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An aide to then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has opened up about her affair with the mayor, sharing insight into their relationship nearly two decades after the story broke, in an essay published by Vanity Fair.In the first-person essay titled "How I Blew Up — Then Rebuilt — My Life," Ruby Rippey, who served as Newsom’s appointments secretary, describes how her months-long affair with Newsom, whom she does not name in the piece, only referring to him as a young "Kennedy-esque." In the essay, she opens up about her heavy drinking and the betrayal of her then-husband and Newsom's deputy chief of staff, Alex Tourk."I don’t stop to consider the consequences—not for Alex, not for myself, not for the life I am building. I am responding to the feeling. His attention lands like a high, and I follow it with a single-minded devotion," Rippey writes."My family placed much of the blame on my boss and the conditions of the office. But it wasn’t the affair that derailed me. It was my alcoholism. The affair just gave it somewhere to live."For nearly two decades, Rippey has rarely publicly spoken about the affairs, keeping those details to her inner circle and therapist. She reveals that a publisher offered to pay her for a memoir about the story shortly after it broke in 2007, which she ultimately declined to pursue.Since 2007, Newsom has announced to the world full of cameras that “everything you’ve heard and read is true,” and eventually served out two terms as California's governor. Rippey shares her story in the dusk hours of Newsom's political career as the state governor and in the dawn of his potential presidential run in 2028.Izzy Gardon, Newsom's spokesperson, wrote in a statement that “The Governor acknowledged his role and publicly apologized nearly two decades ago when he was still mayor.”“In the time since, he met his wife, started a family, and has focused on serving Californians. 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,” Gardon added.In his memoir, Newsom dedicates a "few pages" to the affair he had with Rippey a few months after he divorced his ex-wife Kimberly Guilfoyle, describing it as “the briefest of affairs.""For my former boss, it is a footnote in a longer arc of ascent. For me, it is the fracture that split my life into before and after," Rippey writes.Within those same few pages, Newsom writes about how he was the one who "came clean” to Tourk. She recalled the moment differently, with Newsom attempting to get a hold of her multiple times after she confessed to the affair to Tourk while Newsom was in Davos at the World Economic Forum."Word has already reached him in Switzerland that I might have confessed. All day, his number flashes across my phone," she writes."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. Technically defensible, perhaps, but one that leaves the unmistakable impression that he, not I, was the one who told Alex the truth."Throughout the essay, Rippey details how the seedlings of the affair were planted after she, her husband, staff members from City Hall, and Newsom attended a co-worker's wedding in 2005. During the wedding, Rippey shared how that was the night she had broken her self-imposed sobriety post-pregnancy by drinking glass after glass of wine and Champagne.She would later head to The Carneros Inn with her boss, ultimately waking up next to him the following morning. After that moment, Rippey explained how everything had changed as "boundaries begin to disintegrate" and their relationship quickly evolved into an affair."My phone lights up soon after. “Where are you?” But it never matters where I am because I always go to him—his penthouse in Russian Hill, a private back room in a North Beach bar, the W Hotel in Los Angeles," Rippey writes."We meet, and we drink. There is sex, but it isn’t the point. The point is proximity—to power, to being chosen, to feeling newly visible—no longer muted by pregnancy, by new motherhood, by the strain of white-knuckling long stretches of sobriety."And as the affairs continued, Rippey describes how her addiction to alcohol became worse, as she would get home in the early hours and go to work hungover. It got to a point where Rippey explained she started to turn to cocaine as life began "to spiral."Rippey described how the only reason this cycle in her life stopped was after her sister began to trail Rippey at night to keep an eye on her. Her sister later asked if Rippey would be willing to go to rehab if their father paid for it.Rippey agreed to go to rehab, ultimately resigning from her position with City Hall and ending things with Newsom."When I return home from rehab nearly two months later, I try to resume life as a wife and mother. Meanwhile, Alex leaves each morning for City Hall—for the man I have betrayed him with, still unaware of what had happened between us," she writes."The greatest cost was never public. It was what I did to a good man who deserved better than I gave him."Since then, Rippey has rarely talked about the affair. On one occasion in 2018, during the #MeToo movement, she addressed the controversy after Newsom’s then-Republican gubernatorial opponents questioned the power dynamic between her and the mayor.“Yes, I was a subordinate, but I was also a free-thinking, 33-(year)-old adult married woman & mother,” she wrote on Facebook.In the Vanity Fair essay, Rippey reflects on that moment, highlighting that claiming responsibility for the affair was "the last form of agency" she had, but also acknowledging the role the power dynamic played in their relationship."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. But I didn’t stumble into the space left open—I saw a possibility and went for it," she writes."Both things are true: I am responsible for what I did. Power does not distribute consequences evenly."Rippey reveals that she's been sober for the last 20 years, lives in Mill Valley, and has remarried and has an 11-year-old son with her second husband."The pain of what I did to Alex, and to myself, has stayed with me every day for two decades. I used to think that was punishment. Now I understand it as protection," she adds."We lost the marriage. We didn’t lose the ability to become another version of a family. The damage was mine. But so is the life rebuilt in its wake."
