Ruby Rippey was Gavin Newsom's appointments secretary. She was also the wife of his campaign manager and close friend, Alex Tourk. And in the summer of 2005, she ended up in a sexual relationship with the man who signed her paychecks — a relationship that Newsom, in his recently published memoir, described as the "stupidest and also briefest of affairs."

Rippey just published her own version. It's not brief.

In a Vanity Fair essay published Monday, Rippey laid out a detailed account of the affair, its origins, and its aftermath — directly contradicting the version California Governor Newsom put in his memoir earlier this year. The essay traces the relationship back to a July 2005 wedding in Napa Valley and describes encounters at Newsom's Russian Hill penthouse, a North Beach bar, and the W Hotel in Los Angeles. That's a lot of geography for the "briefest" of anything.

Rippey took particular issue with Newsom's claim in the memoir that he "came clean" to Tourk about the affair. "It reads — to me, at least — as a version of events that gives him credit for something I had already done," she wrote. She says she confessed to Tourk herself, via email, in January 2007. The scandal went public the following month.

The power dynamic is the spine of the essay. "Power does not need to coerce. It only needs to exist," Rippey wrote. She described waking up in his home after passing out drunk, still dressed, having wet the bed. Newsom was married to Kimberly Guilfoyle at the time and was the mayor of San Francisco.

"Both things are true: I am responsible for what I did," Rippey wrote. "Power does not distribute consequences evenly."

She's right about that last part. When the affair became public in February 2007, Newsom held a news conference, said "everything you've read is true and I'm deeply sorry for that," and moved on. Tourk resigned. Rippey entered rehab in 2006 and spent the next two decades in silence. Newsom won reelection with over 73% of the vote. He also lost his marriage to Guilfoyle.

"For my former boss, it is a footnote in a longer arc of ascent," Rippey wrote. "For me, it is the fracture that split my life into before and after."

There's a Kamala Harris cameo in the essay, too. Rippey says then-San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris — who knew her from their time working in former Mayor Willie Brown Jr.'s administration advised her to keep quiet, "I wouldn't say anything right now, Ruby. Just pause. More time will give you better perspective." A publisher had offered Rippey an advance for a memoir at the time. She stayed quiet. For nearly two decades and lost out of the book deal of a lifetime.

Newsom's spokesperson Izzy Gardon responded with a statement that reads like it was drafted by a lawyer who bills by the paragraph: "The Governor acknowledged his role and publicly apologized nearly two decades ago when he still was mayor... he does not have anything further to add."

Newsom is positioning himself for a 2028 presidential run. His memoir was part of that rollout — the carefully curated version of his life, packaged for a national audience. Rippey's essay is the version he didn't authorize. The one where the "briefest of affairs" turns out to have a beginning, a middle, a body of water in Napa Valley, and consequences that lasted two decades — but only for one of the people involved.

The #MeToo movement asked us to think differently about what happens when the boss sleeps with the subordinate. Rippey isn't using that framework explicitly, but she doesn't have to. The facts do the work: he was the mayor, she was the secretary, her husband was his close friend, she went to rehab, he won reelection by 73 points.