smoking bednoun.
Evidence of sexual misconduct by a politician or other public figure.
Example Citation:
Similarly, most of the press long kept rumors of Gary Hart's alleged philandering out of print, but when Hart, the front-runner for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, "spends the night in a townhouse with a woman not his wife, you print it because it's news," Coffey says. The press then got caught up in a feeding frenzy over Hart's sex life, though, with reporters racing each other to see who could find the next smoking bed.
—David Shaw, "Stumbling over sex in the press," Los Angeles Times, August 18, 1991
Notes:
This term is a play on the phrase smoking gun, conclusive evidence or proof, especially of some immoral or illegal activity (which the OED dates to 1894).
