Gavin Newsom’s former aide, Ruby Rippey, has shared a detailed account of their affair from two decades ago. The former staffer shared her side of the story in a personal essay, noting a major discrepancy in the narrative.
Ruby Rippey says Gavin Newsom’s memoir blurs who first told Alex Tourk about the 2005 affair
In her recent essay for Vanity Fair, titled “How I Blew Up – Then Rebuilt – My Life,” Ruby Rippey has opened up about her 2005 affair with Gavin Newsom. In her personal account of the scandal, Rippey contradicted a claim that the Governor of California had previously made about the affair.
Rippey referred to Newsom as her “boss” or the “mayor” in the essay, as he was the mayor of San Francisco when the affair took place. “For my former boss, it is a footnote in a longer arc of ascent,” she wrote. “For me, it is the fracture that split my life into before and after.”
Newsom had publicly admitted to the affair in 2007 during a city hall press conference, where he told reporters, “Everything you’ve heard and read is true.” The California governor once again addressed the scandal in his new memoir, Young Man in a Hurry. In the book, Newsom described his relationship with Rippey as “the briefest of affairs.”
Meanwhile, Rippey’s account of the affair contradicts a major claim that Newsom made in his book. Talking about reading his memoir, Rippey recounts, “When I read the pages a few days later, a familiar feeling returns, the one of being written about by someone who assumes I won’t answer.”
She then claimed, “He also writes that he was the one who “came clean” to Alex. 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 added, “Technically defensible, perhaps, but one that leaves the unmistakable impression that he, not I, was the one who told Alex the truth.”
Originally reported by Namrata Ghosh on Mandatory.
