Editor’s note: Lovefraud received the following story from a reader whom we’ll call “Miriam.”
I met a con man in 2002 on Match.com while I was living and teaching school in Germany. We were married one year later in Germany and moved three times during the marriage.
He lied to me every day for seven years.
Because of the fraud, I lost my retirement house, much of the furniture and furnishings I had collected over 20 years, my car, my life savings, and seven years of my teaching salary.
My husband only worked part time for nine months, but was managing all of our money. He made promises to me that were all broken. He had opportunities to work but always told employers “we don’t need the money”.
Our combined income every year was over $150,000. Yet, after seven years, he filed for divorce and left me with $900 in my checking account.
I had trusted him to manage our finances because I believed he was an honest trustworthy man. When I finally had a chance to go through the bank statements, four months after he left me, I spent weeks going through all the accounts to find out what happened to all of the money!
I had been paying 100% of our living expenses, but I knew there was about$3500 of my salary leftover each month. which I believed was going into my savings accounts and our joint savings.
What I discovered in Sept. of 2010 was that my ex husband had spent or removed a total of over one million dollars from all of our accounts over a seven year period.
The day I added it all up and saw the total, I literally went into the bathroom and threw up. I was physically sick to see how someone I loved had lied to me and stolen from me everything I worked so hard for over fifty years. I have spent over $80,000 during the past five+ years trying to recover some of my money, but I have finally been forced to give up.
This con man is a retired pilot. He has no remorse about destroying my life and embezzling over $400,000 of my salary and savings, or conning me into selling my retirement house, or stealing from me, or leeching off of me for seven years.
The lawyers told me it was my fault that I lost every thing because I put my money in a joint account with my husband! They said he legally had every right to steal all of my salary because it was in a joint account.
This man went to church every Sunday, had gone to a Christian college, studied to be a minister, and called me his soul mate.
I cooked his dinner every night, did the laundry, and treated him like a king because I thought he was the honest, trustworthy man he represented himself to be.
YES, there were signs that he was a sociopath, but like you, I didn’t know what they meant! I want to warn others!
I have cried every day for over 5 years. I am now 66 and cannot retire because of all of these losses.
The Supreme Court, as well as the Superior Court, ruled that it was extreme cruelty, and that I had PROVEN that he had made my life unendurable. But I will receive NOTHING because what he did was LEGAL. I cannot even recover my attorney fees.
My objective in writing to you is to help other people avoid sociopaths and be able to protect themselves in a love fraud marriage. It is too late for me, but I wish I had known twelve years ago what I know now. Help me warn others.
Checklist: Is your partner a sociopath?
Miriam,
The betrayals that come from being involved with a sociopath are hard to stomach, devastating to us. I am very sorry for your losses, knowing how shocking and hurtful they are. Somehow, some way, we go on, not allowing these unscrupulous toads to completely win. May you have peace today, tomorrow, and so on… You deserve it.
– bluejay
I still wake up every day and thank God that I am not married to a liar and thief anymore! But still the tears come…….an entire lifetime of work, and a con man can steal it all in seven short years.
Miriam, i can truly say i understand how you feel. My ex wife was my treasurer in my corporation and she embezzled $100,000. i have been unable to get police to charge her. My QUESTION is did you have a S corp or LLC that your husband stole the money from?
Thank You for your help
Curt
Curt,
There was no LLC or S Corp involved. He took all of my salary and savings and put it into his own individual accounts, or spent it on himself, and then filed for divorce. Very clever. Much of the money was hidden. My mistake was putting everything I had into joint accounts. I kept nothing separate. Big mistake. Bottoms line is I trusted him 100% because I believed all of his lies. I hate myself for trusting him.
This just makes my heart sink. I am so sorry. Thank you for sharing. It helps me keep things in perspective. I’m young. I have time to recoup my financial losses. I had enough warning to be able to hang on to a vehicle despite her trying to trick me out of it. And my tiny retirement account has a portion which has been untouchable by either of us unless I were to quit my job. It isn’t much, but it would get me through a couple months if I ever DID lose my job. If you can find a way to keep moving foward, with all you lost, I have no excuse. I am praying that you are able to see blessings even in the midst of all you have lost, and that those blessings would continue and multiply in your life.
I love my job, which gives me the courage to keep putting one foot in front of the other. I also want to write a book about how this happened to me, to help others.. Title? How about Seductive Deception?
Miriam,
My heart goes out to you. Amazing that our legal system is so convoluted that it allows this kind of betrayal and thievery to go unpunished. The level of destruction in your experience is sobering.
Again, my kindest thoughts are with you…
Slim
Not only did I get victimized by a con artist, I was also victim ex by the judge and the attorneys! They led me to believe I could recover some of what he stole. The legal system is on the side of the criminals, not the victim. This con man did the same thing as Bernie Madoff, but he he did it to his WIFE so it’s legal!!!
Miriam,
Which says a whole lot about how we ‘still’ treat women in this country, and in the world. If we marry a man we are legally considered just this side of chattel. Very sad. Reality is harsh. I did not lose nearly the kind of cash you did. But I did consider contacting an attorney. Luckily, my friend’s father was a retired Judge. He told my friend that I should simply chalk up my loss to learning, as he knew I could not recoup my money.
Again, I am so sorry for pain and suffering. And yes, THANK GOD you are not married to IT any longer!!!!!
Right. I believe in Karma, but so far his fraud has been rewarded. I have suffered enormous pain, almost unbearable. Yet he enjoys all the money he stole without consequence. People who know him have no idea what he did to me because he doesn’t live near me. He purposely picked a gullible naive woman who lived overseas. It was very clever, and well planned. Con men are very good at what they do.
This has nothing to do with women being at any special disadvantage, not compared with men. It’s a huge mistake to believe the outdated propaganda spewed out by man-hating feminazis. Women are not “treated as chattel” any more, and haven’t been for a very long time. I’m sure Miriam’s con-man ex “played the system” in some way in the course of exploiting her, but if so he did nothing that couldn’t equally have been done by a woman, and frequently has been! Female con artists can and do use marriage as a tool to screw men over all the time.
The simple fact is that men are getting shafted all the time in many divorce cases, just as women are in other cases. And I’d venture to say that in some cases both partners are getting shafted!—when the lawyers and the system in general encourage them to fight one other and end up walking off with most of the couple’s assets. The whole thing is a racket. The feminazi gang that’s always whining as if women were the sole “victims” actually makes this problem worse by playing right into the hands of the divorce industry! By turning the whole issue into a sex war of “women against men” it only encourages each sex to fight for “special consideration” for itself (at the expense of the other sex, naturally!) instead of men and women—the public in general—joining together to demand reform in the system as a whole.
Without knowing exactly how Miriam’s ex got away with what he did, I’m at least tempted to guess that from the viewpoint of the justice system he got away with it “by default.” That’s to say, while it was grossly unjust, there wasn’t much the system could legally do to redress this wrong. Often too judges make mistakes or get fooled themselves. Nobody can be “right” all the time. At worst the lawyers and others involved took a load more of Miriam’s money for doing essentially nothing in the end. As bad as that is, in my mind it’s still not as bad as when the system itself knowingly inflicts what any reasonable person would consider a gross injustice on a person.
Off the top of my head, one of the most outrageous examples admittedly happened over in England—though that only shows how problems with the divorce system are not limited to the United States, but are endemic throughout much of the Western world. A guy named Kevin Mansfield was hit by a car back in 1992 when he was about 22 years old. He lost a leg and suffered serious spinal injuries that half paralyzed his remaining leg, and was subsequently awarded half a million pounds in damages—roughly $800,000. Of course he needed the money to help him live a more normal life and generate an income, with medical equipment, a bungalow specially adapted to his needs, no doubt having to drive specially adapted vehicles, and as compensation for what he personally had been deprived of by the accident.
It took six years for the damages to be awarded, and five years after that (by which time he was about 33) Kevin met a woman and made what turned out to be the great mistake of marrying her. I was struck by the fact that he seemed to have married her not long after meeting her; within the same year anyway. I can see how any disabled person would regard him or herself as “handicapped” in the marriage market as well, and therefore vulnerable to exploitation. And I’ll bet that 29-year-old golddigger had her eyes firmly fixed on Kevin’s half million pounds.
Anyway she obviously wanted kids—presumably he did too—but they apparently had trouble getting pregnant, so it took several years. Eventually they resorted to IVF and Kevin’s wife had twins, a boy and a girl. Not long after that—about a year, so it seems—she divorced him.
What I read into that timing is that after staying in the marriage just long enough to get what she wanted out of it, she dumped him. And what she wanted was children, children she could also use as a lever to pry more of his money out of him. Not that she was doing badly herself. She took £50,000 in assets out of the marriage (about $80,000), and was buying herself a house worth £226,000 (about $360,000). Kevin had been looking after his children nearly half the time, six days out of every two weeks, so it’s not as if she had the full burden of them either.
In spite of all that, she decided she should be entitled to over half of HIS damages that HE had been awarded, long before they were ever married, specifically to compensate for HIS disabilities. What is truly outrageous is that judges AGREED with her! That story is here, among other places, in the Daily Mail:
Disabled crash victim fights to save his home
This story mentioned that he was “permitted” to appeal—but in fact the appeal judge ruled against him as well! Lawyers used bullcrap arguments to label Kevin’s damage award a so-called “asset of the marriage” when in reality it was no such thing, and aided and abetted his greedy shrew of an ex-wife in robbing him of over half his award!—£285,000 out of his £500,000—on the absurd basis that her so-called “needs,” because she has “primary” custody of his children, were somehow “greater than his”!
Well, if he’d been an ordinary stiff with no capital assets to speak of and a modest income from a job, she’d have to make do, wouldn’t she? But just because he does have assets that he needs to live anything like a normal life, the divorce industry conspired with her to rip him off. As the article tells us, he doesn’t have £285,000 to give her. So while she’s sitting in her $360,000 house, Kevin may be forced to sell the specially adapted home he lives in and move somewhere a lot cheaper a long way away. That will handicap him further and also make it hard for him to spend time with his own children. I have no idea how he managed to cope with all this.
I’d be willing to bet that if this decision had been put to a JURY of ordinary people, they would have ruled very differently. Certainly I would have sent this rapacious woman off with a flea in her ear. And if legal precedent had clearly told her NO in the first place, none of the couple’s money would have been wasted on legal fees. But this was all done by judges and lawyers, who of course profited handsomely from it as well, to the tune of £80,000 (nearly $130,000) and no doubt more in view of the appeal. It was nothing but legalized theft perpetrated openly by the divorce industry on a disabled victim. But comparable things happen here in the U.S. every day.
I will NEVER believe that IF I, as a woman, had contributed NOTHING to living expenses, not worked, but stolen a million dollars of community money I would have ever gotten away with it. Men are given a pass when they steal from a woman. I don’t believe the opposite is true. At least not in the system where I live. I was basically KILLED (figuratively, emotionally, spiritually) by this sociopath, and he is only rewarded for lying, cheating and stealing. In my view he is not even a human being. Human beings don’t treat other people like that.
I would say the legal system is on the side of the LAWYERS! Naturally they’re on the side of the criminal much of the time because lawyers play both sides! As long as lawyers and courts can go on playing the game that Eric Berne half a century ago famously called “Let’s You and Him Fight,” they continue to rake in money at the public’s expense. And nowhere is this more true that in the divorce racket, where soon-to-be-ex partners who need to reach a fair compromise are egged on to fight one another instead, all to the great gain of lawyers and their hangers-on in the “justice” system. There was a Lovefraud article about this a while back:
‘Divorce Corp’ documentary exposes corrupt and collusive divorce industry
Naturally I’m very sorry this happened to you, Miriam, especially so late in life when it’s so much harder to recover from. Still, I’m wondering HOW it happened that your ex-conman could get away with your assets—if that’s what he did. Was this under German law, or U.S. law? The reason I’m wondering is that my understanding of state laws in the U.S. (whether I’m right or wrong!) is that they work roughly like this, particularly in so-called “community property” states. Assets you bring into a marriage, such as a house, a retirement fund and so on, are yours (so-called “separate property”), and remain yours in the event of a divorce. If a house is sold, you should be entitled to take out equivalent value in the divorce settlement. The same is usually true of property you inherit or receive as a gift, even during the marriage itself. That belongs to you personally as well. Apart from that, all other assets gained by either spouse during the marriage—salaries earned, profits from a business, capital gains and appreciation of property, lottery and other gambling winnings and so forth—are treated as “assets of the marriage” and are generally supposed to be divided equally if the partners divorce, even if it was just one spouse who earned all or most of that income.
Of course I’m well aware that state laws vary, not to mention that a lot of haggling goes on during a divorce and lawyers find all kinds of reasons to “adjust” a divorce settlement one way or another. Also, a crucial point: what happens when a couple incur a net financial loss, instead of a gain, over the course of their marriage? That can easily happen and often does if their income failed to keep pace with their expenditures, or if they took a bath over the recent plunge in real estate values, or whatever. I suppose a loss can end up being “divided equally” as well—and that’s at best! The brutal fact is that if a couple end up with no assets to speak of, then there’s nothing there to be “divided.” So even if one spouse did bring property into the marriage, there’s no way that spouse can hope to take it out again when there’s nothing left to take it out of.
The upshot of all that, the way I see it (though I’m not a lawyer) is that even if your ex-bunco artist did take money out of your joint account and salt it away somewhere in his own name, that money was still an asset of the marriage, not his alone. So you should have been able to recover the value of assets you brought into the marriage yourself, plus your share of whatever else was gained during the marriage, as long as there were funds enough to cover it.
If you weren’t able to, that suggests to me one of two things. Either this man squandered all that money, so there was nothing left to be distributed. If that’s what he did, as sad as it is, I can understand why you were unable to get any compensation for your loss. But your story seems to suggest he walked off with all the money and is somehow continuing to enjoy these ill-gotten gains at your expense. If so, the other alternative is that he’s somehow managed to hide these assets and convince the court he has nothing, which is strictly illegal. He’d be guilty of perjury, among other things. That’s unless he’s done a bunk to some foreign country where you can’t force him to cough up the cash. If none of those explanations is true, there must be something badly wrong with a “justice” system that can’t get you at least some of your money back.
Redwald – it might be possible to find the hidden assets – if you have the money and emotional endurance to fight. A typical sociopath strategy is to bleed all the money so that the target partner cannot afford to fight. Plus, the sociopath devalues and degrades the partner so that she (usually a “she”) is an emotional wreck, has no confidence, and just wants it to end. Not to mention the facts that the sociopaths lie in court, fabricate documents, and hire sociopathic attorneys to play legal games.
The legal system is bad to begin with, and sociopaths twist it to be even worse.
The big question, Donna, is what’s the solution to a difficulty like that? Is it that the legal system itself doesn’t try hard enough to track down hidden assets, so litigants are forced to take on this burden themselves?
Donna,
You’re right. This con man used the legal system to destroy me. Charming, pathological liar, and master manipulator. After only seven years of “marriage” I had $350,000 LESS than I had when I married this con man. He knew how to manipulate me into trusting him to manage ALL of my money. Put the money into all joint, then after gaining my trust, he secretly removed money while I was working. Exactly what you said. He worked at bleeding me of every penny for the last three years before he filed for divorce. It was very very clever and well planned. He made sure I paid ALL of our community expenses. Plus he took my checkbook and wrote thousands of dollars worth of checks to himself during the last two years when my paycheck went into a different account than his money. I hate myself for not figuring it out earlier. He did squander about $700,000. True. (I had no IDEA until after he was gone) but he put over $300,000 into his own accounts, or joint accounts which he cleaned out at the end. He did this to make sure I had no money to fight. I spent five years spending everything I earned paying for legal fees. All for NOTHING! This is where I hate the legal system. My lawyer was terrible, and so was the judge. They knew he was a con man, but seemed unable to help me in any way. The legal system is for and a out lawyers and nothing else. Victims are victimized all over again.
You would not believe the difficulty we had trying to find the money. He refused to cooperate in discovery. I spent more money going back to get another court order for documents and we still didn’t get them. He hid tons of money. We know that. But after the judge let him get by with it, and my lawyer did too, we had to go to trial without the info we needed. Still the superior court (U.S) originally found in my favor and I got a judgement for half of what I lost. Then he appealed. The Supreme Court case cost me another $50,000 and that’s when I lost. I couldn’t not believe it. They agreed it was extreme cruelty but because of many other issues ( complicated) they decided that the superior court judge had made a mistake in the WAY he tried to help me. Bottom line, I got nothing, after losing $850,000 in money and separate property assets. The judge did not order him to reimburse me one penny for paying every penny of our living expenses for seven years. Or for paying for his townhouse expenses, tax bill to the IRS, checks from my pay that were sent to his mother, etc. I sacrificed for years to be able to retire, and all for nothing. Our joint income caused me to loose $100,000 in US federal taxes. Could not contribute to my Roth IRA because his income was too much! Sociopaths believe the rules and laws do not apply to them!! That’s what I learned.
The lawyers told me that once money is taken out out the joint accounts and put into a single account (even if it was earned by the other person!) it belongs to that person! Unbelievable. A million dollars removed by mr. Con man now is ALL HIS! How would you feel? I asked for the money I had before marriage…..couldn’t get it.
What he did is legal, but it’s unethical, dishonest, and he exploited you. You trusted him because you had no reason not to do so. A prenuptial agreement would have been helpful, but there was no way for you to know.
My first marriage was to a great guy (I was widowed), and my second marriage to a spath. I was the same person in both marriages; in one my trust was well placed, in the second it was a ‘mistake’ to trust and believe my ex spath. I know there was nothing I did ‘better’ or differently, nor anything I did ‘wrong’ or stupidly in marriage one vs. marriage two. The problem was completely out of my control: that the spath choose to be a lying, sadistic, crossdressing pedophile.
What happened to you is horrible, and you could not have been expected to foresee it. They are very good at conning people.
Redwald – the problem with the legal system and divorce probably boils down to two things – ignorance and corruption.
Just as those of us who were targeted by sociopaths because we didn’t know they exist, lawyers and judges (the ones who are ethical) often don’t know they exist.
Then there are the lawyers and judges who are corrupt. Even if they aren’t blatantly corrupt, and as the Divorce Corp. movie pointed out, they are more concerned about keeping the litigation going so they can make money than they are about justice of the wellbeing of their clients.
So how do you fight ignorance and corruption? Education can fight ignorance. But corruption? Ethical people have been trying to do that for thousands of years, and it’s still here.
Miriam,
I have no retirement money but I can imagine if I did – and I had worked for it for many years only to get to retirement age to find out it had been stolen by the person I loved and trusted most, I would be beyond devastated. I hope you write the book, that it is wildly successful, and that proceeds from the sale of your book and your public lectures will replace some of the money you had stolen. You deserve to live your retirement years in peace and comfort. I hope your tears end some day and that you can find meaning in this horrible experience. Your article has convinced me never to have a joint account with anyone. I’m even hesitant to ever live with a man, as Colorado is a common law state.
Stargazer, I think you’re wise to avoid joint accounts anyway.
Years ago when my wife and I lived in Massachusetts, one of our colleagues at work was a young woman named Sharon who was living with her boyfriend. This guy was a diver by profession, and I gather he made quite a lot of money at it. The two of them had a joint account, but unlike Sharon who kept proper records in their check register, when this guy wrote a check he often wouldn’t even record how much it was for! Sharon told us he’d simply write down “BIG CHECK” or “LITTLE CHECK” and that was it! (Like Dave Barry, I swear I’m not making this up!) It drove her bonkers, because she never knew how much was left in their account.
My wife and I never opened a joint account, and that suited us fine. Mind you, having separate accounts was effortless for us because we’d always earned comparable amounts of money, and went halves on everything, pretty much. So we never needed to transfer money from one of us to the other. Apart from that, we’d always had somewhat different styles too. My wife always liked to keep meticulous records in her check register, maintaining a running balance, adding in deposits and so forth, so that she always knew precisely how much was in her account. I on the other hand, while I’m nowhere near as bad as that boyfriend of Sharon’s, could never be bothered keeping a running balance. I’d write all the checks down with the amounts, but I knew in my head roughly how much was in my account—not to the penny or the nearest dollar but well enough so I never got overdrawn.
That meant we never “trod on one another’s toes” over a thing like record-keeping. It’s one of many things we never had to argue or get irritated about! 🙂 —unlike some couples. We all think it’s natural to have our own toothbrushes and not have to share! Why not our own bank accounts too? It doesn’t cost any extra.
Now I come to think of it, I guess we’d always had our own tubes of toothpaste as well! That certainly eliminates those stupid arguments about “who keeps squeezing the toothpaste from the MIDDLE of the tube!” Some couples will get into a fight about anything under the sun! We were never like that, largely because we always had the good luck to agree on a great many things, but also, I suspect, because we gave each other “space” on things like finances (and toothpaste) that don’t have to be commingled.
I’m lucky to be able to report that there was never any issue of trust between my wife and myself. I’d never have dreamed of doing anything to defraud her, and I know from her behavior that she would never have done anything of the kind to me. Yet even if we’re never faced with serious problems like deliberate fraud from a partner who was supposed to “love” us, there can be other sources of friction that erode a marriage.
It may be irritating, but to anyone with a sense of perspective it’s still a trivial complaint that “You keep squeezing our toothpaste from the middle of the tube!” However, it’s not so trivial when the complaint is that “Your irresponsible handling of our joint bank (or credit card) account is ruining my credit!” There can be justice in that complaint. While my wife never did anything of the kind, quite a few couples have that problem, without either of them being a “sociopath.” If they’d only kept their finances separate, while it wouldn’t make all their problems go away, at least it would leave each partner to be responsible for themselves alone and eliminate this source of mutual blame and recrimination that can ruin a marriage.
Even when a couple are in perfect harmony and have no cause to disagree over the handling of a joint bank account, there are still other considerations. I’ve always wondered: what do couples do when one spouse wants to buy gifts for the other—Christmas, birthdays, Valentine’s, all those wonderful “special occasions”—and they write a check on their joint account (or charge it to a shared credit card account) that the other spouse gets to see? How can they keep something a surprise? Or simply hide the cost from the other partner, which is just something we like to do with gifts. It’s not a matter of “concealing” what we spent; it’s just that it’s “not done” to wave it in our beloved’s face that “those diamond earrings cost me four hundred and fifty-three dollars and thirteen cents,” or whatever. Years ago if we bought someone a book for a gift, the retail price used to be in an inside corner of the dust jacket where it could be clipped off to “hide” the cost of the book. Etiquette and all that. How do couples “do” that aspect of gift etiquette if their finances are commingled?
I really ought to ask my brothers- and sisters-in-law about that! 🙂 I’m pretty sure they have joint accounts. And they’ve been married a long time as well, so they ought to know how to make it work!
I realize of course that not all marriages are like mine, specifically insofar as couples’ incomes are likely to be unequal. But that’s not a bar to having separate accounts. If one spouse (more often the wife) has no regular outside income, presumably her husband is giving her money, so there’s no reason why she can’t have a bank account of her own and her husband can put money into it for her. Or the other way round. I think it could save a lot of arguments over “who’s doing what to whom.”
Stargazer,
I hope you never have a joint account. I have to tell you….it ruined my life! Although the Chaplain says that couples should have a joint account, in my case it was the dumbest thong I could have done. I had NEVER had a joint account before (my first husband and I had seperate accounts) but I was convinced that I was married to an honest man. I never had planned on joint accounts, but because my husband wasn’t working and he appeared to be responsible with money, had a good credit score, and swore he would never take a penny of my money, I was deceived on every level and got swindled. He knew exactly how to manipulate me. Every penny I had, he got. Bonuses at work, rent money I had, birthday money, my savings from before we were married, refunds from deposits I had paid, etc. He was laughing behind my back I’m sure at how stupid I was. I honestly want other people to know that these sociopaths can lie very well! They lie to everyone….the judge, lawyers, and everyone they know. And they have the ability to believe their own lies!
This story is quite similar to my own. I went out to Germany with a man I met in the British Army out there and married him, sold my home in England for us and he stole the proceeds over 11 weeks from an account in my previous name (had not changed name since marriage)upon return to the UK. He did not work fro 6 months and whilst I was out working, unbeknown to me he was entertaining other women. As he had no salary coming in I allowed him access to my account as he led me to believe he loved me and we were having his daughter from Germany come live with us shortly. I should not have trusted him as money in versus money out did not add up in my head over the 18 months abroad but whilst we were in Germany I was working long hours and I was not in touch with our finances or the language and as he seemed devoted to me and his children from his previous marriage I had no idea of his true nature. I am told that there is nothing that can be done legally and I just have to come to terms with it. The financial loss means that I will enter retirement with no pension. Of course the shock and betrayal has also had an impact on my ability to function in society and my confidence, even 5 years down the line, is still at rock bottom. I sympathize with you and know how scary the future now looks but always draw from your strength and knowledge that you are a decent person who has a lot to contribute to society and your life is worthwhile. He is a disease that thankfully has now left your body and soul alone.
I think these sociopaths look for women who work hard. I worked very long hours, but still did all the cooking and laundry. He leeched off of me in that regard as well! I was working 12hours a day and I didn’t know he was stealing everything I was earning! He told he was investing all of our money for our future…….and continued the lie up until the last year, when he informed me that he was entitled to ALL of my teaching salary because he flew for thirty years!
Mags,
I’m sorry for losses too. It’s nice to know I’m not alone. Yes my ex also was a womanizer. I never had any idea until after he left me, and other women started telling me things. I was truly shocked! Then I saw an old email he had written to one of his girlfriends. He asked her to marry him a week before he had me served with divorce papers!
You’re right. He is a disease. A despicable excuse for a human being. I curse the day I ever met this narcissistic sociopath. It destroyed my life. But I am glad I’m me and not him. I frankly would not want to have his Karma!
Miriam,
I am presently trying to get some karma through the Criminal Prosecution Service regarding the violence toward me from him in the interim period between my discovery of an empty bank account and him sourcing a bolt-hole with his new woman. I have sat through hours of interviews in the hope that they will take my case up despite my not reporting it all when it happened. At the end of a 3 hour video interview a female police officer who was responsible for operating the equipment from another room, came in and actually said to me “so has this incident taught you to be more careful in the future”? This certainly did not help but if I had not found the Lovefraud community I would have crumpled, but I know that it takes a very insightful person, if they have not suffered the same experience, to begin to understand how the sociopath can manipulate a sensitive person’s kindness to suit their requirements. I will never forget the shock and the symptoms I had in the next couple years were as though I had post traumatic stress syndrome in many aspects. Now when I look back I feel sadness that he has got away with his plan but I also realize how empty he is, devoid of real emotion or love for anyone.
These people are mentally ill and not capable of true love. They will alone someday.
They will DIE alone someday.