If few politicians have benefited more from the rightwing’s moral superiority pose than Ronald Reagan, perhaps no one has contributed more to it financially than Richard Melon Scaife:
Remember him? The cantankerous, reclusive 75-year-old billionaire who’s spent a sizable chunk of his inherited fortune bankrolling conservative causes and trying to kneecap Democrats? He’s best known for funding efforts to smear then-President Bill Clinton, but more quietly he’s given in excess of $300 million to right-leaning activists, watchdogs and think tanks. Atop his list of favorite donees: the family-values-focused Heritage Foundation, which has published papers with titles such as “Restoring a Culture of Marriage.”
The culture of his own marriage is apparently past restoring. With the legal fight still in the weigh-in phase, the story of Scaife v. Scaife already includes a dog-snatching, an assault, a night in jail and that divorce court perennial, allegations of adultery.
In 1991, Scaife married his second wife, Margaret, who is called “Ritchie,” after dating her for years while they were both married to other people. A few years ago, Ritchie began to suspect that Dickie, as he is called, was up to his old tricks. In 2005, a private eye she hired to follow Scaife around discovered that he was making regular visits to a motel that rented rooms by the hour:
There, according to [private eye Keith] Scannell, Scaife spent a few hours with Tammy Sue Vasco. Why a billionaire would shack up at Doug’s Motel, of all places, is a mystery. Ditto his choice of companions. Vasco is a tall, blond 43-year-old mother who in 1993 was busted in a sting operation after showing up at a Sheraton hotel and offering to have sex with an undercover cop for $225, the Post-Gazette reported.
Social Register material she is not, but Vasco and Scaife seemed to have a relationship that went beyond the purely professional. The two usually met each other twice a week, for months, at the motel, says an employee of the motel. Scaife would show up in a chauffeured car, dressed in a suit, wearing cuff links, always bearing flowers. Vasco would be waiting in same room every time, Room 5 on the ground floor, facing the parking lot, said the employee. Mr. Dick, as he was known at the motel, would stay for two hours or so, then get back in the car, which had been waiting, and leave.
For reasons that are unclear, Dickie and Ritchie Scaife maintained separate nearby residences in their tony Pittsburgh suburb. One day not long after Scannell had confirmed Ritchie’s suspicions about Dickie, she happened to notice a strange car in the driveway of her husband’s house:
Gaping through a window, according to court papers filed by her lawyers, she spotted Vasco. Then the trouble started. [Scannell] put it this way: “Mrs. Scaife acted as any loving wife would upon finding out just days earlier that her husband had a confirmed meeting, for several hours, at a $40 motel with a woman previously arrested for prostitution.”
Police would later say that Ritchie Scaife began pounding on doors and windows and refused to leave, which is why she was promptly arrested for “defiant trespass.” She was handcuffed and driven downtown to the Allegheny County Jail — near the Liberty Bridge, at 950 Second Ave. — where a woman accustomed to traveling with a personal hairdresser spent the night in what her lawyers later called a “grim” holding cell.
The trespassing charge was eventually dismissed, but as Ritchie Scaife’s lawyer stated in a divorce filing, “The marriage was over!”
In the early 1990s — about the same time Dickie divorced his first wife to marry Ritchie — he gave the extreme rightwing American Spectator magazine $2.3 million to spend on bribes in Arkansas for the explicit purpose of dredging up dirt on Bill Clinton’s extramarital shenanigans and anything else that might turn up.
Managed from Washington by a team of Northeastern elites who had no clue about Southern culture or the murk and muck of Arkansas politics, the “Arkansas Project,” as it was known to the conspirators, was taken for a ride by a coterie of Arkansans who hated the Clintons because they promoted equality for African-Americans.
During the Clinton wars in the late 1990s, the Arkansas Project conspirators — particularly R. Emmett Tyrrell, the American Spectator’s lunatic-fringe publisher, and Barbara Olson, the blonde Ann Coulter-ish wife of the project’s CEO, Ted Olson — appeared regularly on cable chat shows, where they would put on great displays of moral bombast. How they must have smirked off camera, knowing that the millions they were spending to expose Bill Clinton’s philandering had come from a man who had cheated on his own marriage with someone else’s wife.
Not that they cared. Tyrrell still claims that the false statements by the Arkansas troopers, a defrocked judge named David Hale and others were true — despite the fact that most of it was proved false by the $60 million taxpayer-funded investigation headed by Ted Olson’s friend, Ken Starr.
In 2000, Olson argued and won Bush v. Gore at the Supreme Court, which handed the presidency to George W. Bush, for which he was rewarded with Starr’s old post of U.S. solicitor general. Barbara Olson died in the plane that hit the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
Fast-forward to today and note that none of the big “family values” promoting organizations that Scaife has given money to, including the Heritage Foundation, are returning his money in disgust over his disrespect for traditional marriage and his antics at Doug’s Motel.
Finally, a little schadenfreude: Scaife, who is worth about $1.3 billion, had no prenup with Ritchie, which means she can sue for half his fortune. She might soon become a wildly wealthy divorcee.
