The Official Web Site of Tony Castro

Soccer Fans: Beckham, Si! Antonio, No!

Thank God for David Beckham and his timing. Arriving as he did and being introduced to fans in Carson Friday, the soccer superstar may have helped provide Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa with some perspective.

Antonio thought the worst of the fallout over his extramartial affair with disgraced Telemundo reporter Mirthala Salinas was over, especially after Thursday's uneventful day on his rounds of Los Angeles when reporters for the first time failed to ask him about the romance that killed his 20-year marriage.

There was a big sigh in the Villaraigosa camp at City Hall, and speculation grew among political watchers that perhaps the mayor had weathered the worst.

But then the news media has always been easy on Antonio.

Not the public, especially the 3,000 soccer fans who crowded into the Home Depot Center in Carson. When Antonio was introduced Friday, he was roundly booed. "It really came through on TV, and I'm told the mayor looked taken aback by the reception," wrote blogger Kevin Roderick, whose profiles of Villaraigosa and elsewhere have always been adoring.

A good barometer of Antonio may be Roderick's next Los Angeles magazine offering on the mayor, not to mention a barometer on Roderick's own credibility on how he covers Antonio.

The Man/The Myth: What Made Him Do It

Power and the feeling of invulnerability made Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa do it. That and his love affair with his image in the media and finding in Telemundo’s Mirthala Salinas the narcissistic reflection of himself.

“He had gotten to a point where he felt invulnerable and that he’d charmed his way into people’s lives and could do no wrong,” says Dr. Carole Lieberman, the Beverly Hills psychiatrist who has been paying special attention to Villaraigosa since last fall.

Lieberman, a nationally recognized expert in father-son and other family estrangement issues, also believes the Villaraigosa-Salinas relationship over which he has risked his political career is facing a crisis.

“What attracted her to him in first place was his political power and his power in general which is now shaken,” says Lieberman. “For him, her being a television personality, a TV anchor, a political reporter and star in the media is what he found attractive. She was a metaphor for the love affair he’s had with the media.

“But now that she’s on suspension and not on the air, it takes away some of her luster for him. Both of them are now stuck in relationship where their relationship has caused them to lose what it was that attracted them to each other. Now the question is question is: Are they still going to be in love or lust with each other?

“I guess we’ll see. If they are in love, will they be able to weather this storm? For Antonio, though, his first love is himself. If she is what will cause him to lose his political career, she will find that no woman will be worth it for him.”

Lieberman has never seen Villaraigosa professionally but has been studying his relationship with his estranged father and says it is the root of the mayor's motivation, both personally and politically.

“His betrayal of relationships and his lack of commitment goes back to his father,” says Liberman. “His father abandoned him and his family, and in his betrayal of his wife and his family, he is following in his father’s footsteps.”

Lieberman said she has also closely studied video of Villaraigosa’s recent announcements – on June 11 of the breakup of his 20-year marriage to wife Corina and on July 3 of his confirmation of his love affair with Salinas and found two troubling similarities.

“It’s bad enough that he seemed to announce he was getting a divorce without very much remorse, and he said it in this cavalier way in which you almost knew he was having an affair,” says Lieberman.

“And when he announced having an affair, again his voice sounded so happy, so much like the cat that ate the canary but expected people to be happy for him.”