Gavin Newsom’s polished national image just collided with a deeply personal account from a woman who worked steps from his office and later had an affair with him.
Ruby Rippey has broken her silence in a first-person essay that revisits the scandal, her addiction and the damage she feared the affair would cause her husband.
The Independent was among the outlets covering Rippey’s decision to speak publicly on July 28.
In her account for Vanity Fair, Rippey recounts working under then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom while her husband, Alex Tourk, served as Newsom’s deputy chief of staff.
Rippey says Newsom pursued her years before the affair through office visits, soup from her favorite deli and a mixtape. She says they kissed on New Year’s Eve as 1999 became 2000, before she married Tourk.
By 2004, Rippey was working as a commission secretary and had been moved to the desk directly outside Newsom’s office. That position effectively made her a gatekeeper for the mayor.
She says the sexual affair began after a July 2, 2005 wedding at a Napa Valley estate. Rippey says she drank heavily that night while Tourk left early to return to their one-year-old son.
Rippey recalls Newsom massaging her foot in a chauffeured town car. She says her next clear memory was waking beside him in a hotel while still dressed after she had passed out, and she frames the encounters as consensual.
According to Rippey, the affair continued on and off for months. She identifies Newsom’s Russian Hill penthouse, a North Beach bar and the W Hotel in Los Angeles among the locations where they met.
In Los Angeles, Rippey says she woke to find buttons from Newsom’s shirt scattered near the bed. She flew home crying because she understood what the affair could do to her husband, then later realized she had torn Newsom’s shirt after he texted her that the hotel had T-shirts.
Rippey also describes severe alcohol and cocaine addiction during this period. After entering treatment, she says her care team initially advised her not to tell Tourk because the resulting public fallout could threaten her sobriety.
She eventually told Tourk, and the affair became public in early 2007. Newsom issued a public apology at the time and expressed deep regret.
Rippey says Newsom later apologized directly to her. She also writes that she has now been sober for more than 15 years.
The political significance is impossible to miss. Newsom remains a major national Democratic figure and a prospective future presidential contender, making Rippey’s account a direct challenge to the polished, moralizing image he presents nationally.
Another post carrying current coverage focused on the Los Angeles shirt-button detail from Rippey’s account.
That detail is memorable, but the larger story is about judgment, power, betrayal and the personal wreckage Rippey believed could follow. Her account does not require embellishment.
The affair itself has been public since 2007. What changed on July 28 is that Rippey chose to lay out her own account while Newsom’s national profile remains very much alive.
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[ H/T WLT Report ]
