What has been the biggest cheating (infidelity) scandal in your country’s history?
July 19, 2025
Who were they and how did they get caught? What happened after they got caught?
21 comments
I don’t know most of our presidents had affairs that were barely hidden and people loved the tea but that’s basically all
When it turned out that a load of the popular Catholic Bishops and priests had children and entire families.
Plus, of course, the Bishops were also protecting all the priests that were abusing children. That was pretty big.
I guess the funniest would be Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, at the early hours of the day, rushing back to the Élysée Palace and colliding with a milk delivery truck 😆
Or maybe Francois Hollande pictured in his bike, in the morning, without body guards, bringing croissant to his mistress while his official wife is still in the Élysée Palace ? 🤔
Wait! Sarkozy marrying a woman who was married to one of his friends (Jacques Martin, TV host), and whom he met for the first time when he was actually mayor of the city and was legally officiating at the wedding! He literally married them… and went to sleep with the bride.
Or could be Mitterrand, whose two wives and two families gathered at his funerals.
There’s sooooo much more. I won’t even start with Chirac who nailed pretty much all female journalists in the 70s.
All of them pretty always get a popularity boost after this is uncovered
When Twink left a voicemail for her estranged husband and told him to “zip up his Mickey”.
Taoiseach Charles Haughey and journalist Terry Keane. She used to write about him in her column calling him, “sweetie”
Not in the Republic but in the North, but Iris Robinson and the young lad. (40 years her junior)
The king cheating on his wife (the queen) in Spain. The queen is originally just a real estate agent, but married herself into the royal family. This isn’t to say I don’t like her, btw. It’s just a bit of context I guess
Our then president had an affair with a high ranking diplomat working in the presidential office. His wife left him and there was a lot of tabloid drama. It didn’t help that they all were super Catholic and conservative. He was reelected though, because in the end people found all that more entertaining than scandalous. He married his affair and she caused more drama by having a lot of beef with her boss, the (female) foreign minister (same party, both type pearl clutching upper class ladies) over her rank and diplomatic status. Also entertaining.
I’m not sure it would have the same impact now. We pretty much expect our politicians to cheat on their partners & lie through their teeth.
The mayor of my home city, which ruled the city for like forever and was corrupt as hell, died while having sex with his mistress in her bed. There was an attempt to cover it up.
The king Juan Carlos I repeatedly cheated on his wife. For decades. With multiple women (and men apparently). Some of his lovers are now celebrities, one of them in particularly, Bárbara Rey, blackmailed him for years. Nothing happened because he’s the king, but his approval throughout the country plummeted when the first one was discovered. He ended up abdicating in his son in 2014 (for other unrelated scandals, in this case embezzlement) and he now lives in a mansion in Saudi Arabia, apparently full of young girls that come and go. Every couple of months a new past lover appears, now that he isn’t the king the secret service doesn’t have to protect him so all that he’d done in the past is on the out. My favourite detail about all of that was that apparently the president and the secret service at one point begged him to get on a hormonal treatment / get a vasectomy cause he was fucking around too much.
Andreas Papandreou, prime minister of Greece in the 80s and 90s, with an Olympic Airways stewardess called Mimi. But it was less of a scandal than it would have been in the US I think. People were rather amused by the whole thing.
When the user database for the swinger website Ashley Madison site was leaked Iceland’s then finance minister, later Prime Minister Bjarni Benediktsson was on the list as IceHot1
He and his wife tried to do damage control, something about creating the account together for shits and giggles… a totally plausible explanation that we all bought completely.
Shakira caught her husband cheating on her because of… yogurt? and then made a bunch of very memeable angry songs about it. I’m sorry for her because it’s no fun getting cheated on, but the whole thing was a circus.
~~The “CDU-Spendenaffäre” of 1999 is one of the largest I remember. Over 2 million Deutsche Mark were donated by private donors and companies (from weapons manufacturers to candy company Ferrero) to the party over the 1980s and 1990s, wich were not accounted for officially in the parties books. This scandal caused Helmut Kohl to resign as party leader of the CDU and made way for Angela Merkel to rise to prominence. Many top politicians in the CDU were involved and it caused a big shift in the political landscape. Overall this corrupt way of circumnavigating party financing and taxation rules lead to stricter financial monitoring of political parties and a huge trust loss for the CDU.~~
I made a translation error and thought you were talking about financial cheating. Silly me.
Félix Faure died of a heart attack, while receiving a blowjob from his mistress. His mistress was nicknamed : ” la Pompe Funèbre” ( Pompe Funèbre = Funeral Parlours ) And Pomper mean “to suck”.
Justin Trudeau’s separation became public because Sophie had “repartnered” with a local surgeon, and his wife didn’t appreciate it and mentioned it in her divorce application.
President of heavily politicized public TV, asssigned by PiS, got the bishops to grant him annulment of his 25 years of marriage, so he can marry a new wife in one of most recognizable churches in the country, majority of bishops in attendance.
A huge portion of the society was outraged.
Don’t think people care that much about the subject for there to be a big scandal.
Germany, being conspicuously absent, although we’ve had our share of cheating politicians. I guess, we don’t care about the private lives of our politicians, and personally, I find that great!
Minister of Foreign Affairs Ilkka Kanerva’s raunchy text messages to dancer Johanna Tukiainen, which led to his resignation.
Bernhard of Lippe-Bisterfeld, the husband of queen Juliana of the Netherlands having four legitimate children, princesses Beatrix (1938), who later became queen, Irene (1939), Margriet (1943) and Christina (1947) and two illegitimate children, Alicia de Bielefeld (1952) en Alexia Grinda (1967). Due to the press being pretty discrete at the time, it only became public knowledge much later. Queen Juliana knew of the existence of her stepdaughters and they were invited several times to the royal palace and the royal summer house in Porto Ercole, Italy. Alicia described queen Juliana as a warm and loving woman, with whom she went shopping a few times in Italy.
To have a scandal, first you need to be able to be scandalised.
Most Italian people are pretty apathetic when it comes to sexual affairs.
The biggest scandal is probaly the so called Rubygate, when our PM of the time, Berlusconi, tried to cover up the arrest of a 17 yo Moroccan prostitute for petty theft, fearing she would reveal details of the sex parties (he called them elegant dinners) happening in his Rome and Milan mansions with TV starlets (who worked in his TV channels).
He personally called the police station and the questore ( a figure akin to a district attorney) to have her released, because he said he believed the baby prostitute to be Hosni Mubarak’s granddaughter/niece (same word in Italian) and wanted to avoid a diplomatic incident.
He was going through a divorce at the time, because his wife had already known for years about his lifestyle but couldn’t stand being exposed so openly.
It was one of the reasons, although not the main one, of his political downfall.
Oh, and he forced his governing coalition to vote in parliament a resolution to affirm that she was Mubarak’s relative and he was avoiding a diplomatic incident. One of the lowest points of our tragicomic democracy.
21 comments
I don’t know most of our presidents had affairs that were barely hidden and people loved the tea but that’s basically all
When it turned out that a load of the popular Catholic Bishops and priests had children and entire families.
Plus, of course, the Bishops were also protecting all the priests that were abusing children. That was pretty big.
I guess the funniest would be Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, at the early hours of the day, rushing back to the Élysée Palace and colliding with a milk delivery truck 😆
Or maybe Francois Hollande pictured in his bike, in the morning, without body guards, bringing croissant to his mistress while his official wife is still in the Élysée Palace ? 🤔
Wait! Sarkozy marrying a woman who was married to one of his friends (Jacques Martin, TV host), and whom he met for the first time when he was actually mayor of the city and was legally officiating at the wedding! He literally married them… and went to sleep with the bride.
Or could be Mitterrand, whose two wives and two families gathered at his funerals.
There’s sooooo much more. I won’t even start with Chirac who nailed pretty much all female journalists in the 70s.
All of them pretty always get a popularity boost after this is uncovered
When Twink left a voicemail for her estranged husband and told him to “zip up his Mickey”.
Taoiseach Charles Haughey and journalist Terry Keane. She used to write about him in her column calling him, “sweetie”
Not in the Republic but in the North, but Iris Robinson and the young lad. (40 years her junior)
The king cheating on his wife (the queen) in Spain. The queen is originally just a real estate agent, but married herself into the royal family. This isn’t to say I don’t like her, btw. It’s just a bit of context I guess
Our then president had an affair with a high ranking diplomat working in the presidential office. His wife left him and there was a lot of tabloid drama. It didn’t help that they all were super Catholic and conservative. He was reelected though, because in the end people found all that more entertaining than scandalous. He married his affair and she caused more drama by having a lot of beef with her boss, the (female) foreign minister (same party, both type pearl clutching upper class ladies) over her rank and diplomatic status. Also entertaining.
This: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profumo_affair
I’m not sure it would have the same impact now. We pretty much expect our politicians to cheat on their partners & lie through their teeth.
The mayor of my home city, which ruled the city for like forever and was corrupt as hell, died while having sex with his mistress in her bed. There was an attempt to cover it up.
The king Juan Carlos I repeatedly cheated on his wife. For decades. With multiple women (and men apparently). Some of his lovers are now celebrities, one of them in particularly, Bárbara Rey, blackmailed him for years. Nothing happened because he’s the king, but his approval throughout the country plummeted when the first one was discovered. He ended up abdicating in his son in 2014 (for other unrelated scandals, in this case embezzlement) and he now lives in a mansion in Saudi Arabia, apparently full of young girls that come and go. Every couple of months a new past lover appears, now that he isn’t the king the secret service doesn’t have to protect him so all that he’d done in the past is on the out. My favourite detail about all of that was that apparently the president and the secret service at one point begged him to get on a hormonal treatment / get a vasectomy cause he was fucking around too much.
Andreas Papandreou, prime minister of Greece in the 80s and 90s, with an Olympic Airways stewardess called Mimi. But it was less of a scandal than it would have been in the US I think. People were rather amused by the whole thing.
When the user database for the swinger website Ashley Madison site was leaked Iceland’s then finance minister, later Prime Minister Bjarni Benediktsson was on the list as IceHot1
He and his wife tried to do damage control, something about creating the account together for shits and giggles… a totally plausible explanation that we all bought completely.
Use google translate here: [https://www.visir.is/g/2015901404d/bjarni-kalladi-sig-icehot1-a-ashley-madison](https://www.visir.is/g/2015901404d/bjarni-kalladi-sig-icehot1-a-ashley-madison)
Shakira caught her husband cheating on her because of… yogurt? and then made a bunch of very memeable angry songs about it. I’m sorry for her because it’s no fun getting cheated on, but the whole thing was a circus.
~~The “CDU-Spendenaffäre” of 1999 is one of the largest I remember. Over 2 million Deutsche Mark were donated by private donors and companies (from weapons manufacturers to candy company Ferrero) to the party over the 1980s and 1990s, wich were not accounted for officially in the parties books. This scandal caused Helmut Kohl to resign as party leader of the CDU and made way for Angela Merkel to rise to prominence. Many top politicians in the CDU were involved and it caused a big shift in the political landscape. Overall this corrupt way of circumnavigating party financing and taxation rules lead to stricter financial monitoring of political parties and a huge trust loss for the CDU.~~
I made a translation error and thought you were talking about financial cheating. Silly me.
Félix Faure died of a heart attack, while receiving a blowjob from his mistress. His mistress was nicknamed : ” la Pompe Funèbre” ( Pompe Funèbre = Funeral Parlours ) And Pomper mean “to suck”.
Justin Trudeau’s separation became public because Sophie had “repartnered” with a local surgeon, and his wife didn’t appreciate it and mentioned it in her divorce application.
President of heavily politicized public TV, asssigned by PiS, got the bishops to grant him annulment of his 25 years of marriage, so he can marry a new wife in one of most recognizable churches in the country, majority of bishops in attendance.
A huge portion of the society was outraged.
Don’t think people care that much about the subject for there to be a big scandal.
Germany, being conspicuously absent, although we’ve had our share of cheating politicians. I guess, we don’t care about the private lives of our politicians, and personally, I find that great!
Minister of Foreign Affairs Ilkka Kanerva’s raunchy text messages to dancer Johanna Tukiainen, which led to his resignation.
Bernhard of Lippe-Bisterfeld, the husband of queen Juliana of the Netherlands having four legitimate children, princesses Beatrix (1938), who later became queen, Irene (1939), Margriet (1943) and Christina (1947) and two illegitimate children, Alicia de Bielefeld (1952) en Alexia Grinda (1967). Due to the press being pretty discrete at the time, it only became public knowledge much later. Queen Juliana knew of the existence of her stepdaughters and they were invited several times to the royal palace and the royal summer house in Porto Ercole, Italy. Alicia described queen Juliana as a warm and loving woman, with whom she went shopping a few times in Italy.
To have a scandal, first you need to be able to be scandalised.
Most Italian people are pretty apathetic when it comes to sexual affairs.
The biggest scandal is probaly the so called Rubygate, when our PM of the time, Berlusconi, tried to cover up the arrest of a 17 yo Moroccan prostitute for petty theft, fearing she would reveal details of the sex parties (he called them elegant dinners) happening in his Rome and Milan mansions with TV starlets (who worked in his TV channels).
He personally called the police station and the questore ( a figure akin to a district attorney) to have her released, because he said he believed the baby prostitute to be Hosni Mubarak’s granddaughter/niece (same word in Italian) and wanted to avoid a diplomatic incident.
He was going through a divorce at the time, because his wife had already known for years about his lifestyle but couldn’t stand being exposed so openly.
It was one of the reasons, although not the main one, of his political downfall.
Oh, and he forced his governing coalition to vote in parliament a resolution to affirm that she was Mubarak’s relative and he was avoiding a diplomatic incident. One of the lowest points of our tragicomic democracy.