From Daily Mail: The former North Carolina governor running for Senate had a ‘secret’ divorce and began dating his second wife while she was still married, Daily Mail can reveal.
Roy Cooper, 68, is at the top of Democrat politics, and was even tipped to replace Joe Biden as a presidential candidate last year and was on the shortlist to be Kamala Harris’s 2024 running mate.
But despite his decades-long prominent standing in the party, Cooper has kept his divorce, and the overlap with his second wife’s own first marriage, under wraps – until now.
The revelation may come as a surprise for a ‘squeaky clean’ leader once described by left-leaning politics magazine The New Republic as ‘the living, breathing antonym of controversy.’
Rice accuses Cooper of ditching her for a career in politics.
“He was my orientation counselor when I was a freshman and started at [University of North Carolina] Chapel Hill,” she told the Daily Mail. “We dated starting my sophomore year of college, and then we got married two weeks after I graduated from college in 1981.”
Rice said Cooper suddenly announced that “he had signed up to run for state representative” without discussing it with her.
“I told Roy, I don’t want this life, we didn’t discuss this. It was a pretty major life decision.”
Rice and Cooper split during the campaign.
“I took a promotion and moved to Greenville [North Carolina]. I still came back and went to campaign events for him, because he didn’t want anybody to know,” she said, sharing that she told him the marriage was over if he won because she did not want to be a politician’s wife.
She stayed quiet because she never wanted to hurt him, and had agreed not to say anything negative.
Cooper met his second love Kristin while she was working as a staff attorney for the North Carolina General Assembly in the 1980s. At the time Kristin had been married for 10 years to Army doctor Goerge Godette, with whom she had a five-year-old daughter.
Rice and Godette filed for divorce on August 21, 1989. At some point before or after that, Kristin and Cooper began their romance.
The divorce was finalized in May 1991, and Cooper married Rice the following March.
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