Gavin Newsom has issued a fresh response after Ruby Rippey, who worked as his secretary when he was mayor of San Francisco, published an essay titled: ‘How I Blew Up – Then Rebuilt My Life.’
The Vanity Fair essay, published on July 28, 2026, recounts how Rippey says her relationship with the California governor began in 2005 while she was still married to Newsom aide Alex Tourk.
“I had been sleeping with his boss, who was also mine, and the mayor of San Francisco,” she began the essay.
Newsom, now 58, first addressed the affair publicly in a 2007 press conference and later discussed it again in the memoir he published earlier this year. His office has now commented once more.
“The governor acknowledged his role and publicly apologized for his conduct 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,” his office said.
“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.”
In the essay, Rippey says she relapsed at a wedding the two attended in 2005 and later ended up alone with Newsom in a hallway.
She writes that the evening continued with the pair soaking their feet in a hot tub. According to Rippey, her husband left ‘irritated’ after she said she wanted to keep partying, while he took their son home.
Rippey then says she traveled with the former mayor to The Carneros Inn in a chauffeured car, where she says he massaged her feet.
From that point, she describes much of the night as unclear, later recalling ‘waking up beside him the next morning still dressed,’ and also admitting to ‘wetting the bed’.
She also describes a later encounter in which the two had sex, writing: “It isn’t love. It isn’t romance. It’s intoxication.”
Rippey writes that the relationship became public in early 2007, when then-San Francisco City Hall colleagues and reporters began circulating the scandal. Newsom admitted the affair shortly afterward and apologized publicly, while later telling the story again in his 2026 memoir, in which he refers to the episode as one of the lowest points of his life.
In a section titled ‘a real girls’ girl,’ Rippey writes that Kamala Harris contacted her when the scandal became public in 2007, saying she ‘knew her from the Brown administration’.
Rippey claims Harris told her to ‘not say anything right now’, which Rippey describes as ‘the best advice she’d received.’
Near the conclusion of the article, Rippey jumps ahead to 2026 and Newsom’s memoir, taking issue with his description of the relationship as ‘the briefest of affairs’ and with his account that he was the one to ‘come clean’ to Tourk.
“It reads—to me, at least—as a version of events that gives him credit for something I had already done,” she claims.
Rippey, who says she is now 20 years sober, writes that the hurt over ‘what I did to Alex’ has remained with her for the past two decades.
After the affair became public, she and Tourk later divorced. At the time the relationship took place, Newsom’s divorce from Kimberly Guilfoyle had not yet been finalized.