In the 20 years since having an affair with her boss, then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Ruby Rippey has only spoken about it publicly one time, in 2018, when she said that she didn’t believe that “Me Too” applied to her situation, and has consistently refused to give more details. That changed Tuesday, when Vanity Fair published her essay, “How I blew up – then rebuilt – my life,” in which Newsom’s former commission secretary shared a timeline and details about the affair that don’t line up with what the California governor and his allies have said over the years, and which might be problematic for Newsom’s presidential aspirations.
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Until now, we’ve known very little about the affair. The news broke in February 2007, when Rippey’s then-husband, Alex Tourk, resigned from his positions as Newsom’s deputy chief of staff and campaign manager. He’d just learned of the affair from Rippey, and confronted Newsom about it. Newsom confirmed it publicly, and San Francisco media reported that “the mayor has privately said to friends that there were only a couple of encounters.”
Jennifer Siebel Newsom, who’d just started dating Gavin at the time, went a bit further, blaming Rippey for the affair:
“If people did research into the scandal … the woman is the culprit. Alex Tourk is a nice man and it saddens me that his wife did that to him.”
Then, in an 820-word comment on an article blasting her for that remark, Siebel Newsom made this troubling characterization of the events, parroting Gavin’s timeline:
“it was a few nothing incidents when she showed up passed out outside of his door.”
In his memoir released earlier this year, Newsom described the relationship as “the stupidest and also briefest of affairs” and laments his betrayal of Tourk. He also mentions that his sister, Hilary Newsom Callan, had observed that Rippey was “hanging a bit too close” to him during that time, subtly casting her as the aggressor.
11 Months Is Not ‘A Couple of Encounters’
But from Rippey’s essay we learn that the affair started on July 2, 2005, and continued “on and off” until May 19, 2006, when she checked in to rehab in Arizona. They met up to drink and have sex in multiple locations throughout that time, she writes: his penthouse in Russian Hill, a private back room in a North Beach bar, the W Hotel in Los Angeles.
The flirtation started a few months before that, though, when she caught Newsom staring at her during a casual dinner at a Mexican restaurant – while her husband was sitting right there. His choice of pickup line is odd, but her description is classic Newsom.
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As the waiter takes orders, I feel the mayor looking at me. I glance up—across the table—back at him. 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.
Rippey admittedly had a drinking problem for quite some time before these events; in the essay, she mentions that her second DUI occurred more than a decade before the affair. At the time of this dinner, she was sober, but that wouldn’t last long.
I reach for another chip and stare at my husband’s margarita, the salt rim catching the light.
I want it.
But I’m in another self-enforced stretch of sobriety, so I sit on my hands and wait it out.
He Seduced Her in Front of Her Husband
Rippey started working in Newsom’s office from the beginning of his term as mayor, in January 2004, and it seems she caught his eye from the beginning and he engineered ways to be closer to her. She doesn’t make that assertion, but one can connect the dots. She writes:
Just a month after taking office, he legalizes same-sex marriage. When it happens, I am seven months pregnant. I stand beneath the dome of City Hall in a maternity wrap dress and leopard kitten heels, deputized to marry couples.
She notes that her husband’s office, as deputy chief of staff, is close to Newsom’s, but down the hall from her private office, and that “some mornings, I bring [Tourk] two hard-boiled eggs in a Tupperware container.” And then:
One day I am told my office has been reassigned. The mayor wants me at the desk outside his door, a gatekeeper. I understand the logic. It’s a new administration full of young staffers improvising their way through it. Still, losing my office feels like a demotion.
He wanted her as a gatekeeper, or eye candy?
After the encounter at the Mexican restaurant, she says she paid more attention to her appearance at work, desiring that approval and attention from her boss.
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On the day that the physical affair started, the Rippey-Tourks and most of the City Hall crowd were attending the wedding of a fellow staffer in Napa. Rippey was drinking again, alternating champagne and wine, and was too nervous to eat her dinner. Then:
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.
The air changes.
By the time night falls, I am sitting on the edge of a hot tub with my feet in the water. He is across from me, slipping off his shoes and socks, rolling up his pant legs.
Where was Alex Tourk? He was there for the hot tub performance, then left.
My husband leaves soon after, irritated that I want to keep partying while he drives home to our one-year-old son.
Just so we’re all clear on what’s happening, Gavin Newsom was actively seducing his employee, who was married to another employee who happened to be his best friend, right in front of the guy. Gavin Newsom was seducing his best friend’s wife, who’d clearly had a few too many, instead of encouraging her to go home with her visibly irritated husband.
It’s as if he was waiting for Alex Tourk to leave.
Who does that? When normal people see a friend who’s had a few too many at a wedding resisting their spouse’s invitation to go home, they encourage that friend to go on home. Not Gavin.
Gavin then invited Rippey back to The Carneros Inn, a luxury resort in Napa then managed by The Plumpjack Group, in his chauffeured town car. With his sister (Plumpjack’s CEO) and others also in the car, Gavin gave Rippey a foot massage.
RT @KOCH_KOKE: Carneros Inn . California pic.twitter.com/S2b5qcY9Qr
— Carneros Resort (@carnerosresort) September 26, 2014
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She remembers nothing else until the next morning:
The next clear memory is getting into the back of my boss’s chauffeured town car, heading to The Carneros Inn.
Then nothing.
I wake the next morning beside him, still dressed. I am cold, almost shivering, and my dress—the one my mother warned me not to wear—is soaked from the waist down. I had passed out. I had also wet the bed. (It wasn’t the first time.)
She’d accidentally left a gold bracelet at the hotel in her hurry to get home, which Gavin returned to her the next week at work, subtly slipping it onto her desk as he passed.
From there, their texts shifted from work items to “something else,” and everyone at work notices the shift in their interactions, except Tourk.
Cocaine-Fueled Nights
Over the course of the affair, Rippey’s drinking problem morphed into raging alcoholism. She tried to use Antabuse, “a pill that promises to make me ill if I drink,” in an effort to stop, but that didn’t work, so she turned to cocaine:
Alone, cocaine doesn’t appeal much to me. But after one or two bottles of wine, it makes it so I can drink twice as much for twice as long.
The nights blur: rooftop bars, wine, cigarettes, and names I immediately forget. Strangers’ living rooms. Finishing the last lines long after I stop wanting them. The taxi ride home as the sun comes up.
Are we to believe that Gavin wasn’t also partaking? That’s a question that should be asked.
Coming Clean?
Rippey didn’t tell Tourk about the affair until months after she returned from rehab, on advice of the care team, who told her, “We think it’s best for your sobriety not to tell him. Because this involves a public figure, the fallout could be devastating, and it could threaten your recovery.”
She then watched for months as her husband devoted all of his professional energies to a man who’d betrayed him in the most intimate way possible, and couldn’t stay quiet. On January 13, 2007, she confessed the affair to Tourk. He packed his bags and left, telling her he needed a few weeks to think. They never slept under the same roof again, and eventually divorced.
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Tourk requested a meeting with Newsom, Rippey says, because “He wants to hear it directly—to look him in the eye one last time.” In that meeting, though, she says, “There is no straight answer.”
Only in Newsom world is that “coming clean.” Rippey certainly doesn’t think it is:
That detail—subtle but significant—is the one that stays with me. 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.
Why Now?
Ironically, it seems that Newsom’s casual dismissal of the affair in his recent memoir might have sparked her desire to tell her version of the story.
In January 2026, Rippey received a call from a former colleague who’s currently an advisor to Newsom, informing her that Newsom wanted her to know that she appeared in a few pages of his upcoming memoir and offering to read them to her. Rippey declined, but asked, “Does he tell the truth?” The unnamed advisor laughed uncomfortably and said, “Well, we all remember things differently, don’t we, Ruby?”
Rippey says:
For my former boss, [the affair] is a footnote in a longer arc of ascent. For me, it is the fracture that split my life into before and after.
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.
There might or might not be a connection here, but as it turns out, Kamala Harris was there for Rippey when all the cards were down. Harris, who Rippey describes as “a real girl’s girl,” called soon after Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s disgusting remarks about Rippey, to check in. Rippey told her that a publisher had offered an advance for a memoir and that, being broke and “unemployable,” she was considering taking it.
She listens, then says simply: “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. 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.
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Harris is currently the highest-polling potential Democrat candidate for president in 2028, and on Sunday Andrew Yang said he’s heard that she’s prepping to run. That’s not an announcement, but the timeline is interesting.
Me, Too?
In 2018 Rippey said that she didn’t believe her affair with Newsom fell under the “Me, Too” umbrella because she was a willing participant in the affair. She doesn’t walk that back at all in this essay, but made the point that two things can be true at once:
Still, the reckoning exposed what I had missed: 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. 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.
Her silence at the time and refusal to blame Newsom helped in her sobriety journey, she says. But it also allowed Newsom to escape the same consequences she faced in her personal and professional life.
Newsom Response
Newsom responded through a spokesperson, who said 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.” According to Politico, Newsom’s advisers aren’t even pushing back on the essay privately, “steer[ing] clear of disparaging comments.”
BONUS CONTENT
I discussed Rippey’s essay with my friend John Phillips, who covers California politics on his daily talk radio show like no other (well, except for Salem’s Jennifer Horn, also a dear friend, but I have to get up too early in the morning to be on her show). The thumbnail is AI, but I would love it to be foreshadowing!
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