This is mostly a request for legal advice for a friend who recently found out her husband is a lying bastard.
A little background: She’d caught him in minor lies throughout their marriage but generally trusted him. Then a few weeks ago a friend came across an ad the husband had posted on a dating website. After some digging, they found a series of dating websites with different variations of the same ad - some said he was divorced with a kid, some said he was single. Naturally she was pretty freaked out, and since he happened to be out of town when she found out (ostensibly on a business trip, but who knows for real) she went digging through their closets and came across piles of paraphernalia including animal skulls, divination trays, jars of dirt, knives, and some strange herbs, plus books about Ifá. His association with the subject of Ifá wasn’t exactly out of the blue (I think his college degree had something to do with Latin American/Caribbean studies), but my friend is a devout Christian and had been led to believe that her husband was as well. And maybe he is, and there’s a valid excuse for him hiding all that stuff in their house, but to LIE to her about it is pretty heinous (the knives were hidden in their son’s closet, and there were “voodoo heads” hidden around their bedroom). She’s uncovered other lies over the past few weeks, including a business trip he took to Maryland that was actually a trip to the Dominican Republic. They’ve known each other since childhood, and some of the lies even go back that far.
She’s doing the smart thing (IMO) and divorcing him, but they have a small child and she wants sole custody but she isn’t sure if the state they live in will grant it simply based on the fact that the father’s a pathological liar (i.e. he’s not beating them or otherwise doing anything illegal).
Does she have any grounds for demanding sole custody of their child?