Hell hath no fury...

As speculation emerges that Osama Bin Laden may have been betrayed by his first wife, that old saying seems to be re-validated

In 1697, the English author William Congreve wrote a poem called The Mourning Bride which ended with the following lines: “Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d. Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d.” More than 400 years later, these words still carry a angry resonance as speculation rages that Osama Bin Laden was tracked down not by brilliant spy work by the CIA but because his first wife Khairiah Saber betrayed his location.

Apparently Saber, Bin Laden’s first wife, a Saudi woman now in her 60s, fetched up at the Abbotabad complex sometime in February or March 2011. When challenged by one of Osama’s sons as to why she had come back after such a long time, she replied enigmatically, “I have one more duty to discharge for my husband.”

The extended Bin Laden clan now believes that it was Saber who betrayed him by leading the CIA forces to his door. And all because she was jealous of Osama’s latest wife, the Yemeni-born, much younger Amal Ahmed Abdel-Fatah al-Sada with whom Bin Laden shared a bed (while Saber slept alone in a bedroom on another floor).

So, there’s a lesson for you. While the entire might of the US army and the all-seeing eye of the CIA could not bring about Osama Bin Laden’s downfall for well on a decade, his scorned wife managed to do so in a matter of months.

For readers of a certain age, this will bring back memories of that 1996 Hollywood hit, The First Wives Club, starring Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler and Diane Keaton. The three women are dumped by their husbands for younger models and decide on revenge: by taking their husbands for everything they have. As yet another infamous first wife, Ivana Trump (married to ‘The Donald’), putting it in a cameo appearance in the movie, said, “Don’t get mad; get everything.”

But, of course, that is easier said than done. First wives do tend to get mad – and sometimes very mad indeed. As one man found out the hard way when he left his wife and moved out of the family home. When he came back to collect his things, he discovered that she had cut off the right sleeve of each one of his Savile Row suits. Yet another ex-wife crept into her ex-husband’s house and sewed up prawns in his curtain hems (yes, you really can’t get more bonkers than that).

Others take an even more direct approach. Remember Elin Nordegren, Tiger Woods’ ex-wife? When she found out about his posse of mistresses, she chased his car down, golf club in hand and bashed the windscreen in. (Tiger later gallantly insisted that his wife had been unfairly maligned – to widespread scepticism in the media.)

And then, there are the women who wait for years, even decades, on end, before trying to extract a horrible revenge for the humiliation heaped on them. In the UK, Chris Huhne had to resign from David Cameron’s Cabinet when his ex-wife, Vicky Pryce, recently revealed that in 2003 he had prevailed upon her to take some penalty points he had incurred while speeding on her own driving licence. But in an ironic twist, Vicky found herself charged alongside her husband for trying to ‘pervert the course of justice’.

Across the Atlantic, Republican Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich found himself in the ex-wife trap on the eve of an important primary when his second wife, Marianne, crawled out of the woodwork to announce that he had asked her for an ‘open marriage’ in the last years of their relationship. Not exactly the kind of thing that a candidate hoping to make headway in the puritanical heartland of America wants to hear, right? And sure enough, since then Newt’s appeal among women voters has gone down sharply.

Heather Mills tried a similar smear campaign when Paul McCartney asked her for a divorce, suggesting that the former Beatles had been physically abusive towards her in the course of their marriage. But such was the goodwill towards McCartney that nobody paid the slightest attention to these allegations. No wonder then that when Mills scored a paltry 25 million pounds (yes, you read that right: 25 million pounds) in her divorce settlement, she showed her displeasure by pouring a jug of water over McCartney’s attorney, Fiona Shackleton, in a classic case of misdirected anger.

That’s not to say that men don’t behave badly in the aftermath of a marriage, but their acting out mostly takes the form of retaining a tight control over joint resources while women fall back on restricting access to the children – in other words, each party plays to their strengths. And yet, sadly, both sides lose as a consequence.

So, perhaps the best revenge for a scorned woman is not to get mad or even get everything – but to just get on with it. Move on with your life, rebuild the torn corners of your world and wrestle some happiness out of it. Because more often than not, living well is the best revenge of all.

Loss of faith

To feel betrayed, you need to have trusted in someone to begin with

How do you think the average Pakistani cricket fan reacted when news of the latest scandal to hit their cricket team broke? When the British tabloid, The News of the World, ran a sting operation on a bookie who boasted on camera that he could get the Pakistani team to do anything he wanted? And when the next day’s play – when two Pakistani bowlers bowled no-balls in exactly the same overs as he had predicted – proved that he wasn’t lying?

Well, the words ‘shocked’ ‘grieved’ ‘embarrassed’ ‘saddened’ or even ‘angered’ come to mind. But do you think that any of the fans really felt ‘betrayed’?

I think not. To feel a sense of betrayal, you need to have had a feeling of trust to begin with. And while I am sure that the Pakistanis love, admire, hell, even idolise their cricket team, I am not sure that they trust any of their players as far as they can throw them.

I mean, honestly, how could they? Even the most naive Pakistani cricket fan is well aware by now that there is something rotten in the world of Pakistani cricket. Allegations of match-fixing have become routine over the last couple of decades. Charges of ball-tampering crop up every year or so, with such senior players as Shahid Afridi at the centre of the storm. And spot fixing – in which a player tries to oblige his bookie friends by influencing a particular period of play by throwing away his wicket or dropping a catch or, as happened in Lords on that fateful day, bowling a no-ball – is so common as to barely occasion comment.

None of this is such a well-kept secret that the Pakistani cricket fan has no idea that this stuff really happens. So, while I am willing to accept that Pakistani fans may be upset and annoyed, I don’t really think that they really feel let down by their national team. As far as they are concerned, all of this is pretty much par for the course.

See, that’s the thing about betrayal. It only hits you like a sledgehammer if you have no idea that it is headed in your direction at the speed of light.

Ask Elin Nordegren. The Swedish ice-blonde wife of Tiger Woods had no idea that her husband was cheating on her – let alone that he was doing so with an assembly line of busty babes. When she finally found out, it was as if her world had collapsed around her. As she said in an interview to People magazine after her divorce was final, she didn’t suspect him for a minute, so when the mistresses began to crawl out of the woodwork she felt very betrayed – and very stupid indeed.

That’s exactly how Victoria Beckham felt a few years ago, when Rebecca Loos sold the story of her affair with David Beckham, complete with accounts of sexually explicit text messages and raunchy phone calls. The Beckhams had built their brand on being a devoted, wholesome couple who only had eyes for each other and it must have come as a complete shock to Victoria to see hard evidence of her husband’s involvement with another woman. But the ones who probably felt the most betrayed were David’s fans who had bought into the myth of Beckham the family man.

It’s only when the world buys into a particular myth that a sense of betrayal kicks in. We all believed – or at the very least, we wanted to believe – that Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were made for each other. She was our favourite Friend, America’s corn-fed sweetheart; he was the blonde God of good looks, the pin-up idol of every girl (and at least some of the boys). Theirs was a marriage meant to last.

So, when Brad Pitt fell for the dark, dangerous beauty of Angelina Jolie on the sets of Mrs and Mrs Smith (though they swore till they were blue in the face that no actual impropriety occurred until Pitt had left Aniston – yeah, right!) you could hear the sound of a million hearts breaking all over the world. Jennifer was, as expected, devastated and heart-broken, but all of us felt just as betrayed on her behalf.

It was that sense of betrayal that turned us against Shashi Tharoor when the IPL controversy broke. Tharoor was our middle-class hero, the squeaky-clean Malayali boy made good who had come back home to do his bit for his country. He was going to clean the system, making it as honest and incorruptible as himself. He was a politician with a difference; and he was going to make a difference if it was the last thing he did.

So, imagine the shock when it was revealed that Tharoor’s then girlfriend and now wife, Sunanda Pushkar, had been granted sweat equity worth about Rs 70 crores in the Kochi team that won the IPL bid, with minister Tharoor standing as mentor. You could argue that this was nothing compared to the blatant corruption that some of Tharoor’s fellow ministers indulged in.

But that wasn’t the point. The truth was that we expected better of Tharoor. And when he let us down, that sense of betrayal could only be assuaged by his resignation from the government.

I guess the moral of the story is: the higher we build them up, the harder they fall. The more the trust; the greater the sense of betrayal.

The Tiger’s tale

When it comes to cheating, men and women are equal opportunity offenders

So, Tiger Woods turned out to be just another lying, cheating philanderer who played around on his wife. Over the years, as is now revealed, he has had a string of affairs, of the no-strings-attached variety, with a succession of bar hostesses, models and party girls. As of now, the (very voluptuous) body count stands at six but by the time you read this it may well have gone into double figures.

So far, so sports star.

Yes, by now it is a truth universally celebrated by the tabloid press that men cheat. Rich, famous and powerful men cheat even more than others. And rich, famous, powerful sports stars are in a league of their own when it comes to cheating on their (mostly) blonde and beautiful wives.

And yet, no sooner had news of Tiger’s car colliding into a fire hydrant – and of his lovely wife, Elin, breaking the car windows with his golf club (now that must have hurt) ostensibly to rescue him – hit the press, than the usual articles spouting the same old platitudes about cheating men began sprouting all over the media.

How could Tiger do this to his elegant wife, the beautiful blonde who had given him two lovely children, the younger only a few months old? Wasn’t he supposed to be the Nice Guy who was boring as hell, the Original Mr Goodie Two-Shoes who had built up a sporting and endorsement-related fortune on the basis of his squeaky-clean reputation?

But as a succession of hard-faced floozies with identikit pumped-up lips and silicone breasts began pole-dancing – I exaggerate of course, but only a little – out of the woodwork, that reputation lay in tatters at the accident site outside Tiger’s expensive Florida estate house.

Cue a thousand columns and editorials about how this proved that you never could trust men after all. No matter how perfect their public image may be, behind it lay a sordid mess of one-night stands, raunchy phone messages, rough sex, and drug-fueled romps with a series of mistresses in hotel suites across the world – and sometimes (shock! horror!) in the marital bed as well.

Okay, we get it. Tiger Woods is now officially a Bad Guy. But you know what? He didn’t get up to all that extra-marital sex on his own. He was aided and abetted in his cheating by a line of sultry sirens who knew full well that he was married and a father of two. None of these women was under the illusion that this was some grand passion, or that the golfing genius was madly in love with her, or even that this was an affair that would last.

Both parties knew exactly what they were getting into. So, why target Woods alone for letting his libido run riot? Why not point a finger at all those women who were clearly in it for a good time, a few first class trips, maybe an expensive present or two?

Not to mention, the chance to sell their stories, complete with every sleazy detail, somewhere down the line, get their 15 seconds of fame and make a million or two while they are at it? Nobody saves 300 sex-texts, like the appropriately-named Jamie Grubbs did, unless they intend to use them at some future point.

And yet, only Tiger Woods gets pilloried in the press, while his partners in crime get away with becoming C-grade celebrities who can now safely launch a career in show business. Am I the only person who thinks there is something wrong with this scenario?

Or let’s take another rabidly promiscuous man who is never out of the headlines: the astonishingly priapic Prime Minister of Italy Silvio Berlusconi. If he’s not hosting orgies at his country estate – with world leaders in attendance, no less – he is buying expensive birthday presents for an 18-year-old lingerie model. His Minister for Equal Opportunities (yes, seriously), Mara Carfagna, is a former topless model whom he deputed to look after the spouses of world leaders during the recent G8 summit in Rome. (I can only imagine the delighted whoops of joy from the wives when they found out.)

If anyone has any doubts about how the business of state is conducted by Silvio, they have only to listen to a mobile phone recording an enterprising call girl named Patrizia D’Addario made while in bed with him (and no, they were not playing chess). It was released after the Prime Minister failed to help her build a hotel in her home town, as he had promised before they did the dirty.

When Berlusconi was faced with the tapes and the incontrovertible evidence that he had slept with an escort, he famously declared that he never ever paid for sex. If he had to pay for it, he asked indignantly, where was the joy of conquest?

Well, that’s all right then.

But at least Berlusconi was honest in his own twisted way. The truth is that most men treat sex as a perk of power. But as we deride them for it, let’s not lose sight of the fact that these men couldn’t possibly do so without the active connivance of women, who use sex as an aid to advancement.

When it comes to cheating, men may get most of the flack. But the truth is that in this matter – as in so many others – men and women are equal opportunity offenders.