Nicola Sturgeon said she was \u201cdeceived, betrayed and lied to\u201d by her estranged husband, Peter Murrell, as he embezzled hundreds of thousands of pounds from the SNP.<\/p>\n
The former first minister told an audience in Ireland at her first public appearance since Murrell pleaded guilty that she was coming to terms with being married to someone she \u201cdid not know at all\u201d, and acknowledged people would have questions.<\/p>\n
Sturgeon, 55, said she was having \u201cprobably the worst week\u201d of her life and she would probably need to sit with a therapist. \u201cThis is a long-winded way of saying I am not OK\u201d, she said, but insisted, \u201cI will be OK, I am a strong, resilient person.\u201d<\/p>\n
Murrell has been remanded in custody after pleading guilty at the high court in Edinburgh on Monday to embezzling \u00a3400,310.65 from the SNP between 2010 and 2022, spending the cash on items including a motorhome, cars, expensive watches and a telescope<\/a>.<\/p>\n Sturgeon, who was at Listowel Writers\u2019 Week in County Kerry to promote her memoir, has consistently denied any knowledge of Murrell\u2019s crimes and was not charged after a police investigation.<\/p>\n She said: \u201cI know there are questions, I understand that. I would probably be asking as well if I was looking in from the outside on somebody else. \u2018How can she not have known?\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cAnd I think underlying that question there is a big misassumption, which is that I knew anything about it, or that I knew all about it. I think everybody assumes that all of this stuff that it turns out my former husband was buying I knew about it, I just didn\u2019t question how he paid for it.<\/p>\n \u201cAs recently as Monday I was reading about things in the newspapers for the first time, things that I had never seen, I didn\u2019t know about. It wasn\u2019t just that I didn\u2019t question where they came from.\u201d<\/p>\n Sturgeon added: \u201cThe last few years have had some tough ones for me, but this one, I think, surpasses all of them.\u201d<\/p>\n The former SNP leader stressed she had been \u201ccompletely exonerated\u201d after a \u201ctwo-year-long, very forensic police investigation\u201d during which police officers searched the home she and Murrell, 61, had shared.<\/p>\n