Ruby Rippey has broken nearly two decades of silence with a personal essay about an affair she says she had with Gavin Newsom during his time as San Francisco mayor, describing episodes of heavy drinking, addiction struggles, and encounters that raise questions about power and accountability.
Ruby Rippey, now 54, stepped back into the public eye with an op-ed that revisits a fraught episode from the mid-2000s as Gavin Newsom positions himself for higher office. She says the relationship began while she worked in his office and while she was married to his close aide, and she details the ways the affair intersected with her addiction and recovery. Her piece arrives at a politically awkward moment for Newsom as he seeks national support.
Rippey says Newsom shifted her work environment, moving her desk closer to his and creating opportunities for regular contact that fed the relationship. She recounts how proximity to power and the sense of being chosen interacted with her own vulnerabilities as a new mother and someone fighting sobriety. Those dynamics, she argues, mattered as much as the sexual encounters themselves.
She pins the start of the affair to a Napa Valley wedding in July 2005, a night she says featured heavy drinking and a blackout. “My boss and I end up in the narrow hallway outside the bathroom at the same time. We wait, across from each other. The space is tight. The silence stretches. He slips his hands into his tan trouser pockets and smiles—his usual shy, aw-shucks smile. I say nothing. I hold his gaze longer than I should,” she wrote.
Rippey says she woke beside Newsom the next morning, disoriented and ashamed, and she describes the physical evidence of that night bluntly. “I wake the next morning beside him, still dressed. I am cold, almost shivering, and my dress—the one my mother warned me not to wear—is soaked from the waist down. I had passed out. I had also wet the bed,” she wrote. Those lines underscore how much of her account is framed by loss of control and later regret.
She lays out a pattern of meetings in private places — a Russian Hill penthouse, a North Beach bar, the W Hotel in Los Angeles — all while her substance use escalated. “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 wrote. She also confronts the imbalance created when one partner is an elected official and the other is inside his staff.
Rippey frames the situation in terms of power and responsibility and makes a pointed observation about how power operates in relationships. “Power does not need to coerce. It only needs to exist. 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,” she wrote. That passage is central to her argument about how the events unfolded and who bears the burden of accountability.
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She also disputes how Newsom later described the episode in his memoir, arguing that his account gives him credit for an action she says she initiated. The relationship became public after Rippey entered rehab in 2006, then confessed by email in January 2007, and the scandal broke the next month. Newsom acknowledged the episode in a 2007 City Hall statement and later described it as the stupidest and briefest of affairs and the worst betrayal of his life in his memoir.
Rippey says she has been more than 20 years sober, has rebuilt aspects of her life, and co-parents with her former husband. She wrote the essay in part because she disliked the way the episode was framed in Newsom’s own account and wanted to share her perspective. Those personal details ground the piece in recovery and responsibility as much as in scandal.
From a political angle, this essay hands opponents material to question Newsom’s judgment and handling of power, especially as he seeks national support. Republicans will point to the timing and the details as evidence of character issues that matter to voters, and the essay may be used to emphasize a gap between public persona and private behavior. Either way, the resurfacing of these events complicates Newsom’s effort to expand his appeal beyond his base.
