Too much work to be Mrs Kiriakou
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Ending a long account of his prosecution given to a New Zealand audience in August 2017, John Kiriakou added a cost that had been incurred only weeks earlier.

The line

Having said that he would do the whole thing over again, that somebody had to say something, that transparency is real and important, and that a democracy cannot function without it, he listed what it had cost. "It's cost me my marriage," he said. "My wife left three months ago. She said it's just too much work to be Mrs. John Kiriakou."

His own comment on the reason was one sentence: "To tell you the truth, I don't blame her."

The frame he puts around it

The remark closes the talk rather than derailing it. Kiriakou moves straight from the separation to the conclusion he had been building toward: "But I had to do the right thing, and this was the price that we all have to pay. It was all worth it."

The plural is deliberate. Throughout the same talk he describes the cost as having been borne by the household rather than by him, the decision to take a plea, he says, came down to whether his family could live without him for two years rather than twenty, and the calculation was made on their behalf.

Relation to his other accounts

The attribution of the marriage's end to the whistleblowing is consistent across his later tellings. He has said elsewhere that the episode cost him "literally everything", his marriage, his career, his freedom, his children, and that the post-traumatic stress he eventually developed came not from fifteen years of intelligence work but from the divorce. He has also credited the same wife, in earlier tellings, with the advice that shaped his public response: that he had done nothing wrong and therefore had to keep talking until his account became the account of record.

See also

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Heather Kiriakou
- PTSD
- Get better enough to go back
