Divorcing a Narcopath
Image by David Clode
What to Expect After the Break-Up
Mediation or Court?
This blog is written for female survivors of male perpetrators.
Note: the information in this 'long read' is based on case studies in one Australian Jurisdiction, and may not be relevant in your case. Please put your ‘dispassionate observer’ hat on in order to read it.
Know this about your narcopath after he discards you (or you escape him):
His attacks might not be evident immediately after he leaves. He might pretend he ‘wants this to be amicable’ via personal communications while he covertly slanders, smears, steals, spends, manipulates, hides. He’s still got you on the hook. The sooner you can accept that any beliefs you have about him being decent, honourable and having no wish to harm you are FALSE, the better. You are already trying to reconcile your doubts. Do yourself a favour - go with the part of you that suspects he is malicious and dangerous. You will be better armed for what is to come.
Alternatively, if you left him, he might start the attack immediately. There are many stories of narcopaths taking out AVOs (apprehended violence orders) against their wife by making false accusations to police (and being believed) within days of her seeking refuge with her children away from his control and manipulation.
He might spend as much money as he can in the year of separation so that there is nothing in his bank accounts to divvy up when the time comes. He might take a luxury world holiday or buy himself a Lamborghini. In theory, his earnings in the year of separation are still mutual assets, but if the money’s spent, it’s gone. (There is a legal concept known as ‘wastage’, but this doesn’t kick in until the mediation process has failed and you have entered an open court. In real terms, a few hundred thousand dollars in legal costs if you choose meditation).
He might take large sums of money from your joint bank accounts, and either spend it or give it to his new host. These thefts will be disguised by simple entries on the accounts that stipulate payment for professional services. The court will accept that he is within his rights to pay his new host $40,000, say, for a painting she did of him. Or $20,000 for photographs she took of him for his professional use.
(There is a legal concept called ‘wilful disposal’, but this doesn’t kick in until the mediation process has failed and you have entered an open court). A lawyer cannot advise you to remove money and place it in a separate account yourself in the first year, so use your own ethical judgement here. If you never had access to his accounts, there is nothing you can do to prevent him from draining them.
He will lie. About everything. Under oath. On sworn affidavits. On Statutory Declarations, whatever.
He may agree to mediation once you both have lawyers, as he wants to appear fair and reasonable publicly. But his intentions are never to ‘do the right thing by you’. Don’t entertain thoughts that the nice Dr Jekyll you married will surface again. Mr Hyde is running the show from here on in. It will feel like you are now fighting evil itself.
He might not declare bank accounts or assets that you know exist, and the onus will be on you to prove he has them. (There is, however, a legal concept that if you refer to a secret or hidden fact and he doesn’t refute it, it becomes a real fact for the purposes of proceedings – for example that he has a new partner or is living somewhere other than his given address).
He might hide assets. He will convince his mates to hide assets for him. Easy. Men don’t like the idea of being ‘taken to the cleaners’ by women they have already discarded. And he is a master at convincing people to stretch their moral boundaries.
He will do everything in his power to take everything you have legally, including your children, your home, your superannuation, your savings. The Law is now his cover. His lawyers are now his enablers. If he’s of retirement age and you aren’t, the Law wants to give him 70% of everything you have. Yes, really!
He will ignore letters from your lawyers.
He might not respond to an ‘offer’. Do not be misled by your lawyer’s letter which stipulates that “your client has until 4pm on Monday 16th to respond”. English and Legalese are two different languages where common words or phrasing have two different meanings. He is not obliged to respond.
He might block any attempt to have the value of items in his possession assessed and added to the assets list. He simply has to ‘disagree’ with any court-approved valuer your team suggest.
He might try to block your choice of lawyer if you engage one he believes might be smarter than his. He will claim a conflict of interest, whatever.
He might ignore court orders. He will not supply evidence he is instructed to by the Registrar until half an hour before the next hearing on the steps of the courthouse, so that your team has no time to assess the evidence and prepare a reasonable argument. (This falls just outside the legal definition of contempt, and will not be deemed contemptuous until it has happened over and over and you have entered an open court before a Judge. Maybe not even then).
He might supply illegible paper or electronic documents, or documents with pages or sections missing, better copies of which have to be sought again and again, at a cost to you, by legal letter (This is called obfuscation but will not be relevant until you enter an open court).
He might volunteer no information whatsoever. In order to get proof of anything, you will be forced to subpoena third parties – for example, his accountant or associates, at a large cost to you for every subpoena. You have no guarantee that his associates will not also provide falsified or partially obscured evidence via subpoena.
There will be no penalty to him, no slap on the wrist, no authority to punish him for the behaviours above. Unless you progress to court, where a judge might or might not acknowledge that he has behaved unconscionably.
He might ‘drag the process out’ by blocking, ignoring or challenging every move your lawyer makes, in order to force you to spend huge amounts of money on legal fees. The sooner you run out of money, the sooner he WINS. If, exhausted and traumatised, you instruct your lawyer in a closed mediation hearing (your lawyer, his lawyer and the Registrar) to settle even if the outcome is grossly unjust, he will find reason not to settle there and then. The experience of making you suffer and manipulating facts and impressions is gratifying to him.
When a lawyer tells you your next affidavit will be handed to ‘the court’, please understand that this means it will be handed to HIM, so that he can refute, deny, manipulate the facts, discredit and defame you with impunity and by reply in his affidavit.
He will discredit you by whatever means possible, across the entire landscape of your life. As you suffer extreme anxiety at his attacks from every front and have difficulty maintaining your composure every minute of every day, your own behaviour starts to reinforce the picture he paints of you as a crazy bitch.
He wants to destroy you, to punish you for your crime of fighting back. After all the kindness and love you gave him over all those years. Please believe this unbelievable point. It’s in all the literature and, by now, you are experiencing it! You now have an enemy! You married Dr Jekyll and now you are divorcing Mr Hyde.
The Family Law mediation process in Australia is no protection against a manipulative narcopath. Even a 'good' lawyer gives you inadequate protection from harm. The law courts are a place where ‘callous unemotional’ is the cloak worn by the entire population. And professional bullies stalk the corridors of power. As a vulnerable sensitive ‘empath’, or Highly Sensitive Person you are already behind the eight ball. A fish out of water.
This is where you wake up to the pervasive structural influence of gender-bias in our culture - and the Patriarchal structure of the Family Law Court in and of itself.
Without an open court where witnesses can be called to refute his lies and manipulation, the only evidence you have in your favour is financial records. That is all the court cares about in any case. The money trail. The moral contract of marriage is not in the court’s remit. It is a ‘no blame’ system (in Australia).
In theory, ‘non-financial contributions’ are taken into account in the distribution of declared assets. But since every male believes the 5 hours (Australian Census 2016) of domestic work he contributes each week equals 50% of domestic duties, rather than the 25% or less that it actually represents, his self-deceitful sworn lie will be accepted – particularly by a male registrar!
Even if he coerced you into giving up work so he could make you dependent on him, and never lifted a finger in home-making, budgeting or child rearing, the court places no value on the gifts of love you contributed to the marriage - only on the money he contributed as a result of your enabling him to earn it. The idea of ‘non-financial contributions’ is, in reality, dismissed.
If he is an experienced divorcer, you will find that even his banking entries over many years have been cleverly disguised in readiness for the divorce he knows will inevitably eventuate. I’m sorry. I know it sounds paranoid delusional. No normal person could possibly be so scandalously manipulative. But by now we know that marriage to a psychopath is essentially a scam from the outset.
When you ask your lawyer what to expect, he/she will give a good approximation of an explanation, which you may have great difficulty understanding and for which you must pay him/her. They don’t hand out a nice FAQ brochure like they do in the States. There are no step-by-step instructions as to how to write an affidavit, or any such useful information. A schedule of fees will likely be it.
So you will be forced to trust your lawyer, in order to put your own mind to rest. You may be placing your trust in a total incompetent. You have no way of knowing until it is too late. If you choose a high-ranking white male lawyer, know that he will have the same biases about gender, class, race or religion as most Australian males but more power in this place. If you choose a cheap, hungry young female lawyer, know that she is outside the legal patriarchy and will have to work twice as hard as her male counterpart. Additionally, she may not know what she is doing. And you will be charged for every email, every phone call, every photocopy, every moment of her time – competent or not competent.
At a seminar on separation and settlement, we were advised by a lawyer that “everybody lies on their affidavits”, revealing a paradox of our legal system. The statement simultaneously invites every seminar participant to lie as a matter of course, and denies that a good proportion of us have a strong commitment to Truth. She also advised that AVO’s are ‘a dime a dozen’, so they have become meaningless to legal professionals. The Truth is no protection.
The best advice I received in my quest for an affordable competent lawyer was from a senior counsel at a top law firm I couldn’t then afford to engage, who generously gave me a two-hour preliminary consultation after I provided her with my own bullet-pointed brief. It might be useful to pass on what she said. It was this:
“A judge or registrar (in mediation) has to get through a huge list of cases and only has a short hearing to assess the information in front of him/her. This information is expertly distilled by both lawyers into the pertinent points from the armful of evidence they have sorted from the shipload of evidence you supply them with. If you can devote your time during the mediation process to gathering a shipload of proof you have of his hidden assets, likely future income, past habitual expenditure and income, your current deterioration in physical or mental health (as a direct result of his behaviour), written proof of any agreements vows promises contracts, and the necessary financial documents of tax returns and so forth, you will save legal costs. Read and understand the law if you can (Family Law Act). Your truthful evidence will be given equal weight to his lies and fabricated evidence. His history of multiple divorce scams or adultery is off-limits and you must confide in no-one or you will be held in contempt of court.”
You will need to let go of old beliefs you had about good trumping evil, truth winning over lies, a court being a place where justice happens. Discovering that these beliefs are unfounded myths might add to your suffering. Your naivety is conditioned, so relieve yourself of self-blame for not seeing the world the way it really is until now. Allow yourself to grieve for your loss of innocence. Get professional therapeutic support during this traumatising experience.
And in case you don’t know:
You might have heard that family inheritance cannot be put on the list of assets? Not so.
If it is you who supported him for years – until his big project took off, or he got the big job, graduated, or “got the band back together’ – then it is YOU who will be expected to pay HIM maintenance (or the equivalent) after he leaves. The fact that he left before the carrot he dangled for years materialised works in HIS favour, not yours. The moral injustice is not in the court’s remit. Neither betrayal nor life rape is legally criminal. (But you get to keep the stick that was part of the carrot-and-stick arrangement you had with him in the form of PTSD for years to come maybe). Lucky you, eh?
Lawyers, it seems, are not interested in what is morally right or humanely fair. They are only concerned with what is and is not within the law. This means that their understanding of 'ethical conduct' is likely different from yours.
Even the mediation process can take 1-3 years due to any number of procedural or practical delays in the system, before you even get to an open court if you can afford it. The longer you fight the more you open yourself up to sustained psychological and emotional torture. But if you don’t fight, the court will make a finding based on false evidence and you will have to live with this injustice for the rest of your life. You are trapped in the snare of the psychopath until such time as you can remove him from your life. NO CONTACT.
NOTE: The article above is based on my own personal experience divorcing a narcopath through the process of ‘mediation’. Here is an article co-authored by a lawyer and psychologist, advising mediation is not the way to go if you already understand the pathological personality type of your ex. (In essence, when faced with an open court room and judge, the narcopath will be so concerned for his public reputation that he will be restrained from showing his excessive vindictiveness and extreme dishonesty.)
©Margot MacCallum
