Divorces are never a pretty situation. Sometimes though, one person really comes out ahead while their ex is left in the dust. Running away with the house? Boat? Successful business? Passion and heartache know no bounds.
These stories come from around the world, so pay close attention because you don't want to be the one left hanging while an ex runs away with everything!
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35. Real justice
I’ve worked as a legal assistant for two family law attorneys for the last eight years. One of the cases that made me the angriest was a man who cheated on his wife when she had cancer. He then leaves his wife and attempts to hide all his assets while she’s undergoing chemotherapy.
Fortunately, my boss is a the best. She teamed up with a forensic accountant and they took him to the cleaners. He even had to pay the forensic accountant’s bill and attorney’s fees.
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34. Clean get away
My ex left me for another guy. I was with her for 7 years, not married and no kids. She came after me for half value (approximately 250k) of my house I had purchased.
Her and her lawyer ended up with $1,500 each as they continuously played games going through court system. My lawyer cost $20k. Pretty big savings, all things considered.
33. Not the sharpest tool
So my friend's parents had a particularly nasty divorce. Married for 20 years. The nastiness was not because of Wife but the Husband. Husband was “completely blindsided” by the situation. Everything was fine in his mind. He got to come home from work and sit in a recliner and eat the dinner that was made. Take his son to paintball and ignore his daughter and wife. Perfect.
Wife wanted to go to counseling and and asked several times over about 5 years and husband refused. Nothing was wrong in his mind. Finally, wife wanted out and filed for divorce and moved out while husband went on a 4 day paintball trip.
Well it goes on from there. He wants to have a family meeting so she and kids go over and are AMBUSHED by his redneck dumpster fire of a family. It got a bit aggressive and dangerous.
Well. After 3 NASTY years of divorce it’s finally over.
The husband doesn’t have alimony but he has child support for both kids and he has to pay cell phone and health insurance until each kid graduates from college.
Well here is the "you're screwed" part. The husband is a MORON. He was horrible to his daughter (my friend) so she stopped talking to him. Well the idiot said “if she’s not gonna talk to me I’m not paying [anything]." When he mailed the child support check it was 1/2 what it was supposed to be and included A HANDWRITTEN, SIGNED, AND DATED note saying something to the effect of, “[Wife], this check is for the child who speaks to me. I’m not paying for the one who doesn’t and if you say anything to me about or give me any crap, I’ll stop paying for him too.”
That’s cool goofball. Hand-write, sign, and date concrete evidence of your contempt of court and EXTORTION.
Needless to say it did not work out for him.
32. Total loss
As an attorney, I once agreed to represent a person in a divorce. They ended up not being happy with me, so they fired me. No big deal, I returned the un-earned portion of the retainer, boxed up their file, and sent it to them.
But before I had been fired, I had placed the case on a jury docket.
I told them, "You still have a jury trial." The day of the trail the Jury came, and the person didn't show up.
They lost everything.
31. Man child
My wife had a client who was going through a divorce. My wife told her how she knew she was doing the the right thing. This divorce was mutual and she was doing it for the friend rate and the only payments were for filing and court fees and such. The break up was mostly amicable and had been going on for some months. Due to finances they still shared a house. Heck, for some strange reason they shared a bed. Maybe because they worked opposite shifts and only saw each other in passing.
The day of filing comes and he decides he doesn't want to participate anymore. She is starting to second guess herself and is wondering if maybe she is giving up too early on the marriage. Maybe the unhealthy relationship was really tolerable. Maybe she could forgive the fact that he had no ambition and refused to engage in real life activities instead of playing online games.
He would often complain to his wife about how he wished real life could be more like his online life. She has all this running around in her head as she leaves the house clutching her pearls thinking she is making the mistake of her life.
She hears a banging on the glass of a window on her home and thinks it's him wanting to stop he and convince her that they can work it out.
With an unjustified sense of relief and hopeful expectation she turns to see he soon to be ex giving what I can only describe as "finger birds" to her through the front door.
He was just gesturing like a spoiled 12-year-old that didn't get his way. She turned around, got in her car and signed those papers with a huge sense of satisfaction that she was doing the right thing.
30. Poor bird
Divorcee here. Bought a house with my ex, 9 months or so before he left me. Because I moved out (rather than watch/listen to him with the girl he cheated on me with and left me for) he got to keep the house... the house I put my life savings into, both for the deposit and repairs.
He didn't contribute a penny because he was "broke" after buying me a ridiculous diamond ring I didn't want, which he threw a fit about and disappeared for 3 days when I asked if we could exchange it for something more modest.
I had to hire my own lawyer to sue him just to get my name off the house, while he used his uncle for free. I didn't get financial compensation at all, despite all of the money I had to pay out considering all of this was 100% his fault.
And, to top it all off, he got to keep my bird.
29. Is that your idea of romance?
My aunt filed for divorce from my uncle as his father lay on his death bed. She left him for a guy she worked with because my uncle “just wasn’t romantic enough.”
My grandfather had given my uncle a small piece of land attached to his home to build a house on, which he built with his own hands. My uncle, an impressive amateur mechanic, had worked with my grandfather to rebuild an old ‘68 Ford Bronco from parts as one last big project as my grandfather’s health started failing from ALS. My uncle then built his own custom ‘72 Ford truck from parts trucks in his garage, too.
In the divorce, which dragged on for almost 2 years, my aunt got all of that: the house, the Bronco, and the truck. She promptly sold them all. She also got half the money and investments they had and somehow left my uncle stuck with $16k in credit card debt she’d run up during the marriage in exchange for joint custody of his two young sons with no child support. She worked hard to turn the kids against their dad in this arrangement.
You’d think there might have been some sort of abuse or infidelity from my uncle to lead to this spite, but there wasn’t. He said he agreed to these demands just to get her out of his life after she made the divorce so miserable and drawn out.
28. Just 1%
In my country being a lawyer, attorney, and advocate are three separate professions. I am a lawyer. A husband and wife were 50/50 in business together. But unbeknownst to us, the husband gave 1 extra share to his wife.
Anyway, fast forward a year, he is caught having an affair. She wants a divorce, and the attorneys stumble on the 51% shareholding. So she can make all the decisions. Within a week she sells everything, their house in the city, their vacation place in Mauritius, and their game farm. EVERYTHING.
He gets his 49% of the profits from the sales. But she sold it for less than 10% of its value to an unknown trust.
Later it came out the trust was her attorneys' creation. She sold it to herself for nothing, gave him nothing, bought it all back, and has all their stuff now.
Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels
27. The lawyer's perspective
I used to be a divorce lawyer but it was not something I was proud of, plus the partner I worked for was such a nightmare. I was the eleventh associate that worked for her in 10 years. We used to go through 2-3 secretaries a year.
Couple screwed up cases I remember.
For the first case, our client and his wife were Mormon. During the divorce she used to tell him that he had to give her what she wanted in the divorce because they were sealed in the church and would be spending eternity together. We had to fight him not to give her more than she deserved.
The second case I represented the wife of a minor celebrity and said celebrity would file for divorce regularly when she "acted up." Once he determined she was behaving as he liked, he'd cancel the divorce. Rotten jerk.
26. Too much faith
My wife and I were both Jehovah's witnesses, and went through the divorce process. I didn't want lawyers but her father got her one who was also a Jehovah's witness. I assumed because we were all the same religion that he would be fair for both of us. I was ignorant and emotional so I just signed whatever this guy put in front of me.
I was royally screwed over and it hurts me to have pull that document out and show other people my mistake. I am finally getting over the financial hump of that mistake, almost 10 years later.
25. Challenge accepted
Friend of mine is a divorce lawyer. His favorite story is the time a husband in a bitter divorce, got some slimy lawyer and said he would out lawyer her and break the bank before giving her anything she wanted.
This was in front of my friend, the wife's lawyer. He looks at her and says, "I'm working for you pro-bono (free) from this moment forward." He looks back at them and says "I got all day."
24. How not to get screwed
My ex and I had a very civil divorce and thankfully everything is smooth now. But BOTH of our lawyers said that we should go after each other for an additional $50,000.
We both said "why?" That’s going to cause so much additional strain on the already broken relationship. I know that they are just doing their jobs and trying to get the most for their client. But mine pushed and pushed for it, until I had to get angry and told her to drop it.
Maybe not all divorce lawyers are like that, but that sure made the process even worse.
Good thing I’ll never have to do that crap again!
23. The kids pay too
I got screwed by a divorce.
Basically, my mom stole the money that her and my dad put aside to pay for my sisters' and my education. She took that and all of the real estate and most of our family's money. She won everything in the divorce, and she wasn't obligated (and isn't) paying for the study of anyone because "she didn't choose where we were going."
So yeah, my mom is a monster with 1.5 million Euros in her bank account, but always feels like she is in need of money so she doesn't give any to anyone.
pixabay
22. Nothing left
My cousin got jobbed.
He and his wife get married, after a few years he takes out all his 401k to buy a house (her advice). The house looked like a tornado went through it and he had to spend a lot fixing it up. They then fix the extra attached house to get her little brother to move in with his girlfriend. They didn't pay much rent.
She’s a pretty controlling person and he pretty much did everything including making their daughters' lunch.
They divorce after like 8 years.
She now has the house. She has the kid. She rents out the extra house for more money now that her brother moved out. He sees his daughter like once a week and he’s in a crappy small apartment paying child support.
If I’m not mistaken, she may be making more money. She’s set for life and he’s screwed.
21. A real payday
I once was an associate supporting my expert witness partner for a client married to a not famous but famous within Wall Street turnaround guy.
Anyway the wife got an initial offer of $180 million; she turned that down and ended up accepting a "mere" $120 million.
20. Greed destroys them both
My buddy gets slapped with a divorce out of nowhere.
She's asking for 100% of everything, so he tries to say 'lets be reasonable', but nope 100%. So eventually he gets some lawyers and figures that his wife asking for 100% as just a negotiating tactic, and they'll ask for 100%, and he'll offer 0% and then they'll meet somewhere in the middle. But no. His lawyers and her lawyers sit down, and ... yep ... her demands are 100% of everything and it's non-negotiable.
Turns out my buddy's mother-in-law got in her daughter's ear about how she should divorce him because then she'd get all his everything.
Problem is that they have a special needs child so all the money that could have been spent on the child is now being spent on lawyers, and she's going to end up with 100% of nothing.
All his retirement fund, their equity of their houses, it's all going to go up in smoke because it's impossible to make a reasonable deal with the evil mother-in-law whispering into the lady's ear that she can get all his stuff and then she can get a better husband.
Kicker is, when the dust finally settles on their big fat pile of nothing, my buddy is going to be about five years from retirement, with nothing to show for 40 years of work. And he's going to have to pay alimony on anything he earns in those five years.
19. Cool head
When we got divorced, we chose a mediator, I thought that would be better than paying 2 separate lawyers & dragging it out in court. She agreed, but she got some really bad advice from her family & a divorce lawyer. They told her to ask for spousal support, for me to accept all of our debts, she wanted a big part of my pension, and full custody of our son. I got up & walked out of our first meeting & let her stew for a week.
She wanted to move from the West coast to the East coast to be with her family, but she couldn't leave with our son unless I consented. I sent her a letter that if she tried to leave with him, I would have charged with kidnapping. I contacted the local police, the federal police, airlines, ferry, & sent them photos.
We went back to mediation & all of the sudden she changed her tune. I couldn't fight her taking a portion of my pension, but she didn't get spousal support, we split the debts equally & she didn't get full custody.
The mediator told me after that I played that perfectly & my ex was irrational.
10 years later & my ex is still bitter about it.
18. "I'll take care of it."
At the time my ex and I split up, we each held a credit card in our own name with the other as authorized user. The balances on these cards weren't exactly equal, maybe 60-40 him (and that was only because Amex realized that he was on a path to blow through $10k in 6 months and lowered his limit to just above his balance).
On the first copy of the divorce decree, he demanded that I cut him a check for my half of the bills and he'd "make sure they got taken care of." I'm not sure if I or my attorney laughed harder. It's worth noting that up until I left, he hadn't handled any of the finances and wouldn't have known how to pay the company holding my card anyway.
I can guarantee that he would have used that money to pay his card off and left me with a bill.
17. Taking it all
I was the on the bad end of the divorce, and it's a long story. Let's sum it up with:
When I was told by my ex that we were getting divorced, I was also told I would be "allowed" to keep my entire next pay check. I was a teacher, so I got to keep my own $1,100. That day was also my birthday.
When it was all over 4 years later, she had my job - she literally replaced me at my teaching position.
I have 50/50 custody of the kids, but otherwise, you could say I lost everything.
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16. Even my phone number?!
I knew a guy who lost his own cell phone number. He had the same number since high school, but she convinced the judge that she used his phone enough to get his number.
Basically all he kept were his clothes and car and he still had to pay alimony.
15. Not the best deal
Lady marries super rich dude I know. He owns lots of properties. His parents set him up. One of them by the beach makes $24,000 a month. Eight years later she wants a divorce. They have two kids. She says she will take the beach house.
This is when he tells her he owned all of his property before they met. So she only got $5,000 a month for two years. He and his new girlfriend travel and party twenty four seven when they aren't hanging with their kids. His new girlfriend is such a better fit.
14. Check the name twice
I work in family law. My favorite story is the man who accidentally texted his family group chat with a message meant for his mistress.
It didn't end well.
13. Trying to keep it quiet
I know a guy who got a prominent position in our community and ended up cheating on his wife and deciding to leave her. He’s insanely popular until what he’s done to his wife is exposed. She files for divorce and he decides to give her everything, I assume hoping to get everything over quickly and have people move on.
Not so, ends up losing his position the next election cycle and has nothing at all but his car.
He had given his wife millions of dollars in real estate, equipment (he owned a construction company), massive savings accounts, stocks, bonds etc. just to try to save face.
After losing his position, he tried to appeal his divorce.
12. Just do the basics
My client's husband was an elected official (may still be) and signed a separation agreement. He fails to do anything he agreed to, so the wife sues and he fights saying that she forced him to sign. She shows emails where he negotiated the agreement and agreed on the final draft, and she showed emails where she tried to work with him on payments he owed her.
He loses after making his staff member come into court (who testifies that he didn't think he was being forced to) and having a meltdown in court (rumor was he threw his elected title around the judge as a way to get them to help him).
A few months later he shows up to contest the actual divorce, citing the same stuff and then says that she threatened to shoot him, judge sides with my client. He has to now pay her like 6K or get thrown in jail.
All could've been avoided if he responded to the emails she sent him.
11. Gotta learn better eating habits
My neighbor filed for divorce because her husband smacked his lips when he ate and slurped his coffee and soup.
She thought if she didn't she would end up in jail for battery.
10. Virtual Reality
A story of mine that sticks out is that a husband and wife both played some sort of on-line role-playing game, sort of like the Sims I think but a little more elaborate and adult ('Second Life' maybe?). I don't know anything about online games.
The wife got heavily involved with the game, like 10 hours a day, and wouldn't reduce her time playing no matter what he said. What tipped things over the edge however was that he set up a fake profile/avatar and went online to stalk her in the game and found her in a relationship with another person.
Nothing ever happened in real life (neither of them were exactly oil paintings to look at) but that was enough for the guy to initiate a fairly acrimonious divorce.
Pixabay
9. Map it out
I remember my friend’s mom’s divorce from her second marriage. I guess there is a rule where if an attorney has interacted with party a in a suit, they can’t offer services to the opposing party.
So my friend’s mom called every divorce lawyer within a 100 mile radius and essentially boxed her ex out of a lot of decent representation within a reasonable driving range.
8. Wise judge
On my year abroad in the U.S., I took a domestic relations class run by an ex-judge who told us a few good stories.
The first one was a couple who gathered their entire stuffed toy collection and split them in court, each taking turns to pick. He said they weren't even collectibles, just cheap junk you'd get at a fair.
My favorite story was where both parties were both being unreasonable and not thinking of the kids. In the end, he awarded the house to the kids who would permanently live there and the parents who had joint custody would take it in turns living in the house. His argument was that the kids' lives should take priority.
Best thing was neither party could afford to buy an additional place on their own, so the couple had to rent a small flat together and also share that.
Pretty awesome judge in my opinion.
7. They tried to be fair
My mother divorced my dad when I was like 2 years old. They had bought a house together and my dad's family offered her fair value to buy the house from her.
She denied the offer and puts it up for sale publicly.
My dads family buys it for 40% less than what they offered my mom in a public bidding auction.
6. Loophole
I spent six months costing Legal Aid cases for solicitors in the early 90's. Many of these cases included divorces.
The most notable one was a woman divorcing her husband because he discovered he could talk to the dead on their honeymoon and then later spent all their money on spiritualist groups.
That wasn't what made it notable though. During the divorce, the woman left the house. At some point her husband approached her and claimed that as he was letting the house fall into ruin, it would be better for both of them if he sold the house and split the proceeds with her. She agreed to this without consulting her solicitor.
A few weeks later the husband gave her £5. She asked what it was for. It was her share of the house. He'd sold it to his sister for £10 and kept living there. When she went to complain to her solicitors, she found they'd done the conveyancing for him. He'd deliberately used his wife's divorce solicitors and nobody at the firm had realized.
5. Big winnings, big losers
A friend of mine woke up really early one morning, and while he makes coffee he checks the lottery numbers and notices they didn't get a single number. He also realizes he needs milk for the coffee and runs to the corner store.
He then starts to buy lottery tickets for the next jackpot and comes up with what should have been a funny idea. He buys another ticket and plays the numbers that had already won the night before. He goes home and puts the ticket on the fridge where the other ones were, thinking she will have no reason to pay attention to the day they are for.
An hour later wife gets up and makes some coffee and he yells from the living room that he hasn't checked the lottery numbers yet and for her to see if they won anything last night. He hears her use the laptop to check the numbers and then she is quiet for a minute. He said he had this big grin on his face waiting for her to start yelling they won and thinking how funny it would be (I actually think fake winning lottery tickets, and the prank he was pulling, are mean, but that is beside the point).
She yells from the kitchen that they didn't win anything. She heads back upstairs and 15 minutes later she comes through the living room with both their elementary age kids in tow, and says she forgot to tell him she had to go to her mom's for the day and was taking the kids and just leaves. He was shocked. He then went and checked, lottery ticket is gone, not in trash or anywhere else.
He realizes she thinks they won the lottery and she is trying to run off with the winnings. She won't return calls or talk to him and when he calls the house. The grandma confirms she is there, put the kids on the phone, but that is it. She finally shows up with the kids a couple days later and just walks in the house and says "[Bleep] you" and walks into her bedroom and won't talk to him!
Kids confirm that mom thought she had won a ton of money. Realizing what kind of person she is, and that she also isn't very smart to think she would have gotten away with it, he divorced her.
1820796 from Pixabay
4. Wrong Address
A friend of mine's wife was divorcing him because he’s an unreliable idiot. He figured that he was smarter than everyone so he dragged out the process as long as he possibly could making it as difficult as possible on her. Scheduling and rescheduling meetings. Not showing up. Promising to do a thing and then backtracking later. Refusing to negotiate at all. I think his plan was to make the divorce so difficult on her that she would just stay married. He was also doing all this without a lawyer, so her lawyer had to deal directly with him.
After a year of this, his wife had had enough. She told her lawyer to make it happen. So the lawyer set a date and the court served him notice of the divorce proceeding. She showed up to court and he wasn’t there. So as the only party there she got a very one-sided deal. She got their business, custody of the kids, the house and all contents, her car, and the bank account. He got his car, his clothes, and half the proceeds of the sale of the house when she decides to sell it. That’s it. He found out about this when he called the court a week after it happened.
What had happened is her lawyer served the divorce notice to an address in a different town with a similar name. Normally this would have been caught by his attorney who would have received notice directly from the court, but since he had no attorney, there was no one other than him that the court could send it to.
He finally hired a lawyer and tried to get the settlement tossed as he claimed he was never served but the judge said there was nothing he could do.
3. Slow play
During college, I worked at a nice little family owned restaurant. Nice enough place where the owner and his wife split the duties of running the place, and would alternate between hires (she was the one who hired me). The husband however, seemed to have a type of person he would regularly hire, and that was leggy college girls who “would do anything for a job”. A few days in and I soon realized that every other employee knew this too, and all hid it from the wife in fear of reprisals from the husband.
About 5 months in and the husband makes his next hire, and not even a week after I walk into his office to see them being less than professional. The husband, who apparently doesn’t realize that every employee knows he does this, fires me to keep me from “spreading rumors that could get back to his wife”, and have his wife some made up excuse about me harassing the female waitresses to sell her on it.
What I didn’t expect was that when I went for my final paycheck and told the wife what I saw (I figured oh well, was already fired, why not) that the wife already knew about it. She did the books for the place, and pieced it together a year earlier, and was biding her time until their own kids left for college, which happened not too long before I was hired.
When she found out, she stuck a camera in the office without telling him, and had hours of him and other girls on tape. She also had the indecent I witnessed. She told me she was finally going through with the divorce at the end of the week, and since I was the only one who had the courage to tell her, she said that since things should go through quickly, what with her prep time and all the evidence, that she wanted me to be the new manager after the summer break.
A few months later when I came back for the fall, I found out that she got virtually everything in the divorce; the restaurant, their house, their retirement accounts, the cars, even his boat, which she didn’t even want, but took it out of spite.
He had a few stocks that predated the marriage, maybe 20k, so he got to keep those, along with his clothes, but that was it, hardly anything compared to the millions she got.
She offered me the manager job and I took it, and in a surprise twist, she wanted to take me out to celebrate. We had a bit to drink and the end of the night she played the “I don’t want to go back to that big house all alone” card, and me, being the college idiot I was, bought it hook line and sinker. We didn’t leave the house all weekend...
2. Useless judge
I had a divorce that didn’t settle at mediation and went to trial. The parties owned a business together which was started during the marriage. This was their sole source of income and they worked the business together. Obviously the biggest issue was who was going to keep the business (wasn’t worth much to sell and split the profit).
On a temporary basis the General Magistrate ordered the husband (my client) to keep running the business and to pay the wife temporary alimony. At trial, we were in front of the judge this time instead of the General Magistrate.
The judge is older, bad memory, and was fairly new to family law (she previously handled the civil division in the county). She ends up giving the wife the business AND ordering my client to pay the wife alimony! How is someone to pay alimony if you just took away their only source of income for the last 10 years? I filed a motion for rehearing but the judge denied it. My client didn’t have the money for an appeal so unfortunately there wasn’t much that he could do.
Cherry on top? The husband was awarded his home that he inherited from his grandmother. The wife had been living in there during the divorce proceedings. The judge gave her 30 days to move out. She stayed until the last possible day. When the client went back to the home the wife had completely destroyed the inside. She took a screw driver and scratched a “x” on the surface of all of the furniture and the walls. It was complete BS. In fact, this whole case was complete BS.
My client ended up leaving the country at one point. Not sure if he’s back in the US now.
Youtube
1. Extra salty
One of my father's friends tried to salt the earth before getting divorced. A rental house and a cabin were deeded to relatives, the cars they drove every day were sold to other relatives for tiny sums, stocks handed over to a trust 'for the children', etc. He even vanished a chunk of cash from the company he co-owned with his wife using phony invoices and stopped paying himself a salary, electing to burn through their personal savings for over a year instead.
He learned that judges really, really hate when you try to hide or intentionally diminish assets, and they will absolutely refer you to prosecutors for fraud.
I don't think he did any jail time in the end, but his ex-wife got EVERYTHING, plus the satisfaction of firing him from his own company.
