The Ben Shapiro Show - July 29, 2026


Newsom's Ex-Mistress Just Reopened a 20-Year-Old Scandal


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

205.57

Word count

1,648

Sentence count

142

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Alrighty.
00:00:00.000 So it turns out that Gavin Newsom's ex-lover now has a piece in Vanity Affair.
00:00:04.000 And listen, I bear no great love for the California governor.
00:00:06.000 I think he has not done a good job as California governor.
00:00:09.000 You can hear my critiques of him on a podcast I did.
00:00:11.000 It was his podcast in California.
00:00:14.000 This piece, however, it does expose something else.
00:00:16.000 And that is a particular mentality about where responsibility lies when people decide to knock boots.
00:00:21.000 There has been this bizarre kind of assumption that has crept through American society that under any circumstance in which a woman regrets having had some sort of sexual relationship with a dude, somehow a special responsibility lies with that dad.
00:00:33.000 Now listen, This is coming from a guy who's a virgin until marriage.
00:00:37.000 My wife was a virgin until marriage.
00:00:38.000 The only people we have ever had sex with are each other.
00:00:41.000 And I'm an advocate for this lifestyle.
00:00:43.000 There's no more traditionalist person on planet earth than I. When I say that, I say that as a prelude to the idea that you are responsible for your own sexual decision making and that you can't just blame that on power dynamics.
00:00:55.000 This woman had an affair with Gavin Newsom way back when.
00:00:59.000 This exploded outward a couple of decades ago, 20 years ago.
00:01:04.000 So, this woman was originally married to a Newsome staffer while he was the mayor, and then he started knocking boots with her.
00:01:11.000 And now she has a long story in Vanity Fair, in which, again, the attempts to escape responsibility for her own bad decision making, it's pretty wild.
00:01:19.000 The entire structures of thought that we've built on top of all of this.
00:01:24.000 So, she writes in Vanity Fair about how she faced her demons but lost her voice.
00:01:31.000 And now she's ready to share her story.
00:01:32.000 So, here is how it all went down, according to The person with whom Gavin Newsom had this affair.
00:01:38.000 2004, quote.
00:01:40.000 Remember, she's married and she has a newborn child.
00:01:43.000 One night, we all meet at a Mexican restaurant on Lombard Street.
00:01:45.000 Warm tortilla chips, limes, margaritas, sweating in glasses.
00:01:49.000 As the waiter takes orders, I feel the mayor looking at me.
00:01:51.000 I glance up across the table back at him.
00:01:53.000 As if caught off guard, he reacts, pointing at me.
00:01:55.000 Hey, you look really good, he says.
00:01:56.000 You've lost all your pregnancy weight.
00:01:58.000 There's an awkward laugh.
00:01:59.000 I reach for another chip and stare at my husband's margarita, the salt rim catching the light.
00:02:02.000 I want it, but I'm in another self-enforced stretch of sobriety, so I sit on my hands and wait it out.
00:02:07.000 After that, I start paying closer attention, she says, to what I wear Chanel makeup, a yellow silk dress fitted at the waist, pink patent leather heels.
00:02:14.000 At senior staff meetings, we sit in a semicircle facing his enormous oak desk, 12 foot high velvet curtains drawn tight, casting the room in a private glow.
00:02:21.000 I feel important.
00:02:22.000 Okay, so this story is not about how Gavin Newsom is a good guy.
00:02:26.000 He really, really, really is not.
00:02:28.000 Okay, but there is a punchline here that is kind of astonishing.
00:02:32.000 So basically, she decides that she doesn't like her life.
00:02:35.000 She has an alcohol problem, and she ends up in an affair with Gavin Newsom.
00:02:41.000 And she admits in this article that it was totally consensual.
00:02:45.000 Quote The boundaries begin to disintegrate.
00:02:48.000 I linger in doorways, position myself within his sight line.
00:02:51.000 At events, he holds the doors, waiting for me to pass first.
00:02:54.000 The texts shift from work to something else.
00:02:57.000 I manufacture reasons to be near him.
00:02:59.000 The choreography becomes obvious.
00:03:00.000 People notice.
00:03:02.000 As the performance unfolds in plain sight, I start measuring my days by how close it is to five when I can start drinking.
00:03:07.000 And then she says, We meet, we drink, there's sex, but it isn't the point.
00:03:11.000 The point is proximity.
00:03:13.000 To power, to being chosen, to feeling newly visible, no longer muted by pregnancy, by new motherhood, by the strain of white knuckling long stretches of sobriety.
00:03:20.000 It isn't love.
00:03:21.000 It isn't romance.
00:03:21.000 It's intoxication.
00:03:24.000 And then, of course, they break up and she uses cocaine and all the rest.
00:03:31.000 Okay.
00:03:32.000 Now she ends up telling her husband, but she says this.
00:03:37.000 Here's her conclusion.
00:03:38.000 Quote, me too is still more than a decade away, but the arguments are already forming.
00:03:42.000 I hear every explanation.
00:03:43.000 None absolves me.
00:03:44.000 Yes, the drinking mattered.
00:03:45.000 So did my arrogance.
00:03:46.000 The belief that consequences were for other people.
00:03:48.000 I was not confused or naive.
00:03:49.000 I was a grown woman who made choices that hurt someone I loved.
00:03:52.000 I am the culprit.
00:03:53.000 Still, the Me Too Reckoning exposed what I had missed.
00:03:55.000 And here's the punchline Power does not need to coerce, it only needs to exist.
00:04:00.000 The responsibility to hold the line belongs to the one who holds it.
00:04:04.000 That didn't happen.
00:04:06.000 But I didn't stumble into the space left open.
00:04:08.000 I saw a possibility and went for it.
00:04:09.000 Both things are true.
00:04:10.000 I am responsible for what I did.
00:04:11.000 Power does not distribute consequences evenly.
00:04:14.000 We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
00:04:15.000 First, I have a lot of opinions about a lot of things, but I never imagined I'd become someone with extremely strong opinions about betting.
00:04:21.000 And yet, I have these strong opinions.
00:04:23.000 My strongest opinion.
00:04:24.000 The strongest opinion I hold is you need bull and branch.
00:04:27.000 It is that good.
00:04:28.000 It is just that good.
00:04:29.000 I've been moving all around the house right now at night because my wife is up all night with the baby.
00:04:35.000 And whether I am sleeping in one room or another, the thing that comes with me everywhere is the bull and the branch.
00:04:39.000 They're just great.
00:04:40.000 Their bedding is made from 100% organic cotton, designed to be naturally breathable.
00:04:44.000 Instead of relying on synthetic cooling technology or chemical treatments, the fabric itself is woven for airflow.
00:04:49.000 And it somehow keeps getting softer the more you use it.
00:04:52.000 Again, I love their throw blankets, it's like my favorite.
00:04:54.000 I bring them on the road with me.
00:04:56.000 It's funny how quickly your standards change.
00:04:58.000 Once you've experienced better sheets and better bedding and a bed that actually stays cool, you realize what you've been missing.
00:05:02.000 So, if you've been thinking about upgrading your bed, this would be the time to do it.
00:05:05.000 94% of Bowl and Branch customers even say their sheets get softer with every single wash because they do.
00:05:10.000 Sleep cooler this summer with Bowl and Branch.
00:05:12.000 Get 15% off your first order plus free shipping at bowlandbranch.comslash Shapiro with code Shapiro.
00:05:17.000 That's Bowl and Branch, B O L L A N D B R A N C H.comslash Shapiro.
00:05:22.000 Code Shapiro to unlock 15% off. 1.00
00:05:25.000 The key is the idea that.
00:05:28.000 This is a form of coercion.
00:05:29.000 She had a fully consensual affair with Gavin Newsom. 0.98
00:05:32.000 Again, gross. 0.99
00:05:33.000 Gross by her. 1.00
00:05:33.000 She's married and had a kid. 1.00
00:05:35.000 Gross by him. 1.00
00:05:36.000 She was married and had a kid.
00:05:38.000 Also, this notion that because he was a powerful person, which is what drew her to him in the first place, as she admits, that somehow this relieves her of some level of responsibility, or that Gavin Newsom is uniquely guilty for the sin because he was powerful, which was the draw to him.
00:05:58.000 How about you just say, I acted horribly?
00:06:00.000 How about that?
00:06:01.000 This piece is dropping in the launch to Newsom's run, right?
00:06:05.000 Newsom is planning that he will drop his announcement of a run, I assume, immediately after the midterm elections.
00:06:11.000 And, you know, my guess is that there'll be a lot more stories like this to come.
00:06:14.000 I mean, Gavin Newsom was kind of known for this sort of thing in California for quite a while.
00:06:18.000 Now, he has addressed this.
00:06:19.000 He addressed this like two decades ago.
00:06:21.000 I don't think this is a dog that's going to hunt a lot.
00:06:24.000 And of course, at the time, he was married to, I believe, Kimberly Guilfoyle, who then went on to have a relationship with Don Jr. and is now our ambassador to Greece.
00:06:33.000 Again, politics is a weird playground, is it not?
00:06:36.000 Nonetheless, I think that you'll see some more pieces like this about Gavin Newsome, probably in the near future concerning his various peccadilloes with various human beings.
00:06:46.000 But the power dynamic argument that's made in the piece, I find, shall we say, unconvincing.
00:06:51.000 There is something that undergirds this, and that is this perspective on life that everything, value systems, everything is the outgrowth of power.
00:07:02.000 Everything is a reflection of power.
00:07:03.000 The postmodernist author Michel Foucault argued that basically all structures are structures of power.
00:07:10.000 And therefore, racism is not racism, it's racism plus power.
00:07:14.000 Terrorism isn't terrorism.
00:07:15.000 Terrorists are powerless.
00:07:16.000 That's why they're terrorists.
00:07:18.000 So the only true terrorism has to be driven by Western powers.
00:07:23.000 And apparently, your responsibility for banging your boss while you're married is mitigated because he was powerful.
00:07:29.000 We need a society in which blame and shame are things again.
00:07:32.000 We do.
00:07:33.000 Where your decisions are your own and you take full responsibility for those decisions.
00:07:37.000 And we don't treat you as a victim.
00:07:39.000 We don't treat you as though there's some sort of get out of jail moral free card here.
00:07:45.000 That doesn't exist until we go back to that.
00:07:47.000 We're going to have a country that has some serious values problems, and that's going to bleed over into our politics.
00:07:52.000 What an amazing video you just watched!
00:07:54.000 Wasn't that amazing?
00:07:55.000 Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.comslash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.