Valerie Plame - Marriages and Family

Marriages and Family

After graduating from Penn State in 1985, Plame was briefly married to Todd Sesler, her college boyfriend. In 1997, while she was working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Plame met former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, IV "at a reception in Washington "..." at the residence of the Turkish Ambassador." According to Wilson, because Plame was unable to reveal her CIA role to him on their first date, she told him that she was an energy trader in Brussels, and he thought at that time that she was "an up-and-coming international executive." After they began dating and became "close," Plame revealed her employment with the CIA to Wilson. They were married on April 3, 1998, Plame's second marriage and Wilson's third.

Professionally and socially, she has used variants of her name. Professionally, while a covert CIA officer, she used her given first name and her maiden surname, "Valerie Plame." Since leaving the CIA, as a speaker, she has used the name "Valerie Plame Wilson," and she is referred to by that name in the civil suit that the Wilsons brought against former and current government officials, Plame v. Cheney. Socially, and in public records of her political contributions, since her marriage in 1998, she has used the name "Valerie E. Wilson."

At the time that they met, Wilson relates in his memoir, he was separated from his second wife Jacqueline, a former French diplomat; they divorced after 12 years of marriage so that he could marry Plame. His divorce had been "delayed because I was never in one place long enough to complete the process," though he and she had already been living separate lives since the mid-1990s. Plame and Wilson are the parents of twins, Trevor Rolph, and Samantha Finnell Diana, born in January 2000. From his first marriage (1973–1986), to Susan Dale Otchis, Wilson is also the father of another set of twins (also a boy and a girl), Sabrina Cecile and Joseph Charles, who were born in 1979.

Prior to the disclosure of her classified CIA identity, Valerie and Joe Wilson and their twins lived in the Palisades, an affluent neighborhood of Washington, D.C., on the fringe of Georgetown. After she resigned from the CIA following the disclosure of her covert status, in January 2006, they moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. In a 2011 interview, Plame said she and Wilson had received threats while living in the D.C. metro area, and while she acknowledged an element of threat remains in their new home, the New Mexico location "tamps down the whole swirl."