Former Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon has said she was deceived, misled, lied to and betrayed by her estranged husband, Peter Murrell.
Earlier this week, he pleaded guilty at the High Court in Edinburgh to embezzling more than £400,000 from the Scottish National Party and using the money to buy luxury goods.
Ms Sturgeon said this week had been the toughest week of a two-year investigation into the fraud.
She stressed that she had been "totally exonerated" as part of that Police Scotland investigation.
Ms Sturgeon was speaking at an event at the Listowel Writers' Week Literary Festival in Co Kerry where she is promoting her memoir, Frankly.
She declined a request for an interview with RTÉ News and no recording was permitted of her conversation with writer Andrew O'Hagan at the Writers' Week event.
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.
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.
She said she was not ok, but was a strong and resilient person and she would be ok in the future.
"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.
'It's a really painful thing to process'
"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.
"The last few years, there have been some tough weeks, but this one I think surpasses all of them," she said.
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".
"It's a really painful thing to process, and I think I am only in the early stages of processing it," she said.
"It would be hard enough if it was a private thing, but it's been very public," she added.
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.
She said a lot of the material she read following Monday's court hearing, she was reading for the first time.
"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.
"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.
"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.
Peter Murrell pleaded guilty to embezzling £400,310 from the Scottish National Party over a 12-year period from August 2010 to October 2022.
Ms Sturgeon was arrested as part of the Police Scotland investigation and was later cleared of any wrong doing.
In January 2025, she announced that she had separated from her husband.
Murrell was remanded in custody and will be sentenced on 23 June.
