Nicola Sturgeon said she was “deceived, betrayed and lied to” by her estranged husband, Peter Murrell, as he embezzled hundreds of thousands of pounds from the SNP.

The former first minister told an audience in Ireland at her first public appearance since Murrell pleaded guilty that she was coming to terms with being married to someone she “did not know at all”, and acknowledged people would have questions.

Sturgeon, 55, said she was having “probably the worst week” of her life and she would probably need to sit with a therapist. “This is a long-winded way of saying I am not OK”, she said, but insisted, “I will be OK, I am a strong, resilient person.”

Murrell has been remanded in custody after pleading guilty at the high court in Edinburgh on Monday to embezzling £400,310.65 from the SNP between 2010 and 2022, spending the cash on items including a motorhome, cars, expensive watches and a telescope.

Sturgeon, who was at Listowel Writers’ Week in County Kerry to promote her memoir, has consistently denied any knowledge of Murrell’s crimes and was not charged after a police investigation.

She said: “I know there are questions, I understand that. I would probably be asking as well if I was looking in from the outside on somebody else. ‘How can she not have known?’

“And I think underlying that question there is a big misassumption, which is that I knew anything about it, or that I knew all about it. I think everybody assumes that all of this stuff that it turns out my former husband was buying I knew about it, I just didn’t question how he paid for it.

“As recently as Monday I was reading about things in the newspapers for the first time, things that I had never seen, I didn’t know about. It wasn’t just that I didn’t question where they came from.”

Sturgeon added: “The last few years have had some tough ones for me, but this one, I think, surpasses all of them.”

The former SNP leader stressed she had been “completely exonerated” after a “two-year-long, very forensic police investigation” during which police officers searched the home she and Murrell, 61, had shared.

In 2023, Sturgeon was also arrested and questioned by police as part of the inquiry, and she said she had “fully cooperated” with Police Scotland.

Asked about reports she said “no comment” to officers’ questions, she insisted: “I did answer Police Scotland’s questions.”

She continued: “I followed the advice of my lawyer in a very stressful situation. I think most people would follow the advice of their lawyer.”

Sturgeon added that after the police interview she “sent a fully detailed written response to the questions that the police had put to me”, saying she “never heard any more from them for two years until they told me I was cleared”.

The former SNP leader said she was coming to terms with having “spent many years married to somebody that, as it turns out, I obviously didn’t know at all”.

She added: “It’s a really painful truth to process, and I think I’m only in the very early stages of processing it. And then to be in a position of such public turmoil myself makes that even harder.”

But Sturgeon said she wanted “people to hear from me my side of this”, accepting “there are questions”.