Sheehy Phone Scandal: Nebraska Lt. Gov. 2,300 Calls to Women Are Uncovered

Nebraska Lieutenant Governor Rick Sheehy suddenly resigned from office Saturday after records revealed he made thousands of phone calls with his state issued phone to four women other than his wife, one of the women admits to having an affair with Sheehy, the Omaha World-Herald reports.

"I had trusted him, and that trust was broken," said Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman during the resignation announcement. The scandal has come as a deep disappointment to Heineman who picked Sheehy as his running mate in 2006. Sheehy, a republican, received Heineman's endorsement and was the front-runner for the 2014 gubernatorial election.

Now, 53-year-old Sheehy's political future is in doubt, as it has become public that he made roughly 2,300 phone calls, many of them over an hour long, to four women he was keeping a secret relationship with. The report says a majority of the calls were made before July 2012, when his wife, Connie Sheehy, filed for divorce. The divorce has not been finalized. The two were married for nearly 29 years.

Two of the four women Sheehy was calling were elected officials in Nebraska. One of them, a doctor, said she had an affair with Sheehy that lasted four years. The other, a former school board president, declined to comment, the report says. The other two women live out of state and said their relationship with Sheehy was not sexual.

Most of the calls were made outside of Sheehy's office hours, the report says, and took place from hotel rooms when Sheehy was traveling on state business. The report adds that the remaining calls appear to have been made from his car as Sheehy drove to his office at the State Capitol in Lincoln.

The World-Herald also reports that when attempting to speak with Sheehy on Friday morning about the phone records he said he was preoccupied and unavailalbe. But he text the reporters working on the story and asked on Friday night if the story was written "already." 

The following morning, he handed in his resignation.

In July 2011, Sheehy called Ehresman on 27 out of 31 days, talking for 852 minutes in 102 conversations. He also called Hatcher 18 times that month, talking for 104 minutes.

By comparison, he exchanged cellphone calls with his wife 14 times that month, and none of the calls lasted longer than 5 minutes.