Gavin Newsom's Former Mistress Reveals She Tore Every Button Off His Shirt During Steamy Hotel Hookup in Tell-All Essay

California Governor Gavin Newsom's former mistress has shared intimate new details about their years-long affair, including the moment she says she ripped every button off his shirt during a passionate hotel encounter.

Ruby Rippey-Gibney recounted the alleged incident in a candid essay for Vanity Fair, offering her most detailed account yet of the relationship that rocked San Francisco politics.

Rippey-Gibney said the affair began after she and Newsom attended a fellow City Hall staffer's wedding on July 2, 2005.

She recalled spending the reception drinking champagne and wine while her dinner "went untouched."

Throughout the evening, she crossed paths with Newsom several times — first while waiting outside a restroom and later near a hot tub after the reception.

The rest of the night, she admitted, became a blur.

"I wake the next morning beside him, still dressed," Rippey-Gibney wrote. "I am cold, almost shivering, and my dress — the one my mother warned me not to wear — is soaked from the waist down."

She explained she had blacked out after drinking and had wet the bed while unconscious.

"I had passed out. I had also wet the bed. (It wasn't the first time)," she wrote, while stressing that every sexual encounter she had with Newsom during their relationship was consensual, including those she was too intoxicated to remember clearly.

She quietly left while Newsom was still asleep and returned home to her husband, Alex Tourk, who had gone home from the wedding hours earlier after becoming frustrated that she wanted to continue partying.

Although Rippey-Gibney said the affair made working together increasingly uncomfortable, she and Newsom continued seeing one another while he was separated from his first wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and in the midst of their divorce.

During a girls' trip to Los Angeles, Rippey-Gibney said she was relaxing with a friend over wine at the Maison 140 hotel when Newsom texted her, "You should come by."

She immediately headed to the W Hotel to meet him.

The following morning, Rippey-Gibney noticed "tiny shirt buttons scattered like coins" across the hotel room floor but didn't immediately understand why.

Only after boarding her flight home did she receive a text from Newsom that read, "Thank God the W had T-shirts."

"Only then do I understand — hazily — that I tore his shirt off, every button ripped loose," she wrote.

Rippey-Gibney described the emotional toll the affair took on her almost immediately after leaving Los Angeles.

"I am overcome with the understanding that the consequences will not end with me," she wrote while recalling crying on the plane. "They may cost me the best thing that has ever happened to me: Alex. But worse, they will fall hardest on him — the person who least deserves them."

She also recounted another hotel meeting in which she accidentally spilled a glass of red wine onto the carpet.

According to Rippey-Gibney, she watched Newsom drop to his hands and knees, "scrubbing furiously at the carpet with a washcloth" in an attempt to remove the stain.

When he noticed her watching him from the bed, his demeanor suddenly changed.

"You know, we really can't do this anymore," Rippey-Gibney recalled him saying. "You can't be doing this to Alex."

Rippey-Gibney and Tourk divorced in 2017, though the couple later rebuilt their relationship as co-parents.

In a November 2025 Instagram post, Rippey-Gibney revealed: "Tonight I went to my ex-husband's wedding to his third wife with my second husband," she captioned the post. "A really good night."

Newsom married filmmaker Jennifer Siebel in July 2008, and the couple has three children.