Sometimes, those closest to you can shock you.

Like I imagine it would be pretty awful to discover your friend’s ex was leading a whole double life.

How far would you go for revenge?

Read on to find out how this woman was all in when it came to revenge on her mom’s bestie’s ex.

I ruined a man’s life

This happened about 4 years ago, but I recently found out how part of my revenge plan panned out, which is what prompted me to post this.

I have never shared this with anyone before.

For background, my mom has been best friends with “Eileen” (not her real name) since they were both kids, and Eileen has kind of been like an aunt to me.

About 5 years ago, Eileen’s husband of more than 25 years surprised her by asking for a divorce.

Eileen lived about six hours away from my mom at the time, and I lived out of state, so I didn’t find out how everything went down until a few months after their divorce was finalized.

Unfortunately, Eileen’s life kind of spiraled out of control after the separation/divorce.

She developed depression and a drinking problem.

But my mom and some other childhood friends were able to convince her to move back to her hometown, and then they convinced her to go to rehab.

Oh, this is so sad. I am so glad Eileen is getting help.

I moved back home shortly before Eileen went to rehab and, because my school/work schedule was pretty flexible, I was able to housesit and take care of some stuff while she was in rehab.

The first time I visited her in rehab, I got the whole divorce story, and it was bad.

Eileen’s ex, “Jeff’ (also not his real name), hadn’t talked to Eileen about any problems prior to asking for a divorce, so she just assumed he fell out of love with her.

But I was immediately skeptical about the things Eileen told me.

First, Jeff, who was an executive at a pharmaceutical company earning mid-six figures, was fired from his job a year before they split up and decided to take a break before looking for another job.

It was weird to me that Jeff decided to take a break from work because he’d always been such a workaholic.

Hm, that does seem fishy…

Eileen hasn’t worked in years because of a disability, but she has some property and a trust her parents left her that lets her live a comfortable life without working.

Jeff and Eileen lived off money from the trust while he was unemployed.

Then, after Jeff said he wanted a divorce, he refused to go to couple’s therapy or talk about why he wanted the divorce.

The only thing he would say was that they had grown apart and that he was sick of being with a woman like Eileen.

Wow, that is so ridiculously hurtful.

He said Eileen’s mother was right about her.

Eileen’s mother was a classic narcissist, and she bullied Eileen horribly about her attractiveness, weight, intelligence, etc., which caused a lot of psychological problems that Jeff knows about.

Finally, right after the divorce was finalized, Jeff moved out of state, but to a state he didn’t have any family or connections in.

Jeff’s parents are still alive and in their 80s/90s, and Jeff is pretty close to them, so it didn’t make any sense to me why Jeff wouldn’t move to be closer to them if he wanted to move after the divorce.

I didn’t say anything to Eileen because I didn’t want to upset her, but I thought Jeff might have been having an affair, had orchestrated his unemployment to avoid paying alimony, and then moved out of state to be with his mistress.

I just didn’t have a way to confirm it at the time.

Um, is she a genius?!

Then, Eileen asked me to look for a box of Jeff’s stuff he had asked her hold for him until he moved into his new apartment.

She told me all the info on the box, contents, and his new address was in an email he sent her, and she gave me the password to her computer so I could access the email.

This is where I lucked out.

It turns out Jeff had used her computer and set up his email on the computer.

I accidentally clicked on the app for his email when I was searching for Eileen’s email.

I decided to take a peek at his email.

The first thing I noticed was that he had mostly stopped using that email address three years before, which was about 1 year before he was fired.

In a folder for digital receipts I found a confirmation email for a dating site (either POF or match, I can’t remember which), which I think he saved there accidentally.

I also found a verification email for a new email address.

I started to put together a speculative timeline of what happened.

I guessed that about three years before, Jeff started an affair and shortly after, he decided to got a new email address to help keep the affair secret.

I wanted to access his dating profile to get more information, so I tried to use the “forgot password” feature to see if I could generate a email that would allow me to reset the password and log in that way.

Unfortunately, the dating site didn’t recognize Jeff’s old email address.

I thought I might be able to get into Jeff’s new email using his old email to reset the password, and then, maybe, I could use the new email to get into the dating website.

But I didn’t want to risk locking Jeff out of his new email and alerting him until I knew more about what he’d done.

And here’s where I totally lucked out— the email app Jeff downloaded to Eileen’s MacBook had a note feature, and super genius Jeff saved some passwords on Notes.

Classic Notes app…

Most of the passwords weren’t helpful, but I did get the password to the dating site and his Twitter and Netflix accounts.

I logged into the dating site using his new email address and the password.

I was able to read messages Jeff sent to another woman before he broke up with Eileen.

The new mistress sent Jeff her email address in one of the messages.

I searched Facebook for the mistress’s email address and found her profile.

I couldn’t read the mistress’s posts, but she left her photos public. She had recent photos of her and Jeff, so I knew they were still together.

She also posted a photo of a construction crew breaking ground on a new home for her and Jeff, which was interesting interesting because I got the impression from Eileen that Jeff didn’t have a lot of money after the divorce.

Here’s where my background is important.

At the time, I was attending law school (I moved back to my hometown for one semester for a legal residency), and I had access to Lexis’ database, specifically, their public records database.

I had spent a good portion of one of my summer internships tracking down property records and other assets to help recover judgments for clients, so I knew how to search for public records.

Ah, she is a genius and a lawyer!

The mistress had purchased several acres in a wealthy suburb several months before Jeff filed for divorce, and there was no mortgage listed on the record.

I’d already found the mistress’s LinkedIn page, so I knew she worked as an executive assistant before she moved out of state with Jeff.

She didn’t advertise her salary, but I doubted she could have afforded the property with her salary alone.

It’s possible she had money outside her salary, but I suspected Jeff gave her money to purchase the land before he filed for divorce.

I also found an updated record in Lexis showing Jeff and the mistress as joint owners of the property.

I called the county recorder office office to confirm ownership of the property, dates, etc.

The mistress had filed a quit claim just 5 weeks after Jeff’s divorce was finalized.

I was still hesitant to try to log into Jeff’s new email, so I decided to check his old email again to see if there was anything else I should investigate before moving to the new email.

I didn’t find anything, but I noticed that several passwords in his Notes were the same.

I decided to try to log into his new email using the same password he used for the dating site.

I figured the two accounts were created around the same time, so if he had recycled a password, that was the most likely candidate.

It worked.

His new email was a gold mine.

Because this story is already getting ridiculously long, I’ll list some of the relevant stuff I found:

-Jeff hadn’t been fired from his old job. He quit and lied to Eileen.

I found an email from his admin asking where to have payroll send his last check and details about a goodbye party for him.

-Some emails between Jeff and a boat repair person mentioning a leak somewhere on one side of the sailboat near the engine compartment.

The repair guy couldn’t find the source of the leak but he talked about current and future problems with mold and the engine on that side.

-Emails between Jeff and a boat broker, which included the email address of buyers farther down in the string.

-An emailed report from the boat inspector which didn’t include the leak or any mold damage or potential damage to the engine.

-Emails between Jeff and his contractor about changes made to the new house’s sun room (something about a 3 season sunroom vs a 4 season sunroom and the construction needing to be modified to deal with the weight of snow).

-Emails between Jeff and the mistress. They had married.

-The mistress/Jeff shared a calendar.

-Some flirty emails between Jeff and another woman.

-Emails with info on Jeff’s new employer.

I downloaded all the important emails and their attachments and started thinking about a revenge plan.

If she is anything, they are organized!

To my mind, everything was fair game.

He lied about being fired, so I wanted him fired from his new job.

I suspected he hid his money before his separation from Eileen to help pay for his new house, so I wanted him to lose his house.

He cheated, so I wanted to destroy his new relationship.

Anything I could do about the boat was a bonus.

The easiest place to start was the boat.

I had no idea if the source of the leak was found & repaired or if the leak was verbally disclosed to the buyer, but I figured Jeff was a lying jerk so odds were fair he hid the info from the new buyer.

I sent the emails between Jeff and the repairman and another copy of the inspection to the buyer.

I searched Jeff’s county court website 5/6 months later and found out the buyers filed a suit against Jeff (and the broker and inspector).

Ha!

Wow, what’s it like observing your revenge through the internet!

I couldn’t figure out how to take or destroy Jeff’s house, so I settled for contacting the county inspector’s office to complain about the sunroom not being up to code.

This is actually what prompted me to write this post because I just found out some details about what happened with the county inspectors.

(Keep in mind, I heard about this from a third party years after the fact, so I don’t know all the details).

It turns out the sunroom was code compliant, but the inspector did find a workshop/workroom attached to the detached garage that wasn’t on the original permit/plans.

The workshop had a bathroom that the contractor attached to the property’s septic system after the initial inspection.

A mutual friend of Eileen and Jeff’s told Eileen and me, and he guessed this was a big deal because the size of the septic system they installed wasn’t sized to handle the additional…input, but I don’t know for sure.

Jeff had to pay a fine and the workshop had to be removed.

This ended up causing construction delays, which will become relevant below.

As for destroying Jeff’s marriage, my first impulse was to send the new wife the flirty emails between Jeff and the other woman, but when I searched for that woman on social media, I couldn’t find anything.

I had no way of knowing if the new wife knew the other woman and would think that the emails weren’t important or evidence of an affair.

Then, I played around with the idea of updating Jeff’s dating profile and sending stuff to his wife.

But it would take too long to manufacture a fake relationship with real dates and times, and I was worried that Jeff might get an email alert from the dating site that would clue him in.

I ended up just risking that the new wife wouldn’t know the other woman.

I pretended to be someone concerned about an affair between Jeff and the new woman.

Overall, I kept the accusation vague, but I did say Jeff and the new girl went out to eat and to the movies on a few dates Jeff’s shared calendar said the new wife was out of town.

I couldn’t come up with a way to get Jeff fired.

I rechecked his email and calendar over several weeks looking for something I could use to get him fired.

Eventually my legal residency got too busy to devote much time to revenge, so I decided to just let it go.

Yep, ya gotta pick your battles.

Eileen recently reconnected with a friend she shared with Jeff, and that friend gave Eileen an update on Jeff.

Eileen shared the details with me, and that’s what reminded me of what I did and prompted this story.

It turned out that I didn’t need to worry about sabotaging Jeff’s career.

By luck, the woman Jeff had been emailing was actually his assistant at his new job, and Jeff’s new boss was his brother-in-law.

Jeff and his new wife actually moved to her hometown so she could be close to her family, and so Jeff could go to work for his new brother-in-law.

I have no idea if Jeff actually was cheating.

He told the mutual friend that passed this story onto Eileen that they hadn’t been having an affair.

It didn’t matter to new wife, though. Because she and Jeff got together when Jeff was already married, she didn’t have a lot of trust for Jeff.

She didn’t believe Jeff’s denials when I sent the email about him having an affair.

She filed for divorce. And Jeff’s brother-in-law boss fired him.

And since the construction was delayed the new house wasn’t finished when Jeff and new wife divorced.

They had to sell an unfinished home, and Jeff took a big financial hit.

Finally, these weren’t part of my larger revenge plan, but I am pretty petty, so I:

-took the box of Jeff’s stuff (mostly photographs) and threw them away. I told Eileen they must have been lost in the move.

-signed both of Jeff’s email addresses for a bunch of spam, newsletters, mailing lists, etc.

-deleted his Netflix watchlist

-posted, retweeted, and liked a bunch of porn on his Twitter account and deleted all the accounts he was following

Wow, she is really devoted…

I never told Eileen what I did because I wanted her to have plausible deniability, and I didn’t want to interfere with her recovery.

She doesn’t know about the boat lawsuit or the Netflix/Twitter stuff, but she did take satisfaction from his divorce and job loss.

I probably would have let it all go if Jeff had just cheated because I had always really liked Jeff.

I always thought he was nice, but I was obviously wrong about him.

Nice people don’t weaponize childhood trauma to mentally torture their wives.

As far as I’m concerned, Jeff deserved everything I did to him.

This was a three-parter!

What does Reddit say about this revenge tale?

Readers were genuinely concerned about her breaking the law with this one.

Others relished in the Netflix revenge.

People couldn’t help but ask about the legality of all this.

It was a comment that kept coming up.

Others questioned this lawyer’s ethics and future in law.

This revenge went too far.

Ultimately, she should’ve stayed in her lane and let others deal with this situation.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.