By admin 
The woman who had an affair with Gov. Gavin Newsom nearly 20 years ago told her story in a Vanity Fair article published on Tuesday. Though some may call it old news, it’s more relevant today than ever.
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Ruby Rippey’s first-person account, without directly mentioning Newsom by name, proved then and now how some people can get away with morally bankrupt behavior and some people can’t.
Newsom and President Donald Trump have this in common, as much as the two detest each other.
Newsom was Mayor of San Francisco in 2007 when news of his affair with Rippey, his appointments secretary, went public. Rippey also happened to be the wife of Newsom’s campaign manager. It was an egregious abuse of an uneven power dynamic between a politician and a subordinate, not to mention a betrayal of a close friend whose professional life was dedicated to elevating Newsom.
The story broke in February 2007. That same month, I was present when Newsom spoke at a breakfast kicking off the baseball season. From the podium, Newsom joked about how he was knocking Barry Bonds, the former San Francisco Giants star, off the front page. Everybody laughed. Newsom moved on.
Rippey reveals in Vanity Fair how she put her life back together and how her former husband, Alex Tourk, couldn’t look her in the eye for more than a decade after the affair.
Abusing alcohol and cocaine, she was drawn to Newsom’s power. The affair lasted several months, she wrote.
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Not mentioned in the Vanity Fair article was how Rippey received a $10,000 payout after she left her job with Newsom. That taxpayer-provided money came from a fund intended for San Francisco city employees with catastrophic and life-threatening illnesses.
The Bee reported that the payout, “was given approval by the former director of San Francisco’s public health department, Mitch Katz, according to documents received by The Sacramento Bee. She was granted approval for her substance abuse problems – a rare qualification. (Katz is a close adviser to Newsom on health care.)”
All of this and much more about Newsom was publicly known when he was easily elected governor in 2018.
During that campaign, I wrote: “The 50-year-old lieutenant governor and former mayor of San Francisco is the living embodiment of privilege, and people seem to be OK with that. He has white male privilege. Class privilege. Wealth privilege. The privilege of good looks.
“All create a Teflon exterior, protecting Newsom’s horrendous lapses of judgment and character, excusing his questionable background. It is simply accepted without eliciting the negative scrutiny that would dog or even derail lesser mortals.” A friend called to say she agreed with me, but that she was “picking her poison” by going with Newsom.
That’s why Rippey’s story is relevant now.
Newsom is gearing up for a White House run. In a weird way, Trump’s moral corruption has cleared a path and given Newsom’s supporters the permission to excuse him for using people and tossing them aside on his way to the top.
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