Ruby Rippey, a former San Francisco City Hall aide to Gov. Gavin Newsom, has publicly revisited their 2005 affair in a Vanity Fair essay published Tuesday, saying the governor has not told the full truth about what took place.
In the essay, Rippey described how the relationship began, returning to a scandal that shook San Francisco politics when it became public in 2007 and that has long stood as one of the most damaging episodes of Newsom’s time as mayor.
The account lands as Newsom, who is widely expected to pursue a 2028 presidential run after leaving the governor’s office next year, has been attempting to confront the affair directly, including in a memoir released earlier this year.
“Ruby was drinking too much and so was I,” Newsom writes of Rippey, who served as his appointments secretary.
She “was among a group of staffers who came to my apartment for a party. She was the last to leave. It was the stupidest and also briefest of affairs.
“A year later, to her credit, Ruby decided to come clean to her twelve-step group,” Newsom wrote, after which he eventually confirmed the affair to reporters.
Rippey, however, wrote in Vanity Fair that reading Newsom’s version in the memoir left her deeply uncomfortable.
She wrote: “When I read the pages a few days later, a familiar feeling returns, the one of being written about by someone who assumes I won’t answer. He describes it as ‘the briefest of affairs.’ His sister, he notes, observed that I was ‘hanging a bit too close.’”
She also cast a shadow on the idea that Newsom “came clean” to her then-husband Alex Tourk.
“That detail—subtle but significant—is the one that stays with me,” Rippey wrote. “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.”
The California Post reached out to Newsom’s political team for comment on the Rippey essay.
Tourk, who was Newsom’s campaign manager and had declined The Post’s request for comment, resigned after confronting Newsom, and the then-mayor held a news conference apologizing publicly and describing the affair as a “personal lapse of judgment.”
“I want to make it clear that everything you’ve heard and read is true, and I am deeply sorry about that,” Newsom said then.
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