Todd and Sarah Palin/Wikimedia Commons
As reported here yesterday, it’s now official: Iron Dog snowmachine champ Todd Palin has filed for divorce from wife Sarah, the former half-term Alaska governor who leveraged a failed national bid for vice president into a gig as a big-time, national polebrity.
Anchorage attorney Kimberlee Colbo has admitted to submitting the papers for 55-year-old Todd and asking the court to keep the case confidential.
How the papers were filed as TMP (Todd M. Palin) versus SLP (Sarah L. Palin) remains something of a mystery.
As several Anchorage attorneys pointed out today, court clerks are supposed to ensure that court filings list the full names of the parties involved and the names and addresses of the attorneys representing them.
As Rule 10 of the Alaska Rules of Civil Procedure spells out, “In the complaint the title of the action shall include the names of all the parties….When identifying parties in the complaint, the plaintiff shall include as much of each party’s full legal name
as is known to the plaintiff.”
Maybe Colbo, who made the list of “super lawyers,” knows a trick or two about Sarah’s old tactic of going rogue.
The case was well played from the start. Filing on a Friday is the absolute best time to submit documents to the court if you want to avoid the media, and getting away with the use of initials was brilliant.
Court documents blame the divorce on the “incompatibility of temperament between the parties such that they find it impossible to live together as husband and wife.”
Friends have long said that the Palins, like many couples, had a rocky, up-and-down relationship, but they always put the best face on their marriage in public and squelched past rumors of thoughts of divorce.
Now that the divorce has become a reality, the story is exploding into the national news.
Here is the full complaint, which indicates it was drafted on Aug. 27, but was not filed until Sept. 6, which just happens to be Todd’s birthday.
