The following anecdote, which has been edited to facilitate legibility, appears in its original form here.
My name is Scott, and I would like to follow up on my particular case in the hope that some poor guy will come here one day as I did back in February, naive about these things and looking for answers.
On January 26, 2013, I caught my wife cheating for the second time via text messages after a quiet Friday night of unwinding (the first time, three months earlier, it was emails). She had passed out after consuming an entire liter of wine and no dinner with the phone awkwardly in her hands mid-text. When she awoke to see me looking at the texts, World War III broke out, and a violent fight over the retrieval of the phone from my hands ensued. This and arguing went on for about an hour. I was physically beaten with everything in the house she could get her hands on before everything settled, and she quietly retrieved her phone, made her way into the bathroom, locked it, and unbeknown to me called 911.
It didn’t take long for police to arrive. I was sitting calmly and quietly on my couch as they went straight to the locked bathroom door and had her open it for them. They were in there about five minutes before coming straight to me—looking at that moment like I had been attacked by a pit bull—and placing me under arrest. Before asking what had happened, looking around the house, anything. Of course I was taken straight downtown and booked on an assault-on-a-family-member charge. On the way to the station, the arresting officer said to me after hearing my side of the story, “I’m sorry, someone has to go to jail, and you weigh 190 and she 108. Who do you think it’s going to be?”
This was my first taste of what was to come.
After my wife’s being issued a 36-hour mandatory protective order locking me out of my house and prohibiting me from communicating with her, her first stop Monday morning was the divorce attorney’s office. I’m almost certain now that a battered women’s group steered her directly to his door where he met her salivating at the thought of what was to come after hearing about her “situation.”
On the following day, she went before a judge and had a temporary restraining order issued. I had no idea what was going on or what to do as I had no previous criminal record. It was that day that I consulted with my boss’s attorney and after hearing what she was about to do, immediately retained him before my arraignment/advisement the following day. There a trial date was set for the restraining order case in two weeks, which of course my attorney couldn’t make, so the judge decided he would hear both the assault and restraining order cases on April 1. I was stuck out of my house, scrambling for friends’ couches to live on with only a duffel bag of clothes my wife let my brother retrieve for me, all the while trying to maintain my career. This was only the beginning of my nightmare.
On the day of the trial, I felt pretty confident, and I was so happy to finally have my day in court to explain that my only mistake in life was marrying a complete, cheating sociopath. I was sure that the judge would see it our way, and I would be let back into my house (which is solely in my name) and get my car back (which is also solely in my name). I was sorely mistaken.
We proved in court that my wife was a habitual liar and—a little tidbit that I myself didn’t even know—that she was a convicted felon: 11 fraudulent check charges dating back to 2003! Although we caught her in lie after lie on the stand, she herself admitting that she was desperately trying to get the phone back out of my hands (while being “beaten down” again and again), none of that seemed to matter, nor the cheating that had caused the entire argument.
When it was my turn to take the stand to tell my side (finally!), I looked around, and it was like no one was even listening to a word I said. When it was done, the judge looked at me and in a very impolite way told me that he thought I was undoubtedly guilty of getting jealous and beating my wife. She was then awarded a two-year permanent protective order against me! I sat there with my jaw visibly dropping open and tears coming to my eyes. Later my attorney, who I thought truly did his best, said don’t worry, J and D courts usually operate this way, and we will appeal the decision to the higher circuit court. Meanwhile her divorce attorney was outside the door asking, “Is he ready to settle for what we want yet?”
At this point, I had already been paying for my house and her car for almost two months. She moved her boyfriend in two weeks after this happened, and I was looking at paying for the two of them to live in my house for eight more months until the divorce was finalized!
We had a trial the following day to determine who got what, and in light of what had just happened to me, I decided to settle with an agreement that would let her buy the house and car from me (with no credit whatsoever). I sat for another two months forced to make the mortgage and car payments to avoid ruining my credit while awaiting the purchase of the house and car. She was awarded alimony in the agreement, also, as five years is the magic period in Virginia between a short-term and long-term marriage. With no kids…alimony. We had been married at the time of the incident for five years and two months. I went back for the appeal, which she didn’t bother showing up for since she had already gotten everything she wanted. So my verdict was “null process” on the assault charge, and her dropping the restraining order was part of our legal agreement.
My point is, you have no legal rights when this happens to you. It takes all you have mentally to not go insane, and it will change you as a person forever. It takes little or no evidence for this to happen to you. One sociopathic person can and will ruin your life, and the state will gladly help her to do this to you! Just keep your cool and know that eventually it will all be okay. They can’t take away who you are as a person.
Thanks to this blog and what it does to help people.
Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com
*For a similar account, see here.
TALKING BACK to restraining orders 
corrections: “…her person, then he was not wrongfully arrested.” Some laws say that assault is physical touching (a battery).
In Illinois, assault is causing a reasonable apprehension of an imminent battery. It may well be that his state considers assault to be a battery. In the realm of Illinois, I do not see how he could be grabbed for an assault charge. As the story states, he was booked on an “assault” charge. Sometimes the police make things up after they’ve imprisoned you (imprisonment on false pretenses occurs). The judge may not have sided with the respondent, because the respondent had taken the cellphone from the petitioner. The respondent did not state his reason; but it’s possible that the respondent did not know that grabbing the phone would be an illegal act (unfortunately, ignorance of the law is no excuse).
I think it’s possible that the respondent wanted to know if his wife was cheating on him (grabbing the phone was motivated by a desire to determine if his wife was cheating). However, I do not think that the judge was reasonable to say that the respondent had beaten his wife (unless referring to the telephone-grabbing assault, which is quite an exaggeration but nonetheless illegal). Be that the petitioner awoke and attacked the respondent, there becomes an argument in reference to defense of property. If the force used by the petitioner was not reasonable (or defense of property not allowed), then the petitioner was the offender, the respondent was undergoing self-defense. Be that the issue, the petitioner and respondent should have both went to jail.
In many ways, if the respondent was truly curious as to whether or not his wife was cheating on him, and I’m not well-trained in this, he could filed for divorce against his wife, done civil discovery on the phone messages, and determined whether or not from that point he wanted to divorce his wife. Sometimes people make bad decisions in relation to the law, but I think that’s because people are ignorant of the law.
My apologies for any typos, as I’ve lost my eyeglasses as of late.
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Your arguments are carefully reasoned, as always. The processes we’re talking about, though, truly defy reason. They mock it.
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I’ve reconsidered this a little bit. If the state law says that he committed a battery or assault by touching something attached to his person, then he was not wrongfully arrested. If, however, it doesn’t, then he was wrongfully arrested. The argument that the woman could make is that she was in defense of her property (again if allowed by state law). I don’t believe she could argue that she was defending from a further battery, as a significant delay had passed by. But in defending property (the cellphone), she would have to then be able to state how she used reasonable force (against her husband, no less).
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If all the police have to say is, “You’re stronger than her,” as the reason for arresting him rather than her, that’s a false argument. He could just as well sue the police department for something like that. If they were to claim that he battered her by removing the phone, which was attached to her person, then it would be a different story. However, the woman did not awake to defend herself. Instead, it appears that she awoke to attack the man. There was a significant delay between when he took the phone and when the woman woke up. As such, the woman committed a battery (not out of self-defense). As such, she should have been arrested.
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If she hit him first, he had all the right to attack her back in order to prevent a further battery. It’s about who is bigger or stronger. In the realm of law, you have to use “reasonable force” to stop a further attack.
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Well, assault did not occur. It all sounds like false imprisonment. I’m surprised his attorney didn’t mention that assault did not occur. Assault did not occur, because she was asleep. It could have been considered a battery when he took the phone, but supposedly, she was still asleep during the battery. Be that the phone was not his, then he was out of line to remove it from her hands. (He may have been better to claim that it was on the ground, and he picked it up from the ground). However, that she committed an act of domestic battery without a doubt, thus assault and battery. He should have been better filing against her, pressing charges, and then filing for divorce: Prisoner’s dilemma; game theory. It would have put her in a situation to stop pursuing a restraining order, but that does not mean that she would not file for divorce.
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