Former Gavin Newsom aide says his memoir minimizes their monthslong affair

Ruby Rippey, a former aide who had an affair with then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom two decades ago, offered her fullest public account of the affair in a Vanity Fair essay released this week, criticizing the governor’s characterization of it in his recently released memoir.

Rippey, who served as an appointments secretary for the former mayor, said the affair went on for months and objected to the governor’s implications that he was the one who “came clean” to her husband, Newsom’s deputy chief of staff Alex Tourk. The first-person account, which doesn’t mention Newsom by name, comes following the February release of “Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery” in the governor’s final year in office and on the brink of a suspected 2028 presidential bid.

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In the memoir Newsom spends less than a page recounting the affair, calling it the “stupidest and also briefest of affairs.” He said his sister Hilary could see a “connection sparking” between the two and detailed a conversation in which she reminded him that Rippey was married to Tourk. At the time, Newsom had recently split from his then-wife Kimberly Guilfoyle.

Newsom’s account mentions just one encounter where he said she was the last to leave a party hosted at his apartment. He said he eventually came clean to both his sister and to Tourk. But Rippey wrote in Vanity Fair that she was the one who told her husband — not the governor.

“That detail — subtle but significant—is the one that stays with me,” Rippey wrote in Vanity Fair. “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.”

News of the affair broke in early 2007 and Newsom told reporters at the time that “everything you’ve heard and read is true and I am deeply sorry about that.” Tourk, who was serving as his re-election campaign manager, quickly resigned.

Both Rippey and Newsom have said in their accounts that alcohol played a role in the affair. Rippey said she is now 20 years sober.

Izzy Gardon, a spokesperson for the governor, said in a statement that “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. 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, in her essay, denied the affair was coerced, noting that “claiming responsibility felt like the last form of agency I had” as the #MeToo movement arrived “with a new version of my story—one in which I was not the culprit but a powerless subordinate.” While she said she is responsible for her role in the affair, she recognizes the power imbalance.

“Power does not need to coerce,” she wrote. “It only needs to exist. The responsibility to hold the line belongs to the one who holds it. That didn’t happen.”

In the lead-up to the affair, Rippey described how her office has been relocated as “the mayor wants me at the desk outside his door.” In another instance at a Mexican restaurant on Lombard Street in 2004, she said she felt “the mayor looking at me.”

“I glance up—across the table—back at him,” she wrote. “As if caught off guard, he reacts, pointing at me. ‘Hey—you look really good,’ he says. ‘You’ve lost all your pregnancy weight.’ There’s an awkward laugh. I reach for another chip and stare at my husband’s margarita, the salt rim catching the light.”

Former Vice President Kamala Harris, who is a potential 2028 presidential contender alongside Newsom, is also mentioned in Rippey’s essay in a section titled “A Real Girl’s Girl.” At the time, Harris was the district attorney of San Francisco.

Rippey recalled telling Harris that people are asking her to speak out and that a publisher offered her an advance on a memoir.

“She listens, then says simply: ‘I wouldn’t say anything right now, Ruby. Just pause. More time will give you better perspective,’” Rippey recounts Harris saying. “It turns out to be the best advice I receive. I am newly sober and still inside the wreckage—unable to make sense of anything, let alone speak clearly about it. So I stay silent.”

Rippey said the conversation with Harris came after a San Francisco Chronicle story in which Jennifer Siebel Newsom — Newsom’s then-girlfriend and now wife — said, “The woman is the culprit,” in relation to the affair. Siebel Newsom later publicly apologized.