Guest Post by Morbo
Richard Mellon Scaife is a right-wing billionaire newspaper publisher in Pennsylvania who really, really hates Bill Clinton.
Scaife hates Clinton so much that throughout the 1990s he poured millions into an “Arkansas Project” designed to dig up dirt on Clinton. Thanks to Scaife, the nation was periodically distracted by numerous phony “scandals” during the Clinton years (“Troopergate,” Paula Jones, etc.). Scaife even hired a writer, Christopher Ruddy, to inflate the sad suicide of Vince Foster into a full blown conspiracy theory. Ruddy’s scribblings appeared regularly in Scaife’s newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
Why did Scaife do these things? It must be because he’s an upstanding man of great moral virtue who was outraged by tales of Clinton’s womanizing, right?
Wrong. Scaife is currently embroiled in a messy divorce, and court documents that have come to light indicate that he’s quite the sex machine himself — especially for a man of 75.
Scaife’s wife, Margaret Ritchie Battle Scaife, claims that she and her husband split in December of 2005 after she caught him in an extra-marital affair. Scaife denies this, claiming the couple called it quits 10 months earlier. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette picks up the story:
The Scaifes’ marital troubles first gained public attention on Dec. 22, 2005, with what Mrs. Scaife’s lawyers characterize in their brief as “cruel, calculated acts toward Wife by Husband as punishment for her detection” of Mr. Scaife’s alleged affair.
“On December 22nd in the late afternoon, Wife, in an attempt to confirm Husband’s ongoing affair, appeared at the home of her Husband, peered in his residence window to confirm” whether the other woman was with Mr. Scaife. “Wife was arrested under an absurd trespass charge, handcuffed and transported to the County Jail, where she was incarcerated overnight in a grim holding cell,” Mrs. Scaife’s attorneys wrote. The charges were later dismissed but, in the words of Mrs. Scaife’s brief, “The marriage was over!”
So, according to these documents, Scaife’s wife caught him in flagrante delicto and he called the cops and had her carted off to jail. This is a real family values guy! In light of this, would it surprise you to learn that Scaife took up with Ritchie in the early 1980s while Scaife was still married to his first wife? So the man is, Newt Gingrich-like, a serial adulterer.
I’m getting so tired of these hypocrites. Sure, what Bill Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky was wrong. But Clinton took his medicine, apologized to his wife, sought counseling and stayed with his spouse. (Isn’t that what the Religious Right wants you to do in cases like this?) Scaife, by contrast, just follows his overactive glands from one woman to another.
The Post-Gazette story contains lots of other juicy items, including the Scaifes’ fight over a dog and information about how Scaife shelters his riches to avoid paying taxes. Read it and be amused and disgusted. One can only hope that now that all of this has come to light, Scaife will decide to zip it — first his pants, then his mouth.
A little footnote to this saga: Because Scaife is a zillionaire, he was able to persuade a local judge to seal the records related to his divorce. But an employee at the Allegheny County Courthouse made a mistake, and the documents were, for a few days, publicly available online. The Post-Gazette found them there and ran the story.
Scaife is throwing a fit, and his attorneys are demanding that the newspaper return all documents related to the divorce. To its credit, the Post-Gazette has told Scaife to stuff it and responded by posting all of the divorce documents on its website. It’s good to know some folks in the mainstream media do still occasionally show some backbone.