by Eliana Johnson at The Washington Free Beacon
On Dec. 15, 2016, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D., Ariz.) filed for divorce from his wife, Kate Gallego, then a Phoenix city councilwoman. He filed a motion to seal the case file on the same day.
That seal was lifted on Thursday after a 10-month court battle between the Gallegos and the Washington Free Beacon, in which the Free Beacon prevailed in the Yavapai County Superior Court, the Arizona Court of Appeals, and, finally, on Wednesday evening, at the Arizona Supreme Court, which rejected a last-ditch effort from the couple to keep the records under wraps.
It was Ruben Gallego who moved to seal the record back in 2016. In his memorandum making the case to the court, he noted that Kate Gallego had “not yet been served” with divorce papers, nor had “her attorney entered an appearance” in the case, but that she was “likely to give birth any day.”
Gallego’s petition for divorce stipulated that the “parties’ marriage is irretrievably broken” and that “there is no reasonable prospect of reconciliation.” But Kate Gallego appears to have been blindsided by her husband’s decision. When she responded to her husband’s filing in February of 2017, she said she was “without knowledge of information sufficient to form a belief” about her husband’s claim that the marriage was broken beyond repair—and she denied the allegation.
The newly unsealed file also shows that Gallego wanted his wife to…
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