Nearly twenty years after their relationship first made headlines, a woman once employed in Gavin Newsom’s mayoral office is now speaking in detail about the affair that upended her marriage and briefly derailed the political career of a man now eyeing the presidency.
Ruby Rippey held a staff position under Newsom during his time as San Francisco’s mayor.
Her husband at the time served as Newsom’s chief of staff, placing Rippey inside the mayor’s inner circle both personally and professionally.
The relationship began in 2005, in the months following the public announcement that Newsom and then-wife Kimberly Guilfoyle were divorcing.
Rippey’s account describes a pattern that repeated over several months: private meetings, heavy alcohol consumption, and sexual encounters between herself and her boss.
The first such encounter, by her telling, followed a wedding reception where she had been drinking. She left the event in Newsom’s chauffeured car and ended up at a hotel.
She woke up the following morning still in her clothes, disoriented and cold. “I am cold, almost shivering, and my dress… is soaked from the waist down. I had passed out. I had also wet the bed,” Rippey wrote of that morning.
Before Newsom woke, Rippey left the hotel and went home to her husband and their infant son.
A few days afterward, she noticed a gold bracelet sitting on her desk — the same one she had left behind at the hotel. Newsom, she says, had quietly returned it.
That gesture, Rippey indicates, marked the start of a longer pattern. She has admitted to monitoring Newsom’s office schedule so she could arrange to run into him.
At one point, Newsom sent her a text asking simply, “Where are you?”
Rippey wrote of her response to messages like that one: “But it never matters where I am because I always go to him – his penthouse in Russian Hill, a private back room in a North Beach bar, the W Hotel in Los Angeles.”
The fallout from the affair was significant.
Rippey’s marriage ended, and she entered a rehabilitation program to address alcohol use that intensified during this period.
Newsom confirmed the affair publicly in 2007, acknowledging that media reports about the relationship were accurate. He also announced at that time that he would seek treatment of his own for alcohol-related issues.
Years later, in his own published memoir, Newsom referred to the relationship as “the briefest of affairs.”
One detail Rippey has newly disclosed involves Kamala Harris, who at the time served as San Francisco’s district attorney.
Rippey says Harris reached out to her personally once the story became public in 2007.
According to Rippey, Harris urged her not to go public with her own account of events.
Harris’s exact words, Rippey says, were: “I wouldn’t say anything right now, Ruby. Just pause. More time will give you better perspective.”
Rippey says she took that advice and stayed quiet for nearly two decades afterward.
In the years following the scandal, Newsom’s political career continued to rise. He won reelection as mayor and later ascended to the governorship of California, a position he still holds.
Rippey has said she does not deny her own role in the affair or her struggles with alcohol during that time.
At the same time, she has drawn a distinction between her culpability and that of a person in a position of authority over her.
On that point, she said the individual holding power carries “the responsibility to hold the line… that didn’t happen.”
Rippey’s decision to share fuller details now comes at a notable moment: Newsom is in the final stretch of his second term as governor, and he has been widely reported to be considering a bid for president in 2028.
For nearly twenty years, Rippey largely kept the specifics of the relationship out of public view, aside from the initial 2007 confirmation from Newsom himself.
Her renewed account arrives as national political attention increasingly turns toward Newsom’s next potential move, adding a new layer of scrutiny to his record as speculation about a 2028 campaign builds.
