An aide involved in an affair with Gavin Newsom more than 20 years ago, when he was mayor of San Francisco, detailed their relationship and her journey to sobriety in an essay published by Vanity Fair on Tuesday.
Although Ruby Rippey, 54, has spoken previously about her relationship with the now-governor, her first-person essay offers the most intimate description yet of the affair. It comes at a time when Newsom is wrapping up his final year as California governor and considering a presidential run in 2028.
Rippey, who had worked as Newsom’s appointments secretary, was married to Alex Tourk, the then-mayor’s close friend, campaign manager and prior deputy chief of staff, when the affair became public in 2007. Tourk resigned after Rippey told him that she had been sleeping with their boss, she writes.
At the time, Newsom was newly divorced from Kimberly Guilfoyle and he apologized in front of a gaggle of reporters who packed his office for a news conference, admitting “everything you’ve heard and read is true.” Later, he said he was seeking treatment for alcohol abuse.
In the essay, Rippey details that the affair with Newsom happened when she was a new mother and when her drinking, which had been a problem before the relationship, spiraled out of control.
Rippey writes that their relationship began in July 2005 after a wedding at a Napa Valley estate and spanned months, with intermittent sexual encounters until she entered rehab in May 2006.
They met at his penthouse in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood, at a private back room in a bar in North Beach and at the W Hotel in Los Angeles, she writes.
“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 writes. “It isn’t love. It isn’t romance. It’s intoxication.”
Izzy Gardon, a spokesperson for the governor’s office, said on Tuesday that Newsom acknowledged his role and publicly apologized for the affair nearly two decades ago.
“In the time since, he met his wife, started a family and has focused on serving Californians. 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,” Gardon said.
The affair occurred while Gavin Newsom was mayor of San Francisco.
(San Francisco Chronicle / Hearst Newspapers)
Newsom faced renewed criticism for the affair during the 2018 governor’s race amid a larger reckoning over sexual misconduct in politics, corporate America and Hollywood. But Rippey has said she doesn’t see herself as a victim of a powerful man.
“Yes, I was a subordinate, but I was also a free-thinking, 33-yr old adult married woman & mother. (I also happened to have an unfortunate inclination towards drinking-to-excess & self-destruction.),” she wrote on Facebook at the time.
She still doesn’t place blame on the governor for what happened, but noted in her essay that in the post-#MeToo era she came to realize that her then-boss had a responsibility to “hold the line.”
“That didn’t happen. But I didn’t stumble into the space left open — I saw a possibility and went for it,” she writes. “Both things are true: I am responsible for what I did. Power does not distribute consequences evenly.”
For Newsom, she writes, the affair is merely a “footnote in a longer arc of ascent. For me, it is the fracture that split my life into before and after.”
In his memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery,” published this year, Newsom acknowledges the liaison with Rippey, describing it as “the briefest of affairs.”
He also writes that he admitted the betrayal to Tourk, a detail that Rippey takes issue with in her essay. She says she was the one who first broke the devastating news to her husband via email while she was at her parent’s house in Napa and he was home in San Francisco with their young son.
“But resentment is a luxury I can’t afford,” she writes. “Instead, I return to gratitude, not for the affair, not for the pain I caused Alex, but for the totality of what followed. I required something catastrophic to change direction. Something that made the cost of going back — of drinking again — unthinkable.”
After the affair, Rippey and Tourk divorced but continued to co-parent their son, who is now an adult. She’s been sober for 20 years, she writes, remarried and now has a son with her second husband.
“The damage was mine,” she writes at the conclusion of her essay. “But so is the life rebuilt in its wake.”
Times staff writer Taryn Luna contributed to this report.
