Divorces from hell

Nick and Jessica. Britney and Kevin. Jen and Brad. The list goes on. Aside from all of them being beautiful and famous, the one tie that binds this crew is divorce. We’ve become a culture obsessed with the dirty demise of other people’s relationships.

Now imagine making a living off of it.

Every day, divorce lawyers across the state deal with the messy details of splitting couples. They manage the emotional turmoil. They try to quell the drama. And, in the end, they fight and claw for every last bit they can get for their clients.

“I only handle cases from hell,” says noted Boston divorce lawyer Gerald L. Nissenbaum. “If it’s easy, they don’t need me — not at my crazy rates. The case has to be crazier than me, otherwise they’ll think I’m crazy!” 

Asked about their most memorable divorce war stories, local lawyers have an arsenal of anecdotes to share with Exhibit A that makes Britney Spears’ buzz-cutting antics look like child’s play. And, like most tales of humanity, they range from the humorous to the truly tragic.

Daily dose of Robitussin

Sharyn T. Sooho, a family-law attorney and co-founder of DivorceNet.com, says one of the funniest divorce stories she has heard came from a court clerk who witnessed the following bizarre case.

A doctor was filing for divorce from his jealous wife. Every morning, his lawyer told the court, the wife would paint her initials on his penis with the cough suppressant Robitussin. And every night when he returned home from work, she would check to see if the initials had worn off, apparently as some type of litmus test for infidelity.

While the cough medicine might have left the doctor red with embarrassment, it is Sooho who is still experiencing side effects from the case.

“I never have been able to use Robitussin since that happened,” she says. 

In one of her own cases, Sooho represented a man seeking to end his marriage to a woman who suffered serious mental health problems and seasonal mood swings.

While a student at Harvard’s Divinity School, the wife and mother of two began stripping in Boston’s former Combat Zone. Soon, she took out an ad in a local newspaper’s adult section, offering her “talk therapy” services. Claiming she was only offering sex therapy, the woman was quick to point out in her ad that “people with STDs [sexually transmitted diseases] need not apply,” Sooho remembers.

Little did the wife know her roommate was ratting her out to Sooho, informing the lawyer of the long lines of men that waited outside the apartment to visit the woman, all while her children were home.

But perhaps most surreal for Sooho was when the wife — in court — performed an impromptu dance for the judge, asking for affirmation that she did, in fact, have a beautiful body and asserting her constitutional right to take off her clothes for money.

“At the end of the hearing, I turned around and the courtroom was packed!” Sooho laughs.

Although the judge did appear briefly to lose his bearings, Sooho says she won her client an emergency change of custody. 

Third time’s the charm?

A North Shore attorney who asked not to be named recalls one case in which he represented a family therapist who divorced the same woman twice.

“What is it that they say? ‘Physician, heal thyself,’” the attorney says.

When asked what might have caused the relationship to suffer not one, but two divorces, the lawyer says of the couple: “I think they just overanalyzed it and realized that they didn’t belong together.”

Shopping for a pancreas

Longtime family-law attorney Linda T. Kaloustian recalls a divorce horror story from one of her colleagues in which the wife chained herself to her husband’s car, refusing to give him the key until he transferred the title to her.

“She literally had someone chain her,” says Kaloustian. “I mean, she was wrapped around with chains to the hood of the car.”

The tactic worked. “She got the title,” Kaloustian reports.

Throughout her 25-year career, Kaloustian has seen everything from a scorned woman taking the wall-to-wall carpeting from her ex’s abode to a nasty dispute over ski boots to a formal auction between husband and wife looking to divide their assets.

“If there was a lamp, he would say, ‘I’ll give you $25 for the lamp.’ She said, ‘$30.’ He said, ‘$37.50.’ She said, ‘$40.’ He said, ‘Sold,’” recalls Kaloustian. “And these people were very comfortable [financially]. They went through literally every single item in the house, including the wastebaskets.”

But one of the most shocking fights Kaloustian witnessed was over human organs. The wife, she says, required an organ transplant, and the husband was being stubborn over advancing the wife’s share of assets to pay her medical costs.

“It’s not everyday that one goes shopping for a pancreas and kidney,” Kaloustian explains. “Basically, he didn’t want to pay for anything. That was really the bottom line.”

Kaloustian eventually got the funds advanced, the woman had her transplant, and she reportedly is alive and well today.

Despite all the emotional trauma Kaloustian sees in her work, she says there are occasional rays of hope, like the notes she received recently from former clients who each remarried.

“I received two cards and two photos from former clients. They were photos of the second marriage,” says Kaloustian. “They each left a little note, saying: ‘You were right. Happily ever after does occur at times.’”

Hit man for hire

One of divorce lawyer Gerald L. Nissenbaum’s most memorable cases sounds more like something from “The Sopranos” than from central Massachusetts.The husband, who had an estate worth about $50 million, enlisted the attorney’s services because his wife was filing for divorce.

“She was divorcing him because he had punched her in the face and slapped her around,” recalls Nissenbaum. “He did that because she threw in his face the fact that he had been — as we put it in legalese — ‘f—king around.’”

Apparently his violent tendencies were not a one-time occurrence. According to Nissenbaum, the wife found out about her husband’s cheating ways through a newspaper story that reported he had been arrested for violating a restraining order his girlfriend had taken out against him.

“Thus, the divorce began,” the Boston lawyer says.

About six months into the proceedings, Nissenbaum recalls, the couple announced they were re-uniting against the advice of both attorneys. And approximately six months after that, the husband was again arrested, this time for allegedly plotting to have his wife killed.

“You can’t make this up, you see?” Nissenbaum says.

The husband reportedly had hired a hit man, offering him between $10,000 and $20,000 to kill the wife and then burn down the couple’s million-dollar home to make it look as if she had died in the fire. While he had the hit man at his disposal, the husband allegedly figured he would knock off the wife’s lawyer-friend as well — payback for having referred the wife to an attorney to initiate the divorce proceedings.

“As long as he had the hit man here, why not make maximum use of his talents?” Nissenbaum says.

Luckily for the wife, the hit man chickened out, going to the police and getting himself wired to entrap the plotting husband.

“He was ultimately arrested and charged,” Nissenbaum says. “I believe he pleaded guilty.”

Although Nissenbaum was no longer involved in the case after the couple reconciled, he says he assumes divorce proceedings began anew when the wife found out about her “loving” husband’s plot to have her killed. 

Going to the dogs

One of the more twisted cases veteran divorce lawyer Edwin C. Hamada has handled revolved around a couple’s four-legged “children.”

Calling it a case of “doggie custody,” Hamada says his client’s husband was seeking to prevent the wife from obtaining custody of even one of their two treasured Dobermans.

“The husband was willing to do the Solomon shtick and have the dogs put down rather than see her get one of them,” he says.

Although his client ended up with custody of both canines, Hamada says the husband’s irrational behavior is all too common in Probate & Family Court cases these days.

“I can’t imagine people doing this, and wonder how many would say, if they knew they could get away with it, ‘Put down the kids,’” Hamada says.

Asked if the tumultuous nature of his work ever seeps into his personal life, the 69-year-old attorney offers a sobering response.

“I’ve had three wives,” he says. “I still haven’t gotten it right.”

Jeannie Greeley, formerly a reporter for Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, is a Boston-based freelance writer. She can be contacted at jeannieg@comcast.net.