In the divorce case of former Minuteman leader Chris Simcox, the plot has gotten molasses-thick.
Simcox, who helped found the anti-immigration Minuteman group and incurred a $200,000 debt in a failed bid for John McCain’s Arizona Senate seat, has requested that his estranged wife, who has previously alleged that Simcox threatened her and their children at gunpoint, pay him spousal support and take on half of his campaign debt.
Alena Simcox was granted a restraining order from her husband in June, after she alleged Simcox had drunkenly threatened her, her children, and police officers on multiple occasions while wielding a gun.
In this latest filing, Stephen Lemons of the Phoenix New-Times reports that Simcox claims:
he’s eking by on $1,000 a month, and he wants his estranged wife Alena Simcox to pay him “spousal maintenance” in the amount of $1,500 for a full 24 months, a nice $36K.
Simcox complains that the $1,075 per month in child support asked of him is too much, and he thinks Alena should shoulder 50 percent of all he owes, including a $200,000 debt from his failed Senate bid.
In February 2010, he dropped out of the Republican primary for McCain’s seat, and endorsed and went to work as a consultant for Tea Party favorite J.D. Hayworth (who eventually got thrashed by McCain in the August primary). Simcox writes in the filing that since Alena Simcox “supported Husband’s decision to run for the Senate and Husband’s victory would have greatly benefited the community financially and in other meaningful ways,” she should be responsible for half of the debt.
Simcox only worked for Hayworth from March 1 to April 16 of this year, because, the filing claims, Alena Simcox’s allegations “have resulted in extremely negative press for [Chris Simcox] and caused [him] to lose his job with the J.D. Hayworth Senatorial Campaign.”
But there’s more: At the time of the restraining order, the court also ordered Simcox to surrender his weapons, but he was reportedly not immediately served with the order. So Alena Simcox hired bounty hunter Stacey O’Connell to find him.
It so happens that O’Connell was previously kicked out of the Minuteman group for fighting with Chris Simcox, so there was already some bad blood between the two before Simcox claimed that Alena Simcox and O’Connell were having an affair. The two, he said, were “engaged in a pattern of devious and malicious conduct including statements of iniquity, to torment me emotionally in an apparent attempt to drive me out of my marriage.”
In this filing, the New Times reports, Simcox also claims his ouster from the Hayworth campaign was partially their doing: “Wife and boyfriend got me fired.”
The hearing on this case is scheduled for February 28, 2011.
