Who Survives a Political Scandal?

History is littered with the careers of politicians who committed crimes or engaged in moral indiscretions and then tried to lie their way out of public shame. Hence the maxim: “It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.” But honesty doesn’t always save a career, and duplicity doesn’t always sink one. Here we revisit 10 political scandals from across the centuries and around the world to see what about a scandal—or a politician’s response to it—determines whether a career is destroyed.

The Hamilton-Reynolds affair

In 1791 Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton began an on-again, off-again sexual affair with Maria Reynolds, a woman 11 years his junior and, particularly problematic for Hamilton, the wife of a scheming con artist, James Reynolds.

James Reynolds demanded that Hamilton stop seeing his wife or pay him for his silence if he wanted to continue the affair. Hamilton, for his part, did stop meeting with Maria—for a while—before resuming the affair. Over the course of about a year, Hamilton paid Reynolds a sum of more than $1,000 (about $35,000 in 2026). By the end of 1792 James Reynolds had told a group of Hamilton’s rivals that Hamilton was providing him with insider trading information. When confronted by a group headed by James Monroe, Hamilton told his accusers he was not a corrupt politician but rather an unfaithful husband. That seemed to put the matter to rest.

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Fast forward almost five years to 1797, when a reporter published an account of the affair again accusing Hamilton of violating the public trust while serving as secretary of the Treasury. Hamilton, in turn, published a more than 11,000-word screed, in which he staunchly defended his honor while airing the dirtiest of laundry in the most public of ways. In seeking the forgiveness of both his wife Eliza and the public, he wrote in part:

I can never cease to condemn myself for the pang which it may inflict in a bosom eminently entitled to all my gratitude, fidelity, and love.…The public, too, will, I trust, excuse the confession. The necessity of it to my defence against a more heinous charge could alone have extorted from me so painful an indecorum.

Did Hamilton’s candor help salvage a political career in tatters? That’s hard to say: It probably cost him a chance at becoming president, but it didn’t keep him from wracking up 11 Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize.

Grover Cleveland’s love child

Arguably the biggest political sex scandal of the 19th century came during the 1884 presidential election, when the seemingly squeaky-clean image of Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland was aggressively called into question by Republicans, whose candidate, James G. Blaine, was himself widely viewed as corrupt.

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Roughly 10 years earlier, Cleveland—who did not marry until 1886—had fathered a child with Maria Halpin, a widow. After acknowledging paternity, Cleveland sent his son to an orphanage, and Halpin was committed to a mental institution. During the heat of the scandal, Halpin recalled a sexual encounter that she said was nonconsensual and followed by threats if she disclosed anything. (Cleveland’s campaign readily admitted the relationship, saying the two had been “illicitly acquainted.”) She initially sought custody of her son but ultimately accepted a payment, apparently from Cleveland, of $500 (almost $15,000 in 2026) for dropping the matter.

All of this became fodder during the heated presidential campaign, including the publication of a political cartoon depicting Halpin holding a baby who is calling out “I want my pa!” as a stunned Cleveland looks on. Quickly, the question “Ma, ma, where’s my pa?” became the Republicans’ taunting battle cry.

Pro-Cleveland newspapers disparaged Halpin’s character and ran reports that Blaine’s wife was pregnant before they were married. Republican papers painted Cleveland as unworthy of the presidency. In the end Cleveland won the razor-close election, and Democrats added “Gone to the White House! Ha, ha, ha!” as a rejoinder to the Republicans’ persistent query.

The “Checkers” speech

When you say “Richard Nixon” and “political scandal,” one word comes to mind—Watergate. But more than two decades before he resigned the presidency, Nixon found himself embroiled in another political scandal, then as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s running mate in the 1952 presidential election.

Perhaps taking a page from Hamilton’s book, on September 23, 1952, Nixon delivered an extraordinary, nearly 5,000-word address to the country rebutting charges that he was politically corrupt and had taken $18,000 improperly from supporters. In the nearly 30-minute speech, Nixon laid out in excruciating detail his family’s personal finances, including the amounts of his home mortgages and the fact that his wife, Pat, didn’t own a mink coat but just a “respectable Republican cloth coat.”

Nixon had, however, received one gift from a political donor that he was going to keep.

We did get something, a gift, after the election. A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog. And believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore, saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was? It was a little cocker spaniel dog, in a crate that he had sent all the way from Texas, black and white, spotted, and our little girl Tricia, the six year old, named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.

The speech became known as “the Checkers Speech,” and Nixon went on to serve for eight years as Eisenhower’s vice president. He lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy, but he won the presidency in 1968 and was reelected in 1972.

Perhaps Nixon is the proof that there are some scandals you can come back from and some you can’t.

Profumo affair

In early-1960s England the Profumo affair had it all: a senior British government official, a Russian spy, and a young woman who was having sex with both of them.

John Profumo was the secretary of state for war in the Conservative Party government of Harold Macmillan. In 1961 the 46-year-old Profumo, a rising political star, began an affair with 19-year-old dancer Christine Keeler, who was also having an affair with Russian attaché Yevgeny Ivanov. By 1963 rumors were swirling around London, and Profumo was called to Parliament, where he said that there was “no impropriety whatsoever” in his relationship with Keeler. That was quickly proven untrue, and Profumo resigned in disgrace.

Ultimately, neither British nor American intelligence could prove that the Russians intended to use Keeler to entrap Profumo. While his once-promising political career was over, Profumo earned a measure of redemption by devoting the rest of his life to charitable work and in being named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1975.

Chappaquiddick

The presidential aspirations of Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy ended in the early morning hours of July 19, 1969, after he drove his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts. With him in the car was Mary Jo Kopechne, a 28-year-old political aide who had worked on the presidential campaign of his assassinated brother Robert F. Kennedy.

A dazed Kennedy left the scene, and Kopechne died. In an epic display of poor judgment—or political maneuvering—he failed to report the incident for more than 10 hours. Kennedy ultimately pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of the accident and addressed Massachusetts citizens to explain what had happened.

Still the Kennedy mystique was so powerful that by the time the 1980 presidential campaign was ramping up, it seemed that Kennedy might have a chance at redemption by running against the damaged incumbent Pres. Jimmy Carter. But Kennedy bombed an interview with Roger Mudd of CBS News, unable to answer why he wanted to be president.

Kennedy continued to serve as a leader in the Senate until his death in 2009.

The congressman and the sex worker

Barney Frank, long the nation’s most prominent gay politician and among the first to publicly disclose his sexual orientation when he did so in 1987, almost didn’t survive a tawdry sex scandal.

In the mid-1980s Frank paid a male sex worker by the name of Stephen Gobie $80 for sex. Gobie was not a minor at the time. Over the course of more than a year, Frank said that he tried to help Gobie overcome drug addiction and prostitution by paying him to run errands. Frank also said that when he learned Gobie was running a prostitution ring out of Frank’s home, he fired him. Gobie told a different story, saying he was bringing clients to Frank’s apartment with his knowledge.

A congressional investigation found that Frank had intervened on Gobie’s behalf to fix parking tickets and had used official stationery to write letters to Gobie’s probation officer. Frank faced an official reprimand in 1990 and apologized to his congressional colleagues, saying:

There was in my life a central element of dishonesty.…Three years ago I decided that concealment didn’t work. I wish I had decided a few years earlier.

Frank continued to serve in the House of Representatives until choosing not to run for reelection in 2012.

The president and the intern

I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.

One of the most enduring presidential utterances of the 20th century was also a bald-faced lie. The proclamation by Pres. Bill Clinton on January 26, 1998, was perhaps understandable given that Clinton had faced repeated allegations of sexual impropriety that had threatened to sink his political career.

But the president couldn’t wave away DNA evidence that proved the affair, which began in 1995, between the 49-year-old president and the 22-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The relationship was detailed in the steamy Starr Report, named after independent counsel Kenneth Starr. Some of the details were so lurid that Democratic Rep. Barney Frank (see above) quipped that he couldn’t read the whole thing because it involved “too much reading about heterosexual sex.”

Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives in 1998 and acquitted by the Senate in 1999. He left office in 2001, but his scandalous history would haunt the 2016 presidential campaign of his wife, Hillary Clinton, and he appeared multiple times in the Epstein Files.

Gavin Newsom’s workplace issue

The outgoing governor of California and anticipated 2028 presidential candidate Gavin Newsom once made headlines for something other than trolling the president of the United States on social media.

In 2005, while he was mayor of San Francisco and in the middle of a divorce from his first wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Newsom had an affair with the wife of Alex Tourk, his top campaign official. Granted, it’s not having sex with an intern or leaving a young woman to drown, but it’s not behavior that’s going to win “boss of the year” honors. To make matters worse, Ruby Rippey-Tourk worked in Newsom’s office at the time of their relationship, and Alex Tourk had been more than a staff member; he and Newsom frequently socialized. Alex Tourk resigned. Newsom apologized, saying “I’ve hurt someone I care deeply about, Alex Tourk. And that is something I have to live with.”

Newsom went on to be reelected mayor of San Francisco in 2007. He was elected California’s governor in 2018, and during that campaign he addressed the affair. Whether it will come up again in 2028 remains to be seen.

Bunga Bunga: Italy’s Watergate

The scandals involving the late Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi involve tax fraud, corruption, and sex with minors. By his own admission the phrase “bunga bunga”—which came to be used to describe the acts performed by young women at parties held by Berlusconi at his villa—was something that he adopted from his close friend Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi.

Despite convictions—some of which were overturned on appeal—and a very public divorce in 2009 amid reports of his affair with a teenage model, Berlusconi proved to be an enduring and almost irresistibly charismatic fixture in Italian politics. He was elected prime minister three times, serving in 1994, 2001–06, and 2008–11. It was during his last term as PM that “bunga bunga” came into common use in Italy. In 2012 he was convicted on tax fraud charges and banned from holding public office. Sometimes compared to U.S. Pres. Donald Trump for the hold he had on his supporters, he died in 2023.

Overcoming Access Hollywood

The term “October surprise,” according to Merriam-Webster, means “a significant revelation or event in the month prior to an election that has the potential to shift public opinion about an election candidate and that is often orchestrated to influence the election’s outcome.” When The Washington Post reported on October 7, 2016, that the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump had been caught on a “hot mic” having a lewd, expletive-strewn conversation with then Access Hollywood host Billy Bush about the way he treated women, it was October, and it most definitely was a surprise.

Trump’s response to the recording, which dated from 2005, was to admit what was undeniable, that he had said the things on the tape: “I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize.” But he also dismissed out of hand calls from Republicans for him to drop out of the race, almost exactly a month before Election Day.

Trump went on to win the 2016 presidential election, became the only U.S. president to be impeached twice, and, with his election in 2024, the second president to serve nonconsecutive terms. In doing so, he may have rewritten the history books on how to survive political scandal.

How many scandals can one campaign endure?

When Graham Platner announced in August 2025 that he was running for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate from Maine, he took the political world by storm. For this combat veteran turned oyster farmer, the totality of his public service consisted of serving as harbormaster of Sullivan, Maine, population (about) 1,300. He leveraged his status as a populist and a political unknown as a competitive advantage against incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins specifically and the Washington establishment in general.

The problem was that even as he drew enthusiastic crowds to campaign events and defeated his Democratic opponent Gov. Janet Mills in the primary, more became known about Platner’s past. Much of it was, at the very least, controversial:

• A tattoo that seemed to be of a Nazi symbol (he said he didn’t know what it was and had it covered)
• The revelation of racist and misogynistic social media posts
• Allegations of marital infidelity

Platner sought to explain these indiscretions as a result of PTSD, but a July 2026 allegation of sexual assault proved to be one scandal too many. Even as he denied the allegations, Platner ended what had been a tumultuous campaign.

More about political scandals

Why Are Scandals Called “-Gates”?

How Watergate Changed America

Nine American Political Scandals

Monica Lewinsky’s Essay for Britannica