Gingrich has been married three times. In 1962, he wed Jacqueline May “Jackie” Battley (February 21, 1936 – August 7, 2013), his former high school geometry teacher, when he was 19 years old and she was 26.
Throughout his congressional campaign in 1974, Gingrich was having an affair with a young volunteer. An aide who worked with Gingrich throughout the 1970s stated that “it was common knowledge that Newt was involved with other women during his marriage to Jackie.”
In the spring of 1980, he filed for divorce from Jackie after beginning an affair with Marianne Ginther.
In September 1980, according to friends who knew them both, Newt visited Jackie in the hospital the day after she had undergone surgery to treat her uterine cancer; once there, Newt began talking about the terms of their divorce, at which point Jackie threw him out of the room.
Although Newt’s presidential campaign staff continued to insist in 2011 that Jackie had requested the divorce, court documents from Carroll County, Georgia, indicated that she had in fact asked a judge to block the process, stating that although “she has adequate and ample grounds for divorce … she does not desire one at this time [and] does not admit that this marriage is irretrievably broken.”
According to L. H. Carter, Gingrich’s campaign treasurer, Gingrich said of Jackie: “She’s not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of the President. And besides, she has cancer.”
Following the divorce, Jackie had to raise money from friends in her congregation to help her and the children make ends meet; she later filed a petition in court stating that Newt had failed to properly provide for his family.[262] Newt submitted a financial statement to the judge, which showed that he had been “providing only $400 a month, plus $40 in allowances for his daughters. He claimed not to be able to afford any more. But in citing his own expenses, he listed $400 just for ‘Food / dry cleaning, etc.’—for one person.”
In 1981, a judge ordered him to provide considerably more; in 1993, Jackie stated in court that Newt had failed to obey the 1981 order “from the day it was issued.”
In 1993, while still married to Marianne, Gingrich began an affair with House of Representatives staffer Callista Bisek, more than two decades his junior.
Gingrich filed for divorce from Marianne in 1999, a few months after she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
On January 19, 2012, Marianne alleged in an interview on ABC’s Nightline that she had declined to accept Newt’s suggestion of an open marriage.