6 Things You’re Not Going To Like About Carly Fiorina

#5. A jilted ex? Or does he know her best?

Carly Fiorina went through a fairly high-profile divorce with first husband Todd Bartlem, which she claimed ended due to her ascendancy in the world of business.

Her ex-husband says otherwise, arguing that she’s creating a misleading mythology of herself, and “losing her humanity” on a “pathological” pursuit of power.

“She’s a very calculating person and her risks paid off but whenever I read descriptions about her life there’d always be this bit that she rose from a secretary at a real estate company to the head of AT&T… I mean she had a part-time position when she quit law school and she had to have money to pay the rent, so she worked as a secretary to a real estate firm in Palo Alto, but it was incidental,” Bartlem said.

Her ex also noted: ‘She’s never held a political office. She has no experience whatsoever and it boggles the imagination, but that is pretty indicative of the Republican Party. It’s like watching the Hindenburg go down – basically a flaming mess.”

While running for senate, Bartlem also cautioned:

“She’s a plutocrat. Her net worth is high and she sees herself as a member of that class. She’s got spare money in her piggy bank and she’s trying to buy an office. Most normal people would take a county thing, a state office or something, but no. She doesn’t have the ability to see that she’s so got into this thing of mind-over-matter that she can will it. But there are some things in life that you can’t will, and becoming president has got to be one of them. Carly can’t see that because she’s a corporate person. She views herself as a corporation. There’s no humility or humanity left.”

Bartlem also claims that Fiorina had an affair while they were together with senior AT&T executive Frank Fiorina, but Carly accused Bartlem of the same misdeeds.

Fiorina described the breakup as a problem of unequals: “While we were married we were not peers… After I left graduate school and had entered the workforce something changed in my marriage. As my career at AT&T progresses, I became surer of myself. As I came into my own I grew up – Todd and I grew apart.”

Bartlem’s words could be the angry rantings of a jilted ex, or they could be a deeper window into the psychology of a person whose “libido dominandi” should keep them from sitting in the seat of power.

From the Daily Mail: 

‘She is pathologically narcissistic and all she cares about is her,’ he said. ‘Nothing holds together with her.

‘I got kind of suspicious of her towards the end of the marriage because she had no old friends. She had nobody that she knew in the past, and I thought, “God that’s kind of weird.”‘

Today Bartlem believes the reason lies in Carly’s ‘modus operandi’ of ‘dropping people’ as soon as they have fulfilled their useful purpose in her life. Certainly it’s what he believes happened to him.

‘I had no utility and that’s what the judgment was,’ he said. ‘If you aren’t useful to her, your time is over. She learned that in business school. I was heartbroken. It was brutal.’

Bartlem claims that when Carly walked out on him she did so without leaving so much as a forwarding address or phone number. A year after the divorce, he claims, she pulled up in the driveway of their former home and calmly said, ‘I will never see you again.’

True to her word, all contact ceased.