Revelations about California Governor Gavin Newsom’s affair are finally coming out, RadarOnline.com can reveal.
The politician and Ruby Rippey, the wife of one of his top aides, had secret liaisons from 2005 through 2006. Now, Rippey is finally opening up about the cheating scandal that jeopardized Newsom’s political career.
In a Vanity Fair essay published on July 28, Rippey claimed she and her then-husband, Alex Tourk, worked together at San Francisco City Hall for Newsom’s predecessor when they were recruited to join the city supervisor’s team.
Newsom went on to win the 2003 mayoral race, with Tourk becoming his deputy chief-of-staff and Rippey serving as a commission secretary.
As Rippey and Newsom began a closer working relationship, the trio went out to a Mexican dinner one night in 2004 where the mayor told her, “Hey—you look really good,” after she caught him staring at her, noticing that she’d lost most of her “pregnancy weight.”
After that, Rippey said she paid closer attention to what she wore to work, opting for more fitted and eye-catching outfits.
Rippey wrote that the affair began over the 4th of July weekend in 2005 at a longtime City Hall staffer’s Napa Valley wedding.
“Alex and I stand with a group of staffers – talking, laughing, champagne in hand. I am restless in a way I can’t name. I drink champagne, then wine. Then more wine. My dinner goes untouched,” she shared.
Rippey and Newsom later found themselves together in a narrow bathroom hallway smiling at each other, then flirting while dangling their feet in a hot tub as Tourk drove home to care for their one-year-old son.
A very drunk Rippey’s next memory was being in Newsom’s “chauffeured town car, heading to The Carneros Inn,” when “he takes one of my feet and begins to massage it, the gesture half-hidden inside the loud car.”
Rippey then claimed that she blacked out.
“I wake the next morning beside him, still dressed. I am cold, almost shivering, and my dress—the one my mother warned me not to wear – is soaked from the waist down. I had passed out. I had also wet the bed. (It wasn’t the first time.) He is still asleep,” she wrote about waking up next to her boss.
Despite Rippey and Newsom trying to act professional at work, she claimed people began to “notice” their warmer behavior towards one another.
“We meet, and we drink. There is s–, 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,” Rippey shared about the affair.
She continued, “It isn’t love. It isn’t romance. It’s intoxication…His attention lands like a high, and I follow it with a single-minded devotion.”
However, she did detail a steamy hotel encounter where Rippey recalled that in a drunken haze, “I tore his shirt off, every button ripped loose.”
The encounters went on for months and ended after Rippey eventually turned from alcohol to cocaine and ended up in rehab in 2006. Her sister reached out to Newsom and asked that the two never see each other again, to which he allegedly responded, “God bless, God, bless.”
Tourk didn’t find out about the affair until Rippey wrote him a heartfelt email after leaving rehab. He moved out of their home and quit as Newsom’s campaign re-election manager as the scandal became public.
“Everything you’ve heard and read is true,” Newsom told reporters in a 2007 news conference about his affair with his campaign manager’s wife. By then, the mayor was dating his current wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, who told reporters that Rippey was the “culprit” behind the affair.
“It was a few nothing incidents when she showed up passed out outside of his door,” she said.
Not only did the mayor win re-election, but he also went on to serve two terms as lieutenant governor and governor of California. He is said to be strongly considering a run for president in 2028.