47 Divorce Stories That Show Just How Cruel People Can Get When A Marriage Ends

A friend of mine in high school worked at a pizza place. One of the delivery drivers was just ridiculously smart when I talked to him. Later I found out that he use to be a nuclear physicist. His wife was also a nuclear physicist, but left him for her lawyer.

He got screwed out of his kids, most of the assets, and had to pay a lot towards alimony/child support. He did the math, and figured out the tips he didn't get taxed on plus his minimum wage delivering pizza was more than keeping his job as a nuclear physicist. Plus he got a little satisfaction not having to pay her as much. The guy was really nice. I always felt bad for him.

Not a lawyer.

Parents divorce seemed simple dad cheated on mom, mom gets custody of me. Dad didn't like paying alimony and child support to the tune of $2k a month after he gave up rights. Dad had great idea, pay a hitman $15k to k**l soon to be ex-wife. Dad goes through with it, idiot actually pays undercover cop the money. Dad then flys back to Canada (home) and wait for results. International task force is formed to try and detain him. Geraldo Rivera covers story, idiot dad gets arrested in Toronto and flown back to California. In this process I was 3 in care of family back down south, mother in protection by police. Dad's family apparently wealthy gets good lawyer is charged with 17 felonies can't remember how many he was convicted of. He gets 18 months. After all of this mom still had to sue for divorce it took 2 years.

Edit: Mother is ok, is bi polar now and had to move out of state. I moved back after military. Father is out just not allowed in country, never met him. Have talked 4 times.
Found out when I was 18, after issue in military.

I'm a newly admitted lawyer but this wasn't a client, it was a couple I used to babysit for.

He invested in property on the side of marketing, she was in business.

Things went south and she went after the house they lived in and some of the properties he "owned".

Turns out he didn't even own the house they lived in, nor the investment properties, everything was done through his brothers and through some sort of discretionary trust. I'm not too sure of the set up but she only ended up coming out of it with some money and a car.

It completely blindsided her. I thought it was pretty d**n clever.

I still remember the kid though. And how her manner changed so much during the fighting. Really sad seeing the effects on kids.

Omg finally one I can answer!

There's the typical cleaning out the accounts and running, claiming the children first on taxes so the other party can't, claiming the other party as a dependent so they can't file separately, stuff like that.

Then there was this one case.

My client fled the home with her baby after an incident of domestic violence. In my state, both parents have full rights to the children unless a custody order in place. In other words, whoever has the kid, gets the kid. Police will not intervene where one spouse is withholding a child from the other spouse if there are no orders in place.

Well my client had the child for two weeks at her new place when H showed up demanding the child. She refused. He called the police. The responding officer was a family friend of both, but originally a friend of H. This PO shows up and decides to try to mediate the conflict. The PO tells my client something along the lines of "let him hug his son goodbye and he will leave peacefully." My client was hesitant, but agreed. H took the kid and exclaimed "he's mine now!" And ran to his car with the baby. No supplies, no clothes, nothing. The PO claimed he had no idea what was happening (yeah right). And since no orders were in place, there was nothing my client could do.

While we were trying to track him down, we got an order returning the child to my client's possession. He suddenly contacted my client saying he was at a hotel in the area and if she wanted her son back, she could if she came over and slept with him. We sent the police.

My d**n mother is an alcoholic. We (me and my brother) have lived week in week off with her and my dad who is great. For 10 years we lived in ankle deep garbage and had to wade through the living room. Cue around a year ago. Dad gets a full time university job 500km away, making double anything he ever made in his whole life, and I decide I want to go with him. I set a date, pack my bags, and say goodbye to everyone. I'm set to leave in the winter school holidays. My brother was gonna stay in our home city for a while longer living between our mum and our stepmum (dads SO of 10 years thy we lie and trust). Life seems to be presenting me with a huge opportunity. So, the week that I'm supposed to be leaving comes around and on the morning before I'm scheduled to get on a train, we hear a knock on the door. My dad answers to my mum, accompanied by a man in a suit, with a folder of legal documents. We take them inside and Suprise Suprise they're court orders. Cue a 2-month 50,000 dollar legal battle that makes everyone involved unhappy. Finally, it is decided after hours of forensic psychological evaluation that I should go to this new city with my Dad. The legal battle has destroyed my relationship with my mother, and the money spent on lawyers and barristers and whatnot makes my new lifestyle considerably less luxurious than was planned, and makes it hard to assimilate into my new public school, since it's nearly the end of term and everyone is already over school.

TL;DR my dad gets great new job and I plan to go. Mum ultimately just drags out the process and makes life tough.

Over here in the Netherlands most legal costs are paid for by the government if your income is below a certain treshold. In practice this means that if one of the spouses in a divorce has little to no income and the other one has a normal income, the one with the normal income will have to pay a lot of the process drags on.

Concidering there are plenty of ways to drag it on I've seen cases approach rediculous amounts of billable hours.
There is a catch to this however. Your lawyer is paid a set amount if he/she is paid by the government. However, should the money you recieve after a divorce or w/e exceed a certain number, you are expected to pay your own lawyer (which is the reason we still keep track of the hours in these cases). So this one woman who thought she was screwing over her ex husband by dragging the divorce over multiple years got a payout of ~€40k by the end of it. Unfortunately for her she had to surrender most of that straight back in lawyer costs. There was a certain sense of justice in there.

Also proves time and again that when there is conflict the only true winners are usually the lawyers.

My ex and I separated before the divorce. She agreed to watch the dog while I found a new place.

She had the dog put down instead.

My ex-wife gave me all my Blu-Rays back, which was nice. A year later I realized she had removed one disc from each of the Trilogy box sets.

Edit: Man you guys are young. When someone refers to The Trilogies, it's obviously Star Wars or Indiana Jones.
Edit#2: I wasn't even that mad. I shook my head, smiled, and then remembered who I was dealing with. It was so clever, I had to respect it.

No lawyer, but at the time I worked on bank equipment, my favorite was opening safety deposit boxes for the bank. Do I was asked to get there before the bank opened which was odd. I show up and greet the bank employee along with a lawyer and a very angry looking woman. I get the lock open and swing the door open as the angry woman shouts "let me in there!" And I step outside the vault. "That MOTHER F****R!" And storms off, but she threw down a piece of paper that said "F**k you b***h". It had been a nasty divorce and the ex husband got there before she did.

Handled a divorce between a teacher (wife) and a CVS cashier (husband.) I represented the wife.

For all intents and purposes, the wife was the breadwinner of the family and she supported herself, her husband, and their two children. I should note: one of the children was severely autistic and required intensive (and expensive) rehab and education.

During the process of the divorce, the husband (living alone) sued the wife (caring for both children) for temporary spousal support. He met all the statutory guidelines to receive it. But, it just came off as slimy.

At the day of the hearing, the judge reviewed all of the facts and spent 20 minutes lambasting the husband. He called him a "vile creature" that was everything wrong with society.

The judge then told us that his "hands were tied" and that he was forced to grant the spousal support. But he let everyone know how little he thought of the husband.

As we were leaving the court, the husband just kept saying to my crying client "Just like Goodfellas - *F**k you, pay me.*"

It was literally humanity at its worst.

Not a lawyer but got divorced. During divorce proceedings, when we didn't live together anymore, my wife filed a frivolous police report saying that I 'threatened' her. In the police report, she wrote my apartment's address as her place of residence. A court immediately issued a restraining order against me, prohibiting me from being in my apartment (that I rented).

While the restraining order was active (several months) I had to live in hotels and Airbnbs, which of course is 2x-3x of normal rent, without having access to my clothes and other stuff. I also was paying the rent for the apartment that was empty all that time (she never actually went there during that restraining order, even though she claimed it as her residence).
The restraining order was lifted as the case was dismissed after she never provided any evidence or even testimony to DA.

I didn't sign lease extension in time during this process because I had no information how long the restraining order will be for; even though it was lifted right before my lease expired, I ended up having to move (and pay a broker fee).

Of course this also delayed divorce proceedings because we couldn't communicate while the restraining order was active.

Besides that, she refused to sign tax form for "married filing jointly". I ended up filing as "married filing separately", which meant quite a few thousand dollars extra in payment to IRS.

This was the biggest case of 'f**k you over without any gain for me' that I have seen.

I am not a divorce lawyer, but being a banker I get to delve into the personal lives of people and this is what a customer had told me. Well basically, the divorce was cut and dry but as a professional that's not my business why, but I'm worried about his financials though. My guy was the breadwinner in the house. He was a construction foreman I believe so he was the guy planning, paying and watching his employees, he was great. Apparently his wife wanted f*****g everything, but the thing that pissed him off the most was the fact that she took the boat, (his boat that he had purchased *before* ever meeting her!). The funny thing is though, she can not afford anything to move the boat with (I.e, truck). So he had to legitimately move his boat, with his truck, to some place she was staying at, and just leave it. He lost his boat. He asked me at the end how old I was, I tell him 21. He told me never to get married, I'll get to keep my stuff at the end.

My mom was a real piece of work in this department. My mother is mentally unstable and was very a*****e to me as a child. When my father finally moved out and asked for a Divorce I was luckily old enough (13) to legally decide who I wanted to live with. I, of course, chose my dad and that enraged my mother. By court order, she was allowed to live in our 4 bedroom house while me and my dad had to move in with my aunt into a two bedroom house. We lived there for 4 years while my mom did everything she could to slow down the divorce proceedings. During this period my father was court ordered to pay the mortgage and utilities on the house my mother was living in. She would leave all the lights on and crank the heat with the widows open just to drive the utility bills up. She once left the garden hose on for a week into a drain to even make the Water bill outrageous. When it was finally all over and she had taken my dad for as much as she could she decided to sue him for my college fund. I called her and told her if she went through with it I would never speak to her again, she told me if I wanted it I needed to move in with her before I turned 18 so she could get child support from my dad. I refused, she won the case for the money and my dad had to use most of what was left of the fund to pay for her lawyers costs.

I'm not a divorce lawyer but I overheard a conversation with one. While I was waiting in the lobby for my child support case to be called (ex wasn't paying) a woman walked in and sat down. Five minutes later her lawyer comes in and asks why she isn't dressed better. She was wearing what looked like a night gown and bright white flip flops. She explained to him that her husband took everything except that outfit and all of her left shoes. She didn't have money to buy anything else so the neighbor loaned her flip flops because they were the only thing that fit. At first I felt bad for her but then she was whining that she wanted more alimony because the money he was paying weekly barely covered her car payment for her brand new Mercedes.

I know a guy who was very successful in real estate. He contracted type 2 diabetes and while trying to get it under control passed out and wound up in the hospital. While in the hospital, his wife convinced him to give her power of attorney (POA). She sold everything, took all assets, raided retirement accounts and then filed for divorce. He now lives in a 12x8 room at the nursing home trying to sell real estate between dialysis sessions. So sad. Dunno what happened to the ex.

How my soon to be ex wife f****d me over:

My wife and I started having problems when my step son started getting to the age of rebellion. I would try and discipline him and she would step on my toes and let him do whatever he wanted. One day I end up punching the door and scarring everyone because my step son told me he didn't love me and that I'm not his real father. I raised him since he was 2. He's ten now. So my wife leaves me. I have a legitimate daughter with her. It's been over a year and my wife tells me she can't focus on her job and school because my daughter is too young for school yet. She let her son live with his biological father. I convince her that my daughter should live with me while we go through a divorce. So after 3 months she wanted our daughter back. I told her no that she had just moved in with me. Meanwhile she's stubborn on making a shared custody plan and she's stubborn on how to split our material things. She asks me if our daughter can go down and visit for the 4th of July holiday. I agree and she takes her to the state she resides at and bought her health insurance and enrolled her in school and a bunch of other things that I immediately did when she came to move with me. Then she filed for divorce in that state. Now I can't legally go get my daughter back after this 4th of July holiday because the child can not leave the state until the end of the divorce.

She is going to take everything from me.

Edit: I have spoken to a divorce lawyer and I'm kinda just sitting on my hands. I need to prove that it's in my daughters best interest to live with me. Should I fail, I won't do anything that will harm my image to my daughter. I always think back to a question I've been asked before, if you can trade places for a day with anyone, who would it be?

I would choose my daughter to trade places with. So she can see with my own eyes and heart how much she means to me. I love her with all my might.

Child of divorce here.

My father was a plastic surgeon. Worked his way up from a janitor at a hospital that didn't graduate high school to getting through med school mid 30s. Married my mom in his 40s (she was 20 years younger). They always had a strained relationship. He was a workaholic and also had a drinking issue. My mother on the other hand was controlling and manipulative. I could see both of their issues at a young age.

I always knew they needed to be separated but it didn't happen until my early 20s which couldn't have been a worse time. My dad had lost a considerable amount of money after the recession and had also gotten 2 types of cancer (prostate and colon) and almost died and pretty much stopped practicing medicine. My mother decided this was the perfect time to divorce him and in the process take every little thing could from him including my younger siblings. He fell into a deep depression and still to this day thinks he loves this woman while she continues to take advantage of him.

I managed to help him win back his house in court but he lost every other bit of cash and property.

A real s**t storm. Still dealing with it 3 years later

Edit: before any backlash about taking sides in the divorce start flooding in...i know it's my mother and I shouldn't take sides but she did some horrible things to my family. It's taken years to recover from and while it wasn't all her fault she was the primary catalyst in the situation and didn't have to be spiteful and take every little thing from a man who gave her everything.

Am getting divorced. Basically my lawyer said if I ever want to marry someone again just make sure she makes more money than me. I'm out about $65k so far.

My dad basically appealed custody over and over, bringing in new friends to back his character. This forced my mum to seek a barrister/lawyer to defend herself.

My dad is/was a massive problem gambler - had no permanent home and was pretty s**t at practical life stuff (nutrition, education, etc.)

This forced my mum to dig into all her savings to pay legal fees to keep a child anybody with a sound mind would know is much more capable than my dad.

So in the end my dad basically made my mother bankrupt trying to get custody over a child he wouldn't have been able to raise.

10/10.

Guy was married to a woman who f****d another guy, had that other guy's baby, and never told the husband, then for other reasons they start divorce proceedings, a paternity test is done, the husband finds out the kid isnt his, and the courts rule that he still has to pay child support, because it is in the best interests of the kid.