Another blogging conundrum. Do I mention Richard Mellon Scaife’s ugly divorce, or do I ignore what is arguably a private matter with no political relevance? Tipping the scales is Scaife’s destructive role in financing every right-wing cause imaginable, including funding the Arkansas Project, created, of course, to dig up dirt on the Clintons’ personal life.
And in this case, as Oliver Willis put it, “karma’s a bitch.”
Unfathomable but true, when Scaife (rhymes with safe) married his second wife, Margaret “Ritchie” Scaife, in 1991, he neglected to wall off a fortune that Forbes recently valued at $1.3 billion. This, to understate matters, is likely going to cost him, big time. As part of a temporary settlement, 60-year-old Ritchie Scaife is currently cashing an alimony check that at first glance will look like a typo: $725,000 a month. Or about $24,000 a day, seven days a week. As Richard Scaife’s exasperated lawyers put it in a filing, “The temporary order produces an amount so large that just the income from it, invested at 5 percent, is greater each year than the salary of the President of the United States.”
The numbers are just one of many we-kid-you-not dimensions to this tale. In late 2005, Ritchie Scaife peered through a window at one of her husband’s many homes and saw him with one Tammy Sue Vasco, a woman whose colorful criminal history includes an arrest for prostitution. And this tryst was no one-afternoon stand. Ritchie Scaife describes Vasco in court filings as her husband’s “mistress.”
The WaPo ran a 3,000-word feature on Scaife’s mess, and it reads like a rather salacious novel, with each revelation a little more eyebrow-raising than the last.
And yet, there are still a few details that missed the cut.
The WaPo piece notes that Scaife is not at all fond of media attention, despite owning a handful of newspapers and newsweeklies, including the Pittsburgh Tribune Review.
Though he jousts, indirectly, with public figures, Scaife seems to detest attention. He almost never speaks to the media, and on one of the few occasions he did, it was to tell a reporter, who’d sandbagged him on the street, that she was ugly and that her mother was ugly, too.
Jonathan Schwarz noted that there was actually quite a bit more to it than that. Karen Rothmyer, the reporter at the receiving end of Scaife’s disgust, explained:
After several unsuccessful efforts to obtain an interview, this reporter decided to make one last attempt in Boston, where Scaife was scheduled to attend the annual meeting of the First Boston Corporation.
Scaife, a company director, did not show up while the meeting was in progress…A few minutes later he appeared at the top of the Club steps. At the bottom of the stairs, the following exchange occurred:
“Mr. Scaife, could you explain why you give so much money to the New Right?”
“You fu**ing Communist c*nt, get out of here.”
Well. The rest of the five-minute interview was conducted at a rapid trot down Park Street, during which Scaife tried to hail a taxi. Scaife volunteered two statements of opinion regarding his questioner’s personal appearance – he said she was ugly and that her teeth were “terrible” – and also the comment that she was engaged in “hatchet journalism.” His questioner thanked Scaife for his time. “Don’t look behind you,” Scaife offered by way of a goodbye.
Yeah, he’s a class act all the way.
Paul Krugman added that, during his research for “Conscience of a Liberal,” he noted that Scaife’s name kept coming up as a major financier for the modern conservative movement. “But just because someone is a baleful influence on our political life doesn’t mean he’s a terrible person. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean he isn’t.” From the Post piece:
Dickie, as he’s known to his handful of friends, acquired a mean streak at an early age, according to his now-deceased sister, Cordelia Scaife. (She once told The Washington Post that she and her brother hadn’t spoken for 25 years.) His trouble with alcohol started when he was at prep school, and he later was tossed out of Yale when he rolled a keg of beer down a flight of stairs and broke the legs of a fellow student. His father, a below-average businessman, died a year after Richard graduated from the University of Pittsburgh. His mother was “just a gutter drunk,” as Cordelia put it.
As Schwarz put it, “It would be distasteful if Scaife weren’t such an unpleasant person.”