Gavin Newsom’s Ex-Lover Tells Her Story in Shocking New Essay: ‘Power Does Not Need to Coerce’

14 February 2026, Bavaria, Munich: Gavin Newsom, Governor of the US state of California, takes part in the 62nd Munich Security Conference. Photo by: Marijan Murat/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA)’s ex-lover is telling her side of the story in a shocking new essay detailing their whirlwind 2005 relationship and its consequences.

Ruby Rippey was working as Newsom’s Appointments Secretary when the affair began. Her then husband, Alex Tourk, was a close friend of Newsom’s and his Chief of Staff from 2004 until 2006.

At the time, Newsom was also going through divorce proceedings from his first wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is now President Donald Trump’s Ambassador to Greece.

The affair didn’t come to light until 2007, when Tourk resigned as Newsom’s re-election campaign manager after Rippey confessed to him about the affair. Newsom admitted to reporters at City Hall, “Everything you’ve heard and read is true, and I am deeply sorry about that.”

Vanity Fair published Rippey’s first-person essay about the affair on Tuesday as Newsom eyes a potential presidential run.

While Rippey does not outright name Newsom in her essay, she calls him the “mayor of San Francisco” who is “often described as Kennedy-esque.”

She details her struggle with alcoholism both before and after the affair, describing “self-willed stints of sobriety” that disappeared the year of the affair. At that time, she also turned to cocaine.

“We meet and we drink,” she wrote of the affair. “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. It isn’t love. It isn’t romance. It’s intoxication.”

Her father, she said, offered to pay for her rehab. From the treatment center in Arizona, she resigned from her job and wrote a letter to Newsom ending the affair.

At home, she could no longer keep the affair a secret, and penned an email to Tourk: “Just sex—on and off for months—with the mayor. It ended before rehab. I’m sorry.”

Rippey describes herself as the culprit, writing of the guilt she bears for hurting Tourk and destroying their marriage.

Although she said she was not coerced, she noted a “reckoning” into what she had “missed” about Newsom’s culpability as the #MeToo movement emerged.

“Power does not need to coerce,” she wrote. “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.”

Newsom’s office responded to Rippey’s essay on Tuesday.

“The governor acknowledged his role and publicly apologized for his conduct nearly two decades ago when he was still mayor,” his team said in a statement.

“In the time since, he met his wife, started a family and has focused on serving Californians. 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.”

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