What are the dirty tricks your spouse and his/her lawyer can do to attack you during a divorce?
Understand that while the tone of this answer to your question is a little—a little—tongue in cheek, it’s still true.
Dirty tricks that often work whether you are a man or woman:
- falsely accuse your spouse of substance abuse (drugs, alcohol)
- falsely accuse your spouse of being mentally ill
- falsely accuse your spouse of having an extramarital affair
- falsely accuse your spouse of child abuse (both physical and sexual)
- this works best for women, but it’s starting to gain ground with men too
Dirty tricks that work mostly for women:
- falsely accuse your spouse of spouse abuse, both physical and sexual (virtually nobody will ever believe a wife abuses a husband unless a busload of nuns with time and date-stamping video cameras witness it too and testify to it)
- falsely accuse your husband of “pornography addiction”
- falsely accuse your spouse of never being home, being an absentee parent, never caring for wife and children, you get the idea
- falsely accuse your spouse of being “controlling” (whatever that means, but it works, so who cares what it means, eh?)
- falsely accuse your spouse of 1) failing to provide you and your children of adequate financial support and 2) never giving you access to spending money and 3) wasting, dissipating, and diminishing marital assets
Dirty tricks that work mostly for men:
- falsely accuse your spouse of parental alienation (this rarely works, but when it does, it works better for men than for women; falsely accusing a father of parental alienation doesn’t get much traction)
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