Ruby Rippey says the affair with her boss, Gavin Newsom started on July 2, 2005, at a colleague's wedding in Napa, and ended about a year later. Newsom's memoir, published this year, calls it "the stupidest and also briefest of affairs."
One of those accounts has dates. The other has adjectives.
Rippey, who worked as a secretary for Newsome while he was San Francisco mayor, laid out the timeline in a Vanity Fair essay titled "How I blew up — then rebuilt — my life." She was married to Alex Tourk, Newsom's close friend, deputy chief of staff and campaign manager, at the time of the affair. Tourk resigned from both positions after learning Newsom had slept with his wife. Tourk and Rippey divorced shortly thereafter.
According to Rippey's account, Newsom initiated the relationship at a restaurant while Tourk was present, telling her, "Hey — you look really good... You've lost all your pregnancy weight." The physical relationship began at the Napa wedding after Tourk left early, continued at Newsom's penthouse in Russian Hill, a private back room at a North Beach bar, the W Hotel in Los Angeles, and the Carneros Inn — a luxury resort in Napa managed by Plumpjack Group, the company run by Newsom's sister Hilary Newsom Callan.
That last detail is worth sitting with. The governor used a property managed by his own family's company as a location for an affair with his campaign manager's wife.
It also happened while Newsom was married to former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle. The affair also broke up Newsom's marriage.
Rippey describes struggling with alcoholism and cocaine use during this period, drinking "one or two bottles of wine" nightly and taking Antabuse, an alcohol deterrent medication. She entered rehab and confessed the affair to Tourk in January of 2007. The story broke publicly in San Francisco media the following month.
Newsom's current wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, previously addressed the scandal in an 820-word statement that placed responsibility squarely on Rippey. "If people did research into the scandal... the woman is the culprit," she said. She characterized the encounters as "a few nothing incidents when she showed up passed out outside."
Victim blaming, nice Jennifer. I guess the current Mrs. Newsom doesn't support the #MeToo movement considering Gavin was Rippey's boss at the time of the affair.
Rippey's Vanity Fair essay directly contradicts Jennifer's framing. "Both things are true: I am responsible for what I did," she wrote. But she described Newsom's memoir account as "a version of events that gives him credit for something I had already done" — referring to her decision to end the affair and seek treatment. She also wrote a line that reads less like a personal reflection and more like a deposition: "Power does not need to coerce. It only needs to exist."
A Newsom spokesperson responded that the governor "acknowledged his role and publicly apologized nearly two decades ago." Which is technically true. It's also the kind of sentence a crisis communications firm produces when the original apology didn't anticipate a Vanity Fair rebuttal twenty years later.
Newsom is widely expected to run for president in 2028. Kamala Harris, who Rippey says advised her to stay quiet at the time " and not out Newsom while he was running for reelection as San Francisco's mayor, telling her, "I wouldn't say anything right now, Ruby. Just pause" — is also positioning for that election race.
The pattern with Newsom is always the same. The French Laundry dinner during lockdowns. The "rules for thee" energy policies. The carefully curated image that keeps running into inconvenient receipts. Every time, the defense is the same — it was a long time ago, it's been addressed, let's move forward.
