[patteeu]

Originally Posted by bobr17

It started out as a mutually agreeable divorce in Texas, which is a community property state. However, as things progressed, she got increasingly more greedy and bitter (at the prodding of her parents, primarily), changed legal representation 3 times and dragged the process out over a year, even though there were no children.

On the day scheduled for the actual hearing (or whatever it's called), her legal counsel managed to postpone the thing after Bob Dole sat at the courthouse for 3 hours, then finagled a last-minute change of venue (or whatever its called) later in the day. After getting dressed and driving the 25 miles to the new location, the judge was already in a pissy mood because they had been waiting for 45 minutes, completely ignoring that the was no advance notice of the time and location change. On top of that, she managed to manufacture claims of infidelity out of thin air while offering no evidence of such behavior and sobbing uncontrollably.

The end result was an irritable, Bible-thumping judge who decided that Bob Dole was such a POS that the whole concept of community property wasn't worth observing, and he gave her pretty much everything. Bob Dole got a lot of debt that wasn't even his (50% of her student loans, for example), the automobile with a bank note attached, his La-Z-Boy recliner, and not much else.

Bob Dole was left so financially crippled that appealing the decision (which Bob Dole was told that in Texas, would have gone right back to the same damned judge that made the decision for the first level appeal) wasn't really a viable option.

I'm sorry to hear your story. It's all too common IMO. This is the kind of thing that leads me to my position. If she had no evidence of misbehavior on your part, she shouldn't have been able to take you to the cleaners like she did. It's not right. Thank goodness there weren't children involved.