Mark Sanford extramarital affair

Lieutenant Governor André Bauer announced that he could not "take lightly that his staff has not had communication with him for more than four days, and that no one, including his own family, knows his whereabouts.

"[7] On June 23, Sawyer reported that Sanford had contacted his staff that morning, after apparently being out of touch with them for five days, and expressed surprise at all of the attention to his absence.

"[14] Several hours after arriving back in the United States, Sanford held a press conference, in which he admitted that he had been unfaithful to his wife.

"[20] Sanford acknowledged secretly meeting Chapur five times in 2009, including two multi-night stays, one in New York City and one in the Hamptons, paying expenses in cash to avoid detection.

[22] Governor Sanford also told reporters that months before his affair became public he had sought counsel at a religious organization called The Family, of which he became a member when he was a Representative in Washington, D.C. from 1995 to 2001.

[23] Two other leading Republican politicians who were members of The Family, Senator John Ensign and former Congressman Chip Pickering, were also caught engaging in extra-marital affairs at around the same time as Sanford.

[24] On June 25, La Nación, a Buenos Aires newspaper, identified the Argentine woman as María Belén Chapur (also reported as "Maria Belen Shapur"), a 43-year-old divorced mother of two sons who speaks four languages: Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Chinese.

Chapur received a political science degree from the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina and had previously worked as a translator and correspondent in 2001 for Canal América 2, an Argentine television station, and filed television news reports for the station's New York City bureau in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

[30] In May 2010, several months after the conclusion of both divorce and impeachment proceedings against Sanford, he visited Chapur in Florida with the intention of rekindling their relationship.

[34] Sanford remained with his family on Thursday, June 25, 2009, at his beach home[35] and was planning to return to work for cabinet meetings the next day.

[40] However, Sanford defended the legitimacy of a previous two country trip organized by the South Carolina Department of Commerce, but said that he would reimburse the government for the Argentina part.

Ballentine, an ally of Sanford's, said afterward, "I told him the writing is on the wall...he could put an end to it all, but if he doesn't, members of the House will take things into their hands."

[43] A month later, the resolution was successfully introduced and it was announced that an ad hoc committee would begin drafting articles of impeachment starting on November 24.

[45] On December 3, during its third public hearing on the matter, the ad hoc committee unanimously voted to drop the vast majority of charges from the investigation, saying that they did not warrant "overturning an election.

[48] Among the reasons given for the decision not to remove Sanford from office included the fact that his governorship was going to expire in any event come January 2011 (Sanford was term limited and ineligible for re-election) and the fact that André Bauer (the man who would have replaced him) was seen to be a rival to others with serious interest in obtaining the 2010 Republican nomination for governor.

After leaving office, Sanford was photographed in January 2011 by the Argentinian magazine Caras together with Chapur at a Uruguayan resort in Punta del Este.

And out of fairness to my boys and to folks that I've hurt, I'm not going to say more than this: any of those seemingly goofy feelings that I described a couple years back have intensified, not dissipated, with time.

[51] In 2013, Sanford ran in and won the special election to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of Tim Scott from the United States House of Representatives.

[52] Sanford would go on to serve two more terms in Congress, but in 2018, he was ousted in his party's primary election by Katie Arrington, who managed to barely avoid a runoff.