Swarovski crystals in pewter sparkled on her gown as she walked down an aisle of rose petals in a gauzy, summer evening wedding.
“The primary,” she explained, now 27 and filing for divorce from Morrissey, 65, a Virginia state senator who did jail time over their relationship when she was a minor and timed their wedding to his election cycle.
Anyone following Virginia politics knows the story of a teenage receptionist and the self-styled “Fightin’ Joe.” He’s a twice-disbarred attorney who has acknowledged fathering eight children with five women. He’s in court for his own cases of dog bites, defamation and trespassing, as well as appearing for his clients.
I asked him about the breakup, and he said allegations of abuse and infidelity in Warren’s divorce papers are “made up of whole cloth.”
“I adored Myrna and treated her like a princess,” he said, adding that he thinks she ended the union on Election Day in 2019 because “she found a younger boyfriend.”
“I guess I thought it was a perfect marriage,” he said. “Until it wasn’t.”
But that’s not where we’re going with this. Now’s the time for Warren to tell her story — not one that has been written for her by her husband and the media since she was 17, when she thought experience working at a law firm would help her get into law school, not get a 10-year sentence as a public spectacle.
“I had big dreams in a small girl, you know?” Warren said of her teenage self. The one who graduated from high school early. Who wanted grad school and a big career, bigger than anyone else in her family had achieved.
She is still trying to understand everything that has happened. Friends and family warned her, even as she pulled herself together for political ads or news photos, feeling despondent in those gorgeous clothes and grand settings. “They knew I was miserable because I just did not have a smile on my face.”
The world saw a lot: Morrissey’s seduction of her, the salacious texts between them, her bear of a father following his daughter to the gated community where Morrissey lived, yelling at the end of the driveway — “She’s a minor!” — made big news.
It saw her mistakes. She did what teens often do. She rebelled, not with the usual partying but by becoming an election-winning, coifed and made-up, smiling, childbearing political wife.
But it did not see Myrna Pride Warren. Before she even determined what kind of law she wanted to practice, she learned how to work a room of potential voters, respond to reporters’ questions and mingle with old White politicians who sometimes held her a little too close, their hands a little too low.
“They kissed, you know, close,” she said, pointing to the corner of her lips. Her husband seemed to love the attention people gave her; they openly obsessed about him being with a younger Black woman. “He would, like, get a high off of people telling him how beautiful or how smart I was.”
She held on to her dreams of college, working on a degree while managing the life of a 30- or 40-year-old.
First came Chase, born in 2015, when Warren was 18. She became pregnant with their second child — a daughter named Bella — when Chase was just 2 months old, making Warren a mother of two at 19. Their youngest, Maverick, was born in 2018. She often cared for four kids, the total including a daughter Morrissey had fathered before he met Warren.
“While I was with him, I was in school, but I maybe had three classes and at most I completed one with an A and another withdrawn or fail,” she said. She was watching her friends head to graduation and she wasn’t making progress. “I was juggling the house and juggling the campaign, juggling his mess, juggling a custody case between him and his other daughter.”
After the third child she kept posing for political photos, calendars and campaign billboards, an A student trying to be an A-plus wife, determined to make her rebellion work. One afternoon, when she went into Morrissey’s sports car (of course the father of eight drives a sports car) to get something, she found a pill bottle of his to treat chlamydia, she said. That confrontation launched the biggest, most physical fight they had, court papers indicate. “The beating of my life,” she alleges.
So in 2019, they agreed to separate — with a condition: She signed a contract he had drafted to make sure she would appear at his state Senate campaign events, pose for photos and support his candidacy. “He told me he needed the image,” she said. No longer Fightin’ Joe, but Family Joe.
Warren made the congratulatory rounds after he won, but she was done. She had uncovered additional infidelity by then, according to the divorce papers she filed last month. She told me about raunchy texts she found from other young women. She showed me the photo he had sent her of his youngest children with another woman, twins born after the separation who appear in his most recent campaign ads. She was emotionally depleted.
She has been working at a bank and is ready to be on her own, done with the Joe show. But to file for divorce, she needed an attorney, someone who didn’t know Morrissey.
Mary White, 65, is an Air Force veteran and fierce in court. In a nasty divorce case, when she heard the opposing counsel had a wicked cat allergy, White rubbed the paperwork all over her cat before sending it back to that lawyer.
“I was really itchy during that case,” said the opposing attorney, Darcey Geissler. They’re now co-counselors, teamed up to represent Warren. You can tell they’re having a good time.
The lawyers began in January, when they battled Morrissey in court after he alleged that Warren’s boyfriend of one year, who lives with her and the kids, struck her 4-year-old across the buttocks with a wet belt. She briefly lost custody over that. The child had a rash, Warren said.
I saw the picture used in court. It clearly showed a rash. All three kids had several interviews with investigators, and none of them said they witnessed or endured any physical abuse, police said. The judge threw out Morrissey’s complaint and returned the kids to their mother. That’s when Warren spoke out in a scathing Instagram post, the first public announcement that wasn’t scripted, crafted and calculated.
“I am tired of being beaten down by him and guarding his secrets,” she wrote. “No more.”
She said that “falling under his spell at the very young age of 17 was the biggest mistake of my life. I see now how he groomed me and made me feel important — I was 17 and so gullible.”
Her father, Coleman Pride, 69, didn’t stop trying to save his daughter from that mistake.
As he watched campaign billboards and ads and fawning articles portray his daughter in a happy marriage during an unsuccessful mayoral run by Morrissey, Pride began his own campaign — Say No to Joe.
A retired programmer for IBM, Pride had the time to fight Morrissey. And the patience to be there when his daughter was done with the marriage. “We didn’t discuss right or wrongs, what decisions were made,” he said.
Now Pride wants voters to break with Morrissey, too, so he’s campaigning with former delegate Lashrecse Aird, Morrissey’s Democratic primary rival.
Warren isn’t joining him — she’s done with campaigns, done with politics, even done with dreams of law school. She has had enough of lawyers. “I want to stay in banking,” she said. “Or maybe I’d like to give back, maybe counseling.”
She’s still wrapping her head around co-parenting, and was careful to text Morrissey a reminder about their son’s preschool graduation the day before she met with me.
“I didn’t want him to be sad that his dad didn’t show up,” she said, when one of her lawyers chided her about it.
“Was he there?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. And he had his campaign clipboard with him,” she said. “The primary.”
