Gavin Newsom’s ex-mistress drops bombshell essay on affair that nearly destroyed the governor

The spicy affair that once rattled the Bay Area came back to light Tuesday as Gov. Gavin Newsom’s former mistress described their fling in explosive detail.

Newsom’s former San Francisco City Hall aide Ruby Rippey told the story of her earthshaking affair with him to Vanity Fair.

The scandal, when publicly revealed, nearly caused Newsom’s downfall early in his political career.

Newsom famously confessed the ordeal to the public in a stunning press conference.

Rippey described her affair with Newsom in the Vanity Fair essay from start to end in thorough detail.

She says she joined Newsom’s winning mayoral campaign in 2003 as an aide alongside her husband, Alex Tourk.

As she settled into the administration the next year, she described that Newsom moved her office closer to his and she began dressing more salaciously.

“I start paying closer attention to what I wear. Chanel makeup. Pink patent leather heels. A tight pencil skirt. I cross my legs; I feel important. It’s hard to reconcile that woman with the person I would become in one short year,” she wrote.

Rippey also described an awkward comment Newsom once made in front of her husband as they ate at a Mexican restaurant together.

“Hey—you look really good,” Rippey recounted Newsom saying. “You’ve lost all your pregnancy weight.” 

Rippey, a self-described alcoholic who is trying to stay away from booze in the early days of Newsom’s administration, says the interaction makes her yearn for it.

Another year later, Rippey says, the affair starts.

She broke her sobriety at a wedding, downing wine and champagne until she ends up in a hallway with Newsom. Rippey describes the tense interaction.

“My boss and I end up in the narrow hallway outside the bathroom at the same time. We wait, across from each other,” she writes. “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.”

“The air changes.”

Then her memory begins to blur. Rippey says she ended up dipping her toes in a hot tub with Newsom before she made her way into his town car. On the way to The Carneros Inn, she says Newsom massages her feet.

That was the last thing Rippey remembered before she woke up the next morning “cold, almost shivering” and “soaked from the waist down.”

She had passed out and wet the bed as Newsom slept nearby.

A few days later, Newsom slipped her a gold bracelet her grandmother gave her that she left in the hotel room.

Rippey continually describes her encounters and affection for Newsom as intoxicating.

“It isn’t love. It isn’t romance. It’s intoxication. The text message is a hit. The glance across the hallway, a hit. The risk floods my bloodstream. I walk down the corridors of City Hall—my nude stilettos striking the marble floor. He looks at me, his gaze deliberate, newly curious. It feels like oxygen,” she wrote.

On another scandalous occasion, Newsom guilted Rippey for the affair after she spilled a glass of wine on his carpet. She had been watching him scrub at the stain from his king-sized bed.

“You know, we really can’t do this anymore. You can’t be doing this to Alex,” Newsom said to Rippey.

Rippey believed the comment may have ended the affair, but she says the encounters continued for months.

The woman said she traveled to Los Angeles in order to stay in proximity of him. As she stayed at another hotel, Newsom coaxed the married woman to his side.

“You guys should come by,” Rippey said he texted her.

After drinking at his hotel’s bar, her memory goes blank again.

She then wakes up at Newsom’s side again, but this time, with buttons all over the floor. Rippey didn’t know the source of the buttons at the time. In shame, she booked a flight home and cried on the plane.

As she landed, Newsom reached out again. She realized the buttons were on Newsom’s shirt, and she had torn it off.

“Thank God the W had T-shirts,” she said Newsom texted her.

The affair had collapsed her life into itself.

The California Post reached out to Newsom’s office for comment.

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