Martha Mitchell, wife of Nixon’s attorney general who ordered the break-in at the scandal’s heart, was drugged and kidnapped

The phone call came five days after the Watergate break-in. Martha Mitchell began telling a reporter that she would leave her husband, former US attorney general John Mitchell, if he did not quit the “dirty business” of politics.

But the conversation ended abruptly and Mitchell was heard shouting: “You just get away – get away!” Then the line went dead. She had been accosted by a former FBI agent and would be forcibly tranquilized and held captive for days.

Mitchell would also see her reputation destroyed by loyalists to the then president, Richard Nixon, because of what she knew about Watergate – dooming her to become one of the hidden figures of the biggest political scandal of the 20th century.

That is now about to change. The 1970s celebrity socialite will next month be played by the Hollywood actor Julia Roberts in Gaslit, an eight-part TV drama co-starring Sean Penn as John Mitchell and Dan Stevens as the White House counsel, John Dean.

The series on America’s Starz network – riding a wave of books, exhibitions and films marking the 50th anniversary of the break‐in and burglary of the Democratic national headquarters at the Watergate complex – illuminates the mostly forgotten role of a woman who paid a tragic price for trying to raise the alarm about Nixon’s skulduggery.

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