Battling addiction and the humiliation of a highly publicized
altercation in a Newark hotel room with a former lover she met
in a rehab program, Alameda County Supervisor Nadia Lockyer
abruptly resigned Friday.

Despite Lockyer's tumultuous last few months and increasingly
bizarre behavior, her announcement Friday surprised even her
chief of staff, who learned about the resignation from news
reports as he worked in her office at the Alameda County
administration building.

Lockyer, the wife of state Treasurer Bill Lockyer, was a
political unknown in the Bay Area before her influential husband
funded most of the record $1.6 million spent on her 2010
supervisorial campaign.

Lockyer's resignation is the latest chapter in a lurid and murky
tale involving the high-profile political couple from Hayward
and allegations of sex tapes, blackmail, drug use and violence.
It started with a Feb. 3 incident in a Newark hotel room in
which she called police saying her former boyfriend, Stephen
Chikhani, assaulted her. She checked into an inpatient rehab
center shortly afterward.

Chikhani remains under investigation by the state attorney
general's office in connection with the alleged assault.

In her resignation letter Friday addressed to "constituents,
colleagues and friends," Nadia Lockyer, 40, said she could be a
"great mom" and a good supervisor but not while dealing with
"early recovery from addiction and the aftermath of
interpersonal violence."

"In AA and NA, days of sobriety are counted," Lockyer wrote. "In
motherhood, the number of days with a healthy level of stress
and tears should be too. While I can boast 77 days of sobriety
to this day, I can barely count to ten in the latter category.
For this, I owe my family, constituents, staff and colleagues a
huge apology."

Bill Lockyer, 70, is one of California's leading Democrats. He
was elected to the state Legislature in 1973 and later served as
state attorney general. He is exploring a run for the state
controller's office in 2014 when he is termed out of the
treasurer's job.

"I fully support Nadia's decision to step down as county
supervisor and focus on completing her recovery and caring for
our son," Bill Lockyer said Friday in a statement.

Nadia Lockyer did not mention her husband in her resignation
letter, saying she was leaving office in part to "focus on the
well-being of my child" and her recovery.

News to her staff

Her chief of staff, Ruben Briones, was listed as the contact
person on her resignation letter, which was circulating on
Internet news sites, but when The Chronicle asked Briones for
comment, he could not confirm the letter's authenticity and had
to make a few calls to see if his boss had indeed resigned.

County officials and her colleagues on the Board of Supervisors
also were caught off guard by Lockyer's resignation. Board
President Nate Miley said he asked Lockyer on Tuesday to resign.
She replied that she'd consider it over the next week.

"I told her the status quo is unacceptable," Miley said. "There
has been a lot of drama and a lot of distractions, and she needs
to focus on her personal life. She was doing a disservice to her
constituents, her staff and her family."

The supervisors meet Tuesday and have 60 days to appoint a
replacement.

Lockyer's brief political career has been pockmarked with
controversy. She ran for supervisor in a bitter race against
former state Sen. Liz Figueroa, who had casually dated Bill
Lockyer a decade earlier, before Nadia and Bill Lockyer were
married. Nadia Lockyer told The Chronicle during the race that,
"whenever I went anywhere, there were a lot of negative things
she would say about me," she said.

"I have no idea what she's talking about," Figueroa told The
Chronicle's Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross. "Anyone who knows me
knows that's just not me."

During that race, campaign materials were circulated in which
Nadia Lockyer falsely stated that she was a prosecutor. She
worked as the executive director of the Alameda County Family
Justice Center, a one-stop center for victims of domestic
violence and sexual abuse.

The root of Lockyer's recent trouble, however, stems from the
encounter with Chikhani, a man she met in 2010 while both were
in treatment, she for alcohol dependency and he for chemical
dependency.

The Chronicle reported in February that Bill Lockyer was sent a
sex tape of his wife with Chikhani some weeks before the hotel
incident. He concluded he was being blackmailed to allow their
relationship to continue and went to Alameda County District
Attorney Nancy O'Malley, a friend, to try to get a stay-away
order imposed.

'Place called addiction'

Nadia Lockyer went back to rehab again after that incident. But
after a month, she returned to work.

"I got myself in a place called addiction all by myself," Nadia
Lockyer wrote in her resignation letter Friday. "A decade of
nonstop trauma, pain and loss are my personal excuse. But this
time, this recent trauma is just too much and something I can't
ignore."

No one answered at the Lockyers' Hayward hills home Friday
afternoon. But Leona Fryer, a longtime Hayward hills resident
who is a neighbor of the Lockyers and who voted for Nadia
Lockyer and contributed to her campaign said: "She resigned.
That's what we wanted."

San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Matthai Kuruvila
contributed to this report.

Carolyn Jones and Joe Garofoli are San Francisco Chronicle staff
writers. Twitter: @joegarofoli. carolynjo...@sfchronicle.com,
jgarof...@sfchronicle.com