majority Hispanic district, a seat once held by his father.

In her opening remarks that evening last fall, Ms. Menendez exuded confidence, poise and glamour. The event was a triumph for the Menendezes, who hammed it up in selfies that Ms. Menendez shared the following morning.

“So fun to host @chcidc’s 46th Annual Awards Gala,” she wrote on Instagram. “Sibling time was a bonus.”

The Menendezes have surely enjoyed the privileges of being children of a powerful political leader. But the very next day, they began to confront — not for the first time — a corollary dynamic: the anguish and embarrassment of having their father accused of public corruption.

Amid heart emojis in praise of her performance the night before, Ms. Menendez’s Instagram feed became littered with comments like “How corrupt is your family?” and “Your dad’s going to the gallows.”

Since then, the drama has been relentless. Just this month, new developments have underscored the gravity of the case against the Menendezes’ father, who, with his wife, Nadine Menendez, is accused of accepting bribes of gold, cash and a Mercedes-Benz in exchange for an array of political favors.

After a former ally pleaded guilty and began cooperating with prosecutors, Senator Menendez and Nadine Menendez were additionally charged with obstructing justice. Both have pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Alicia and Rob Menendez used to be game to talk publicly about their father, joking about his penchant for playing Super Mario Bros., his love of musical theater — “Wicked” is his favorite show, they said in a 2011 campaign ad — and his bragging about being on the varsity bowling team in high school.

These days, they are understandably less eager to talk about him. But their desire for privacy is complicated by the fact that they too are public figures who cannot, without sacrificing their own careers, avoid a public spotlight.

Rob Menendez, 38, is fighting for political survival in a Democratic primary that falls less than a month after the day his father’s trial is expected to start, May 6. The men share a name, and Senator Menendez has not ruled out running for re-election — leaving open the possibility that both could appear on the same ballot and confuse voters.

Alicia Menendez, 40, has been forced to address the charges against her father — and calls for his resignation — on live television.

The legal drama has unfolded in parallel with important events in the siblings’ own careers. Earlier this month, a judge ordered Senator Menendez and his wife back to court just as Alicia and Rob were preparing for President Biden’s State of the Union address — Alicia would be contributing to MSNBC’s live coverage of the event, and Rob would be in attendance, a member of the congressional assembly.

Friends and colleagues say that it is a challenging time emotionally and professionally for Alicia and Rob Menendez, both of whom declined through spokesmen to comment for this article.

They are unlikely — however unfair it may be — to escape the stigma of the allegations against their father, said Sally Quinn, the longtime Washington Post writer who does not know the Menendezes but has observed the familial fallout of political scandal from the Nixons to the Clintons to the Cuomos to the Trumps.

“When your close loved one is at the center of a political scandal,” she said, “it’s in your obit too.”

On the afternoon of Jan. 2, Alicia Menendez was sitting in the most high-profile seat of her career, filling in for Nicolle Wallace on the highly rated MSNBC news show, “Deadline: White House.”

She was conducting a live interview with an airline safety consultant when she abruptly ended the conversation. “We’re going to take a quick break, and we’ll be back with some breaking news right after this,” she said.

Seconds later, Ms. Menendez was gone, and a colleague was on the air in her place. “Hello, I’m Ari Melber with some breaking legal news,” he said. “New Jersey United States Senator Robert Menendez now facing new allegations in a second superseding indictment.”

Ms. Menendez’s quick exit that day was part of a promise she had made to viewers months earlier, when her father was first indicted.

“I have been watching along with all of you as a citizen, and also as his daughter,” she said on the air in September. “I will not be reporting on the legal case.”

In the past, she has described herself as someone who cries easily, but that day she betrayed no emotion. She concluded by saying that her colleagues would continue to cover the story, “as they should.”

Asked if MSNBC was troubled by the complications of Ms. Menendez’s connection to the subject of a significant political scandal, a spokesman for the network declined to comment or to make available any of her colleagues, producers or bosses to discuss her work.

Ms. Menendez has been grappling with the realities of being a politician’s daughter for years. “You can’t have a private life as an elected official,” she told The Washington Post in 2013. “It’s not a family-friendly institution.”

She and her brother were raised in Union City, N.J., a densely packed city in northern New Jersey that for decades has been a hub of immigrant life. Their father is the child of Cuban immigrants, and their mother, Jane Jacobsen, is of Irish-German-Norwegian descent — a “gringa,” as Alicia wrote in a 2012 essay. She said that Ms. Jacobsen helped to instill in her children a strong Latino identity, even if they did not speak Spanish. (Their parents divorced in 2005.)

When she and her brother were young, their mother was a teacher and guidance counselor, and the family lived in an apartment above their father’s law firm. “He was terrible at making money,” Ms. Menendez told The Washington Post.

Mr. Menendez became mayor of Union City and was elected to Congress when Alicia was 9. She spent “Take Your Daughter to Work” days at the Capitol. Though Mr. Menendez traveled frequently to Washington, he remained a demanding figure. “Dad was an original tiger mom,” she told The New York Times in 2015.

Ms. Menendez landed at Harvard University, class of 2005. She majored in women’s studies, was the president of an elite “final club” and considered herself an “ethnically ambiguous feminist,” she said in a 2004 article in The Harvard Crimson.

Her ambitions were set on politics. She worked for Jon Corzine’s New Jersey gubernatorial campaign (when Mr. Corzine won, he appointed then-Representative Robert Menendez to his seat in the U.S. Senate). And she managed the campaigns of peers running for Harvard student government, including Rohit Chopra, now director of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

“She really could sell a pork chop to a rabbi,” Mr. Chopra said, describing Ms. Menendez’s political skills to The Crimson in 2004.

She worked in television production and progressive politics, eventually focusing on media. She appeared on HuffPost Live, Fusion and PBS before landing at MSNBC in 2019.

She is also the host of a podcast, “Latina to Latina,” a weekly interview show, now in its sixth year. As an interviewer, “she has this ability to bring people to the point of self-discovery,” said Juleyka Lantigua, who owns and produces the podcast with Ms. Menendez.

At MSNBC, she was the solo anchor of the network’s “American Voices” program, which first aired in 2020, and is now one of three anchors on “The Weekend,” with Michael Steele and Symone D. Sanders Townsend.

Ms. Menendez is a go-to source of support and strategy for friends, said Jose Antonio Vargas, a journalist and immigrant rights activist.

Before Mr. Vargas, who was born in the Philippines, revealed himself to be an undocumented immigrant in a 2011 New York Times Magazine story, he turned to Ms. Menendez for advice. He stayed on her couch in her Washington apartment, and she prepared him to answer tough questions from the public and from TV personalities like Bill O’Reilly. “She is the kind of person that you want in a crisis,” Mr. Vargas said.

(Ms. Menendez has interviewed Mr. Vargas on her news shows, as she has other friends, including Mr. Chopra, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director, who declined to comment.)

In a crisis of her own, Ms. Menendez has maintained her composure, Mr. Vargas said. Last fall, she joined him for a Broadway performance of “Here Lies Love,” a play he helped to produce. It was the first time he had seen her since her father was first indicted.

“How are you holding up?” he asked her.

“I am OK,” he said she told him, in a manner that didn’t invite further questions. “I can tell from the way she looked at me that that was all I could ask.”

While Alicia Menendez has seemingly found a way to keep the bribery scandal at arm’s length, it has been more difficult for her brother, whose career is more overtly tied to their father.

Two years ago, Rob Menendez announced he would run for his father’s former congressional seat, and he was instantly embraced by a cadre of powerful New Jersey politicians, essentially guaranteeing him a win in the heavily Democratic district. He traded a job at a law firm where he was earning $456,000 a year for a seat in Washington and a commuter marriage — something his father cautioned, from experience, would be a strain on his wife and two young children, according to a confidant of both men.

He has since focused heavily on constituent services and sought to carve out a bipartisan policy niche. It is an effort driven by a desire to prove his mettle and to dispatch the whispers that he is in Congress only because he was anointed, according to interviews with more than a dozen colleagues, constituents and friends.

“He has really made strides to get out from under — from the beginning — his father’s umbrella,” said Jimmy Davis, the mayor of Bayonne, N.J., one of the largest cities in the congressional district. “His thing was to make his mark and to set his own legacy.”

But even as he tries to chart his own course, he appears intent on remaining the same loyal son who, at 32 years old, was the first witness called by his father’s defense team during an unrelated 2017 corruption trial that ended with a hung jury.

In September, after Senator Menendez was again charged with accepting bribes, a cascade of prominent Democrats in New Jersey began calling for the senator’s resignation.

Rob Menendez has not.

“He’s my father,” he said in a recent interview on PBS, by way of explanation.

“In a situation where a family member is going through a challenge, you support them,” he added, noting that “everybody deserves their shot in court to present their case.”

But there is little doubt that his father’s legal troubles have cast a shadow on Rob Menendez’s re-election effort.

In a state where party bosses can tamp down most viable primary challenges, particularly for popular incumbents, he is locked in a spirited contest for the Democratic nomination with the mayor of Hoboken, Ravi Bhalla.

Unlike in his first race in 2022, Rob Menendez struggled to raise money last year; as of January Mr. Bhalla had raised three times as much for the June 4 primary. Senator Menendez’s trial is scheduled to take place in the weeks before the election, creating a potential public-relations disaster for his son.

“Clearly it is a horrible situation, and he doesn’t deny that,” said Bill Matsikoudis, a political supporter and friend. The congressman’s strategy, Mr. Matsikoudis said, was to “double down on his work in the capital” and to be omnipresent in the district.

“I’ve seen some pretty impressive maturity, actually,” Mr. Matsikoudis said.

But in late January, a social media feud flared between Mr. Menendez and Mr. Bhalla that vividly demonstrated his vulnerabilities.

Mr. Bhalla called Mr. Menendez the “entitled son of corrupt Bob ‘Gold Bar’ Menendez.” Mr. Menendez said Mr. Bhalla’s “posturing” about ending machine politics in New Jersey “was as believable as Donald Trump being a stable genius.”

Each campaign has since released an internal poll that showed their candidate had the edge, and Democratic strategists expect the election to be close.

“Rob came out of the gate already swinging,” said Hector Oseguera, a left-leaning Democrat who competed in 2020 for the seat Rob Menendez now holds and has been following the race closely. “That says he’s concerned.”