When you are young, you don’t always make the best decisions, especially when it comes to who you are dating.

What would you do if the PhD student you are dating ends up cheating on you with a student of his and lying to you about it in the process?

That is what happened to the woman in this story, so she shined a light on a bunch of shady stuff he was doing, so he lost his scholarship and job, but that is just the beginning.

Read on to get the very satisfying revenge story.

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.

We had so much in common, fell in love and it really seemed like fate, both planning to move 3000 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.

She loved hanging out with Jake.

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.

She also got along with Jake’s advisor’s wife.

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.

He made a huge mistake – commenting on her weight!

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 talk.

She did a great job not letting his comments get to her.

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.

He called to break up with her.

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 dumb, what’s the real reason.

He is absolutely lying.

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.

She was obviously furious!

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.

She realized he had wanted to break up a long time ago.

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.

He clearly liked a big gal.

Although, when he’d said those things to me about my weight it was 1am, I lived about 95 miles away and we had just slept together 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?

She emailed Jake’s roommates.

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.

George was really nice.

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!

So I went up and George let me into the house while Jake was gone.

She took lots of pictures.

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.

George and OP rubbed their relationship in Jake’s face.

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, drunk 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.

When I went to leave the next morning, Jake said I didn’t have to act like that 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.

That wasn’t even the revenge.

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.

Time for the REAL revenge…

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.

George and OP spread the word.

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 entitled BS.

She also called Mary.

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.

George has more good news.

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.

They didn’t know who reported it.

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.

They took almost all the animals.

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.

Here’s the deal on grant money…

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 didn’t go to jail.

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!

He got what he deserved!

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.

Jake had lied to his family about the breakup.

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.

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.

She got her master’s degree.

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.

It seems like in the long run life worked out okay for everyone.

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.

He just can’t get past this mistake.

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 a drunken make out session with George who is now a successful and tenured professor with a lovely wife and daughters.

She ran into Jake and pretended she didn’t know him.

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?

I bet the look on his face was priceless!

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.

She had another opportunity to get revenge.

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.

I couldn’t control it, I scoffed.

He probably won’t get the job.

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.

Mary called with an update.

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.

They will definitely not hire him now.

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.

Here’s the takeaway…

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.

Wow, this revenge went on for a very long time and that is just what cheaters deserve.

Let’s read what the people in the comments on Reddit had to say.

This person hopes the story is fake.

Here is someone that says she needs to get a life.

This person thinks she needs therapy.

Her revenge might have been over the top.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.