WINFREY: Just before their affair started,
she threw a baby shower for his wife. Meet the other woman.
This is Lynne. Lynne is a mother of four who lived in a small town.
Millions of people cheat on their spouse every day,
but we almost never hear this side of the story.
Lynne wrote me a letter that she is now going to read.
LYNNE: (Reading) "Dear Oprah, I was the other woman.
I had an affair with a co-worker for over three years.
I threw his wife a baby shower.
My daughter baby-sat for their sons.
She trusted me.
Being the other woman was more painful than I could ever describe.
Always being put second, getting leftover everything, always being an call.
I slept with her husband while she was at the hospital with her son.
I saw their new home before she did.
I lied to her when she called me,
I lied to my children time and time again just to be with him.
I did everything I despised. I felt desperate and dirty.
I watched him shower before he went back home to her.
I felt like a prostitute."
WINFREY: So when I first heard about this letter,
I was like, `Why would you want to come on
and face the world with this story?'
LYNNE: I guess I want to--I want to make something good
out of something bad.
For my own healing, and because I just think--you hear
about cheating and affairs,
but you never hear about the other woman.
WINFREY: Were you married?
LYNNE: I was not married.
WINFREY: You were not married.
And how did you--how did it start?
LYNNE: I met him the first day of work
and knew him for about a little over a year.
We were really, really good friends, we were really close friends.
And I knew his wife. And then it just kind of start--you know, he was...
WINFREY: Was it an emotional affair first?
LYNNE: Right. You call it friends.
And there's some innocent flirting at work
and then some e-mails and then pretty soon it's,
`Here's my home e-mail.'
And then all of a sudden you find yourself on e-mail every night.
And then he's saying, you know,
`I really think you're pretty,' or,
`I think you're sexy,' or, `I want to kiss you.'
And then you get, you know,
he starts making you feel really good about yourself,
and you just slowly get sucked in.
And yeah, we had an emotional affair
for probably three months before it was ever physical.
WINFREY: Mm-hmm.
LYNNE: And I think that's just as damaging. It's more...
WINFREY: Oh, it is. It is indeed. So how did it progress to sex?
LYNNE: The e-mails got, you know, more
and more explicit and more sexual, and more often.
We had this business trip that was, you know, many states away,
and we just decided that, when we went on this business trip,
after everybody got settled in,
he would just come over to my hotel room.
WINFREY: Mm-hmm.
And obviously you knew that it was wrong because
you knew he was married from the beginning, right?
LYNNE: Right. And it's--I don't know if I was just
in a weak place or the way he makes you feel,
and I just--it just sucked me right in.
WINFREY: Well, this is what I don't get.
I mean, obviously people can do whatever they want
to do in their lives and everybody makes mistakes.
What I don't get, though,
is why you would then have to throw
his wife a baby shower?
LYNNE: Oh, I threw her the baby shower before.
WINFREY: Oh, OK.
LYNNE: Before. We knew each other.
My daughter baby-sat for their kids. I saw her at functions.
And I threw her a baby shower.
And about two months later, the emotional affair started.
WINFREY: Mm-hmm.
LYNNE: And, you know, we were friends. She trusted me.
WINFREY: She trusted you.
LYNNE: We didn't do things together, but she said she liked me.
WINFREY: She wouldn't expect you would be sleeping with her husband?
LYNNE: No. No.
WINFREY: How did--how was the affair discovered?
LYNNE: She had gotten a phone call and somebody had sent her a note.
She just chose not--I just think she couldn't handle it.
She couldn't--she didn't want to believe it.
He lied to her over and over, put his hand on a Bible
and swore to God he was not having an affair.
And she said the only way, you know, that she would ever
believe it is if somebody sent her pictures.
And we were out of state at a business meeting again,
and she received pictures while we were gone.
WINFREY: So other people obviously knew this was going on, in the office.
LYNNE: Right.
WINFREY: Other people knew.
LYNNE: Yeah.
WINFREY: Lynne just admitted that she had a three-year
affair with a married man whose wife she was friends with.
Lynne showed us how she carried out this lurid love affair.
LYNNE: We're pulling into a rest area close to town.
We would come here over the lunch hour,
we'd meet here year-round, twice a week like clockwork
for almost three years.
Every time he would call on the phone,
I would just get all excited and I would speed to get out here.
Every second that I could be with him, I would be with him.
We'd push it to the last minute. I'm driving to the softball field.
We would meet here maybe once a week if we were lucky.
The majority of our sexual relationship was,
sad to say, in the back of a minivan.
And that sounds pretty pathetic.
I was making up excuses to my children, telling them I'm going
one place and then, you know, in reality
I was driving out here to have sex with a married man.
I'd drive off by myself, and he'd drive home to his wife
and crawl in with her after he showered, of course.
You know, I just had to wash me off.
We had sex at their house quite a few times.
She would go home for the weekend.
Sometimes the kids were there, they were just sleeping.
And I would pull into his garage, and he'd shut the garage door.
And we'd sleep in the spare bedroom.
WINFREY: What were you telling yourself?
Because if you're having sex in the back of a minivan,
and you're not 16 or 26 even, so you under--you--common
sense would tell you this is not going anywhere. Right?
LYNNE: Common sense.
WINFREY: Common sense would.
LYNNE: I didn't have any back then.
WINFREY: You didn't have any.
LYNNE: You just--you choose to believe what you want to believe.
You choose to believe everything.
WINFREY: Was he telling you he was going to leave his wife?
LYNNE: He said he couldn't leave his children.
He didn't love his wife.
He wanted to be with me,
but he could not leave his children because he was, you know,
had a broken home as a child, and he couldn't do that to them.
So he just kept asking me to be patient with him and to be understanding.
And then he'd said, `OK, in six months I'll make a decision.'
And then another six months and then--and I just believed.
I just believed so strongly everything he said.
And you choose to believe the one person who is lying to everybody else.
But you believe he's telling you the truth.
WINFREY: Yeah. That's a good way to put it. Did his wife ever confront you?
LYNNE: She called me--she called me one time
just a few months after it started and asked me.
She said she'd heard some rumors or somebody had told her
and she just wanted to call me and ask me.
And he had warned me that she was going to call,
and I said,
`Oh, no, no. We're just really good friends and sometimes people
at work think it's more than that, because we're really good friends.'
WINFREY: How did you feel after saying that?
LYNNE: I wanted to tell her so bad. I wanted to just say,
`You're right,' you know? I wanted her to find out, because then...
WINFREY: Because you wanted him.
LYNNE: Because then he would have to make a decision.
WINFREY: Yeah.
LYNNE: And it would be over, because I didn't know how to get out of it.
WINFREY: So you're the classic other. woman.
Is this the classic other woman, Robin Smith--Dr. Robin?
Dr. SMITH: Yeah, the classic other woman
and I was struck by two things; one, you talked about
all of the nice things he said to you.
And it's interesting, Oprah, because women can be so sucked
in when we are desperate, empty and needy.
WINFREY: Yes.
Dr. SMITH: Yes. And so it's dangerous, because what happened was
he started saying things to you that you didn't believe about yourself,
meaning positive things.
WINFREY: But this is interesting,
because, you know, I don't--show me a woman
and I'll show you a woman who's been desperate and needy.
Dr. SMITH: Yes.
WINFREY: I mean--my 20s are classic for this kind of behavior.
But I would think that after it happens to you a couple of times,
that that's what growing is up.
I'm just surprised that this happens to a full-grown adult.
Dr. SMITH: Well, yeah, I'm not.
WINFREY: Well, you wouldn't be.
Dr. SMITH: Well, I wouldn't.
WINFREY: You know what I'm say something?
Because all of us were fools at some point in our 20s, were you not?
Can I get a witness? OK. OK.
Dr. SMITH: But the thing is, even about having sex in a van,
and you said, you know,
`You're not 16, you're not 26, how could you do that?'
How you could do that is really not feeling worthy of something more.
WINFREY: Yeah.
Dr. SMITH: That's the only way that that kind of behavior could occur.
The other issue that's critical here is the issue of hoping
that he would leave his wife. And why do I bring that up?
Because women get into this competitive thing where
we want someone to choose us. We want to win.
WINFREY: Absolutely.
Dr. SMITH: We want to win.
WINFREY: I was going to say that.
Dr. SMITH: And we don't understand that often
it's a booby prize when you win.
When you win in that game, it's a booby prize.
[APPLAUSE]
Dr. SMITH: Part of what's important
to really understand is that the only way this could happen
is that you were absent from your own life.
So the real question for you to answer is,
`When did I lose or never had the ability
to make decisions that were good for me?'
LYNNE: I think when I was growing up,
maybe I--I was a lot different than my siblings.
Dr. SMITH: Did you end up feeling left out
when you felt different from your siblings?
LYNNE: I felt more black sheep of the family.
Dr. SMITH: Yes. Yes.
LYNNE: So I was always, like, a problem child, I guess.
Dr. SMITH: So listen to this, problem child, black sheep,
too far on the outside, and then you find somebody
who says you're the center of the world.
LYNNE: Oh, he loved everything about me.
Dr. SMITH: He said.
WINFREY: Well, if he loved it that much, he'd be with you.
That's the truth. That is the truth.
LYNNE: Right.
WINFREY: You were saying to the producers that there are
so many signs that his wife could have obviously known.
What were they?
LYNNE: Just taking too long when he--he would say he was,
you know, going to work out or going to the store,
and it would be like two and a half hours showering
when you get home.
Cell phone bills, I had a $300- or $400 cell phone bill every month.
If she would have opened it up, she would have seen my number all over it.
Hunting trips. Just checking up, you know?
Just--he just would go so much more often than he did before.
WINFREY: So ultimately, you are here because you wanted to share
this story so that other women who might get engaged
in an emotional affair or might, you know, choose to take
the road that you did think twice about it, is that right?
LYNNE: Oh, think five times about it.
Don't--you know, don't--nothing good can come out of it.
WINFREY: Yeah.
LYNNE: It hurts everybody, everybody,
not just two or three people. It hurts everybody.
WINFREY: Well, the bottom line is, too, you have no power, you have no power.
LYNNE: No, no, you have no control over anything.
WINFREY: No power. Isn't that right, Robin?
Dr. SMITH: Absolutely. No power. The illusion, again, that you are special.
WINFREY: You're being lied to all the time.
Dr. SMITH: And it's nothing but an illusion. It's an insult.
LYNNE: Mm-hmm.
Dr. SMITH: And if women could breathe in the fact that it is
insulting for a married man to be pursuing them.
I mean, if we don't get anything else across today,
it is an insult to have someone who is committed to another person,
and if they don't love that person, that's between that man and that woman.
But it is insulting to any of us to have someone who is married
to pursue us and say things that are sexual
or that are sensual or that are affectionate, it is an insult
and we should take it as an offense,
not as something that strokes our empty, wounded egos.
We need to fix ourselves.
WINFREY: That's it. Thank you, Dr. Robin. Thank you.