Gavin Newsom humiliated as former aide lifts lid | Political News

A former staffer of California Gov. Gavin Newsom is sharing for the first time her account of the scandalous affair she had with the Democratic politician nearly 20 years in the past.

Ruby Rippey, 54, wrote an essay in Vanity Fair on Tuesday, marking the first time the former aide shared her account of the affair. Almost 20 years earlier, in 2007, Newsom, who was then serving as mayor of San Francisco, admitted to the affair, saying at City Hall, “Everything you’ve heard and read is true.”

Conversations surrounding the affair reignited earlier this 12 months, when Newsom wrote in his memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry,” that the connection was the “stupidest and also briefest of affairs.”

At the time, Rippey was married to Alex Tourk, a close good friend who was also his deputy chief of employees and marketing campaign supervisor. Meanwhile, Newsom was separated from Kimberly Guilfoyle, though their divorce had not been finalized. Guilfoyle now serves as President Donald Trump’s ambassador to Greece and was briefly engaged with the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr.

In the essay, Rippey—who not often discusses the incident— didn’t use Newsom’s title, though she described the person concerned in the affair as the mayor of San Francisco, and referred to him as “often described as Kennedy-esque.”

The girl said that she was not coerced into the affair, though she solid Newsom as accountable for holding energy and continuing with the escapades. She added that she was to blame for betraying her husband, explaining that she made the choice at a time when her life was spiraling, and she was closely consuming alcohol and utilizing cocaine.

“Power does not need to coerce,” she writes. “It only needs to exist. The responsibility to hold the line belongs to the one who holds it. That didn’t happen.”

She said the affair began in 2005 and lasted for months. While Rippey says their encounters weren’t essentially steady, they did get together on-and-off over an prolonged period of time.

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“I always go to him — his penthouse in Russian Hill, a private back room at a North Beach bar, the W Hotel in Los Angeles,” Rippey writes. “We meet and we drink. There is sex, but it isn’t the point. “The point is proximity — to power, to being chosen.”

Responding to Newsom’s memoir, Rippey said it was she, not Newsom, who finally got here clean to her husband, not like what the governor had claimed in his guide.

“That detail—subtle but significant—is the one that stays with me,” Rippey wrote. “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 said she entered rehab in 2006 and has now been sober for 20 years. After getting treatment, she said she wrote a letter to Newsom ending the affair.

“When I return home from rehab nearly two months later, I try to resume life as a wife and mother. Meanwhile, Alex leaves each morning for City Hall—for the man I have betrayed him with, still unaware of what had happened between us,” she wrote. “For months, I say nothing. The silence settles into my body like a fever. Until one night I am no longer able to carry it.”

Tourk and Rippey finally divorced, and he also left the Newsom administration. He then based Ground Floor Public Affairs, which has represented major firms such as Amazon, Lyft, and Goodwill.

A spokesperson for the governor said Newsom “acknowledged his role and publicly apologized nearly two decades ago when he was still mayor.”

“In the time since, he met his wife, started a family, and has focused on serving Californians,” spokeswoman Izzy Gardon said in a assertion. “He addressed this chapter of his life, including in his memoir, and out of respect for everyone involved, does not have anything further to add.”