In Their May issue, Los Angeles Magazine has an exclusive interview with former local television reporter Mirthala Salinas, who went from anchoring one of LA's leading Spanish-language newscasts, to becoming the talk of the City of Angels after it was revealed that she was carrying on an extramarital affair with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Los Angeles Magazine has provided Shawn Hubler's interview with Salinas to The Huffington Post, and it is reprinted below.
THE MAYOR AND MIRTHALA
She went from rising Spanish-language TV anchor
to "the other woman," hiding out in her condo. Now that their relationship is over, Mirthala Salinas speaks about Antonio Villaraigosa and moving on
BY SHAWN HUBLER
EXCLUSIVE TO 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. "Be-cause at the end of the day, maybe there were no excuses.
"If I hurt someone, it was never my intention. I apologize."