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California governor Gavin Newsom is currently the unofficial front-runner to be the Democratic nominee for the presidency.
But like most politicians — or most grownups, for that matter — he’s got a few skeletons in his closet.
In a memoir published earlier this year, Newsom admitted to sleeping with a staffer while he was mayor of San Francisco (before he met his current wife).
In the book, Newsom opened up about sleeping with Ruby Rippey, who was then married to his friend (and staffer) Alex Tourk.
Now, Rippey has opened up about her relationship with Newsom in a new interview with Vanity Fair, admitting, among other things, that she wet the bed during their first tryst, and that Kamala Harris encouraged her to keep quiet about the affair.
Rippey says the flirtations with her then-boss began during a night out shortly after she gave birth.
“Hey — you look really good,” she recalls Newsom saying. “You’ve lost all your pregnancy weight.”
She adds that she was in the throes of addictive addiction at the time (Newsom has been open about his own past battles with substance abuse) and that the situation escalated shortly thereafter when both parties were drinking at a co-worker’s wedding.
“We meet and we drink. There is sex, but it isn’t the point. The point is proximity—to power, to being chosen, to feeling newly visible—no longer muted by pregnancy, by new motherhood, by the strain of white-knuckling long stretches of sobriety. It isn’t love. It isn’t romance. It’s intoxication,” she writes.
Rippey eventually checked into rehab, and one of her counselors advised to keep the affair a secret (even from her husband) during her early sobriety.
She claims that then-district attorney Kamala Harris echoed that advice.
“Soon after, Kamala Harris calls. I know her from the [former mayor Willie] Brown administration; she is now the district attorney. I tell her people are urging me to speak publicly. A publisher has offered an advance for a memoir. I am broke and unemployable,” Rippey writes, adding:
“She listens, then says simply: ‘I wouldn’t say anything right now, Ruby. Just pause. More time will give you better perspective.’
“It turns out to be the best advice I receive. I am newly sober and still inside the wreckage—unable to make sense of anything, let alone speak clearly about it. So I stay silent.”
These days, Rippey and Newsom are both happily remarried and no longer pinned down by addiction.
But even though most of the events described in Rippey’s article took place more than 20 years ago, Newsom would probably prefer that that chapter of his life remain in the distant past.
