Help fight judicial bias against fathers

****PLEASE NOTE: LEVELS AT BOTTOM ARE ONLY SUGGESTIONS! DONATIONS OF ANY AMOUNT ARE APPRECIATED****

Abstract:  As I realize that this is incredibly long, I'll summarize and you can read the whole thing if you desire

1.  Wife does drugs, habitually cheats.

2.  I file for divorce and custody.

3. Justice system wants to just hand custody to mother

4. I may be able to beat the system if I have enough money

5. Being a male does not make me a worse parent.  It does not make me less nurturing, or empathetic, or compassionate.

6. Again: "levels" at the bottom are SUGGESTIONS.  If you can only donate 1$, donate 1$.  I am deeply appreciative for all donations.  The levels are just incentives.

In October of 2009 I married the woman of my dreams; vivacious, funny, smart and so on.  She was pregnant with our daughter whom she gave birth to in November.  We moved into our new house in May and everything seemed to be going well.  Then, one night in February of 2011, I couldn't sleep.  I went upstairs to use the computer and my wife had left her Skype open.  The conversation was ongoing and was between her and a guy who she met playing video games.  It detailed how they were going to meet up when I went to visit my friend for his wedding, among other more explicit messages.

I typed in, "It's your husband.  We need to talk."

So she swears up and down that it's just fantasy, nothing was ever going to really happen.  I believe her because at this time I didn't really know any better.  I give her the benefit of the doubt.  But then it happens again about three months later.  I discover she's chatting with some other guy she met while playing video games.   Pictures were exchanged (the nsfw variety), messages sent, the usual.  She says again, it's just fantasy.

We write countless emails, back and forth, her saying, "What have I done!?", me saying, "It's ok, we all make bad choices, the key is to learn from them!"  Her crying, me consoling.  Just the way she likes it.

In June of 2012 she tells me that she's been cheating on me with the guy who has been supplying cocaine to her.  She also tells me how she has been stealing drugs from work (she's a nurse) and using them (and I'm not talking just Ibuprofen or Milk of Magnesia, I mean Oxycontin, Dilaudid, the prescription pain killers).  I draft up a contract that says I will stay and help if you meet these conditions for 1 year; 1. No more cheating.  2. No more drugs, 3. More interaction with the kids and family, and 4. Fix your finances (She made ~65k/year or more but resented having to pay more in bills each month than I did so she had almost 1.5k in overdraft charges because when the charges eventually DID come out they were for 3 or 4 times the original amount (ie. RGE: one month was roughly 100 dollars.  She'd not pay it for 4 months and then get hit with a 400 dollar fee in one month).  We still have a deficit at our daycare from the times she didn't pay which I am slowly paying off at 100$/month. 

My birthday rolls around, she buys me no gift.  Her birthday rolls around I buy her a 2000$ trip to New Orleans that I can't afford but I just vainly hope that she will see I'm trying.  That even though I don't have that much money I'm willing to go into debt for her "“ which is something she had actually stated she desired previously.   In October she starts going out at nights, 2-3 times a week.  Some nights she doesn't come home.  We get in arguments where she states, "I feel like you're trying to be my father!"  I don't know what to do.  I start to talk about divorce. 

This all comes to a head when one day she claims she is working.  My mom was picking up our daughter from daycare but I had forgotten to leave the carseat.  As the hospital that my wife worked at was directly across the street from the daycare, I told my mom to just go across the street and get my wife to give her the carseat from her car.  However, it turns out she never showed up for work that day.  She had been called off.   Numerous texts/phone calls go unanswered (worth mentioning that she guards this thing like fort Knox.  It is never not within 2 feet of her person so I'm guessing it was on a nightstand somewhere turned off/ignored).  Eventually I have to leave work early to go drop off the carseat. 

Of course it's not that easy, she claims that we can work things out and I'm sort of wishy washy on the whole concept of how to go about doing it (Lawyers? Mediators? How to get the forms?) so things progress to the point where I say I should stay until at least after Christmas so the kids can have one more good Christmas.  The day before Thanksgiving we have our family Thanksgiving.  Afterwards she gets all dressed up and goes to a house party with her sister instead of spending the evening with her family.  The next day an argument ensues.  She receives a text from some guy she "met at a bar whose wife cheated on him" and she wanted to know, "How he forgave her." I say that's not OK, we fight, she goes upstairs to break my computer (her time honored past time when things start going South between us).  I take a video of this, she flips out and runs down into the bathroom.  When I follow she attacks me, stabbing me with a fork, kicking me in the balls, trying to headbutt me.  Eventually I restrain her until she calms down.  Then she gets up and takes a bunch of prescription pills and drives off as I'm on the phone with 911 telling them my wife is trying to kill herself. 

She's discharged from the hospital 4 days later.

She goes out to the strip club the following night.

After the Christmas holiday I move out.  She goes to Montreal a week later to have a drug fueled sex romp with a guy she met, of course, playing video games.  She loses her job because someone calls drug compliance and reports her.  She claims she quit because it was a witch-hunt.  To now I've sort of been in denial about how bad things really are for her.  How unable she is to manage her life well and deal with the stresses that life throws at us.  Her solution to everything is to just bury herself in her addictions; sex, drugs, video games, shopping, etc. and wait for it all to end.  But after she loses her job it finally clicks "“ this is not someone who should have any interaction with kids, let alone my own.  I don't trust her to be anywhere near my child. 

I have a safe and loving home for my daughter.  We play games, go outside, color, take pictures, and I try to assert some semblance of order into what is an incredibly confusing time for her.  I do not bad mouth my wife (although she coaches my daughter to say some terrible things during her supervised visitation ("Mommy said you just took me away from her!")), and try to remain positive and upbeat around her at all times.  I'm thankful that for the interim until this all gets sorted out, my mother has agreed to let me stay with her and has been endlessly helpful.  I'm also thankful that my friends and family were able to scrape together the 3,500$ for the retainer for the lawyer.  However, I got my first bill and things aren't looking good.

I've used up 1,500$ of that retainer before we even went to court.  The legal system is biased towards mother and I'm also the accuser so the burden of proof rests with me.  While I do have lots of text messages, pictures, videos, intercepted emails, etc that can help me win my case (and after the first hearing there is a ray of hope), I'm naïve to think I can outspend her or resolve the case before the 3,500$ retainer is used up.  Her parents are blind to the monster their daughter truly is and have decided to bankroll her cause.  They are wealthy, affluent, and deluded.

We had our first court date mid-February and things went fairly well.  The referee (I am not sure if he's a judge or not) determined that at least until the next court date it would be supervised visits twice a week (I maintain custody for now) for her.  The next step is to compile all of the evidence that she is an unfit mother to show the lawyer that is assigned to my daughter.

So in closing, please, help me secure my daughter's future where she belongs - in a happy, healthy, engaged, home.  Not a den of drugs where she will be neglected, placed in front of the TV for hours at a time while her mother plays video games looking for her next score.