The Arizona Democrat also wanted his ex-wife, Kate Gallego, to pay his attorney’s fees
Ruben Gallego may have been in a tight Senate race in the fall of 2024, but the media didn’t seem interested in the bizarre circumstances of his 2017 divorce. The Washington Free Beacon, however, was. The Free Beacon was locked in a 10-month, ultimately victorious legal battle with Gallego and his ex-wife to unseal their divorce records. They provide a prism through which to understand his longstanding relationship with California Democrat Eric Swalwell and the questions he is facing in the wake of mounting accusations against his friend and former roommate.
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 foot the bill for the divorce proceedings, stipulating that he was “entitled to an award of attorney’s fees” pursuant to an Arizona statute allowing a court to award attorney’s fees based on several factors.
Kate Gallego saw things differently, asking the court in her February 2017 response to “enter an order that husband contribute to wife’s attorney’s fees and costs.”
Gallego pressed the court, in his opening bid, to ensure Kate Gallego would not be entitled to “long-term spousal maintenance,” asking the judge to find that “neither party is in need of nor entitled to an award of long term spousal maintenance.” Though Kate Gallego argued that she was “entitled to spousal maintenance,” she waived her rights to any such support in the final divorce decree: The pair acknowledged they were “financially independent and no financial assistance by means of spousal maintenance is required now or hereafter.”
Though divorce records are public in Arizona, Gallego argued that this case should be treated differently because “each party is a high profile public official” and the “case will likely receive intense scrutiny from the media.”
The divorce was finalized in April 2017, with both parties stipulating that “there was no domestic violence in the marriage” or that “significant domestic violence did not occur.”
Just over a year later, in his telling, the 39-year-old Gallego met 25-year-old Sydney Barron at the congressional baseball game. His own accounts of what happened next vary. In his book, They Called Us Lucky, Gallego writes of proposing to Sydney in February 2019, just eight months after their first meeting: “In February 2019, I asked her to marry me,” he writes. The two were legally married in December of 2019 but went on to announce their engagement on social media two months later, in February 2020.
Gallego described himself as “the happiest man in the world.”
“She said yes!” he told his followers. The two held a wedding in Puerto Rico in April 2021.
Throughout the legal proceedings this year, the Gallegos maintained they were pressing to keep the records sealed in order to protect their young son. The partially unredacted file released on Thursday contains no personal information about the child.
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