Laptop Assault: Former TX Lt. Governor David Dewhurst Jailed

DALLAS —Tuesday night, the combustible relationship between Former Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and the woman he's been seeing for 2½ years once again required a third party — the local police.

Celebrity dust-ups are commonplace in Hollywood and New York, but seemingly toxic romances rarely make the news in Texas.

According to Dallas authorities and the Associated Press, the 75-year old Dewhurst was arrested on charges of domestic violence Tuesday after he pushed his 41-year old companion down while trying to retrieve a laptop they share.

The arrest occurred Tuesday just before midnight, and Dewhurst was booked into the Dallas County jail around 12:15 Wednesday morning. By 5 a.m., he was released after posting $1,000 bail.

Officers responded to a disturbance around 5:20 Tuesday evening at the DoubleTree Hotel near Dallas Love Field. The arrest record reports that Dewhurst was chasing a woman around the hotel entryway to get control of a laptop computer, and in the struggle, the woman fell and hit her head on a concrete bench.

Neither Dewhurst nor the woman have commented publicly, and the incident remains under investigation by the Dallas Police Department's Public Integrity Unit.

This is nowhere near the couple's first tussle to require police response.

Last May, Dewhurst's girlfriend was charged with injury to an elderly person in Houston after she was accused of breaking two of his ribs and biting and kicking the former state leader. Although those charges were dropped in October, the woman was arrested three weeks later — this time for throwing candle wax on him, as well as hitting and scratching him. Court records indicate that, partially at Dewhurst's request, the case was dismissed last week.

Yes, their meltdowns are very public, and provide the kind of fodder radio show hosts find irresistible. But while the one-liners fly back and forth across the airwaves, two people are spiraling out of control and the consequences of such behavior is often nowhere near funny.

Police are duty-bound to investigate crime after it's happened, and for the moment, Dewhurst and his girlfriend haven't done deadly damage to each other. But if they can't reconcile and find a way to coexist together or separately, all the shock jock jokes may soon subside into, "Gee, I never saw that coming."

(Before losing his 2012 bid for the Republican nomination in a runoff to Ted Cruz, Dewhurst was Texas' lieutenant governor from 2003 to 2015. In 2014, he lost the race to keep his seat in a primary runoff against Dan Patrick.)