Senator Menendez's Wife Is Being Treated for Breast Cancer

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May 16, 2024Updated 4:05 p.m. ET

On Wednesday, a lawyer representing Senator Robert Menendez in his bribery trial painted a picture of a marriage cloaked in secrecy and deception, casting the senator’s wife, Nadine Menendez, as an opportunist who traded on his name.

Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Menendez was projecting a new message: He was a protective husband asking for privacy for his wife, who, he revealed for the first time, was being treated for breast cancer. Ms. Menendez, he said, was preparing to undergo a mastectomy and possible radiation treatment.

“We are of course concerned about the seriousness and advanced stage of the disease,” Mr. Menendez, 70, said in the statement. “We hope and pray for the best results.”

The timing of the announcement, issued by his Senate office, punctuated a remarkable first week of trial. And the revelation served to shine a newly intense spotlight on a couple whose fates are intertwined — but whose priorities may not be.

The statement was issued Thursday morning as Mr. Menendez was in Federal District Court in Manhattan, where he is on trial, charged with accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for political favors for the governments of Egypt and Qatar and for friends in New Jersey.

A day earlier, the senator’s lawyer told jurors that Ms. Menendez, 57, was largely to blame for the gold bars and other lucrative bribes prosecutors say he took as payoffs.

“She kept things from him,” the lawyer, Avi Weitzman, said Wednesday afternoon in an hourlong opening statement. “She kept him in the dark on what she was asking others to give her.”

“There won’t be a single piece of tangible evidence that shows that the senator accepted — requested — a bribe,” he added.

Mr. Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, said he was releasing the new details about his wife’s diagnosis now because of “constant press inquiries and reporters following my wife.” He asked that she be given privacy as she battles cancer.

Ms. Menendez, who married the senator in 2020, has not appeared in court, and her lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ms. Menendez was originally scheduled to stand trial with her husband and two other defendants beginning this week. But last month, the judge presiding over the case, Sidney H. Stein, agreed to postpone her trial by at least two months after her lawyers informed the court that she was dealing with a “serious medical condition” that would require surgery.

The disclosure prompted widespread speculation in New Jersey political circles. But at the time, the lawyers shared details of her diagnosis only in a sealed submission to Judge Stein, withholding it from the public.

It is unclear when Ms. Menendez will have surgery or how long a period of recovery might be required.

On Thursday, Mr. Menendez said that his wife had been diagnosed with “Grade 3” breast cancer.

After breast cancer is detected, it is common for cells to be analyzed and assigned a grade ranging from one to three. A Grade 3 cancer, according to the American Cancer Society, suggests a “faster-growing cancer that’s more likely to spread.”

Ms. Menendez’s lawyers, in arguing for a delayed trial, said that she was too sick to be capable of assisting in her own defense.

Judge Stein, who has moved the case along at a brisk pace, told jurors that the trial would not be held next Wednesday, Thursday or Friday before the three-day Memorial Day weekend. He offered no explanation for the six-day break so early in the trial.

The senator and Ms. Menendez have both been accused of conspiring to trade Mr. Menendez’s clout as a senator and leader of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for lucrative bribes, including gold bars, cash and a $60,000 convertible for Ms. Menendez. They have both pleaded not guilty.

In opening statements on Wednesday, a prosecutor with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York described Ms. Menendez as a crucial “go-between” for the senator and New Jersey businessmen accused of providing the payoffs.

Prosecutors have said that the bribes were passed through Ms. Menendez to her husband, and that she served as a messenger who relayed information in emails and texts, sometimes using what she and her husband called her “007” phone.

The first witness to testify on Thursday in Mr. Menendez’s trial — an F.B.I. agent who led a 2022 search of the senator’s home in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. — spent hours describing the contents of a locked bedroom closet and the locations in the house where hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash were found. The closet contained a safe filled with cash and gold bars, jewelry, women’s clothing and a navy blazer that held notes written on Senate stationery, the agent said.

Mr. Weitzman on Wednesday said the senator had no knowledge of the gold bars discovered in his wife’s closet.

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