When a marriage breaks up, things are bound to get a little intense. Sometimes, people will do everything in their power to make sure their ex-spouse hurts just as much as them. Nothing is too petty or off limits for these scorned exes.
She Took The Thing She Knew He Couldn’t Do Without
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“A former co-worker and his wife had split up. Among other things, she took all of his belts from the house. He showed up for work with an ethernet cable tied around his waist because he didn’t have any belts. We worked an early shift, so there weren’t any stores open before he had to get to work.”
He Laughed All The Way To The Bank After Pulling A Financial Fast One On His Ex
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“I worked with a guy who really stuck it to his ex-wife. When I met him, he was working in a sporting goods store, making $8 an hour. He was not like the other retail monkeys. He was older, well groomed, well spoken, clearly educated etc. One night after work, I saw him get into his car, and I couldn’t help but notice that it was a nice Jaguar. I asked him how he could afford it, and he explained it to me:
He had been a Senior Vice President at a well known Fortune 500 company, pulling in $300,000 with bonuses and stock options. He was married, but the marriage fell apart and in the divorce, she demanded that she get the house and 40% of his wages. He and his lawyer somehow managed to get her to agree to let him keep the house in exchange for 75 percent of his pay, no dollar figure or employer specified. As soon as she took the settlement, he quit his job and looked for a minimum wage job. He said to me, ‘She gets 75 percent of nearly nothing now.’ He had other money stashed away, so he didn’t even need the job. He had the house, and it’s equity as well. Also, no kids, so there was no child support. Just alimony.
She was furious, of course, and tried to sue him, but failed at least once and when she claimed that the settlement was not keeping her in the lifestyle she was accustomed to, he simply told the judge that the divorce was traumatic for him and he could no longer do his old job as a result. At least at that time, she did not manage to get out of the deal. Not sure how it all ended, but I thought it was brilliant, if not crazy-level spiteful.
He was a good employee too. Good with customers, showed up on time, no absenteeism or anything like that. He claimed he loved each payday because it reminded him how little she was getting.”
She Traumatized Her Own Daughter In Her Effort To Peddle Lies
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“I was a clerk for a judge that handled divorce cases. We had a couple that were both lieutenant colonels in the Air Force. They had one daughter who was about 11 or 12. Both had graduate degrees and were generally intelligent people. Well, the husband had an affair and things went sour with the relationship. The daughter was at that age when her relationship with the mother was starting to get a little strained, and she mentioned how she wanted to stick with her dad because he was about to be stationed elsewhere since the parents would be going their separate ways.
The mother freaked. The first thing she did was go to the local police department and claim the father had been touching and abusing the daughter. They investigated and couldn’t find any evidence, so they dropped the case. The mother then went to the Air Force Office of Special Investigations and reported the same thing. The Air Force then suspended the husband from duty and conducted their own investigation. Same result, no evidence of wrongdoing, and the case was dropped. The mother then went to the next state over where the husband was about to be transferred and contacted the local police there with the same story about touching and abuse. They, of course, do their own investigation, but the same result, the case was dropped.
Of course, this whole time the daughter has been interviewed a dozen times by psychologists, various therapists, the police, the Air Force, and who knows else. The daughter was traumatized by people constantly asking her if her dad had been touching her/abusing her and so forth. Not to mention the harm it did to her father’s career. He was ruined from any possible promotion just because of the allegations. As well as the fact that infidelity in the military is a big no-no. But that was his own doing.
Well, once word of all this got back to the judge, he was furious. He’s a former Air Force Jag and still had contacts in the ranks. Well, the couple came in front of him one day for a hearing, and he outright told her she better stop this behavior or he was going to hold her in contempt of court for the maximum amount of time he could lawfully hold her in a cell. He said he’d also contact the DA and recommend the filing of charges, contact her Air Force superiors and recommend reprimand to the fullest extent possible, and basically anything and everything he could do within his power. It was one of the most messed up things I’ve seen during my relatively short experience in the legal world.
She lost any hope for a relationship with her daughter, possibly for the rest of her life. Her Air Force career was over. And last I heard, the DA’s office was looking into possible charges. I don’t know what happened with that because I left soon after all of this happened. The judge in this situation didn’t have much authority outside the divorce itself. He could make recommendations and suggestions to the DA and Air Force but had no power to bring charges. The most he could do is put her in contempt of court.”
She Did It, Even Though She Knew It Was Her Son She’d Hurt The Most
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“My sister-in-law is mid-divorcing my brother after 30 years of marriage. She’s met someone else, so far so normal. It happens, right?
The thing that’s destroyed him is the fact that she emptied their son’s savings account which my parents (who are very far from well-off) have paid into once a month for years. That’s his university fund wiped out. I don’t know about messing with your spouse, but it’s the one betrayal my brother can’t come to terms with.
My parents had set up an ordinary child savings account with my sister-in-law as the sole trustee. They trusted her, but unfortunately, this gave her complete control over the funds in the account.
Legally, there’s not much we could do. She claims she thought it was ‘spending money’ for my nephew for items of clothing, days out, etc. Bollocks to that. My parents already spend a fortune on that kind of stuff, and she’s clearly spent it all on her new relationship with the unemployed twit who also left his wife and three kids for her.
My parents have always had savings accounts for ALL their grandchildren, including my own children, and we ALL knew the money was for the kids to pay university fees or put towards a deposit on a home or something similar. So while she’s morally disgusting, I think legally my parents are destroyed.
One glimmer. She didn’t get what she wanted financially in the divorce settlement because my brother’s solicitor asked for a provision in the order relating to her repaying the money taken from the account. Faced with having to explain to a judge why there was a dispute over it, she backed down on some other stuff. So my nephew has a new account which my parents have started paying into, and my husband and I are doing what we can, too. Meanwhile, her life is circling the drain in all sorts of other ways which I personally couldn’t give a crap about except to the extent that my poor nephew is trapped in the middle of it.”
After She Caught Him In The Act, She Put Her Plan In Action
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“My mom’s friend (we’ll call her Wifey) suspected her husband was cheating on her with his ex-wife. Yes, his ex-wife. The one he’d divorced prior to marrying Wifey. She hid a tape recorder (it was the ’80s) under the couch and caught him talking to his ex on the phone, making plans to meet up and bone. She played it cool, real cool. Wifey didn’t let on that she knew. She waited till the husband went out of town for a business trip.
She changed the locks on the house, took his prized saddle and threw it into the fireplace. She emptied their bank accounts so every check he’d written on that trip bounced. The house was in her name. The husband came back, couldn’t get in the house, and found he didn’t have a dollar left to his name. All she’d left him was the truck.
When they went to court, Wifey told the judge that since her husband was cheating with his ex-wife, a notoriously loose lady, she was afraid that she had AIDS. So the judge made the husband keep Wifey on his health insurance for the next few years so she could get regular AIDS tests!
My mother told me that it took the husband eight years to recover financially. All over his ex-wife that he’d already married and divorced once! Man, I hope the coochie was worth it!”
She Made One, Small Request, But Even That Was Too Much For Him
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“I worked for a lawyer who worked divorces. This was his favorite case.
A guy, who was making $150,000 a year, decided to get a Thai mail order bride, and they had three kids together. Dude had an affair, decided that he doesn’t want a ‘fresh off the boat’ wife and mixed race kids, and initiated a divorce. The woman’s only priority was to have custody of the kids, so against her attorney’s advice, she was willing to take a deal where she got a car, $1,200 in child support, no spousal support, and $3,000 lump sum from their joint account so she could rent an apartment. There’s ZERO chance that he actually wanted custody of the children because he already shacked up with the girl he was having an affair with.
She wanted full custody so bad, she was willing to live with three kids in a modest two-bedroom apartment and also pull the kids out of expensive extracurricular activities they were doing in order to economize. One of the kids has some talent in an Olympics event, to the level where she was getting professional coaching lessons.
She also got a crappy job after being nothing but a housewife since coming to the U.S. The husband took it in front of the judge, against the advice of his own attorney. The attorney told him that he was nuts to turn this down, all because he didn’t want to give her $3,000. But the guy figured that the judge would come to a decision that landed somewhere between what she wanted and what he wanted, not realizing that there’s a formula based on income that judges use to determine child support payments.
At court, the judge awarded the wife the $3,000 lump sum as well as $1,700 in child support FOR EACH KID. So because he didn’t want to give his ex-wife $3,000 so his kids could have a place to live, about 50 percent of his take-home pay was going to his ex for the next decade.
The attorney I worked with was a tightwad about money who never did anything for free, but this was the one case where he represented the woman for just a nominal fee because he wanted justice.”
She Started A Bar Brawl Just To Win Over Her Husband
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“The wife picked a Friday night when the drink-happy husband was good and sloppy and went a couple counties away to a crazy, redneck bar where nobody knew her. She picked the biggest, most wasted cowgirl she could find, called her a nasty name and poured a drink over her head. The cowgirl beat the crap out of her. Black eyes, swollen face, the whole nine yards. She then drove straight to the police station near her house and told the cops that she had been beaten and escaped from the husband. The cops went to the house, he mouthed off, not knowing why they were there, and they kicked the crap out of him. He did a year in jail for domestic battery and ‘resisting arrest.'”
He Knew What She Was Up To, So He And His Lawyer Set A Trap
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“When I got divorced, my addict wife of 18 years had started another affair, this time with her addictions counselor. My lawyer and I laid a trap for them. Just in case you don’t know, intimate relations between a counselor and patient are frowned upon by the corresponding regulatory bodies. And I was more than angry after putting her through rehab, only to have her fall back into her old behavior.
Shortly before the divorce was finalized, I filed a complaint with the State body licensing health professions. Knowing they were in some peril because of their unprofessional relationship, she had backed off her exorbitant demands. I paid her a modest settlement, kept the house, got custody of the three teenage kids, plus child support. Her lawyer naturally included a clause in the divorce where I had to agree to not say anything negative about her lover and their relationship. But the lawyer messed up and never asked if I had already filed charges, and thus didn’t didn’t require me to rescind them. The lawyer had assumed I was just bad mouthing them to neighbors and friends, and it never occurred to the lawyer that we were doing much more.
When the Board of Health Professions responded to my complaint shortly after the divorce was finalized, I told them that it would take a subpoena to get me to testify (a subpoena trumps a divorce settlement). They were happy to oblige.
They stripped his license and placed him on a register of sanctioned health professionals. He never worked again. They were broke in a handful of years, and she divorced him when the money ran out. In the interim, his mother died, leaving a fair-sized estate, so it took longer than I expected. Oh, and the frosting on the cake was that his wife and I traded notes, notably hotel receipts from the time of their affair, that helped each of us in our respective divorces.
Justice was served.”
He Was Fine With Ruining Himself If It Meant Ruining Her Too
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“Generally speaking, a person needs to serve 20 years in the U.S. Military to qualify for retirement and, if you have been married more than 10 years, then the spouse is entitled to half of that in the event of a divorce. There are exceptions, such as the early retirement options that are offered now and again, as well as medical retirement.
While I was in the USAF, I knew a Chief Master Sergeant whose wife cheated on him while he was in the desert. He had been in the USAF for 19 years and was up for reenlistment. When he got back home, he didn’t reenlist and got out with no retirement just so that his wife couldn’t get any of it in the divorce.”
As A Retired Divorce Lawyer, Her Mom Had Seen It All
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“My mom is a (now retired) divorce lawyer, so these terrible stories brought food to my table my whole life.
She was an ethical lawyer and would never represent someone shady. This guy came because his wife wanted a divorce. She claimed that he was cheating on her with his secretary, which he obviously denied. And my mom believed him. So in the middle of a very long and contested trial, the secretary showed up to one hearing. Nothing special. So my mom started talking to her. She was one of those people that doesn’t know how to shut up and just told my mom all about how it was all a plan since the beginning to get a bunch of properties from the wife that she owned and how these two had been in love and in a relationship for years. The cool part was that my mom couldn’t actually do anything because she was the guy’s lawyer. So, instead, she went to the next room where the wife and her lawyer were standing and she literally said, ‘Hey, come here.’ She took them over to the secretary and asked her to repeat the whole story. And she DID! The other lawyer recorded the whole thing. God, she was dumb. My mom then told her client that she would no longer represent him and that he was a jerk. Fortunately, the wife got to keep her stuff and her children because with that they proved the adultery.
But the worst was this crazy, dangerous guy, that was gonna get half of his wife’s assets. SO, knowing that his (still) mother-in-law was loaded, he basically tried to kill her so his wife would get the inheritance and he would get half of that. Obviously, his plan didn’t work AT ALL. Now he’s in jail for attempted murder after he sent the poor, old lady to the hospital for weeks.”
In One Fell Swoop, She Lost “Her Life’s Belongings And Memories”
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“There was this lady who was going through a nasty divorce. Her husband had all of her possessions moved into a storage locker. He quit paying for the storage locker and conveniently failed to tell his ex-wife that it wasn’t being paid for any longer. My buddy, who buys storage lockers, said that he saw the lady showed up with police officers in tears at the auction sale after someone else had already purchased the locker. The police told her there was nothing they could do, that this is a civil case and she would have to pursue it through the courts. In other words, someone else had just purchased all of her life’s belongings and memories for pennies on the dollar.”
He Wanted Her Money And He Wanted It Now
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“I used to be a secretary for a family law Solicitor.
We had this one divorce case where the wife was a teacher of 30 years and had a nice pension. In the divorce settlement, it was decided somehow that the pension would be considered as a marital asset, and the husband was entitled to 40 percent. He wanted the money right away, and so she had to cash in her pension, so to speak, and had to receive a reduced amount. The husband ended up getting around $20,000.
He was a drinker, wasted the money and drank himself to death within two years of receiving the money.”
Their Landlords’ Bitter Divorce Worked In This Family’s Favor
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“I have a coworker who rented a really nice sized house for his wife and four children. He always talked about wishing he could own a house that big for his family, but he would need to settle on renting for now.
He talked about how unbelievable the price was to rent a house that size, and how nice the couple was that owned it.
Well, the couple who owned the house eventually started going through a messy divorce.
The house was in the wife’s name, and she didn’t want the husband to have it.
She told my coworker about the divorce, and he thought she was going to say that he had to move because they needed to sell the house.
Instead, she asked if he wanted it. He said he was already getting it for a steal for what they charged for rent, and couldn’t possibly afford to buy it.
She replied, ‘I will take whatever you think you can offer and it’s yours.’
The wife also knew that her husband wouldn’t be cold-hearted enough to fight it, either, since it wouldn’t look good having a story about him kicking a family out of their home.”
He Adored That Dog, And That’s Why She Wanted It
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“A wife negotiated like a woman possessed for custody of the couple’s dog, which the husband (my client) adored. We negotiated the husband’s visitation rights for the life of the dog. So she had a vet put the dog down a week after the divorce was final.”
He Hit Her Where It Really Hurt: Her Prized Garden
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“A husband and a wife were having an acrimonious separation. If I remember correctly, he was successful, and she was going after him for an immense amount of money.
She happened to be a multi-prize winning gardener. We’re talking about an absolutely exceptional collection of rare and gorgeous flowers, shrubs, the works.
After an unsatisfactory development in their divorce proceedings, she came home to find that her husband had ridden their lawn mower over her entire garden, shredding every last stem and leaf into bits.”
As Soon As He Left, She Noticed Something Off About The Business
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“My client and her ex-husband owned a successful renovation company. Marital issues happened, and they decided to divorce. They looked at the money that was in the banks, the value of the company based on it’s past, the value of the house, etc. Eventually, they made an agreement in which she got the company and house and he walked away with the ready cash. He took off for a sunny place to start his life again
Turns out, the husband had been planning to leave her for a while. He stopped paying the vendors and the payroll taxes, which is where the money in the bank accounts originally came from. The company had been existing on credit for over six months while he emptied the bank accounts. Employee’s paychecks started bouncing within weeks of him leaving, so they quit. Jobs were not getting finished, so customers demanded refunds. Within 12 months, she was looking for someone to buy the home in a short sale just to get enough cash to close out the payroll accounts before declaring bankruptcy.”