Gavin Newsom's former mistress has published a first-person account of their 2005 affair that directly challenges the governor's memoir, and reveals that Kamala Harris privately told her to keep quiet.
Ruby Rippey, who served as appointments secretary to then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, laid out the affair in a detailed Vanity Fair essay that names dates, locations, and private conversations, including one with then-District Attorney Kamala Harris, who Rippey says advised her to "pause" and avoid public comment or book deals after the scandal broke in 2007. Fox News Digital reported that both Newsom's team and Harris's team were contacted for comment and did not immediately respond.
The essay arrives at a politically volatile moment. Newsom is positioning himself for a potential 2028 presidential run after being termed out as California's governor, and Rippey's account raises fresh credibility questions about a scandal he has long tried to minimize. Her version of events contradicts key claims in Newsom's own memoir, most pointedly, who told her husband the truth about the affair.
At the center of Rippey's dispute with Newsom is a simple factual question: who told Alex Tourk, Rippey's husband and Newsom's campaign manager, about the affair? Newsom's book, Rippey writes, leaves "the unmistakable impression that he, not I, was the one who told Alex the truth." She says that impression is misleading.
Rippey states she disclosed the affair to Tourk herself, via email, while he was still working for Newsom. Tourk then confronted the mayor directly and resigned on the spot. Newsom's memoir, she contends, claims credit for a confession she had already made.
In her Vanity Fair piece, Rippey put it plainly:
"It reads, to me, at least, as a version of events that gives him credit for something I had already done. Technically defensible, perhaps, but one that leaves the unmistakable impression that he, not I, was the one who told Alex the truth."
Rippey also noted that Newsom's book described the relationship as "the briefest of affairs" and cited his sister's observation that Rippey "was hanging a bit too close." The New York Post reported that Rippey's account directly contradicts multiple elements of Newsom's memoir. Her essay describes encounters that continued "for months", at City Hall, at The Carneros Inn in Napa, in hotel rooms, and at Newsom's Russian Hill penthouse in San Francisco.
When Rippey later asked an unnamed Newsom advisor whether the governor "tells the truth" in his book, the response she received was dismissive: "Well, we all remember things differently, don't we, Ruby?"
Perhaps the most politically charged revelation in the essay involves Kamala Harris, who was serving as San Francisco's district attorney when the affair became public. Rippey recalls Harris reaching out to her privately and delivering pointed advice.
Rippey recounts Harris telling her:
"I wouldn't say anything right now, Ruby. Just pause. More time will give you better perspective."
Harris also counseled Rippey against taking a book deal. The advice, as Rippey describes it, effectively urged the woman at the center of the scandal to stay quiet while the powerful men around her shaped the public narrative. Rippey's essay does not accuse Harris of wrongdoing, but the implication is clear: the future vice president's instinct was to protect the political ecosystem, not the woman caught inside it.
Rippey had previously signaled her intent to tell her side of the story publicly, and the Vanity Fair essay represents the fullest account she has offered to date.
Neither Harris's representatives nor Newsom's office responded to Fox News Digital's request for comment. That silence stands in contrast to the detailed memoir Newsom published years ago, a book Rippey now says got the basic facts wrong in ways that served his political interests.
The essay does not read as a simple score-settling exercise. Rippey frames the affair as entangled with her own battle with alcoholism and the gravitational pull of proximity to political power. She writes that the encounters were "fueled by addiction and status."
In one passage, she describes an early encounter in Newsom's chauffeured town car:
"The next clear memory is getting into the back of my boss's chauffeured town car, heading to The Carneros Inn."
She recounts another scene in the same car: "I stretch my legs across the center console and let my heels fall off. He is in the front seat. He takes one of my feet and begins to massage it, the gesture half-hidden inside the loud car." The encounters continued from there, hotel rooms, the penthouse, City Hall itself.
Rippey writes candidly about what drew her in: "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 also recounts a moment after the birth of her first child when Newsom approached her at a Mexican restaurant and said, "Hey, you look really good... You've lost all your pregnancy weight." Rippey presents the comment as part of a pattern in which Newsom exercised influence without overt coercion. As she puts it in the essay: "Power does not need to coerce. It only needs to exist."
The bare facts of the scandal have been public for nearly two decades. In 2007, Newsom admitted to the affair at a news conference and announced he would seek treatment for alcohol abuse. Tourk had already resigned. The political damage at the time was significant but not career-ending, Newsom went on to become lieutenant governor and then governor of California.
What Rippey's essay adds is a detailed counter-narrative to the version Newsom codified in his memoir. She accuses him of rewriting the sequence of events to cast himself as the one who came forward, when she says she had already confessed to her husband. She accuses his book of minimizing the duration and nature of the relationship. And she accuses the political apparatus around him, including Harris, of encouraging her silence while Newsom controlled the story.
The timing of the essay compounds the political problem. Newsom is widely seen as eyeing a 2028 presidential bid, and the resurfacing of the affair, now with a detailed first-person rebuttal from the woman involved, threatens to revive questions about his character and honesty at the worst possible moment.
The governor already faces separate scrutiny. A Department of Justice probe has examined behested payments flowing to a nonprofit connected to his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom. And reports have emerged that the FBI placed a cooperating witness inside Newsom's political circle as part of a broader investigation. Rippey's essay lands on top of an already precarious pile.
For Democrats weighing their 2028 options, the accumulating baggage around both Newsom and Harris presents a difficult calculation. Veteran strategist James Carville has already urged the party to move past Harris, and Rippey's account gives the party's critics fresh ammunition against Newsom as well.
Several important questions remain unresolved. Rippey's account of Harris's advice is her recollection alone, Harris's team has not confirmed or denied it. The specific passages in Newsom's memoir that Rippey disputes have not been independently examined against her timeline. And the identity of the Newsom advisor who told Rippey "we all remember things differently" remains undisclosed.
Rippey does not appear to make formal legal allegations in the essay. Her account is personal, not litigious. But the political damage does not require a courtroom. A detailed, named, first-person narrative from the woman at the center of the scandal, one that accuses a sitting governor of rewriting history to protect himself, carries its own weight.
When the powerful get to write the memoir, they usually get to write the ending. Rippey just wrote her own chapter, and the people who told her to stay quiet still haven't said a word.
