BY HER MAN: Ex-Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s career disintegrated when he was found to frequent prostitutes, including Ashley Dupré (inset). But wife Silda (above) is still with him. (
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She once bashed Hillary Rodham Clinton for staying with Bill after the Monica Lewinsky scandal — yet Silda Spitzer would do Hillary one better.
The wife of former Gov. Eliot Spitzer wouldn’t just stay married to her cheating husband. She’d stand by his side as he resigned from office after getting caught with a string of high-priced hookers.
Five years ago today, the “Luv Guv” scandal broke, and as friends and aides recounted then, no one was more shocked than Silda — who liked to tell people that her name meant “Teutonic war maiden.”
“This is a person who never made missteps,” her friend Janet Ward-Black said. “Just like everything with Silda always was, she had a perfect wedding . . . a perfect man. And then . . . poof!”
Suddenly, the warrior goddess was “poor Silda.” Her decision to stand next to her husband as he resigned became the inspiration for the CBS nighttime drama “The Good Wife,” in which Julianna Margulies plays the wife of an adulterous politician.
“I remember thinking, ‘Get off the stage!’ ” Margulies said, recalling seeing Silda on TV. “I couldn’t believe [she was] gullible enough to get up there.”
Even after the world learned all the unsavory details — Eliot Spitzer had spent $100,000 on 20 visits typically wearing no condom yet keeping his dress socks on — Silda stayed.
In the two days Spitzer spent debating whether to quit, Silda was one of only two people to encourage him to fight for his political life.
On top of that, she blamed herself.
“On some level, this is my fault. The wife is supposed to take care of the sex,” she was quoted as saying. “This is my failing. I wasn’t adequate.”
None of her friends could figure it out. Silda Spitzer was a strong, accomplished, self-made woman, a middle-class kid from North Carolina who graduated from Harvard Law, then went to work at the white-shoe firm Skadden Arps before joining the international legal team at Chase Manhattan bank.
Silda had been married once before — in 1982, to financier Peter Stamos, for 29 days — but neither of them have ever discussed it. She married Spitzer in 1987, and they have three daughters: Elyssa, 23, Sarabeth, 20, and Jenna, 18.
In 1994, Silda gave up her career to support her husband’s political ambitions, and not long after he won the governership, her friends noticed the toll it was taking on her.
“I think the whole period of his governorship hasn’t fit her,” one friend said shortly after the scandal broke. “It strained the marriage.” As governor, Spitzer traveled often, and this once-ambitious career woman was rattling around a Fifth Avenue apartment all day, her Children for Children foundation her only outside pursuit. Otherwise, she’d paint and make jam.
Today, not much has changed, and Silda Spitzer keeps a low profile. Children for Children has become Generation On, and she works with NewWorld Capital on environmental initiatives and is co-vice chair of the Urban Green Council.
An intensely private person, Silda has never commented on the scandal or why she chose to stay, but her husband hasn’t shared her discretion, telling his biographer why he thinks the marriage survived.
“An affair begins to connote an emotional relationship,” Spitzer said. “If I had an affair, I’d still be governor, but I might not be married. In the grand scheme of things, I’m glad I am where I am.”