Maria Belen Chapur, the woman who has been having an adulterous affair with Governor Mark Sanford, has written a letter to an Argentinian TV station in an attempt to explain how she and Sanford were caught in their adultery.
The letter details the difficulties she has faced over what she characterizes as the terrible act of some miscreant who brought her affair to light. Read the letter closely, and you may find plenty of condemnation of the exposer, but not a whiff of contrition for what she did. Chapur has even suggested that God will punish the nasty person who exposed her tryst with a married man:
3. (sic) Finally, I have a firm suspicion of who did this great act of damage, which was aimed at me specifically but at the same time destroyed the lives of so many others. Since I don’t have sufficient proof and live in a country of laws, I’m obligated to keep their identity anonymous. I’m no one’s judge; I leave all that in the hands of God.
Why is it that Maria cannot take responsibility for the damage she’s done? What about the lives she has destroyed? No, no apology at all. This was all someone else’s fault. In fact, it was all the fault of whoever brought this to light
Behold her pain:
I’ve decided to send you this communication, which will be the only one, to clarify certain incorrect things that are being said and in that way put an end to the subject that, as you can imagine, is a huge source of pain for me, my two children, my whole family and the good friends, men and women, whom I’ve gathered throughout my life and who have always been with me.
And of course, to Ms. Chapur, the pain she, her children, family and friends are dealing with is not her fault at all. She was simply having a long-term, intercontinental affair with a married man, after all… Nothing wrong with that. The guy who is really to blame is that nefarious hacker, who she cannot name because she lives in a “country of laws.”
Who’d want to bet that it wasn’t a recent lover she’d cheated?
4 responses so far ↓
1 novaseeker // Jul 3, 2009 at 10:23 am
Or maybe her ex-husband (if she had one)?
What I’ve seen (and I’m sure you have as well, Welmer) is that people who are caught in affairs often bend over backwards to justify their behavior. Both men and women do this, but I do think that it’s more common for women to do it because male affairs tend to generate far less “sympathy and understanding” than female affairs do. It’s very common for women who are caught in adultery to not express remorse for what they have done, to blame their husband (or the target’s wife) for having “caused” the situation, and therefore ultimately the fallout from it, and to generally reach for all kinds of justifications, contextulizations and so on as to avoid blame themselves. We just saw Sandra Tsing Loh do this very publicly in The Atlantic. Chapur is behaving in a consistent way — deflect blame, change the focus from her to the source of the information and so on. It’s kind of the standard operating procedure for adulterers.
2 miles // Jul 3, 2009 at 12:32 pm
That was deeply funny.
She has reacted just as you’d expect an entitled pretty westernized women to react.
Well, if we can have the “French arrangement” for women, the dammit we should have it for men to right??????
I mean if a guy pulled the same thing (can you imagine if Sanford held a press conference and complained about whoever ratted him out and blamed that party for the whole mess?! How delicious would that have been!), he’d never get away with it and would be called out on it.
I hope she loses her job for this. If society wanted to send “the right message”, that is what would end up happening to her. Yes, Im well aware of the fact that Im considered heartless.
3 whiskey // Jul 3, 2009 at 10:54 pm
My money is on a recent lover. An ex-husband is unlikely to care.
4 Justin // Jul 5, 2009 at 9:42 am
I think she has a pretty good point. Whoever brought this to light must be a real jerk.
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