Add The California Post on Google Gov. Gavin Newsom’s former San Francisco City Hall aide Ruby Rippey shared her side of their 2005 affair in a Vanity Fair essay published Tuesday, claiming Newsom has not been fully truthful about what happened.
In her new piece, Rippey recounted how the affair started, a pivotal moment that rocked San Francisco politics when it was revealed in 2007 and has remained one of the most embarrassing moments in then-Mayor Newsom’s life and career.
Newsom is widely expected to launch a 2028 presidential campaign after terming out of the governor’s office next year. In that context, he has sought to fully own his role in the affair, which he recounted in his memoir earlier this year.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s former San Francisco City Hall aide unveiled her side of the story to Vanity Fair on Tuesday. Anadolu via Getty Images “Ruby was drinking too much and so was I,” Newsom writes of his former 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.
Ruby Rippey recounted how the affair started, a pivotal moment that rocked San Francisco politics in 2007. Facebook “A year later, to her credit, Ruby decided to come clean to her twelve-step group,” and Newsom later acknowledged the affair to the press.
But in Rippey’s new piece, she claims that reading those parts of the memoir made her feel unsettled.
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 said. “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 piece.
Tourk, who was Newsom’s campaign manager and had declined The Post’s request for comment, resigned after confronting Newsom, and the 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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