Newt's Daughter Claims He Didn't Abandon Cancer Patient Wife

By Ujala Sehgal
National Journal
Updated: May 14, 2011 | 5:30 p.m.

One of the greatest stains marring the political career of Newt Gingrich is the ugly story of how he tried to finalize a divorce from his first wife while she was in a hospital bed for cancer surgery, amid extensive evidence of his philandering.

After Gingrich made his intention to run in 2012 official, his daughter, Jackie Gingrich Cushman, decided the time was ripe to announce that the infamous hospital room divorce never actually occurred, in a column she penned entitled "Setting the Record Straight." According to Cushman, who was there in the hospital and "saw and heard what happened," this is how the divorce unfolded:

I was 13 years old, and we were about to leave Fairfax, Va., and drive to Carrollton, Ga., for the summer. My parents told my sister and me that they were getting a divorce as our family of four sat around the kitchen table of our ranch home... 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.

(More here.)