Ruby Rippey Gibney, the former aide who had an affair with Gavin Newsom while married to his top political ally, has broken her silence in graphic detail, and the California governor has said nothing in response.
Rippey Gibney, now 51, published a first-person essay in Vanity Fair laying out the timeline, the locations, and the intimate particulars of her relationship with Newsom, who was then the mayor of San Francisco. She served as his appointment secretary, sitting at a desk just outside his office. Her husband at the time, Alex Tourk, was Newsom's deputy chief of staff and one of his closest political allies.
The essay marks the most extensive public account Rippey Gibney has ever given of the affair. As the New York Post reported, the piece arrives as Newsom is widely expected to pursue a 2028 presidential campaign, a fact that gives the revelations political weight well beyond the personal.
Rippey Gibney traces the beginning of the relationship to July 2, 2005, when both she and Newsom attended a City Hall staffer's wedding in San Francisco. She wore a strapless white dress, one her mother had warned her not to wear. Newsom was in the process of divorcing his first wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle. Rippey Gibney was married to Tourk.
In the Vanity Fair essay, as the Daily Mail detailed, Rippey Gibney described meeting Newsom in a hallway and later at a hot tub that evening. She wrote that she passed out and woke beside him the next morning.
"I wake the next morning beside him, still dressed. I am cold, almost shivering, and my dress, the one my mother warned me not to wear, is soaked from the waist down. I had passed out. I had also wet the bed. (It wasn't the first time)"
Rippey Gibney states in the essay that all of her encounters with Newsom were consensual, including ones she was too drunk to remember. That framing is hers alone; Newsom has not commented on the Vanity Fair piece, and the Daily Mail reported receiving no response when it contacted the governor's office.
Things grew awkward at work after the wedding, she wrote, but the relationship continued. Rippey Gibney had signaled for weeks that the essay was coming, and the finished product spares few details.
The essay recounts a later encounter at the W Hotel. Rippey Gibney had planned a trip to Los Angeles with a friend and was drinking wine by the pool at the Maison 140 hotel in Beverly Hills when she received a text message from Newsom: "You should come by."
She went. The next morning, she wrote, she found "tiny shirt buttons scattered like coins" across the hotel room floor. Rippey Gibney wrote in the Vanity Fair piece:
"Only then do I understand, hazily, that I tore his shirt off, every button ripped loose"
Newsom, she recounted, later texted her: "Thank God the W had T-shirts."
Another hotel encounter ended with Rippey Gibney dropping a glass of red wine. She described Newsom getting on all fours near the edge of the bed, scrubbing the carpet with a washcloth. It was during that meeting, she wrote, that Newsom told her the relationship had to stop.
"You know, we really can't do this anymore. You can't be doing this to Alex"
That line, Newsom invoking Tourk's name, as recalled by Rippey Gibney, captures the central betrayal. Tourk was not just Rippey Gibney's husband. He was the man running Newsom's political operation. Tourk resigned after confronting Newsom about the affair, and the couple divorced in early 2007. They share one son.
When the affair became public in 2007, Newsom issued a brief public apology. The Washington Free Beacon reported that during a 2018 gubernatorial debate, Republican candidate Travis Allen confronted Newsom directly: "If you can't trust Gavin with his best friend's wife, how can you trust him with your state?" Newsom responded that he had been "honest about it" and "learned an enormous amount from it."
Newsom married Jennifer Siebel in July 2008. They have three children. His political career never slowed. He won the governor's mansion and has spent years positioning himself for a presidential run.
Fellow Democrat Amanda Renteria, who served as political director for Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, was less forgiving. Fox News reported that Renteria accused Newsom of misconduct and misusing his power, calling the pattern "completely unacceptable."
"This pattern of misconduct is completely unacceptable. From Washington to California, citizens have begun calling out misuse of power wherever and whenever it happens."
Renteria's objection pointed to a broader problem for Democrats. Senator Kamala Harris endorsed Newsom for governor even as she publicly declared that sexual harassment was inappropriate "in every circumstance in every way." The contradiction went largely unchallenged within the party.
Newsom has since retreated from direct press scrutiny on multiple fronts, preferring controlled messaging to open questions from reporters.
The Vanity Fair essay is not simply a catalog of hotel rooms and text messages. Rippey Gibney also wrote about the cost to Tourk, the man she described as "the best thing that has ever happened to me."
"I am overcome with the understanding that the consequences will not end with me. They may cost me the best thing that has ever happened to me: Alex. But worse, they will fall hardest on him - the person who least deserves them"
Tourk has since remarried. In November 2025, Rippey Gibney posted an image of herself with Tourk at his third wife's wedding. Her caption read: "Tonight I went to my ex-husband's wedding to his third wife with my second husband. A really good night."
That post, breezy and self-aware, sits in sharp contrast to the rawness of the Vanity Fair account. Rippey Gibney appears to have made peace with the wreckage. Whether Newsom's political future can absorb the same level of public exposure is a different question.
Kimberly Guilfoyle has signaled she has not forgotten the affair, either, a reminder that the personal damage Newsom caused extends well beyond one marriage.
The timing of Rippey Gibney's essay is not accidental. Newsom has spent years building a national profile, raising money, and testing the waters for a White House bid. His fundraising operation has remained aggressive even as legal and political scrutiny has mounted.
San Francisco political analyst David Latterman told the New York Post that he hoped Democrats would not overreact. "What would be really sad is if Democrats make a bigger deal out of this than Republicans for self-flagellation," Latterman said.
But the problem for Newsom is not that Democrats might overreact. It is that they have consistently underreacted, endorsing him, funding him, and clearing the field for him while the record sat in plain view. Renteria called it out years ago. The party ignored her.
Newsom slept with his close friend's wife while that friend ran his campaigns and managed his office. He apologized once, briefly, and never looked back. Rippey Gibney has now put every detail on the record. The governor's silence says plenty on its own.
A party that lectures the country about power, consent, and accountability might want to start with the man it plans to nominate.
