Fact Check: Stories of Newt Gringrich's divorce contain inaccuracies

Times-Union readers want to know:

There's an email going around about how Newt Gingrich served his wife with divorce papers as she lay in the hospital dying from cancer. Is this true or just hyperbole from the anti-Gingrich camp?

It's true that Gingrich has been married three times. It's also true that he has admitted to infidelity. As for the email's claim, which has been circulating for almost 30 years, there are differing versions from the different camps.

One thing not at issue is that Gingrich's wife was on her deathbed. She was in the hospital recovering from surgery and is still living today.

The origin of the claim was a 1984 profile of Gingrich in Mother Jones magazine, according to FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan fact-finding project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

The article stated that Gingrich's former press secretary, Lee Howell, said that Gingrich presented his first wife Jackie Battley with a list of divorce terms while she was in the hospital recovering from surgery for uterine cancer. Howell said Battley was "still sort of out of it" at the time, but that Gingrich wanted her to sign the list.

Two months later, The Washington Post followed up on the Mother Jones story. The Post quoted Battley as saying that Gingrich wanted to discuss divorce terms while she was in the hospital. The 1985 story said the couple's two daughters were also there.

The Post's story quoted Battley as saying that the divorce was a surprise to her. Gingrich said that the two had talked about divorce off and on since 1969, FactCheck.org reported.

Asked if he had handled the matter in an insensitive manner, Gingrich told the Post: "All I can say is when you have been talking about divorce for 11 years and you've gone to a marriage counselor, and the other person doesn't want the divorce, I'm not sure there is any sensitive way to handle it."

On his campaign website, Gingrich has called the hospital story "a vicious lie. … It is completely false." But this contradicts comments made repeatedly by Battley after their divorce, the Post reported in a Nov. 18 story.

The former couple's second daughter, Jackie Gingrich Cushman, had not commented about the hospital visit until May, when she wrote a column, "Setting the Record Straight," around the time Gingrich announced his presidential campaign. She wrote that her parents told her and her sister that they were divorcing well before her mother was hospitalized to remove a benign tumor, FactCheck reported. (Battley had previously been treated for uterine cancer and had had two surgeries.) Here is what Cushman wrote:

"Later that summer, Mom went to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta for surgery to remove a tumor. While she was there, Dad took my sister and me to see her. It is this visit that has turned into the infamous hospital visit about which many untruths have been told. … My mother and father were already in the process of getting a divorce, which she requested."

There are conflicts in the different reports about who requested the divorce. Cushman wrote that her mother requested it; the Mother Jones article said that Gingrich asked for it in April 1980; and Gingrich's comments in the 1985 story suggest that he wanted the divorce and Battley didn't. But, FactCheck.org notes, all accounts agree that the divorce was in the works before Battley had surgery. 

Cushman's column did not, however, specify exactly what happened at the hospital visit. Gingrich himself has offered few details, but in November interviews with UnionLeader.com and Fox News' Sean Hannity, he admitted to arguing with Battley in the hospital. He did not say what the argument was about, FactCheck.org reports.

Carole Fader: (904) 359-4635