Nothing says "I'm ready to run for president" quite like your former mistress dropping a Vanity Fair tell-all about your affair from two decades ago. Gavin Newsom is apparently getting the full nostalgia treatment as Ruby Rippey Gibney decided now was the perfect moment to share every juicy detail of their illicit relationship, as Conservative Brief reported.
Newsom's team responded with what can only be described as the political equivalent of "we talked about this already, please stop bringing it up at Thanksgiving." His office released a statement saying the governor apologized publicly back when he was still mayor, has since gotten married, started a family, and would very much like everyone to move along. He even wrote about it in his memoir, so clearly the matter is settled. Case closed. Nothing to see here. Please clap.
Except Rippey Gibney had other plans. Her essay in Vanity Fair lays out a relationship that started after she wore a strapless white dress to a City Hall staffer's wedding on July 2, 2005. She was his appointments secretary, which apparently meant she was also scanning his calendar for openings and showing up wherever he was expected. Their rendezvous locations included his Russian Hill penthouse, a private room at a North Beach bar, and the W Hotel in Los Angeles, because nothing screams discretion like a string of glamorous locations.
Rippey Gibney describes the whole thing not as some great love story but as "another form of intoxication," which is honestly one of the most brutally honest descriptions of a political affair ever committed to paper. She was battling cocaine and alcohol addiction at the time, and she says all encounters were consensual, even the ones she was too intoxicated to fully recall. She also apparently ripped every button off one of Newsom's shirts during a passionate meeting, which is either very dramatic or very expensive depending on your perspective.
Here's where it gets really awkward. Rippey was married to Alex Tourk, who happened to be Newsom's close friend AND the guy running his re-election campaign. Meanwhile, Newsom hadn't even finalized his divorce from Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is currently serving as the U.S. Ambassador to Greece. Talk about a tangled web.
Rippey entered rehab in May 2006 and ended the affair but didn't tell her husband until January 2007. Tourk confronted Newsom, quit his job, and the whole thing went nuclear. Newsom held a grim press conference where he admitted "Everything you've heard and read is true" and said sorry for hurting Tourk. He later called it "the stupidest and also briefest of affairs" in his memoir.
The timing here is absolutely chef's kiss. Newsom is widely expected to chase the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028 after hitting his term limit as governor. Political analyst David Latterman told The California Post that predicting the political fallout is tough without knowing everything Rippey Gibney plans to reveal. He also noted it would be "really sad" if Democrats made a bigger deal out of this than Republicans did, basically begging his own party not to self destruct over it.
Rippey Gibney is now sober, remarried, and has apparently patched things up enough with Tourk to attend his later wedding. She also revealed that Kamala Harris, then the San Francisco District Attorney, called her after the scandal broke. Sometimes politics really is just a very small, very messy world.
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