Years-old divorce records detailing the split between Arizona Democratic Senate candidate Ruben Gallego and Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego have been released after the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that they could no longer be kept sealed on Wednesday.
While the records do not demonstrate evidence of infidelity or domestic abuse within the marriage, Ruben Gallego had hoped to keep them private in order to avoid personal scrutiny as his race for the Senate against Republican Kari Lake enters its eleventh hour.
Both Ruben and Kate Gallego have blamed Republican Senate hopeful Kari Lake for directing scrutiny towards their divorce and indirectly causing the publication of their divorce records, an accusation Lake has denied.
"We demand an apology from Kari Lake for lying about our family and the circumstances of our divorce," they said in a joint statement. "She will stop at nothing to score a cheap political point — even if it means endangering the privacy and well-being of our young son. We have long put our child before all else and will continue to do so."
"I hope everybody who says they're going to vote for him will hold off until we get the details about why he ran off on his wife when she was nine-months pregnant," Lake said on KTAR-FM. "We don't know if it was spousal abuse."
The records, from 2016, show that Democrat Ruben Gallego filed for divorce from Kate Gallego ahead of the birth of their son, stating that their marriage was "irretrievably broken," a commonplace legal term in Arizona. They largely determine how the two intended to co-parent their son.
The records were unsealed following a lawsuit filed by conservative journalism website Washington Free Beacon, which argued that divorce records were normally unsealed in Arizona and that Arizona voters deserved transparency from Ruben Gallego as he made his bid for Senate.
"I've reviewed this entire file multiple times now. I think everyone's going to be rather deflated with the results of it," said Yavapai Superior Court Judge John Napper, who originally presided over the Free Beacon's case, in a video obtained by 12 News. "This is a, well, I'm not a politician, and maybe this will be very, very important information. But this looks to me like one of the most garden-variety divorce files I have ever seen."
Gallego has maintained a consistent lead over Lake as the election fast approaches, with polling from FiveThirtyEight giving him 52% of the vote in Arizona, 12 points ahead of Lake.
© 2024 Latin Times. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
