FishbowlLA

Villaraigosa’s 2012 KPCC interview about his marriage — and the political fallout that followed

By Jordan Vega · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, June 2012

In late June 2012, LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa sat for a KPCC interview with senior online reporter Alice Walton in connection with a Loyola Marymount conversations-series event. Walton’s piece for KPCC included the mayor’s on-record answer to a question about the public collapse of his marriage — specifically the way he handled the dissolution after his affair with Telemundo reporter Mirthala Salinas had become public. The original FishbowlLA framing noted that the mayor’s staff had not wanted him answering the question and that he had answered it anyway.

Then

Villaraigosa’s marriage to Corina Raigosa had ended in 2007 after the Salinas affair became public knowledge. The political and personal cost of that disclosure had been substantial through the rest of his second mayoral term. The June 2012 KPCC interview was, structurally, one of his most direct on-record acknowledgments of the personal regret involved — and it was paired in the same interview cycle with his earlier 2012 acknowledgment, in a CBS LA interview with Stephanie Abrams, of growing up with an abusive father.

Alice Walton’s reporting for KPCC was characteristic of the station’s policy-reporter style — building substantive interviews around city-hall and mayoralty events, then turning the political-personal admissions into reported pieces. The LMU “Future of Los Angeles” conversation that produced the interview was envisioned as the first of a series, though as the original FishbowlLA piece noted at press time, the follow-up events had not been formalized.

Villaraigosa’s relative term-end candor was structurally important. Mayors in their final year of office — Villaraigosa would leave office in July 2013 — often shift toward more personal-history framing of their record as the legacy-press cycle begins. The 2012 KPCC interview was an early move in that shift.

Now

Antonio Villaraigosa left office in July 2013 and was succeeded by Eric Garcetti. He ran for California governor in 2018, finishing third in the primary behind Gavin Newsom and John Cox. He has continued in California political life across the interval, most recently as a candidate for the same gubernatorial seat in the 2026 cycle.

Mirthala Salinas had been suspended from Telemundo after the 2007 affair disclosure. She subsequently moved into broader Spanish-language broadcasting and other media work across the interval; the broader question of the news-organization ethics around the affair (a reporter covering a politician she was also romantically involved with) became one of the most-cited US Spanish-language broadcasting ethics cases of the 2000s.

Alice Walton has continued in political reporting across the LA-region public-radio ecosystem; her byline has remained one of the durable ones across the post-2012 KPCC-LAist transition. KPCC itself has continued as the lead LA-region public-radio newsroom and integrated with LAist in the 2018-2020 transition.

The 2012 piece reads now as a small documented moment of late-second-term Villaraigosa candor that, given the broader contours of his post-mayoral career, became one of the more-quotable on-record acknowledgments of how the affair had reshaped his personal-political trajectory.

Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.

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