Gavin Newsom's former mistress has published a first-person account of their affair in Vanity Fair, revealing that then-District Attorney Kamala Harris privately urged her not to speak publicly, a claim neither Newsom nor Harris has addressed.
Ruby Rippey, who served as Newsom's appointments secretary at San Francisco City Hall while married to his campaign manager Alex Tourk, laid out the affair in granular detail in the essay published Tuesday. She described encounters that stretched over months, in hotel rooms, at Newsom's Russian Hill penthouse, in the back of his chauffeured town car, and at The Carneros Inn in Napa Valley. Fox News Digital reported that both Newsom's and Harris's teams were contacted for comment but did not immediately respond.
The essay is not a legal filing. It is not an allegation of criminal conduct. Rippey herself states she entered the affair willingly. But the account raises pointed questions about how two of California's most prominent Democratic politicians handled the fallout, and whether the instinct to protect political careers took priority over honesty.
The New York Post reported that the affair began on July 2, 2005, at a wedding where Rippey broke a stretch of sobriety. Rippey described encounters fueled by alcohol and what she called the gravitational pull of political power. Her husband, Tourk, was Newsom's close friend and top aide, and had no idea.
In the Vanity Fair essay, Rippey described the dynamic in her own words:
"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."
She also wrote that "power does not need to coerce. It only needs to exist." That line captures the tension at the center of the essay: Rippey insists the encounters were consensual, but she now views the power imbalance between a mayor and a subordinate employee, who also happened to be married to his campaign manager, as a factor she did not fully reckon with at the time.
Rippey stated plainly in the essay that she was not coerced. In a written confession she later sent to her husband, she described the relationship bluntly: "Just sex, on and off for months, with the mayor."
Her sister, according to the account, confronted Newsom directly, telling him: "She is unwell. She is getting help. Even if she reaches out to you, it is your responsibility to say no."
One of the sharpest disputes in the essay centers on who confessed. Rippey says she disclosed the affair to Tourk via email while he was still working for Newsom. Tourk then confronted Newsom directly and resigned immediately.
But in Newsom's memoir, Rippey writes, the governor claims he was the one who "came clean" to Tourk. That version, she argues, gives Newsom credit for a confession she had already made, rewriting the timeline to cast himself in a more honorable light.
When Rippey later asked a Newsom advisor whether the governor "tells the truth" in the book, the response was dismissive:
"Well, we all remember things differently, don't we, Ruby?"
That answer, evasive, patronizing, and carefully noncommittal, tells its own story. Newsom's team has not directly addressed whether the memoir's account is accurate. The governor, who is already facing a Department of Justice probe targeting him and his wife, has offered no public response to Rippey's essay.
The most politically loaded revelation in the essay involves Kamala Harris. At the time the affair became public in early 2007, Harris was serving as San Francisco's district attorney, a position that made her both a peer of Newsom's in the city's political establishment and a figure with her own ambitions to protect.
Rippey recounts that Harris listened to her account and then delivered a piece of private advice:
"I wouldn't say anything right now, Ruby. Just pause. More time will give you better perspective."
Harris also counseled Rippey against taking a book deal, according to the essay. The advice was framed as concern for Rippey's well-being. But the practical effect was clear: silence served the political interests of everyone in the room except Rippey herself. Newsom avoided further public scrutiny. Harris avoided the awkwardness of a fellow San Francisco power player's scandal spiraling further. And Rippey was left to carry the story alone.
Harris's team, like Newsom's, did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment. The former vice president has never publicly addressed Rippey's claim. Whether Harris's advice was genuinely well-intentioned or politically calculated remains an open question, but the fact that it aligned so neatly with the interests of the political class, rather than with the woman at the center of the scandal, is difficult to ignore.
Newsom's broader political operation has come under increasing pressure in recent months. A guilty plea by former aide Dana Williamson has raised further questions about the governor's inner circle and the culture of loyalty that surrounds him.
After Tourk's resignation forced the scandal into the open, Newsom held a news conference at San Francisco City Hall on February 1, 2007. He publicly apologized for the affair and announced he would seek treatment for alcohol abuse.
The public admission was treated at the time as a moment of accountability. Newsom's career survived. He went on to serve as lieutenant governor and then governor of California. But Rippey's essay complicates the narrative that Newsom handled the episode with transparency. If her account is accurate, the confession Newsom received credit for was one she had already delivered, and the public apology came only after his hand was forced by Tourk's departure.
Rippey's essay also describes a later encounter at a Mexican restaurant, after the birth of her first child, in which Newsom allegedly told her: "Hey, you look really good... You've lost all your pregnancy weight." The comment, as Rippey frames it, reflected a man who saw their relationship through a lens of casual entitlement even after the public fallout.
The governor, who has faced growing scrutiny over his financial dealings and recently hired Hunter Biden's former defense attorney amid federal probes, now faces a different kind of reckoning, not legal, but personal and political.
The Vanity Fair essay chronicles more than an affair. It traces Rippey's battle with alcoholism and cocaine use, her eventual path to sobriety, and the long aftermath of a scandal that defined her life far more than it defined the careers of the powerful men and women around her.
Rippey does not claim victimhood in the conventional sense. She acknowledges her choices. She names her addictions. She accepts responsibility for the betrayal of her husband. But she also insists on owning her version of events, a version that contradicts the carefully managed accounts that Newsom and his circle have put forward for nearly two decades.
Several questions remain unanswered. Did Rippey ultimately decline the book deal Harris advised against? What is the full extent of Newsom's memoir account, and will his team address the specific discrepancies Rippey has identified? Will Harris ever respond publicly to the claim that she counseled silence? And does the unnamed Newsom advisor's dismissive response, "we all remember things differently", reflect a broader strategy of quiet discrediting?
Neither Newsom's team nor Harris's team has offered answers. Polling has shown that even a significant share of Democrats support federal scrutiny of Newsom, suggesting that the governor's credibility problems extend beyond partisan lines.
Rippey's essay does not ask readers to feel sorry for her. It asks them to notice who got to tell the story, and who was told to stay quiet. For nearly twenty years, the answer was the people with power. Now the woman without it has spoken, and the silence from Sacramento and Washington is its own kind of confirmation.
When the powerful tell the less powerful to pause, to wait, to let time give them "better perspective," it almost never serves the person being told to wait. It serves the people who need the clock to run out.
