Add The California Post on Google Gov. Gavin Newsom’s former lover, the ex-wife of top aide and close friend Alex Tourk, recalled an off-color comment the then-San Francisco mayor said to her in a Vanity Fair essay.
Ruby Rippey said she dined with Newsom and her husband at a Mexican restaurant in 2004 when the now-governor made an uncalled-for observation.
“Hey—you look really good,” Rippey said Newsom observed, “You’ve lost all your pregnancy weight.”
The comment elicited an “awkward laugh” from the table. Rippey, a then-recovering alcoholic, said shortly after that she thirsted for her husband’s margarita.
Just months after, Rippey would have the first of her sexual encounters with Newsom in July 2005.
Their affair would send shockwaves through California’s political sphere. The scandal, when publicly revealed, nearly caused Newsom’s downfall early in his political career.
Newsom famously confessed the ordeal to the public in a stunning press conference. At the time of the affair, Rippey was married to Newsom’s close friend and top aide Alex Tourk, and Newsom had yet to finalize his divorce from Kimberly Guilfoyle, now the U.S. Ambassador to Greece.
Rippey would go on to describe her romance with Newsom as “intoxicating.”
“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,” she wrote.
The affair doesn’t halt until Rippey delved into cocaine, she said, and an emergency room visit for her non-stop bleeding nose opens her family’s eyes to the severity.
Her sister tells her that their father would pay for Rippey’s rehab. She agrees to go, she said.
Rippey’s sister tells Newsom to stay away from her.
“She is unwell. She is getting help. Even if she reaches out to you, it is your responsibility to say no,” her sister told him.
“God bless, God bless.…” Newsom replied, according to Rippey.
Newsom admits to the affair on television in February 2007 as he’s dating now-first partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom. Rippey stays silent as her “phone floods with calls and texts from reporters.”
Some time later, she still declines any interviews with reporters and shot down characterizations that their interactions were nonconsensual.
“I was not coerced. I knew what I was doing,” she wrote.
The Vanity Fair essay is penned as Newsom aspires to be a top presidential candidate in 2028.
It’s also the first time Rippey has told her story in detail about the affair as Newsom’s second gubernatorial term winds down later this year.
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