Posted: Fri, 28 May 2010 10:13 AM - 20,515 Readers

By: Luisita Lopez

If you're just about anywhere in this world, you know about the hell and fire that Sandra Bullock, America's sweetheart and Oscar winner, has been put through by her husband, Jesse James, the creep with the body tattoos and sleazy sexual appetites.

We've had weeks of Sandra and her newly adopted baby, Louis Bardo Bullock, on the covers of the entertainment weeklies -- Sandra holding up baby, Sandra cradling baby, Sandra in cool hat hugging baby, Sandra looking drained and skinny, but baby looking healthy and appropriately chubby.

There was one day last week when one of the gossip shows played the same nanosecond video of Sandra in Austin over and over. There was Sandra carrying her baby, walking to or from a black Range Rover, the license plate of which was blurred in the shot as if doing that would protect her privacy. The cameras have caught her, too, in New Orleans, near the mansion she owns there in the Garden District, where she might or might not live with her New Orleans-born son.

For weeks, maybe a month, Sandra kept the media at bay, hiding in her place in Los Angeles, while revelations about her husband's gross infidelities made headlines. It all came with pictures: Jesse James doing a Nazi salute, Michelle "Bombshell" McGee in a sexy outfit, doing what her nickname suggests.

There was, during this time that had to be a torment to Sandra, not a word or public sighting of her.

Then the breakthrough came: an exclusive People magazine cover story of a sweetly smiling and beatific Sandra holding up her baby. The picture -- the moment frozen in pop history -- evoked her Oscar-winning role as the Southerner Leigh Anne Touhy, who adopts a homeless black teenager in the film "The Blind Side."

It was one of the biggest-selling issues since the cover stories on the Jolie-Pitt babies.

Now, a bit late, comes Jesse James with his story, pleading for forgiveness and understanding.

He's all over the place, peddling excuses and apologies, reveling in psychodrama and fake choked-up tears. There's no holding back with this guy. He blames his sexual gluttony on the beatings he says he received at his father's hands (which his father denies).

Poor Jesse.

"I was a terrorized kid," he told ABC's Vicki Mabrey (who has made a bigger name for herself just by getting the interview). This was not "60 Minutes." This was a friendly platform handed to Jesse James to talk about his cheating heart.

"The struggle within myself for the things that I did ... to damage marriage and my life and everything else, it's all me," James said. Here and there, his eyes blinked nervously and misted over, the teardrops formed and rolled down his cheeks.

"It was me trying to self-sabotage my life."

Where do people learn to talk like that? "Self-sabotage my life" seems to come straight out of a flack's script. It's hard to tell what's more sickening, what he did to his marriage or how he wants to pass it off as aberrations of an abused child.

He's all shifty eyes and mealy mouth, lies dribbling out of him.

Why the heck did Sandra Bullock hook up with him?

She's glorious. Always is, always was. She's Miss Congeniality. She's beautiful, she's talented and rich and good.

They married in the Santa Ynez valley wine country, north of Los Angeles, on July 16, 2005. She was nearly 41 and he 35. She is a Southerner, born in Virginia, educated at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C. She'd had several boyfriends, but mainly she's had a stellar career, one of the most famous faces in the world, an actress that commands millions of dollars per film, a producer and philanthropist.

He'd been a professional bodyguard, owner of a motorcycle outfit called West Coast Choppers and former host of Discovery Channel's "Monster Garage."

She has homes in Austin, Los Angeles and New Orleans, but she is identified mostly with Austin, where she owns a restaurant, Bess Bistro, a bakery and floral shop, and a lavish house.

The wreck of their marriage was built-in there from the start. Solo successful woman in her 40s with plenty of money but no children meets handsome, tough. and protective guy with cute kids and divorced. Click!

Funny. Bullock spent years designing and building her dream home on Lake Austin. She soon moved out of her $7.5 million palatial mansion, after discovering the house was a potential deathtrap, she tore it down.

And so it is with her marriage.