First lady opens up in Walters interview

COLUMBIA -- Gov. Mark Sanford may have hurt first lady Jenny Sanford with his affair, but his adultery didn't take away his wife's self-esteem, she told ABC's Barbara Walters on a show to air tonight.

Jenny Sanford is among Walters' "10 Most Fascinating People of 2009," according to the network, which released excerpts of the interview with Sanford on Tuesday, the same day that Time Magazine named the affair as its top scandal of the year, six places ahead of Tiger Woods' "transgressions."

As Jenny Sanford has said in earlier interviews, she told Walters she found out about her husband's affair in January and forbid him to see the other woman. She said she told him not to see his four boys or her for a month last summer, as well.

"It's been a crazy year. ... Certainly his actions hurt me, and they caused consequences for me, but they don't in any way take away my own self-esteem. They reflect poorly on him," she told Walters.

Sanford said she did not know where her husband was for five days last summer when he disappeared from the state.

The governor told his staff he was hiking the Appalachian Trail although he was in Argentina seeing his lover. State lawmakers are considering whether to impeach Sanford for abandoning the state when he took the trip.

When he returned, Mark Sanford, at a tearful news conference, confessed the affair.

But Jenny Sanford was not beside him, and she told Walters that the governor never asked her to appear.

See our special section on Governor Mark Sanford

"I wouldn't have. If he had asked me, I would have said no," she said.

Many of Jenny Sanford's counterparts have stood with their spouses for similar moments of scandal, including the wives of former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey, who outed himself as gay; former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who acknowledged he was the client of a call girl ring; and Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, who was arrested in an airport bathroom sex sting.

Jenny Sanford has moved out of the Governor's Mansion in Columbia along with the couple's four sons to the family's home on Sullivan's Island. The governor visits the boys on the weekends, she told Walters.

The first lady also is penning a memoir entitled "Staying True," due out in April.

She is scheduled to appear in an hourlong interview with Walters in April in conjunction with the book's release.

Sanford hearing

The seven legislators on the House Judiciary Impeachment Subcommittee could decide today to recommend whether Gov. Mark Sanford should be impeached, censured or left to carry out his remaining 13 months in office without admonishment.

Today is the subcommittee's last scheduled meeting. It is scheduled to begin at 2 p.m.

The members will decide whether the governor committed serious misconduct when he mixed a tryst with his mistress with a trip to Argentina in 2008 for a trade mission. The legislators also are weighing whether Sanford improperly used state aircraft on five trips and if his trip to see his lover this summer put the state at risk in the event there had been an emergency.

The subcommittee will pass its recommendation on to the full 25-member House Judiciary Committee, which is expected to complete its deliberations before Christmas.

Follow @yvonnewenger on Twitter for updates.

The Associated Press, The State and The Greenville News contributed to this report.