Nancy Cunningham's account was revealed in a series of interviews with nationally known author Kitty Kelley, whose article was published yesterday in the online edition of The New Republic.

Cunningham's extensive comments come as her legal fight with the U.S. Attorney's Office over a share of the proceeds from the sale of the family's Rancho Santa Fe house appears headed to a conclusion that would permit her to keep some of the money.

“We hope the case will be settled on Sept. 8,” said Douglas Brown, the lawyer representing Cunningham in the forfeiture case. He said he has a settlement conference scheduled that day with the magistrate judge in U.S. District Court.

In the interviews, the 54-year-old Cunningham laments the abrupt change in her life wrought by the scandal in which her husband admitted accepting more than $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors. Instead of her five-bedroom, eight-bathroom Rancho Santa Fe home, she now lives with her 87-year-old mother in a small bungalow in an unspecified San Diego neighborhood described by one of her lawyers as “a real dump,” according to the article.

Her bitterness toward the former congressman is clear, most obviously from her insistence on referring to her estranged spouse as “Mr. Cunningham.” She told Kelley: “It's mentally distancing. As far as I'm concerned, he no longer really exists.”

She also discloses one fact that she had fought to keep secret for 30 years, stating that her husband was so troubled by his memories of the Vietnam War that he slept with a weapon at hand.

“When we first married, he slept with a knife under his pillow,” Cunningham said. “Well, the knife graduated to a loaded gun.”

She had first made that allegation when filing for divorce in 1976. But after reconciling with him, she had the filing sealed so it wouldn't hurt his political career. After the scandal broke and The San Diego Union-Tribune  sued to have the papers unsealed, she pleaded – successfully – with a judge to keep the statement about the weapons secret.

Perhaps the most surprising part of the article is her disclosure that on the night before Cunningham was sentenced, he dropped off a duffel bag with laundry and – unexpectedly – nearly $32,000 in $20 and $100 bills in plastic bags.

James Macy, another of Nancy Cunningham's lawyers, said the congressman had arranged to drop off several suitcases and two duffel bags to have his wife hold as his personal belongings while he was in prison. Macy said the money was found when he started to inventory the belongings.

He said he notified the U.S. attorney of the cash “so they wouldn't think money was being laundered” and has put it in “safekeeping.” He added, “I subsequently believe that that money wasn't from a tainted source.”

Cunningham said she has stopped taking many of her husband's calls from prison, but revealed that he now “claims he's innocent, that he's been railroaded by the government, that he shouldn't be in prison. He says he signed the plea agreement under duress.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Phillip Halpern, one of three prosecutors in the Cunningham case, declined to comment on Nancy Cunningham's remarks, saying he could not talk about an ongoing investigation.