![\"Nicola](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0024710a-614.jpg\"\/)
\nNicola Sturgeon said she would talk more about her experience in the days and weeks ahead<\/p>\n
Former Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon has said she was deceived, misled, lied to and betrayed by her estranged husband, Peter Murrell.<\/p>\n
Earlier this week, he pleaded guilty at the High Court in Edinburgh to embezzling more than \u00a3400,000 from the Scottish National Party and using the money to buy luxury goods.<\/p>\n
Ms Sturgeon said this week had been the toughest week of a two-year investigation into the fraud.<\/p>\n
She stressed that she had been “totally exonerated” as part of that Police Scotland investigation.<\/p>\n
Ms Sturgeon was speaking at an event at the Listowel Writers’ Week Literary Festival in Co Kerry where she is promoting her memoir, Frankly.<\/p>\n
She declined a request for an interview with RT\u00c9 News and no recording was permitted of her conversation with writer Andrew O’Hagan at the Writers’ Week event.<\/p>\n
She said she would talk more about her experience in the days and weeks ahead, because she did want to tell the story from her side.<\/p>\n
\nNicola Sturgeon said she would talk more about her experience in the days and weeks ahead<\/p>\n
She addressed the question of how she could not have known about her husband’s actions by saying she was working in a busy job as Scottish first minister, which involved her being away from home a lot.<\/p>\n
She said she was not ok, but was a strong and resilient person and she would be ok in the future.<\/p>\n
“It’s a tough thing to come to terms with, and I have to do it in the full glare of publicity,” she said, to applause from the audience of more than 100 people.<\/p>\n
‘It’s a really painful thing to process’<\/p>\n
“I don’t think it’s going to come as a surprise to anybody here that it has probably been the worst week of my life,” Ms Sturgeon said. <\/p>\n
“The last few years, there have been some tough weeks, but this one I think surpasses all of them,” she said. <\/p>\n
She spoke of the difficulty she was having coming to terms with the fact that she was married to someone “I obviously didn’t know at all”.<\/p>\n
“It’s a really painful thing to process, and I think I am only in the early stages of processing it,” she said.<\/p>\n
“It would be hard enough if it was a private thing, but it’s been very public,” she added.<\/p>\n
Ms Sturgeon said she understood the question — she said she would probably have been asking it herself: how could she not have known about her husband’s criminal activities.<\/p>\n
She said a lot of the material she read following Monday’s court hearing, she was reading for the first time. <\/p>\n
“We were two people on high salaries, no kids. I was doing a job that I was working around the clock, away from home a lot of the time,” Ms Sturgeon said.<\/p>\n
“This doesn’t reflect well on me: I didn’t spend a lot of time in my kitchen. I didn’t spend any time in the kitchen.<\/p>\n
“I have been deceived, misled, lied to and I have been betrayed and I won’t be the first or the last woman who has been betrayed by her husband,” she said.<\/p>\n
Peter Murrell pleaded guilty to embezzling \u00a3400,310 from the Scottish National Party over a 12-year period from August 2010 to October 2022.<\/p>\n
Ms Sturgeon was arrested as part of the Police Scotland investigation and was later cleared of any wrong doing.<\/p>\n
In January 2025, she announced that she had separated from her husband.<\/p>\n
Murrell was remanded in custody and will be sentenced on 23 June.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon has said she was deceived, misled, lied to and betrayed by her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":471703,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-471702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471702\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/471703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}