Patton grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. Her father is epidemiologist Curtis L. Patton, who was a professor at Yale University; her mother was a homemaker. Patton graduated from the University of Miami with a B.A. in English literature. She attended the Quinnipiac University School of Law; school officials have stated that she was a student for only two semesters, and did not graduate. On her LinkedIn page, Patton previously claimed an affiliation with Yale University, which she had never attended.
Career
An Eric Trump Foundation staff biography of Patton states that she was involved in casting the 2012 and 2014 seasons of The Celebrity Apprentice. Patton was one of 16 unpaid directors at the Eric Trump Foundation, though her position did not appear in the Foundation's 2014 tax filings. Her HUD financial disclosures stated that she had been a vice president and a board member at the Eric Trump Foundation from January 2009 to January 2017, and she speaks of being with the Trump family since 2009. In May 2016, during Donald Trump's 2016 Presidential campaign, Patton narrated a YouTube video called "The Trump Family I Know – A Black Female Trump Executive Speaks Out," in which she defended Trump against accusations that he was racist. She spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention; the official convention program listed her position as "Vice President of The Eric Trump Foundation and Senior Assistant to Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, and Donald Trump, Jr." In her convention speech, she acknowledged historical racism, but said that Donald Trump knows that black lives, LGBTQ lives, veterans' lives, and police lives matter. Later in the campaign, Patton joined other campaign spokeswomen on the Trump-Pence Women's Empowerment Tour. She is a director of National Diversity Coalition for Trump.
Trump Administration
Beginning in January 2017, Patton served as a White House liaison and Director of Public Liaison for the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. Since the Trump Organization co-owns some properties that receive federal rental subsidies from HUD, her position raised questions of conflict of interest. Since July 5, 2017, Patton has served as head of Region II. She has no reported experience with housing policy. Congressional Representatives Grace Meng and Nydia Velázquez, both Democrats from New York, publicly urged the administration to reconsider the appointment. In January 2018, Patton called April Ryan, the White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief for American Urban Radio Networks, "Miss Piggy". Patton later apologized. In September 2018, Patton commented positively with two emojis on an Instagram post by Donald Trump Jr. mocking the assault allegations against Kavanaugh. That same month, she shared a 10-year-old photograph of CNN's Anderson Cooper during Hurricane Ike. She claimed that this demonstrated CNN's penchant for perpetuating sensationalism and fake news. In November 2018, Patton claimed that she would be moving from her New York apartment in Trump Plaza to public housing, saying, "It hit me like a ton of bricks that this is no longer okay," Patton said. "It was not okay for me to preside over the largest housing crisis in the nation from the warmth and comfort of my own safe and sanitary apartment while NYCHA residents continue to suffer the most inhumane conditions" and blamed the housing authority for ineptitude and indifference to the conditions "suffered by hard working residents." She began an announced month-long stay in NYCHA housing on February 11, 2019. On February 27, 2019, U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows presented Patton at the hearing of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen before the United States House Committee on Oversight and Reform to rebut Cohen's assertion that President Trump is a "racist." This prompted a sharp exchange later between Meadows and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who asserted, "The fact that someone would actually use a prop, a black woman, in this chamber in this committee is alone racist in itself." After being pressed by Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings on what she meant, Tlaib clarified her remarks and apologized to Meadows. In May 2019, after using her government Twitter account to share a partisan tweet, Patton controversially remarked "I honestly don't care" in regards to a potential violation of federal law under the Hatch Act. Patton received a warning letter from the Office of Special Counsel in September 2019 for two violations of the Hatch Act, but the OSC decided not to pursue disciplinary action and cleared her of two other alleged violations, one of which was the above mentioned tweet. In August 2019, she responded to the suicide of accused underage sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein with an Instagram post comparing Epstein's death to the conspiracy theory version of Vince Foster's 1993 suicide. The post read: "Hillary’d!! P.S. Let me know when I’m supposed to feel badly about this... #VinceFosterPartTwo".
Personal life
Patton says she has struggled with substance abuse and addiction, and publicly praised the Trump family for standing by her through tough times.
