Eduardo Tamayo is best known as the first husband of Tulsi Gabbard, the former Hawaii congresswoman who later became U.S. director of national intelligence. He and Gabbard married in 2002, when she was 21, and divorced four years later. He has given no interviews since and has kept out of public life, so most of what is known about him comes from Gabbard or from reporting about her. The most detailed account of his life came from an unexpected place, a 2024 investigation into the religious movement she grew up in.
Table of Contents
Who is Eduardo Tamayo?
Eduardo Tamayo is a Hawaii man who married Tulsi Gabbard in 2002 and divorced her in 2006. The two grew up in the same community on Oahu and knew each other as children. After the marriage ended, he went back to a private life.
Beyond that, the verified record is thin. His age has not been reliably reported. He is often called a businessman, but that label shows up only in secondhand write-ups and has never been documented, and what he actually does for a living is not publicly known.
Childhood friends in Hawaii
Gabbard and Tamayo were friends well before they married. They grew up together in Hawaii and surfed as kids, part of a tight community where the families knew one another.
Gabbard described it to Vogue in 2013. “You know, young love,” she said. “We surfed together and were best friends. His family was like my family.”
They married in 2002, when Gabbard was 21, in a small ceremony before a justice of the peace. That same year she won a seat in the Hawaii House of Representatives and took office as Tulsi Gabbard Tamayo, becoming the youngest woman elected to a state legislature at the time.
How the marriage ended
Military service pulled the marriage apart. Gabbard enlisted in the Hawaii Army National Guard in 2003 and deployed to Iraq the next year with a medical unit, serving in the combat zone into 2005. She has described the deployment as lasting about 18 months. The couple divorced in 2006.
Gabbard said little about the breakup at the time, and she kept the Tamayo name for years, running for and serving on the Honolulu City Council as Tulsi Gabbard Tamayo into 2011. When she dropped the name, she explained the decision in a written note:
“The deployment was very hard on my husband, and on our marriage. Sadly, Eddie and I became another statistic, another sad story, illustrating the stresses war places on military spouses and families. I had kept the Tamayo name in the hopes that we might still have a future together. However, recently I’ve come to fully realize that that’s not going to happen. Eddie and I are still friends, and I’m grateful the Tamayo family continues to welcome me as one of their own.”
For years, that note was the whole story, a young marriage that a long deployment wore down.
A reported tie to Chris Butler’s organization
In November 2024, as Gabbard awaited Senate confirmation as Donald Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, Newsweek published an investigation into her long association with the Science of Identity Foundation, a group founded by a Hawaii guru named Chris Butler. Several former members told Newsweek they considered the organization a cult. Gabbard has praised Butler publicly, describing him as her spiritual master and, at a 2015 event in Washington, her “beloved grandfather.”
One line in that investigation concerns Tamayo. Citing documents gathered by journalist Christine Gralow, Newsweek reported that he is the nephew of a person who runs Butler’s schools.
That changes how the marriage looks. The familiar account keeps Gabbard’s first marriage and her religious upbringing in two separate chapters. The reporting suggests they overlapped, that the family she married into belonged to the same network that has followed her throughout her public career. Whether the marriage came out of that world, and whether it had any part in the divorce, are open questions. Tamayo has never addressed them.
Claims about Tamayo that don’t hold up
With so little confirmed, the gaps have filled with errors. Three of the most repeated are easy to correct.
- His birthday. Many pages give his date of birth as April 12, 1981. That is Gabbard’s birthday, not his.
- His parents. Some sites name his mother and father as Carol and Mike. Those are Gabbard’s parents.
- His net worth. No reliable outlet has published a figure. The numbers online are invented.
One claim has slightly more behind it. The site Heavy reported in 2019 that Tamayo’s family may have Filipino roots, possibly connected to a general who survived the Bataan Death March in World War II. That reporting is old and difficult to verify now, so it is best treated as unconfirmed.
Where is Eduardo Tamayo now?
Gabbard remarried in 2015, to cinematographer Abraham Williams, and in May 2026 she resigned as director of national intelligence to support him through treatment for bone cancer.
Her first husband has said nothing through any of it. The question the Newsweek reporting raised, whether his marriage to Gabbard was ever separate from the religious world she came up in, has no answer on the record. The one person who could settle it has stayed quiet for two decades.
