But excerpts from her two-hour conversation with investigative reporter Brian Ross dominated the headlines Thursday.
In the interview, which aired on ABC Thursday night, two days before the South Carolina primary, Marianne Gingrich talks of the moment when Gingrich revealed his six-year affair with then-congressional aide Callista Bisek while he was married to Marianne.
She said her husband was clearly asking permission to continue the affair. “He wanted an open marriage, and I refused.”
Six months later, Gingrich married Bisek, and asked the Catholic Church for an annulment of his 18-year marriage to Marianne.
Gingrich denies that he ever asked his ex-wife for an open marriage and was upset during Thursday’s debate when questions about his marriage led the broadcast.
The former House speaker slammed CNN moderator John King, saying that he was “appalled” that King would begin a presidential debate on such a topic. Gingrich called the question about his ex-wife’s allegations “as close to despicable as anything as I can imagine.”
Marianne grew up in Leetonia, Ohio, about 25 miles southwest of Youngstown. She met Gingrich at a GOP fundraiser in Ohio in 1980 and they married in Leetonia in August 1981.
In an appearance on the ABC morning talk show “The View,” Ross said Marianne Gingrich does not think her ex-husband “has the moral character to serve as president, given what happened to her and what he asked of her.”
During a campaign stop in South Carolina, Newt Gingrich said the interview was “tawdry and inappropriate.”
Kathy Lubbers and Jackie Cushman, Gingrich’s daughters from his first marriage to Jackie Battley, wrote a letter to ABC obtained by the website Politico, essentially asking that the details of his marriages be off-limits.
“The failure of a marriage is a terrible and emotional experience for everyone involved,” they wrote. They also mention that parties in a divorce can have “differing memories of events. . .”
Marianne Ginther met Newt Gingrich in 1980 when he appeared at a fundraiser in Ohio. He asked her to marry him, she said, before he asked Battley for a divorce. That divorce took place in 1981 while the first Mrs. Gingrich was being treated for cancer.
Marianne mentions in her ABC interview that Gingrich asked her for a divorce shortly after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
The second Mrs. Gingrich has spoken very rarely of her ex-husband since their divorce.. She did speak with Esquire magazine in 2010, also criticizing him for campaigning on family values while conducting an extramarital affair.
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