Ruby Rippey writes in a revealing new essay that the affair was “a footnote in a longer arc of ascent” for Newsom, but for her, “the fracture that split my life into before and after”
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NEED TO KNOW
- A former senior aide to Gavin Newsom has published her most detailed account of their affair since it became public nearly 20 years ago
- Ruby Rippey’s new essay reflects on her alcoholism and the infidelity that shattered her marriage to Newsom’s longtime political adviser and campaign manager Alex Tourk
- She also addressed how Newsom wrote about the affair in his memoir, and shared “the best advice” she received at the height of the public scandal — from future Vice President Kamala Harris
A former senior aide to Gavin Newsom has shared the most detailed account of her mid-2000s affair with the Democratic politician since it became public in 2007.
Ruby Rippey, who worked for Newsom when he was the mayor of San Francisco, published an essay in Vanity Fair on Tuesday, July 28, that revisits her life-altering chapter with the future California governor.
The essay reflects on both her alcoholism and the downfall of her marriage to Alex Tourk, who also worked under Newsom as a longtime political adviser and campaign manager at the time.
“Nobody had been surprised when rumors about my affair surfaced long before treatment,” the former aide to Newsom and his mayoral predecessor Willie Brown writes. “Nearly everyone seemed to know except the one person who most needed to know: my husband.”
“I had been sleeping with his boss, who was also mine, and the mayor of San Francisco,” Rippey adds.
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Newsom first publicly acknowledged the affair in February 2007 after Tourk confronted him about it and resigned as the campaign manager for his mayoral reelection.
“Everything you’ve heard and read is true,” Newsom told reporters in 2007, according to The New York Times. “And I am deeply sorry about that.”
“I’ve hurt someone I care deeply about, Alex Tourk,” Newsom said at the time. “And that is something I have to live with.”
In a statement responding to Rippey’s new essay, a spokesperson for Newsom — who is openly considering a run for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination — told PEOPLE that the governor “acknowledged his role in the affair and publicly apologized nearly two decades ago when he was still mayor. In the time since, he met his wife [Jennifer], 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,” spokesperson Izzy Gardon continued.
Tourk declined to comment when reached by PEOPLE on Tuesday.
Rippey writes in her essay about coming clean to Tourk about her infidelity after entering a rehabilitation program for alcohol following years of struggles, abuse of other drugs, and late drunken nights with Newsom, who was going through a divorce with Kimberly Guilfoyle at the time. (Guilfoyle later dated Donald Trump Jr. and now serves as Trump’s U.S. ambassador to Greece.)
Rippey explains that the lines with Newsom began to blur over the Fourth of July weekend in 2005, after a friend’s wedding at a Napa Valley estate. Her husband drove home to be with their 1-year-old son, but she writes that she stayed back to party and ended up falling asleep fully clothed beside Newsom in a hotel room.
More nights followed and they began hooking up, Rippey writes, including on a separate yet coordinated trip to Los Angeles and at his penthouse in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood. “We meet and we drink. There is sex, but it isn’t the point,” Rippey recalls of their trysts. “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 continues: “It isn’t love. It isn’t romance. It’s intoxication. The text message is a hit. The glance across the hallway, a hit. The risk floods my bloodstream. I walk down the corridors of City Hall — my nude stilettos striking the marble floor. He looks at me, his gaze deliberate, newly curious. It feels like oxygen.”
Rippey admits that she chased the “high” of his attention with “single-minded devotion,” never pausing to consider the consequences it would have on her marriage, family and career. “I was not confused or naive. I was a grown woman who made choices that hurt someone I loved.”
Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty
By May 2006, she checked into a rehab facility in Arizona and penned two letters: one to resign from her job under Newsom and one to end the affair.
“When I return home from rehab nearly two months later, I try to resume life as a wife and mother,” Rippey remembers. “Meanwhile, Alex leaves each morning for City Hall — for the man I have betrayed him with, still unaware of what had happened between us.”
On Jan. 13, 2007, Rippey writes that she emailed her husband a confession, blaming her alcoholism and noting the affair ended before rehab.
Tourk left the house for a few weeks and eventually requested a meeting with Newsom, which was scheduled for the day after he returned from the annual World Economic Forum gathering of rich and powerful figures in Davos, Switzerland.
“For years, he answered late-night calls from his boss, sacrificed weekends without hesitation,” Rippey writes of Tourk. “He wants to hear it directly — to look him in the eye one last time. There is no straight answer.”
Weeks later, Newsom’s new girlfriend and future wife Jennifer Siebel — who started dating the then-mayor after the affair ended — weighed in on the controversy by commenting online that “the woman is the culprit,” describing Rippey as “bad news” and dismissing her fling with Newsom as “a few nothing incidents when she showed up passed out outside of his door.” (Siebel quickly issued a statement apologizing to Rippey and Tourk for the insensitivity.)
As it felt like Rippey’s world was crumbling down, she got one of the most helpful calls — from then-San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, who’s described in the essay as “a real girl’s girl.”
“Soon after, Kamala Harris calls. I know her from the Brown administration,” Rippey writes. “I tell her people are urging me to speak publicly. A publisher has offered an advance for a memoir. I am broke and unemployable.”
According to Rippey, the future California attorney general, U.S. senator and first female vice president responded with: “I wouldn’t say anything right now, Ruby. Just pause. More time will give you better perspective.”
“It turns out to be the best advice I receive,” Rippey writes. “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.”
Representatives for Harris did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment on their 2007 interaction on Tuesday.
Credit: AP Photo/George Nikitin
While Rippey acknowledges and reflects on the power imbalance of having an affair with your boss who is also the mayor and your husband’s boss, she writes that when “#MeToo arrived with a new version of my story — one in which I was not the culprit but a powerless subordinate,” she did not feel it was an accurate depiction of what occurred in the mid-2000s.
“Power does not need to coerce. It only needs to exist. The responsibility to hold the line belongs to the one who holds it. That didn’t happen,” Rippey writes. “But I didn’t stumble into the space left open — I saw a possibility and went for it.”
“Both things are true: I am responsible for what I did. Power does not distribute consequences evenly,” she adds.
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Rippey writes that this past January, an adviser to Governor Newsom whom she knew from their time in San Francisco reached out to give her a heads-up that she would be mentioned in the governor’s new memoir, Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery.
In the memoir, Newsom describes it as “the briefest of affairs” and recounts himself coming clean to Tourk — “technically defensible, perhaps,” Rippey responds, “but [it] leaves the unmistakable impression that he, not I, was the one who told Alex the truth.”
Rippey writes that she is now two decades sober, happily married to her second husband, and has rebuilt her relationship with Tourk as they co-parent their son. She describes the affair as “a footnote in a longer arc of ascent” for Newsom, but for her, “the fracture that split my life into before and after.”
“Does he tell the truth?” Rippey recalls asking Newsom’s staffer in January about what he wrote in the memoir.
“Well,” the staffer allegedly replied. “We all remember things differently, don’t we, Ruby?”
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