For months, Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake has speculated that her opponent, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), had used the courts to hide \u201csomething really, really bad\u201d in his divorce from Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego. But on Thursday, an Arizona court unsealed most of the case file \u2014 revealing what one judge called \u201cone of the most garden-variety divorce files I have ever seen.\u201d<\/p>\n
The records were made public following a 10-month-long legal battle between the Gallegos and the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication that filed a lawsuit earlier this year to unseal them. The partially redacted documents show Gallego filed a petition to dissolve the marriage on Dec. 14, 2016 \u2014 shortly before the birth of their son \u2014 claiming that his marriage was \u201cirretrievably broken.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lake and Gallego are locked in a heated race to replace Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I) \u2014 and one that could help determine the balance of power in the Senate in 2025. With polls showing Gallego leading, Lake and her allies have repeatedly sought to paint Gallego\u2019s personal life in a negative context \u2014 running ads describing him as a \u201cdeadbeat dad\u201d and alleging his divorce records contain a \u201cmassive story.\u201d<\/p>\n
In an interview with The Washington Post last year, Gallego attributed the divorce to his post-traumatic stress disorder from serving in the Iraq War. The documents, however, offer little insight into why the Gallegos\u2019 marriage fell apart. Instead, the 465 pages that were unsealed Thursday by the Yavapai County Superior Court detail standard divorce proceedings, including the dividing of property and assets, as well as custody and child support arrangements. They also include no details of any illegal activity or infidelity and expressly state that no physical abuse had occurred.<\/p>\n
Following the documents\u2019 release, the Gallegos blasted Lake and demanded an apology \u201cfor lying about our family and the circumstances of our divorce,\u201d the former couple wrote in a joint statement.<\/p>\n
Lake, they added, \u201cwill stop at nothing to score a cheap political point \u2014 even if it means endangering the privacy and well-being of our young son.\u201d<\/p>\n
Caroline Wren, a senior adviser to Lake, said in a statement to The Post that \u201cit\u2019s bizarre that Ruben Gallego would demand an apology from Kari Lake for his appalling behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone knows Kari Lake had nothing to do with this lawsuit, which was filed by an independent media outlet, however we do find the revelations from the divorce records to be shocking, especially considering Ruben Gallego is spending millions on advertising claiming to want to protect women, yet he served his unsuspecting wife with divorce papers when she was days away from giving birth, and even demanded she pay his attorney\u2019s fees!\u201d Wren wrote. \u201cIf Ruben Gallego will turn his back on his pregnant wife days before she gives birth, he will turn his back on Arizona.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s unclear whether Kate Gallego was completely blindsided as the Lake campaign has claimed. In Gallego\u2019s petition to seal the record, his attorney acknowledged that Kate Gallego had not yet been served but said the couple had been \u201cengaged in informal discussions about some of the substantive issues in this matter.\u201d His attorney also added that Kate Gallego\u2019s legal counsel stated that she would not oppose the motion to seal the files.<\/p>\n
The Gallegos\u2019 divorce was finalized in 2017. Last year, Kate Gallego publicly endorsed her former husband\u2019s Senate campaign.<\/p>\n
The former couple had gone to great lengths to keep the records private \u2014 with Gallego filing the petition for divorce in a county 100 miles away from Phoenix, where they lived, and asking a judge to seal the entire file. Divorce records in Arizona are typically open to the public. But a judge found that the privacy interests of Ruben and Kate Gallego \u2014 then, respectively, a new congressman and Phoenix City Council member \u2014 outweighed the state\u2019s open records policy.<\/p>\n
However, in January, the Free Beacon petitioned the court to make the records public, as they \u201creflect the character and behavior of a public figure holding and running for federal office,\u201d according to legal documents. The Gallegos, in response, fought to prevent the release of the records entirely and, later, to redact portions of the divorce filings.<\/p>\n
The legal battle continued through the appeals court. And, on Wednesday, the Arizona Supreme Court rejected a request by the Gallegos to keep the redacted records from the public sphere.<\/p>\n
The Yavapai County Superior Court judge who had first ordered the records unsealed agreed to redact some parts of the divorce filings, including details about their son and financial information.<\/p>\n
The rest, he ruled, ought to be public \u2014 though, he predicted in June that \u201ceveryone\u2019s going to be rather deflated\u201d by its contents after much hype.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
For months, Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake has speculated that her opponent, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), had used the courts to hide \u201csomething really, really bad\u201d in his divorce from Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego. But on Thursday, an Arizona court unsealed most of the case file \u2014 revealing what one judge called \u201cone of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":11294,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}