TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C3
ZACH GIBSON/GETTY IMAGES
Katie Hill resigned from Congress amid a sex scandal and a nasty divorce. It put her
at the center of a fierce debate about sexism, sexual orientation and revenge porn.GREGORY BULL/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) is charged with using campaign funds on extramarital
relationships with five women, including a staffer. He has kept his seat in Congress.respectfully. If you start off that
way, “they’re more likely to recip-
rocate,” Ain said. “If you roll
around in the mud, they’re more
likely to meet you there.”
Part of keeping a low profile is
not putting many details in any
court documents. Omar’s divorce
filing, for example, cited only an
“irretrievable breakdown” as the
reason for the end of her mar-
riage. (She declined a request to
speak for this story, and Hill was
not made available as of press
time.) Anything in a court filing
will be in the media shortly, Ain
noted, which some people use as
leverage. “But both people are
embarrassed by inflammatory
filings,” Ain cautioned.
As difficult as it is to divorce
while in politics, it’s also difficult
to find the time and privacy to
repair a marriage during gruel-
ing campaigns or while working
long hours. In his 2016 memoir
“The Opposite of Woe: My Life in
Beer and Politics,” John Hicken-
looper, the former Colorado gov-
ernor who’s running for Senate,
describes going to great lengths
to avoid public speculation about
his marriage. When he and his
now-ex-wife, Helen Thorpe, went
for marriage counseling during
his 2010 gubernatorial cam-— and at times appeared to be
choking back tears. She vowed to
fight against digital exploitation:
“I will not let my experience scare
off other young women or girls
from running for office.”
[email protected]but it found no evidence linking
her opponent to a conspiracy.
Coya and Andy later divorced.
Hill is trying to use the visibili-
ty of her divorce for good. In her
resignation video to supporters,
Hill said she was hurt and angrypaign, they would meet with a
therapist in the basement of a
Quaker meeting house, so as to
avoid being spotted in a waiting
room.
Hickenlooper and Thorpe
eventually separated and then
divorced while he was in office,
but “we still love each other
dearly,” he writes. “We still try to
do whatever we can to make each
other happy.” They live only a
block apart, he notes, so as to
co-parent more effectively.
The public’s interest in politi-
cians’ divorces and sex scandals
is particularly fierce, Ain said,
because there are always people
in the opposing party who
would like to see an opponent
compromised. Hill’s situation
reminds Walsh of a public spat
between Coya Knutson, who in
the 1950s was the first woman to
represent Minnesota in Con-
gress, and her husband, Andy
Knutson. Andy was jealous of
his wife’s success and suspicious
that she was cheating on him. In
1957, the Democratic-Farmer-
Labor Party (DFL) wanted to
back a different candidate; they
approached Andy with a letter
for him to sign, asking his wife
not to run for reelection. The
Fargo Forum published the let-
ter; soon Andy’s plea plus accu-
sations that Coya was having an
affair with one of her aides
became national news.
“It has always been my belief
that an individual’s family life is a
personal matter,” Knutson told
The Post in 1958. She lost her
reelection campaign that year
and filed a complaint with a
House subcommittee, arguing
that she had been the victim of a
“malicious conspiracy” involving
her husband, the DFL and her
opponent’s associates. The com-
mittee agreed that her personal
life had been exploited and prob-
ably contributed to her defeat,tal, and they’re assumed to be
more pure and ethical,” she ex-
plained. “Because of that as-
sumption of them being ‘good,’
when they have a failing, the fall
from grace is steeper and harder
to climb back up.”
Case in point: Rep. Duncan D.
Hunter (R-Calif.) faces federal
charges alleging that he’s used
campaign funds on extramarital,
intimate relationships with five
women, including one on his
staff. Hunter remains in office
(and, for now, married).
Sixty years ago, a divorce plus a
sex scandal shocked voters more
than it does today. When Nelson
Rockefeller divorced his wife in
1962 and the following year mar-
ried a woman who’d volunteered
on his gubernatorial campaign, it
was widely viewed as costing him
the 1964 presidential nomina-
tion.
Later, public splits became less
of big of a deal. In 1980, then-Rep.
Newt Gingrich’s first marriage
ended after he had an affair with
a campaign volunteer, Marianne
Ginther, and he still went on to be
speaker of the House. He married
Ginther, and 18 years later di-
vorced her and married Callista
Bisek, with whom he’d had an
affair in the 1990s.
While mayor of New York,
Rudolph W. Giuliani announced
at a 2000 news conference that
he was separating from his sec-
ond wife, Donna Hanover, and
acknowledged he was in a rela-
tionship with Judith Nathan. Ha-
nover learned of the split from
watching television. Giuliani’s
subsequent marriage to Nathan
is now ending in acrimonious
fashion.
Mark Sanford’s career sur-
vived his 2009 sex scandal. While
governor of South Carolina, he
disappeared for a few days to visit
his mistress, María Belén
Chapur, in Argentina, and it
nearly got him impeached. He
had a very public divorce that
caused him to call off his engage-
ment to Chapur. But Sanford
went on to the U.S. House, and
now he’s challenging Trump for
the Republican nomination in
2020.
More recently, Rep. Joe Barton
(R-Tex.) didn’t fare as well: He
retired earlier this year after
reports that he’d had several
extramarital affairs, and a lewd
photo he’d sent to one of his
mistresses circulated online.
Oregon’s 5th Congressional
District is so marriage-unfriend-
ly that every single member since
it was created for the 1982 elec-
tion has divorced while in office
— Portland Monthly has called
the trend “the Curse of the Fifth.”
But for only one representative
did the split seem to have lasting
political consequences. When
Jim Bunn, a Republican family-
values candidate, divorced his
wife of 17 years in 1995 and
married his chief of staff less than
a year later, he was voted out
after just one term. According to
a 2002 story in the Oregonian, his
brothers, supporters and even his
wife-to-be had advised against
tying the knot with a staffer. “I
wasn’t a bright enough person to
listen and understand,” Bunn
told the publication of his mind-
set at the time.
Martha Schrader, the ex-wife
of that seat’s current occupant,
Rep. Kurt Schrader, doesn’t think
the district itself is to blame.
Rather “it’s just Congress that’s
hard on relationships,” she told
Portland Monthly earlier this
year, adding: “I’m hopeful when
Kurt retires, the next person
elected stays married.”
Sanford K. Ain, a divorce attor-
ney in Washington, estimates he’s
done about 20 politicians’ divorc-
es. He said the key to keeping a
split quiet is to treat your spouseDIVORCE FROM C1Think divorce is miserable? Try getting one while in elected o≠ice.
TOM BRENNER/REUTERS
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and
her husband are divorcing. She
alleges physical and emotional
abuse in court documents.BY ANNE MIDGETTEBeethoven’s 32 piano sonatas
are a library of masterworks
spanning a lifetime of styles and
artistic growth. In recent years,
it has become popular to hear
them all at one go, either in a
sequence of concerts or a single
marathon day. The pianist Jona-
than Biss, however, has opted for
a gentler and user-friendlier ap-
proach in a three-concert project
at the Phillips Collection, curat-
ing a selection of the pieces,
including many of the lesser-
known ones, to give listeners a
more thoughtful and slower-
paced guide though exciting ter-
rain.
Biss is 39 but has the gravitas
and experience of an elder
statesman — particularly when
it comes to Beethoven. He has
just completed a recording of the
entire sonata cycle over nine
years, accompanied by an online
series on the Coursera platform
called “Exploring Beethoven’s Pi-
ano Sonatas,” created with the
Curtis Institute, where he stud-
ied and where he is now on the
faculty. He studied with Leon
Fleisher and thus is a grand-stu-
dent, so to speak, of Artur Schna-
bel, the high priest of Beethoven
in the 20th century and the first
pianist to record the entire
Beethoven sonata cycle.
Schnabel was also known for
his imprecision — the “clinkers,”
as he termed them — and on
Sunday afternoon, it sounded as
if Biss had picked up some of
those along the way. You could
hear the arc and intention of the
ideas, but the tempos were
mushy and the playing often
soupy. The reason emerged at
intermission: Biss was feeling ill
but would try to finish the con-
cert. He returned to the stage, his
face grayish, and worked his way
valiantly through the program,
which opened with the expan-
sive No. 4 in E-flat, offered the
“Pathetique” (No. 8) as the most
famous piece on the program,
continued with the sunny and
ingratiating No. 10 in G and
ended with the ambitious and
expansive No. 11 in B-flat
(Op. 22), which Beethoven was
very proud of but which hasn’t
proved one of the more enduring
sonatas, perhaps because he col-
ored more within the lines in this
piece than in many of the others.
It’s always interesting to hear
what superb artists sound like
when not at the top of their game
— to get a look, in effect, at what
lies behind the polished curtain,
where the weaknesses are and
what remains. And in a career
that puts such a premium on
perfection — to the extent that
some Juilliard students fear that
any audible mistake could cost
them their future — it’s coura-
geous to go out on a day that one
knows probably won’t go well.
Biss offered a vision of compel-
ling musicmaking, of a gripping
narrative sense, and even of
some of the struggle that we
associate with the deaf
Beethoven’s pounding at the
keys. But as a performance, it
was more a placeholder, and a
promise of what lies ahead — the
middle- and late-period sonatas
Biss will perform in the next two
concerts, in December and
March.
[email protected]
MUSIC REVIEW
Ailing Biss
still powers
through
sonatas
BENJAMIN EALOVEGAJonathan Biss in 2013.
While the pianist was
not at his best, he’ll
return to Phillips for
two more concerts of
Beethoven sonatas in
December and March.
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