My BIL’s ex-wife mounted a viscous campaign against him in her zeal to win custody of her kids back. She ultimately prevailed, even though:
a) Their marriage ended when she left him, and their 3 kids, for a man she met on the internet. One day he came home to find her with her bags packed. She declared that their marriage was over, that she’d found the love of her life, someone who “got” her, and that she was going to California to be with him. No mention of the kids. She returned within a week when she discovered that her internet lover was a woman posing as a man.
Honestly, you can’t make this shit up.
b) After their divorce, his ex-wife decided she wanted him back once he started seriously dating my SIL. She tried to seduce him, and when he didn’t fall for it, she flipped out and attempted suicide. (She called him and said that she’d taken a bunch of pills.) When even that failed to get him to return to her, she wrote him an email telling him to come get the kids because she needed to start focusing on HERSELF for a change. So he came and got the kids, and kept them for nearly a year while continuing to pay child support to her.
c) After filing a motion to change him to the primary custodian, which would also stop the child support checks she was living on (she was unemployed), she suddenly decided that she loved the kids and wanted them back. And she was going to get them back come hell or high water. She started her campaign with a series of calls to CPS complaining that she feared that he was molesting/abusing his son. That resulted in 3 visits from a social worker to their home.
d) She called the kids’ teachers and asked them to pay special attention to her kids and to document any signs of trauma or abuse because she feared he was harming them, mentally and physically. She also told the school that she had court documents listing her as the primary custodian, and that if he tried to pick up the kids, as he’d done for years if they had baseball/soccer practice after school, he was to be arrested.
e) In the meantime she married a guy who was subsequently fired and sued by his ex-employer for filling out, and pocketing, fraudulent car rebates. As a result, neither of them had jobs.
f) Her own father wrote a letter to the mediator telling her that he thought his daughter was unstable.
In her findings, the court-appointed psychiatrist wrote that the father seemed “bitter” and that mother seemed “sincere.” She believed that the kids should return to their mother. End result was that the kids were ripped out of the stable home and placed back with their fruit loop mother and her new free-loading husband. The guy who had been decent and stable and loving the entire time was left paying tens of thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees for making the mistake of fighting her.
In an amusing follow-up, it’s been five or so years since the kids went to live with their mother. The two oldest kids are out of the house and over 18. So the ex-wife is left with the troubled son. Recently, she had the audacity to call her ex-husband and ask him to take custody of him because she couldn’t handle him anymore. He said, “You’re asking the guy who *molested *your son to take him back?” Her response, “Don’t be ridiculous. I did what I had to do to get my kids back.”