Nevada Governor Wants Mansion Back - and Wife Out
Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons looks on before the Bernard Hopkins versus Joe Calzaghe light-heavyweight boxing fight.
BRENDAN RILEY, Associated Press Writer
May 07, 2008
The state that pioneered the quickie divorce is witnessing a potentially ugly breakup that has the governor of Nevada fighting to get back into his own mansion.
Republican Gov. Jim Gibbons filed for divorce last week after moving out of the 23-room official residence. With his wife, Dawn, now ensconced in the Governor’s Mansion, he has gone to court to have her evicted so that he can move back.
Entire sitcoms have been built on less. And many Nevadans are fascinated by the whole spectacle.
“This isn’t a tourist attraction, but it’s certainly an attraction,” said Michael Green, a history professor at the College of Southern Nevada.
A popular liberal blogger, Hugh Jackson of lasvegasgleaner.com, has gleefully declared, “Gibbons vs. Gibbons: Let’s get ready to rumble!” and has taken the opportunity to re-post photos of Gibbons partying on a cruise with a crowd of women.
With a judge sealing most of the records Monday at the governor’s request, the blogosphere is full of rumors about why Gibbons, 63, wants a divorce. He is not talking publicly, and his 54-year-old wife has said she has no idea why he wants to end their marriage of nearly 22 years.
The divorce case — and the potential political fallout — are the latest in a series of difficulties for the first-term governor, including a corruption investigation by the FBI, still under way, and claims by a Las Vegas cocktail waitress that he assaulted her in a parking garage after she rebuffed his advances just before his 2006 election.
Police last year said they found insufficient evidence to support the waitress’ claim. But during the furor, Dawn Gibbons literally stood by her husband and resolutely defended him, lending critical support at a supremely perilous moment in his career.
Gibbons moved out of the mansion — a 1908 structure with fluted white Ionic columns, wraparound verandas and a grand, Greek Revival-style portico — sometime earlier this year and returned to the couple’s modest, four-bedroom house about 25 miles away in Reno, which is appropriate, given the way Nevada turned the phrase “I’m going to Reno!” into a 1940s euphemism for divorce. He continues to conduct some official business at the mansion before driving back to Reno at night.
The move has raised questions about the governor’s compliance with an 1866 state law that says a governor must “keep his office and reside at the seat of government.”
The Nevada Appeal in Carson City said in an editorial that the governor should be the one living in the mansion — unless “they change its name to the First Lady’s Mansion.”
“Dawn Gibbons should leave and let the taxpayers’ representative do our business in our mansion. If she wants to live there, she should get elected governor or live with the one we’ve got,” Sid Goodman of Las Vegas wrote in a letter to the editor of the Las Vegas Sun.
Gibbons press secretary Ben Kieckhefer has described the move to Reno as a temporary situation and said there is no violation of the law.
