Kathy Griffin“To be trusted is a greater complement than to be loved.” – George Macdonald

Jeanine and I caught a rerun on Larry King on Saturday as we were cooking dinner. We ate at home because we were forced to order the “tasting” menu while at a restaurant the night before. That will be another post at another time, but in short, it seemed a bit like bait-and-switch to me especially since we were already sitting down (committed) before being told that the restaurant was a tasting menu (fixed-price) only after 7:00 PM.

Anyway, it was so outrageously expensive (in my opinion) that we decided to stay in and cook on Saturday night. It feels familiar to have Larry King playing in the background and it’s usually entertaining as long as he’s not interviewing people about one of the world’s wars. It also happens to be funny when his guest is Kathy Griffin.

So we’re drinking wine, chopping onions & garlic for the red sauce and learning all these great fun facts about Kathy Griffin. We had no idea how much she loved queers. She did this really funny bit about gays in the military and witnessing the “gay inhale” on her tour in Iraq when a soldier saw her in the mess hall and gasped in her diva presence. We became bona fide Kathy Griffin fans in 60-minutes of Larry King Live.

Although it wasn’t exactly Live. It was a repeat from early July so the news about her divorce isn’t really breaking news at this point. She mentioned that trust was behind the breakup so we were both waiting for the scorned woman rant when she threw us a curve ball with this revelation:

“My ex-husband, without my knowledge, was sneaking into my wallet when I was asleep in the mornings and taking my ATM cards of my own private accounts and withdrawing money,” she said. The money totaled $72,000 and the stealing happened systematically over an eighteen month period.

The recap on CNN.com continues about how they tried to work through their problems. “He admitted it and apologized and … we went to couple therapy, I really wanted to make it work,” she said. But in the end, they weren’t able to get beyond the trust issue.

Her husband took approximately $923 each week — based on my calculations. If Kathy earns $2 million a year, then the equivalent to someone making $100,000 a year would be something like $50 a week. Not a lot of money in the big scheme of things, but you would probably notice if $50 disappeared out of your checking account on a regular basis. At a minimum, we would all probably call the bank and ask about the missing funds.

Would we be able to forgive and be okay with it? Or is trust, once broken, able to be repaired? It’s just money, after all, but I’m curious what others think of the amount, the crime, and if a stealing spouse can ever be trusted again?