Los Angeles magazine, May 2008

IN HER LIVING ROOM, which is just big enough for  two people, stands a coffee table. On the table are six lighted candles, some scented with grapefruit, some with coffee cake. Arranged next to them are a silver tea set and a vase of red and white roses. Andrea Bocelli is singing a Mexican love song on the stereo. Near the tea set is a Valentine red volume titled Love’s Book of Answers, which counsels: “Kiss now, talk later.… Indulge your appetites.… Don’t keep any  secrets.” The advice didn’t help.

“What can I say?” Mirthala Salinas asks, smiling. “I’m a romantic.”

Salinas, scorned in headlines last summer as the mayor’s “other woman,” settles into her plush brown couch. Her English is touched with a slight Spanish accent. So much has changed, she says, that the woman in those headlines could be another person. “I think people will always judge me. They have the right to do that,” she says. “I respect that.” Her hand rises to her neck, to a silver pendant that contains her mother’s ashes. She cannot help but relate her six-month affair with Antonio Villaraigosa to her own vulnerability after the loss, a few months before, of her mother to cancer. It’s no justification, though, she says. “I don’t want to come across as ‘Oh, now she excuses herself.’” She reaches again for the dove-shaped pendant. “Because at the end of the day, maybe there were no excuses.

“If I hurt someone, it was never my intention. I apologize.”

ON THIS SUNNY AFTERNOON at her Studio City condominium, Mirthala Salinas, 35 and a year older and wiser, has agreed to speak for the first time about her present, her future, and—as much as she can without hurting anyone else—the scandal last year with Villaraigosa, who is 55. He was one of the most charismatic politicians in California. She was one of the most popular Latina journalists in Los Angeles. During their affair, Villaraigosa announced that he and his wife, Corina, were separating. “I had a tough summer. I got divorced. It wasn’t pretty,” the mayor told PBS interviewer Charlie Rose in February, four months after his affair with Salinas ended. By then, though, his poll numbers were back up, and he was stumping for Hillary Clinton.

Mirthala Salinas is only beginning to recover. People call her the mayor’s mistress and a home wrecker. Her TV station, stung by her conflict of interest when she announced the breakup of the mayor’s marriage while they were secretly dating, reassigned her to reporting news from the desert towns east of Los Angeles. “It was a matter of dignity,” she says. “They wanted me to go to Riverside. I wasn’t going to Riverside.” So she resigned. She was off the air for four months before she finally landed a show on AM talk radio. Slowly, however, she is rebounding. A producer has approached her about hosting a series of TV specials, and she has reconciled with the boyfriend she was seeing before Villaraigosa. Unlike the mayor, he is someone you probably don’t know. Yanni Raz, a 32-year-old Israeli-born real estate agent, declined to be interviewed, except to confirm that he and Salinas are engaged and about to be married. She would like to have children soon.

THE FIRST TIME WE TALK, Salinas meets me at her doorstep. She is tall and slender. Her face is heart shaped and Disney pretty, with big brown eyes and a welcoming smile. She is in high heels, jeans, and a blue-and-brown top with an Empire waist and a neckline low enough to be a little sexy but high enough to be modest. She is friendly, earnest, and more innocent than I expected. “Come in,” she says. Her hand is delicate, with pale pink nails. It trembles. She wears pale lip gloss and a little mascara, which will run later when she cries.

Her tables are strewn with framed photographs of her brothers, sisters, and nieces. Her walls are hung with Asian art. By the fireplace are a hookah and a guitar. Her mantel holds a local television Emmy, small and golden. A large and well-tended philodendron winds around a stand next to her couch. She has two little white dogs, Jamel and Galleta. Their toys are piled neatly next to a wet bar near the stairs, which lead to her bedroom. A slight breeze blows in a window that opens to a patio filled with plants.

She offers fruit and cookies on the coffee table, with tea brewed from fresh mint.

Our conversation lasts for three and a half hours. Afterward, we talk again on the telephone, and once again for another two hours in the Toluca Lake office of the producer who wants her to host the TV specials. The office is hardly personal, but our talk grows more so. In both settings, she declines to answer many of my questions out of respect for Villaraigosa’s family. She wants to cause them no more pain. She knows, though, that she will be asked for interviews until she finally relents, and she wants to close this chapter of her life. “I’m starting new,” she says, “in every sense.…

“It’s something that happened in my life, and it’s part of my past. I’m starting all over again, personally and professionally.”