Did Ruby Rippey lose her voice twenty years ago, as she suggests in her Vanity Fair essay, when her affair with then San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom exploded into public scandal, or did she simply have no defense to offer at the time? Perhaps Kamala Harris’s advice that she remain silent was not merely counsel to let time provide clearer perspective, but the advice of an attorney who understood that no arrangement of words could defend what Rippey had done to Alex Tourk, her husband at the time.
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| By Pablo Picasso at LACMA |
For the record, I have said before that I will never vote for Gavin Newsom. My opinion of him is exceptionally low. So none of what follows should be mistaken for a dispatch from Team Newsom.
It was not until I read Rippey’s essay that I learned of Newsom’s affair with her. From it, I learned that she worked for him. What elevated the story from garden-variety political infidelity to something approaching daytime-soap-opera tawdriness was that Rippey was married to Newsom’s friend and deputy chief of staff in the San Francisco mayor’s office when the affair began in 2005. The scandal did not become public until 2007, when Tourk was managing Newsom’s reelection campaign for San Francisco mayor.
What prompted Rippey to write for Vanity Fair was Newsom’s memoir and its mention of their affair. I am fairly confident his strategy was simple: acknowledge an old scandal himself before somebody else excavates it during an anticipated 2028 presidential campaign. I have no firsthand experience with the memoir, nor do I plan to read it. What I know of Newsom’s account comes from what Rippey recounts and what has been reported elsewhere. Apparently, he described theirs as “the briefest of affairs.” What was he supposed to call it? The loveliest affair?
By Rippey’s own telling, this was not one of those grand, doomed romances in which two people tumble helplessly into love. Her story is saturated instead with alcohol, cocaine, blackouts and increasingly reckless behavior. She recounts waking beside Newsom after passing out and discovering that she had wet the bed, something she acknowledges had happened before. Later came cocaine use severe enough that a persistent bloody nose sent her for medical treatment. This is not a love story. Even Rippey does not present it as one.
Could Newsom’s position have influenced the relationship? Of course. He was the mayor of San Francisco, and he was her boss. Rippey coordinated appointments to nearly one hundred city boards and commissions, and Newsom had her desk moved directly outside his office to serve as a gatekeeper. Power matters, particularly when one person controls the workplace of another. Was moving her desk outside his door part of some design to keep her physically close? Possible. We do not know. What we do know is that proximity soon became something Rippey herself says she wanted.
One night, at what reads less like a private rendezvous than a staff dinner at a restaurant, Rippey noticed Newsom staring at her. He told her she looked good and remarked that she had lost her pregnancy weight. Her husband was sitting across the table. Afterward, by her own account, Rippey began paying closer attention to what she wore: Chanel makeup, fitted dresses, pencil skirts, pink patent leather heels. She is not coy about wanting Newsom’s attention.
Then comes the choreography. A stare. A compliment. Doors held open. A prolonged silence in a restroom hallway. His aw-shucks smile. Her lingering in doorways and manufacturing reasons to appear within his sight line. At a wedding, her husband eventually went home to their infant son while she stayed behind to continue partying with Newsom and other staffers. Somewhere among these gestures, glances and deliberately engineered proximities, the affair took shape.
Rippey acknowledges that Newsom’s attention landed like a high. She wanted proximity to power and the feeling of being chosen. She drank heavily. She used cocaine. She planned a girls’ weekend in Los Angeles knowing Newsom would be there for work, then went to see him. Against that account, why object so pointedly to Newsom’s memoir noting that his sister thought Rippey was “hanging a bit too close”? Perhaps that is his side of the story. But it is hardly a version that materialized from nowhere.
And then there is the dispute over who told Tourk.
Does it matter, nearly two decades later, who technically delivered the news that his wife had been sleeping with his friend and boss? In Rippey’s account, she contacted Tourk while she was staying with her parents and he was home caring for their son. In Newsom’s account, he later says he “came clean” to Tourk. Rippey objects that the phrasing leaves the impression that Newsom deserves credit for revealing something she had already disclosed. She may be entirely right about the sequence. But what does correcting that sequence materially change about the betrayal itself?
Secrecy, after all, was hardly handled with the precision of a covert operation. Newsom’s driver reportedly waited while Rippey was inside with him. People around City Hall noticed their behavior. Whether Tourk first learned the truth from his wife or later heard it directly from his boss is meaningful to Tourk, certainly. But as a moral distinction between the two people who betrayed him, it seems rather thin.
I am certain it was painful, and probably humiliating, when Jennifer Siebel, Newsom’s girlfriend when the scandal became public, blamed Rippey for the affair. Good for Rippey for declining the memoir opportunity she says was offered at the time. Good for her for protecting her sobriety, rebuilding her life and reaching a place where she can look back at herself with greater clarity. She may well be a better person than Newsom. She is also not the one widely presumed to be contemplating a presidential campaign.
But I keep returning to Harris’s advice. Perhaps remaining silent was not simply about allowing time and sobriety to provide perspective. Perhaps Harris, an attorney, also understood what a memoir at that moment could invite. A book filled with alcohol, cocaine, blackouts, nights stretching toward 3 a.m. and sex with her husband’s friend and boss would have been a gift to Team Newsom. It would not have required anyone to prove there were other men. Someone merely had to whisper the question: Were there other men? In a political scandal, insinuation can travel much farther than evidence.
And now, nearly twenty years later, I wonder whether Rippey has handed Team Newsom the very weapon Harris may once have helped her avoid. If this affair is awakened during a presidential campaign, her essay gives Newsom’s defenders an unusually convenient counternarrative. Instead of lingering on a mayor who slept with his friend’s wife and his own employee, they can point to Rippey’s own account of cocaine, heavy drinking, blackouts, deliberate attempts to attract his attention and efforts to arrange proximity to him. Suddenly, the conversation can be nudged away from what he did and toward what kind of woman she was. That would not absolve Newsom. It would, however, be an extraordinarily useful way to change the subject. And Rippey has now supplied much of the material herself.
Which brings me back to “the briefest of affairs.” Was it really necessary, twenty years later, to suggest that Newsom had somehow diminished her story by describing it that way? Rippey says the encounters continued on and off for months. Newsom calls the affair brief. Perhaps it felt long to her. Apparently, it felt brief to him. Brevity can feel very different to the two people involved.
Somewhere between his compressed version and her twenty-year reckoning is probably the less cinematic truth: Gavin Newsom betrayed his friend, Ruby Rippey betrayed her husband, and neither gets to rewrite the other’s experience simply because enough time has passed to make the story tellable.
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