Ruby Rippey Had an Affair with Gavin Newsom. Twenty Years Later She Says Kamala Harris Gave Her the Best Advice She Got: Stay Silent

31 Jul 2026, 06:15 by Jerome London · Thought Catalog

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images News via Getty Images

Updated 6 minutes ago, July 31, 2026

In 2007, Ruby Rippey’s affair with Gavin Newsom, then the mayor of San Francisco, cost her a marriage and put her face on the front page of every local paper. When reporters and a publisher came for her story, then-district attorney Kamala Harris told her one thing: pause, don’t speak. She stayed quiet for almost two decades.

Ruby Rippey is speaking out for the first time in a new Vanity Fair essay, “How I Blew Up, Then Rebuilt, My Life,” writing that the professional boundaries with Gavin Newsom started crumbling while she worked as his secretary at San Francisco City Hall.

At a February 2007 San Francisco press conference, Mayor Gavin Newsom publicly acknowledged his affair with the wife of his campaign manager. Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images.

She was the mayor’s gatekeeper, sitting at the desk outside his door, when the affair began at a Fourth of July weekend wedding in Napa in 2005. Her husband, Alex, was Newsom’s deputy chief of staff and later ran his reelection campaign, still working for the man sleeping with his wife.

Gavin Newsom glances back at a Black History Month event in San Francisco on February 2, 2007, days after publicly acknowledging his affair with Ruby Rippey-Tourk. Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images.

She confessed to Alex by email in January 2007. Days later the story broke everywhere: the SFGate headline read that the campaign manager had resigned and confronted a mayor “in shock,” and the New York Times ran “San Francisco Mayor Admits He Had Affair with Aide’s Wife.” Newsom held a live press conference. “Everything you’ve heard and read is true,” he said.

Broke and unemployable, Rippey had a publisher offering an advance for a memoir and people urging her to go public. Harris, whom she knew from Willie Brown’s administration, called and told her to wait. “I wouldn’t say anything right now, Ruby. Just pause. More time will give you better perspective.” Rippey calls it the best advice she got.

Gavin Newsom, days after admitting to the affair, smiles at a City Hall swearing-in ceremony for San Francisco assessor Phil Ting on February 1, 2007. Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images.

Twenty years sober now, she’s telling it in part because Newsom’s new memoir describes “the stupidest and also briefest of affairs” and credits him with being the one who “came clean” to Alex, the confession she says she’d already made. In her essay she draws the line she says his account blurs: “Power does not need to coerce. It only needs to exist. The responsibility to hold the line belongs to the one who holds it. That didn’t happen.”

Gavin Newsom tears up at a San Francisco swearing-in ceremony for City Assessor Phil Ting on February 1, 2007 — the same day he acknowledged the affair with Ruby Rippey-Tourk. Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images.

Her marriage to Alex ended, but they became a different kind of family. When Alex remarried in November, he called to invite Rippey and her second husband. “Ruby,” he told her on the phone. “We are family.”

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