Gavin Newsom’s former mistress has broken her silence in a jaw-dropping new account of the affair that nearly wrecked his political career when he was mayor of San Francisco.
Ruby Rippey Gibney, who worked in Newsom’s City Hall office and was married at the time to his former deputy chief of staff, Alex Tourk, laid out intimate details of the scandal in a Vanity Fair essay published Tuesday.
The affair became public in 2007 and turned into one of the most embarrassing chapters of Newsom’s rise through California politics.
Now, nearly two decades later, Rippey Gibney is telling her version of the story in graphic detail.
She wrote that the physical relationship began after a July 2, 2005, wedding attended by City Hall staffers.
Rippey Gibney said she wore a strapless white dress to the wedding despite her mother’s disapproval, drank champagne and wine, and barely touched her dinner.
She said she later found herself in a hallway with Newsom while the two waited for the bathroom, and later encountered him again near a hot tub.
Rippey Gibney described the rest of the night as blurry, but said all encounters with Newsom were consensual, including the ones she was too drunk to remember.
She recalled Newsom massaging her feet in a chauffeured town car before she later woke up next to him in bed.
‘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.),’ she wrote.
While Newsom continued sleeping, Rippey Gibney said she rushed home to Tourk, who had left the wedding early after becoming irritated that she wanted to stay out and keep partying.
She wrote that things became awkward at work after that night, but she and Newsom continued seeing each other.
At the time, Newsom was separated and divorcing his first wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle.
Rippey Gibney said she later planned a girls’ trip to Los Angeles after learning Newsom would be there for work.
While she and a friend had wine by the pool at the Maison 140 hotel in Beverly Hills, she said she received a text from Newsom.
‘You should come by.’
She went to see him at the W Hotel and woke the next morning to find “tiny shirt buttons scattered like coins” near the bed.
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Rippey Gibney soon realized the buttons were not hers.
On her way home, she wrote that she cried on the plane as she realized the affair could destroy her marriage.
‘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,’ she admitted.
After landing, she said she opened her phone and saw a message from Newsom.
‘Thank God the W had T-shirts.’
‘Only then do I understand—hazily—that I tore his shirt off, every button ripped loose,’ she continued.
In another episode, Rippey Gibney described Newsom cleaning red wine from a hotel carpet after she dropped a glass.
She said she watched him ‘on all fours near the edge of the bed, scrubbing furiously at the carpet with a washcloth.’
As she lay on the king-size bed, Rippey Gibney wrote that Newsom looked at her and snapped that the relationship had to stop.
‘You know, we really can’t do this anymore. You can’t be doing this to Alex,’ she recalled him saying.
Rippey Gibney and Tourk divorced in early 2007.
They share a son and appear to have maintained a friendly relationship years later.
In a November 2025 social media post, Rippey Gibney shared a photo with Tourk and wrote, ‘Tonight I went to my ex husband’s wedding to his third wife with my second husband. A really good night.’
Newsom later married Jennifer Siebel in July 2008.
The couple have three children.
The newly published essay lands as Newsom continues to position himself as one of the Democratic Party’s biggest national figures and a possible future presidential contender.
That makes the timing brutal.
Gavin Newsom has spent years cultivating the image of a polished, camera-ready progressive who lectures the rest of the country about values, leadership and morality.
But the affair remains a reminder of the messier San Francisco chapter that Democrats would rather leave buried.
Rippey Gibney’s account does not just revisit a personal scandal.
It drags back into view the old Newsom brand: entitlement, recklessness and a trail of damage left for other people to clean up.
For California voters, none of this is new.
For the rest of America, it is another look at the man Democrats keep trying to sell as their next great national star.
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