I finally told Jess, “Go ahead and take pictures your way, but I refuse to waste my time in direct contradiction to what we agreed on and what the pros said.”
I reminded her I had a full-time job and couldn’t spend all these hours working on her store doing things only her way. Jess didn’t budge. Not only that, but she took only a few pictures doing it her way and then stopped. I tried multiple times to get the pictures taken, but Jess sabotaged my best efforts. The result of Jess’s stubbornness and not following through was that we could not sell anything online. The potential of another revenue stream was lost.
The last year her store was open, 2007 to 2008, the business was not going well. I attempted to find out what the financial situation was, but she accused me of not trusting her and trying to control her. She revealed some debt but hid how bad it really was. When creditors started coming after me, the situation could not be hidden anymore, and the business collapsed in March 2008. Jess was served with an eviction notice due to being three months behind in rent.
I looked at the daily sales and tried to come up with a solution. We could have paid the back rent to stay awhile longer and have a complete going-out-of-business sale to minimize the debt, but at this point, Jess was unwilling to try and said the money coming in wouldn’t justify it. There was nothing I could do. Jess would not continue, so the store had to close.
We had a weeklong going-out-of-business sale, but that didn’t generate as much cash as I had expected. The huge inventory Jess had accumulated was not selling, and she did not advertise as she said she would. I was able to sell some of the furniture and fixtures on Craigslist and other Internet sites, but all that cash went to the costs of closing the business.
I looked around town to find a short-term lease for about three months so we could sell the rest of the inventory. I would have to take charge and do all the advertising and marketing; Jess was a mess and not able to do it. No one was willing to give us a short-term lease; they all wanted a multiyear commitment.
The staff, Jess, and I boxed up the entire inventory. There were 135 two-foot-square boxes in total containing close to nine hundred dresses. We put all this in our 1,550-square-foot home, along with the clothing racks, fixtures, fabric, sewing equipment, and everything else from the store. Our house was packed full. The next day there was a major incident with a customer at our house. The woman had paid for her wedding dress, and alterations had been completed. Jess said the dress had been shipped to her via FedEx. The woman had not received it, so Jess told her to come to our house.
I’m not exactly sure of all the details, but there was a huge blowup between Jess and the woman. I tried to help, but Jess was completely out of it and irrational. I asked Jess if she had the FedEx receipt to show the woman the dress had been shipped, but there was no receipt. The woman was very upset and knew Jess was irrational. She made multiple angry comments that Jess had serious issues and was not right.
Jess retreated into the house, started slamming things around, and then smashed an expensive camera on the floor. I went outside and told the woman I’d find out what happened and would ensure the dress was delivered to her. It turned out the dress had not been shipped, but Jess’s pride would not allow her to admit this. Jess claimed the store manager was supposed to ship it. I never found out why the package had not been shipped, but I made sure the woman got her dress. Jess accused me again of controlling her.
A week after all the inventory was moved in our house, I told Jess I wanted to leave the past behind and move on, but Jess would not forgive herself or other people she felt had wronged her. She tore herself apart with feelings of failure, anger, and low self-esteem, and she couldn’t move on. She accused me of not being able to move on. Jess would not stop accusing others and me of not caring about her. We had many talks about moving forward and not bringing up our past mistakes, but she still was controlled by her emotions and lashed out at those around her, using my past mistakes as a weapon to justify her anger and pride. Even though we had talked at length about the same issues over and over, she still accused me of “never” talking, not understanding her, and “never” putting her first. Her false accusations against me were becoming unbearable.
Jess started telling me she was afraid I would hurt her, because she’d been beaten by her ex-husband. Based on her history of habitual lying with a wild victim mentality, I had doubts about this alleged abuse. I asked her if I had ever shoved her, hit her, raised a hand to her, or thrown things at her. She said, “Of course not,” and then I asked why she thought I might. She said only that it might happen, and I asked her if I was anything like her ex. She said no. I said I didn’t get into conflicts with other people, because I wanted peace, and then she accused me of being too passive and letting people walk all over me.
A few months passed, but Jess was completely unmotivated to do anything about the inventory in our home. She talked about selling dresses out of the house, but it was just talk. I asked her many times to try and do something, but she refused. I even put a couple of ads on Craigslist and eBay to try and sell everything as bulk lots, but she would not follow up on any of the ads. It was very frustrating. She ignored the problem with our home, which now looked like it belonged on one of those hoarder shows on TV. Store stuff was everywhere, and I was constantly shifting boxes around to try to make space. We stopped having people over due to the huge mess. It was embarrassing.
The mess in our home was very difficult to take. I lost count of how many times I came back to my once happy, clean home and thought, Why has my life come to this? Being a slightly nerdy and tidy engineer now surrounded by all this crap packed into almost every room in my home was very frustrating. This frustration was compounded by my having to work hard to pay off the second mortgage and home equity loan, while Jess did nothing to help with the finances. She avoided the problem by going shopping instead of trying to help. I asked every couple of weeks if she had tried to sell the inventory or do something, but she always came up with a lame excuse, like she’d had a busy day.
It took quite a while for her to start doing something about the inventory in our home. Mom had many talks with her and was a big help in motivating Jess. Jess got a teenager to help her move things around and relied on word of mouth to sell dresses. She called a bunch of her prior customers to tell them she was selling dresses below cost. She sold only a few.
One of my concerns, I told her, was that now we were opening up our home to strangers and potential criminals. I was worried for her safety—someone might think we had a lot of money stashed in the home from dress sales. Jess said her customers were nice people and would never do that, but I thought the problem was that their friends could be potential criminals. They might come over to rob and harm her while I was at work. I repeatedly asked her to look into selling everything off as bulk lots for her own safety. I didn’t tell Jess that her efforts were not working—anything negative would further demotivate her.
After only a few weeks, Jess stopped doing anything about the dresses. I asked her to look for a job to keep herself occupied and to help with all our expenses. One of my reasons for asking her to do this was that her depression and victim mentality were getting worse. She was not doing anything with her life, and sitting around watching TV all day was destroying her. The pure trash on daytime TV seemed to be geared toward people with no careers or aspirations. The commercials for ambulance-chasing attorneys telling people they are all victims were a constant bombardment. It was negatively affecting her outlook on life.
Instead of getting a job she was talented at, she took a part-time position as a receptionist at St. Paul. I was glad and told her it was good that she was working again and was surrounded by good people. Part of me wasn’t too happy with this menial job, but at least it was something. Jess was an incredible salesperson, dress designer, and seamstress, but all her natural gifts and talents were being wasted. She took the easy route instead of starting her career back up. I kept my mouth shut about my
thoughts on her not trying to do better, for her own sake.
Creditors continued calling Jess and me on a regular basis and sending mail demanding payment. A few creditors served her with papers to appear in court, and Jess began the paperwork to declare chapter 7 bankruptcy to keep them at bay. Before she could file, she was required to go through credit counseling and take a class. We had to submit our household income and expenses and tally all the known creditors with their debt.
Jess did an exceptional job with this. She knew how important it was and spent weeks digging through all the files and getting the totals. The debt was huge. She declared $293,000 owed to creditors, but there was $551,000 of total debt. This included what we owed from remortgaging our home, the additional home equity loan, and taxes to the IRS and Michigan Department of Treasury she had not paid. The bankruptcy didn’t cover the costs of the second mortgage and home equity loan used to fund her store, and I was stuck paying those.
Chapter 7 bankruptcy does not eliminate tax debt. Jess had $74,300 combined tax debt between the IRS and the Michigan Treasury. I was numb at this point. Jess had hidden this from me also. Even with all the talks we’d had about lies of omission, she had still done it again.
It was also bad for my parents. Jess had convinced my mom to give her an initial $30,000 loan without telling me. Jess had an incredible gift for manipulating facts and coming up with stories to make people do things they would not normally do. This loan was another example of how she could bend people to her will. The loan wasn’t all the money she took from my mom. Jess also manipulated her into signing up for credit cards with my mom as the account holder and then getting additional cards issued in Jess’s name for the store. Jess convinced Mom that I would be extremely angry if I found out about these credit cards, so this was hidden from me also. Near the end of the store’s closing, Jess racked up an additional $43,800 in credit card debt in my mom’s name. My parents were out $73,800 in total.
A while after the store closed, my dad told me my mom had been crying at their home before everything collapsed. She had told Jess to stop charging on the cards, but Jess didn’t stop. My mom had to cancel all the cards and pay all the credit card debt.
I was shocked the total debt was this much. I’d known it was bad…but not this bad. My parents were also included in the bankruptcy, so they lost their $73,800. Jess promised they would get as much back as possible when she sold the inventory. Jess gave my mom a very expensive ruby ring, appraised for around $8,000, from Thailand out of guilt since my mom had lost all her money.
Before the bankruptcy was filed, Dearborn Federal Credit Union (DFCU) filed a lawsuit both “Jointly and Severally” against Jess and me in early 2009. Jess had accumulated $42,800 of debt on DFCU credit cards used for her store. They couldn’t get any money out of her with previous debt-collection notices, but because Jess had credit cards issued in my name, they also came after me.
DFCU’s case stood on their alleging that Jess had bought personal items on these business cards, and DFCU tried to argue that I had bought personal items and so was also responsible for her debt. All the credit card statements I provided proved that I had not bought any personal items. The court ruled in my favor in July 2009, after I proved the business was in Jess’s name only and I had cards only to buy supplies for her store. In the court order releasing me from all DFCU’s claims, I was the only one released; Jess still could be taken to court again for this debt. It cost me $2,580 in legal fees to get this cleared up.
Jess filed for bankruptcy in October 2009. When we went to court to get the ruling, the only people who appeared in the courtroom to protest the bankruptcy were two attorneys from DFCU. The court approved the bankruptcy anyway. In the bankruptcy, all creditors were given time to collect assets from the store, but they never contacted us. The entire inventory remained in our home, and Jess stopped doing anything about it. About once a month, I would ask her about what progress she had made. This only angered her, and she gave lame excuses for why she had done nothing.
One excuse she gave for not selling the inventory was that she had an emotional block and needed time. I never told her I thought this was just a feeble excuse. I couldn’t help but think that she was leeching off me. I was paying for everything, and she wouldn’t lift a finger to help with the financial disaster she had caused. What if I decided to quit my job and not do anything, using the “emotional block” excuse? We would lose everything and be homeless.
To make the financial situation worse, I intercepted a home equity loan statement in the mail before Jess got it and discovered that the principle balance had not gone down; it had risen. When we took this loan out, Jess had assured me that she needed only $20,000 out of $60,000 available in our home’s equity. It turned out that Jess had used up all the equity, and the balance of the loan was now $70,000. This was really bad.
I went through boxes trying to find out information on the home equity loan taken out a couple of years earlier and was shocked when I found the paperwork. In addition to the loan, Jess had apparently signed up for insurance on the loan, which cost half of the monthly payments I was making. My signature had been forged on the paperwork. This explained why the balance had increased to $70,000—the payments I’d been making minus insurance payments were not enough to lower the principle. Damn. After all we had gone through, yet again she’d hidden information from me.
I was pissed and lost it. I started yelling at her and punched her curio cabinet. I broke the glass and bloodied my fist. This was the only time in our entire marriage that I hit anything in anger. Later on Jess denied that she had signed up for the insurance and claimed the bank must have done it. I did not believe her. I could not trust her at all now.
After all this bankruptcy mess, Jess started staying out very late, not returning calls, and making up stories of where she was. She drove home drunk once that I know of. I discovered she had bought a second cell phone and was hiding it from me. One evening she told me she was out with a female friend of hers. I called the woman, and she had no idea what Jess was talking about.
Suspicions and thoughts of her cheating on me were going through my head. Jess would not give me straight answers, and I knew her well enough to recognize patterns when she was hiding something. I installed a key logger on our computer to find out what was going on. I even got a GPS tracker and kept it in the trunk of our car. I knew she was hiding what was going on, and I had to resort to this to find out the truth. Jess told me multiple stories of where she was, but the GPS tracker proved she was lying.
Jess was up until two in the morning on the computer on October 15, 2009. The next day she came up with a shallow excuse about what she had been doing, but I could tell she was not telling the truth. I intercepted a chat conversation with the key logger, and my worst fears came true. I found out she was seeing another man, Tony B., whom she had met at the gym. We all went to Bally by Briarwood Mall in Ann Arbor, but I had never met Tony.
In their chat conversation starting at midnight, Tony wrote that he was at the hospital taking care of his daughter, Lorena. Jess and Tony were going back and forth on many things about their relationship, and Jess was playing around with him. Tony wrote, “I know u don’t do planned events regarding love/sex.” Jess wrote in response, “love can’t be planned, on the other hand, sex can.” Later on in the chat log, Jess wrote, “it doesn’t matter h much I like you, the matter is you never answered my question of how you feel about me.” She also wrote, “I oftenly think of the first moment that I was undertoxicationed. I threw myself at you, and you rejected me.”
I have no clear understanding of what Jess meant by writing “undertoxicationed.”
They went back and forth for a while, and near the end of the session, at 2:20 a.m., Tony wrote, “if I say “I love you” would believe me?” Jess did not reply to this, and the chat session ended. It was really hard for me to read this, and I was furious. I thought of Jess as nothing but a lying, cheating slut.
This
was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. I had had it, and it was time to eject myself from the marriage. I met with a divorce attorney in Ypsilanti. But he was a smarmy little man, and I had a dark feeling about him. I began looking for a different attorney.
A few days later, I confronted Jess about Tony. She countered by claiming there had been no sex; there was just talking, and he had kissed her. She said he was only a friend and that things had gone too far. I didn’t tell her I knew what they’d typed on the chat log and knew she was lying. But in her own words on the chat log, it was clear she was the one who had sexually offered herself, but there was no evidence of sex actually happening. She tried to convince me that she wanted to end it but was afraid he would blackmail her—she claimed she was the victim. That was pure bullshit. She also blamed this on me, saying she just had needed someone to talk to since I wasn’t there for her. That pissed me off, and I told her there was never a valid excuse for cheating on your spouse. If you wanted to see someone else, the marriage had to be over. I didn’t believe any of her excuses, especially her tired victim routine where she blamed me.
Jess begged me to talk with one of the pastors at St. Paul with her. Hearing my marriage-had-to-over statement really shook her up. I agreed to go, but I still felt the marriage was over, and I planned to file for divorce. I had put up with too much for too long.
The pastor talked with us, and I said my intentions were to end the marriage. Jess didn’t want this and still claimed there had been no sex; she was just depressed, scared, and lost. She still loved me and didn’t want to lose me. The thing is, part of me still loved Jess, even after all the crap she had pulled throughout our marriage. We talked more, and the pastor convinced me to stay in the marriage. He asked us both to agree that Bally was off-limits forever for both of us; we needed to find a different gym. We both agreed.
Tales of the Crazy Page 8