Will the “worst-kept secret in Sacramento” blow into public view?
It’s hard to say.
The secret? That Gov. Gavin Newsom was engaged in multiple alleged extra-marital affairs over the course of 2020, a time where many of his orders shuttered nearly all personal and economic activity across the nation’s largest state.
Sources on K Street and within the Capitol complex peppered The Sun with corroborating rumors of infidelity by Newsom during the pandemic year.
One such instance allegedly occurred with a high-ranking official within his own office, K Street sources told The Sun.
“This is spiraling into the worst-kept secret in town,” a K Streeter, speaking anonymously to The Sun on Wednesday afternoon, said.
The Sun is not publishing the name of the official alleged to have engaged in relations with Newsom.
Underlying the growing chatter? Word of an impending exposé from The Los Angeles Times, adding professional woes of the 40th Governor currently under threat of recall.
Wednesday night, hours after announcing Rob Bonta as his appointee for Attorney General to replace U.S. Health and Human Secretary Xavier Becerra, the top auto-fill search result for “Newsom” on Twitter was “Newsom affair.”
Late in the evening, Capitol sources noted that POLITICO had also joined the chase for the story.
As of this publication time, neither statewide publication had issued a story on the matter, raising intervening questions of whether the story was being killed or still investigated.
Instead, an anonymously-sourced story from the Los Cerritos News unfurled the various allegations bouncing across midtown Sacramento in the evening.
The alleged affairs would be Newsom’s second brush with public infidelity. The first, exposed in 2007 but occurring in 2005, was with Ruby Rippey Gibney, his commission appointments secretary as Mayor of San Francisco.
At the time, Gibney was married to Alex Tourk, Newsom’s campaign manager, while the then-Mayor was separated from his now ex-wife Kimberly Guilfoyle.