Todd Palin is going rogue.
He appears to have filed for divorce from his wife, former Alaska governor and U.S. vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, with a document filed Friday citing “incompatibility of temperament.”
The Palins have not spoken publicly about the breakup, but paperwork filed in Anchorage Superior Court matches the Palins’ initials, birthdates and marriage dates. The filing also includes initials matching the Palins’ youngest child, Trig Paxson Van Palin (T.P.V.P.). The boy was born shortly before Sarah Palin was chosen as the running mate for Republican presidential candidate John McCain in the 2008 election.
The Palins were married in 1988 and have five children, four of whom are now adults.
Sarah Palin was a former beauty queen who became governor of Alaska in 2006 and, later, a candidate for vice-president alongside McCain. Todd Palin spent much of the 2000s as a fisherman and an oilfield worker while his wife pursued her political career.
“We met in high school, and two decades and five children later, he’s still my guy,” Sarah Palin told the Republican National Convention in a speech in 2008.
The 2008 election catapulted the whole Palin family into the media spotlight, for better and for worse. Their daughter, Bristol, was criticized for becoming pregnant as an unwed 17-year-old while her mother was running on the Republican ticket. Years later, Bristol was accused of punching someone in the face several times at an Anchorage house party in 2014.
The couple’s eldest son, Track, spent less than two months in a halfway house after he was convicted of assaulting his father in 2017. He was also accused of punching his then-girlfriend in 2016. He pleaded guilty to misdemeanour possession of a firearm while intoxicated, and the rest of the charges were dismissed.
Sarah Palin released her memoir, Going Rogue, a year after her election loss.
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In the divorce filing, the plaintiff seeks joint custody of the one 11-year-old child living in the family home and calls for an “equitable division” of marital debts and assets.
“There is an incompatibility of temperament between the parties such that they find it impossible to continue to live together as man and wife,” the document says.
As of this writing, the Palins have not publicly acknowledged the divorce filing.
— With files from the Associated Press
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