Gingrich Account of Divorce Disputed by Aides

By Julie Bykowicz - Dec 28, 2011 5:38 AM GMT+0700

Newt Gingrich, who hoped to put his personal past behind him by saying he’d made mistakes, has revived the issue with questionable claims about the details of his first divorce.

The Republican presidential candidate insists that it was his then-wife, Jackie Battley, who sought a divorce in 1980. After court records showed he filed the action, the Gingrich campaign said he’d done so at her request. Court documents, Gingrich’s own previous explanations and the recollections of two former Gingrich aides refute his current claim.

“It’s totally untrue that she wanted the divorce, and Newt knows that,” Dot Crews, who worked in the former Georgia congressman’s office from 1979 to 1984, said in a telephone interview today. Crews, 80, recalled Gingrich confiding during a car ride in his home district that he’d decided to file for divorce.

“He talks about redemption, and then he lies like this?” Crews said.

Gingrich, 68, has largely sidestepped specific questions about his two divorces as he campaigns for president, focusing on his current marriage to Callista Gingrich. An online column in May by daughter Jackie Gingrich Cushman, referenced on his campaign website, asserted her mother had asked for the divorce. The elder Jackie, 75, couldn’t be reached for comment.

‘30 Years Old’

Reporters today asked Gingrich, the former U.S. House speaker, to square the description of the divorce as her idea with divorce papers indicating it was his.

“It’s 30 years old,” Gingrich said during a stop in Dubuque, Iowa. “You can read my younger daughter’s column and talk to her. She’s covered it, I think, more than adequately, and that’s all I’m going to say on that.”

R.C. Hammond, Gingrich’s campaign spokesman, also referred to the daughter’s column as the definitive account of the divorce. “You can’t get much closer to the source than that,” he said in a telephone interview today. “The family has put this behind them.”

Hammond questioned whether aides interviewed by Bloomberg News were real Gingrich employees; House records show they were.

After a CNN reporter showed the Gingrich campaign divorce documents, also obtained by Bloomberg, that indicate Newt Gingrich filed for divorce, Hammond said Gingrich had done so at his first wife's request.

On May 7, days before Gingrich announced he’d seek the Republican presidential nomination, Jackie Gingrich Cushman wrote in a creators.com column headlined “Setting the Record Straight” that her mother had “requested” the divorce.

Wife’s Responses

Court documents show Newt Gingrich filed for divorce on July 5, 1980. Jackie Gingrich “has adequate and ample grounds for divorce” and “does not desire one at this time,” according to her answer to the divorce filing.

In another filing, she stated that she “does not admit that this marriage is irretrievably broken.” The documents also show the court had to force Gingrich to pay the required amount of support during and after the divorce proceedings.

Gingrich’s earlier statements show he wanted the divorce -- contradicting his more recent statements.

“When you’ve been talking about divorce for 11 years and you’ve gone to a marriage counselor, and the other person doesn’t want the divorce, I’m not sure there is any sensitive way to handle it,” The Washington Post quoted Gingrich as saying in a January 3, 1985, article. “There were long periods in my marriage when I was in enormous pain.”

Former Aides’ Accounts

Two former Gingrich staff members described in recent interviews how their onetime boss had informed them about his decision to divorce his first wife.

He was first elected to congress in 1978, after two unsuccessful campaigns.

Dolores Adamson, a staff assistant in the congressman’s Georgia office from 1980-1983 whose name was Shanks at the time, said she picked him up at an airport in Georgia after he flew in from Washington.

They were having lunch at a Steak and Ale restaurant when he told her he’d decided to get divorced and wanted her help informing other staff members and constituents.

Adamson said he told her it’s something he had to do.

“He said he was going to the hospital to talk to his wife about the terms,” Adamson said.

She said she later asked him why he wanted the divorce. “Jackie can’t run uphill,” Mrs. Adamson recalled him saying, which she took to mean that his wife was overweight and ill, not a plus for an aspiring national politician.

Today, retired and living in St. Augustine, Florida, Adamson is a harsh critic of Gingrich. “I get very angry at his lies,” she said. “He manipulates -- whatever he wants he can get.”

Confiding

Crews, who worked for Gingrich for 10 years, said she remembers him pulling employees aside to tell them privately about his divorce plans.

Her exchange with him occurred in a car, she said. “He said, ‘I wanted to tell you before you heard it from somebody else,’” she said. She remembers telling him he could lose his congressional seat over a divorce, to which he matter-of-factly replied he would return to teaching.

Crews said she was stunned to see recent media accounts in which the Gingrich campaign claimed it was his first wife who sought the divorce.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she said. “It’s just about the biggest mistake they could make to say these things because they are so easy to check up on.”

As for whether she’ll vote for her former boss: “I would prefer that the Republicans nominate someone else.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Julie Bykowicz in Washington at jbykowicz@bloomberg.net; Albert Hunt in Washington at ahunt1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva at msilva34@bloomberg.net