The Aftermath
This is where Treva’s story starts to fall apart.
Treva claims that the physician recorded her injuries and sent her to a counselor, but a few seconds later, she claims that she was not referred to an advocate who could help her navigate the trauma she endured. Which is it? Did she have help or not?
Roughly three weeks later, she informed me that “as a faculty member at the university,” she had access to the “law clinic”. She had a lawyer (I did not). Treva and her lawyer dictated the content of the divorce papers, with little to no input from me. Nowhere in these papers did she claim that she was the victim of an abusive marriage. She made no attempt to get custody of the children from a man she now claims was violent and abusive, either in the initial divorce or either subsequent court action.
Why is that odd?
According to a 2012 snapshot of the University of Alabama’s webpage, the law clinic “takes a holistic approach to a victim’s civil legal needs, with the clinic student first representing the victim in obtaining a protection from abuse order and then, in order to meet the victim’s other legal needs, providing legal assistance in matters relating to divorce, custody and support, employment and debt issues, housing, property recovery, and public benefits.”
Treva claims that the “few resources” she was able to find on her own weren’t integrated enough to offer her good, sound advice about her rights. She claims she tried to file a police report but the officer refused to take it. No lawyer worth their degree would allow that to take place! Treva did file a police report, but it wasn’t “weeks” after like she claims in her video. She waited six years, and only did so after I took her to court over unpaid child support. Did they take her seriously six years later? They took her seriously enough to call me in for an interview. I complied fully with the investigation. I consulted emails and my journals when I got home and reached back out to offer more context for my accounting of events in the areas where my memory was incomplete.
They dropped the investigation three weeks later.
I don’t know why they dropped their investigation. I’m sure the suspicious timing of the report didn’t help her case. Treva agreed fairly early in the process that her support payment was probably too low, but she didn’t agree that the support should be back-dated to the court filing date. She seemed to believe that any delay in the case would reduce the amount she would ultimately have to pay. Why not roll the dice and see what the judge says?
The Apology
I never thought I would have to deal with any of this. The year after she left, Treva sent me the following email:
By this point, she had not lived in my home for a full year. She was living in North Carolina and had already started a relationship with a man that she told me was about 20 years her senior and, as she phrased it, a “pagan”. I never expected an apology, regardless of how warranted it was. (She also sent a similar message apologizing to my family members for the lies she told about me.)
What Did the Apology Cover?
In the summer of 2012, shortly after she left, Treva told her sister and brother-in-law that she was leaving me because I was gay. I'm not, and she knew that. She also knew her brother-in-law (we'll call him "Cletus") was just the kind of homophobic redneck who would take that news personally.
Cletus called and threatened to kill me the next time he saw me.
She didn't have to raise a hand against me or say a threatening word herself... She just planted the story and let him do the rest.
I wasn't thrilled with the accusation. I considered Cletus to be a friend (up until that point). I wasn't immediately worried, though. I lived a couple of hours away and, in addition to being a homophobic redneck, he was a perpetually unemployed homophobic redneck. I didn't expect him to pay for two tanks of gas just to do a little murdering.
My opinion changed in the summer of 2014.
Cletus sent me a friend request on Facebook, which I considered but declined. The optimistic side of me believed he simply wanted to bury the hatchet. The realist in me figured he wanted to bury it in my skull. Some statements can't be walked back!
Two days after he sent the friend request, Treva married Ed. Cletus didn't take this very well. Treva called to tell me that Cletus was arrested for threatening his wife and children at gunpoint. Several days later, we had this email exchange:
As an aside, wasn't it nice of her to say, "Please be safe"? "I know I caused all of this, but I want a paper trail to show that I'd feel bad if my words or actions led to a predictable outcome!"
She continued:
That's her pattern, though. She doesn't do her own dirty work. She recruits people that she can use—a homophobic brother-in-law, her sister, gullible lawyers and, eventually, the Tuscaloosa County Sheriff's Department—and lets them carry the consequences of whatever story served her purposes in the moment. The 2013 apology reads very differently once you know what she'd already set in motion the year before...
The 2014 threat is the primary contributing factor to our move from Tuscaloosa, and was one of the reasons we started meeting at the Alabaster Police Department instead of the Burger King parking lot.
My Shortcomings
I know I wasn’t perfect, but I never claimed to be. I worked over an hour away from home five days a week for eleven years, leaving most mornings before anyone else in the house was awake and arriving home late in the evening. After spending twelve hours in a highly stressful environment, I wasn’t always excited about “doing stuff” when I got home. Most nights, I just wanted to relax and play video games or watch TV.
She even admitted as much in a text message a month after the divorce.
I should have joined CrossFit with her. Maybe I should have tried to put my foot down when she joined, but she held all the power in the relationship. She controlled the finances. She made the big decisions about where we would live or what we spent our money on. For a long time, she only allowed me to be friends with the people at church whose wives she found tolerable. She was the one that wanted to adopt.
She’s the one that wanted to divorce.