Elin Nordegren was a golden girl, the sweet-faced Swedish blond enigma betrothed to golf's dreamboat. Few knew who the beautiful Stockholm native really was until a tidal wave of sex scandal came crashing down around her little family.

We have sparse biographical info about most sports wives. Former model Nordegren appeared to fit the part seamlessly, trophy wife and world-class nurturer, visible only from afar, silently supporting her spouse from the sidelines. A former swimsuit model, she had been working as the au pair to Swedish golfer Jesper Parnevik and his wife Mia when she first caught Woods's eye. For a year Woods asked to be introduced to her, something he had in common with other players on the circuit: <a href=">"There was a big line of single golfers wanting to meet her," Mia Parnevik later said. "They were gaga over her." Once introduced, however, Nordegren was soon smitten: "I loved him, we had so much fun, and I felt safe with him," she later told People. "Our wedding day was one of the happiest days of my life."

Following her opulent, celebrity-studded 2004 wedding at Sandy Lane resort in Barbados, Nordegren discovered the downside of the public eye. Fake nude photographs made the rounds online, but she sued when Irish magazine the Dubliner published the photos and claimed they depicted her. She won the subsequent libel suit.

Scandal struck again, hard, in the early morning after Thanksgiving 2009. Woods crashed his Cadillac Escalade into a hydrant and a tree near his home in Windermere, Florida. According to the town's police chief, an upset Nordegren had rescued Woods from the vehicle by breaking the windows of the SUV with a golf club. Later, it emerged that they had been arguing about reports of Woods's infidelity; namely, a National Enquirer piece on an affair with nightclub promoter and hostess Rachel Uchitel.

Woods issued his first public apology before 2009 was out, but then women began to sally forth. The chances that the couple would repair their marriage faded into the distance like a long, well-hit golf drive. "I felt stupid as more things were revealed -- how could I not have known anything?" Nordegren later told People in her only public interview on the subject. "The word betrayal isn't strong enough. I felt like my whole world had fallen apart. It seemed that my world as I thought it was had never existed. I felt embarrassed for having been so deceived. I felt betrayed by many people around me."

After attempting a reconciliation for "months and months" and deciding that a union "without trust and love" wasn't possible, Nordegren moved on, divorcing Woods on August 23, with an estimated $100 million settlement (thanks to the help of London law firm McGuire Woods, which employs Nordegren's twin sister, Josefin Lonnborg). Woods and Nordegren agreed to share custody of daughter Sam Alexis, 3, and son Charlie Axel, 1, while Elin continued work on her bachelor's degree in psychology. One lesson she's applying directly to her own circumstances: the five stages of grief.

"It is hard to describe the emotional roller coaster I have been on, and it's not over yet," she explained to People. "I pretty much followed -- and am following -- the stages of grief that I have learned in my psychology studies: shock, bargaining, anger, depression -- and I am still working on the last stage, forgiveness and/or acceptance."

--Kimberly Chun

The dozen-plus women who caused Tiger to roam? They all like to party, some for pay, and they don't keep quiet.

The first to surface, Rachel Uchitel, was a former Bloomberg News TV producer and a VIP lounge hostess at Tao Las Vegas. But she had appeared in public before the Woods scandal, in tragic circumstances: A photo of her, distraught and holding a picture of fiance Andrew O'Grady, who worked in the World Trade Center, was published in the New York Post after the  September 11, 2001, attacks. The granddaughter of Maurice Uchitel, who owned the renowned El Morocco club, Uchitel continued her family tradition of upscale nightlife hospitality by managing the inner sanctum shenanigans at the VIP lounges of clubs Griffin, Stanton Social, Marquee, Tao Bistro, and Dune in New York, as well as the Pink Elephant in Southampton. Her side project: romancing the rich and famous, including an unnamed baseball player and assorted actors.

After the Woods scandal broke, details rapidly emerged about the full-throttle relationship that involved obsessive sexting and assurances of affection ("Rachel told me, 'I'm having an affair with Tiger Woods. We're in love!'," said affair outer Ashley Samson). Uchitel and her lawyer, Gloria Allred, scheduled a press conference, which was called off at the last minute because, according to CBS News legal analyst (and Allred's daughter) Lisa Bloom, "Mr. Green has arrived." In other words, a cash payoff -- according to TMZ.com, Uchitel was silenced by a $10 million confidentiality agreement. The pouty star-lover later surfaced in the limelight in even less auspicious surroundings: "Celebrity Rehab," which she fled, only to promote later.

And all the other women Woods swung with? Shortly before the first anniversary of Woods's Thanksgiving accident, Loredana Jolie published a tell-all book, "The Real Diary: Lessons from the Good Time Girl to Champion" about her sexual run-ins with the golfer, which were allegedly riddled with three-ways and fantasies about men. Jolie didn't hold back on Woods's wife, dubbing her a gold digger because she didn't seem to care, or know, that Jolie was with Woods in his home.

The second Woods woman to come out, cocktail waitress Jamie Grubbs, was already in the public eye: She had appeared on "Tool Academy." Her first intimate encounter with Woods came mere days before Nordegren gave birth to the couple's first child. Other women in Woods's world share much in common: their work as porn stars. Holly Sampson of "Emmanuelle 2000" claimed she had sex with Woods at his bachelor party but never when he was married. Joslyn James was a Tiger playmate for three years, a liaison recorded by easily savable sexts. Allred found brisk business representing James, who told the New York Daily News that she just wanted "an honest apology. My relationship with Tiger was never about money." Devon James (no relation to Joslyn) also claimed to have a "dirty," two-year-plus relationship with Woods.

The rest of Tiger's lovers were blonde hotties, among them 40-something cougar Theresa Rogers, onetime Penthouse Executive Club dancer Cori Rist, lingerie model (and winner of the "Tiger Woods Mistress Beauty Pageant" on the "Howard Stern Show") Jamie Jungers.

Any regrets from this outspoken crew? Not from Sampson, James, and Jungers, with a December cocktail party to celebrate the crash heard 'round the world.

Maybe from Uchitel, who told the Daily Mail in November, "I am not the same as the other girls and I never ever imagined in my wildest dreams that I would be caught up in a scandal like this." As part of her life rehab, she's studying forensic psychology and getting a professional private detective license. "And yes, that means I will be hunting down cheating husbands ... I may as well do something career-wise that I have a flair for."

--Kimberly Chun

At the start of 2010, actress Sandra Bullock seemed to have it all. The previous year she had two of her biggest hits, "The Proposal" and "The Blind Side," and according to Oscar handicappers, the best actress award was hers to lose for the role as Leigh Anne Tuohy, adoptive mother of offensive lineman Michael Oher.

Her personal life appeared to be similarly sewed up: Bullock and husband Jesse James had won a custody fight for his daughter, Sunny. Her perpetually grinning husband had made his name as the tough-guy host of reality show "Monster Garage" and as the CEO of West Coast Choppers. He was close at hand as she made the rounds during awards season. "To my husband, there is no surprise that my work got better when I met you, because I never knew what it felt like for someone to have my back. So thank you," she declared during her Golden Globe acceptance speech. Both an Oscar and a Razzie were hers in a public relations coup.

Many observers were just as blindsided as Bullock when In Touch broke the news that the seemingly dutiful hubby, who had gallantly held an umbrella over his wife's coif on the red carpet, had been cheating. Was James "the Most Hated Man in America," as one Entertainment Weekly headline proclaimed (and as James called himself in his first sit-down interview), besmirching the happiness of America's sweetheart?

Bullock would later tell People, "I had no idea about anything until that day when I got the call [that the tabloid was publishing a story about James's infidelity]. Never in a million years did I foresee something like this happening. I wish it hadn't, and it still doesn't seem real." But Bullock pulled yet another public relations coup. She laid low, out of the public eye, and managed to secretly adopt a baby, Louis, whom she had initially planned to adopt with James.

Bullock came out on her own terms to People (and helped make the May double issue among the magazine's best-selling issues). The message of single motherhood came through clearly: The independent woman was far too busy being a new mom to worry about a no-good man. As for the life-imitates-movies angle, she admitted to People, "I had to smile at all the parallels."

--Kimberly Chun

Who was the woman behind the ink, the other woman who threw the wrench into Bullock's immensely popular works? Heavily tattooed stripper and fetish model Michelle "Bombshell" McGee's origins are murky, though one thing is clear: She had an 11-month affair with James. The bodacious, outrageous McGee couldn't be further from Bullock in terms of image: Both are brunettes and James's intimates -- and all comparisons stop there.

McGee's image is that of the voluptuous bad girl you wouldn't bring home to mother. No surprise that the man who touts his tough-dude cred, and who claims to be a descendent of the outlaw Jesse James, might find McGee seductive.  (Go back one wife, and there's a much closer affinity between McGee and James's ex, adult actress Janine Lindemulder.) Picture the Suicide Girl aesthetic -- a scandalous punk rock vixen with an exhibitionist streak and a taste for sex work -- taking a turn for the seedy.

But the Bombshell did not begin that way. The mother of two told CBS that she grew up Amish, although she claimed on cybersex site SoCalGlamourGirls that she was raised in Montreal, lived in the south of France, and was working on a graduate degree in biochemistry. Whichever back story you believe, McGee's Nazi-inspired tats and poses in SS gear haven't endeared her to the public. She explained to TMZ that the shots were the photographer's idea, and pictures of her licking a dagger while clad in a Nazi armband were simply an attempt to be "provocative." Of the getups, she opined to the Hollywood Gossip, "I don't believe it's racism at all. Anti-Semitism? Yes." Later, though, she told RadarOnline.com that if she could change anything, it would be her fascist-flavored body art.

As for James, McGee told In Touch (the unlikely magazine that scooped all the gossip tabloids), "I would never have hooked up if I thought he was a married man." Sexting and regular sexual encounters, including hookups in James's garage in California, were conducted while Bullock was filming "The Blind Side" in Louisiana. McGee also slapped one of the more memorable nicknames ever on her lover, "Vanilla Gorilla," because he was so "well-endowed."

Post-scandal, the Bombshell continued to blow up where she could, promoting, in the buff, Ashley Madison, a website dedicated to cheaters. She claimed at Sydney's SexPo show that she had zero regrets, once again tagging James as "the one who broke a vow." In any case, the entanglement appears to be kaput. By autumn James was stepping out regularly with "LA Ink" tattoo artist Kat Von D, who gives McGee a run for the money in the body art department.

--Kimberly Chun

The CBS legal drama "The Good Wife" might easily have modeled itself on Elizabeth Edwards. In 2010, being the good wife could sometimes count against your approval ratings. Yet Edwards weathered life's tempests and trials with a resilience forged in the intense heat of public scrutiny, and likely her legacy will rise above the scandal, even as her last years were defined by it.

For better or worse, her reputation had been tied to the political fortunes -- and personal failings -- of her husband. The pair's entwined history went back more than three decades: "Saint Elizabeth" met "Ego Monster" John Edwards when both were law students at the University of North Carolina. True to form for a woman coming of age in the '70s, she kept her own name, Anania, in the professional world, and never put her own career to the side. She kept pace at the Office of the North Carolina Attorney General and at various law firms, until the devastating death of son Wade in a 1996 car accident, shortly after he was honored at the White House as a finalist in an essay contest.

Elizabeth Edwards devoted herself to the Wade Edwards Foundation and to campaigning with her husband and Democratic presidential nominee Senator John Kerry in 2004. But she was diagnosed with breast cancer on the very day Kerry conceded. "I have sometimes talked about the strange gift that comes with the awful tragedy of losing a child," she wrote of her diagnosis in her 2006 memoir, "Saving Graces: Finding Solace and Strength From Friends and Strangers." "The worst day of my life had already come. And I knew too that I had a chance to beat this."

Beating cancer was the goal, but her strength was further tested when she learned in 2006, shortly after John announced his run for the presidency, of her husband's affair with videographer Rielle Hunter. Though assured that it was a single night, a momentary error in judgment, Elizabeth Edwards's response was perfectly understandable: She cried, screamed, ran to the bathroom, and puked. "Like most wives -- or husbands -- in my position, I wanted to believe his involvement with this woman had been as little as possible," she noted in her 2009 memoir, "Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life's Adversities." "It turned out that a single time was not all it was. More than a year later, I learned that he had allowed [the woman] into our lives and had not, even when he knew better, made her leave us alone. … Those with any fame or notoriety or power attract people for good reasons and bad." In this case, notoriety won, as Hunter gave birth to John Edward's baby.

So, was Elizabeth Edwards a woman rising above a humiliating situation, or was she somehow complicit in what happened? Books that came out early in 2010 leaned toward the latter opinion. "Game Change," by two political journalists and close-up observers of the 2008 presidential election, at one point characterized her as an "abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending crazywoman." (She said on "Larry King Live" that the authors never contacted her.) Scant weeks later, Edwards aide Andrew Young admitted in his memoir, "The Politician," to his part in the twisted masquerade of pretending he was Hunter's lover. The misguided scheme, he asserted, was intended to spare a dying woman's feelings. Several months later, though, Young accused Elizabeth of "not facing the facts and not taking responsibility of her role in constructing the myth of John Edwards." The good wife was cursed if she did, cursed if she didn't.

After telling Larry King, "I want people to see me as a moral person who tries to make the right decision when the time comes," Edwards faded back out of the spotlight. The repercussions haven't: Her husband faced a federal investigation into whether his campaign improperly gave money to Hunter. Meanwhile, the other woman and Young have been battling over a reported sex tape in court.

The Edwardses filed divorce papers in January, but North Carolina law dictates a mandatory one-year separation. Elizabeth Edwards told People in June that the final break would happen only if one of them wants to remarry. But before that could come to pass, the cancer spread to her liver and claimed her life on December 7. Friends said that John Edwards had remained "very much a presence."

In her last days, Elizabeth Edwards reached out to her friends. "It isn't possible to put into words the love and gratitude I feel towards everyone who has and continues to support and inspire me every day," she wrote on Facebook. "To you I simply say: you know."

--Kimberly Chun

Rielle Hunter has flitted, like a wild-tressed blonde butterfly, around the edges of fame, or infamy, throughout her life. Born Lisa Jo Druck to a family of race-horse breeders, she was an accomplished equestrian who found herself in the thick of an insurance fraud scandal: Her father was implicated in a scheme to electrocute horses for insurance money -- including Lisa's show jumper, Henry the Hawk. Little wonder the rich girl ran wild and loose in the late-'80s New York club scene, so wild that her life provided the basis for then-boyfriend Jay McInerney's "Story of My Life" and his drug-gobbling, "sexually voracious" party-girl character, Alison Poole. Acting ambitions and actual writing work for TV and movies brought Hunter out west, where she met and wed Alexander M. Hunter III.

They later divorced, and she finally got her groove on as the founder of Midline Groove Productions. Upon meeting Edwards in a New York restaurant, she came on to him by declaring, "You are so hot." She pitched the idea of traveling with candidate Edwards and creating a series of video Webisodes of his campaign, hammering out a prototype for viral marketing efforts to come. BusinessWeek later hailed Hunter's clips as proof that Web video is "a serious medium, ready to contend with traditional media for audiences and ad dollars."

Unfortunately, any reputation Hunter had as a videographer was soon overshadowed by rumors that she was carrying Edwards's child, which she at first denied. She hid out in a gated community near Edwards supporter Andrew Young, who claimed to be the father of Hunter's child and then told the truth about the relationship in his book, "The Politician." Following much back and forth about whether Edwards would take, or be allowed to take, a paternity test, the former North Carolina senator acknowledged in January that he was the father of Frances Quinn Hunter.

For her part, the mistress said, "[I] kept my mouth shut" -- until a slick new suitor, GQ, came calling. Hunter, who claimed not to be an attention-seeker, stripped down to pearls and an oversized, white button-down shirt for photos. She later defended herself against the backlash by saying that she was too trusting. GQ reporter Lisa DePaulo countered, "Rielle is a smart woman. She knows what she wore and what she was doing in the photo shoot."

Now that the media dam was open, Hunter also went on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and asserted, "I do not believe I wrecked his home." Media confession was good for the soul. As she told GQ: "I could have cashed out big. But that's not what I'm about. I love Johnny and I love my daughter more than anything in the world and I don't want to ever do anything to hurt them or hurt their relationship." She also admitted that the GQ photo shoot wasn't a good idea. "What I was thinking was I would like to have one sexy shot where the world can see me as a beautiful woman as opposed to all those photos that are out there of me looking like some Wicked Witch of the West."

Wicked or not, Hunter wants her fair share. She filed a lawsuit against Young over an alleged sex tape showing her with Edwards. Hunter's lawyers argued that the mistress is due a cut of Young's book profits: The aide, after all, promoted the video in his tell-all. Just what Hunter will get remains to be seen.

--Kimberly Chun

Last year Jenny Sanford became an unwilling recruit to the scorned political wives club, whose members include Elizabeth Edwards and Silda Wall Spitzer. If you're going to be a member, though, you might as well be one of the standouts.

The affairs of South Carolina governors don't usually make international headlines, but Mark Sanford managed to call attention to his indiscretions in every way possible. He had left his four sons unattended on Father's Day to go "hiking on the Appalachian Trail," which turned out to actually be Argentina, where his paramour lived.

That wasn't the only wrong turn: Sanford undermined a teary-eyed public confession and vows to work on his marriage with wistful declarations about his "soul mate" on a distant continent and hints about other indiscretions.

Unlike political wives past, Mrs. Sanford was nowhere to be seen at the June 24 press conference. By that date, she had known about the affair for six months, although her husband had promised that the relationship was over. Enough was enough: She had four sons to take care of.

Jenny Sanford seemed equipped to handle this disgrace with startling acuity, from her forgiving but no-nonsense statement to her finesse with the press, including a Barbara Walters interview that landed her on the Most Intriguing list for 2009.

As quaint as it sounds, her manners smacked of good breeding. Likely her years as a Harvard-educated lawyer (as well as her shaping of her husband's political career) had honed her razor-sharp timing and sense of the public opinion. And she gave her spouse just enough rope to hang himself before she left him swinging.

Her book publisher may have denied that the rush to print had anything to do with the upcoming divorce, but Jenny Sanford's timing kicked into gear again when her memoir debuted in February rather than the planned May publication date. "Staying True," an oh-so-clever title that hit on fidelity and self-respect, weighed in at only 256 pages but was long enough to get across the pointed details of her pain and that of her sons. (One boy declared the affair "worse than Spitzer.")

Like a lawyer laying out a case, she detailed the signs that a good wife overlooks (such as Mark's insistence on dropping the word "faithful" from wedding vows) and what a husband expects a wife to endure (like his statement about whether he would regret not going to Argentina, about which Mrs. Sanford archly wrote, "Clearly these are thoughts I wish he had kept to himself.")

Sanford showed wronged wives everywhere not only how to leave, but also how to do so with grace. About 8.6 million viewers tuned in for her side of the story, as told to Barbara Walters on "20/20." The hardback made the top 10 on the New York Times bestseller list. Her husband, meanwhile, paid $74,000 in fines to settle his ethics case over his travel and campaign expenses.

And if there were any signs of moping (she admitted to being "in a puddle for six months"), Jenny Sanford erased those by briskly going back on the dating circuit. Nor was she out of the political life yet: She endorsed Representative Nikki Haley, who ended up replacing the outgoing Sanford in the governor's seat.

Mrs. Sanford made a tidy enough living weighing in on mistresses and plugging "Staying True" -- one address to University of South Carolina students earned her $15,000. As for future plans, a novel and a 9-to-5 job may be in her future, but in 2010, the first lady of South Carolina was busy serving up revenge as an elegant and tasty dish.

--Vera H-C Chan

Of all the high-profile and Web-monitored mistresses of 2010, Maria Belen Chapur was one who kept her distance. Then again, the woman at the receiving end of South Carolina governor Mark Sanford's affections (and impassioned emails) lived nearly 5,000 miles from the scandal's epicenter.

Local media set up camp at her place near the Buenos Aires zoo when the story first broke in 2009. American media (and their translators) did their darndest to profile Sanford's "soul mate." Soon after, she released a statement to say that her private life was her own, she'd make no more statements, and that whoever hacked her email account and found the governor's messages had destroyed a lot of lives.

Distance has helped: Few details have emerged since the initial investigative flurry, beyond the barest sketch of a mother of two who once worked as a TV reporter and interpreter. But, when the marriage between Mark and Jenny Sanford ended in March, a sighting of soul mates seemed preordained.

Sure enough, a spring weekend weekend trip to Florida tied the governor with an attractive brunette. He later confirmed the outing, without naming names, at a press conference.

"As a matter of record, everybody in this room knows exactly who I was with over the weekend ... That is no mystery to anybody given what I said last summer. And you know the purpose was obviously to see if something could be restarted on that front, given the rather enormous geographic gulf between us, and time will tell, I don't know if it will or it won't."

With a calmer and more tight-lipped Sanford at the helm, everyone's attention was back to politics as usual -- South Carolina state politics, that is. In a gubernatorial election year, the only relationship that occupied political observers was his support for candidate Nikki Haley.

It took the ex-first lady of South Carolina to spill the details in October that something had indeed restarted: Jenny Sanford confirmed to "Good Morning America" that the governor was seeing Chapur. She hoped for a union, "because it would make it seem like maybe there was a reason to break the whole family up and go through all this."

The four sons have yet to meet dad's new lady, although Argentina is no longer on the "do not mention during dinnertime" list. Indeed, according to Mom, son Bolton made Argentina a school assignment and wrote on the family crest, "Dad has this mistress in Argentina, and we had to move back to Charleston."

Further Chapur sightings will doubtless be reported if and when she visits our fair continent again. Meanwhile, the distance that's news these days is the one that appears to be growing between Sanford and Haley, set to take the governor's seat come January.

Chapur's discretion paid off for Mark Sanford. The New York Times, noting higher approval ratings and budget wins, said the lame-duck governor was leaving on a "political upswing." Many South Carolinians graded him a C or better.

As for his next steps, he feels grateful for the forgiveness after his self-described "political near-death" and says that he's learned "you never say never in life." To paraphrase Andrew Lloyd Webber, don't cry for Mark Sanford ... well, you know the rest.

--Vera H-C Chan

For Eva Longoria, it was a double-barreled betrayal by sexting.

Like most celebrity unions, that of Eva and Tony Parker showed a cheery philanthropic face to the world. Their workplaces lay more than 1,300 miles apart -- hers on the "Desperate Housewives" set in Los Angeles, his on the San Antonio Spurs court -- but as she told CNN in March, "Distance makes the heart grow fonder."

The impossibly beautiful couple did appear to be holding it together, but the start to married life wasn't smooth. Longoria told "Extra" that her husband had cheated soon after their nuptials and had kept his acquaintance going on Facebook -- shades of poor social-networking etiquette to come.

So when Eva came across Tony's alleged heavy-duty flirtation with Erin Barry -- reportedly hundreds of text messages -- the end was near. Barry's husband, Brent, after all had been Parker's former teammate, and the four had been close friends. At their wedding, Brent Barry proclaimed to ESPN, "We're like family."

Parker denied anything physical, and by the time Longoria found out, the electronic exchange had died down. But, given his history -- and her own friendship with Erin Barry -- it was too much for Longoria. The couple talked divorce, then briefly showed a united front with civilized his-and-hers tweets announcing their breakup.

Then Longoria leaked the news about the text messages and unleashed the media hounds.

The calculated leak brought attention to the other woman, who was undergoing a quiet divorce of her own -- until the hounds came, that is. And when it comes to Parker's basketball family, betrayal turned out to be contagious. While NBA men aren't known for their fidelity, fellow players' wives are supposed to be off-limits, and rumors swirled about an unhappy coach and teammates.

One thing the divided spouses seem to agree on: Wait at least a week after Parker signed a four-year extension worth $50 million before filing papers, thereby ruling out any trades.

While Tony Parker has kept firmly to the "that's my private life" line, others aren't keeping mum. A British model has stepped forward claiming a textual exchange with the point guard. In a post-Tiger landscape, will men never learn to keep their phones in their pocket?

--Vera H-C Chan

Erin and Brent Barry could have kept their separation under the radar, even if they hadn't filed their petitions with their initials only. Although Barry holds an NBA record as the second father-son duo to win an NBA Championship (his father is Hall of Famer Rick Barry), the San Antonio Spurs point guard had left basketball in October 2009, just about a year before filing divorce papers.

But the 22-year marriage unraveled, and, according to Barry's dad, his daughter-in-law was the one who wanted out. Erin Barry allegedly began boosting her ego by sexting her old friend Tony Parker -- without the knowledge of her husband or Tony's wife, Eva Longoria Parker.

Parker and Barry had been Spurs teammates, and the foursome were pals: The Barrys attended the Parkers' idyllic French chateau wedding, where Barry declared they were "like family." Erin even contributed a guest spot in a playful "Grease" lip-sync video, meant to inspire Spurs fans to do their own -- although in an ironic forecasting of things to come, Erin-as-Rizzo shoved Eva-as-Sandy off a bench.

The glare of the Parkers' high-profile divorce in November shone a bright light on the Barrys' low-key parting. Reporters clamored to speak with Erin, the mother of two, who tearfully stuck to "no comment." Later the tone turned defiant, when she broke her silence on her charity Website: "I am so busy with my children and law school studies that to take even a few moments out of my day to address this ludicrous issue is an annoyance. I only take the time to explain myself because apparently my silence, as a result of my indifference, has been construed as an admission of guilt."

Barry denied the affair (and, by all accounts, there wasn't anything physical), but she made no denial or even any reference to text messages. "I pride myself on being a Mom first, an advocate for abused children second, and a law student third," she wrote, before turning the announcement into a pitch for abused children.

It's a strange place to be in, for a woman who worked as an advocate for abused children, first as a caseworker and then as a political lobbyist. According to an interview with San Antonio Woman magazine, Barry -- an adopted child herself -- was deeply drawn to the issue of helping the neglected, and her work helped pass the Senate Bill 6 in Texas, which called for reform in Child Protective Services.

And the divorce is curious as well: Erin Barry picked up and followed her high school sweetheart through five different teams. (Well, almost high school sweetheart: He attended an all-boys Catholic school; she attended the all-girls school across the street.) A year after he was done with the NBA, she moved out.

In their years together, Erin did a lot of charity work and pulled her husband in as often as possible, using his status to get more attention for worthy causes. She told San Antonio Woman, "A lot of families in this business want their privacy and prefer to keep a low profile. ...The way I see it, Brent's been in the NBA for 11 years. I need to do all I can now to get him out there to as many events as possible while people still recognize his name."

Now her name's known too.

--Vera H-C Chan