The life of Rep. Katie Porter: How a self-proclaimed 'minivan-driving mom' is holding Wall Street and Facebook to the fire

For the last two years of high school, she ended up at Phillips Academy, a prestigious boarding school in Massachusetts, which she said was a "huge culture shock."

She didn't get in in the typical fashion. She ended up in a class of gifted students, being studied by a psychologist at Iowa State University, after acing the SATs in seventh grade. The psychologists did experiments about careers and social skills on her class. One career test said she should be a vending machine repair person.

Regardless of that, she loved the experience and applied for Phillips, thinking it would be a similar summer school experience, not realizing she had applied for an entire year of tuition. But she got in, on scholarship, and stayed on the following year.

After high school, Porter broke away from a family tradition of going to Iowa State University, instead attending Yale University, where she majored in American Studies. But even then the focus on her studies was understanding economic hardships. Her thesis was called "The Effects of Corporate Farming on Rural Community."

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In 1997, after graduating from Yale, she traveled the world for six months and taught English to eighth graders in Hong Kong. She was 22.

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She returned to the US and studied law at Harvard University. Porter had an "inkling" she might want to be a teacher. But during those years she didn't know what sort of law she wanted to do, even after working for a US attorney one summer, and for several firms in another. While she was at Harvard, Alan Dershowitz gave her a B, and she's still bitter about it.

In 2000, in her third year of law school, Porter had a pivotal moment when she read an article in Time magazine about bankruptcy legislation. The article quoted Elizabeth Warren, who said the law would be a "death by a thousand paper cuts." She thought Warren "sounded interesting," so she dropped tax law and took her 8 a.m. bankruptcy class instead. It took one class for Porter to realize the subject was for her.

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Kamala Harris, who was then California's attorney general, appointed Porter as a watchdog to oversee how banks distributed a $25 billion mortgage settlement. She performed the role from 2012 to 2014, and continued teaching law at the same time.

Her life changed the day Trump became president. Before that she had never considered a career in politics. After he won, she thought to herself she'd wait another four years for someone like Warren or Harris to take Trump on. Then she could work for them, and make a difference.

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In early 2017, Porter announced she was running for Congress in Orange County. "When I launched my campaign, I set out to win," she told Elle. "I knew it would be a tough race, but as a consumer protection advocate, I'd taken on tough things before, like standing up to the big banks and calling them out for cheating people."

But she wasn't entirely comfortable with it, at least at first.

She told NBC: "It wasn't that I didn't think I was good or talented or hadn't worked hard, it was just that there's a kind of declarative aspect of being a candidate that I think can be kind of culturally uncomfortable for women. And I think we're pushing back at that a lot or understanding more. But we know for women that most women don't run unless they're asked to run, unless they're told to run."

During her run for congress, several insiders thought Min was spreading rumors that Porter was not up to the job, because of her divorce with her abusive ex-husband.

In 2013, she had taken out a protective order against her husband, alleging he'd smashed a window and threatened to kill himself if she left him. Porter said people were describing her as "shady", so she took her story to HuffPost and explained the situation.

"I'm the most boring person in America. I'm a mom of three kids, I protected my family, I ended a marriage that was troubled," she told HuffPost.

She wasn't impressed when he later laughed it off by sending her a note and a packet of the cookies. She said he could eat all the Oreos he wanted, but then he needed to learn his material, because she needed answers.

In October, Porter held Mark Zuckerberg to the fire. She asked him whether he'd be willing to spend an hour a day for the next year as a Facebook content monitor, watching graphic videos of murders and stabbings, and only have access to the same benefits that his employees get. He tried to answer in a roundabout way, and finally she answered for him: "Okay, then you're saying you're not willing to do it."