Nicola Sturgeon has admitted she needs therapy after learning about her disgraced husband’s embezzlement crime. The former first minister said she “probably should be” seeing a therapist after Peter Murrell deeply betrayed her.
Sturgeon, 56, revealed that she is experiencing a “complex cocktail of emotion” after Murrell, 61, embezzled £400,000 from the SNP and was later jailed for five years. The former Nats leader said she did not realise that he was going to plead guilty until less than a week before the trial. But finding out he had been planning to admit it for months hit her ‘like a ton of bricks’.
Coming to terms with betrayal
She told the All Talk podcast, “I’m in a process right now. I’m trying not to seem as if I’m sitting in the therapist’s room at the moment, which I probably should be.
“I’m in a process right now of coming to terms with being deeply betrayed by somebody I loved and trusted. And this is still quite recent when people say ‘oh she must have known what he was doing’.
“I’ve learned a lot about what he did the same time all of you did because over three years he never really levelled with me.
“So some of what’s been, you know the day he pled guilty, I was still learning about some of the detail of what he’d done for the first time. And then suddenly realising I’ve been living with somebody I never really knew properly.
“That’s obviously first and foremost been something for me to come to terms with and I don’t think I’m there yet.
“My whole family is having to come to terms with that as well. It’s a really difficult process. I don’t know what else to say.
“I’ve loads of emails from people, which are really lovely when people say I’ve been through something similar, but I’m not the first person and I’ll not be the last horribly betrayed by a spouse.
“You know it’s just the nature of it is a bit different.
“So what I’m going through is different in nature, different because of the public element of it. It’s not probably that different to what a lot of people go through but it’s really hard to come to terms with that.”
A complex cocktail of emotion
She continued: “I absented myself from the house as much as I practically could. But I was there sometimes.
“There’s part of me still trying to understand this as well as I’ve been so deeply betrayed by this person. And yet part of me still found myself worrying about whether he was OK and I find that easier now he’s no longer there in front of me.
“It’s a really complex cocktail of emotion because you can’t just stop caring about somebody that you’ve been married to for as long and lived with for even longer.
“Because it’s almost like it becomes two separate people.
“There’s the person you thought that you knew, that you still kind of care about and there’s this person that you’re now only starting to know or understand. As you can probably hear, it’s a really difficult thing to process. And it’s going to take me a long time to process.
“There are some days I don’t think about it that much and other days I can’t think of anything else. It’s probably going to be like that for some time.”
Learning of the guilty plea
When asked if she still cares about him, Sturgeon said: “I didn’t know he was going to plead guilty until very, very close to the point he did.
“Of the things that I knew, things I’d been asked about myself by the police, things that had appeared in the media, which all turned out to be a kind of fraction of what actually then kind of transpired, I struggled to see how he couldn’t be guilty.
“But he was you know, it’s all a big misunderstanding, it’ll all be... and then suddenly he was pleading guilty. I found out less than a week, I think, before he pleaded guilty that he was going to plead guilty.
“So I didn’t have very long to kind of prepare myself for that. I’d still been thinking, ‘oh he’s gonna go to trial, that might be a year away’. But when the prosecution read out some detail of it in court, there was this line that hit me like a ton of bricks, that he’d been negotiating a guilty plea since March 3. And I hadn’t known that. He was still lying to me right up till the day he pleaded guilty.
“And that’s a really, really, really hard thing to process.
“I mean when somebody’s still there and you’re still seeing them and he was very isolated over that three-year period.
“I’m not trying to evoke sympathy for him at all, but he was very isolated. He rarely left the house.
“He wasn’t communicative. So I was a bit worried about his wellbeing, his mental health.
“And then now I kind of think, what a mug, why were you worried about him? He didn’t worry about you.”
She added: I don’t have a victim mentality and I never will allow any man to turn me into a victim but he did.”
Asked if she would ever visit him in prison, she said: “No. I’m not going to speak to him. I’m not going to visit him.
“I’m not going to spend any more time worrying about him.”
