In an essay for Vanity Fair published Tuesday, a former aide to Gavin Newsom reflected on the affair she had with him in the early 2000s when he was mayor of San Francisco — and on the inherent imbalance of power that shaped both the relationship and its fallout.
“Power does not need to coerce. It only needs to exist,” Ruby Rippey wrote. “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. Both things are true: I am responsible for what I did. Power does not distribute consequences evenly.”
Rippey, who worked for Newsom initially as a deputy campaign finance director and then as his commission secretary after he took office in 2004, wrote about her alcohol addiction, her relationship with Newsom while she was married to Newsom’s then-deputy chief of staff Alex Tourk and what happened after the news of the affair became public in 2007.
“Nearly everyone seemed to know except the one person who most needed to know: my husband,” Rippey wrote. “I had been sleeping with his boss, who was also mine, and the mayor of San Francisco.”
Rippey said the affair with Newsom began after a colleague’s wedding in July 2005 in Napa Valley. (Newsom, now governor of California, had filed for divorce from Kimberly Guilfoyle in January 2005.)
It isn’t love. It isn’t romance. It’s intoxication. The text message is a hit. The glance across the hallway, a hit. The risk floods my bloodstream. I walk down the corridors of City Hall—my nude stilettos striking the marble floor. He looks at me, his gaze deliberate, newly curious. It feels like oxygen.
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.
The two continued a sexual relationship in places such as Newsom’s penthouse in Russian Hill and the W Hotel in Los Angeles, until she eventually entered rehab and confessed to her husband. The news became public in February 2007 when Newsom admitted to the affair.
“I want to make it clear that everything you’ve heard and read is true, and I’m deeply sorry about that,” Newsom said at the time. “I’ve hurt someone I care deeply about,” adding that it “is something I have to live with.”
Newsom declined to comment on the essay to MS NOW.
Rippey said former Vice President Kamala Harris, who was the district attorney at the time, advised her not to speak publicly. “It turns out to be the best advice I receive,” Rippey wrote. “I am newly sober and still inside the wreckage—unable to make sense of anything, let alone speak clearly about it.”
The post Ex-aide who had affair with Newsom reflects on power imbalance in new essay appeared first on MS NOW.
