Legal fees from abusive and contentious divorce

Hi, my name is Sarah, and I am in the middle of a nasty divorce after 20 years of marriage. During my marriage, I was subjected to physical, verbal, emotional, and financial abuse. In addition, my husband cheated on me during our marriage, and he ultimately abandoned me and our 3 children.

During our separation he played head games with me, telling me he wasn’t sure what he wanted and he just needed time to figure things out. This turned out to be a lie, as I found out that he had a girlfriend and she was pregnant.

I told him I wanted a divorce, and initially he agreed and said he would file, as he controlled the finances. We had started several businesses together during our marriage, including an auto body shop and a business flipping houses. But even though I worked at both businesses, he would not give me money for household expenses, so I had to maintain a full time job in addition to working at our businesses in order to make ends meet and pay the bills.

However it soon became glaringly obvious that this was yet another delay tactic, and he had no intention of filing for divorce. He still needed me for the businesses, as I handled all the paperwork side of things, which were things he simply didn’t understand. So he expected me to still work at the business, while giving me nothing for support for the kids.

I agreed to help with the accounting and the paperwork as long as he paid me for my time, as I figured that this would at least help me out financially and I would hopefully be able to save enough to hire a lawyer. However as time went on, he became verbally and emotionally abusive when I was at my full time job if I didn’t drop everything to take care of whatever he needed.

The final straw came when he was driving our youngest daughter to school and she asked him if he was going to marry his girlfriend. We are not sure what took place in the car, but it resulted in her going into school and telling her teacher that she wanted to kill herself. The school had me take her for a psych evaluation and because she had been thinking about suicide she was hospitalized for 5 days. At this point, after multiple incidents of disturbing behavior towards his children, including physical altercations with his oldest, I decided to get a restraining order, as he was planning to pull our daughter out of the psychiatric hospital as he did not believe in therapy for mental health.

I was able to get a restraining order against him as well as supervised visitation. He has only seen the kids a few times, as he balks at having to be supervised and thinks he should be able to see his kids whenever and however he wants. I was also able to finally hire a lawyer after I got my tax refund last year. However he has used the court system to delay and obstruct things as much as possible.

Over the last year I have paid my lawyer over $14,000 and I am now out of money. The restraining order is up in 2 weeks, and we are no closer to divorce. I am pretty sure he is just biding his time until the restraining order is lifted and he can start harassing me again.

The law in my state says we have to go through mediation before we can go to court, and my lawyer needs an additional $3,000 from me for mediation and when that fails, or when he decides to delay the process further we will have to go to court and it will be an additional $10000 for court, this does not include that I currently owe my lawyer $1160.00. Even if I could pay this I’m fairly certain that he will continue to delay, and without a restraining order I’m scared of what this could mean for my girls and I.

I’m embarrassed to ask for money as I’ve always been able to pay my own way and take care of my girls, even without my husband’s help. But I desperately need help if we are going to be able to continue to fight and gain our freedom.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and if you can help I would be forever grateful