All year long, Kari Lake has hinted that Ruben Gallego is using the courts to cover up something dark and disgusting in his divorce from Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego.
“What is Ruben Gallego hiding?” Lake asked in February.
And in March, in April and on through Wednesday, when the Arizona Supreme Court declined to keep the Gallegos’ divorce file sealed.
In campaign ads and in interviews, Lake has warned Arizona voters that Gallego was “hiding something BAD in these records.”
“He’s desperately trying to bury his divorce records, which many people suggest reveal some VERY troubling insight into his character,” Lake said in August. “What is Ruben hiding?”
Nothing much, as it turns out.
Ruben filed just before Kate gave birth
On Thursday, Gallego’s divorce files were unsealed — the result of the conservative Washington Free Beacon’s 10-month-old lawsuit to open the records and expose what Lake has teased all year.
The records tell us pretty much what we already knew.
Gallego filed for divorce just a few weeks before his wife gave birth to their son, saying their marriage was “irretrievably broken” — the boilerplate language commonly used in Arizona divorce cases.
Gallego asked that the filing be sealed, noting then-Phoenix Vice Mayor Kate Gallego hadn’t yet been served with divorce papers and was “likely to give birth any day.”
OK, that’s hardly a flattering picture of Ruben Gallego. But, other than his reason for requesting that his filing be shielded from public view, it’s also nothing we didn’t already know.
The Gallegos announced their coming divorce in December 2016, the same month it was filed.
The information in the divorce is nothing new
The Free Beacon on Thursday declared that Kate Gallego was “blindsided,” noting a February 2017 filing that said she was “without knowledge of information sufficient to form a belief” about her husband’s claim that the marriage could not be repaired.
If she was blindsided, that, too, is nothing new.
“It is painful when any marriage ends, and it is not something that I ever wanted or expected,” Kate Gallego wrote in announcing their split on Facebook in December 2016.
Opinion: Bad news for Lake. She’s lost the lawyers
Ruben Gallego has long connected the divorce to his post-traumatic stress disorder, the result of fierce fighting while deployed during the Iraq War in 2005.
Lake, meanwhile, has done her best all year long to paint the Marine combat veteran as some sort of monster — the sinister details of which would be spelled out once Gallego’s divorce records were unsealed.
“The people of Arizona deserve to know what kind of man he is before casting their ballot,” she said on Wednesday. “He’s hiding something bad.”
Lake figured Gallego was a monster. He wasn’t
Here’s what isn’t in the divorce filing.
No claims of domestic violence. No claims of clandestine affairs.
No haggling over the division of assets before the divorce was finalized in April 2017.
In fact, the Gallegos have remained friendly in the seven years since their divorce and co-parent their son. Each has endorsed the other’s campaign.
Yavapai County Judge John Napper, in his June ruling that the records should be unsealed, called the divorce case “one of the most garden-variety divorce files I have ever seen.”
The couple says they sought to keep the records private to protect their son.
As for Lake, who apparently thought the deep, dark secrets revealed in Gallego’s divorce file would be her ticket to the Senate — she’s suddenly gone silent.
Oh, she’s still busy reposting the manufactured gasps of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and others, rehashing what we already knew.
As for acknowledging the answer to all those questions about the deep, dark secrets he was supposedly hiding?
Maybe she’s working on an apology post?
Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) at @LaurieRobertsaz and on Threads at @LaurieRobertsaz.
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Opinion: Ruben Gallego divorce is not what Kari Lake imagined
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