She lived with J. Steven Griles, whom she began dating while he was one of her supervisors at the United States Department of the Interior,[1] and they were married in March, 2007, "three days after Griles pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his relationship with Jack Abramoff and a previous romantic partner.

In February 2007, a newspaper claimed in March 2006 that before Wooldridge resigned as assistant attorney general for Environment and Natural Resources Division (ENRD), she had purchased a $980,000 vacation home on Kiawah Island, South Carolina, with two other individuals: J. Steven Griles, a former deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, her boyfriend at the time; and Don R. Duncan, vice president for federal and international affairs and a lobbyist for ConocoPhillips, a Houston based oil corporation.

Griles himself became an oil and gas lobbyist and subsequently pled guilty to obstruction of justice in the Jack Abramoff affair.

[citation needed] The allegation was that Wooldridge acted improperly by approving several consent decrees in litigation between the government and ConocoPhillips, supposedly giving the company preferential treatment.

Nine months after buying the home with Duncan and Griles, and just before stepping down, Wooldridge had approved the consent decrees, giving ConocoPhillips three more years to pay millions of dollars in fines for a Superfund toxic waste cleanup and the installation of pollution controls, which had been estimated to cost US$525 million, at nine of ConocoPhillips' refineries.