It has been a rough year for California State Treasurer Bill Lockyer.
After struggling through state budget and pension crises, the 70-year-old Democrat is now embroiled in a convoluted soap-opera scandal involving his young wife and what the San Francisco Chronicle reports as a sex tape she made with a guy she met in rehab.
Revelations of the sex tape came to light after Lockyer’s 40-year old wife, Nadia, an Alameda County Supervisor, called police on Feb. 3 after she was allegedly assaulted in a motel by an “ex-boyfriend.”
In the weeks following the event, it became clear that the motel encounter was a soured tryst between Nadia Lockyer and her ex-boyfriend, who the San Jose Mercury News identifies as Stephen Chikhani, a 35-year-old with a history of meth arrests who met Mrs. Lockyer while they were both in rehab last year.
Reports later came to light that Mrs. Lockyer and Chikhani were the subject of a sex tape that Chikhani had apparently made in case Nadia Lockyer tried to break off the relationship. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Bill Lockyer saw the tape, as well as explicit photos and texts sent between his wife and Chikhani, about six weeks before the motel room incident.
In an effort to get a court order to separate the couple, Bill Lockyer told authorities that his wife was being stalked by a former lover, but the courts determined that the relationship was consensual.
The Lockyer saga has captivated the California political world, and been a major embarrassment for Bill Lockyer, whose storied career in California politics also includes a stint as the state’s attorney general. Nadia Lockyer is now back in rehab, and Chikhani is headed back as well. But he told reporters that they have only scratched the surface of the Lockyer scandal.
“There’s a way bigger story than the sex tapes,” Chikhani said.
