Liz Barry

How to name and

shame legally

THE MARRIAGE

When I first met my wife-to-be, Liz, I was 35, she was 20. I had a good job, my own house, and a pension to look forward to, I was inexperienced with women, and naive and trusting. By contrast, she hadn’t managed to hold down a job before she met me, had no exam  qualifications, and lied to me about both. I wasn’t bothered about her work or school background, but I was worried why she would lie to present herself as something she wasn’t.

Within a year of our marriage I discovered a love letter and confronted her with it. She admitted to having sex with at least 3 other men in the run-up to our wedding, one of whom was a man in his 60s, called Barney, whom she had planned to sleep with during the week before we married!

At the time we married, I actually thought she loved me. In  reality, I was an easy target for a gold-digger. I was a kind and gentle man she thought she could rely on not to make too much fuss when in time she would divorce me and strip me of everything. Her behaviour began to knock the kindness out of me from the beginning, and when she finally robbed me of my children and turned their hearts and minds against me I lost the ability to love altogether.

Liz Barry

THE DIVORCE

During the divorce proceedings, my wife’s mother let slip to the court welfare officers something which they felt sufficiently concerned about that they called me in, specifically to tell me what she had said: “the divorce had not worked out as intended.”  Intended?  So, there was a plan, and there was more than just my wife involved in it!                                         

So, in  what way did the divorce not work out as intended?

1/ For  a start, I was not someone who would give up my children without a fight. My wife completely misjudged me on that.

2/ Then she misjudged her own lawyer. Liz Barry didn’t bargain for the fact that when you hire the dirtiest lawyer in town, he is likely to do the dirty on you as well as on your opponent. He secured for her £100,000 of the equity from  the sale of our home. The court ordered specifically that this money was not to be used to pay legal costs, and was ring-fenced to buy a home for her and our children. Her lawyer managed to get round this, pocketed the money, and she and our children have remained in an over-crowded council flat ever since.

3/ Worst of all she thought that ruthlessly manipulating our children for her own ends would have no consequences. She poisoned their minds against me in an attempt to drive me from our home. Eventually she gave up and left, taking the children with her, after which I put it up for sale so she could have a share of  the equity to buy herself a house. She came round to thank me, and as she left she said that in return she would sort things out with our daughter so she would come to see me in future. I can still picture her saying this as she got into her car on the drive to leave.

I couldn’t believe how brazen she was, admitting to me that she had manipulated our daughter’s mind and emotions in order to get money from me. If she did try to undo the damage she had done, she didn’t succeed. 10 years on and I have not seen my daughter or eldest son since, and they remain implaccably hostile to me, without ever pointing to any substantial reason why. I doubt I shall ever see them again, such is the damage which Liz Barry greed for money inflicted on our children.

Her mother, when speaking to the welfare officers, seems to have wanted them to believe that her daughter had not done this deliberately. Perhaps she couldn’t face the truth herself: that her daughter had forever destroyed the bonds between me and my children in her sordid attempt to grab as much of my money as she could get.

Our approach to our children  was fundamentally different. To me, their future meant everything. I worked to provide a nice home for them. I wanted to spend all of my free time with them, to create a wide circle of  friends for them, to make then confident, intelligent, high achieving people. I felt thwarted at every turn. My wife didn’t pull her weight. Although she either didn’t work or worked part time, she made little effort to use her time to make our home warm and welcoming, or to create networks of friends for our children . When I came home from  work, I found I had to spend time tidying up, cooking, fixing things, time I would have preferred spending with our children., and my constant irritation with her made me less patient with our children.

Above all, it was paramount to me that our children came first. I would never have broken  up our home, and I couldn’t believe it when she did, putting her own emotional need to find another man before the needs of our children for a stable home.