Gavin Newsom's former mistress has published a step-by-step account of their affair in Vanity Fair, and claims then-District Attorney Kamala Harris privately told her to keep quiet.
Ruby Rippey, who served as Newsom's appointments secretary at San Francisco City Hall, wrote that encounters with the mayor stretched across months and unfolded in chauffeured town cars, hotel rooms, and his Russian Hill penthouse. She was married at the time to Alex Tourk, Newsom's close friend and campaign manager, a man whose career and marriage both collapsed once the affair surfaced in 2007. Fox News Digital reported on the essay Tuesday, noting that neither Newsom's team nor Harris's team responded to requests for comment.
The essay does more than rehash an old scandal. It challenges how two of California's most prominent Democrats handled the fallout, and raises pointed questions about who benefited from Rippey's silence.
In the Vanity Fair piece, Rippey describes the affair not as a single lapse but as a pattern that played out over months while she worked steps from Newsom's office. She wrote that the draw was "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."
One passage recounts getting into Newsom's chauffeured town car and heading to The Carneros Inn, a resort in wine country. She described a moment in the car where Newsom massaged her foot from the front seat, "the gesture half-hidden inside the loud car." Other encounters took place at his Russian Hill penthouse and in hotel rooms.
Rippey also recounted a meeting at a Mexican restaurant after the birth of her first child, where she says Newsom told her: "Hey, you look really good... You've lost all your pregnancy weight." The remark, in her telling, was not small talk. It was a prelude.
She framed the relationship in terms that stopped short of calling it coercion but left little ambiguity about the imbalance at its center. "Power does not need to coerce," she wrote. "It only needs to exist."
The most politically charged claim in the essay involves Kamala Harris, who at the time served as San Francisco's district attorney. Rippey wrote that after the affair became public, Harris called her privately and advised against speaking out or pursuing a book deal.
Rippey quoted Harris as saying: "I wouldn't say anything right now, Ruby. Just pause. More time will give you better perspective." The essay does not specify whether the conversation was in person or by phone, and Harris's team did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
The claim is Rippey's alone. No second source confirms it. But the political logic is hard to miss. In 2007, Harris and Newsom occupied the two most powerful offices in San Francisco city government. A public airing of the affair, with Rippey's full cooperation, would have damaged both of them. Rippey's decision to go public now reopens a chapter that California's Democratic establishment clearly preferred to keep closed.
Harris did not deny the account. She did not confirm it. She said nothing at all.
Rippey wrote that she was the one who confessed the affair to her husband, sending him an email while he was still working as Newsom's campaign manager. The New York Post reported that her written confession to Tourk was blunt: "Just sex, on and off for months, with the mayor."
Tourk confronted Newsom and immediately resigned. The affair then erupted publicly. On February 1, 2007, Newsom held a news conference at City Hall where he admitted to the relationship. He subsequently announced he would seek treatment for alcohol abuse.
But Rippey's essay disputes a key detail in Newsom's own telling. She writes that his memoir falsely claims he was the one who "came clean" to Tourk, a framing she says gives Newsom credit for a confession she had already made. When she asked a Newsom advisor whether the governor "tells the truth" in his book, the response, she says, was dismissive: "Well, we all remember things differently, don't we, Ruby?"
That kind of answer is familiar to anyone who has watched powerful people manage inconvenient facts. Rippey's version may or may not hold up under scrutiny. But Newsom's team has not offered a competing account, just silence.
The Vanity Fair essay lands at a moment when Newsom is already under significant legal and political strain. A Department of Justice probe into the governor and his wife was referenced in Fox News's coverage, though no details about the investigation's scope appeared in the article itself.
Newsom's inner circle has drawn federal attention as well. His former chief of staff recently pleaded guilty to federal crimes, and the governor has since retained a high-profile defense attorney as the investigation tightens.
Rippey's essay, by itself, is a personal account of a nearly two-decade-old affair. It carries the weight of one woman's memory and the limits that come with it. But it arrives in a political environment where Newsom's judgment, his circle, and his honesty are all under active examination, and where the Democratic Party can ill afford another scandal dragging down its candidates with voters.
The Vanity Fair piece is not simply a political exposé. Rippey wrote at length about her battle with alcoholism, her struggle through early motherhood, and the eventual breakdown of her marriage to Tourk. She described the affair as entangled with her addiction, encounters "fueled by addiction and status" rather than romance.
That framing complicates any attempt to reduce the story to a simple tale of a powerful man and a willing subordinate. Rippey entered the relationship willingly, by her own account. But she also recognized, years later, the power imbalance that shaped it. She was a staffer. He was the mayor. She was married to his best political operative. Every layer of the relationship ran through his authority.
Her journey to sobriety is woven throughout the essay, and she presents the act of writing it as part of that process, reclaiming a story she says was taken from her, first by the affair itself, then by Newsom's memoir, and then by the advice of people like Harris who told her to stay quiet.
Fox News Digital noted that neither Newsom's team nor Harris's team provided any response. The silence speaks for itself, or at least, it lets Rippey's version stand unchallenged in the public record.
When powerful people tell a woman to stay quiet, they rarely do it for her benefit. Rippey stopped listening. California's Democratic establishment will have to deal with what she had to say.