Inevitable: Nadia Lockyer Resigns

Alameda's long countial nightmare is over. Nadia Lockyer has resigned from her seat on the county's Board of Supervisors:

Battling addiction and the humiliation of a highly publicized altercation in a Newark hotel room with a former lover she met in a rehab program, Alameda County Supervisor Nadia Lockyer abruptly resigned Friday. 

Despite Lockyer's tumultuous last few months and increasingly bizarre behavior, her announcement Friday surprised even her chief of staff, who learned about the resignation from news reports as he worked in her office at the Alameda County administration building. 

Lockyer, the wife of state Treasurer Bill Lockyer, was a political unknown in the Bay Area before her influential husband funded most of the record $1.6 million spent on her 2010 supervisorial campaign. 

Lockyer's resignation is the latest chapter in a lurid and murky tale involving the high-profile political couple from Hayward and allegations of sex tapes, blackmail, drug use and violence. It started with a Feb. 3 incident in a Newark hotel room in which she called police saying her former boyfriend, Stephen Chikhani, assaulted her. She checked into an inpatient rehab center shortly afterward. 

Chikhani remains under investigation by the state attorney general's office in connection with the alleged assault.

Lockyer's resignation letter hints at the personal wreckage she has left in her wake:

In her resignation letter Friday addressed to "constituents, colleagues and friends," Nadia Lockyer, 40, said she could be a "great mom" and a good supervisor but not while dealing with "early recovery from addiction and the aftermath of interpersonal violence." 

"In AA and NA, days of sobriety are counted," Lockyer wrote. "In motherhood, the number of days with a healthy level of stress and tears should be too. While I can boast 77 days of sobriety to this day, I can barely count to ten in the latter category. For this, I owe my family, constituents, staff and colleagues a huge apology."

That poor kid. This really should have happened weeks ago, but became inevitable when she started sending emails accusing her 70-year old husband, and State Treasurer, of getting her addicted to drugs. When it come to rationalizing bad behavior, pretty women are often working at a much higher level than the rest of us. 


There's some brave talk about how Lockyer can try to resume her career after getting sober in the manner of John Burton, but that's crazy. When Burton left Congress over raging cocaine use, he was already a well known pol, and member of a family of well known pols. Lockyer may have married one of the state governing class's lifers, but she has nowhere near the stature of Burton, or a 100 other "second acts" you could name. We're never going to hear from her again.