The woman, identified as Maria Belen Chapur, wrote a letter to Fox News seeking to explain the events that led to the exposure of her affair with the Governor of South Carolina.
"My hotmail account was hacked around November 24th, through an old e-mail account under my name provided by an Argentine company," she said.
"I made my denouncement at that time at the Argentine company, where my old account was still opened, as did the denouncement at Hotmail. I was finally able to close down that old account and to recover by December 8th, my hacked Hotmail account, after answering a long questionnaire sent by Microsoft."
The affair was exposed after South Carolina newspaper The State received records of email exchanges between Sanford and Maria. Sanford, who had claimed that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, returned from a trip to Argentina last week and walked right into the controversy. He has since admitted the affair, and apologised to the public.
She also denied that the emails were hacked by a friend with whom she spent some time in Brazil. "This friend, as you could all well read in my recently published emails, is an excellent, respectable and honorable man incapable of making anything similar to that. Far away from being the author of this evil action he was instead another victim. In December 2008, the stolen e-mails were sent by the hacker to him as well as to the newspaper The State," she protested.
Belen Chapur is not the first public figure to complain of having their webmail account hacked. Sarah Palin's webmail was hacked by 20 year-old college student David Kernell, after he researched the answers to personal security questions that were designed to identify her, and was able to retrieve password.