A former staffer who had an affair with Gavin Newsom is setting the record straight two decades after the scandal rocked Democratic politics.
Ruby Rippey, 54, penned a first-person essay in Vanity Fair Tuesday, marking the first time the former aide to the California governor has shared her version of events—just as the 58-year-old gears up for a likely 2028 presidential bid.
In 2007, Newsom, then the mayor of San Francisco, famously stood before reporters at City Hall and admitted to his affair with Rippey, who was married at the time to Newsom’s deputy chief of staff and friend, Alex Tourk.
“Everything you’ve heard and read is true,” said Newsom, who had not yet finalized his divorce from Kimberly Guilfoyle, now Donald Trump’s ambassador to Greece.
In her essay, Rippey doesn’t necessarily disagree with that sentiment. However, she does take issue with Newsom’s retelling in his memoir, Young Man in a Hurry.
Released in February, Newsom writes that it was the “stupidest and also briefest of affairs,” and that he eventually “came clean” to Tourk.
“That detail—subtle but significant—is the one that stays with me,” Rippey wrote. “It reads—to me, at least—as a version of events that gives him credit for something I had already done. Technically defensible, perhaps, but one that leaves the unmistakable impression that he, not I, was the one who told Alex the truth.”
A representative for Gavin Newsom said the governor “acknowledged his role and publicly apologized nearly two decades ago when he was still mayor.”
“In the time since, he met his wife, started a family, and has focused on serving Californians,” spokeswoman Izzy Gardon said in a statement. “He addressed this chapter of his life, including in his memoir, and out of respect for everyone involved, does not have anything further to add.”
Rippey, then the secretary to the San Francisco Commission on the Environment, said the affair began at a City Hall colleague’s wedding in July 2005.
“We meet and we drink. There is sex, but it isn’t the point. The point is proximity—to power, to being chosen, to feeling newly visible—no longer muted by pregnancy, by new motherhood, by the strain of white-knuckling long stretches of sobriety,” she wrote.
Now 20 years sober, Rippey said her choices were fueled by alcoholism and cocaine use, which culminated in a stint in rehab in 2006. It was there, she alleged, that she wrote a letter to Newsom ending the affair.
“When I return home from rehab nearly two months later, I try to resume life as a wife and mother. Meanwhile, Alex leaves each morning for City Hall—for the man I have betrayed him with, still unaware of what had happened between us,” she wrote.
“For months, I say nothing. The silence settles into my body like a fever. Until one night I am no longer able to carry it.”
The couple divorced, and Tourk left Newsom’s reelection campaign. He later founded Ground Floor Public Affairs, which has represented companies including Lyft, Amazon, and Goodwill. Tourk did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
As she was thrust into the spotlight, Rippey said she remained silent, partly due to advice from then-attorney Kamala Harris.
“ I tell her people are urging me to speak publicly,” Rippey wrote. “She listens, then says simply: ‘I wouldn’t say anything right now, Ruby. Just pause. More time will give you better perspective,’” she went on, calling it “the best advice” she received.
She also recounts being dragged in the papers by Newsom’s then-girlfriend and now-wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom. At the time, the actress and filmmaker told reporters that Rippey was the “culprit”—something she later apologized for.
Rippey added that the resurgence of the #MeToo movement in 2017 also fueled a narrative that she was entirely exonerated because she was a subordinate who had been taken advantage of. That, too, she rebuffs.
“Both things are true: I am responsible for what I did. Power does not distribute consequences evenly,” she wrote.
