Millions up for grabs in Scaife divorce fight (Caught him in Affair)

[RamboLiberal]

The divorce case titled Scaife v. Scaife has wound its way through the courts under a blanket of secrecy as both sides struggle over a storied Pittsburgh fortune surpassing $1.4 billion and a temporary monthly alimony payment bigger than the life savings of most people.

Margaret Ritchie Battle Scaife, 60, and her husband, Mellon banking and oil heir Richard Mellon Scaife, 75, have been unable to agree on support payments, whether one of his newspapers is a hobby or a business investment, and even the date of their separation. She says they split in December 2005, after she caught him in an affair. He says they separated 10 months earlier.

Details of the dispute have remained out of the public eye for more than a year. Lawyers for Mr. Scaife, a reclusive financier of the political right who underwrote much of the campaign against the Clinton administration in the 1990s, asked Allegheny County Judge Alan Hertzberg to seal the record of his divorce. The judge complied.

The marriage of Richard and "Ritchie" Scaife, as she preferred to call herself, was Mr. Scaife's second. The couple had been together since the early '80s while Mr. Scaife was still married to his first wife, the former Frances Gilmore. In the course of the next 14 years, Ritchie Scaife would serve on the board of Mr. Scaife's publishing company, sometimes exercising influence in its editorial judgments, and once sat alongside him during a rare interview he granted in the midst of the Clinton investigations. All the while, she was living in a Shadyside house of her own two blocks from the Westminster Place mansion occupied by Mr. Scaife.

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The case could also affect the fortunes of Mr. Scaife's publishing enterprise, notably the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, which, records filed with the divorce papers show, he has subsidized with more than $140 million -- Mrs. Scaife's lawyers contend the figure is $244 million -- from one of his trust funds over the past 15 years, and which has lost between $20 million and $30 million yearly since it was started in 1992.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07259/817950-85.stm