Jenny Sanford Is A Free Woman! Judge Grants Divorce

Judge Grants Jenny Sanford Divorce Plea


A Charleston judge has ruled that Gov. Mark Sanford's admitted affair with an Argentine woman is grounds for his wife, Jenny, to divorce him.

Because the case involves adultery, the divorce will not be final until the judge signs the decree after a waiting period, likely in mid-March.

Jenny Sanford said she plans to remain at the former couple's Sullivan's Island home with their four sons. Gov. Sanford did not attend the hearing.

"The dissolution of a 20-year marriage is not a cause for celebration, it's a sad occasion," Jenny Sanford said afterward.

Jenny Sanford said her main goal now is to instill character in her children as she will now raise them as a single mother.

"This is the beginning of a new chapter for me and for our children."

The couple filed an agreement to resolve property and custody issues, but requested those records be sealed. As of right now, the entire file is sealed until the judge makes a ruling.

"There is a wealth of information the children are not aware of," Jenny Sanford said in court of sealing the agreement. Releasing the details would serve no public purpose, Jenny Sanford said, and would "cause further damage to my children"

The judge said she would rule on that request later.

Gov. Sanford’s office released a statement today, the same as the one he released in December when news of his wife’s divorce filing became public.

"While it is not the course I would have hoped for, or would choose, I want to take full responsibility for the moral failure that led us to this tragic point,” Gov. Sanford said in his statement. “Jenny is a great person, and has been a remarkable wife, mother and first lady.

"I will join with her in asking the press to respect our shared desire for privacy as we quietly move forward. We respectively ask for your prayers."


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Jenny Sanford's Book Reveals Emotional Abuse & Affairs

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A Guide To Jenny Sanford's Revenge


Jenny Sanford puts her long list of grievances with her soon to be ex-husband, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, on full display in her new book.

"Staying True" is filled with nasty accounts of the Governor that paint him as insensitive, uncaring, selfish, out of touch and cheap. She offers new details of her husband’s affair in the book out Friday and is unflinching in her criticism of the governor.

To capture all the dirt Sanford dishes on her husband, POLITICO has created a guide to the book, cutting it down into three sections: her marriage, the affair and the fallout.

The Marriage

After getting over her husband’s unwillingness to include a pledge to be faithful in their wedding vows, Jenny writes that as newlyweds living in New York — where she was an investment banker and Mark started a real estate company — the two were “deeply in love and had a world of possibilities in front of us both.”

But not long after they moved to South Carolina, Jenny grew frustrated by what she found to be thoughtless, and sometimes strange, behavior.

When the newlyweds first visited the Sanford family home for a holiday, “Mark explained, I would be sleeping with his sister while he slept across the hall with his brothers,” Jenny writes, describing the room as having “bunk beds, trundles, desks and even surfboards hanging from the ceiling.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she told her husband.

“I’ve always slept with my brothers, and I don’t see why that has to change now that we’re married,” he responded.

Soon thereafter, Jenny’s grandfather died, but Mark refused to fly to the funeral in Chicago. “He explained that he had hardly known my grandfather,” she writes. “Having met him a handful of times, he didn’t think he needed to be at the funeral.”

Jenny also quickly noticed that Mark was prone to being “cheap,” once drawing her a picture instead of giving her a gift and on another occasion returning a necklace he purchased for her birthday after seeing her wear it out.

“That’s what I spent all that money on?” he said upon seeing the necklace on his wife. “I hope you kept the box!”

“Knowing Mark’s extremely frugal habits, I knew not to expect much from Mark for birthdays or for Christmas, even if I felt it was surely nice to be remembered every now and again,” Jenny writes about her husband before he was elected to Congress. “Once in office, however, his habits deteriorated, and he even forgot my birthday once. Thereafter, I nudged the scheduler to remind him.”

Jenny was her husband’s campaign manager for both his first congressional run and his first run for governor, and she says there is only one reason she was picked for the job: She could do it for free.

Mark first told her of his decision to run for Congress while she was still lying in the hospital bed after giving birth to one of their four sons.

Mark said he chose her for the job because she was “free.”

“Free? I think my plate is pretty full right now,” she responded.

“You can do this with the babies at home,” he told her. “The only way this will even possibly work is if we keep our expenses incredibly low, and that’s why I really need you. You are free.”

The relationship further unraveled once Mark was a member of Congress and frequently away from his family, she says in the book. The strain, Jenny writes, was enough to make her first think of divorce after the two aired their frustrations with the marriage.

“His job demanded that he be calculating and sometimes manipulative. I was growing more vulnerable, and he was forming a hardened shell,” she writes. “For his part, Mark complained that I didn’t understand the stress he was under. We didn’t say it in so many words, but it was clear that while both of us were rarely alone, in our own distinct ways, we were lonely. What we did say led to tears — mine — and to soul-searching about whether we should even stay married.”

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The two were not able to reconcile those differences during his time in Congress.

During one confrontation toward the end of his third term, Jenny told him that she thought “he was incredibly self-absorbed and disconnected from reality and from me.”

“The more he succeeded politically, the more time he spent living in that persona, and none of it served our marriage well,” she writes. “It seemed to me that Mark had become the empty-eyed politician he used to abhor.”

The Affair

Jenny writes that she first suspected her husband was seeing another woman when he did not immediately return from a trip to Ireland in November 2008 with some of his contacts at the Republican Governors Association, for which he was serving as chairman.

She called the governor’s office and found out he was in New York, but his staff was not sure why he was there.

“I didn’t know either but would soon come to know that this trip was a rendezvous with his mistress,” she writes.

When she later found a racy e-mail exchange between the governor and his Argentine mistress, television reporter Maria Belen Chapur, she confronted him.

“Jenny, I’m sorry. I’ll end it,” he said.

The governor at first denied that he was in love with his mistress, but the way he defended the Argentine woman when Jenny attacked her signaled otherwise.

“He touted her wealth, bristled when I asked questions and defended her when I referred to her plainly as ‘whore.’ ‘She is not a whore!’ he protested. He seemed to be oblivious to his ability to pierce my heart,” she writes.

The governor was soon asking his wife for permission to visit his mistress.

“Mark was unrelenting, in time escalating pressure to get me to condone his foreign adventure,” she writes.

“He wanted my permission to go, but I was never going to grant it.”

He only stopped requesting to see the other woman when Jenny threatened to kick him out of the house and run off with their children.

When the governor declared that he was leaving town to “get his head right,” his wife made him promise that he was not going to see the other woman.

“I will not see her,” he told Jenny.

“I shiver when I think that while I was cleaning up after a delicious family meal with the boys and their cousins, he was e-mailing his ‘soulmate’ with visions of her tan lines,” she writes.

The Fall-out

When the governor finally landed back in the United States to intense media attention after disappearing for several days to see his mistress, he called Jenny to ask, “How are you doing?”

“How am I?” she responded. “How do you think I am?”

“Jenny, be gentle with me,” the governor said.

“Gentle?” she shot back. “Do you know what kind of a storm you are returning to? And where do we stand?”

Sanford told his wife that he had ended the affair and that he had met with a reporter at the Atlanta airport upon his arrival and “told her of my love of adventure travel and so on.”

Jenny doubted that her husband’s story would hold, and when national scrutiny heightened and the governor decided to hold a press conference, she advised him to “be honest and get it over with.”

“Whatever you do, don’t talk about your heart,” she said.

The governor, of course, did not follow his wife’s advice, holding an emotional tear-filled press conference in which he confessed his love for his “soulmate.”

After the press conference, he called Jenny to ask: “How’d I do?”

“Are you kidding me? You cried for her and said little of me or the boys,” she responded.

Of the exchange, she writes: “I guess he’d forgotten I was not the one to praise his performance.”






Jenny Sanford: Husband Asked For Affair Advice


In a new memoir "Staying True", South Carolina first lady Jenny Sanford writes that Gov. Mark Sanford sought her advice about his romance and how to deal with the media after she discovered his extramarital relationship with an Argentine woman.

Jenny Sanford, who managed political campaigns for her husband during their 20-year marriage, writes in "Staying True" that the governor used her as a sounding board, wondering aloud whether he should follow his heart to Argentina and if he would live a life of regret if he didn't.

"Clearly those are thoughts I wish he had kept to himself," Jenny Sanford writes in the book to be released on Friday. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the 214-page book, published by Ballantine Books, on Tuesday.

In an interview with ABC's Barbara Walters, airing Friday on "20/20, " she says that from the beginning, her marriage was a "leap of faith" because he refused to include a vow of fidelity in their marriage ceremony.

"With the benefit of the knowledge I have about Mark now, I could point to this moment as a clear sign of things to come," she writes. But at the time, she found his honesty "brave and sweet" and thought he just had cold feet.

What ended it all

Jenny Sanford tells Walters that the final blow to the marriage was the publication of racy e-mails between her husband and his Argentine mistress, Maria Belen Chapur, whom Sanford called his "soul mate." The e-mails were published last year by The State newspaper in Columbia, S.C.

One e-mail from the governor to Chapur read: "I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night's light — but hey, that would be going into sexual details."

Jenny Sanford said that her children saw the e-mails and were devastated. "It just ripped me up, to see them reading these e-mails, to see them have to grow up so fast," she says.

Mark Sanford, once considered a possible 2012 Republican presidential candidate, disappeared for five days last summer.

He returned to reveal at a tearful Statehouse news conference he was not hiking the Appalachian Trail, as he told his staff, but in Argentina seeing his mistress.

The revelations he made then, and during a subsequent interview with the AP, derailed his political career and ultimately unraveled his marriage.

Affairs with multiple women

In the book, Jenny Sanford, a Georgetown-educated, former Wall Street vice president, traces the story of the Sanfords from the time the couple met in the 1980s to the trying events of the last year. The book includes eight pages of photographs of the Sanfords' wedding and family and of Mark Sanford's political career, which included three terms in Congress and two as governor.

Jenny Sanford discovered the affair in January 2009 after coming across a letter her husband had written to his mistress. She writes in her book she was "gut-punched all over again" when she found out the governor had dalliances with still other women, some of which she learned about from his interview with the AP when he said he had "crossed lines" with a handful of other women.

The book also gives a sense of the rumor mill that exploded in South Carolina in the wake of the governor's admissions. Jenny Sanford writes that, before the AP interview, the governor called her to say "he had more explaining to do" because another woman had suggested to a media outlet she had an affair with him.

She writes her husband told her at the time the relationship was "nothing much" and nothing she needed to know about earlier.

Jenny Sanford wrote her husband had admitted only one affair until that point and now "ever businesslike, he wanted to know what I thought he should reveal in the interview." She does not say what advice, if any, she gave the governor.

"Here he was again asking for my advice instead of first considering how the news might make me feel," she wrote.

It's unclear from the book the identity of that woman. The AP never reported on an extramarital relationship between the governor and any woman other than Chapur.

Sanford's office had no comment on Tuesday.

Governor refused to sign contract

Jenny Sanford also reveals in the book that following the revelation of the affair, she had her attorney draw up a contract under which she would not reveal the affair if her husband would stop seeing his mistress. She writes that the governor refused.

Jenny Sanford moved out of the Governor's Mansion last summer and now lives with the couple's four sons at the family beach house on Sullivans Island.

She filed for divorce on the grounds of adultery in December and a final hearing is scheduled for later this month.

The outside dust jacket of the book makes no mention of the affair, or even that the author is the first lady of South Carolina.

The cover has just the title and her name and a picture of Sanford sitting on the beach in a rose blouse and blue jeans. The back of the dust jacket contains an excerpt from the book that includes what the author calls the simple truth she has come to learn.

"What matters most is how you live your life, not what you have to show for it," she writes.


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Jenny Sanford Steps Into The Limelight, Alone...Creating A New Life

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From Shadow to Limelight for a Governor’s Wife


As the political standing of Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina continues to crumble, the career of his wife, Jenny Sanford, seems to be taking off.

She is writing a memoir, "Staying True", to be released in April by Ballantine Books, about grappling with her husband’s marital infidelity. She has applied to trademark her own name in order to sell clothing, mugs and other items. She will appear next month on a Barbara Walters special on ABC as one of the “10 Most Fascinating People of 2009.”

She has set up a privately financed personal Web site, complete with news releases and photographs. And she has endorsed a candidate to succeed her husband, State Representative Nikki Haley, a Republican and the only woman in the race.

“She is stepping from the background into the foreground,” said Jack Bass, a professor of humanities and social sciences at the College of Charleston. “She has moved from promoting him as a loyal spouse to using those same talents on behalf of herself.”

In South Carolina, some politicians and experts believe she may run for office. They are quick to note that she has served as campaign manager during her husband’s races, shares his conservative fiscal values and acted as de facto chief of staff briefly in his first term.

“Yes, if I had to bet, I think she will run,” said Robert Oldendick, director of the Institute for Public Service and Policy Research at the University of South Carolina. “Just look at what she’s doing externally.”

Ms. Sanford declined to be interviewed for this article, and her friends played down the idea of a run for office.

Ms. Sanford’s re-emergence is accelerating at the same time that her husband, a Republican, is battling an impeachment resolution in the Legislature, dismal approval ratings and 37 charges of ethics violations over his unreported use of friends’ airplanes and improper use of campaign contributions. Once a potential presidential contender, he saw his political fortunes reversed after his confession in June to an extramarital affair with a divorced Argentine named María Belén Chapur, whom he called his “soul mate.”

After the admission, the Sanfords separated but did not dissolve their 20-year marriage. She is believed to be the only governor’s spouse in such a separation, although Gov. Jim Gibbons of Nevada has filed for divorce from his wife, Dawn Gibbons.

Ms. Sanford, who is independently wealthy, moved out of the Governor’s Mansion with their four sons and cardboard boxes of belongings and rebuffed Mr. Sanford’s efforts at reconciliation. A defiant Vogue interview and some choice words about her husband later, Ms. Sanford had become a reluctant poster woman for not standing by her man.

“All I can do is forgive,” she told Vogue. “Reconciliation is something else, and that is going to be a harder road. I have put my heart and soul into being a good mother and wife. Now I think it’s up to my husband to do the soul-searching to see if he wants to stay married. The ball is in his court.”

But these latest image-raising moves — the book, the Web site, the endorsement — suggest a person who is growing more comfortable as a headline maker.

“Initially, she may not have been interested in being in that spotlight,” said Danielle Vinson, the political science department chairwoman at Furman University in Greenville. “But it’s clear that it’s not going away, and she seems to have embraced it.”

By separating from her husband, but remaining first lady, friends say, Ms. Sanford has the best of two worlds as part public figure, part independent woman. She enjoys the perks of political office (a staff assistant, expert advice, ready publicity, admiring colleagues) without the pitfalls (a breakneck schedule of photo-ops and glad handing beside a politically toxic husband). Ms. Sanford has one full-time employee in the governor’s office, Meg Milne, an assistant and spokeswoman.

While Ms. Sanford does not receive a salary as first lady, she works on initiatives about promoting healthy eating and preventing cancer. She does not appear in public often, but she is scheduled to attend a holiday open house on Dec. 3 at the mansion, although not necessarily with the governor.

Ms. Sanford would make a strong candidate for office but could face a negative reaction if she were viewed as capitalizing on her husband’s affair, said Adam Fogle, the editor of the Palmetto Scoop, an online publication about South Carolina politics.

“At the end of the day,” Mr. Fogle said, “she’s got Sanford at the end of her name.”

Ms. Sanford has not expressed plans to run for office. Her friends dismissed the notion of a Jenny Sanford campaign as far-fetched.

“That would shock me as much as the news about Mark shocked me,” said Sally Williamson, a close friend and owner of an antiques store. “I do not think that’s how she would see herself as being beneficial.”

Ms. Sanford’s political views are closely aligned with her husband’s, especially on reducing taxation and government spending, said Joel Sawyer, a former communications director for the governor. But much of her work as first lady has been on public health. She serves on the boards of organizations for children’s health and cancer prevention and founded an initiative called the Healthy South Carolina Challenge that advocates healthy eating, exercise and not smoking.

These days, Ms. Sanford spends most of her time caring for her sons, ages 11 to 17, and writing the memoir in a simple beachfront house on Sullivan’s Island with a view of Fort Sumter. A Georgetown-educated former investment banker, Ms. Sanford is surrounded by a close-knit circle of professional women.

“She’s creating her own identity,” said Marjory Wentworth, the state poet laureate and a longtime friend who lives in nearby Mount Pleasant. “So many people have written her e-mail messages and letters of support. Here and there, when something matters to her, she will respond with a statement about her beliefs.”

One such statement concerned Ms. Haley, whom Ms. Sanford endorsed for governor. A conservative, 37-year-old Indian-American state representative from Lexington, Ms. Haley has attracted considerable attention in a state of older, mostly male and white politicians.

An ally of Mr. Sanford who distanced herself from him after the scandal, Ms. Haley was described by Ms. Sanford in the endorsement as “principled, conservative, tough and smart.”

Few details have been released about Ms. Sanford’s memoir. But Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, calls it an “inspirational memoir” that “will grapple with the universal issue of maintaining integrity and a sense of self during life’s difficult times.”

That is consistent with how Ms. Sanford is beginning to present herself: in selective sound bites that emphasize her independence and resilience.

“She was always the driving force behind Mark Sanford, the engine that powers the car,” said Mr. Fogle of the Palmetto Scoop. “Now the car broke down, and she’s on her own.”


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