An aide involved in a relationship with Gavin Newsom more than 20 years ago, when he was mayor of San Francisco, detailed their relationship and his journey to sobriety in a story published by Vanity Fair on Tuesday.
Although Ruby Rippey, 54, has previously spoken about her relationship with the current governor, her first-person account offers a deeper explanation about the matter. It comes as Newsom finishes his final year as governor of California and is considering a run for president in 2028.
Rippey, who once served as Newsom’s recruiting secretary, was married to Alex Tourk, the then-mayor’s close friend, campaign manager and deputy chief of staff, when the affair became public in 2007. Tork resigned after Rippey told him she was sleeping with their boss, he writes.
At the time, Newsom had just split from Kimberly Guilfoyle and apologized in front of a crowd of reporters who packed his office at a news conference, admitting that “everything you’ve heard and read is true.” Later, he said he wanted treatment for alcohol abuse.
In the story, Rippey explains that the affair with Newsom happened when she was a new mother and when her drinking, which had been a problem before the relationship, got out of hand.
Rippey writes that their relationship began in July 2005 after a wedding in Napa Valley and lasted for months, with occasional sexual encounters until he entered rehab in May 2006.
They met at his private house in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood, in a private back room at a bar in North Beach and at the W Hotel in Los Angeles, he writes.
“We meet and drink. There is sex, but it is not the point. The point is close – in the power, choice, feeling that has just appeared – no longer silenced by pregnancy, by the new mother, by the difficulty of white-knuckling the length of sobriety,” he writes. “It’s not love, it’s not romance, it’s drunkenness.”
Izzy Gardon, a spokeswoman for the governor’s office, said Tuesday that Newsom acknowledged his role and publicly apologized for the incident nearly two decades ago.
“Over time, he met his wife, started a family and focused on serving the people of California. He spoke about this chapter of his life, including his memorial, and out of respect for everyone involved, he has nothing more to add,” Gardon said.
The story happened when Gavin Newsom was the Mayor of San Francisco.
(San Francisco Chronicle / Hearst Newspapers)
Newsom faced renewed criticism over the issue during the 2018 gubernatorial race amid a spate of sexual misconduct in politics, corporate America and Hollywood. But Rippey said he doesn’t see himself as a victim of a powerful man.
“Yes, I was a downer, but I was also a free 33-year-old married woman and a mother. (I also had a bad tendency to drink too much and destroy myself.),” she wrote on Facebook at the time.
He has not blamed the governor for what happened, but he noted in his story that in the #MeToo era he realized that his boss at the time had a responsibility to “hold the line.”
“That didn’t happen. But I didn’t hold back on the space left open – I realized I might have wanted that,” he wrote. “Both of these things are true: I am responsible for what I have done. Power does not distribute consequences equally.”
For Newsom, he writes, the story is “a footnote in a long climb. For me, it’s a fracture that divided my life before and after it.”
In his memoir, “The Fast Guy: A Memoir of Discovery,” published this year, Newsom acknowledges the connection with Rippey, describing it as “short stories.”
He also writes that he agreed to be betrayed by Tork, information that Rippey deals with in his story. She says she was the one who told her husband the devastating news via email while she was at her parent’s house in Napa and at home in San Francisco with their young son.
“But anger is a luxury I can’t afford,” she writes. “Instead, I return to gratitude, not for love, not for the pain I caused Alex, but for everything that followed. I needed something catastrophic to change course. Something that makes the cost of going back – of drinking again – unimaginable.”
After dating, Rippey and Tork divorced but continued to work together with their son, now grown. She has been sober for 20 years, writes, remarried and now has a son with her second husband.
“The damage was mine,” he wrote at the end of his story. “But so is the life that has been rebuilt behind it.”
Times staff writer Taryn Luna contributed to this report.
