For months, Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake has speculated that her opponent, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), had used the courts to hide “something really, really bad” in his divorce from Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego. But on Thursday, an Arizona court unsealed most of the case file — revealing what one judge called “one of the most garden-variety divorce files I have ever seen.”
The records were made public following a 10-month-long legal battle between the Gallegos and the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication that filed a lawsuit earlier this year to unseal them. The partially redacted documents show Gallego filed a petition to dissolve the marriage on Dec. 14, 2016 — shortly before the birth of their son — claiming that his marriage was “irretrievably broken.”
Lake and Gallego are locked in a heated race to replace Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I) — and one that could help determine the balance of power in the Senate in 2025. With polls showing Gallego leading, Lake and her allies have repeatedly sought to paint Gallego’s personal life in a negative context — running ads describing him as a “deadbeat dad” and alleging his divorce records contain a “massive story.”
In an interview with The Washington Post last year, Gallego attributed the divorce to his post-traumatic stress disorder from serving in the Iraq War. The documents, however, offer little insight into why the Gallegos’ marriage fell apart. Instead, the 465 pages that were unsealed Thursday by the Yavapai County Superior Court detail standard divorce proceedings, including the dividing of property and assets, as well as custody and child support arrangements. They also include no details of any illegal activity or infidelity and expressly state that no physical abuse had occurred.
Following the documents’ release, the Gallegos blasted Lake and demanded an apology “for lying about our family and the circumstances of our divorce,” the former couple wrote in a joint statement.
Lake, they added, “will stop at nothing to score a cheap political point — even if it means endangering the privacy and well-being of our young son.”
Caroline Wren, a senior adviser to Lake, said in a statement to The Post that “it’s bizarre that Ruben Gallego would demand an apology from Kari Lake for his appalling behavior.”
“Everyone knows Kari Lake had nothing to do with this lawsuit, which was filed by an independent media outlet, however we do find the revelations from the divorce records to be shocking, especially considering Ruben Gallego is spending millions on advertising claiming to want to protect women, yet he served his unsuspecting wife with divorce papers when she was days away from giving birth, and even demanded she pay his attorney’s fees!” Wren wrote. “If Ruben Gallego will turn his back on his pregnant wife days before she gives birth, he will turn his back on Arizona.”
It’s unclear whether Kate Gallego was completely blindsided as the Lake campaign has claimed. In Gallego’s petition to seal the record, his attorney acknowledged that Kate Gallego had not yet been served but said the couple had been “engaged in informal discussions about some of the substantive issues in this matter.” His attorney also added that Kate Gallego’s legal counsel stated that she would not oppose the motion to seal the files.
The Gallegos’ divorce was finalized in 2017. Last year, Kate Gallego publicly endorsed her former husband’s Senate campaign.
The former couple had gone to great lengths to keep the records private — with Gallego filing the petition for divorce in a county 100 miles away from Phoenix, where they lived, and asking a judge to seal the entire file. Divorce records in Arizona are typically open to the public. But a judge found that the privacy interests of Ruben and Kate Gallego — then, respectively, a new congressman and Phoenix City Council member — outweighed the state’s open records policy.
However, in January, the Free Beacon petitioned the court to make the records public, as they “reflect the character and behavior of a public figure holding and running for federal office,” according to legal documents. The Gallegos, in response, fought to prevent the release of the records entirely and, later, to redact portions of the divorce filings.
The legal battle continued through the appeals court. And, on Wednesday, the Arizona Supreme Court rejected a request by the Gallegos to keep the redacted records from the public sphere.
The Yavapai County Superior Court judge who had first ordered the records unsealed agreed to redact some parts of the divorce filings, including details about their son and financial information.
The rest, he ruled, ought to be public — though, he predicted in June that “everyone’s going to be rather deflated” by its contents after much hype.
