December 04, 2019

What do you do if you find out your partner was cheating on you in the middle of the divorce process!?

7 minutes

Welcome to the Hello Divorce podcast. I'm your host, Erin Levine. I'm super excited to share with you my top insider tips for divorce, including actionable steps in bite-size pieces to lowering the cost, conflict, and confusion surrounding your divorce so that you can move on to that next awesome chapter with peace of mind and your financial and emotional wellness in check.

Today's topic is, what do you do if you find out your partner was cheating on you in the middle of the divorce process? How can that help you, or does it even help you, with your divorce outcome?

This happens more often than you think. We've had many clients come to us who have said that they and their spouses have worked really, really hard to keep that marriage together, sometimes for months or even years, and ultimately one or both of them decided that it's just not the right fit and it's time for a divorce. Those divorces tend to be a lot more amicable. However, sometimes during the divorce, we find out later that one of the spouse has cheated. This happens across the board in gay marriages, in heterosexual marriages with both men and women.

Erin Levine:

In a recent case we had, our client found out that her spouse was cheating after reviewing many of the bank statements linked to her husband's account during the divorce process. She found a whole bunch of charges that had nothing to do with her or the kids or her husband. There were charges to Victoria's Secret. There were super expensive, pricey dinners, price charges to other women's clothing stores. There was even a trip to Hawaii during the marriage that my client and her kids knew nothing about that was during a time that her husband was supposed to be on a business trip.

So, finding this out was a terrible revelation. My client was really upset. She was angry. She was sad. She had a million different emotions. And the first thing we had her do was pause the divorce, because it's never helpful when you're feeling that emotional to try and negotiate or litigate your divorce. It's just impossible to be clear about your position when you're feeling that level of emotion. So that's the first thing we did.

The second is that our client really wanted to use this information to find out how it could her in divorce. The first lesson we had to tell her, which was not her favorite thing to hear, was that in a no-fault divorce state, finding out that your spouse had an extramarital affair is not going to help your case in a really big way. In other words, it's not going to be something where you get handed $10,000 or $100,000 for your spouse's bad behavior. However, there are ways in which finding out that your spouse cheated on you during the marriage can help you.

As an example, in this case, we looked back to the bank statements and found out where community, or joint earnings, had gone to benefit this third party, the woman that her husband had been cheating with. We were able to recover those funds because half of her spouse's earnings during the marriage are joint. They're community. So to the extent that they were used for a non-community purpose for the benefit of this third party, we were able to recoup that money and give half of it to our client.

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By Erin Levine

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