Former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey has formally announced his bid to run for mayor of Jersey City in 2025.
McGreevey, a Democrat, resigned from his post as New Jersey’s 52nd governor in 2004, less than three years into his term. He announced he would step down at a press conference where he came out as gay and disclosed his extramarital affair with another man.
An announcement video titled “Second Chances” and released late Wednesday night — barely a day after polls closed in the 2023 election — makes direct reference to the circumstances of his resignation, showing McGreevey famously announcing “I am a gay American” as he told the state he’d step down.
But it also highlights his journey as a seminary student who obtained a master of divinity degree and sought ordination in the Episcopal Church, and his work with prisoner re-entry.
McGreevey, 66, is the former head and founder of the Jersey City Employment & Training Program but was fired from that post over what city officials described “financial improprieties” in the organization, and the program shut down last year. McGreevey is now executive director of the New Jersey Reentry Corporation, which provides job training and other services to released prisoners.
“What’s the point if we just throw everyone away who’s ever made a mistake?” his daughter, Jacqueline McGreevey, asks in the video. She says her father’s work to provide services and counseling to prisoners taught her people deserve second chances.
At the time of McGreevey’s resignation, aides identified the man with whom he’d had an affair as Golan Cipel, whom McGreevey had previously appointed to a $110,000 homeland security post despite being unable to get federal security clearances and being broadly criticized by legislators as unqualified. Cipel said at the time there had been no romantic affair and that McGreevey had sexually harassed him, which McGreevey denied.
Micah Rasmussen, who was McGreevey’s communications director when the governor…
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