Her Boyfriend Cheated On Her And Broke Up With Her, So She Made Sure He Paid The Price For Years To Come

Matthew Gilligan

7 months ago

Source: Reddit/AITA/Unsplash/@harlynkingm

Just a heads-up…

You’re either gonna think this woman is totally awesome…or you’re gonna think that she’s a total psychopath.

There is no in between!

Check out what she did after her ex-boyfriend did her dirty.

Start now!

I ruined my ex-boyfriend’s life 20+ years ago and I just made sure it stayed ruined.

“When I was in college in the 90s, I met “Jake” (then M23) through mutual friends.

He had already graduated and was planning to move to the opposite side of the United States for grad school and I had already been making plans to move with friends only a 90 minute drive away from where he was moving to.

It all seemed so perfect…

We had so much in common, fell in love and it really seemed like fate, both planning to move 3,000 miles and landing so close together. He had two sisters and a younger brother who were all awesome people and I became instant friends with them as well.

Because he was in school and I was working, I would usually go to him to hang out on weekends. He was renting a house with 2 roommates, also in his program.

We were young so money was tight but we had fun, went for taco dates and spent a lot of time at his house where he was breeding and selling small animals. Jake was an animal sciences PhD student so being around animals was normal and I loved it.

I met and became friends with his advisor’s wife (“Mary, F mid-50s) who worked in administration at the university. She is a lovely woman and I would often have lunch with her when I went over on weekends.

Jake was a teaching assistant (TA) and I met other people in the program and made friends with them faster than he did.

Then Jake said it…

After about 2 years of dating, I was at the house one day, laying in bed together, in a state of some undress and he said out of the blue, he was concerned I’d been gaining weight and it made it harder for him to be attracted to me.

No concern about my health, it was all about him finding me unattractive. I sat up and said, well, then maybe you should make sure there is better food for me to eat than crackers and cheese when I come up on weekends. Even at 23, I didn’t take that kind of garbage. I had gained MAYBE 10 pounds since meeting him two years earlier and still wore the same size clothes (about a US size 6-8).

I wasn’t going to engage in a fight about it after all, it was his problem, not mine, so I asked him calmly, so what is your solution to this? He stared at me blankly and said well, I guess that you should try to lose weight and I said, nah, I’m not going to do that so what are YOU going to do about it.

He said, well, I guess nothing, I wanted to let you know how I feel and I said, cool, thank you, put my clothes back on, went to sleep and drove home the next day as usual.

Things came to a head.

We keep dating and about 3 months later he called me and said he wanted to break up after close to 3 years. The reason AND I QUOTE “You don’t know enough about science”. He felt like he couldn’t have a conversation with me about his work where he didn’t have to use common names for animals instead of scientific ones.

I said, well, that’s a lie, what’s the real reason. He said it was the real reason. He came to see me a month later to return something of mine and I confronted him, demanding the real reason. He finally admitted he had been seeing one of his undergrad students, let’s call her Meg, a 19 year old. He was then 26 and her teacher.

I screamed at him to leave, my roommate threated to throw him off our second floor balcony if he didn’t go and he left. It hit me all at once after he walked out and I went from rage to stunned laughter. I’d met Meg a few times and at one point, she was at his house for a BBQ and spilled something all over her pants.

Jake asked me if I could loan her some sweats. I couldn’t because I was a size 8 and she was a size 18. Nothing wrong with that, AT ALL, but the point is, I realized he made those comments about my weight to try and get me to break up with HIM because he was a coward.

It didn’t make much sense.

He clearly liked a big gal. Although, when he’d said those things to me about my weight it was 1 am, I lived about 95 miles away and we had just had *** so I don’t know how he thought this would go, even in hindsight, it’s perplexes me.

Did he think I was going to break up with him and storm off into the night and drive for an hour and a half?

ANYWAY, I emailed his roommates, it was the early 2000s, it’s how you communicated anything you didn’t want to say on the phone. I wanted to let them know we’d broken up and that they were always lovely to me and thanked them for being friends.

They both admitted they knew about Meg and were the ones to demand that Jake tell me or they would. That’s when he broke up with me with the lame, you don’t understand science excuse. One of his roommate, a super nice, super cute guy named “George” offered to help me get a few things still at their house that he had collected for me away from around the house.

He suggested I come up for the weekend, we go out and drink and have a good time, all the things Jake didn’t want to “waste” money on and I said sure!

She knew a secret.

So I went up and George let me into the house while Jake was gone. I took photos of all of his animals because while I might not be a PhD student, I paid attention and I knew he had an endangered species in his care. He wasn’t breeding it, it was an un-releasable animal he had taken in from a rescue organization.

There was paperwork he had to submit with a $25 fee and he refused to do it, saying he didn’t want the government in his business. I took photos of that animal, all his breeding conditions and a photo of an animal not allowed in the state which was in a tank, right next to a window and visible from outside.

I then went out for a night on the town with George. We stumbled in early, around midnight so Jake and Meg who were watching TV would see me in a short dress, intoxicated and George practically carrying me. I spent the night in George’s room.

He was a total gentleman but made sure to leave the room and parade past them in his boxers a few times and we giggled and moaned loudly so they could hear us.

That didn’t go over well…

When I went to leave the next morning, Jake said I didn’t have to act like a ***** in front of him as I ate a donut slowly in my rumbled dress with messy hair while George beamed at me and then planted a kiss on my head.

Meg looked ashamed, not quite knowing where to look and I said have fun with my leftovers and walked out. I wanted to think the petty, loud, “hook up” and a few juvenile insults was my “revenge”. It was not.

It was time to put Jake in his place.

The next day I had my photos developed (ahhh, the good old days) and called the state office of Fish and Wildlife. I reported the animals in the house, the potential over-crowding of breeding animals and the two animals he shouldn’t legally have at all in the state and asked them how to make a report.

Turns out Jake wasn’t well liked by his peers in his program, or by his roommates but I was! George had suggested that he and their other roommate could submit complaints to the University that a TA was sleeping with one of his students and showing her favoritism.

The night we were out at the bars, we made sure to tell the story to anyone who they knew. They made sure all the women in his classes knew he was sleeping with Meg.

It wasn’t a large program so people knew fast he had cheated and was now dating his student. George and the other roommate made sure people knew they had put in complaints, sick of Jake’s entitlement.

With my full statement made and photos sent to the state wildlife officials, I called my friend Mary, Jake’s advisor’s wife. She knew about the break up and lame reason and I let her know he admitted he was sleeping with a student.

I’d been emailing with him and he admitted to it in writing so I sent that to Mary. To say she was not happy about that was an understatement. She said she made sure it would be investigated and told her husband, Jake’s direct advisor while I was on the phone with her.

Her plan was working.

Speaking of investigations, a few weeks later George called me, giddy, to say state Fish and Wildlife officials were there, confiscating animals. He told them he would be happy to tell them whatever they needed to know.

Meg was there when it happened and told the officials as far as she knew, all the animals belonged to her boyfriend Jake and that they were all legal. That put George and the other roommate in the clear. One animal was kept in the backyard so it was implied to Jake that a neighbor reported it.

While they were there to investigate, they knew to look in the back window to see the far more problematic, illegal to have in the state under nearly any circumstances, animal.

Since George was on the lease, he was able to let them in to investigate in the house. The animals were all in communal areas and the officers stayed there for a few hours and returned with a warrant to take all the animals and enter Jake’s room to investigate.

George and the other roommate let them into their rooms with no issues and were quickly cleared. Meg apparently couldn’t get a hold of Jake and eventually drove to the University to find him. Remember, no cell phones yet! It was a good day. The only animals they left was some guppies in a fish tank.

She wasn’t done yet.

Now, PhD students need grant money to do research and a large part of animal studies funding comes from the federal government. Jake had just gotten an EPA grant right around when he broke up with me. So I called the EPA and asked how I would report that a person with a federal grant was being investigated for illegally harboring endangered animals.

Long story short, he lost his EPA grant and had to make restitution on what had already been used, close to $30,000. He would never be able to get another federal grant.

He avoided jail time on the state charges since all the animals were in good health but lost all his breeding animals (worth thousands of dollars) since they were collected for safe keeping during the investigation when the two illegal animals were taken.

In the end, he owed a $15,000 fine and the two animals went to a nearby nature center. For years, I would stop by if I was in the area to visit them!

Things went from bad to worse for Jake.

The university revoked his scholarship and fired him from teaching for having an inappropriate relationship with a student.

He somehow escaped being expelled but it always shocked me that he never tried to hide the relationship with Meg and was so stupidly self assured he didn’t even wait the 4 weeks until she would have been done with his class to start publicly dating her.

By the University rules, he would have been in the clear to date her, not being her teacher anymore and she would just have to avoid any classes he was a TA in. It never fails to make me laugh.

After a few months, I emailed his sisters and told them I missed them because Jake broke up with me after trying to call me fat and cheating on me and I felt weird contacting them. The girls told me he told the family I broke up with him because of the distance.

Oh, boy…

I forwarded them emails that Jake wrote after the breakup, talking about how he fell for Meg and he was sorry about it but it was true, I couldn’t keep up with him academically and it made him attracted to Meg.

Jake managed to convince his dad to pay for one more year of school so he could get a Master’s instead of a PhD and while I stayed in contact with his sisters and brother via email and then social media, I largely let it all go. I got even, made some friends, Mary became like an auntie to me and I went on with life.

I went on to get a master’s degree myself and my specialty? Helping scientists and doctors communicate their work to lay people. You know, us dummies who can’t remember all the scientific names.

I swear, it happened by accident, not design but I love it and I work with everyone from small town doctors and nurses to pharmaceutical companies to museums to state and federal governments to film and TV producers. I travel a lot and speak and get to learn a lot of cool things about our planet and how things work.

I knew through his siblings that Jake and Meg got married and had 2 kids. Meg dropped out of the sciences and became an accountant, Jake went back to breeding animals.

Every once and awhile, his sisters or brother would tell me something over for lunch or via text but we had our own relationship that exists outside of him.

Apparently when I sent a wedding gift for one of his sisters he loudly complained at a co-ed bridal shower that all of his siblings still were my friend and didn’t make an effort to embrace his now wife, Meg. Apparently the sister just laughed and said, I don’t make it a habit to be friends with homewreckers.

This is how Jake’s parents found out how their relationship started and ours ended, 10 years after we broke up.

Jake never found out I was behind reporting him to the state and in the end, I didn’t lie about a single thing, except maybe exaggerating an intoxicated make out session with George who is now a successful and tenured professor with a lovely wife and daughters.

She wasn’t done yet!

Fast forward about 20 years to a few weeks ago. I was at a university giving a lecture to a room of 250 undergrad and grad students. In the end, I was mingling with the student afterwards and I hear a voice say, hey , long time no see and I realize it’s Jake and I didn’t change the expression on my face, at all.

I was completely shocked and my instinct was to play dumb! So I said, I’m sorry, help me out, have we met at another workshop or lecture? He looked incredulous and said, it’s me Jake and I said, I can’t place you but I would love to figure it out.

Finally I gasped and said, oh my goodness, Jake! I guess I blocked you out and said, well, lovely to see you and moved on quickly when he tried to reach out and hug me.

I was happy to leave it there, with the satisfaction of him seeing me as a guest lecturer in a science department of a major University when he was just in the audience.

The department chair and faculty who had invited me to speak took me out to dinner and while there, one of them said, so you know Jake? I said, I did from over 20 years ago, being vague about how.

She went on to tell me he had been there for an interview for a teaching position and had spent a few days there observing and they were likely going to hire him.

She couldn’t help herself.

I couldn’t control it, I scoffed. When they all looked at me I said, I’m sorry, I’m just shocked he’s teaching after what happened at University X. They said what happened and I said, he was sleeping with a 19 year old student when he was 26 and he had to leave the program without a PhD because he couldn’t afford to stay after losing his scholarship.

The three people I was with all looked at each other like they knew they had a problem and said, wow, we’ll have to look into that and changed the subject.

My old friend Mary (retired a year or 2 now but still friendly with her old collages) called me this weekend to say a friend at the university let her know someone had called doing a background check about Jake and they pulled his file which included being fired, leaving the program with a lower degree and the complaint letters from over 20 years ago about his conduct.

Mary’s name had been on it with her husband listed as the faculty advisor, so she thought she’d like to know. As a bonus, it had a copy of his arrest record for the illegal animals.

I guess his dad had paid for a decent lawyer to get the record expunged after the charges were reduced and he paid the fines so it doesn’t show up on a standard background check.

I don’t think he’s going to get that job.

So I will return to my life, content that the universe comes through sometimes, especially if you give it a little nudge now and then. The best revenge is when you don’t have to do anything wrong, you just have to help direct knowledge to the right places.

If there is anything I can impart to any young women and men reading this, as I shimmy happily into my now size 10 pants, it’s that, if someone who is supposed to love you complains about your weight or looks, that is their problem to fix mentally, not yours and maybe it’s time to check out what they are doing behind your back or simply move on.

Remember though, it is their flaw, not yours. If Jake hadn’t been a coward and tried to make me break up with him and just ended things with me in a mature way, I might not have found out about Meg and turned his own wickedness back on himself.”

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This reader thinks she needs to get over it…