Editor’s note: A Lovefraud reader whom we’ll call “Edna” sent along the following letter. She received it from her then husband’s mistress last summer. Edna reached out to the young woman once she located her number on his phone records. They shared their stories to help piece together the mystery of the man they were both dangerously entangled with. Names and some details have been changed for their protection. Part 2 will post tomorrow.
Letter from the mistress
I met Brandon during the summer, immediately following my college graduation. Brandon approached me at a nightclub at a beach resort area near where I live over Memorial Day weekend. I was at a low point in my life; I was desperately trying to get over a bad break-up. My self-esteem was low and I was sick of getting my heart broken over and over again by young, good-looking, cheating jerks. Brandon came into my life out of nowhere with the promise of being a good guy who would never treat me like my ex.
He was around 15 years older than me, he had a nice face, he was a bit chubby and he was losing his hair. I was attracted to him because he was the opposite of my ex-boyfriend. He presented himself as a nice, normal guy who was down on his luck and I actually thought he was genuine. I thought that his extra weight and not so perfect looks would mean he would treat me better than the younger good looking guys I usually went for. He told me that he was a single dad, he went to an Ivy League school, both of his parents were professionals and he was in the financial industry. I thought I was safe with someone like him but this relationship was the most dangerous situation I could have gotten myself into.
Thinking about this relationship, I just feel disgusted and sick to my stomach. I even lost a bunch of my friends because of Brandon, they hated him, refused to be around him and they barely knew him. They saw what I couldn’t (or maybe they saw what I didn’t want to) see. Looking back at it, there were just so many red flags.
I apologize
Before I share my story I want to apologize to you (the wife) and I want to let you know that I would never knowingly date someone else’s man. I’m not a home wrecker and I am a girl’s girl who would never lure another man away from a woman. Some people are like that and are trashy, I am far from that. I am educated and come from a good family.
Brandon told me that he had been separated from his wife for over a year, he was in the final month of a long, drawn out divorce and that there was no love there anymore. He said he was just waiting for the final divorce decree to go through but there were financial complications holding things up. He was affectionate with me especially out in public, he didn’t hide me away, and I never caught him on the phone with you (the wife) so I believed him.
There was something about his charm, his over-the-top affection (at first) and the way he toted around his tiny little dog everywhere that sucked me in when I should have run. He had a nice apartment, he presented himself as a doting father of a toddler and he had a very expensive car so I assumed he was stable and successful. All of this was a façade. It scares me how quickly I got wrapped up in this. We were literally inseparable from the day we met. He came on so strong and so fast right from the beginning. Had the relationship progressed at a normal speed I would have seen all the cracks in him so I guess that’s why he kept things moving at such a speed. We were basically living together from the night we met.
Cocaine and marijuana
I don’t do drugs but early on I knew he was doing drugs, mostly cocaine and marijuana. It’s hard to hide when you are spending that much time together and he really didn’t try to hide his drug use that much in the beginning. But I really had no clue the full extent of what was going on. As I grew more and more attached to him I would ask more about the drugs. He would just tell me that I’m crazy to think he was doing a lot of drugs. He kept telling me it was just a really bad couple of months for him and he’s not usually like this. He said a little bit of “pot” helped to take the edge off his stress.
He constantly wanted me to feel pity for the fact that he was at the end of a divorce and that his wife kept him from seeing his son as much as he would like. He would always say he wanted to see his little boy more but for the few months that we were together he never made any effort to stop the partying or the drugs. His words and his actions were usually miles and miles apart. He was also oddly obsessed with his son’s photographs and he would show them to everyone and anyone. It was so excessive that it was weird. He was desperate to create the identity of a doting father who longed for the chance to be “father of the year” to his son.
I don’t know if he was ever sober for even a few days while we were together. When I first met him he was in full-blown party mode. Aside from all the drugs, he drank a lot. He drank more than anyone I ever known. He was always home and he barely ever worked on his computer. I couldn’t figure out what he did. He liked to act like a big shot investment banker guy but I don’t think he was much of anything. I would overhear him over the phone trying to get people to invest with him and he would always say he took time off but he was going to make a big come-back.
When I first figured out the drugs were more than just about getting him over a bad time in his life, I wanted to confront him. But at the same time I didn’t want to be difficult and tell him what he had to do about his drug issue, because who am I? I think he chose me because he could tell that I am not the type to ask a guy too many questions about his past or tell a guy what to do.
Found the stash
But when things got serious really fast I told him how I felt about all the drugs and he said he’d change things but that’s when he started to really hide them. He would lie and tell me he was not using any more but I went through his apartment several times and it never failed I always found his stash of drugs. As much as I liked his attention and was falling for him, I never truly opened up to him fully because I was so unsure about everything. I kept catching him in lies and his whole story didn’t really add up. Trying to solve the mystery of Brandon kept me hooked on him for months.
I would drink socially and I felt like he would do everything he could to get me drunk so I didn’t realize what he was doing. I am very thin so my alcohol tolerance is low. He would always insist on making or ordering my drinks himself and they were always so strong.
Random friends
Many times I just felt unsafe and uncomfortable around him and his random friends. He didn’t have any real friends or anyone in his life that he had known for longer than a handful of months. I met so many random people through him that I couldn’t keep up.
There were so many people coming in and out of his apartment at all hours of the day and night too. There were lots of older men and some of them made me so uncomfortable because they were so shady. And there were a rotation of really trashy girls too. They were so disgusting and some of them had children. The trashy girls would definitely do drugs with him; they would come over and go straight to the bathroom.
He did have a very nice gay friend who lived a few floors below him in his apartment complex but he would come over in the middle of the night wearing just a tiny silky robe and I thought it was weird. And to make matters more confusing, Brandon acted feminine sometimes so it was all a little confusing. Looking back at it now, I think he might have been gay/bi-sexual and he definitely got a kick out of watching me sink deeper and deeper into my confusion with all the craziness of his lifestyle.
The drug dealer
And then there was the drug dealer. His drug dealer didn’t look like the drug dealers you see on TV. She was young, short, of Asian descent and kind of chubby. I don’t know exactly how often the drug dealer came to see him but it was a lot. It was hard to tell because Brandon was always running in and out of his apartment, saying he was going to the car, or running out to meet a friend to discuss business.
I didn’t want to be a crazy girl and say I’m coming with you each and every time. It was only towards the end of the relationship that I actually was like I’m coming with you to “meet your friend,” who I knew was a dealer. Or I’d go with him to the car knowing he would manage a way to get the drugs that he stashed in the hidden compartment underneath the driver’s seat. He would literally guzzle half a bottle of sleeping aide on a daily basis to fall asleep at night.
Broken man
I wanted to figure out what he was up to, part of me wanted to solve the mystery so maybe I could help him. I’ve always been the fixing type in a relationship and Brandon was the most broken man I had ever come across. But in the end I realized that he didn’t want any help. He absolutely loves his lifestyle.
He has so many vices and he lies about everything (even when it would be easier to tell the truth) that it’s hard to know what is going on with him. He was addicted to everything from chewing tobacco, drugs, alcohol, violent video games, sex, porn, gambling, food, etc. It was so bad that there were times I would literally stand outside the bathroom and listen at the door to hear if he was really taking a dump to make sure he wasn’t doing drugs in there. I watched him like a hawk to try to keep him on the straight but there was always a way for all of his vices to be done. He even put weird screen protectors on his computer and cell phone so you couldn’t see what he was looking at when you were looking over his shoulder. He enjoyed keeping me all twisted up and obsessing over what he was or wasn’t doing.
Barely worked
As I mentioned, he barely worked and I don’t really know what he did. He would talk about some stock investments from time to time and scream violently at random people over the phone for money. Sometimes it was for as little as $500 but he was screaming as if it were a million dollars. And he would try to surround himself with people who he thought had money because he said he wanted them to be potential investors or business partners.
His apartment complex was run similar to a hotel. It had a full concierge service as well as a luxury, very expensive restaurant and nightclub in the lobby. Many times he would have large group of random people at the dinners and he would sign for the expensive tabs (the restaurant was also run like a hotel where you could just sign for things). I don’t know how he paid those large bar/restaurant tabs or how he paid for his expensive car or how he paid the rent for his expensive apartment.
He rarely seemed to have any money for anything outside of his apartment building though. He ate breakfast, lunch and dinner in the super expensive restaurant that was located in his building, but when we were outside the building he could barely afford a cheap meal for us. And once he even left me to pick up the tab when we were on a double date at an inexpensive restaurant, so embarrassing. And another time he left me to pay for his maid service. He would also ask to borrow cash from time to time. How could he afford several hundred dollars on a single meal in his building but he couldn’t afford a normal restaurant outside the building? I have no clue how he is getting money. It was all so weird.
In the beginning he seemed really nice, complementary and he showed me lots of affection and attention but soon after he was just wrapped up in his own world of just caring about himself. The more I cared about him, the more he retracted his affection and the more he ignored me. He treated me so badly towards the end; it was pathetic that I stayed as long as I did. He had no respect for me and he could care less about my feelings.
At the pool
Near the end of the relationship he took me out to the beach to visit with one of his friends, some random much older man in his 50s or 60s. The three of us were just lounging around this guy’s backyard in the early evening and then out of nowhere the doorbell rang. Three very young, very average looking girls walked in.
I thought nothing of it at first because I assumed the girls were his friend’s daughters. The girls walked out to the pool, immediately took all their clothes off and went straight into the pool. They did it with such ease as if they had done that many times before that I realized that they had to be prostitutes. Even worse, I realized that Brandon must have hired them because his friend kept laughing at him. It definitely didn’t seem like it was the girls first time meeting Brandon and his friend.
I was in such shock and I was so hurt that I frantically called one of my friends and asked them to pick me up right away. Brandon seemed to have a smug look on his face as I was hysterical. He never tried to console me or keep me from leaving. He just sat back on a lounge chair enjoying the view of my craziness as well as the view of the naked girls who were fondling each other.
Hours later following my departure, he called me and he denied that they were prostitutes. He claimed that he had nothing to do with them coming over. His said his friend invited them over, as always it was never him. Nothing was ever his fault according to Brandon. He also said he kicked them out right after I left and he tried to get in touch with me sooner but he was having phone service issues.
But I knew different, I knew he hired them, I knew he slept with them and I knew he didn’t care about me. Or maybe he got off on set up this situation to see if I would fight the girls over him. He was always doing stuff like this and he would always call hours later after he did whatever it is he wanted to do and he would try to make me out to be some insecure girl who misunderstood the situation. There is something about his charm, his eyes (weird stare), the mystery of the situation that would eventually lure me back into his crazy world. He had me in some weird trance or something.
Mind games
He would play all these mind games with me where he would pretend to forget to take his wedding ring off when he came back from visiting his child even though he was only gone for an hour or two (he did this several times). I would ask him about it and he would lie saying it wasn’t his wedding ring. He would say “it’s just a ring and it only fits on this ring finger, does it bother you here”? I was like, “no it makes me happy,” is he dumb? I clearly was the dumb one. I know when my gut is telling me something is wrong but I ignored my gut. Obviously I talked myself into believing every word he said when I shouldn’t have.
But as the months went on, I was more and more unhappy and he knew it and he didn’t do anything about it. I would tell him that he is a 36-year-old father and this isn’t the life a 36-year-old father should want for himself. I felt like he was literally addicted to his lifestyle of drugs, sex with hookers, random people all around and a girlfriend who was emotionally deteriorating before his eyes.
I knew the relationship with him wouldn’t last. That is why I never let him meet my parents even though he kept pressuring me to meet my family. Looking back at it, knowing what I know now, I think it is crazy that he wanted to meet my parents while he was still fully married. He asked for my address when we were fighting one time but I never gave it to him. I am so glad I never told him where my family lives. He would ask about my parents all the time. He knew I came from a wealthy family and I am sure that he thought he could get some money out of them when the time was right.
As the lies and drugs progressed, I gradually pulled myself out of it. Each time I left because of a fight, I made sure I took all my belongings before leaving just in case I never did come back. Just like you (the wife), I needed concrete proof of what I was unsure about before I could leave for good.
Wow. Heading to part two right now. I had very similar things happen to me. Those sick games with other women. Mine’s pot dealer was short and chubby, too. She was willing to have a certain type of sex I wasn’t willing to have. I found out years later. He called her the human fist. Pathetic sub-human creatures. I sounds like you are about to escape and I am riveted towards reading Part II.