Fact Check: Did Ruby Rippey reveal Gavin Newsom affair for the first time in 2026?

WASHINGTON, DC: California Governor Gavin Newsom's past affair with former aide Ruby Rippey has resurfaced after she published a new essay in Vanity Fair reflecting on their relationship and its impact on her life.

The essay prompted some social media users to claim that Rippey had revealed the affair for the first time in 2026.

The essay, which offers Rippey's most detailed personal account of the affair and its aftermath, has reignited interest in the nearly two-decade-old scandal as Newsom is widely expected to mount a 2028 presidential campaign. Let's fact-check the claim.

Claim: Ruby Rippey revealed Gavin Newsom's affair for the first time in 2026

The rumor emerged after Vanity Fair published a first-person essay by Ruby Rippey detailing her affair with then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and its lasting impact on her life.

Many social media users interpreted the essay as Rippey's first public disclosure of the relationship, with posts claiming she had "finally revealed" or "just admitted" to the affair in 2026.

The narrative quickly spread online, suggesting the relationship had remained secret until now and framing the essay as a new political scandal.

Fact Check: False, affair predated Ruby Rippey's 2026 account

However, that portrayal leaves out key context. Newsom publicly acknowledged the affair in 2007, telling reporters that "everything you've heard and read is true."

Rippey has also spoken publicly about the relationship in previous years, including comments in 2018. While her Vanity Fair essay marks her first comprehensive, first-person account of the affair, it does not reveal the relationship for the first time.

Rippey also reflects on the early days of Newsom's mayoral administration, recounting her marriage, pregnancy, struggles with alcoholism, and the relationship with Newsom that developed into an extramarital affair. She later entered a rehabilitation program and left her position in the mayor's office.

After the affair became public in 2007, Rippey said she was inundated with calls from journalists and found herself at the center of intense media scrutiny.

That same year, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, who began dating Newsom shortly after the affair ended and is now California's first partner, described Rippey as the "culprit" in comments to reporters. 

Siebel Newsom later apologized for those remarks. At the time of publication, the governor's office and a spokesperson for Jennifer Siebel Newsom had not responded to requests for comment.

Newsom's memoir and Rippey's essay offer differing accounts of the affair

In his new memoir, Newsom writes that he "came clean" about the affair to Alex Tourk, his top aide and Rippey's husband at the time. Rippey disputes that account in her essay, arguing that it gives Newsom "credit for something I had already done." 

She wrote that while Newsom's version may be "technically defensible," it leaves readers with the impression that he, rather than she, was the first to tell Tourk about the affair.