Ditch him, Dina!
That was a longtime friend’s advice yesterday for New Jersey first lady Dina Matos McGreevey.
“If it was me, the day he told me he was gay, I’d be gone,” said Isabel Costa, a community activist in New ark’s Ironbound district, where Matos McGreevey grew up.
Costa said Gov. Jim McGreevey’s dramatic coming out of the closet on national TV “was the shock of my life.”
“I never had an in kling,” she said.
“I’m so naive,” she said, adding that her 38-year-old friend never said a word to her about the gover nor’s sexual prefer ences.
“I’m sure she didn’t just find out, I presume she’s known for a while,” she said.
“I think it’s very bad for her, for her marriage and her child,” she said of the bombshell disclosure.
“I have no idea why he did it so publicly – maybe it’s because something worse is coming.”
Asked if she thought Matos McGreevey will stay with her husband of four years or move out with Jacqueline, their 2-year-old daughter, Costa said, “I have no idea what’s in store for her.”
Matos McGreevey’s aunt, Aderito Paolo, also said her niece never mentioned anything about McGreevey’s sexuality.
“I don’t know if she knew anything,” she told The Record of Bergen County. “If she knew, she didn’t say anything to anybody.”
At least one close McGreevey friend believes the governor’s wife just learned about his gay life.
“I don’t think that she did know it,” George Zoffinger, head of the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, told Diane Sawyer on ABC’s “Good Morning America” yesterday.
“I think the governor basically told his family only recently,” added Zoffinger, who had dinner with McGreevey after the announcement.
As for whether the couple will stay together, he said: “I can tell you that the family is very resilient. I know that the governor loves his wife . . . They’ll get support from a lot of his friends, who . . . have reached out to both of them, and hopefully they can work all this out.”
The governor’s wife declined interview requests made through her husband’s office yesterday and did not answer calls to her office at Columbus Hospital in Newark, where she is the executive director of fund raising.
Asked about the future of the McGreevey marriage, a spokesman for the governor said there would be no comment.
McGreevey’s first wife, school librarian Kari Schutz, who lives in Canada in a suburb of Vancouver, B.C., with their daughter, also kept a low profile yesterday.
But her mother told The Post McGreevey had consulted them about his announcement and had discussed its impact on their 11-year-old girl, Morag.
“His daughter has been his primary concern,” said Agnes Schutz, who lives near Kari and Morag.
“We think it’s very courageous,” she said of McGreevey’s decision to go public about being gay – something she said they had been aware of for some time.
Asked about the impact of the very public announcement on McGreevey’s preteen daughter, she said, “That’s the first thing he asked about when he discussed it with us.”
“He spoke to [Kari], there was a lot of discussion. It was done with her input and approval,” Schutz said.