Groom regrets scandalous NYT wedding feature

Carol Anne Riddell, the former TV reporter and one-half of the newlyweds who have been widely criticized for participating in a Sunday New York Times wedding feature that detailed how the couple had broken up their previous marriages in order to be together, said she regrets nothing. Riddell told Forbes on Tuesday: "We did this because we just wanted one honest account of how this happened for our sakes and for our kids' sakes. ... There was nothing in the story we were ashamed of."

But now it seems like her groom, advertising executive John Partilla, has some misgivings --  about agreeing to let the Times profile him, that is.

"I think if we had had an indication afterwards of the nerve it would have struck," he told Page Six, "we obviously would not have shared our life in any way publicly."

As The Cutline's sibling blog, The Lookout, said on Monday, the Times' Vows column is "typically a place where the spawn of diplomats and Wall Street titans share cutesy tales of how Cupid's arrow brought them together, while making sure to drop in a casual mention of the elite schools attended by the couple."

In other words, it is typically not a place where you find anecdotes about beer spilling into laps in Irish pubs as a married man and woman awkwardly confront the mutual feelings of love that will ultimately bring about divorce proceedings for each of them. But that was indeed the saga of Riddell and Partilla's union. (And yes, they both have kids.) Here's how the Vows write-up read, in part:

"'The part that's hard for people to believe is we didn't have an affair,' Ms. Riddell said. 'I didn't want to sneak around and sleep with him on the side. I wanted to get up in the morning and read the paper with him.'

"With that goal in mind, they told their spouses. 'I did a terrible thing as honorably as I could,' said Mr. Partilla, who moved out of his home, reluctantly leaving his three children. But he returned only days later. Then he boomeranged back and forth for six months."

"We are really proud of our family and proud of the way we've handled this situation over the past year," she said.

Her ex-husband, unsurprisingly, feels differently. "People lie and cheat and steal all the time. That's a fact of life. But rarely does a national news organization give them an unverified megaphone to whitewash it," Bob Ennis told Bercovici on Tuesday. He said he wasn't "contacted or interviewed or given any opportunity to opine on any of it, including having my 7-year-old daughter's picture in the paper."

Ennis, described by Bercovici as "a media executive who has held high-level jobs at IAC and News Corp.," continued: "The idea that they'd fact-check a style story — I don't think that's incumbent on them. But there's a difference between that and publishing a choreographed, self-serving piece of revisionist history for two people who are both members of the media industry."