Mirthala Salinas

Villaraigosa heated up the summer of 2007 when it was revealed the married Los Angeles mayor had been carrying on an affair with a local Spanish-language anchor woman.

"The rumors were true," read anchor Mirthala Salinas, on NBC-Telemundo Channel 52, in Spanish on June 8, 2007. "Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa confirmed today that he is separating from his wife, Corina, after more than 20 years of marriage."

What Salinas wasn't saying that day was that she was the other woman.

"It felt like something in my stomach, like a ball in my stomach, like a hole in my stomach... something here.” Salinas told Los Angeles magazine in May, 2008. “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.”

Corina Villaraigosa
Villaraigosa soon admitted that Salinas was the other woman, and suddenly the reporter says Channel 52 was trying to stick her on a beat covering the desert towns east of LA.

Many speculated that the affair would ruin Villaraigosa, whose name is a combination of his and his ex-wife, Corina's last names, a romantic gesture that now seems shamefully hypocritical. But in March, 2009, the mayor won reelection and has shown no signs of bowing out of politics.