How To Deal With A Divorce
As a divorce lawyer, I have seen some truly unbelievable twists and turns in my worst cases. There was one couple who separated ten years ago but didn’t get divorced until a couple of years ago.
The woman was set to receive the man’s house in the settlement, so he burned it down and faxed her the transfer of ownership forms. He may end up going to prison for arson, so his plan might not have been the best.
Hidden Truth
When I was three years old, my mother lost her life in a car accident, but my family never told me the full story.
Years later, I discovered from a newspaper article that the accident was actually my mother’s fault. She was not paying attention and crossed the center line, causing the collision that resulted in her death and the death of the person in the other car.
“Heaven”
At a wedding I attended, something truly unexpected occurred. While dancing, the bride’s aunt collapsed and passed away on the dance floor. The DJ immediately stopped the music and called for emergency medical services.
When they arrived, the aunt was taken away, and the music resumed. The DJ chose to play Bryan Adams’ song “Heaven” as the next song, which was met with shocked expressions from the guests. I will never forget that moment.
Close Call
When I was 15, my parents were going through a divorce. My mom worked night shifts, and my dad was living with one of his friends. One night my sister, who was 19 at the time came home pretty drunk from a party.
She was acting goofy and fell on the couch next to me. She started grabbing my leg and laughing, and we started fondling. That’s when I made the biggest mistake of my life.
We ended up doing it right there. When we woke up the next day, she had no recollection of the night before, so I just kept silent. Fast forward to when I’m 18. Sister is home from college and dad is over for a visit.
They get into an argument, and in a fit of rage, my dad announces how he has never forgiven her for getting an abortion at 19. The baby she aborted was in fact mine…, and as far as I know, I am the only one who is aware of this since she has never mentioned that night.
Weird Dad
When I was 13, I spent a summer with a friend who invited another girl and me to go swimming in her pool. When we arrived at her house, we were shown to her room to change.
As I was changing, my friend whispered, “What the heck?” I turned around and saw a line of used sanitary pads on the girl’s desk.
The situation became even stranger when the girl came into the room, and my friend asked her about the pads. She matter-of-factly replied, “They’re for my dad so he can check that I’m not pregnant.”
Double Life
I was in a relationship with this girl for almost two years. We celebrated holidays and festivals together and even talked about getting married.
She told me that she lived at home with her mother, who had terminal cancer, and didn’t want to bring anyone new into her life because of the pain of knowing she would soon be gone.
As a result, we spent all of our time at my place, and I never met her family or mother. One night, I received a message from a guy asking how I knew her.
When I told him the whole story, he revealed that her mother was actually fine and that she had been engaged to him and living with him the entire time.
They were due to get married in two weeks. It was shocking to learn that she had been able to deceive both of us so effectively for so long.
Eating The Homework
The woman I used to babysit for worked at a school in Toronto as an assistant or something similar. She would often tell a strange story about how the class pet rabbit would go home with a different student each weekend.
The school staff tried to avoid giving the bunny to one particular student because it was clear that his home life was not ideal.
However, they eventually gave in and let the student take the rabbit home. Unfortunately, the student’s parents ended up eating the rabbit. They didn’t even seem ashamed when they told the teacher about it on Monday, claiming they were out of food or something similar.
Weird Phone Call
My uncle works in dispatch for my town, and he recently told my family about the strangest call he has ever received. He said that he received a call from a landline one night and when he answered, there was only static on the other end.
This happened two more times. Eventually, he called a squad to go check out the address provided by the caller ID.
When the authorities arrived and entered the house, they immediately saw a body that had been there for five months. The strangest part was that there was no electricity or any other utilities working, so there’s no way the calls should have been able to go through to dispatch.
If they hadn’t received the calls, it’s unknown how much longer the body would have remained undiscovered.
No More Magic
While I was working in the kitchen at Cinderella’s castle at Disneyland, a family of four came in for dinner. During the meal, the husband politely stood up and tapped his glass to get everyone’s attention. What he said next chilled me to the bone.
He announced that his wife of 15 years had been cheating on him for over a year. The entire restaurant was shocked. The husband signaled for his kids, paid the waitress, and left his wife crying at the table.
No Guilt
My girlfriend traveled five hours by train to see me, only to arrive at my house and tell me that she doesn’t love me anymore and wanted to break up. She left, and I cried for about 15 minutes before calling my best friend and asking if he could come over with some beers so I wouldn’t be alone all weekend.
However, when he answered the phone, I heard my girlfriend asking him something in the background. It turned out that she had traveled five hours to break up with me so she could cheat on me with my best friend without feeling guilty about it. I no longer talk to him.
The Bad Doctor
Years ago, I heard rumors that a relative through marriage had lost their license to practice medicine because of some accusations of misconduct. At the time, all I heard were whispers of something amiss but didn’t know much about it.
Decades later, a friend who became a doctor was able to look up the case since I had mentioned it offhand—I said I heard scant rumors. It turns out it wasn’t just some rumor, it was a full-out, massive scandal.
There was severe misconduct of patients, many of whom testified at trial about how he misused his position, including wanting naughty favors in exchange for medication.
He vehemently denied the accusations, but his character witness was severely flawed and there were way too many accusations for it to have been a conspiracy.
The details were far beyond what I was expecting. It happened years ago, and he’s been barred from practicing, but I still don’t even know if I can hide my disgust next time I see him.
I don’t want to bring up skeletons in the closet to disrupt the familial peace, but I’m actually really angry that none of my family members were honest to me about the situation.
Kids Know More Than They Let On
My mom told me this story the other day and it freaked me out. When my oldest sister was little, like 3 years old, she asked my then-pregnant aunt to pick her up to hold her.
My mom said she was like “She can’t pick you up, honey, she has a baby in her tummy.” And then my little sister was like “That baby is dead!” My mom freaked out.
Still, my aunt and grandma were fine and were telling my mom it was all good, she was just a toddler and didn’t know what she was saying.
They were so, so wrong. Well, lo and behold my aunt goes to the doctor the next day for a routine pregnancy checkup, and the baby was dead. Give me the willies just thinking about it.
Home Away From Home
Two and a half years ago, I was in dire financial straits. I sold my home to keep my struggling business afloat. But I neglected to tell the owners about one key thing.
They have an 800 square foot bunker on the property that I built about seven years ago. The bunker that I’ve called home since I sold it. The entrance to it is well-hidden, but I still come and go very early/very late in the day.
I’m a single man who keeps to himself. I’m now in a situation where I could move somewhere else, but I love this hidden paradise so much.
Way to Leave Us Hanging
A long time ago, back when I was still in middle school my mom’s best friend passed on. She wouldn’t tell me how it happened. Only that it was sudden.
When I asked why we weren’t going to the funeral she told me that there wouldn’t be one because “her body was being donated to science.” I didn’t ask any more questions. That was the last time we ever talked about her.
Well, five months ago my mom handed me her phone to find the number for Domino’s and as I’m scrolling through her contacts I come across the phone number of the dead best friend. Biggest WTF moment of my life.
The next day I called it from a pay phone at Waffle House and she picked up. I instantly recognized the voice and accent. She’s not dead. Turns out, my mom had been lying all these years about her BEST FRIEND BEING DEAD. It was beyond messed up.
Pregnant Disaster
I was pregnant with my oldest daughter and had extreme pain one day, so I came home early from work. When I get home I see two purses that I knew weren’t mine sitting on the stand.
I head to my room to see if my then-boyfriend could explain the purses; I’m hearing noises coming from our room. I opened the door to peek in and he is having a threesome. I close the door and just go back into the living room. I was shocked.
I was supposed to be on bed rest, but I was the only one who had a job, so I was going to school and working while he got to stay home all day. I was livid, but what was scary is that I was so furious that I remained calm.0
I went into the living room, sat on the couch and waited for them to come out; when they finally did I asked them if they had fun?
I told them they needed to get out of my apartment. He tried to talk to me, but I told him he needed to get out.
I calmly packed off of his stuff up, had a friend come over because I couldn’t do heavy lifting being 7 months pregnant and dropped his stuff off at his parents’ house that night. It’s still shocking to me that I remained so calm being that angry.
Big Pharma
I was promoted to VP of my company. The company was in trouble, and the CEO had asked me to figure out why and fix it. I arranged for a random drug test. All employees, the CEO, me, everyone.
All on the same day, and everyone went down at the same time. Even said I would ignore weed, but anyone with anything stronger would be gone.
We get the results back and I fired everyone who had tested positive for any drug other than weed. The CEO and myself were the only two people left working for the company.
Change of Heart
Amazingly, once at a wedding I saw the groom actually object. He just stood up there and started crying, then announced in front of everyone that he had fallen out of love with the bride a while before but didn’t know how to break it off.
It was extremely uncomfortable, and they both stepped out. Suddenly, they came back in and got married—and months later, we found out the awful truth.
It was because she’d apparently told him she was pregnant right then and there. They’re still together, with three kids now. I’m not sure about the husband, but I can confirm that the wife is having an affair.
Neither of them are happy, but she has a comfortable life and he doesn’t have the spine to leave. Just really, really sad.
Can’t Put A Price On Education
On September 14th, 1986, my dad dropped me off at boarding school and gave me a five-dollar bill. I never heard from him again. He never paid my tuition bill. So, from the age of 14, I took every job I could get and worked my way through.
At $4 an hour, I didn’t even come close to paying off my entire bill, but the school let me stick around because I was a model student in and out of the classroom.
We get to graduation. I opened my little diploma thing expecting to see a bill in five figures. Instead there was a note: “Congratulations on your graduation.
A group of us who believe in you and love you have taken care of your bill. We are proud to present you with your diploma.” I later found out that one of my friend’s dad, a fairly well-off dentist, went fundraising among his golf buddies because he didn’t want to see me enter life at 18 under crushing debt.
Sweet Revenge
Wife cheats on her husband during his frequent travels for work. She files for divorce and gets to keep the house.
Months elapsed and the husband is still rightfully ticked off about the unfairness of it all, but has no recourse. Then he has an epiphany: “I wonder if she changed the password to the Nest Thermostat?” She did not.
For the next year he continues to mess with the thermostat. In the middle of summer when they’re sleeping in HIS bed, he turns the heat on to 90 degrees at 3 a.m. Middle of winter?
Time to shut off the heat and hope the pipes freeze. Away on vacation? Turn the air conditioning down to 55 and let it run 24/7 for a nice surprise bill when they get home.
It’s That Time of the Month (for a Divorce)
Had a soldier stationed at Guantanamo Bay who met a local. Fell madly in love. They decided to get married so she could come with him back in the States once his tour was done.
She was working on American dishes and was making spaghetti. He comes home from work one day, and she’s making it. She puts the meat in, puts the canned sauce in, and then pulls an unlabeled bag out of the freezer and adds it to the sauce.
After she did this, their marriage was over. At this point in the session, she’s crying with broken Spanglish. She’s trying to explain she didn’t know any better. Through the hysteria he informs me her mother and grandmother told her if she wanted to keep her man, she needed to put her menstrual blood in his food.
It was so hard to keep my composure. I was trying to hard not to gag. They both described they were madly in love, but he couldn’t let it go. They ended up getting a divorce. Having done this for 14 years, I have found it 100% accurate that truth is stranger than fiction.
He’s Got It All in the Bag
My husband has been an officer for over 20 years. One night, he was patrolling the downtown area when he noticed a purse that someone had left behind.
He opened the bag to check for an ID and instead, he found a poop. That’s right, some lady had taken a huge dump in her own handbag and then left it behind.
He’ll talk freely about crazy stuff like autopsies and burnt bodies—but this particular story, he definitely wishes he could forget…
A Wheel-y Good Defense
A friend’s sister went to court over a moving violation. She’s an engine tuner and had built herself a beautiful first gen Mitsubishi Eclipse with 6-700 horsepower at the wheels.
This car, inevitably, attracted the attention of local law enforcement, who pulled her over with no fewer than eight cruisers after some slightly aggressive acceleration around a left turn.
During cross-examination, she asked the officer who’d made the call why exactly she had been pulled over. “I heard the engine revving, and I saw you spinning the tires and sliding around the corner.” “To be clear, officer, which tires were spinning?” “The rear tires.” “So I was spinning the rear tires, and it was the back end that swung out?” “Yes ma’am, that’s correct.”
“And you’re sure that’s what you saw?” “Clear as day, ma’am. The light turned green, you stepped on the gas, and the rear tires broke loose under power.” “The rear tires broke loose under power? There’s no doubt in your mind that that’s exactly what happened?” “None at all.
” Then, there was silence in the court before her huge reveal. “Your honor, this officer is either lying or hallucinating. My car is front wheel drive.”
Race to the Finish
I have a story related to a divorce case. I once worked on bank equipment, and my favorite was opening safety deposit boxes for the bank. So one day, I was asked to get there before the bank opened, which was really odd.
I show up and greet the bank employee—along with a lawyer and a very angry looking woman.
She is really impatient to get into the safety deposit box. I get the lock open and swing the door out, and she’s screaming, “let me in there!,” So I stepped outside and let her rush by.
A few moment later, I hear a string of loud curse words: it was empty. Then she busts out and storms off, but while she passed she threw down a single piece of paper that had been in the vault. It basically said, “Screw you, witch.” It had been a nasty divorce, and the-ex husband got there before she did.
Brothers Never Known
I always knew that my parents had some kind of “family secret.” Various mutterings amended streams of conscious, etc. in my childhood. From the sound of it, I was under the impression that I had an older sibling.
I am the oldest sibling of four, so I was fixated on the few little details, but as I grew older, I assumed it was a very morbid kind of imaginary friend delusion I had.
When I was in high school, I was talking to my mother when she slipped, saying something about her early relationship with my dad. I pushed her on it and found out that she had stayed with my dad after they had a child at age 15.
She went on to tell me that I’d had not one, but three older siblings, and that were lost in some kind of accident. My mom broke down. I didn’t push for details and never have.
That day, I went from being the oldest of four to the middle of seven. Probably my frame of reference for the concept of “trauma.” Every obsession, every worry, and character flaw of my teenage self at that time burned into my character like scars.
Something Doesn’t Match in This Match…
My brother dumped his fiancée a month before the wedding because when she gave birth. The baby that was born was black, and neither he nor his fiancée is.
Unsurprisingly, a paternity test proved it wasn’t his, and thus child support was denied.
Like Something Out Of A Movie
My aunt died in the hospital several years ago. She was clinically dead for a few minutes. But that’s only the beginning of the story. In that time, she says she floated above the operating table and saw them trying to revive her.
She says she felt a pull on her and flew out through the very top of the room. She remembered very clearly floating above the light fixture on the ceiling and then there being darkness. Suddenly she found herself floating above the ground several inches just above a field of dirt.
In front of her was a very large chasm, deep, very dark, she couldn’t see the bottom of it from where she was. On the other side of the chasm was a beautiful field. Green grass, flowers, trees and sunlight.
On her side of the chasm it was overcast and very little light, no vegetation, just brown dirt. She felt the same force that pulled her out through the ceiling of the hospital start pulling her across the chasm.
As she started floating over the chasm these hands reached out of the blackness and started pulling at her, almost like ripping the flesh from her legs and feet. She says it was the worst feeling of pain and cold she had ever experienced and it horrified her.
After what seemed like forever she reached the other side of the chasm and the hands went away. The feeling of pain and terror was replaced with a feeling of happiness and contentment and warmth.
Several family members that had been dead for some time were there and they seemed to be beckoning her over. She was going to the field when she heard the doctor say something. It sounded like it echoed very loudly from the other side of the chasm.
Suddenly that force pulled her across the chasm again only this time much faster than she had been pulled over the first time. Again the hands came and again the cold.
The hands ripped at her and she felt the pain she had felt before. Finally she came to the dirt side of the chasm again. Then blackness. Then she was on the ceiling of her room in the hospital again and she saw her body spasm and her arm smacked the doctor’s arm, breaking his watch.
Her spirit was pulled back into her body again and she heard him say something like “She’s back” and then blackness again. Several hours later she woke up and she was ANGRY, at first. Then she realized she was alive and she thanked the doctor and apologized for breaking his watch. He was surprised because when she did that she was technically dead.
More Than He Bargained for
Private investigator here. One woman I was hired to investigate was married to a guy who made a decent living. He wasn’t mega-rich, but he likely made around $250K a year.
He started to suspect his wife was cheating on him, so we tailed her for the weekend. It was only one weekend, but we quickly discovered that she was selling herself on Craigslist and Backpage.
We caught over 13 men coming in and out of her motel room that weekend and found her ads online.
Too Much Off The Top
Went to an open house in my town. The realtor told us that the couple was getting a divorce. The man had left his wife. She was a bit strange. So, we make our way up to the master bedroom and the only piece of “decor” was a long glass display case like you might use to showcase a model ship or car.
It was about two feet long. Inside was something that looked like a ticker-tape rolled up at one end and pulled across the length of the case.
It was a life monitor readout that slowly flat-lined to the end. Across the bottom of the case was displayed a ponytail…with a good-sized section of the scalp still attached to it.
Totally morbid. We got the heck out of there. Found out later that the daughter of the couple had been killed by a drunk driver. The wife went a little batty and drove her husband away.
Too Young To Run
The second time I got catfished was the last time I tried to meet a girl online. I was a junior in college and had been talking to this girl a few states away for weeks online. She claimed to be 19 (I was 20) and she was a cute redhead in the pics she sent me, so I chatted her up regularly even though she lived far away.
At some point, she surprises me with her plan to take a bus out to my university and spend the weekend hanging out and partying with me. When I picked her up at the bus stop I barely recognized her. She sort of looked like the cute redhead I had pictures of, but way younger, like she could be the daughter of the girl I had been talking to online.
I played it cool, trying to be a gentleman, but quickly decided that spending the weekend partying with what appears to be a 14-to-16-year-old would be a bad idea. I told her that there were no good parties on the docket and took her home to my parents’ house where I figured we could lay low until Sunday when I could shuffle her back onto a bus and be rid of her.
Well, late the next evening while we were sitting on the living room floor watching a movie with my parents, the phone rings. I answered the phone to hear a crying woman pleading to know where her daughter was and if she is ok. That’s when it hit me…I was somehow harboring a freakin’ teenage runaway. Not a good look.
I got the girl on the phone with her mom and started grabbing all of her stuff and putting in my car. Apparently, her mom had found my phone number on their phone bill and traveled to my school looking for her daughter. I promised to meet her on campus with her daughter ASAP.
Well, we didn’t even make it out of the driveway before the authorities showed up. The cop looked at me, then pointed to the girl and said, “Is that her?”, and I replied, “Yeah, take her home man” and that was it.
Luckily for me, I think this girl may have had a history of running away from home because they didn’t ask me a single question or anything, they thankfully just took the girl and left. Then my mom came out into the driveway asking why the authorities were there…
I had some ‘splainin’ to do. And then, when I returned to school, all of my roommates and neighbors told me that the authorities had been scouring the campus for me and an underage runaway. I spent the next couple weeks explaining to everyone I knew how I got hoodwinked by an internet girl and that they had the story wrong.
Doesn’t This Guy Have Anything Better to Do?
Story from my parents who are lawyers. So throughout the divorce proceedings, there was a car that was a huge point of contention between the husband and wife. After months and months of saying he would never let the wife have the car, the husband concedes in exchange for something great, like one of their summer houses.
It turns out he had been driving the car for three hours everyday in a big loop around the city, putting thousands and thousands of miles on it basically making it worthless. The amount of planning and spite that went into that was amazing.
