I’ve been noodling over the Ben Roethlisberger story myself, Emily, and there are two things I can take away from it so far. First, regardless of his guilt or innocence, Roethlisberger’s a giant dumbass. While it’s easy to say there is a “pattern” of sexual assault accusations against him, the two cases are very different. Which I point out not to defend him but to indict him.

Yes, he’s been accused of rape in a civil suit filed against him by a woman in Lake Tahoe. But that woman didn’t go to the police and waited a year to file her civil complaint against him. A former colleague ratted her out for “bragging” about having sex with him. Roethlisberger, while unable to persuade a judge to dismiss the case, had the court of public opinion on his side and got through the NFL season seemingly not distracted by the claims.

Even if what happened at Lake Tahoe was consensual and he did nothing wrong, it should have been a wake-up call for him. Perhaps make him think twice before going on a pub crawl in a college town. Instead of making him more cautious, though, it’s almost as if it made him overconfident—that he could do anything and get away with it. Now he has put himself in a much more difficult situation. His accuser reported the incident to the police immediately. The Steelers, who pretty much ignored the civil suit, are “concerned.” The police want to talk to him—and to his Nevada accuser. The sport is waiting for commissioner Roger Goodell, who’s notoriously tough on NFL miscreants, to weigh in.

Which brings me to my other takeaway. There’s an important lesson for women in this story (besides the obvious “beware of celebrity athletes”): If you are raped, report it. Call 911, find a cop (as the Georgia woman did), go to a hospital. It’s not a guarantee that your attacker will be caught or prosecuted or convicted, but it’s going to help your case far more than waiting a year and then lawyering up for a civil suit. Certainly this woman is being taken more seriously because she’s not the first one. But at least some of it has to be that she filed a criminal complaint and isn’t looking for money.

It’s not easy, and I’m not speaking abstractly of something I know nothing about. I’ve been there. You have to tell multiple people what happened to you, multiple times. You have to share personal and awkward details that you probably haven’t had time to cope with. You might have to undergo an exam that forces you to surrender what little is left of your dignity. But it’s the only way to prove, without a doubt, that something terrible happened to you and to give authorities what they need to find your attacker. And it’s the only way to keep him from doing it to others.

Tags: ben roethlisberger, Rape, sexual assault

Emily, I agree with you that Jenny Sanford should stop talking to the media. When a husband describes his affair with another woman not as a regrettable indiscretion but as “a love story” and refers to said woman as his “soul mate” and to his wife as someone he’s trying to fall back in love with, does it not beg the question: Why is Jenny Sanford trying to save her marriage? She talks about the need to preserve her children’s dignity but what about her own dignity? Hasn't she read He's Just Not That Into You or at least seen the movie? I say cut him loose so he can be with his Argentine sparkle and Jenny can start finding herself a new love who thinks enough of her not to go on international dates and prattle on and on about it for days to the national media.

I think rather than over-sharing her anger with amused reporters and publicly unloading all that emotional baggage, she’d be better off packing up her hubby’s clothes and personal belongings in some beat-up, old luggage and leaving them on the sidewalk in front of the State House. This simple act would speak louder than anything she could actually say. Hanna, I'm clearly siding with Maureen Dowd.

Tags: Jenny Sanford, Mark Sanford Affair; press conference

Hanna, perhaps the most enduring lesson of the Mark Sanford unraveling is that when your marriage falls apart, don't call in the AP reporters. I generally side with Ruth Marcus and have been pro-Jenny Sanford. But the danger in claiming the moral high ground is that the air starts to get thin, and the lack of oxygen makes you say stupid things. Like Jenny's offering far too many details about her husband's behavior. (I do however, like imagining the discussions in which Mark asks Jenny's permission to go to Buenos Aires to get laid.)

But in order to retain the public's sympathy, Jenny should stop talking. And how about skipping the references to Job? Jenny Sanford is a wealthy woman with four healthy sons and an adolescent for a husband. That last fact is painful, but doesn't put her in Job territory. Author Christina Nehring, in her defense of being crazy in love, writes that she has "been derailed by love, hospitalized by love, flung around five continents ..." Mark Sanford must be a fan of the book. Derailed—check; flung around five continents—check; hospitalized—well, if he doesn't stop talking, I predict the next stop on his "journey" will be Belleview.

Tags: Jenny Sanford, mark sanford, mark sanford affair

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The Op-Ed Divas have a showdown today about Jenny Sanford. Ruth Marcus writes in the Washington Post that Sanford is a model of the wronged political wife. She realizes she is not the one humiliated, her husband is, Marcus argues, and therefore she can and does face the press mob with dignity. Maureen Dowd agrees with our own Willa. For her, Sanford is a model of what NOT to do. When your husband publicly calls the other woman his “soul mate” and the heroine of a “tragic” and “forbidden” love, you change the locks and pull down the blinds and talk to your mother, not the AP. (Me, I’m personally fixated on the detail that Mark Sanford asked his wife several times if he could see the mistress. Is this some Southern courting ritual I’m unaware of?) So who’s right? Marcus or Dowd?

Tags: affair, Jenny Sanford, mark sanford

This weekend, both the Times and the Post published complimentary yet enormously frustrating profiles of Mark Sanford's wife Jenny. They portray her as a tough, sharp domestic goddess, without ever questioning what such a tough, smart woman is doing playing domestic goddess in the first place. Both pieces make clear that Sanford is a very intelligent, hard working, focused, “Old Testament woman with a 170 IQ,” who has been indispensable to her husband’s rise. A magna cum laude Georgetown graduate and a former vice president at the enormously reputable Lazard Freres & Co., Sanford walked away from her career to have a family and help her husband realize his political ambitions. Junk trade?

A typical Jenny Sanford anecdote goes like this: Mark Sanford apparently told his wife he wanted to run for Congress while she was still in the hospital, just having delivered their second child. Despite the fact that this news came out of nowhere, on a very busy day, she took it in stride. This—supportive and game, but never at the expense of her family—seems to be her M.O. “The Sanford house was in a perpetual state of constructive chaos, friends said. Jenny Sanford would be folding laundry and cooking dinner while on the telephone with campaign advisers about what the next television advertisement would say,” writes the Post. “She oversaw his staff, drafted speeches, set policy and raised money. She even baked oatmeal chocolate chip cookies for reporters and other guests.”

Guys, she bakes cookies! “So often when a woman is business minded, they’re not good at being a cookie baking soccer mom, but that’s the thing about Jenny,” a friend of Sanford’s told the Times. “You cannot stereotype her that way. She can be either one of those things and do it effortlessly.”

As these two pieces tell it, if Mrs. Sanford is not a woman who had it all, she was a woman who did it all. She did the thinking, and she did the babies. She managed the campaign, and she made snacks. “She was the bulldozer that cleared the path and got [Mark Sanford] there," and she was the woman who would “choose one of her son’s class plays over a presidential dinner anytime.”

Now, it’s not that this set of characteristics doesn’t have a certain appeal (and, not to cast too many partisan stones, a particularly Republican one at that), but in light of last week’s events, they also have a stark downside. Because she did the thinking and the babies, now she’s a very tough, very smart woman with a killer oatmeal chocolate chip cookie recipe who is best known, personally and professionally, for having a husband who likes to “spark” on women other than her. Turns out doing it all amounted to doing everything for everyone but herself. And that may be admirable, but, in light of her husband’s behavior and Mrs. Sanford’s seemingly real and impressive talents, it's some seriously misdirected energy.

Tags: Jenny Sanford, mark sanford, political wives

Slate’s Will Saletan has a provocative defense of Sanford today:

I feel awful for Sanford's wife and kids. But compared with all the cheaters who have gone before him, I don't think less of him for genuinely loving the other woman or for admitting it. It beats the hell out of seducing somebody, kicking her to the curb, and pretending she was nothing to you—or really meaning it.

I suppose there is some honesty in that. But let’s remember that he was doing it at a press conference. Surely John Edwards and John Ensign and even Eliot Spitzer have explanations for what drew them to their mistress, or prostitutes. Surely these explanations would humanize them and force us to picture standing in their shoes (or pants, I guess). But they stay silent, because they implicitly understand that, at that moment, any self-serving explanation comes at the expense of the people they have betrayed. True repentance does not begin with self justification and elaborate vows to repent. It begins with some form of suffering.

For such a private man, Sanford seems to make little distinction between his inner and public lives. In the press conference, he seemed to regard his responsibility to South Carolina’s voters as equal to his responsibility to his wife. In the same e-mail, he writes to his mistress about becoming a vice presidential candidate and about the “erotic beauty of you holding yourself.” This is the natural consequence, I suppose, of having turned “family values” into a political issue; after a while the distinctions begin to blur.

Tags: affair, mark sanford, marriage

“We careened… from not having enough information about the governor to having too much. Way too much,” says Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post. “There was Sanford talking about ‘that whole sparking thing’ and ‘serious overdrive.’ Really, if Sanford’s sparking, I don’t want to know about it, whatever drive he’s in.”

Well, neither do I. But you can’t blame Sanford for the fact that Americans demand their married, male politicians report any deviation from a “normal” sex life. He gave us an epic, fall-from-grace religious narrative because the governor of South Carolina, for whatever reason, is held to a particular standard of sexual conduct—one that does not allow for meaningless dalliances. The remarkable thing about Sanford is how fervently he seems to buy into the justness of this demand; unlike, say Bill Clinton, or Larry Craig, he never seemed bitter at some perceived violation of privacy. If it seemed more like a therapy session than a press conference, perhaps its because Sanford gave so willingly what his audience was demanding.

Looking over the Double X gallery of post-coital apologies, it occurs to me that we don’t really have a model for unfaithful politicians of the other sex. Would a woman in Sanford’s place, with four boys and a saintly husband at home, have had to confess on national television? Would we be comfortable with the press policing the sexual behavior of a young and powerful female politico?

Tags: mark sanford

Mark Sanford's shocking presser from this afternoon is all anyone can talk about. Salon's Gary Kamiya admires Sanford for going off-script, and describes the Governor's confession as "so intimate it was almost unwatchable." Politico is reporting that Sanford went to Argentina on South Carolina's nickel back in 2002, but it's unclear if his relationship with "Maria" had already begun at that point. Gawker's Alex Pareene described it as a "bravura live political meltdown," and semi-congratulated Sanford for not blaming others for his philandering.

If you haven't seen it yet, check out the video of Sanford's confession below and let us know what you think.

Also, check out Double X's photo gallery putting Sanford's apology in the context of the recent spate of philandering pols' statements.

Tags: argentina, embarrassment, mark sanford, mark sanford affair, press conference

How about a poll, XXers. Which worse: Your husband turns out to be Client Number 9, Eliot Spitzer's code name in the prostitution scandal; or your husband, Governor Mark Sanford, writes erotic e-mails to his dear Argentinian friend, Maria, such as this:

I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night’s light—but hey, that would be going into sexual details.

As Stephen Sondheim wrote so many years ago, "Maria. I just kissed a girl named Maria."

Place your vote in the comments section below.

Tags: Eliot Spitzer, mark sanford

A guest post from Double X intern Meredith Simons:

Sara, I agree that the way the truth about Sanford's whereabouts unfolded underscores the importance of local newspapers. But said local newspaper's release of e-mails between Sanford and Maria, the mysterious Argentinian, complicates things a little bit. The State's reporter didn't go to the Atlanta airport on a hunch. The paper had known since December that Sanford was having a transcontinental affair. And they had a McClatchy reporter on the ground in Argentina Wednesday, knocking on Maria's door just as the news broke in the States.

This raises all sorts of questions: Why did The State wait so long? Would they have released the e-mails (and sent someone to Argentina) if Sanford hadn't attracted attention to himself by disappearing? It's counterintuitive to suggest that a news organization would cover up such a huge story, but it's very strange that they let things go on as long as they did. After all, they've known about Maria for more than six months, and they had no way of knowing that the press corps was about to get caught up in a game of "Where in the World is Mark Sanford?" So what were they waiting for?

Tags: mark sanford, the state