Ex-wife drops bomb on Gingrich campaign

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This article was published 20/01/2012 (5209 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Newt Gingrich’s scandalous marital past is coming back to haunt him two days before the all-important primary in the socially conservative, family-values state of South Carolina.

The second of Gingrich’s three wives, Marianne, told ABC’s Nightline on Thursday that her ex-husband asked her for an “open marriage” that would allow him to carry on with Callista Bisek, the congressional aide he was bedding behind her back.

She refused, and Gingrich later married Bisek.

Marianne Gingrich has come forward now, she said in the interview, because she believes her former spouse of 18 years lacks the moral character to serve as president of the United States.

When he admitted to a six-year affair with Bisek, and made his request to remain married with a mistress on the side, Marianne Gingrich said she was stunned.

“I just stared at him and he said: ‘Callista doesn’t care what I do,’ ” she said in her first television interview since their 1999 divorce.

“He wanted an open marriage and I refused.”

Newt Gingrich later denied he asked for an open marriage. He also angrily denounced CNN’s John King, the moderator of Thursday night’s Republican debate, for raising the issue.

Gingrich blasted what he called the “destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media.”

Marianne Gingrich, a self-described conservative Republican, added she was shocked to learn he’d conducted his long affair with Bisek “in my bedroom in our apartment in Washington.”

“He always called me at night,” she recalled, “and always ended with ‘I love you.’ Well, she was listening.”

In an interview last year with Esquire, Marianne Gingrich offered some insight into her ex’s public and private proclamations.

“He believes that what he says in public and how he lives don’t have to be connected,” she said.

Marianne Gingrich is levelling her allegations as a batch of new polls suggest Gingrich is gaining ground on front-runner Mitt Romney in South Carolina.

The state’s Republican primary voters, 60 per cent of them evangelicals, are weighing their options in advance of Saturday’s contest.

Gingrich has attempted to portray himself as the socially conservative alternative to Romney, who’s been married to the same woman for 42 years. It’s a reinvention that has often seemed laughable, in particular when Gingrich has opined about the sanctity of matrimony in explaining his opposition to same-sex marriage.

The country’s leading evangelicals apparently haven’t bought it, recently snubbing Gingrich to throw their support behind former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. They said Gingrich has too mjuch personal baggage.

Marianne Gingrich has said Gingrich proposed to her within weeks of meeting her and before his 1981 divorce was final from his first wife, his high-school geometry teacher seven years older than him. Newt and Marianne walked down the aisle six months later.

But 18 years later, Gingrich was having an extra-marital affair with Bisek while pushing for former president Bill Clinton’s impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

— The Canadian Press