One could have been forgiven for thinking, when Nadine Arslanian Menendez first stepped into our collective consciousness, a week ago, Oh, we’ve seen this before. Accompanying the stories about bribery and influence-peddling indictments were photos of a tall, leggy blonde woman in a low-cut blouse and miniskirt standing (or striding) next to her squat, older powerful politician of a husband. But assumptions are dangerous things and, in this particular case, unfairly reductive.
Because this is no ordinary rags-to-bullion story. And before we jump to conclusions, it would be wise to take a look at how Nadine got to where she is today.
Nadine Tabourian was born in Beirut in 1967 to Armenian parents, who fled Lebanon during that country’s civil war, when she was a child—first to Greece, then London, and ultimately to the United States, where, after a short spell in Palo Alto, California, the family settled in New York.
Nadine attended New York University, earning an undergraduate degree in international politics and a graduate degree in French language and civilization. Over the next decade or so, there was a marriage, to one Raffi Sarkin Arslanian, and two children—a girl and a boy, now in their 20s—and, in 2005, a divorce.
After that, according to The New York Times, came years of “legal tumult and financial uncertainty” during which she “relied mainly on alimony and child-support, and at one point picked up part-time work as a hostess at a New Jersey restaurant.” The financial uncertainty would in time be relegated to the past. As for the legal tumult, that seems unlikely.
When Nadine first met Robert Menendez, at an IHOP in Union City in 2018, the New Jersey senator—a son of Cuban immigrants who rose to chair the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, a position he held until last Friday—was between indictments. In 2015, he had been charged in federal court with conspiracy, bribery, and fraud, but when the jury couldn’t reach a verdict, there was a mistrial, the charges were dropped, the Senate Ethics Committee “severely admonished” him, and life went on.
At the IHOP that day, sparks flew amid the buttermilk pancakes and handcrafted melts. Nadine, Menendez told The New York Times, was “beautiful and bright and had such a great personality. There was just this aura about her.” She was similarly smitten: “I didn’t know at that time that Bob was a senator.... He was very intelligent and had a great sense of humor, and he was very, very hot.”
The divorced, aura-suffused, registered Republican and the divorced, very, very hot Democratic senator began dating—although, according to the New York Post, because she had been seeing Doug Anton, a lawyer, Menendez “sent Capitol Police officers to his love rival’s office to ‘bully him out of the picture,’ [said] a friend of the attorney—who represented R. Kelly during his sex-trafficking trial.”
The new couple started traveling the world, and in October 2019, in front of the Taj Mahal, he proposed to her by singing “Never Enough,” from the musical The Greatest Showman, which, in hindsight, has an interesting lyric: “Towers of gold are still too little / These hands could hold the world but it’ll / Never be enough.” There’s a video of the special, private moment on YouTube—we won’t speculate on whether U. S. prosecutors should consider introducing the clip as evidence—but even though Menendez displays a serviceable light baritone, there’s really no need to watch it. A year later, they were married.
And now, by all means, jump to conclusions.
The couple’s first cause was benign (except to the Turks): Menendez was instrumental in finally getting the U. S. government to officially acknowledge the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire a century ago, which resulted in the deaths of more than a million Armenians, among them relatives of Nadine’s.
“He was very intelligent and had a great sense of humor, and he was very, very hot.”
But other, less altruistic causes soon took precedence, according to the U. S. Attorney’s Office, which last week charged the Menendezes with “engag[ing] in a corrupt relationship” with three New Jersey businessmen “who collectively paid hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes … in exchange for Senator Menendez agreeing to use his power and influence to protect and enrich those businessmen and to benefit the Government of Egypt.”
The key links in the Senator Menendez–Egyptian government chain, says the United States, were Nadine Menendez and Wael Hana—one of those three New Jersey businessmen, an Egyptian who was a friend of Nadine’s before she met Menendez. According to the indictment, Hana and the others, Jose Uribe and Fred Daibes, supplied Nadine with mortgage payments to avoid foreclosure on her home, as well as “a low-or-no-show job.”
An F.B.I. search of the Menendez home in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, uncovered cash, bars of gold bullion (presumably given right around the time Menendez was busy googling “how much is one kilo of gold worth”), and a Mercedes-Benz C300 convertible worth $60,000. Upon delivery of the car, Nadine reportedly texted Menendez, “Congratulations mon amour de la vie, we are the proud owners of a 2019 Mercedes.❤️”
(About said Mercedes: The New York Times reported that a few days after Menendez interfered in a New Jersey criminal case to protect business associates of Uribe, Nadine texted Hana, “All is GREAT! I’m so excited to get a car next week,” and then met Uribe in a restaurant parking lot, where he gave her $15,000 in cash. She made her down payment on the convertible the next day. “You are a miracle worker who makes dreams come true,” she texted Uribe. “I will always remember that.”)
There were also unspecified “home furnishings,” more than $480,000 in cash “stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing—including inside ‘SENATOR MENENDEZ’-embroidered jackets—closets, and a safe,” plus some $70,000 more in Nadine’s safe-deposit box.
The quid for this quo? Mainly, Menendez “provided sensitive, non-public U.S. government information to Egyptian officials and otherwise took steps to secretly aid the Government of Egypt.” One of several examples from the indictment: in July 2018, following meetings between the senator and Egyptian officials—meetings that had been “arranged and attended by” Nadine and Hana—Menendez texted Nadine to tell Hana he was “going to sign off on a multimillion-dollar weapons sale to Egypt.” That text was duly forwarded to Egyptian officials, “one of whom replied with a ‘thumbs up’ emoji.”
The Menendezes were arraigned at Manhattan federal court on Wednesday. They arrived holding hands—he in a pin-striped suit, she almost unrecognizably demure in a white blouse, her hair pulled back, carrying a Chanel handbag—ignored reporters’ questions, and pleaded not guilty to charges of bribery. If convicted, they could each be sentenced to 45 years in prison, though a term of that duration is regarded as improbable.
Menendez has so far resisted escalating calls to resign—mostly from Democrats; Republicans don’t seem averse to normalizing the idea of an indicted, possibly convicted, politician serving in office, for some reason—claiming that the charges “misrepresented the normal work of a Congressional office,” which, being naïve, we hadn’t realized bore an uncanny resemblance to the efficient management of corruption and greed. Nadine said through her lawyer that she will “vigorously defend” herself against what her husband has described as “baseless allegations.”
Normal work, baseless allegations … well, if verdicts were emojis, it would be interesting to see which direction that thumb ends up pointing, especially once judge and jury are done interpreting texts such as this one, from Nadine to an Egyptian official: “Anytime you need anything you have my number,” she wrote, “and we will make everything happen.”
George Kalogerakis, one of the original editor-writers at Spy, later worked for Vanity Fair, New York, and The New York Times, where he was deputy op-ed editor. A co-author of Spy: The Funny Years and co-editor of Disunion: A History of the Civil War, he is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL
Jack Sullivan is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL
