The Survivor.(Silda Wall Spitzer)(Interview)

Labeled a hero, a victim, and everything in between, Silda Wall Spitzer opens up to Rebecca Johnson about privately overcoming a public debacle.

Hers was the face that launched a thousand discussions. She knew. She didn't know. She cared. She didn't care. She'd be a fool to leave him. She'd be a fool to stay. For the record (or off, as none of her intensely loyal friends want to be quoted on the subject), Silda Wall Spitzer, wife of the former governor of New York State, did not know about her husband's extramarital affairs with prostitutes. If you knew how Silda normally looksbright-eyed, pretty, hopefuland compared that image with the ashen-faced woman standing behind her husband as the scandal broke, you wouldn't have a doubt either. Eliot Spitzer broke his wife's heart.

A year later, paparazzi still sometimes follow her around, and publications from People to Newsweek still pepper her with interview requests, but Silda Wall Spitzer has moved on. Sitting in a hotel lobby in midtown Manhattan, dressed in a fashionable black Tory Burch sweater, publicist (a post-resignation hire) nearby, Spitzer carefully chooses the words to describe her ordeal. "All of us face challenges in life," she says. "But we have to use our internal power to move forward and try to respond the best we can, keeping in clear sight what is important to us."

What matters to her now is familyof coursebut also the work she began twelve years ago with Children for Children, a thriving nonprofit agency that encourages children to engage in volunteer service, an idea hatched after she witnessed the excessive parties her children attended while growing up on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Unwittingly, she stumbled on one of those neat incidences of unintended consequencesyoung people who volunteer are more likely to perform better academically, finish school, and go on to lead productive lives. Today, her charity operates in 27 states and has touched the lives of 92,000 children.

More recently, the former corporate lawyer and Harvard law school graduate has taken a new job at a hedge fund cofounded and operated by a woman, a rarity in the world of finance. Those accomplishments are the reason she has decided to break her long silence by speaking exclusively to VOGUE. As she says, "The issues that I have been working on are incredibly important, especially now." Also, she admits that one day she'd like her children to read an article that is not a rehash of what happened last spring.

One day, I'd like to write that article, but for now there are a lot of people who want to know how Silda Wall Spitzer has coped with a pretty terrible year. The answer is, surprisingly well. "She has clearly suffered. Who wouldn't?" says her friend Diana Taylor, a managing director at the private investment firm Wolfensohn & Company, as well as New York city mayor Michael Bloomberg's long-term girlfriend. "But I think she's been enormously brave, stalwart, and a true lady every step of the way." When it comes to the ceaseless chatter that arose around Silda, questioning everything from her character to her marriage, Taylor can't help sounding defensive on her friend's behalf. "For anyone to second-guess what someone else does in a situation like that. . . ." Taylor pauses, clearly having learned the political necessity of modulating strong emotions when talking to the press. "Well, that's just wrong. Nobody has the right to judge anybody in that circumstance."

"There are no heroes here," says Silda. "Just a person trying to do whatever it takes to be a productive, useful participant in society"