May 8, 2008 11:30 pm US/Eastern
Fossella's Political Career All But Destroyed
Staten Island Congressman Admits Long Extra-Marital Affair, Fathering Child, Now 3, With Retired Air Force Lt. Col.
Reporting
Lou Young
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
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Staten Island and Brooklyn Rep. Vito Fossella was arrested in Virginia overnight on charges of driving while intoxicated.
CBS
He ran a red light and wrecked his life.
Staten Island Congressman Vito Fossella's drunk-driving arrest has now exposed so much more.
The Congressman on Thursday admitted to a secret affair and a love child.
Fossella's home in the Great Kills section of his borough is as dark as the Congressman's political future. That future has collapsed under the weight of a scandal that broke with Spitzer-esque suddenness.
The full depth of it may have been visible in Mary Patricia Fossella's face last Friday when the rest of us thought it was only drunk driving.
"I've embarrassed my family," the embattled Congressman said at the time.
Now we all know what Mary Patricia may have known.
"I have had a relationship with Laura Fay, with whom I have a 3-year-old daughter," Vito Fossella said in a statement on Thursday morning. My personal failings and imperfections have caused enormous pain to the people I love and I am truly sorry."
The experts say, politically, he's most certainly finished.
"A five-year affair and a child out of wedlock that's 3 years old, why you still have your other family, wow, that's a really double life. That says something about someone that I think people won't like and won't forgive," said Baruch College professor Mickey Blum.
He might have politically survived the drunken-driving rap, but he called Fay to bail him out and told the Alexandria, Va., Police he was going to visit his daughter. Reporters followed the trail. It was only a matter of time.
"Staten Island is a pretty conservative place," Blum said. "And he has run as a conservative family man. At this point the hypocrisy is going to be the problem."
Forgiveness is a tall order at this point.
"I'm not supporting him at all," Staten Islander Delores Materna said. "I'm a woman, a wife, a mother. My heart goes out to his wife."
Fay, the other woman in all this, is a retired lieutenant colonel in the Air Force who resigned to take care of Fossella's daughter.
Fossella has been representing his district for the last 11 years and is up for re-election, but if he resigns before July 1, a special election will be held to fill the House seat.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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