Divorce, Separations and Annulments

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    Pete Hegseth’s Mother Accused Her Son of Mistreating Women for Years

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    Penelope Hegseth made the accusation in an email to her son in 2018, amid his contentious divorce. She said on Friday that she regretted the email and had apologized to him.The mother of Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, wrote him an email in 2018 saying he had routinely mistreated women for years and displayed a lack of character.“On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself,” Penelope Hegseth wrote, stating that she still loved him.She also wrote: “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”Mrs. Hegseth, in a phone interview with The New York Times on Friday, said that she had sent her son an immediate follow-up email at the time apologizing for what she had written. She said she had fired off the original email “in anger, with emotion” at a time when he and his wife were going through a very difficult divorce.In the interview, she defended her son and disavowed the sentiments she had expressed in the initial email about his character and treatment of women. “It is not true. It has never been true,” she said. She added: “I know my son. He is a good father, husband.” She said that publishing the contents of the first email was “disgusting.”Questions about Mr. Hegseth’s treatment of women have emerged in the weeks since Mr. Trump chose him, a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, to lead the Pentagon. The issue is expected to be a subject of scrutiny during Senate confirmation hearings.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Can ‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ Change a Conservative Religious Culture?

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      In the seventh episode of the new reality show “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” a character makes this observation of a fellow married mom struggling with a controlling husband: “It’s kind of a theme with our church, though, and kind of what the problem is. Everyone is getting married before their brains even develop.”The show, which is on Hulu, follows eight influencers in Utah who are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is being marketed as a docudrama with a religious gloss; a caption for the trailer on TikTok promises “Secrets, scandals and viral handles.” This group of conventionally attractive mostly 20-somethings was cast because, as part of a loose network of friends who call themselves “#momtok,” they already had millions of social media followers. Following their rise to fame over the past few years, they made headlines for a cascade of salacious and embarrassing public moments.“Mormon Wives” is being sold as regular reality TV dreck — I say this with love. I love garbage. So I was surprised to find that beneath the usual petty squabbles and plastic surgery recovery scenes, there is a much deeper theme of religious conflict.These women are engaged in an ongoing discussion about, among other subjects, the social conservatism of Mormonism — where chastity is a virtue, homosexuality is a sin and the father is the “is the presiding authority in his family” — and whether they can change the culture of the church and also the broader world, including their own families.(A similar conversation has also been happening on “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” but it tended to be overshadowed by the criminal behavior of one of the cast members, which played out over multiple seasons. I told you, I love garbage).The “Mormon Wives” very public grappling with rigid gender roles and working outside the home is also part of a larger trend I wrote about earlier this year — while every demographic group is moving away from organized religion in the United States, young women are leaving “in unprecedented numbers.” They are pushing back against their churches and disaffiliating in part because they feel like second-class citizens in their houses of worship.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      As Lopez Files for Divorce From Affleck, Should You Reunite With an Ex-Partner?

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      As Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck show, rekindling an old romance is risky. We asked couples counselors what you should ask before diving back in.When the superstars Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck married in 2022, decades after calling off their initial engagement, it seemed like the stuff of a romantic Hollywood blockbuster.“Love is beautiful,” Ms. Lopez wrote after the couple’s Las Vegas nuptials. “Love is kind. And it turns out love is patient. Twenty years patient.”But Ms. Lopez filed for divorce from Mr. Affleck on Tuesday after two years of marriage, ending months of frenzied media speculation about their shaky union, and highlighting a decidedly unromantic truth: Reuniting with an ex-partner does not guarantee a happy ending.“I have certainly seen people who are in long-term happy relationships who got back together after having broken up,” said Elizabeth Earnshaw, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Philadelphia. “I would say that is the exception to the rule.”Many couples counselors said they recommended taking an almost clinical approach to reuniting with an ex — even (or especially) if you are swept up in the thrill of rediscovering old passions. Here are four questions therapists recommend asking.1. Do we both understand why we broke up?That is a “laughably obvious” question to start with, admitted Lisa Marie Bobby, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Denver and the founder of Growing Self, a counseling and coaching service. But if you and your partner cannot both articulate a clear answer without defensiveness or tension, that is a red flag, she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jennifer Lopez Files for Divorce From Ben Affleck

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      The A-list couple, who married in 2022, had attempted to rekindle their romance after close to two decades.Jennifer Lopez filed for divorce from Ben Affleck on Tuesday after two years of marriage, capping a decades-long romantic history that spawned its own famous portmanteau: “Bennifer.”Ms. Lopez filed the petition to dissolve the couple’s marriage to the L.A. County Superior Court, according to court records. The filing, which was first reported by TMZ, was submitted on the second anniversary of the couple’s lavish wedding celebration at Mr. Affleck’s home in Georgia.Representatives for Ms. Lopez and Mr. Affleck did not immediately respond to requests for comment.The on-again, off-again relationship between Ms. Lopez, 55, a singer and actress, and Mr. Affleck, 52, an actor and director, has been a subject of pop-culture fascination since the early 2000s.The pair began dating while filming the 2003 romantic comedy “Gigli.” Although the movie was panned, the relationship between its stars became “the summer’s most watched romance,” according to an article that year in The New York Times. They got engaged in 2002, but postponed the wedding the following year, citing the media frenzy around their union.The pair split and moved onto other relationships: Ms. Lopez married the singer Marc Anthony in 2004, and Mr. Affleck married the actress Jennifer Garner in 2005. (Both ended in divorce.)In the spring of 2021, tabloids lit up with headlines that Ms. Lopez and Mr. Affleck were dating again. In July 2022, the superstars were wed at a midnight ceremony in Las Vegas, complete with a pink Cadillac convertible. They held a celebration with family and friends in Georgia in August, with Ms. Lopez wearing a Ralph Lauren gown and a sweeping veil.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How to Avoid a Drawn-Out Divorce

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      The sticking points in a breakup aren’t the same for every couple, but lawyers who have brokered countless divorces have some advice for keeping things simple.Ask any divorce lawyer: The only people who control how long a divorce takes are the two parties going through the divorce.Although many divorces are finalized through mediation, a process in which lawyers try to broker a resolution without having to go to court, those negotiations can sometimes take years, prolonged by things like child custody battles, when emotions can be expected to run high. Perhaps less explicable is when the holdup arises over the splitting of assets like homes, vintage cars or art collections.About six years after they were declared legally single, the formerly married actors Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt continue to be legally entangled. The reason: a French vineyard they bought while together; Mr. Pitt is suing Ms. Jolie for having sold her stake in the property without his consent, according to reports by Us Weekly and People. Ms. Jolie is asking him to drop the suit so the family can heal.Although your average split isn’t likely to be held up by a fight over a winery, many couples find that certain jointly held assets can be sticking points in the event of a breakup or divorce. So what precautions — if any — are couples taking to avoid a bruising battle after they’ve decided to part ways?Alan Feigenbaum, a divorce lawyer in New York City, has seen divorce proceedings drag out over the division of valuable art collections. But things can become absurd, he said, when negotiations are dragged out over property that isn’t even particularly valuable.“Some of the most ridiculous things I’ve seen,” he added, “is arguing over who gets to keep their children’s toys.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Former Spouses Discuss Co-Parenting and Being the Best of Friends

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      “We genuinely like each other,” Alex Yaroslavsky said of his ex-wife and co-parent, Liza Cooper. They even live in the same apartment building.In Unhitched, couples tell the stories of their relationships, from romance to vows to divorce to life afterward.Liza Cooper and Alex Yaroslavsky, both from New York City, met in their late 30s, in March 2007, through a dating app; they married about a year later. Both secular Jews, the two seemed compatible on paper, yet differences in their communication styles sometimes created conflict and ultimately brought an end to their marriage.But with patience, work and a sympathetic landlord, the two managed to become dear friends and co-parents after their divorce. They now live on different floors of the same Upper West Side apartment building.Dates of marriage June 15, 2008 to Dec. 13, 2018Age when married Ms. Cooper was 37; Mr. Yaroslavsky was 38. (They are now 53 and 54.)Current occupations She is an administrator in a hospital and a dating coach; he is an executive coach with his own company.Children One son, age 14.Where did they grow up? In 1980, Mr. Yaroslavsky, an only child, immigrated to the United States with his parents when he was 10. The family had lived in Lviv, which was then part of the Soviet Union and is now Ukraine. He quickly learned English.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist From ‘The Golden Bachelor’ Announce Divorce

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      Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist, the “Golden Bachelor” couple who married in January, announced they will be divorcing three months after their wedding.Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist were the first couple to meet and marry on “The Golden Bachelor,” ABC’s spinoff of “The Bachelor” featuring cast members 60 and older.On Friday, the newlyweds announced that they will also be the spinoff’s first couple to divorce.They made the announcement in a joint appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “Theresa and I have had a number of heart-to-heart conversations, and we’ve looked closely at our situation, our living situation, and we’ve come to the conclusion mutually that it’s probably time for us to dissolve our marriage,” Mr. Turner, 72, said.The anchor Juju Chang replied in shock. “Three months after getting married?” she said. “I mean, what the heck, guys?” she asked later in the interview.Explaining their decision, Mr. Turner said both were dedicated to their families — each has children from previous marriages, as well as grandchildren — and that it made the most sense for them to live separately. Ms. Nist, 70, added that they had looked at homes near family members in South Carolina and New Jersey but that they had been unable to reach a conclusion.The couple, through a representative, declined to be interviewed for this article.The franchise had positioned the pair as evidence that invigorating love stories can unfold later in life. Before marrying Ms. Nist, Mr. Turner, a retiree from Indiana, was married for 43 years to his high school sweetheart, Toni. She died in 2017 after a brief illness.“People my age still fall in love,” Mr. Turner told The New York Times after he was announced as the series lead of the first “Golden Bachelor” season. “People my age still have hope, and they still have vigorous lives.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gypsy Rose Blanchard Files for Divorce From Ryan Anderson

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      The couple married while Ms. Blanchard, who was found guilty of helping to kill her mother, was still in prison. Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who was convicted of helping to kill her abusive mother in a widely covered case, filed for divorce Monday from Ryan Anderson after just under two years of marriage, according to Louisiana court records.Mr. Anderson, a special-education teacher from Louisiana, has said that he sent Ms. Blanchard a letter at the Chillicothe Correctional Center in Missouri and that the two began corresponding. They married while Ms. Blanchard was still in prison in 2022.After her release in late December, Ms. Blanchard became the subject of frenzied social media attention, much of which concerned her relationship. The pair discussed their introduction to married life on Entertainment Weekly and documented a trip to New York City for Ms. Blanchard’s millions of social media followers.Ms. Blanchard filed for divorce in Lafourche Parish, La., just before 2 p.m. on Monday, according to the clerk of court, and the legal grounds for divorce are not yet public. TMZ was first to report the news of the couple’s divorce proceedings.Ms. Blanchard and Mr. Anderson did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.The ongoing fascination with Ms. Blanchard has raised fresh questions about the ethics of public obsession with true crime figures and victims of abuse — and of remaking those figures as influencer-style celebrities.Ms. Blanchard, now 32, pleaded guilty to the second-degree murder of her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, in 2016. Ms. Blanchard’s boyfriend at the time, Nicholas Godejohn, was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.A plea agreement acknowledged that Dee Dee Blanchard had been abusive: “Gypsy’s mom was abusing her physically, medically, giving her medication she didn’t need, having her go through procedures that she didn’t need,” Ms. Blanchard’s trial lawyer, Mike Stanfield, said at a news conference in 2016.An HBO documentary and a Hulu mini-series released during her sentence characterized her as a victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy — a form of abuse in which a parent sickens a child for attention — and drew intense public attention to the case.That attention morphed into a complex strain of social media celebrity after Ms. Blanchard’s release. She amassed more than eight million followers on Instagram and close to 10 million on TikTok, where she shared day-by-day updates with Mr. Anderson and promoted her Lifetime series, “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.”Comments on such posts were mixed, with some praising her frank discussion of her regrets — among them, she said, her role in murdering her mother — and others expressing discomfort that her story was being repackaged as entertainment.“It feels like a disservice to let her become just another social-media curiosity, with her abuse and her crimes being meme-ified for an uncaring public,” Alice Bolin, the author of “Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession,” wrote in an article for The Cut.Ms. Blanchard deactivated her TikTok and Instagram accounts last month, citing concerns about the effects of public scrutiny on her mental health.Alain Delaquérière More

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      Saudi Arabia, Lagging on Women’s Rights, Is to Lead U.N. Women’s Forum

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      Saudi Arabia will chair a United Nations commission on women, bringing condemnation from human rights groups, which said the kingdom still has an “abysmal” record on women’s rights.Saudi Arabia won an uncontested bid to lead a United Nations body dedicated to women’s rights for the 2025 session, bringing condemnation from human rights groups that argued that the kingdom had an “abysmal” record on women’s empowerment.On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the U.N., Abdulaziz Alwasil, was elected chairman of the Commission on the Status of Women, a U.N. body whose aim is to protect and promote women’s rights around the world.The Saudi state news agency wrote that the country’s new chairmanship “confirmed its interest in cooperating with the international community to strengthen women’s rights and empowerment” and highlighted strides the country had made toward greater social and economic freedom for women.But the decision drew scathing criticism from human rights groups. Amnesty International’s deputy director for advocacy, Sherine Tadros, said in a statement that Saudi Arabia had an “abysmal record when it comes to protecting and promoting the rights of women.” She argued that there was a “vast gulf” between the U.N. commission’s aspirations and the “lived reality for women and girls in Saudi Arabia.”The commission, established in 1946, has 45 members that are selected based on geographic quotas. No vetting process is required for a country to be elected to the commission, and there is also no requirement that it meet certain standards of gender rights to join.Saudi Arabia had been expected to win the chairmanship, which typically lasts two years, and its bid was reported to have drawn no dissent from other member states.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More