A WOMAN SCORNED.

Hokitika Guardian, 20 May 1920, Page 4

A WOMAN SCORNED.

DEMPSEY’S FORMER, WIFE HITS OUT.

■ NEW YORK, March 22. Mrs Maxine Dempsey, former •wife of Jack Dempsey, the champion heavyweight boxer, is an exemplification of the familiar truth that heli has ‘‘no fury like ,a woman scorned.” In an. interview at San Francisco yesterday with the United Press correspondent, she not only tells the circumstances that changed her love for u.e boxer into violent 'hate, but also casts reflections upon the champion’s *pasl ring record and tells the world generally, and rival boxers particularly, of Dempsey’s vulnerabilities. Mrs Dempsey is in San Francisco tc. testify for the Government prosecution of her former husband and his manager Jack Kearns, on a charge of evading military service during the war. 'Mrs Dempsey told how she ass her former husband along the thorny 1 path of pugilistic prominence, dividing with him her earnings as a piano player in a kinema, where the patrons were goods porters and miners. Then, she says, when the championship was within her grasp, 1 he divorced her without making provision for her future. But the spark that kindled the flame of her hatred, she says, came only a short time ago when the champion realised that his former wife might prove a dangerous witness against him. It took the form of photograph of himself inscribed: “Maxime. Love from Jack.” ■ This is Mrs Dempsey’s story: “Those, who criticise me'for telling the truth about Jack should picture -me neglected in a small mining town while he was getting plenty of money and fame. ,1 helped him when he was an unknown lighter. Then when he knew about Whip Willard he divorced me. Did I get any motor-cars or pretty clothes as a result No. All I got was neglect.. And not even when the American Legion began to investigate Jack’s enlistment did I say anything until one day, after he was afraid ! would testify against him, I received a photograph. I was mad.. And I wrote a letter to a newspaper saying that Jack was a slacker. That started things.”