Silda Wall Spitzer

The Associated Press speculates that Eliot Spitzer may have spent as much as $80,000 to buy the company and sexual favors of high school dropouts, while the New York Post opines that he may have been sleeping with hookers for as long as a decade. We found this November 10, 2006, profile of Silda Wall Spitzer, his wife of 19 years, in The New York Times, as then-Governor-elect Spitzer prepared to take office as the scourge of Wall Street:

By her own admission, she is an ambivalent political spouse, a high-powered woman in her own right who surrendered certain personal goals for the demands of public life. She was formerly a rising corporate lawyer, first at the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, and then as in-house counsel for Chase Manhattan Bank, and she makes no bones about the satisfaction she found in the work force.

But as her husband plunged headlong into the political life, she decided to devote herself to their three daughters (now ages 12, 14 and 16) and to starting a philanthropic foundation. In a recent interview, she declared, “It’s not necessarily the way I thought I would be spending my time.”

[snip]

Mr. Spitzer’s circle of close advisers is small, and his wife is among those he trusts most on political matters, friends and aides say. "I can’t imagine he would do anything significant — from appointments he would make to major decisions on policy issues — without full consultation with her," said Lloyd Constantine, a former prosecutor who was the chairman of the transition committee in 1998 as Mr. Spitzer prepared to take office as New York attorney general.

Mr. Spitzer makes no bones about his wife’s influence. "At the end of every day, there’s the inevitable recounting of what I was doing and where we’re heading on different issues," he said. "She pushes me to defend my views where we disagree. If I can’t convince her, I know my thinking needs work."

He cited Ms. Wall Spitzer’s "deeply held sense of ethics" and her intellect as forming the bedrock of her judgment. "I rely on her very much as someone to talk to in order to resolve a tough issue," he added. "What length of sentence to ask for, how severe a fine should be. They come down to questions of what is just and fair."

Article HERE. Silda Wall is of an age to be my younger sister. Were it so, I and a couple of buddies would -- by now -- be in lockup. But Eliot would have tubes up his nose.