A 2006 video clip of then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom confronting a reporter over questions about his relationship with a 19-year-old woman has gone viral, racking up hundreds of thousands of views on X in recent days and reviving scrutiny of a chapter the California governor has spent nearly two decades trying to close.
The clip, first reported by the Daily Mail, shows Newsom, then 38 years old, reacting to a journalist's question about a San Francisco Chronicle column by Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross. That column was the first to air allegations that Newsom had given alcohol to Brittanie Mountz, a model and restaurant hostess who was under the legal drinking age of 21.
Newsom did not answer the substance of the question. He walked away from the reporter while firing back personal complaints about the journalist's conduct. The exchange offers a window into how the governor handles uncomfortable questions about his own record, not with transparency, but with deflection and hostility.
The reporter opened with a straightforward question:
"It hasn't been a very easy week for you, and I wondered whether you had any comment on the Matier and Ross story about the drinking?"
Newsom's response was not an answer. It was a lecture directed at the journalist. He told the reporter:
"You can't help yourself, you cannot!"
He continued, telling the reporter it was "increasingly impossible to have a conversation with you" and suggested the outlet send different reporters if it wanted access. When the journalist tried to de-escalate, saying "It's not personal here, either" and "It's just a story, mayor", Newsom kept walking and kept complaining.
He told the reporter: "You keep missing a lot of facts... let me tell you, the investigation is not helped by a lot of things that have been reported." He never addressed the substance of the allegation, whether he had supplied alcohol to a woman too young to drink legally.
In September 2006, Newsom, the 38-year-old mayor of San Francisco, briefly dated Mountz, who was 19. The nearly 20-year age gap drew immediate public attention. On September 6, 2006, the pair walked the red carpet together at the opening night of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Mountz was also photographed holding a wine glass at the opening of a Bay Area shopping mall, where she had either just turned 20 or was about to.
The legal drinking age in California is 21. A probe was opened into whether Newsom supplied Mountz with alcohol. It did not result in any charges.
Newsom later told the New York Times that Mountz was "a friend" and added: "I won't go into details. Dating is not a term I would use. But friendship, yes." That characterization, friendship, not dating, has become a recurring feature of how his operation handles the episode. The New York Post reported that Newsom's memoir does not mention Mountz at all, and that his office later characterized the relationship as a "friendship" even as Newsom himself acknowledged they "went on a few dates."
A local newspaper editor, quoted by ABC at the time, offered a blunter assessment: "He makes a lot of bad choices. He's dating this girl who's barely out of college. He lets his hormones take over."
The Mountz episode was not an isolated incident in Newsom's personal history. His colorful love life stretches back to the early 1990s, when he dated kindergarten teacher Kelley Phleger for five years. Phleger later married "Miami Vice" actor Don Johnson.
Newsom married Kimberly Guilfoyle in 2001. They divorced in 2006, the same year the Mountz relationship made headlines. Guilfoyle was later engaged to Donald Trump Jr. Newsom's memoir reportedly details his realization that the marriage was over, though the timing of his other relationships raises its own questions about how neatly those chapters overlapped.
In his memoir, Newsom wrote: "I thought of myself as a single guy who happened to be mayor. Had my head been on straight I would have seen it the other way around." That line captures something telling. The mayor of a major American city treated his office as secondary to his personal life, and expected the public to look the other way.
The Mountz story was not even the most damaging personal scandal of his mayoral tenure. In 2007, Newsom publicly admitted to having had an affair two years earlier, in 2005, with Ruby Rippey Gibney, his City Hall appointments secretary. Gibney was married at the time to Alex Tourk, Newsom's good friend and campaign adviser. The affair ended the Tourk marriage. Gibney quit her job at City Hall.
Newsom's public apology at the time was carefully worded:
"I am deeply sorry. I humbly ask all of those I have hurt for their forgiveness. I will not let my personal failures impact my public duties."
He added: "I believe the best way I can atone for what I have done is to focus every day on helping to make this a better city. That is what I intend to do." The people who paid the price for his conduct, Tourk, Gibney, and their marriage, received no such benefit.
Newsom began dating Jennifer Siebel the same year the Mountz video was filmed. He married her in 2008. Siebel, who had previously dated George Clooney, described how Newsom broke the Mountz news to her early in their relationship.
She recalled him telling her: "You're not going to want to talk to me after tomorrow. There's a thing in the paper coming out about me and my 20-year-old girlfriend. I never dated her." Siebel later told People magazine: "You just have to have a sense of humor about those things."
But Siebel's humor did not extend to the Gibney affair. In 2007, she spoke to the San Francisco Chronicle and took aim at Gibney directly, saying: "I shouldn't say this, but there are two sides to every story. If people did research into the scandal... the woman is the culprit. Alex Tourk is a nice man and it saddens me that his wife did that to him."
She later apologized for those remarks, saying she was "deeply sorry" for statements that "hurt Alex and Ruby Tourk and everyone else involved." She called it "an expression of frustration that I profoundly regret." But even in her apology, she added: "I have tried to see Ruby's side of the story but unfortunately everyone near to her has stories and says she is bad news."
The Newsoms' approach to personal controversy follows a pattern: deny, minimize, blame others, apologize only when forced, and then move on as if the record has been wiped clean. Newsom has said his family is the only thing standing between him and a 2028 presidential run. If that is true, voters deserve a clear accounting of the personal history he keeps trying to rewrite.
The New York Post noted that Newsom's memoir does not mention Mountz. Reports from the time indicated that Mountz's listed age on MySpace changed from 19 to 26 while she was dating Newsom, a detail that fueled additional scrutiny about the relationship's optics and whether someone was trying to obscure the age gap.
Newsom's memoir tour has already struggled to draw crowds, and the resurfaced video adds another layer of difficulty. When a politician writes a book about his life and leaves out the episode that generated an investigation and national headlines, that is not an oversight. It is a choice.
The Daily Mail contacted the California Governor's office for comment on the resurfaced video. No response was noted.
The resurfaced clip is not just a curiosity from Newsom's past. It is a case study in how he handles accountability. A reporter asked a simple, legitimate question about a published allegation. Newsom responded by attacking the reporter, questioning the reporter's professionalism, and walking away without addressing the substance.
That instinct, to treat scrutiny as a personal affront rather than a civic obligation, has followed Newsom from City Hall to the governor's mansion. His confrontational exchanges with journalists are not rare outbursts. They are a governing style.
The probe into whether Newsom supplied alcohol to Mountz ended without charges. The relationship, by all accounts, was brief. But the way Newsom handled the questions, then and now, tells voters everything they need to know about how he treats transparency when the subject is himself.
A man who cannot answer a straightforward question from a local reporter without lashing out and walking away has no business asking the country to trust him with more power.
