In an essay for Vanity Fair published Tuesday, a former aide to Gavin Newsom reflected on the affair she had with him in the early 2000s when he was mayor of San Francisco — and on the inherent imbalance of power that shaped both the relationship and its fallout.

“Power does not need to coerce. It only needs to exist,” Ruby Rippey wrote. “The responsibility to hold the line belongs to the one who holds it. That didn’t happen. But I didn’t stumble into the space left open—I saw a possibility and went for it. Both things are true: I am responsible for what I did. Power does not distribute consequences evenly.”

Rippey, who worked for Newsom initially as a deputy campaign finance director and then as his commission secretary after he took office in 2004, wrote about her alcohol addiction, her relationship with Newsom while she was married to Newsom’s then-deputy chief of staff Alex Tourk and what happened after the news of the affair became public in 2007.

“Nearly everyone seemed to know except the one person who most needed to know: my husband,” Rippey wrote. “I had been sleeping with his boss, who was also mine, and the mayor of San Francisco.”

Rippey said the affair with Newsom began after a colleague’s wedding in July 2005 in Napa Valley. (Newsom, now governor of California, had filed for divorce from Kimberly Guilfoyle in January 2005.)

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Erum Salam

Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.