Posted on 02/02/2007 8:40:57 PM PST by SmithL
For more than a year, the affair between San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and the wife of his good friend and campaign manager, Alex Tourk, was a bomb that those around the mayor knew would one day go off.
But it wasn't until last week that the fuse was finally lit, by Tourk's wife herself.
After this week's explosion, people close to the mayor, Tourk and Ruby Rippey-Tourk, revealed what had gone on behind the scenes.
We're told the affair didn't last long -- the mayor has privately said to friends that there were only a couple of encounters. Rumors started making the rounds of City Hall in late 2005, soon after Newsom and Rippey-Tourk were reportedly spotted together in the mayoral town car at a wedding in Napa.
But no firsthand witnesses ever came forward, and the talk receded as Newsom, who was going through a divorce, was spotted with a succession of other women.
The story took on new life last spring when Rippey-Tourk left her job as Newsom's appointments secretary to undergo treatment for alcohol and drug abuse, leaving people to speculate that she had been shipped out before someone started asking questions about her conduct and her relationship with the mayor.
Mayoral staffers and political operatives sensed that they still had a problem on their hands. Several of them, none of whom would speak for attribution, knew that at least some of the rumors were true -- and that, at best, they had just stalled the inevitable.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about the whole story was that it stayed secret as long as it did, without even Alex Tourk knowing about it.
Apparently, colleagues kept it from him in part because they didn't want him hurt.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Unless .. of course .. he was a repub .. THEN IT WOULD HAVE BEEN FRONT PAGE NEWS EVERY DAY.
I have really come to dislike these people .. they do not believe any of the rules apply to them .. just repubs or the "little people".
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