The estranged wife of billionaire and newspaper owner Richard Mellon Scaife, the Pittsburgh banking heir turned media mogul, was awarded $725,000 a month in temporary support during their acrimonious divorce, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported Sunday.
They're also fighting over custody of their dog.
More:
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.
So the current or recent adultery wasn't his first.
Some juicy tidbits:
The Scaifes' marital troubles first gained public attention on Dec. 22, 2005, with what Mrs. Scaife's lawyers characterize in their brief as "cruel, calculated acts toward Wife by Husband as punishment for her detection" of Mr. Scaife's alleged affair.
"On December 22nd in the late afternoon, Wife, in an attempt to confirm Husband's ongoing affair, appeared at the home of her Husband, peered in his residence window to confirm" whether the other woman was with Mr. Scaife. "Wife was arrested under an absurd trespass charge, handcuffed and transported to the County Jail, where she was incarcerated overnight in a grim holding cell," Mrs. Scaife's attorneys wrote. The charges were later dismissed but, in the words of Mrs. Scaife's brief, "The marriage was over!"
