How Newt Stopped Marianne From Revealing Secrets the First Time

How Newt Stopped Marianne From Revealing Secrets the First Time
—By David Corn
| Thu Jan. 19, 2012 1:31 PM PST

~snip~
Gingrich's six-year-long extramarital tryst with Callista Bisek, a congressional aide at the time, is not news. But his alleged effort to define his own marriage as a union between a man and a woman and a woman had not been previously reported.

It's not much of a surprise that Marianne would lob this bombshell at this point. She and Newt went through an acrimonious divorce in 1999. Back then, as a recovering Newt-watcher, I covered some of those proceedings and on occasion spoke to Marianne. What was striking at the time was that Gingrich seemed to be the one acting vindictively in the proceedings. Marianne appeared to just want a clean exit (with the right amount of compensation). Here's part of a dispatch I wrote for Salon:

“We don’t know. We just don’t know. If you find out, let me know. It’s a mystery.” So said Marianne Gingrich, the soon-to-be ex-wife of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, when asked why she thought Newt was being a hard-ass in the divorce proceedings he initiated against her.

We were talking Tuesday morning in a courtroom in the Superior Court of Washington, minutes before the latest hearing in the case, and I remarked that it was hard to make sense of Newt’s scorched-earth approach to the divorce, which has already revealed his six-year-long extramarital affair with congressional aide Calista Bisek and tainted whatever was left of his image as a family-values Republican.