Ruben Gallego at an Aug. 9, 2024, campaign rally for Kamala Harris in Glendale. Photo by Gage Skidmore | Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0
The divorce records of U.S. Congressman Ruben Gallego and Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego should be unsealed, the Arizona Court of Appeals ruled Thursday.
The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative political news outlet, sued to unseal the records back in January. In an opinion column, the editors of the publication wrote that they did so because Gallego had been speaking about his divorce publicly, and the public deserved to be able to fact check him.
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The Beacon filed a lawsuit to unseal records from the 2017 divorce in Yavapai County Superior Court, where the divorce proceedings took place. Gallego had already been campaigning for a year for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Kyrsten Sinema, who did not run for reelection.
In Arizona, it’s not common for divorce records to be sealed, but at the Gallegos’ request, in 2016 the court sealed the records in their entirety after finding that “the privacy interests of the parties outweighs the general open records policy.”
Following the Beacon’s lawsuit, the Gallegos — who remain political allies — proposed that the court release a redacted version of their divorce records, to protect financial information as well as details about their minor child.
The court agreed to some, but not all of those redactions, and the Gallegos appealed that decision to the Court of Appeals.
The appeals court affirmed the lower court’s decision, saying that Yavapai County Superior Court did not abuse its discretion when it rejected some of the Gallegos’ proposed redactions.
“The Gallegos had the burden to show continuing or new overriding circumstances to prohibit access to court documents or any portions thereof,” Presiding Judge Brian Furuya wrote in the ruling. “They did not meet that burden.”
Ruben and Kate were married in 2010. In 2014, Gallego was elected to represent the 3rd Congressional District in the U.S. House. In late 2016, when Kate was only a few months away from giving birth to their son, Ruben filed for divorce.
While Ruben’s Republican opponent in the Senate race, Kari Lake, has said that she is not involved in the Beacon’s effort to unseal the divorce records, the circumstances surrounding his divorce is one of her go-to talking points.
“Ruben Gallego walked out on his wife when she was 9 months pregnant with his first born,” Lake posted on Instagram on Aug. 12. “He served her with divorce papers and ran-off with a DC lobbyist…The people have a right to know what Ruben has done & who Ruben really is.”
The divorce was finalized in 2017, and Ruben married lobbyist Sydney Barron, who worked for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee at the time, in 2021. They have a daughter together, born in 2023.
Kate Gallego has continued to support Ruben’s career, endorsing him for his run for Senate.
“Kari Lake will stop at nothing to score a cheap political point — even if it means endangering the privacy and well-being of our young son,” Ruben and Kate Gallego wrote in a joint statement. “We have long put our child before all else and will continue to do so. It is shameful that Lake, her allies, and those who amplify her cruelty refuse to respect two people who are just trying to raise a beautiful boy together.”
Gallego told the Washington Post in March 2023 that post-traumatic stress disorder, caused by his time as a Marine deployed to Iraq in 2005, was a contributing factor in his divorce. He told the Post that he drank and smoked too much and had “extreme outbursts” as he attempted to cope with the deaths of the 22 Marines in his company who were killed while he was deployed.
The Court of Appeals ruling came just one day after the only scheduled debate between Lake and Gallego, and on the second day of early voting in Arizona.
Lake has consistently lagged behind Gallego in polls, with an Emerson College Poll of 1,000 likely Arizona voters from Oct. 5-8 putting him seven points ahead. The polling average from FiveThirtyEight, which analyzes political polls, shows Gallego with a nearly 8-point lead over Lake.
After Wednesday’s debate, Gallego briefly took questions from the media, but Lake sent surrogates in her place, including Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk and her campaign’s senior advisor, Caroline Wren.
“I think it is despicable to leave a woman when she’s nine months pregnant, and I would like to know, and I think a lot of Arizonans want to know why Ruben Gallego is fighting tooth and nail, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, to seal his divorce records,” Wren told reporters. “What are in those divorce records? I think the people of Arizona deserve to know that, and so females should be very concerned.”
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