Newsom’s Affair Partner Reveals She Was Blackout Drunk During Encounters

“Anyone who is mentally incapacitated due to alcohol and other drugs cannot give consent,” states a high school sex education curriculum used in Washington state.

“Exploiting a person’s impairment from the use of alcohol or other drugs is not okay under any circumstances. If someone is incapacitated from alcohol and/or other drugs, they cannot give consent,” reasons Dartmouth University’s sexual consent guide.

The sentiment is a common one repeated in schools, colleges, and workplaces across the country. Incapacitation from alcohol negates one’s ability to consent. Intoxication, meanwhile, negatively impacts one’s judgment.

When power dynamics are thrown into a situation involving a woman repeatedly so drunk that time and again she fails to remember her sexual encounters, consent is bound to be in question. Or, at the least, a man’s decision to continue having sex with a woman who doesn’t remember it the next morning should be under great scrutiny.

Yet no one cared when this summer Ruby Rippey, California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s former secretary and affair partner, penned an essay in Vanity Fair revealing that on several occasions she was blackout drunk when she had sex with Newsom. (RELATED: The Women Who Will Haunt Gavin Newsom’s Presidential Campaign)

By blackout drunk, I mean that she was so inebriated that, though she was conscious and interacting with Newsom, her brain was not forming memories normally.

A state of inebriation associated with not remembering what happened the next day is medically established to begin at 0.16 percent BAC, which is twice the legal limit for driving in California. The University of Toledo classifies this as “very drunk” and says that the effects include “nausea, disorientation, dizziness, increased motor impairment, blurred vision, judgment further impaired.”

In her July Vanity Fair essay, Rippey writes that she doesn’t remember her first sexual encounter with Newsom, which happened the night they both attended a wedding, at which she drank liberally and didn’t touch her food. She says the last thing she remembers is Newsom massaging her feet in his chauffeured car. The next thing she knew, she writes, she was in bed next to him, having passed out and wet the bed.

This wasn’t the only time she didn’t remember what happened with Newsom upon waking up the next morning.

On another occasion, at a Beverly Hills hotel bar, she writes that she remembers “only flashes,” like “leaning in too close” to Newsom, before everything “goes black.” When she woke up the following morning next to Newsom, her head was pounding and shirt buttons were all over the floor. She wondered where the buttons came from. It was only when Newsom texted her “Thank God the W had T-shirts” that she surmised that the buttons had come from her tearing Newsom’s shirt. Yet again, she had been so drunk that she didn’t remember the sexual encounter at all.

This is, of course, highly concerning. Here we have a woman stating publicly that she was extremely drunk when she had sex with Newsom — and when he was her boss and the mayor of San Francisco to boot.

Moreover, she describes herself as being “wasted” when she returned to her husband after her meetings with Newsom. “I come home at three in the morning, wasted, breath thick with alcohol, and slide into bed beside my sleeping husband, pressing my cold body against his for warmth.”

This is the sort of thing that even the most sexually liberal coach against. That Washington high school sex education curriculum, for instance, gives an example of what should be avoided. “Naomi is highly intoxicated and therefore cannot consent. Even if her words (“uh-huh”) indicate yes, the fact that she is drunk means that she cannot consent.”

In her Vanity Fair essay, Rippey goes on to detail how she developed an addiction to cocaine during her affair with Newsom. “Alone, cocaine doesn’t appeal much to me,” she writes. “But after one or two bottles of wine, it makes it so I can drink twice as much for twice as long.”

As she continued her affair with Newsom, her mental state became foggier and foggier.

“The nights blur: rooftop bars, wine, cigarettes, and names I immediately forget. Strangers’ living rooms. Finishing the last lines long after I stop wanting them. The taxi ride home as the sun comes up. The city already moving—belonging to people who have slept. My body, a crime scene.”

When Rippey finally goes to rehab, it is her sister who calls up Newsom and tells him it is his responsibility to say no if Rippey ever calls him again.

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We’ve long known that Rippey’s consent was questionable. In my book, Newsom Unleashed: The Progressive Lust for Unbridled Power, I wrote that Rippey’s long-known problems with cocaine and alcohol rendered her vulnerable to her boss’s advances.

Read more The President Gets It

Another worrying sign about the consent involved in Newsom’s relationship with Rippey came from Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Newsom’s now-wife. At the time the affair was revealed, Siebel Newsom claimed that it had consisted of a “few nothing incidents when [Rippey] showed up passed out outside of his door.” As I wrote in February, “What kind of boss has an affair with his secretary with substance abuse problems who shows up passed out outside his door?”

But we have not known — until now — Rippey’s account that she was so drunk during some of their encounters that she doesn’t even remember them.

Yet the press seems to have ignored this revelation. Stories on Rippey’s Vanity Fair essay have focused on the fact that her account of the affair conflicts with the story of the affair that Newsom published in his memoir earlier this year. (He described it as “the stupidest and also briefest of affairs.”) (RELATED: Gavin Newsom Will Regret His Book Launch)

The headline of the Sacramento Bee’s story on the Vanity Fair essay reads: “Ruby Rippey reveals new, contradicting details of Gavin Newsom affair in Vanity Fair.” The Guardian said, “Former Gavin Newsom aide shares fresh details of affair.” The New York Times went with: “Aide Who Had Affair With Newsom 20 Years Ago Details Her Experience.”

The Times characterized her essay thusly: “She seems to blame herself for betraying her husband and says that her life spiraled as she drank heavily and used cocaine.”

The newspaper did, at least, point to Rippey’s consideration in her essay of the role that Newsom’s position of power played in the affair. The Times quotes Rippey as saying: “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.” What the Times did not reckon with was Rippey’s reflections on how alcohol and drugs impacted her ability to consent.

Rippey’s acknowledgment that her boss’s position of power played a role in the affair is novel. At the time of the #MeToo movement, she came out to say her role as his secretary had no impact: “Yes, I was a subordinate, but I was also a free-thinking, 33-[year]-old adult married woman & mother.” Now, she says of that 2018 statement: “Claiming responsibility felt like the last form of agency I had.”

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Only the conservative California Globe seems to have taken notice of how worrying the allegations leveled against Newsom in the Vanity Fair essay are.

In an article titled “Gavin Newsom’s Predatory Behavior Coming Home to Roost,” Katy Grimes writes that Newsom’s position as mayor and Rippey’s role as his secretary is “a classic power imbalance used by a predator.”

I was on maternity leave when Rippey’s essay came out. Upon reading it, I wondered if there would be a public debate over Newsom’s relationship with Rippey. Would people ask if this was unforgivable, especially for a politician? After all, the country was closely following the story of Graham Platner and the sexual allegations leveled against him that involved his own heavy drinking. Newsom himself (falsely) claimed he would go to rehab after his affair with Rippey was revealed. A problem with wine, the implication was, had impaired his judgment when he had the affair.

Alas, no such public debate ever came. Everyone simply moved on, reasoning that the story of Newsom’s affair is old news.

On Reddit, one person responded to the story by writing: “Seriously who gives a f**k? 33 year old woman and 38 year old man have an affair. The end.”

But no one should be able to get away with this. Rippey was Newsom’s best friend’s wife. She was in the throes of alcohol and cocaine addictions so bad her nights were blurry and her memories nonexistent.

Newsom knew exactly what he was doing to Rippey, her husband, and their baby son. In Rippey’s account, we hear Newsom tell Rippey one night in a hotel while cleaning up spilled wine: “You know, we really can’t do this anymore. You can’t be doing this to Alex.” And yet, according to Rippey, the affair went on “for months” thereafter.

Again, no one should be able to get away with this, let alone a governor with designs on higher office. It’s one thing to have an affair with your subordinate while mayor. It’s quite another to have an affair with a subordinate who is constantly drunk out of her mind.

Ellie Gardey Holmes is the author of Newsom Unleashed: The Progressive Lust for Unbridled Power.