In L.A., it's sex and the City (Hall)

LOS ANGELES — When he was elected mayor in 2005, Antonio Villaraigosa was just what Los Angeles needed. After the bowl of oatmeal Jimmy Hahn and the vacationing septuagenarian Dick Riordan ended their terms, the little firecracker with the Chiclet smile was the hyperactive booster rooster the city craved.

The Democratic mayor was on fire. Only the city didn't know how hot.

The 54-year-old married mayor has a 35-year-old girlfriend, who happens to be a local TV anchor, who reported on the air last month that the mayor was splitting from his wife. Why? She didn't say. Why? Because she is his mistress.

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

Los Angeles politics can be dull. There's all the dreary municipal corruption, none of the fizz. Council deliberations on wastewater recycling can't compete with the antics of the celebrity residents and freeway chases. The citizenry has a kind of attention-deficit disorder when it comes to civic governance. Not now.

"At L.A. City Hall, the summer of love," read the headline on Steve Lopez's column in the Los Angeles Times. Everybody is tuning in.

It's like one of those bodice-rippers on Spanish-language cable, a telenovela for our times. Appropriate? For a mayor who used to have a small devil and the words "Born to Raise Hell" tattooed on his shoulder, perhaps.

None of our business?

The Web site LA Observed reports that the Villaraigosa affair is the most viewed story at LATimes.com and the Los Angeles Daily News site. A recent blog head: "Antonio Villaraigosa, Living La Vida Loca."

Stop, you say. This is none of our business. Excellent point. So you may direct your criticism to the mayor, who keeps holding news conferences about his personal life while he admonishes the media for its interest in his personal life.

An exchange from his Tuesday news conference, his second on the state of his marriage.

Reporter: "Is Miss Salinas pregnant?"

Mayor: "I can tell you emphatically that that question is outrageous, and the answer is no, she is not pregnant."

Villaraigosa continued, because he always continues: "And that's why — the fact that you would ask a question like that — that's precisely why I said that the details of this relationship are a personal matter. I've acknowledged the relationship. I've acknowledged the divorce. But more than that is frankly not a public matter."

The gossip began months ago, when reporters noticed Corina Villaraigosa, 49, had stopped attending public events with her husband, who had stopped wearing his wedding ring. This gossip was not without foundation; they had a lengthy separation a decade ago after the former California Assembly speaker's previous affair. Antonio, who has two teenage children with his wife, also has two grown daughters by two former girlfriends.

After blogger Luke Ford posted that the mayor's marriage was "kaput" in late January, the Los Angeles Times grilled Villaraigosa and printed his denial: "Absolutely not true." As for the wedding ring, Villaraigosa was wearing it again. His aides said he had stopped wearing the band because he had lost weight and it was slipping off.

Last month Villaraigosa announced the couple's separation. Then he held a news conference. Then his wife filed for divorce. He said he would not change his last name, which is a merger of his previous name, Villar, and his wife's, Raigosa. No word from Corina Villaraigosa on her plans.

Finally, the Los Angeles Daily News published a piece Tuesday outing Salinas by interviewing Antonio Villaraigosa's 88-year-old mother-in-law.

There are questions about Salinas, who has reported a number of stories about the mayor and his political fights, which is a problem. Telemundo says she was moved off the political beat, but obviously not far enough.

The station said Thursday that Salinas would be taking a leave while her bosses conduct an ethical review.

In her statement, Salinas said: "I first got to know the mayor at a professional level, where we went on to become friends. The current relationship grew out of our existing friendship."

California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez, a friend of the mayor, confirmed to the Los Angeles Times that he dated Salinas in 2003 when he was divorced from his wife. The L.A. Weekly also reported that Salinas had a past relationship with Alex Padilla, a state senator from Los Angeles.

What will the political fallout be? Villaraigosa is a rising star for the Democrats, one of the party's most visible Latinos. After he was elected, he made the cover of Newsweek under the headline "Latino Power."

In the short term, a few experts wonder if the tumult over his personal life might at least cause some collateral damage to the Democratic presidential campaign of New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who sought the mayor's recent endorsement because he is one of the nation's most well-known Hispanic politicians.

That sort of publicity does not augur well for Villaraigosa's role as a national chairman of Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign.

When Villaraigosa endorsed Clinton in May, it was widely considered a coup for the senator because of the mayor's appeal to Hispanic voters, who make up a growing wedge of the electorate in key swing states.

"Still a rock star"

Villaraigosa's personal story — he was raised by a single mother, grew up on the city's Eastside and dropped out of high school only to ascend to the pinnacle of power in Los Angeles — stood as a tale of redemption.

But strategists widely agree that campaigning with Villaraigosa, at least for the time being, might pose political peril for Clinton, whose own husband was infamous for his indiscretions.

"The Clintons clearly have their own baggage to deal with in the marital-infidelity department without having to defend the personal behavior of a prominent campaign supporter," said Garry South, a Democratic strategist who ran former Gov. Gray Davis' 1998 and 2002 campaigns.

A Clinton campaign spokesman said Friday that "there's no change in terms of the mayor's role with the campaign."

Villaraigosa also is eyeing a possible run for the governor's mansion in 2010, where he might face off with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who was also marred by scandal after he admitted to sleeping with the wife of his campaign manager.

Regarding Villaraigosa: "Right now, his popularity is really stratospheric," said Jaime Regalado, executive director of the Edmund G. "Pat" Brown Institute of Public Affairs at Cal State in L.A. "It's going to take a hit, but he's still a rock star."

Los Angeles Times and Associated Press material is included in this report.