April 10, 2008

Mirthala apologizes and explains

In an extended interview following last summer's revelations that she had an affair with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Mirthala Salinas tells Los Angeles Magazine that the tryst was a "learning experience" and that she apologized for hurting people.

"It was never my intention," Salinas said.

The interview appeared on magazine's Web site today.

Salinas outlines the timeline of her relationship with the mayor for the magazine and talks about her time spent with other, current Sacramento politicos, such as Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez:

By 2001, she had become a reporter and weekend anchor at Channel 52. Two years later, she began dang Assemblyman Fabian Núñez, who would soon become speaker. Núñez, she says, “had been divorced for eight or ten years.” Their relationship posed no ethical conflict with her work, she says, because she was not a political reporter, never interviewed him, and did no stories about issues in which he was involved. She says she told her supervisors about the relationship. “It was never a big deal.”

She says that she and Núñez were serious. “I mean, we met families. But I think the timing…he was in Sacramento, I was here. He was busy, I was working weekends. It was just hard.” After six or eight months, she says, they broke up. Núñez eventually remarried his former wife. Before the breakup, however, Salinas became a friend of his good friend Villaraigosa.

As for Sen. Alex Padilla, with whom Salinas was romantically linked, she said there was never anything there.

Alex Padilla? Where, Salinas wondered, had that name come from? She says—and a Padilla aide confirms—that she and Padilla had never done anything more than attend a couple of public events as friends. Indeed, almost comically old-fashioned, Salinas says she has been in love fewer than a half dozen times in her adult life.

Salinas said her friends encouraged her to take a shot with Villaraigosa. "I felt special," Salinas said. "OK, putting the whole world aside, the media scrutiny, the people hurt, I felt special. It was a beautiful feeling."

She also spoke about announcing on air that the mayor's marriage was ending.

“It felt like something in my stomach, like a ball in my stomach, like a hole in my stomach…something here.” She touches her abdomen. “I put myself like it wasn’t me, like it was another person doing what I was doing. I pretended I wasn’t reading it. At that moment, it was like it wasn’t me sitting at the news desk, doing the newscast.… It was something I wish I would not have done.”

Salinas also takes a none-too-subtle dig at Riverside, where she was to be transferred by Telemundo, the Spanish-language TV network where she worked, after news of the affair broke.

"It was a matter of dignity," she said. “They wanted me to go to Riverside. I wasn’t going to Riverside.”

She now hosts a Spanish-language talk-radio show...in Los Angeles.

Read the whole piece here.

Posted by Shane Goldmacher on April 10, 2008 9:57 AM