5 Celebrity Mistresses We Completely Forgot About Once Their 15 Minutes Were Up

Being a celebrity mistress is not a great career move. The big names burn out over time, but there are tons of minor celebrity mistresses that just flash in the pan. Fifteen minutes of fame? Try fifteen seconds of fame for some of these ladies.

It’s always the same story, too. Some woman makes out with some celebrity at some party, she gets an interview with a gossip rag, she’s top of news and social media trends thanks to pervs looking for pictures of her in her underwear, and then it’s over. We completely forget about her.

And even the bigger names don’t really have any staying power, either. The biggest celebrity mistress is arguably Monica Lewinsky. In the scant media appearances and interviews she has granted nearly two decades after the scandal she found herself at the center of, she has admitted that leading a normal life has been a pretty difficult prospect.

She has all but withdrawn from the public eye, just desiring a little bit of privacy, and to not be known as “that girl” anymore.

And that’s honorable. This article isn’t about slut-shaming any more than it’s about female empowerment. It’s about the lengths that five women went to “become somebody” based on a seedy relationship with an already-somebody only to end up forgotten before they had a chance to enjoy their limelight.

These are the “oh yeahhhh, that girl” mistresses, and because of that, we won’t be including recent Weiner mistress Sydney Leathers, who is still getting public traction out of her plastic surgery, porn film and brush with AIDS (instead of her opinions, which she wants to be known for). We’re also not including Robin Thicke’s proto-mistress Lana Scolaro, because her story is still just breaking.

But still, we believe that Scolaro will be forgotten soon, just like:

Leyla Ghobadi

This Canadian model made major gossip headlines just earlier this year with a claim that Kanye West had been unfaithful to Kim Kardashian (who was at the time pregnant with his child). She told Star Magazine that she had been hooking up with West since last summer, and that she was only coming clean out of respect for Kim. She later backtracked (meaning she lied the first time) and said that she had been with West before he was with Kim. Above is the only picture we could find of her face.

Traci Nobles

Cheerleading coach Traci Nobles was the original Sydney Leathers. Okay, technically she was like the fifth woman in the original Anthony Weiner sexting debacle, but she seems to be the one who tried to get the most out of her lewd connection to the disgraced congressman. She appeared on the Today Show to talk about it, and even scored a book deal for a memoir titled I Freinded You (misspelling totally intentional) which didn’t really do that well.

Brittany Kerr

Kerr, a former American Idol contestant and cheerleader, became infamous last year as country star Jason Aldean’s “other woman” after the two were photographed making out. To her credit, Kerr avoided cashing in on the affair, breaking her silence once and pretty much just to say a quick “sorry.” Still, gossip rags dug up everything they possibly could on her, only for her name to pass into obscurity when Aldean and his high school sweetheart/wife publicly pledged to work things out. They broke up anyway, and no one has heard from Kerr since.

Rielle Hunter

John Edwards’ mistress Rielle Hunter has gotten a lot of traction over the years, but she’s always been kind of a poor man’s Monica Lewinsky. The weird, shady, and sometimes-contradictory elements of her affair with the former senator and two-time presidential candidate kind of took on lives of their own, overshadowing Edwards and Hunter as individuals. But Rielle, believe it or not, actually has an incredibly interesting story. For instance, did you know that she is (was) an actress and film producer? That she has like seven names? That she is actually a pioneer in the use of YouTube for viral marketing? That her father was implicated in a massive, highly-publicized horse insurance fraud scandal? It’s all good stuff, but the only thing she’s remembered for is the affair, and even then, not much remembered at all.

Rupert Sanders

Ah ha! You thought this was going to be a pseudo-misogynistic article all about women, didn’t you? Male mistresses also occasionally emerge from relative obscurity to wreak total havoc on the occasional female celebrity, but it’s a little more rare. Sanders and Kristen Stewart had the affair that rocked 2012, resulting in a deluge of gossip, half-truths, and whole lies. Now that the dust has settled, Stewart and Robert Pattinson have broken up (if they were ever dating to begin with) as have Sanders and his model wife of over 10 years, Liberty Ross. The best thing about Sanders’ affair is that it involved the four shyest people in Hollywood. Nobody gave a single interview, tweet, or witty rejoinder. The complete radio silence was so deafening, even our gossip litmus tester Page Mackinley hard a hard time sorting through all the reports.

Sanders has since lost the Snow White sequel and though he is currently “attached” to two other films, his career is pretty uncertain, or at least, stalled. Worse, no one really remembers who he is.

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