Newt Gingrich’s ex-wife revealed for the first time today that the GOP presidential hopeful had asked for an open marriage so that he could have a wife and a mistress.
Marianne Gingrich, his second wife, said she wanted American voters to know his true moral character. There have been fears that her explosive television interview could end her former partner’s campaign for the White House.
Regarding the claims, Marianne told ABC: “And I just stared at him and he said, ‘Callista doesn’t care what I do.’ He wanted an open marriage and I refused.”
As of early Thursday morning, ABC News had not announced when it will air the interview, but it will presumably be Thursday or Friday night, on the eve of the South Carolina primary on Saturday.
Marianne Gingrich’s last interview was with Esquire, for an article published in August 2010. What was apparent then was that she has neither forgiven nor forgotten. She has obviously timed this interview so that it will air just before a potentially make or break primary in a state that is hotbed of Republican “values voters.”
In the 2010 interview, Marianne Gingrich confirmed one of the more paradoxical rumors about Newt’s marital history.
Nearly everyone knows that when Gingrich famously broke up with his first wife, Jackie, in 1981, she was being treated for cancer. He had already proposed to Marianne Ginther when he gave Jackie the news, and he and Marianne were married six months later.
What is less well known is that nearly two decades later, when Gingrich, then 56, decided to divorce Marianne so he could marry Callista Bisek, a 33-year-old Capitol Hill staffer, Marianne had just received a serious diagnosis of her own:
After going to the doctor for a mysterious tingling in her hand, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
Early in May, she went out to Ohio for her mother’s birthday. A day and a half went by and Newt didn’t return her calls, which was strange. They always talked every day, often ten times a day, so she was frantic by the time he called to say he needed to talk to her.
“About what?”
He wanted to talk in person, he said.
“I said, ‘No, we need to talk now.'”
He went quiet.
“There’s somebody else, isn’t there?”
She kind of guessed it, of course. Women usually do. But did she know the woman was in her apartment, eating off her plates, sleeping in her bed?
She called a minister they both trusted. He came over to the house the next day and worked with them the whole weekend, but Gingrich just kept saying she was a Jaguar and all he wanted was a Chevrolet. “‘I can’t handle a Jaguar right now.’ He said that many times. ‘All I want is a Chevrolet.'”
Callista may have been a Chevrolet then, but now that she has a $500,000 revolving credit account at Tiffany’s she appears to have transformed herself into a Bentley.
While he was negotiating the transition from his second wife to third, Gingrich was unfazed by the prospect of being publicly revealed as a class-A hypocrite, according to Marianne in 2010:
[Newt had] just returned from Erie, Pennsylvania, where he’d given a speech full of high sentiments about compassion and family values.
The next night, they sat talking out on their back patio in Georgia. She said, “How do you give that speech and do what you’re doing?”
“It doesn’t matter what I do,” he answered. “People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.”
When they got to court, Gingrich refused to cooperate with basic discovery. Marianne and her lawyer knew from a Washington Post gossip column that Gingrich had bought Bisek a $450 bottle of wine, for example, but he refused to provide receipts or answer any other questions about their relationship.
Then Gingrich made a baffling move. Because Bisek had refused to be deposed by Marianne’s attorney, Newt had his own attorney depose her, after which the attorney held a press conference and announced that she had confessed to a six-year affair with Gingrich. He had also told the press that he and Marianne had an understanding.
“Right,” Marianne says now.
That was not true?
“Of course not. It’s silly.”
So in 2000, Marianne — along with the rest of us — learned that the affair between Newt and Callista had been going on for six years, meaning since 1994. That was one year before political columnists whispered about the speaker having a new “favorite breakfast companion,” two years before Speaker Gingrich, who was actively engaged in adultery, made himself a champion of “traditional marriage” by ramming the Defense of Marriage Act through Congress and four years before he led the persecution and impeachment of Pres. Clinton for having an friends-with-benefits affair with a staffer, while he himself was engaged in a long-term affair with a staffer.
Another interesting item in Marianne Gingrich’s’s 2010 interview is an inference that the Clinton team found out about Newt’s affair with Callista while the speaker was driving the investigations into the Monica Lewinsky scandal:
One night, Marianne says, Bill Clinton called from the White House. She answered the phone and the president asked if he could please speak to her husband. Could the Speaker come over immediately? After he hung up, Newt summoned his driver and went in the back door to the Oval Office. During that meeting, he would tell her later, Clinton laid it out for him: “You’re a lot like me,” he told him.
Whatever else happened at that meeting, Newt Gingrich was muzzled in the critical run-up to the ’98 midterms. Three weeks before the election, Gingrich got a visit from Kenneth Duberstein, a senior Republican who had served as chief of staff to Ronald Reagan. “He says, ‘What’s going on? We’re gonna lose seats if something doesn’t change.’ ” Marianne jumped in, too. “I asked Newt, ‘What are you doing? Why aren’t we out there blasting them?'”
This was his true turning point, she believes. As his personal failures and his political contradictions closed in on him, she began to entertain fears about his fundamental decency. “I used to tell him I don’t care if you lose Congress as long as you’re standing for what you believe in and what we’ve worked for — as long as you don’t sell out,” she says. “But he wanted the life he wanted. You can call it opulent. You can call it self-indulgent. You can call it anything you want to. But that’s not me.”
There is a chance that ABC’s airing this interview with Marianne Gingrich so close to the South Carolina primary could actually end up helping Gingrich — or at least not hurting him as much as his opponents might wish.
Case in point: During the final week of the recall election against California Gov. Gray Davis, in 2003, the Los Angeles Times ran an exhaustively vetted story in which numerous women in the United States and Great Britain asserted that Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican frontrunner for Davis’ seat, had fondled, groped or otherwise sexually harassed them.
The timing of the article actually appeared to rally independent male voters to Schwarzenneger, who won the election with 48.5 percent of the vote.
Assuming ABC News airs the interview with Marianne Gingrich on Nightline tonight or tomorrow, whether it has an effect on the voting on Saturday will largely depend on how Republican women in South Carolina view what the former Mrs. Gingrich has to say.
I think voters have every right to hear what this woman has to say about a man who wants to be POTUS, but I’m not completely cool with ABC running it a day or two before an important primary.