The woman at the center of Gavin Newsom's most damaging personal scandal is preparing to break nearly two decades of public silence. Ruby Rippey-Gibney, the former San Francisco City Hall aide who had an affair with Newsom while he was mayor, will recount her perspective in an upcoming Vanity Fair piece, a move that lands squarely in the path of Newsom's widely anticipated 2028 presidential campaign.
A source familiar with the matter told The New York Post that Rippey-Gibney plans to tell her side of the story for the first time. The governor's office did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Vanity Fair.
The timing matters. Newsom has spent years positioning himself for a national run. He recently released a memoir detailing his romantic life as a single mayor. Now the other party to the affair that nearly ended his career in 2007 is about to offer her own account, and Newsom's team apparently has nothing to say about it.
The facts of the original scandal are straightforward and ugly. Rippey-Gibney worked as Newsom's appointments secretary at San Francisco City Hall. She was married at the time to Alex Tourk, Newsom's longtime political adviser and former campaign manager. Newsom engaged in a sexual relationship with her while Tourk, the man running his political operation, was none the wiser.
When Tourk discovered the affair in early 2007, he confronted Newsom and resigned. The betrayal was both personal and professional. Tourk lost his marriage and his boss in the same moment. Newsom lost the man who had helped build his political career.
Newsom then held a news conference and offered a public apology. He did not hedge.
"I want to make it clear that everything you've heard and read is true, and I am deeply sorry about that."
He called it "a personal lapse of judgment." He announced he was giving up alcohol and would seek professional help. He sought counseling from Mimi Silbert, president of the Delancey Street Foundation.
But the alcohol narrative shifted over time. By 2018, during his first gubernatorial campaign, Newsom told The Sacramento Bee a different version of the story.
"No, there's no rehab. I just stopped. There was no treatment, no nothing related to any of that stuff. I stopped because I thought it was a good thing to stop."
He later resumed drinking. The original 2007 announcement, with its talk of professional help and reflection "with friends and family", reads differently against that 2018 walk-back. Whether Newsom was more honest in 2007 or in 2018 remains an open question. What's clear is that the two versions don't sit comfortably together.
For years, Rippey-Gibney largely avoided speaking publicly about the affair. She has since remarried and stayed out of the political spotlight. But she did surface briefly during Newsom's 2018 gubernatorial campaign, posting on Facebook as the #MeToo movement swept through public life.
Her post was notable for what it did not say. She did not accuse Newsom of harassment or coercion. She wrote that she supported the #MeToo movement but did not believe her relationship with Newsom belonged in that category.
"Yes, I was a subordinate, but I was also a free-thinking, 33-year-old adult married woman & mother."
She also stated she was struggling with alcoholism and self-destructive behavior during that period of her life. It was a candid admission, and one that stood in contrast to the way others around Newsom characterized her role.
Democrats have a long track record of rallying behind their own when personal scandals surface, as recent episodes with scandal-plagued candidates have shown. The Newsom affair followed the same pattern. Newsom survived politically. He won reelection as mayor of San Francisco later in 2007, was elected lieutenant governor in 2010, and won the governor's mansion in 2018.
The woman involved, meanwhile, disappeared from public life.
One detail from the original scandal's aftermath deserves renewed attention. Jennifer Siebel, who had begun dating Newsom in late 2006, months before the affair became public, stood by him through the crisis. They married in 2008.
But shortly after the scandal erupted, she made a striking comment to the San Francisco Chronicle.
"I shouldn't say this, but there are two sides to every story. If people did research into the scandal... the woman is the culprit."
She apologized shortly after the remark was published. Still, the comment, blaming "the woman", is hard to square with the progressive feminist branding the Newsoms have cultivated in the years since. Jennifer Siebel Newsom built a public identity around women's empowerment and documentary filmmaking on gender issues. That makes her 2007 instinct to publicly blame the female subordinate in her future husband's affair all the more revealing.
The pattern of progressive leaders going quiet when their own allies face misconduct allegations is hardly unique to the Newsoms. But the gap between their public principles and private conduct is worth noting as Rippey-Gibney prepares to offer her own version of events.
Newsom is widely expected to launch a 2028 presidential campaign. His memoir, his national media presence, and his aggressive posture on federal policy all point in that direction. The Vanity Fair piece lands in that context, whether by design or coincidence.
San Francisco political analyst David Latterman offered a telling comment on the potential fallout.
"What would be really sad is if Democrats make a bigger deal out of this than Republicans for self-flagellation."
That framing is worth unpacking. Latterman's concern isn't that the affair matters on the merits. His concern is that Democrats might hurt themselves by taking it seriously. The assumption baked into that analysis is that the scandal should be treated as old news, a settled chapter in Newsom's rise.
Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who preceded Newsom and played a role in bringing key figures into City Hall, told The Post the scandal caught him off guard. He said he hadn't paid much attention to Rippey-Gibney because her husband, Tourk, also worked for him.
"I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to [Rippey-Gibney], because her husband worked for me as well. I didn't pay any attention, until after the fact."
Brown suggested voters are no longer concerned about that kind of conduct as a measure of whether someone is qualified for office. He has been described as supportive of Newsom's likely presidential run.
That may be true in a general election. But a Vanity Fair feature, with Rippey-Gibney's own words, her own account of what happened inside San Francisco City Hall, is a different animal than a decades-old news clip. It puts a human face and a first-person narrative on a story Newsom has spent years trying to reduce to a single line: mistakes were made, lessons were learned.
When scandals attach to Democratic figures seeking higher office, the party's instinct is often to circle the wagons. Sometimes prominent allies rush to defend the embattled candidate. Other times, the party quietly distances itself. Which path Democrats choose with Newsom will say a great deal about whether they believe their 2028 frontrunner can withstand a full airing of the facts.
The Vanity Fair piece has no announced publication date. Its specific contents remain unknown beyond the general framing that Rippey-Gibney will tell her side. Rippey-Gibney did not respond to The Post's request for comment. Neither did Tourk.
What Newsom told the country in 2007 was carefully managed. He acknowledged the affair, blamed alcohol, sought help, and then, by his own later admission, never actually entered rehab and eventually resumed drinking. He framed the episode as a personal failing, not a professional one, and voters in San Francisco accepted that framing.
Newsom himself put it this way to The Sacramento Bee in 2018:
"Sometimes people make mistakes in their lives and you then work hard never to make them again, because you learn from them. I like to think I'm a better person, and I like to think that a lot of people have made mistakes, we just don't read about them."
Fair enough. But Rippey-Gibney lived with the consequences of that "mistake" too. She was the subordinate. She was the one Jennifer Siebel Newsom publicly called "the culprit." She was the one who vanished from public life while Newsom climbed from City Hall to the governor's mansion.
Now she's telling her story. And the man who wants to be president will have to reckon with it, not on his terms, but on hers.
Accountability is supposed to be a two-way street. Newsom has spent two decades controlling the narrative around this affair. Rippey-Gibney is about to remind everyone that she was there too, and that she has a voice he can't manage.
