The woman at the center of Gavin Newsom's most damaging personal scandal is preparing to tell her side of the story, nearly two decades after the affair rocked San Francisco City Hall and almost ended his political career.

Ruby Rippey-Gibney, the former appointments secretary who had a sexual relationship with then-Mayor Newsom while working under him, will recount her perspective in an upcoming Vanity Fair piece, the New York Post reported, citing a source familiar with the matter. Neither Rippey-Gibney nor Vanity Fair responded to requests for comment. Newsom's governor's office also stayed silent.

The timing is hard to ignore. Newsom is widely expected to pursue a 2028 presidential campaign after terming out as California's governor. He recently released a memoir in which he detailed his romantic escapades as a single mayor of San Francisco. Now the other party to his most consequential "escapade" appears ready to offer her own account, one that Newsom cannot control.

The original scandal

The affair became public in early 2007 when Alex Tourk, Newsom's longtime political adviser, former campaign manager, and Rippey-Gibney's then-husband, discovered that the mayor had been sleeping with his wife. Tourk confronted Newsom and resigned.

Newsom moved quickly into damage-control mode. At a public news conference, he said:

"I want to make it clear that everything you've heard and read is true, and I am deeply sorry about that."

He called the affair a "personal lapse of judgment," announced he was giving up alcohol, and said he would seek professional help. News organizations widely reported that he had entered an alcohol rehabilitation program.

But Newsom told a different story years later. In a 2018 interview with The Sacramento Bee during his first gubernatorial campaign, he denied entering rehab. He said he had sought counseling from Mimi Silbert, president of the Delancey Street Foundation, and stopped drinking for a period, before eventually resuming.

"No, there's no rehab. I just stopped. There was no treatment, no nothing related to any of that stuff. I stopped because I thought it was a good thing to stop."

That contradiction, announcing professional help publicly, then later denying he received formal treatment, has never been fully resolved. Newsom framed the whole episode as a learning experience. He told The Sacramento Bee: "Sometimes people make mistakes in their lives and you then work hard never to make them again, because you learn from them."

Rippey-Gibney's long silence

For years, Rippey-Gibney largely avoided speaking publicly about the affair. The one notable exception came during Newsom's 2018 gubernatorial campaign, when she posted on Facebook addressing the scandal in the context of the #MeToo movement.

She wrote that she supported #MeToo but did not believe her relationship with Newsom belonged in that category. Her reasoning was direct:

"Yes, I was a subordinate, but I was also a free-thinking, 33-year-old adult married woman & mother."

She also disclosed that she had been struggling with alcoholism and self-destructive behavior during that period of her life. The post was notable for its candor, and for the fact that it was the only time she had publicly addressed the matter in over a decade. Rippey-Gibney has since remarried.

The question now is what she intends to say in Vanity Fair that she hasn't said before, and why she's choosing this moment to say it. The California Post, which first reported the upcoming essay, did not indicate what specific claims or details Rippey-Gibney plans to include beyond "recounting her perspective."

How Newsom survived, and who paid the price

The political fallout from the 2007 scandal was remarkably asymmetric. Tourk, the wronged husband, lost his job and his marriage. Rippey-Gibney lost her anonymity and, by her own account, was battling addiction. Newsom lost nothing of consequence. He won reelection as mayor of San Francisco later that same year, was elected lieutenant governor in 2010, and captured the governor's mansion in 2018.

Jennifer Siebel, who began dating Newsom in late 2006, months before the affair became public, stood by him. She later married him in 2008. But her public comments about the scandal were revealing. Jennifer Siebel Newsom told the San Francisco Chronicle:

"I shouldn't say this, but there are two sides to every story. If people did research into the scandal... the woman is the culprit."

She apologized shortly after those comments were published. But the remark laid bare a pattern: the political apparatus around Newsom directed blame at Rippey-Gibney, the subordinate employee, while the man who held all the institutional power moved on to higher office. That dynamic may be exactly what Rippey-Gibney now intends to address.

Newsom's broader orbit of allies and associates has faced its own reckoning in recent years, with former aides caught up in legal trouble that has cast a shadow over the governor's inner circle.

The presidential calculation

Willie Brown, the former San Francisco mayor who preceded Newsom and played a role in bringing both Rippey-Gibney and Tourk into City Hall, spoke to The California Post on Wednesday. Brown, who remains supportive of Newsom's likely presidential bid, downplayed the potential damage.

He said he hadn't paid much attention to Rippey-Gibney at the time: "I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to her, because her husband worked for me as well." He added: "I didn't pay any attention, until after the fact."

Brown argued that voters are "no longer concerned about that kind of conduct as evidence of whether or not you're qualified." It's a convenient theory for a man whose own political legacy is intertwined with Newsom's rise. Whether it holds in a contested presidential primary is another matter entirely.

San Francisco political analyst David Latterman offered a different take on the potential fallout:

"What would be really sad is if Democrats make a bigger deal out of this than Republicans for self-flagellation."

That comment hints at the real anxiety inside Democratic circles, not that Republicans will weaponize the story, but that Democrats themselves will tear at it during a primary. Newsom has already shown a tendency to frame scrutiny as persecution. He has claimed that a federal probe into his administration amounts to political payback for his presidential ambitions.

And the governor's problems extend beyond old personal scandals. A Newsom ally reportedly wore an FBI wire as a federal corruption investigation expanded toward the governor himself, a development that suggests the walls around Newsom's Sacramento operation may be closing in from multiple directions.

What the essay could change

The substance of Rippey-Gibney's Vanity Fair piece remains unknown. No publication date has been announced. The California Post learned of the essay from an unnamed source, and none of the principals, Rippey-Gibney, Vanity Fair, Tourk, or Newsom's office, agreed to comment.

But the mere fact of its existence reshapes the landscape. For nearly two decades, the narrative around the affair has been Newsom's narrative: a mistake, an apology, a recovery, a career that marched upward without interruption. Rippey-Gibney's 2018 Facebook post offered a glimpse of a different story, one involving a subordinate employee, addiction, and a power imbalance that Newsom's camp tried to paper over by blaming the woman.

Democrats have spent years insisting they believe women who come forward with uncomfortable truths about powerful men. That principle was easy to champion when the powerful men in question were on the other side of the aisle. Rippey-Gibney's essay will test whether the standard applies when the man is one of their own, and when he's running for president.

Newsom's memoir shows he's comfortable revisiting his past on his own terms. The question is whether he can handle someone else doing the revisiting. His track record suggests he'll try to change the subject. The familiar Democratic playbook of deflecting when confronted with inconvenient facts works until it doesn't.

Newsom built a career on surviving the consequences of his own conduct. Rippey-Gibney lived with those consequences. Now she gets to write them down.