Gavin Newsom’s Campaign Manager Quits Over Alleged Affair
I’ve thought for a long time that having a personality disorder was a requirement for being a politician.
Gavin Newsom, the Mayor of San Francisco, who is currently seeking another term has just added more support for my theory.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s re-election campaign manager resigned Wednesday after confronting the mayor about an affair Newsom had with his wife while she worked in the mayor’s office, City Hall sources said.
Alex Tourk, 39, who served as Newsom’s deputy chief of staff before becoming his campaign manager in September, confronted the mayor after his wife, Ruby Rippey-Tourk, told him of the affair as part of a rehabilitation program she had been undergoing for substance abuse, said the sources, who had direct knowledge of Wednesday’s meeting.
Rippey-Tourk, 34, was the mayor’s appointments secretary from the start of his administration in 2004 until last spring. She told her husband that the affair with Newsom was short-lived and happened about a year and a half ago, while the mayor was undergoing a divorce from his then-wife, Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, said the sources, who spoke on condition they not be identified.
Alex Tourk “confronted the mayor on the issue this afternoon, expressed his feeling about the situation in an honest and pointed way, and resigned,” said one source close to Tourk and his wife.
Tourk’s resignation was announced in a statement that Newsom’s campaign released Wednesday. The statement quoted Tourk as saying only that he was resigning for personal reasons.
Newsom hasn’t been tried or convicted of anything yet so I this affair is just “alleged” at this point. I guess it’s possible that Newsom’s political enemies could be trying to undermine his re-election effort with this story.
But it appears that while Alex Tourk, who was Newsom’s friend, was working his ass off of for the mayor’s campaign, Newsom is humping his wife, who also just happens to be an employee in the mayor’s office. When Tourk found out, he quit.
It makes you wonder if Newsom has any character at all.
After meeting with Tourk, Newsom maintained his public schedule, which included attending a reception for city commissioners and officiating over a marriage in his office.
Privately, however, aides said the mayor was in shock over the meeting.
Newsom in shock? Oh, poor baby. What about Alex Tourk? I can understand that Tourk would be shocked after being betrayed by Newsom and his own wife. But Newsom? What was he shocked about? That he was caught?
It is interesting that there was no mention of sexual harassment laws in the San Francisco Chronicle article. San Francisco has a law on just about everything you can imagine and if it’s not already on the books, I can assure you that somebody is working on it.
I know there are laws pertaining to sexual harassment on the job and while Ruby Rippey-Tourk may have been a willing partner in the betrayal of her husband, the matter of consent is always a little fuzzy when one partner in the affair has control over the salary, evaluations and career path of another. Because of this, the policy in many private companies, which have been often sued over such matters, is that supervisors can never become sexually involved with their subordinates. Such relationships often have adverse consequences for other employees in the organization because an employee can use sex to “sleep her way to the top.”
Newsom is handsome, smart and rich. He was all those things before he got into politics. So why risk it all just to bang a loyal friend’s wife who is also working on your staff when there are tens of thousands of women (or men) he could have? It can’t be about getting sex.
From my own, limited personal experience with Newsom, I can only speculate that he’s grown comfortable with a corrupt brand of power as a way to get things done. When I lived in San Francisco, I often wrote to members of the Board of Supervisors and Newsom was one of the few who responded and he always sent a thoughful response. But when the corruption of Mayor Willie Brown’s office because obvious and some citizens were suggesting a recall of Brown, I asked Newsom if he would support it and he wrote back that he would not. This was interesting because while Newsom spoke publically against city hall corruption, he was loyal to Willie Brown. It was Brown who originally appointed Newsom to the Parking Commission and the Board of Supervisors to fill a vacant seat, giving him his start in politics.
It will be interesting to see if there’s any action taken on the sexual harassment issue. Or do such regulations just apply to “the little people?”
UPDATE: It’s official. Gavin Newsom admitted to the affair and apologized.
“I’m deeply sorry,” Newsom said during a brief news conference at City Hall the day after the aide resigned. Newsom appeared poised but visibly emotional. He spoke for about a minute and left without taking questions.
[...]
“I want to make it clear that everything you’ve read is true and I’m deeply sorry about that,” he said. “I hurt someone I care deeply about, Alex Tourk and his family and friends, and that is something I’m deeply sad about and sorry for.”
I’ll give him points for not pulling a Bill Clinton or a Ted Haggard and pretending it didn’t happen.
UPDATE: RightCelebrity has photos of Gavin Newsom, Alex Tourk, and Ruby Rippey-Tourk and refers to Alex Tourk as Newsom’s best friend. If that was true, that makes Newsom even sleazier and a man who no longer has a best friend. I’ll bet a lot of his friends are looking at their pretty wives with new questions on their minds.
UPDATE: There’s a video on YouTube of Gavin Newsom getting very angry and defensive when asked about his drinking. It’s hard to make out what he’s saying to a reporter but he’s obviously very angry. Today’s article in the San Francisco Chronicle said that Ruby Rippey-Tourk told her husband about her affair with Newsom as part of a rehabilitation program for substance abuse. The same article mentioned that some believed that Newsom had been drinking before a recent public event.
…In December, several witnesses at a late Friday night vigil for a mortally wounded police officer at San Francisco General Hospital reported that Newsom appeared to have been drinking when he arrived.
There seems to be a lot of dysfunctional, self-destructive behavior down there in San Francisco’s City Hall.
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February 1st, 2007 at 12:36 pm
[...] See also: SF Party, Viewpoint Journal, and Binary Circumstance [...]
February 1st, 2007 at 5:15 pm
is this idiot still gonna forgive this slut ? who,s face does he see when he kisses her at night?
February 4th, 2007 at 3:10 am
[...] Must read local SF blog sources on the Newsom scandal: SF Party, Viewpoint Journal, and Binary Circumstance, Joe My God, Greg Dewar, Professors Squared, Gavin Watch, Starkedsf, Gitell, and The Mayor and the Hair. [...]