Two sides to every story
This is one of those "trying to process it all" posts. If it's riddled with errors, it's because I'm exhausted. Apologies. It's sort of rambly.
A few months ago, my husband and I went to see a movie (Beowulf; color me unimpressed) and ran into a woman whose ex-husband was an investor in a sports academy owned by one of my hubby's friends (...in the house that Jack built).
The woman (H) told us she and her ex-husband (F) had just finalized an ugly, drawn-out divorce. This woman didn't know Lon or me; in fact, Lon had only spoken to her maybe a handful of times, and I've never spoken to her before in my life, but she sat down next to us and proceed to tell us what a lying, cheating, scumbag of a bastard her ex-husband was, how he left her for a conniving, gold digging slut (her words, not mine), and cheated her out of her rightful share of the marital assets. She wanted to sit down with my husband and talk to him about what he remembered about the sports academy he attended with F and a couple of movie projects her ex had been involved in because she wants to take her ex back to court and sue him for more money beyond the divorce settlement.
So here's the thing. My husband has no knowledge at all of her ex-husband's business dealings. They were casual acquaintances who were both studying martial arts. They weren't business associates or really even friends outside of their weekly classes. Everyone from the academy went out to dinner together once and F invited Lon to one of his movie premieres once, but that was merely a courtesy on his part, not an indication of how tight they were.
I'm not sure what she thought Lon could tell her that she thought could help her case, and Lon essentially told her the same thing, but she took his business card anyway, and as the weeks went by and we didn't hear anything from her, I thought that was the end of that.
Well, she called us again a few days ago, and for the last three nights in a row, she's come over and stayed for hours taking an "affidavit" from Lon. The conversations have gone a little something like this.
Lon: The studio was in a huge facility.
H: So you thought it was extravagant. You thought a small studio would have been better.
Lon: It was one of the best gyms I've ever been in, state of the art equipment, top of the line everything.
H: So you thought they spared no expense. They spent too much money outfitting the gym. All the intentional spending was wasteful.
Lon: There were only 10 adults in my class. (That was just his class, btw. He had no idea how many kids or adults were in the other classes).
H: So they didn't have enough students to sustain the gym. You thought it was a bad business decision on their part to have such a large facility, even though they knew the business was failing.
Lon: T and S (Lon's friends who ran the academy) tryied to generate more interest in their program by offering an after-school program.
H: So they were throwing good money after bad. They knew it was failing, but they kept spending anyway by coming up with new and more expensive programs.
Lon: I stopped attending classes after about a year and a half because I got too busy with other things. (That was about the time H's ex-husband began his affair with one of the gymnastics instructors there).
H: You stopped attending because you "had no more respect for how F conducted himself at his place of business."
And so on and so forth for the next three hours, for the last three nights in a row. Everything Lon said, she twisted to suit her own purposes. She also gave us links to websites she's up and copies of a family Christmas letter she sent out to all of their friends and family, basically blasting F for leaving her and taking all their money, and she wants Lon to come to court and testify against F on her behalf. Last night, she admitted her portion of the divorce settlement amounted to roughly 3 million dollars, and that's what she agreed to, but she thinks she deserves alimony too and intends to keep going back to court until she gets it. She rants on and on about what a bastard her ex is, and I'll admit I don't have a very high opinion of his morals for his affair, but this whole thing is starting to creep me out!
My sister and my best friend are both married to men with psychotic exes. Crazy, but also smart. They know just what to say and how to act to secure people's sympathies, but they deliberately leave things out and make things up. They're also constantly hauling them back to court for one trivial thing or another. One of the last times Skanky Psycho-Bitch took my sister and BIL back to court was to complain to the judge that my sister shouldn't be allowed to be present at drop offs and pick ups of her son. The judge told her she was being ridiculous and wasting the court's time. It also cost my sis and BIL a crapload of money to have a judge tell SPB what anyone with an ounce of common sense already knows.
I also think it's appalling how many people get sucked into the drama of it and start bad-mouthing my brother-in-law and my friend's husband when they only have the embittered ex's version of the story to go on. SPB actually got someone to go over to my sister's house one day and threaten to "f*ck her up" if she didn't watch her back, then SPB physically attacked my BIL. She's also a big fan of telling everyone who'll listen to her what an ass my BIL is and posting ugly letters on the Internet. If you only ever heard what she had to say about it, you'd probably think he was an ass too.
But I'm getting off track. Maybe F really is precisely the bastard H is making him out be, but maybe he's not. Maybe I would feel differently if I heard what he had to say about it. Maybe in this story, he's my BIL and H is SPB. Or maybe H really is the wronged party here, fighting the good fight against a sleazy ex-husband. I don't know.
Whatever the case, the more we spend time with her, the more I don't want to get sucked into all this. I really don't feel good about marching into court and blasting F based solely on H's version of events alone, but what are we supposed to do? Go to F and demand he tell us his side of the story? It's not even any of our business.
While I'm at it, I really don't see what going into court and talking about a sports academy that was taken over by someone else a couple of years ago is going to accomplish. There's not any money to get out of it. It was a struggling business when T, S, and F owned it; they have no interest in it now. What's the point? She maintains F deliberately failed at the business to get out of having to give her more money. Whut? Srsly?
I feel sorry for her. It's obvious she's in a lot of pain, but she's also so angry, it's spilling out of her like a sickness. Is the money really worth all it's costing her to get it?
Before Lon would sign anything, he made a bunch of changes to the documents she faxed over. He took out things he didn't say and made changes to things that he didn't agree with. By the end of it, it was a very neutral document that essentially said he knew F casually and on a personal level didn't approve of F having an affair with one of the teachers (especially since two of his children were present at the academy when he spent time with her), but that was F's private life. Furthermore, Lon had no inside knowledge of how the business was run because he was a friend and a student, not an investor or a consultant, and therefore not in a position to give a professional opinion about what was a bad business practice and what wasn't.
She was really mad when she saw the changes he'd made. "Why did you do this? It's all watered down now!"
Lon told her, "The write up you sent me were your words, not mine. I'm not signing anything that I don't agree with." If she'd listened to him in the first place, she'd have known taking any sort of a statement from Lon was a waste of her time because he could only give her an outside observer's point of view. He wasn't in on anything else.
H wants to come back in a couple of days to talk about another financial project F was involved in (that Lon had absolutely NOTHING to do with) because she's trying to build up her case from that angle too. If she was frustrated by his statement about the studio because it didn't give her anything she could work with, she's going to hate his statement about the movie project. He has nothing at all to say there! I guess it will give her a chance to vent a little more.
This whole thing is a mess. I feel bad for everyone involved in it.
I just looked out my window, and it's snowing again. Bloody fantastic.
A few months ago, my husband and I went to see a movie (Beowulf; color me unimpressed) and ran into a woman whose ex-husband was an investor in a sports academy owned by one of my hubby's friends (...in the house that Jack built).
The woman (H) told us she and her ex-husband (F) had just finalized an ugly, drawn-out divorce. This woman didn't know Lon or me; in fact, Lon had only spoken to her maybe a handful of times, and I've never spoken to her before in my life, but she sat down next to us and proceed to tell us what a lying, cheating, scumbag of a bastard her ex-husband was, how he left her for a conniving, gold digging slut (her words, not mine), and cheated her out of her rightful share of the marital assets. She wanted to sit down with my husband and talk to him about what he remembered about the sports academy he attended with F and a couple of movie projects her ex had been involved in because she wants to take her ex back to court and sue him for more money beyond the divorce settlement.
So here's the thing. My husband has no knowledge at all of her ex-husband's business dealings. They were casual acquaintances who were both studying martial arts. They weren't business associates or really even friends outside of their weekly classes. Everyone from the academy went out to dinner together once and F invited Lon to one of his movie premieres once, but that was merely a courtesy on his part, not an indication of how tight they were.
I'm not sure what she thought Lon could tell her that she thought could help her case, and Lon essentially told her the same thing, but she took his business card anyway, and as the weeks went by and we didn't hear anything from her, I thought that was the end of that.
Well, she called us again a few days ago, and for the last three nights in a row, she's come over and stayed for hours taking an "affidavit" from Lon. The conversations have gone a little something like this.
Lon: The studio was in a huge facility.
H: So you thought it was extravagant. You thought a small studio would have been better.
Lon: It was one of the best gyms I've ever been in, state of the art equipment, top of the line everything.
H: So you thought they spared no expense. They spent too much money outfitting the gym. All the intentional spending was wasteful.
Lon: There were only 10 adults in my class. (That was just his class, btw. He had no idea how many kids or adults were in the other classes).
H: So they didn't have enough students to sustain the gym. You thought it was a bad business decision on their part to have such a large facility, even though they knew the business was failing.
Lon: T and S (Lon's friends who ran the academy) tryied to generate more interest in their program by offering an after-school program.
H: So they were throwing good money after bad. They knew it was failing, but they kept spending anyway by coming up with new and more expensive programs.
Lon: I stopped attending classes after about a year and a half because I got too busy with other things. (That was about the time H's ex-husband began his affair with one of the gymnastics instructors there).
H: You stopped attending because you "had no more respect for how F conducted himself at his place of business."
And so on and so forth for the next three hours, for the last three nights in a row. Everything Lon said, she twisted to suit her own purposes. She also gave us links to websites she's up and copies of a family Christmas letter she sent out to all of their friends and family, basically blasting F for leaving her and taking all their money, and she wants Lon to come to court and testify against F on her behalf. Last night, she admitted her portion of the divorce settlement amounted to roughly 3 million dollars, and that's what she agreed to, but she thinks she deserves alimony too and intends to keep going back to court until she gets it. She rants on and on about what a bastard her ex is, and I'll admit I don't have a very high opinion of his morals for his affair, but this whole thing is starting to creep me out!
My sister and my best friend are both married to men with psychotic exes. Crazy, but also smart. They know just what to say and how to act to secure people's sympathies, but they deliberately leave things out and make things up. They're also constantly hauling them back to court for one trivial thing or another. One of the last times Skanky Psycho-Bitch took my sister and BIL back to court was to complain to the judge that my sister shouldn't be allowed to be present at drop offs and pick ups of her son. The judge told her she was being ridiculous and wasting the court's time. It also cost my sis and BIL a crapload of money to have a judge tell SPB what anyone with an ounce of common sense already knows.
I also think it's appalling how many people get sucked into the drama of it and start bad-mouthing my brother-in-law and my friend's husband when they only have the embittered ex's version of the story to go on. SPB actually got someone to go over to my sister's house one day and threaten to "f*ck her up" if she didn't watch her back, then SPB physically attacked my BIL. She's also a big fan of telling everyone who'll listen to her what an ass my BIL is and posting ugly letters on the Internet. If you only ever heard what she had to say about it, you'd probably think he was an ass too.
But I'm getting off track. Maybe F really is precisely the bastard H is making him out be, but maybe he's not. Maybe I would feel differently if I heard what he had to say about it. Maybe in this story, he's my BIL and H is SPB. Or maybe H really is the wronged party here, fighting the good fight against a sleazy ex-husband. I don't know.
Whatever the case, the more we spend time with her, the more I don't want to get sucked into all this. I really don't feel good about marching into court and blasting F based solely on H's version of events alone, but what are we supposed to do? Go to F and demand he tell us his side of the story? It's not even any of our business.
While I'm at it, I really don't see what going into court and talking about a sports academy that was taken over by someone else a couple of years ago is going to accomplish. There's not any money to get out of it. It was a struggling business when T, S, and F owned it; they have no interest in it now. What's the point? She maintains F deliberately failed at the business to get out of having to give her more money. Whut? Srsly?
I feel sorry for her. It's obvious she's in a lot of pain, but she's also so angry, it's spilling out of her like a sickness. Is the money really worth all it's costing her to get it?
Before Lon would sign anything, he made a bunch of changes to the documents she faxed over. He took out things he didn't say and made changes to things that he didn't agree with. By the end of it, it was a very neutral document that essentially said he knew F casually and on a personal level didn't approve of F having an affair with one of the teachers (especially since two of his children were present at the academy when he spent time with her), but that was F's private life. Furthermore, Lon had no inside knowledge of how the business was run because he was a friend and a student, not an investor or a consultant, and therefore not in a position to give a professional opinion about what was a bad business practice and what wasn't.
She was really mad when she saw the changes he'd made. "Why did you do this? It's all watered down now!"
Lon told her, "The write up you sent me were your words, not mine. I'm not signing anything that I don't agree with." If she'd listened to him in the first place, she'd have known taking any sort of a statement from Lon was a waste of her time because he could only give her an outside observer's point of view. He wasn't in on anything else.
H wants to come back in a couple of days to talk about another financial project F was involved in (that Lon had absolutely NOTHING to do with) because she's trying to build up her case from that angle too. If she was frustrated by his statement about the studio because it didn't give her anything she could work with, she's going to hate his statement about the movie project. He has nothing at all to say there! I guess it will give her a chance to vent a little more.
This whole thing is a mess. I feel bad for everyone involved in it.
I just looked out my window, and it's snowing again. Bloody fantastic.