The hearing at court for the next day was still on. Claiming she had the flu, Jess asked for a delay, but the judge said no. The judge told Linda she had to represent Jess at this hearing. After that, Jess would have to find another attorney. I had paid a $2,000 retainer for Linda but would not voluntarily pay for Jess’s second attorney. I might be forced to pay, but I would put up every roadblock I could. Linda’s quitting would only end up costing me more money in the end and delaying the divorce.
When I got back home, Jess’s lockset I had removed was back in the bedroom, hanging in a bag from the doorknob. The Phillips heads of the screws in the original lockset I had put back on the door with Loctite were a bit rounded off. Ha! She didn’t know I had put thread locker on the screws—they were not coming off! I know this was trivial and petty, but it was funny.
The next day Jess was late for the hearing. It was typical Jess. She called her attorney and said she was stuck in traffic. Of course she was; it was morning, and there was always rush-hour traffic. Any normal person would leave early enough for something as important as this, but not Jess. She had to put the blame elsewhere instead of getting herself ready on time. This caused our hearing to be delayed for almost two hours, as multiple people scheduled to appear after us ended up going before us. Ray said he would probably get a parking ticket for an expired parking meter. I told him it would be funny to send Jess the bill for the ticket. That was the mode I was in with her now.
While we were waiting, Ray and I spoke about Jess’s perspective in cases like this, what she thinks she is entitled to, and what the court considers lies. In Jess’s case, it was clear she was lying, and if she testified and stuck to her stories, it would be perjury.
When it came to spousal support, her perspective was that I had supported her throughout our marriage and she deserved continued support. However, my perspective was that she had taken enough due to her building up massive debt, ruining our finances, and causing indescribable personal chaos and legal trouble. She was capable of getting a job and getting a paycheck if she put her mind to it. From my viewpoint, enough was enough, and I shouldn’t have to continue paying someone who had done so much damage.
Ray asked me how old Jess was. I told him she was fifty-two. He replied that her habits of creating conflicts with people, arguing, and being a victim were so ingrained at this point that she would never change. I agreed and said she was a lost cause. Ray replied that this divorce would take time. But soon she would be out of my life, and things would only get better.
The hearing today in the judge’s chambers was to schedule future court appearances. The meeting was with the judge’s legal assistant. It looked like the divorce wouldn’t be done until November. Linda was there, sitting in the hallway and looking very unhappy, and she did not go into the judge’s chambers with Jess. Jess must have really pissed her off. I waited outside while my attorney and Jess were in the chambers with the assistant.
When Ray came out, he was not in a good mood. Jess told him after they left the chambers, “Please tell your client not to hit me.” Ray said that he very strongly told her he did not believe her and that the judge’s assistant heard him say this to her. Jess waited to say this just outside of the chambers so others could not hear her. I believe Jess did not want anyone else to hear this because it was false. She was very calculating in her actions and false accusations, so this was going to be a very rough couple of months. Ray told me it was very clear that she was a habitual liar and that this case was going to be very difficult.
Part of me wished she would do something so extreme that it got her sent away, and then I could get a PPO on her. That would help me in the divorce when the court realized the extreme lengths she had gone to of falsely accusing me of horrible acts.
For the next few days after work, I completed paperwork required for the court. The court needed a verified personal financial statement showing bank accounts, real estate, vehicles, personal property, retirement plans, spouse’s assets, and other assets. This was not too involved, as I already had most of it done for my attorney in a very detailed spreadsheet. The forms provided by the court were really old PDFs. They were not editable digital PDFs with fields that could be filled in on a PC, which showed how far behind the tech curve they were. I scanned them and then used a PDF editor to overlay text on the forms.
It would be interesting to see what Jess submitted. I doubted she would list her properties or bank accounts in Thailand as assets. We also had to list liabilities and judgments. She probably wouldn’t mention the 2005 Thai bankruptcy judgment against her and the Thai court warrant ordering her to six months in jail. There was another separate judgment a judge had made against her due to lying on the witness stand in Thailand a few years ago.
The Thai court had ruled in 2011 that she had lied on the stand as a witness for her mother, who sued her niece over stealing a microwave. This alleged theft occurred almost six years before 2011, and her mom had wanted to sue before the statute of limitations ran out. Suda had been stewing over this all this time and could not let it go. It was incredibly foolish, prideful behavior that never amounted to any good but only caused more problems.
When Jess was going to testify for her mom in 2011, I tried to persuade her to talk to her mother and convince her not to sue family over a $100 microwave theft six years earlier, but they would not listen. Once they felt that their pride had been hurt, there was no stopping them—even over something so trivial. Both Jess and her mom would go into pure vengeance mode and would do or say anything to convince people they had been wronged. The niece countersued Jess for lying on the stand and won the judgment. When Jess traveled to Thailand a few years ago to help her mom with this case, I had known it would be a disaster, just like every other previous time when their pride had been ramped up. They never learned.
I had to redo some of the financials for the court over the next few days. I had made them too detailed, and items with a current value of under $500 could be taken off. Ray also stated that Jess and her attorney said her dresses were worth $190,000, and I had only $175,000 on my estimate. This was very good news—my personal property worth went way down, and hers went way up.
I spoke to Steve about the situation with the flight ticket with Jess and Leah. I asked Steve if he and Katrina had ever talked with Leah about what had really happened with Jess and me, but he said no. I told him what had happened with the flight ticket and how Leah had said she felt uncomfortable getting in the middle of this. I told him I cared about Leah and didn’t want to see her get hurt, especially when she was starting her life as a newlywed.
When I told Steve that Jess had claimed Leah had given her $1,200 for the flight but then Leah had balked when I asked for a receipt, he immediately said Leah probably hadn’t paid for it but that somehow Jess had convinced her to say this so she could get more money. I told Steve that was exactly what I thought also. He also was concerned that Jess was conning Leah, and he didn’t want to see her hurt. When Leah got back from her honeymoon, Steve and Katrina would get with her and share what Jess had done to them and what they had found out about all her lies at my expense.
I also asked Steve if Jess had been at the wedding, and he said no, they hadn’t seen her there. My thinking that Jess had not known where to go since she had lost the wedding invitation was probably correct. She had gotten all dressed up for nothing.
On June 19, I discovered that all the bank records, tax documents, vehicle records, my job records, my medical records, and other paperwork in the filing cabinet were gone. Jess took everything. That really pissed me off—I had tried to be civil and keep her able to access all shared financial documents, but she had stolen everything. I sent an e-mail to Ray asking how to get them back, and he said he had started a motion to remove her from the home. He would also request the immediate return of all documents on the same motion. This theft was sure to be another strike against her in the court’s opinion.
That day was Father’s Day. I didn�
�t go to church—I didn’t want to hear about fatherhood. Being denied a family was tough, and I didn’t want to hear this message. I did call my dad to wish him a happy Father’s Day. I thought about how I would ever have my own son or daughter give me a call on those or other days. My eyes teared up as I thought about this.
I bought a safe that day and decided to wait for the neighbor to get home to help me haul it upstairs. It was not a big one, just a cheap $300 Sentry Safe, but it weighed about two hundred pounds. I needed this to keep all legal and divorce paperwork safe from Jess’s prying eyes.
Jess came to the house and stayed the night for the first time I knew of in eight days. It had been ten days since I had seen her. She started complaining about not being able to sleep for a week, having headaches, having a fever, and coughing. I’d had enough of her hypochondria and thinking herself sick over all these past years, but now I had zero sympathy for her and didn’t want to hear it. I’d heard enough stories of her misery to last multiple lifetimes. She seemed to thrive on self-pity and craved the attention it brought her. I wouldn’t respond to her pity party or give her any sympathy. She even asked if my mom had had any remedies for coughing. I said I didn’t know, but Mom probably did.
Later Jess came up to me and said to tell my dad, “Happy Father’s Day.” She was genuinely glad I still had my father. She asked to give me a hug, but I told her I didn’t want a hug from her. I kept about five feet away from her. She also said she was sorry things had turned out the way they had and that she knew I’d had different expectations about our marriage and hadn’t wanted this to happen. She told me that I was a good person and that she didn’t believe what others said about me. I wondered what she meant about this and thought maybe a part of her felt guilty after hearing people repeat to her all the false stories she’d told about me. She was really nice to me and not falsely accusing me of things for a change.
Her statements about me were a complete 180 degree turn. She was the one who had been making things up to trash me in other people’s eyes, but now her guilt had to be getting to her. She still couldn’t admit to making up all these horrible lies about me. Her mental state simply prevented her from seeing any fault in her actions. In her mind, it had to be someone else’s fault that her new friends who didn’t know me thought badly of me. It had to be a hellish existence to make up and believe her own horrible false accusations and then deny them and even believe she had never said them. I couldn’t even imagine the mental conflicts going on in her mind. I was not going to have any hope for continued nice behavior—I knew she would flip at any time.
The next day Ray gave me a call about Jess’s recent request to pay for her new attorney. He couldn’t agree to this because I had already paid for the first one. I reminded him about the Kay Jewelers receipt and that Jess did have money but was hiding it. He exclaimed, “That’s right!” He was still in the process of submitting a motion to give me exclusive rights to the home, which would keep her out. I had to put together a list of the crap she had pulled plus the limited days she had spent at the house to show that she already had a place to stay.
Just as I had predicted, Jess flipped from her nice behavior and went into attack and victim mode. On June 22, she sent an e-mail titled “Thank you for our small talks yesterday, please withdraw cash for me.” I didn’t see it until after I talked with Ray that morning. She wrote:
I appreciate our small talks yesterday,
Please deposit cash, I still owe the money to a couple of my friends from the trip to my mom funeral for the cost of the airplane ticket and my personal expenses for the trip (this doesn’t include the funeral expenses). My mom gave us the money when she was still alive over $17,000.00+ and also bought your flight tickets to Thailand and back.
You transferred the money, and then you withdrew it on the same day, that I was leaving for my mom funeral, it caused additional stress and sorrow to the loss of my mom.
My mom was very sad and upset when you filed the divorce, especially you timed it so cruelly to ruin her joy and happiness for her special moments with her grand daughter, Phonphan’s wedding. it was a few days right before her grand daughter’s wedding. I had to come back home sooner that I couldn’t even attend the wedding. My family has been very kind to you and stood by you.
My mom health deteriorated fast after the news about the divorce. Chuck, when you lost your mom, I was there the whole time to comfort you, your dad, and the rest of the family as much as I was allowed to without being attack either by your families and your mom’s neighbor.
Let me get to the point of what seem to be our concern..., I would like you to make a withdraw of cash of for the followings without any further delay:
1.$ 1,671.00, flight ticket
2.$ 800.00..., the money that you promised me on the email
3.$ 2000.00 monthly expense that Ms. Linda Phillips inform your attorney for the month of May
4.$ 2000.00 (subtracts $500.00 of what you transferred to your TCF account yesterday for partial monthly expense for the month of June.
5.5. Divorce attorneys’ fees;
Linda ******: She asked for $3,500.00 +, (to complete your divorce matters).
Thomas *****: $ 3,000.00 +, (to continue with your divorce procedures).
6.Your attorney makes it impossible for us to have our lives.
7.Your outrage and anger are really my concerns.
8.I asked your attorney at the pretrial hearing to ask you to stop hitting me... and per his own exact words, he said, “He will”. I hope that you will stop your violent behaviors, if you feel that you are out of control, please leave the house.
9.Please bring the cash in.
10.At this point, I am still waiting for Mr. Springer to represent me..., but I already paid him $400.00. Again this is another borrowed money.
This was almost all bullshit, and the woman was clearly deluded. When it came to money, she wouldn’t even mention the $74,883 she had taken from my mom, which was gone forever. My mom also had spent months at the store sewing and helping her. I thought of coming up with an estimate of the hours she had worked there, setting an hourly wage, and then giving Jess a bill just to be an ass, but I wouldn’t.
There was also the almost $200,000 in loan costs from my home that I had paid to fund her store. The vast financial devastation she had brought on my parents and me didn’t even matter to her. The $17,000 Jess was quoting came from the sale of one of the properties she owned. It had sold for 2 million baht, about $61,000 in US dollars. I didn’t know where the majority of this money had gone.
If she pressed me to pay back “borrowed” money, I would simply ask for receipts from people she had borrowed money from, but I would tell her that these people would be brought to court hearings to testify under oath about money they’d lent her. Ultimately Jess was responsible for paying back money she’d borrowed after I filed for divorce, so this was not an issue for me to be concerned about.
Numbers six and eight on the list were sure to irritate Ray. He had been ticked off at the hearing and had told her he didn’t believe her when she told him as they exited the judge’s chambers, “Please tell your client not to hit me.” Now she was resorting to another lie, claiming Ray had said, “He will.”
How could she really think I was hitting her? Who knew? She had descended into such low depths of self-esteem and being a complete victim; it was possible she had convinced herself she was getting hit. The year before, during the hell of fighting the DV charge, she would tell me I was a wonderful, gentle man some days, but on other days, she claimed she was being abused. It was entirely dependent on her state of mind, not on reality. During the few times I had confronted her about her claims of being hit, she would not even discuss it and had run away.
Her claims of being hit might also be a ploy to get me to respond in order to deflect attention away from her. It was one of her habitual strategies to throw out something ridiculous and false to try and get me to respond in order to take the attenti
on off her own lies and issues. In either case, I was not going to respond to this e-mail. If she asked about it, I would say I had to consult with my attorney about the proper thing to do.
When I got back home from work, she was not there as usual, so it was nice and peaceful. Diva greeted me as usual, extremely happy to see me. I got down on the floor with her, and she began jumping, body slamming, and kissing me with happiness. I remembered how Jess used to run to give me a hug and passionate kiss when I came home from work. What a change this had been.
I was going to take an extra three days’ vacation before the next week’s Fourth of July mandatory shutdown at work. I hoped she would not be in the house. I needed to de-stress and relax for a bit.
On June 30, Jess showed up at the house and stayed the night. She was very hostile and demanded I look through boxes to find her things I had packed when she was in Thailand over Christmas the year before. I had only repacked all the stuff she had left strewn all over the house. I didn’t reply. She continued making all sorts of false claims about my boxing away other clothing items she could not find. I hadn’t done what she was accusing me of. It was another one of her blame games.
Fifteen
She’s Removed from the House!
Jess stayed the night in the house on July 1 and left the next morning. I really hoped she wouldn’t be here during the Ford shutdown, but that didn’t happen. In the evening, she was lying in bed, and I was getting a shirt out of the bedroom for work the next morning. She complained about stuff, and I ignored her. When I looked at her, she was wearing a very revealing nightgown, and her left breast was exposed. The sight of her and her boobs disgusted me.
Tales of the Crazy Page 24
