Newsom affair with friend’s wife resurfaces amid presidential run rumors

New details emerged Tuesday about an affair that took place 20 years ago between Gov. Gavin Newsom and Ruby Rippey, his former aide when he was the mayor of San Francisco.

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In an essay published in Vanity Fair on Tuesday morning, Rippey describes a monthslong, on-and-off affair between her and Newsom, back in 2005 when he was the mayor of San Francisco. This is the first public account of the events leading up to the affair between her and Newsom, who was then her boss. 

Rippey does not address why she published her account now, though she does reference the governor’s memoir, released earlier this year, which mentioned their affair in a single paragraph.

“When I read the pages a few days later,” she said of the governor’s memoir, “a familiar feeling returns, the one of being written about by someone who assumes I won’t answer.”

In the article, Rippey breaks down the events that lead up to the affair, and her ongoing struggle with alcoholism and sobriety, starting in 1999. That was the year she first met her former partner Alex Tourk, who is now a well-known political strategist in San Francisco. The article timeline weaves through the next 26 years until the present day.

Rippey details the political career that she and Tourk embarked on together. 

They started their political careers working for former Mayor Willie Brown and then were recruited to work on Newsom’s mayoral campaign. Once he was elected, both went on to work in his administration, developing close friendships. Both Tourk and Rippey worked as Newsom’s confidantes: Tourk was his deputy chief of staff, and Rippey worked as a commission secretary.

Rippey writes that the affair started during a 2005 July Fourth celebration in Napa Valley.

“My boss and I end up in the narrow hallway outside the bathroom at the same time. We wait, across from each other. The space is tight. The silence stretches. He slips his hands into his tan trouser pockets and smiles—his usual shy, aw-shucks smile. I say nothing. I hold his gaze longer than I should,” she wrote. At the start of the year, Newsom was reportedly in the middle of a divorce process from Kimberly Guilfoyle. The two were officially divorced the following year.

The series of events she describes unfolds as clandestine encounters, sneaking around and meeting after work events. Rippey, all the while, says she was struggling with alcoholism, to which she attributes her reckless behavior and infidelity. While the account focuses largely on her affair, Rippey’s thesis seems to be focused on how it was a wake-up call and led to her journey toward sobriety.

For longtime insiders and residents of San Francisco, Newsom’s affair is old news. As mayor, Newsom notably confessed in front of the media at the time: “Everything you’ve heard and read is true, and I am deeply sorry for that,” he said in February 2007 outside of San Francisco City Hall. Tourk later resigned from his office, and so did Rippey.

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But the affair is perhaps news to many people who live outside of the Bay Area, who are starting to learn more about the presidential hopeful who has been rumored to have his eyes on a 2028 run. After publication, the governor’s office responded to SFGATE’s request for comment to say thatNewsom “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.”

It added that Newsom has already addressed this chapter of his life, and mentioned it in his memoir, and “out of respect for everyone involved, does not have anything further to add.”

In Newsom’s memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry,” he refers to the affair as the “stupidest and also briefest of affairs.” 

Rippey recounts a conversation she had with Kamala Harris, then-district attorney of San Francisco County, who told her to wait before she spoke publicly about the affair.

“I wouldn’t say anything right now, Ruby. Just pause. More time will give you better perspective,” Rippey writes she said. She said the advice Harris gave her was the best she had received at the time, and is the reason she was able to stay sober. 

Rippey is more than 20 years sober, she writes. She also cleared the air in her essay that her relationship with the governor was consensual, despite an early account from Jennifer Siebel Newsom, his girlfriend at the time and now his wife, who remarked publicly that the affair was “a few nothing incidents when she showed up passed out outside of his door.”

Rippey said a journalist called her shortly after, asking to clarify details, that the statement made by her made it sound like it was “nonconsensual.” 

“A columnist from the San Francisco Examiner calls. I know him socially. He asks if I want to speak publicly. I thank him but decline. He says her framing makes it sound nonconsensual. It wasn’t, I tell him. I was not coerced. I knew what I was doing,” she writes.

This story has been updated.