As Spitzergate hit the airwaves last week, Dina Matos McGreevy, ex-wife of the "gay American" former New Jersey governor, Jim McGreevy, made the rounds of the cable news networks, empathizing with Silda Wall Spitzer. In a New York Times op-ed, she mused, "Who knows why powerful men conduct themselves this way?"
Well. Matos McGreevy may have knew more than she's been letting on. The Newark Star-Ledger reports:
A former aide to James E. McGreevey said today that he had three-way sexual trysts with the former governor and his wife before he took office, challenging Dina Matos McGreevey's assertion that she was naive about her husband's sexual exploits.
The aide, Theodore Pedersen, said he and the couple even had a nickname for the weekly romps, from 1999 to 2001, that typically began with dinner at T.G.I. Friday's and ended with a threesome at McGreevey's condo in Woodbridge.
There's a few ways to look at this revelation -- if it's true. First, political wives are a much, much savvier lot than the way they present themselves to be, and savvier than the media generally give them credit them for. Who knows, for example, what Wall Spitzer knew or suspected about her husband's sexual habits? Of course, regular threesomes with Pedersen may not have led Matos McGreevy to the conclusion that her husband was carrying on a long-term romantic affair with a different man, Golan Cipel. People are into all kinds of stuff, after all, and sexuality and gender exist on a spectrum. But this bombshell (again, if it's true) does put a dent in her argument that she was caught completely unawares by his coming out.
--Dana Goldstein
