Free Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage by Dina Matos McGreevey Page A

Columbia. What I saw as Jim’s connection to Kari—not what he might do with her, but what he might feel for her—blinded me to the possibility of other, more perilous connections. But, frankly, I didn’t think Jim had either the time or the opportunity for dalliances. Politics was his mistress. Also, I knew he never went anywhere without a driver, a ready-made chaperone.
    I traveled in political circles, and I’m pretty sure that I must have had at least a dozen acquaintances who knew, or suspected, what Jim was up to. But there’s an old saying that explains why none of them told me, and it’s the one about killing the messenger. Can’t you just see it? “Hey, Dina! I heard your boyfriend carries five-dollar bills in his back pocket to give to the strippers.”
    With one exception, my closest friends didn’t know these rumors, and the friend who did know dismissed it. She’d heard other rumors she knew to be false—one that Kari had left Jim because he was “abusive,” which was obviously ridiculous, since they maintained a cordial relationship—so it was just as easy for her to dismiss the stripper rumor. Plus, the rumor about Jim and the strippers just didn’t fit with how we seemed as a couple, and not just to her.
    Beyond our acquaintances there was a small crowd of dedicated onlookers who must have known a lot more than I did. One was Ray Lesniak, Jim’s longtime mentor, whom I’d first met a dozen years earlier in Elizabeth’s city hall. As a member of Jim’s inner circle when he was both the mayor of Woodbridge and a gubernatorial candidate, Ray was in a position to know everything there was to know about Jim, which was far more than I knew. I don’t know if Ray thought I was aware of the rumors of Jim’s affinity for strip clubs and prostitutes, but he certainly never told me anything, or warned me even obliquely. I wondered if he’d even made the connection that I was the woman he’d met years earlier as the Planning Board commissioner his opponent had appointed. If he did remember me from that day in the Elizabeth city hall, he never acknowledged it. Our relationship, such as it was, was polite and existed only because of our mutual connection to Jim. What Jim’s circle of advisers—later characterized by the press as his “cleanup squad”—knew with certainty, the press knew as rumor. But in each case, especially because I was involved in local politics myself, some of Jim’s advisers must certainly have thought that if
they
knew what they knew, then
I
must know what they knew. But I didn’t. I would have to be out of my mind to have had an intimate relationship with a man who engaged in such behavior. And since I didn’t seem to be out of my mind, there had to be some other explanation. Many people knew that Jim wasn’t what he appeared to be, so I guess that made it easy for them to take the next step and conclude that
I
couldn’t possibly be what I seemed to be either. Their conclusion? Collusion. I must have struck some sort of bargain with him. There must have been something I wanted from him politically, in exchange for my appearance of partnership. That’s the only way I can make sense of the charge that I was just a “political wife.”
    Of course, the local press was also on watch, especially reporters for the
Star-Ledger
, the
Bergen Record
, and the New Jersey Bureau of the
New York Times
. They didn’t have as much information as Ray and Jim’s inner circle did about Jim’s sexual risk-taking, but they did know the rumors. And so they reached more or less the same conclusion as those who knew more: Every woman has her price.
    I rarely read the newspapers. As a working mother, First Lady, and wife, I read mostly letters, e-mails, and speeches I was to deliver. I had little time for the papers. That’s not to say that I didn’t follow the news or keep up with what was happening. I remained as interested as ever, but I got my information from television and radio,