Jenny Sanford: Governor asked her advice on affair

[February 03, 2010]  CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) -- In a new memoir, South Carolina first lady Jenny Sanford writes that Gov. Mark Sanford sought her advice about his romance and how to deal with the media after she discovered his extramarital relationship with an Argentine woman.

Jenny Sanford, who managed political campaigns for her husband during their 20-year marriage, writes in "Staying True" that the governor used her as a sounding board, wondering aloud whether he should follow his heart to Argentina and if he would live a life of regret if he didn't.

"Clearly those are thoughts I wish he had kept to himself," Jenny Sanford writes in the book to be released on Friday. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the 214-page book, published by Ballantine Books, on Tuesday.

Mark Sanford, once considered a possible 2012 Republican presidential candidate, disappeared for five days last summer.

He returned to reveal at a tearful Statehouse news conference he was not hiking the Appalachian Trail, as he told his staff, but in Argentina seeing his mistress, Maria Belen Chapur.

The revelations he made then, and during a subsequent interview with the AP, derailed his political career and ultimately unraveled his marriage.

In the book, Jenny Sanford, a Georgetown-educated, former Wall Street vice president, traces the story of the Sanfords from the time the couple met in the 1980s to the trying events of the last year. The book includes eight pages of photographs of the Sanford's wedding and family and of Mark Sanford's political career, which included three terms in Congress and two as governor.

Jenny Sanford discovered the affair in January 2009 after coming across a letter her husband had written to his mistress. She writes in her book she was "gut-punched all over again" when she found out the governor had dalliances with still other women, some of which she learned about from his interview with the AP when he said he had "crossed lines" with a handful of other women.

The book also gives a sense of the rumor mill that exploded in South Carolina in the wake of the governor's admissions. Jenny Sanford writes that, before the AP interview, the governor called her to say "he had more explaining to do" because another woman had suggested to a media outlet she had an affair with him.

She writes her husband told her at the time the relationship was "nothing much" and nothing she needed to know about earlier.

Jenny Sanford wrote her husband had admitted only one affair until that point and now "ever businesslike, he wanted to know what I thought he should reveal in the interview." She does not say what advice, if any, she gave the governor.

"Here he was again asking for my advice instead of first considering how the news might make me feel," she wrote.

It's unclear from the book the identity of that woman. The AP never reported on an extramarital relationship between the governor and any woman other than Chapur.

Sanford's office had no comment on Tuesday.

Jenny Sanford also reveals in the book that following the revelation of the affair, she had her attorney draw up a contract under which she would not reveal the affair if her husband would stop seeing his mistress. She writes that the governor refused.

Jenny Sanford moved out of the Governor's Mansion last summer and now lives with the couple's four sons at the family beach house on Sullivans Island.

She filed for divorce on the grounds of adultery in December and a final hearing is scheduled for later this month.

The outside dust jacket of the book makes no mention of the affair, or even that the author is the first lady of South Carolina.

The cover has just the title and her name and a picture of Sanford sitting on the beach in a rose blouse and blue jeans. The back of the dust jacket contains an excerpt from the book that includes what the author calls the simple truth she has come to learn.

"What matters most is how you live your life, not what you have to show for it," she writes.

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On the Web:

Jenny Sanford: http://www.jennysanford.com/

Ballantine Books:
http://www.ballantinebooks.com/

[Associated Press; By BRUCE SMITH]

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