Train Wrecks: McGreevey v. McGreevey
“I think he knew in his heart of hearts at the time — he needed to get a wife, and he went and got one. And I think he really used her,” says a former friend of the couple. “But I don’t think she was an unwitting partner. She probably knew something was up with this guy.”
SCANDAL IS THE fuel that feeds our 24-hour news cycle today, and Jim McGreevey’s confession that he had a secret gay lover, had hired this lover for a homeland security post he wasn’t qualified for, and had been blackmailed by this lover, forcing him to resign his office in August 2004, was the media equivalent of a tractor-trailer of gasoline. Everyone seemed aghast except the governor himself, who proudly declared his gayness as Dina stood by his side in a powder-blue St. John suit, her terrible frozen smile coming off as a sad impersonation of the Joker squaring off against Batman.
Splashes of gasoline have continued to stoke the story, perhaps the biggest being Teddy Pedersen, part of the cabal of good-looking young men who were members of the McGreevey political posse and whom Dina later labeled “The Lost Boys.” (Signaling the coming political apocalypse, a month before McGreevey resigned, the Record of Bergen County ran an exposé on the Lost Boys: “NJ Governor James E. McGreevey Hires a Dozen ‘Pretty Boys’; Big Jobs, No Experience Needed.”)
If Teddy is to be believed, he regularly hopped into bed with Jim and Dina for threesomes, assignations they eventually dubbed “Friday-night specials,” according to him. In an interview with the Star-Ledger in March, Pedersen, now 29 and a real estate developer, claimed the trio would go out to eat at a local TGI Friday’s, then retreat to McGreevey’s condo for sex. These exploits don’t appear in either Jim’s or Dina’s memoirs, though Pedersen has given a sealed deposition in the divorce case. Dina denies the threesomes ever happened, a view shared by people who know her. “Frankly, I think she’s a prude,” says one of them. “Look, you can’t always tell what someone is like in bed. But it’s like some people are good huggers, and others are barely out of the freezer. Dina is a chin-to-chin toucher by way of greeting. Never mind hot — she’s not warm. She would be a very odd person to have a threesome.”
Which raises one final question: Who cares? In the almost four years since the resignation, as the McGreeveys have squared off — in court, in the media, and, ironically, given their fight over where to drop off Jacqueline, on the shelves of Barnes & Noble — to each get their version of their ridiculous marriage accepted as the official one, the second rule of scandal has surfaced: Even in America, there’s a point where we’ve had enough. (Heard from Britney lately? My point exactly.) Jim’s book quickly fell off the best-seller list; Dina’s never made it there at all.
Dina’s seemingly dazed appearance on Larry King Live following the Eliot Spitzer sexcapade in March (Silda Spitzer having had her own awful turn at the podium with her husband) seemed to somehow put an exclamation point on all the McGreevey fatigue. Speaking in her flat mouthful-of-mashed-potatoes voice, Dina reiterated the Dina canon: Jim married me for political gain, Jim never loved me, Jim’s resignation was “as if he were making another political speech during a campaign season.”
