This Was the Wildest Divorce I Ever Encountered

I’ve been training circle of relatives regulation for extra than twenty years within the Washington, D.C. Place, and one of the craziest instances I ever encountered concerned a girl who alleged that her husband — my consumer — was emotionally abusive and stalking her online so one can get a protection order, one that in the long run were given him kicked out of the residence for two weeks. During that point, we filed for divorce even as she orchestrated a circulate out, and took extra than seventy five-percentage of what turned into within the house, leaving it in horrible condition. My client agreed to pay the guide and stay away from her and then moved again in.

Almost straight away, she changed her thoughts about the custody agreement and requested the court docket to revise it. In her counter-criticism for divorce, she alleged that my customer was having an affair — which become no longer authentic, and grew in no way demonstrated — and that he had restricted her get admission to money, even taking budget from her account without her know-how. In discovery, we discovered that she becomes the one who’d been having an affair for a while and that she had plenty of cash from various assets, inclusive of the budget she took from her very own financial institution account at the same time as claiming her husband had withdrawn them.

My customer had to combat to get a shared custody time table with the kids — first at a transient hearing, then at a complete 3-day custody trial, in which the children had their very own lawyer advocate for shared custody (as encouraged in line with the custody evaluators), yet mom refused to go with this.

Less than six months after the custody trial, she filed for contempt in opposition to her husband, even though she turned into the one that became directly in contempt. Ultimately, after a full-day hearing on that, her contempt petition turned into denied, and she becomes ordered to pay her husband extra than $12,000 in felony prices. Then we had the assets trial, where she desired lifetime alimony and more excellent than 1/2 the marital assets, even though she had squandered a sizeable component of their finances on additional felony charges and insisted on handiest working part-time.

The decide gave her no sympathy, and denied any alimony and allowed her husband to keep more than half the assets due to the fact she agreed with us that the spouse had dissipated marital budget. In rejecting the lawyer’s prices request more than $300,000, the judge located them to be completely unreasonable. Of course, this lady appealed the very last judgments, and in the long run, we reached a settlement to avoid in additional litigation.

This is a perfect instance of the way one individual can take fantastically unreasonable positions, make unfounded allegations, and the other individual will have to discover the power to maintain combating for what is fair, and additionally recognize while to reach an agreement to avoid limitless entanglements.

I assume my customer virtually benefited from having a divorce train to help him address the emotional turmoil at some point of the procedure, and he becomes lucky to have an excellent aid network of family and buddies inclined to testify and assist as wanted.

Ultimately, we will in no way be capable of alternate a person else’s attitude, which shapes their reality (although all of us else sees it otherwise). Those that can be given that, recognition on what’s inside their control and move on, are ways better off. Sooner or later, the kids will recognize who dragged the fight out, and who ended the craziness to limit their publicity to conflict.