Train Wrecks: McGreevey v. McGreevey
All of which has everybody — everybody, it seems, except Jim and Dina McGreevey — asking a simple question: How? How did the dissolution of the marriage between the affable former governor and his stylish wife dissolve, so quickly and so virulently, into charges of unbridled ambition and Machiavellian emotional manipulation (that’s Dina pointing the finger at Jim), Paris Hilton consumerism and scorned-woman revenge (Jim, back at Dina), and, oh yeah, steamy Friday-night threesomes with their studly 20-year-old chauffeur? (More on that shortly.)
Among people who know them, there is an air of recoiling surprise that the McGreevey divorce turned so irrevocably, and unnecessarily, toxic. “I feel sorry for Dina, and I feel sorry for him,” says a mutual friend who knew the couple during their days in the governor’s mansion. “And I think the fact that neither of them has allowed grace or any sort of redemptive wave to roll over this drama is pathetic.”
Finding redemption can be tricky business when two people face a sudden, violent fork in the road and each goes down a different path, one happily skipping, the other staggering. That fork came during the press conference in Trenton at which Jim McGreevey announced he was leaving office and declared publicly, for the first time, “My truth is that I am a gay American.” Anyone who has ever come out of the closet will tell you that there ensues a stunning burst of exhilaration, of weight-off-the-shoulders freedom. But for Dina, the moment was exactly the opposite: As her husband took the first steps to a new identity and happily took a sledgehammer to his old one, he also took one to hers, with seemingly no thought given to the fact that she had no new life to run to — just an old one now shattered. And so it was in that moment on national television that the perfect storm, set in motion by Jim and Dina McGreevey on the night of his election to the governor’s office in 2001, erupted.
IF YOU WERE to spend a few days at the McGreevey divorce trial — and be glad you haven’t — what you’d see would be the worst elements of the reality-television culture that we’ve become. On the right side of the courtroom sits Jim, almost always in an ill-fitting navy suit, a red tie and bad rubber-soled shoes. He bounds into court each day with an aw-shucks enthusiasm that is almost jarring, as if the coach has just called him off the bench. He regularly chats up the jaded press corps, and if he notices their open disdain for both him and these proceedings, he never shows it. He then invariably grabs his leather-bound Bible — his prop of choice since announcing plans last year to become an Episcopal priest — adjusts his glasses, and drops into his role as novice divinity student at the plaintiff’s table.
