James E. McGreevey's Resignation Statement
I am the governor, gay and American
I've been struggling with my identity all my life, trying to figure out who I really am.
As a child, I often felt uncertain, even confused. Respecting the traditions and community in which I grew up, I worked hard to secure acceptance as part of a traditional American family. I married my first wife, Kari, out of respect and love. Together, we had a wonderful and extraordinary daughter. Kari then chose to return to British Columbia. I was then fortunate enough to marry Dina, whose love and zest for life were a tremendous source of energy. Together, we had a beautiful daughter.
Former New Jersey Governor McGreevey
Yet, from my first days at school until today, I've always felt certain emotions, a state of mind that separated me from others. But, because of my determination, and also because I believed I was doing the right thing, I forced myself to adapt to a reality I considered acceptable; a reality in which all the classic "good and right things" of adolescence and adulthood were layered. However, in my deepest and most spiritual reflections, at a certain point I began to ask myself what this "acceptable reality" really meant to me. Were there realities I was running away from? What values was I pursuing?
I don't believe God tortures a person purely by choice. I believe God enables all things to work together for the greater good. At 47, it's probably too late to have this discussion. But here it is, despite everything. At a certain point in life, you have to look deeper into the mirror of your own soul and recognize your own unique truth in this world—not as you'd like to see it, but as it is.
And here's my truth: I am a gay American. And I've been fortunate to live in the greatest nation in the world, with the most extraordinary tradition of civil liberties; in a country that gives so much to its people. And yet, for the pain, suffering, and anguish I've caused my beloved family—my parents, my wife, and my friends—I wish I could leap past this moment. Because this is a deeply personal decision, and one not normally intended to be made public. Nevertheless, we cannot and should not ignore it.
I am here today because, to my great disgrace, I had sex with another man, a violation of my marriage vows. It was wrong. Stupid, unforgivable. And for this, I ask my wife's forgiveness and mercy. She has shown extraordinary courage throughout this ordeal, and I can only consider myself blessed for her love and strength. I realize that this matter and my sexual orientation, if kept secret, would expose me, and especially the office of governor, to uncontrolled rumors, false accusations, and threats of disclosure. Therefore, I nip these kinds of threats in the bud by disclosing my sexuality directly to you. Let me be clear: I hold myself entirely and solely responsible for my actions. However, it is now necessary for me to do what is right to make amends for the consequences of my actions and to remain faithful to my loved ones, my friends, my family, and even to myself.
Regarding the office of Governor, being gay makes little difference. In fact, the ability to authentically define my identity would likely have allowed me to be more effective in fulfilling my constitutional duties. Given the circumstances surrounding this matter, and its likely impact on my family and my ability to carry out the work of government, I believe the right decision is to resign. To facilitate a smooth transition, my resignation will be effective November 15 of this year. I am very proud of what we have accomplished during my administration and I want to humbly thank the citizens of New Jersey for granting me the privilege of governing their state.
James E. McGreevey, former Governor of New Jersey
From "Corriere della Sera" of August 14, 2004 by Gianni Riotta
Blackmail and Power: The Gay Governor Scandal
Gay lovers and nepotism – The scandal confronts America with new sexual mores. The New Jersey chief had hired his mistress. Arguments and threats followed, followed by his resignation.
Threatened and blackmailed by his former lover, James McGreevey, 47, a Democrat, the boy wonder from Woodbridge, who rose from toll booths to Harvard University and the office of governor of New Jersey, committed political suicide on Thursday, six days after his birthday: he resigned after acknowledging in a press conference that he had cheated on his wife with a man and hired his lover as a consultant, violating the ethics that govern the United States.
McGreevey's impeccable career destroyed by decision to hire boyfriend as counterterrorism consultant
«"Oh, you're from New Jersey? And which exit?" In Siena, the contradaioli ask each other, "Are you from the Dragon or the Giraffe?" In Paris, citizens question their arrondissement of origin. Not so in New Jersey, the state separated from New York by the mouth of the Hudson River. It is, more humbly, the highway exit number that defines identity and belonging. And nowhere is the maze of ring roads more frenetic than in the village of Woodbridge, a population of 97,000 in the shadow of the intersections between the congested lanes of the Jersey Turnpike and the gray asphalt of the Garden State Parkway. Woodbridge's wunderkind, who rose from toll booths to Harvard University and the office of governor of New Jersey's 8,414,000 residents, is James McGreevey, a Democrat. Forty-seven years old on August 6th, charming, well-funded by lobbies, a great rallying critic, McGreevey committed political suicide on Thursday, six days after his birthday, acknowledging in a conference that he had cheated on his wife with a man and hired his lover as a consultant, violating the ethics that govern the United States. The exit is no longer a number on the highway, it is a farewell to his hopes of governing, in front of his perplexed mother, Veronica, and his wife, Dina Matos McGreevey, in a charming blue suit with white pockets, reminiscent of a naive secretary from the days of Doris Day. I can't tell you what was in Dina's eyes: surprise, embarrassment, resignation, liberation, curiosity, and, if I may venture, even a hint of revenge. Now she is the one holding her husband, possessing him, clutching the slender thread of salvation.
Because in this story of New Jersey, the state that held the record for toxic waste, smoky chimneys, and suburban row houses coexisting with the musical glories of Frank Sinatra and Bruce Springsteen, you don't know where ambition ends, where lust begins, where we lapse into an old plot of recommendations and nepotism, and where instead we are encroaching on the life of the future, with confused sexual identities, called "metrosexuals," not marked with the precision of the big green highway signs, Jersey Turnpike, Garden State Parkway.
McGreevey has already had two wives: with the first, he has a daughter who lives in Vancouver. Then, in 2000, he married Dina, who gave birth to his daughter, Jacqueline, in 2001. Of the wedding, McGreevey said, "I married out of respect," not the sentiment most often cited behind the scenes. Of today's affair, he admits, "I violated my marital commitment." That the young governor was gay was a secret known to all; journalists, lobbyists, congressmen, and senators joked behind the scenes with the kind of jokes that political correctness doesn't air in public, but which still circulate secretly. It would have gone on like this for a long time if McGreevey, who was balancing his erotic, romantic, family, and political life, hadn't begun a relationship with Golan Cipel, 35, and appointed him special advisor for counterterrorism and security in New Jersey.
Her lover, paid $110,000 a year (€91,000) to protect the state's cloverleaf intersections from Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, at the expense of citizens who hate taxes? Does the scandal of a gay lover matter more in this surprise resignation in a country where Representative Barney Frank is still the homosexual elected to the highest office, or the nepotism of a lover appointed out of affection? Or the threats of Golan Cipel, who at the end of the relationship reportedly asked the governor for five million dollars as a farewell gift, saying he would sue him for sexual harassment if he refused? And how many people, in the state that across the metallic Hudson River and New York's blue bay witnessed the collapse of the Twin Towers live, are shocked that counterterrorism is in the hands of a gentleman whose passion for the governor is the credentials of a commando hunter? On the beaches of New Jersey, for many summers plagued by hospital waste washed up on the shore by the current, needles included, on weekends the only talk is of McGreevey: did he do well, did he do badly, why? Psychology experts may remember James McGreevey's father, a Marine drill sergeant, a life spent barking orders at recruits, and his mother, a nurse. Two professions of rules and rigor, and little James succeeds in school, is elected to all the high school offices, and ends up at prestigious universities, Columbia, Georgetown, and Harvard. Mayor of Woodbridge, member of the local parliament, governor, narrowly beaten the first time by Mrs. Christie Whitman, who ultimately won. Scandals are a daily occurrence in New Jersey, and McGreevey uses them to further his career, accusing his rival Donald DiFrancesco of his casual blending of civil and family contracts in a minute and colorful conflict of interest, which ended with his resignation. Once elected, McGreevey also began to run into trouble. A $629,000 bill for a garage attracted criticism, followed by an $18,000 helicopter bill, a $75,000 bill for a mission to Ireland that included a $720-a-night suite, and a $3,100 bill for a family celebration, tarnished his image. Two aides were forced to resign, Police Chief Santiago and counterterrorism consultant Cipel, after just eight months.
But no one imagines that the Cipel case will degenerate into blackmail, into McGreevey turning to the FBI to report the threats, into his resignation. Now the state should be governed by a local Democratic senator, but the Republicans are in revolt and demanding early elections. Politics will end, as always, among the trucks of "Jersey," meetings, clashes, shoves, deals, resignations, surprises. This time, however, America has discovered what high school kids already know: there is no longer a rigid boundary between sexual identities, "us," "them," "straight," "gay." Stories, loves, impulses, desires, and lifestyles are blurred with more twists than the ring roads. James McGreevey knows very well "which way he comes from," Woodbridge and his working world behind him. He knew less about living his private life, and politics is not yet ready for these uncertainties. To his credit, one thing remains the reform of EZ-passes, the electronic toll booth on highways: don't laugh, it's a revolution in New Jersey.
From "La Repubblica" of August 14, 2004 by Vittorio Zucconi
The governor's grand refusal is the accidental hero of America's gays.
The politician was forced to come out as gay and leave public life. He was threatened by his former lover, a collaborator.
McGreevey's outing embarrasses Democrats. Thanks to him, the left had wrested New Jersey from the Republicans. The man with whom she had an affair demanded $5 million to keep quiet.
A Pride in San Francisco
James Baldwin, the writer, was right when he observed that in America "it's better to be born black than gay, because being born black is a disaster, but at least you don't have to confess it to your mother." And while confessing one's homosexuality to one's mother is certainly difficult, admitting one's gayness in front of one's mother, one's father, one's wife, the entire state of New Jersey, and the national and international cameras is the nightmare that New Jersey Governor James McGreevey had to live through two days ago, resigning from office and publicly confirming the truth that Baldwin, black and gay, had shouted. That in a land where a married President is forgiven for love affairs in the "Oral Study" and another President for thousands of deaths in a war waged on false pretenses, homosexuality remains the only political sin that cannot be forgiven. The love that must never speak its name.
Since last Thursday afternoon, when the young, handsome, Catholic, and just forty-seven-year-old Democratic governor of New Jersey, with degrees, law doctorates, and master's degrees in teaching from Columbia, Harvard, and Georgetown, committed his civil "seppuku" with the saber of the media, McGreevey has become the involuntary hero of a gay community already exasperated by the controversy over same-sex unions. He has also become the scarecrow symbol of left-wing depravity, which conservatives immediately and gleefully erected against the Democrats on their radio and television networks. "I am a gay American," said the former governor of a state that the left had managed, thanks to him, to wrest three years ago from the long electoral dominance of the right. That association between the two words "American" and "gay" was no coincidence. It was chosen so that they would clash, like nails on a chalkboard of clichés, uttered with provocative pride.
But the courage of the public sacrifice of a man for whom horizons of glory were being drawn, now shattered, and the nobility of his words would have been clearer and more effective if behind that confession hadn't been the shadow of a greedy lover and a multi-million dollar lawsuit. The five million dollars in damages for "sexual harassment" that Golan Cipel, her "toy boy," the toy boy as the tabloids in nearby New York quickly dubbed him, demanded from the governor who had hired him for $110,000 a year to have him at hand at state taxpayers' expense, in the vague position of "consultant." Perhaps out of ingratitude, perhaps out of spite or jealousy, the "toy boy," an Israeli citizen, a former sailor in the navy and then an official in a Judean municipality whom McGreevey had met and fallen in love with during a visit to Israel, had been hired as head of anti-terrorism security in New Jersey. Only to discover that his foreign passport barred him from accessing the national intelligence secrets necessary for his work. No one had ever understood what official function Golan Cipel performed.
The criticism leveled at him today by many in the gay community, torn apart by official opposition to same-sex civil unions, which McGreevey admitted in New Jersey, is that he didn't have the courage to "out" himself, to reveal himself spontaneously without waiting for his lover's lawyers. But if in a perfect world, full of heroes of civil courage, McGreevey should have come out before even beginning his political career as mayor of a small town in the suburbs of New York, in the real world where this son of a staunchly Catholic family grew up, in the world of rough-and-tumble provincial politics, the future governor has been entangled, for the last 47 years of his life, in that vortex of dissimulation from which every turn of the screw makes it harder to escape. He married, first to a classmate, the mother of his first daughter, Veronica, who left him after a discreet divorce and a clean break, which took the woman and her daughter to the other side of the continent, to live in British Columbia, Canada. And when he was chosen by the Democratic "political machine" in New Jersey to face Republican governor Christie Todd Whitman, the party bosses, like the Hollywood studio czars had done with Rock Hudson, advised him to get married again, to silence the increasingly hissing rumors of his homosexuality and to offer the usual superficial respectability, à la "Carosello family", to the electorate.
Three years ago, he married Dina, mother of his second daughter, two-year-old Jacqueline, that very blonde and very pretty woman who stood beside him last Thursday, hand in hand, a magnificent soldier in a lost battle, listening to him announce that he is a "gay American." Later, she will simply say, with great sobriety, that she knew everything from their wedding day and that hearing her husband confess what she already knew in private was "a liberation," which will allow her to stay with him, with even more affection. And "liberation" is probably the most correct word to use at the end of this melancholy story of a scandal that should never have been a scandal. Liberation for him, first and foremost.
Then for his wife. For his daughters, who are less and less like children every day, with Veronica, the eldest, now 11. Liberation for a Democratic Party in New Jersey that has long had to live with a dead man in its home and the burden of ever-new, real scandals, such as the case of McGreevey's top donor, indicted for using female prostitutes as "election angels," sent to comfort and support local petty regime leaders during election time. And liberation for John Kerry, the national Democratic candidate for the White House, who in New Jersey is comfortably ahead of Bush in the polls and will have time to stem the negative backlash before November. A fake political career is over, and perhaps a real life can begin. And there's no longer even any need to confess it to his mother, who was on stage behind her son, while he confirmed what Gore Vidal had written in 1948, in his "The City and the Pillar": "The American public has no idea how many homosexuals there are among its political leaders." Now he has to imagine a little less.
