The former North Carolina governor running for Senate had a ‘secret’ divorce and began dating his second wife while she was still married, Daily Mail can reveal.
Roy Cooper, 68, is at the top of Democrat politics, and was even tipped to replace Joe Biden as a presidential candidate last year and was on the shortlist to be Kamala Harris’s 2024 running mate.
But despite his decades-long prominent standing in the party, Cooper has kept his divorce, and the overlap with his second wife’s own first marriage, under wraps – until now.
The revelation may come as a surprise for a ‘squeaky clean’ leader once described by left-leaning politics magazine The New Republic as ‘the living, breathing antonym of controversy.’
Before his marriage to current wife Kristin, 69, Cooper was wed to his college sweetheart Georganne Rice, now 65.
But Rice says he ditched her for a career in politics, without warning.
‘He was my orientation counselor when I was a freshman and started at [University of North Carolina] Chapel Hill,’ she told the Daily Mail in an exclusive interview.
‘We dated starting my sophomore year of college, and then we got married two weeks after I graduated from college in 1981.
‘I thought everything was great, until one day he came home and told me that he had signed up to run for state representative.
‘We had not discussed it or anything. We were in our mid-20s, and I wanted to start a family. I was completely flabbergasted that he would decide to run. He wouldn’t even discuss it with me; he just came home and told me.
‘I told Roy, I don’t want this life, we didn’t discuss this. It was a pretty major life decision.’
As the young attorney ran his campaign for a state house seat in Raleigh in 1985 and 1986, he and Georganne secretly split, she said.
‘I took a promotion and moved to Greenville [North Carolina]. I still came back and went to campaign events for him, because he didn’t want anybody to know,’ she said.
‘But the day he won the election, I told him, if you lose, then we can talk about our marriage. But if you win, I didn’t sign up for this. He won, and he’s been in politics ever since.
‘When he first ran for governor, he called me and said, if somebody contacts you, please don’t say anything negative
‘I don’t wish anything bad on Roy,’ she added. ‘But my friends think it’s funny it’s never mentioned that he was married before.
‘I had a lot of people texting me when his name was mentioned for Vice President last year, going, “Do you think he’s ever going to acknowledge that y’all were married for over five years?”
‘It’s kind of crappy to sign up to run for office and then just come home and tell your wife and not discuss it. So, I can see why he might not want to talk about it.’
Despite his long political career, the only mention of his marriage to Georganne is the 1981 announcement of their wedding in the Rocky Mount Telegram.
But Cooper did give some details about his second love Kristin in a 1997 interview with the North Carolina News & Observer.
Kristin, née Bernhardt, was working as a staff attorney for the North Carolina General Assembly in the 1980s, making Cooper one of her de-facto bosses at the time.
Cooper told the newspaper they met while devising an update to a law about car salvage.
‘While many romances have been sparked in automobiles, few can claim, as the Coopers can, to have met in the Legislative Study Committee on Auto Salvage Titles,’ News & Observer interviewer Rob Christensen wrote in the May 12, 1997 piece.
Assembly records show that law was updated in the 1989 legislative session, meaning Cooper and his now-wife’s romance likely started some time that year or earlier.
There was just one problem. Kristin was 10 years into her marriage to Army doctor Goerge Godette, with whom she was raising a five-year-old daughter.
Court records show the couple filed for divorce on August 21, 1989, during the legislative session when Kristin and Cooper reportedly began their romance.
Kristin and George did not finalize their split until May 1991. Cooper married her the following March.
The Godette’s’ decree of divorce, signed by the judge on May 1, 1991, said that ‘a state of complete and irreconcilable incompatibility has arisen between the parties such that the legitimate aims of the marriage have been destroyed’.
While fighting over alimony, Kristin’s attorney sent a list of questions to the Army Lieutenant doctor, including: ‘During your marriage, have you ever had sexual relations with another person?’
His attorney objected and wrote that the question was ‘irrelevant and constitutionally privileged.’
A joint filing by the former couple said they separated sometime between December 1987 and April 1988.
The dates suggest Kristin had split with her first husband when she got together with Cooper but was still legally married.
The court awarded Kristin primary custody of their daughter Hilary, with visitation rights for George of 14 days a year.
Neither Cooper nor Kristin’s ex-husband responded to requests for comment.
Cooper went on to serve as a state senator, 16 years as North Carolina Attorney General, and a term as governor from 2017 to 2025.
Court records show that in 2011, Hilary, then age 26, filed for adoption by Cooper, officially becoming his legal daughter.
On Monday, Cooper announced his candidacy for the US Senate. North Carolina is set to be a key battleground between Democrats and Republicans in 2026.
The apparent overlap between Kristin’s first marriage to a veteran and her relationship with Cooper may prove controversial in The Tar Heel State, after 2020 Democratic nominee for the NC US Senate race Cal Cunningham was embroiled in a scandal over an extramarital texting affair.
Cunningham’s steamy messages with the wife of an Army veteran, revealed by website National File in October 2020, led to an Army investigation into the would-be senator, who is a Lieutenant Colonel in the Reserves.
The father of two narrowly lost in the election the following month to Republican Thom Tillis, whose upcoming retirement has prompted Cooper’s run for the seat.