Gavin Newsom responds to Ruby Rippey’s claims after ex-mistress writes new tell-all essay

Gov. Gavin Newsom has spoken out after his former affair partner described their fling in explosive detail in a new tell-all piece on Tuesday.

“The governor acknowledged his role and publicly apologized for his conduct 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,” his office stated.

“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.”

The scandal, when publicly revealed, nearly caused Newsom’s downfall early in his political career as then-mayor of San Francisco.

Newsom famously confessed the ordeal to the public in a stunning press conference. At the time of the affair, affair partner Ruby Rippey was married to Newsom’s close friend and top aide Alex Tourk.

Rippey in her new piece recounted how the affair started in 2005, when she broke her sobriety at a wedding, downing wine and champagne until she ends up in a hallway with Newsom.

Then her memory begins to blur. Rippey says she ended up dipping her toes in a hot tub with Newsom before she made her way into his town car. On the way to The Carneros Inn, she says Newsom massages her feet.

That was the last thing Rippey remembered before she woke up the next morning “cold, almost shivering” and “soaked from the waist down.”

Newsom had shared his side of the incident in his memoir this year.

“Ruby was drinking too much and so was I,” Newsom writes of his former appointments secretary. She “was among a group of staffers who came to my apartment for a party. She was the last to leave. It was the stupidest and also briefest of affairs.

“A year later, to her credit, Ruby decided to come clean to her twelve-step group,” and Newsom later acknowledged the affair to the press.

However, the marital cheater in her tell-all seemed to dispute Newsom’s narrative.

She wrote: “When I read the pages a few days later, a familiar feeling returns, the one of being written about by someone who assumes I won’t answer. He describes it as ‘the briefest of affairs.’ His sister, he notes, observed that I was ‘hanging a bit too close.’”

She also cast a shadow on the idea that Newsom “came clean” to her then-husband Alex Tourk.

“That detail—subtle but significant—is the one that stays with me,” Rippey said. “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.”

The bombshell story comes as Newsom eyes the White House in 2028 after he gets termed out as governor.

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