By admin 
The former aide Gov. Gavin Newsom had an affair with while he was mayor of San Francisco revealed more details in a Vanity Fair essay published Tuesday that contradicts Newsom’s public recollection of their brief relationship.
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Ruby Rippey worked as Newsom’s deputy campaign finance director, and later appointments secretary from 2004 to 2006. At the time, she was married to Alex Tourk, Newsom’s close friend, deputy chief of staff and later reelection campaign manager, who resigned after confronting Newsom about the affair in spring 2007.
The affair, which threatened to derail Newsom’s political ascent, could serve as opposition fodder as he mulls a run for president in 2028 after he leaves office next year. At the time, Newsom, who was also being criticized for appearing drunk in public, admitted in an emotional press conference “everything you’ve heard is true” and pledged to seek help for drinking.
Rippey previously characterized the affair in 2018 as an “ugly” but consensual episode, despite the power imbalance between her and her boss, whom she did not mention by name except as “Kennedy-esque” and “the mayor of San Francisco.” Newsom was single and newly separated from his former wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is now the U.S. ambassador to Greece.
“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,” Rippey wrote. “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.”
Rippey and Tourk later divorced and remarried other people, but remain friendly. Rippey did not respond to a request for comment. Tourk declined to comment.
‘Proximity to power’
The liaison, which Rippey said began around July 2005 and continued sporadically for months, coincided with her increasing dependence on alcohol and cocaine.
“We meet and we drink. There is sex, but it isn’t the point. The point is proximity — to power, to being chosen,” wrote Rippey, who said she was spiraling as she faced being a new parent and “white-knuckling” sobriety.
She and Newsom often met at “his penthouse in Russian Hill, a private back room in a North Beach bar, the W Hotel in Los Angeles,” until Rippey’s sister intervened and her family agreed to pay for her to attend rehab in Arizona.
Rippey said she ended the affair by sending a letter of resignation and a breakup letter to Newsom in May 2006. She later received a $10,000 payout from a fund earmarked for staffers with “catastrophic illnesses.”
“What I didn’t know until later was that my sister had also reached out to my boss. She called his cell and told him not to see me again,” she wrote. “His response, she told me, was some version of ‘God bless, God bless.…’”
Rippey said she confessed the affair months later in a January 2007 email to Tourk, who by then was managing Newsom’s reelection campaign.
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Tourk then requested a meeting with Newsom, who was attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Days later, Tourk resigned from the campaign and Newsom publicly admitted to the affair, saying he would seek help for alcohol dependency, and he went on to win reelection.
The Sacramento Bee later reported in 2018 that he underwent counseling and temporarily abstained from drinking instead of attending a traditional treatment facility.
Kamala Harris: ‘A real girl’s girl’
As reporters pressed Tourk, Newsom and Rippey for details following the press conference, Rippey said she received a call from then-District Attorney Kamala Harris.
Rippey said a publisher had offered her an advance to write a memoir, which she was considering as she was “broke and unemployable.” She said she was also being criticized as a “culprit” with a “checkered past” by First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom, who later apologized.
“I wouldn’t say anything right now, Ruby. Just pause,” Harris said. “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,” Rippey wrote. “So I stay silent.”
‘Briefest and stupidest of affairs’ vs. ‘technically defensible’
In his memoir published earlier this year, Newsom wrote about his affair with Rippey as the “briefest and stupidest” of flings.
Rippey said a Newsom adviser contacted her in January to give her notice that the memoir would briefly mention the affair, which Newsom wrote ended after he “came clean to (his sister) Hillary and Alex Tourk.”
“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,” Rippey wrote. “Technically defensible, perhaps, but one that leaves the unmistakable impression that he, not I, was the one who told Alex the truth.”
Newsom spokesperson Izzy Gardon said in a statement that the governor had already apologized for his role in the 20-year-old affair.
“In the time since, he met his wife, started a family, and has focused on serving Californians,” Gardon said. “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.”
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