Senator and Actress Reportedly Break up After 3 Years of Dating

Sen. Cory Booker and actress Rosario Dawson have reportedly broken up. The New Jersey senator has been dating Dawson for nearly three years, but a source close to them told Marie Claire that they called it off last month. They said that Booker and Dawson struggled with their busy schedules and long-distance arrangement, but that they are still friends.

Booker and Dawson went public with their romance during Booker’s bid for the presidency in 2019. At the time, Booker said that he had “a boo” during an interview on The Breakfast Club radio show, and after a few weeks of speculation, Dawson admitted to a TMZ reporter that it was her. The two reportedly connected over activist causes and shared roots in the northeast, but while Booker has been representing New Jersey in Washington D.C., Dawson has been there without him all summer filming Clerks III.

Booker and Dawson’s romance was uncharacteristically public for both of them, who tended to keep their private lives to themselves beforehand. In March of 2019, Booker told CNN that he met Dawson in 2017 when she was in a relationship with someone else, then saw her again about a year later and made his move. He said: “So we met again, and I had one of those really awkward experiences. I’m a United States senator, and I had to get up the courage to walk up to her and ask her for her phone number. And [being on TV] doesn’t make me nervous, but that made me nervous.”

Dawson accompanied Booker on the campaign trail in 2019 and even spent the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic with him in 2020. Their social media followers thought that there might be wedding bells on the horizon when Dawson sold her mansion in California, signaling that she would be living with Booker full time in New Jersey. Dawson is originally from New York City.

The news of Dawson and Booker’s breakup was eventually corroborated by a second anonymous source, but so far neither star has commented publicly on it. Their representatives have not responded to other outlets’ requests for comment, either. Dawsons’ next on-screen appearance will likely be Clerks III which has finished filming, but does not have a release date yet. She will also star in the upcoming Star Wars series Ahsoka on Disney+, and she has two more movies as well as a TV miniseries in the early stages of production.