SACRAMENTO — Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Sacramento) announced via Twitter that she got married over the weekend.
“On a beautiful Easter weekend Roger Sant and I got married,” she tweeted on Tuesday. “It was a lovely ceremony joined virtually by our kids and grandkids. Despite the crisis we are in and the uncertainty of when it will end, love & joy are still a part of this world; life must be celebrated & cherished.”
Earlier this year, Matsui announced that she planned to marry Sant, a Washington, D.C. billionaire who co-founded Applied Energy Service, in May.
Born Doris Okada in the Poston camp during World War II, Matsui, 75, graduated from UC Berkeley and married Robert Matsui, a lawyer, in 1966. He was elected to the Sacramento City Council in 1971 and to Congress in 1978. Re-elected 13 times, he served in the House until his death in 2005 at age 63. That same year, Mrs. Matsui won a special election to succeed him, and she has been re-elected seven times.
Doris Matsui served as deputy special assistant and deputy director of public liaison for President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1998, and was a Washington lobbyist for corporate clients before running for Congress. She has a son, Brian, and two grandchildren, Anna and Robby.
Among other positions, she is a member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, Congressional Caucus on Women’s Issues, National Service Caucus, and Smithsonian Institution Board of Regents.
Prior to starting AES, a Fortune 200 company, in 1981, Sant was assistant administrator for energy conservation and the environment at the Federal Energy Administration. He was also director of the Energy Productivity Center and a lecturer in finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Sant is co-founder and chairman of The Summit Foundation, which provides support for international empowerment of girls, the restoration of the Mesoamerican Reef ecosystem, and radically improving the sustainability of U.S. cities; and of The Summit Fund of Washington, which focuses its efforts on cleaning up the Anacostia River and reducing the incidence teen pregnancy in the District of Columbia.
Sant served as a regent of the Smithsonian from 2001 to 2013; is vice chairman of the board of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History; and is on the board of the World Wildlife Fund-U.S., which he previously chaired and later co-chaired.
He was married to Washington philanthropist Victoria Sant, who died in 2018.