I Read the Gavin Newsom Affair Tell-All So You Don’t Have To
Blackouts, cocaine, hotel-room wreckage and an idling chauffeured Lincoln—the woman at the center of Newsom’s most notorious scandal remembers considerably more than he does.
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🕐 5-Minute Read
“I had been sleeping with his boss, who was also mine, and the mayor of San Francisco.”
That is Ruby Rippey describing the affair Gavin Newsom calls “the stupidest and also briefest of affairs” in his new memoir.
Brief? That is not how Rippey remembers it.
In a long and astonishing Vanity Fair essay ($) written in the first person, she recounts sleeping with Newsom while working for him at San Francisco City Hall. Her husband, Alex Tourk, was Newsom’s deputy chief of staff and one of his most trusted political aides.
So the mayor was sleeping with his employee, who was also the wife of the man helping run his administration.
I will say this for Rippey: She does not try to write herself out of her own scandal. She was an alcoholic, later used cocaine to keep herself drinking, and admits that she actively pursued Newsom’s attention.
“I was not coerced,” she writes. “I knew what I was doing.”
Fair enough. But Newsom was still the mayor. He was her boss and her husband’s boss. Rippey’s willingness to accept responsibility for her behavior does not erase his.
And that is before we get to the white dress.
The Wedding
The affair began at a Napa Valley wedding in 2005. Rippey wore a white strapless dress her mother had warned her not to wear. She drank Champagne, then wine, then more wine. Her husband eventually went home to their one-year-old son while she stayed behind to continue partying.
Later, Rippey climbed into a chauffeured car with Newsom and several other people. She stretched her legs across the center console and let her heels fall off. Newsom, sitting in front, took one of her feet and began massaging it.
Then her memory stops.
She awoke beside him the next morning, still wearing the dress. It was soaked from the waist down because she had passed out and urinated in the bed. Rippey gathered her things and left, forgetting a gold bracelet that had belonged to her grandmother.
A few days later, Newsom walked past her desk and silently dropped off the bracelet.
They both pretended nothing had happened. Then they started doing it again.
Rippey says the affair continued on and off for months. They met at Newsom’s Russian Hill penthouse, in the private back room of a North Beach bar and at the W Hotel in Los Angeles. Around City Hall, she lingered in doorways and looked for reasons to cross his path. His texts would arrive asking, “Where are you?”
She always went.
Rippey writes that the real attraction was not romance. It was the feeling of being chosen by the most powerful man in the building. The attention itself became another intoxicant.
This is where Newsom’s position matters. He was not some random man she met at a bar. He was the mayor, carrying on an affair with a visibly unraveling subordinate whose husband reported directly to him.
The Stain and the Shirt Buttons
One night at Newsom’s penthouse, Rippey spilled red wine on his pale carpet. She watched California’s future governor get down on all fours and scrub at the stain with a washcloth.
“You know, we really can’t do this anymore,” Newsom told her, according to Rippey. “You can’t be doing this to Alex.”
It is quite a scene: Newsom cleaning up the physical evidence while acknowledging the betrayal—and then continuing the affair anyway.
When Rippey finally left the penthouse in the early morning, Newsom’s black Lincoln was still idling outside. The driver had been told to wait. She climbed into the back seat knowing that he almost certainly understood what had just happened upstairs.
The Los Angeles episode is even more lurid.
Rippey arranged a girls’ trip knowing Newsom would be there for work. She and a friend spent the afternoon drinking Chardonnay before joining him at the W. Rippey remembers a few flashes from the hotel bar. After that, nothing.
She woke beside Newsom with a pounding head:
“On the floor near the bed are tiny shirt buttons scattered like coins. Not mine. One is stuck to the back of my thigh. I peel it off and dress carefully, leaving without waking him.”
Newsom later texted her: “Thank God the W had T-shirts.”
Rippey figured out that she must have ripped his shirt open during a night she could barely remember.
And through all of this, Alex kept going to work for Newsom.
The Collapse
By then, Rippey’s drinking had taken over her life. She was showing up late and hungover. She tried Antabuse, a medication that makes a person sick if they drink, and drank anyway. Eventually she stopped taking it.
Then she added cocaine because it allowed her to drink more and stay out longer.
Her sister started following her through bars at night to make sure she stayed alive. After one particularly bad nosebleed, she drove Rippey to an emergency room, where a doctor cauterized the inside of her nostril.
Rippey entered rehab in May 2006 and ended the affair. Her sister also called Newsom and told him that Ruby was sick. Even if she contacted him again, the sister said, it was his responsibility to refuse.
Newsom’s response, as it was later relayed to Rippey, was some version of: “God bless, God bless.”
After leaving rehab, Rippey remained silent for months. Alex continued working on Newsom’s reelection campaign, unaware that his wife and his boss had been sleeping together.
In January 2007, she finally confessed by email. Alex confronted Newsom, resigned, and ended the marriage.
This part matters because Newsom now writes that he “came clean” to Alex. Rippey says she had already told her husband. In her telling, Newsom admitted the affair only after Alex knew and demanded an answer.
That is not a minor dispute. Newsom’s version allows him to appear as the man who voluntarily told a painful truth. Rippey’s version has him acknowledging it after someone else forced the issue.
Then Kamala Harris makes an appearance.
Harris, San Francisco’s district attorney at the time, called Rippey as reporters and publishers pursued her. Her advice was to remain quiet, pause and let time give her some perspective.
Rippey says it was the best advice she received. It was also, whether intentionally or not, very helpful to San Francisco’s rising political class.
Rippey is now 20 years sober and remarried. She still accepts responsibility for the affair, but says she has come to understand the imbalance more clearly.
“Power does not need to coerce,” she writes. “It only needs to exist.”
So, Does It Matter?
Extramarital affairs no longer end presidential campaigns on their own. The salaciousness will make this story travel, but that does not necessarily mean it will cost Newsom votes.
For the story to cause lasting political damage, his opponents must connect it to something larger. In this case, they have an opening.
The affair itself is old. The dispute over how Newsom tells it is new. He chose to revisit the episode in a memoir that helps introduce him to a national electorate, and he portrays himself as the man who “came clean.” Rippey says that is not what happened.
That turns the political question from whether Newsom was unfaithful into whether he is sanitizing his past as he prepares to ask voters for a promotion.
The lurid details will do much of the work. This appeared in Vanity Fair, but parts could have run in Penthouse. The white dress, the blackouts, the cocaine, the shirt buttons and the waiting Lincoln are tailor-made for headlines, attack ads and viral clips.
Republicans will use every one of them. Newsom expects that. The more immediate danger may come from Democrats who do not want him to become the nominee.
Rival campaigns do not even have to challenge Rippey’s insistence that the affair was consensual. Her own formulation gives them what they need: She was responsible for her choices, but Newsom held the power and failed to exercise the judgment his position required. Those two things can be true at the same time.
Democratic opponents—or the operatives and commentators surrounding them—can use the story to raise questions about Newsom’s judgment, his treatment of subordinates and his honesty about an embarrassing episode. That is far more dangerous than another argument about marital fidelity.
None of this guarantees that the story will derail him. Voters have forgiven worse. But opposition research works best when it reinforces an existing suspicion, and Newsom’s critics already portray him as slick, ambitious and carefully packaged.
The sex makes this story irresistible. Newsom’s retelling of it could make it relevant.
He was a willing participant in the affair, so whatever political consequences follow—then or now—are his to bear.
But one has to feel for Jennifer Siebel Newsom and their children. They did not create this scandal, yet they must endure its return. A family can say nobody is perfect only so many times.
For them, this just has to be one big downer.