Ex-Wife Sends 'Bum' Checks for 'Adult Child Support'

Who says divorce has to be civil?
By Polly Davis Doig,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 20, 2015 7:39 AM CST
Ex-Wife Sends 'Bum' Checks for 'Adult Child Support'
Paying alimony doesn't mean one has to be happy about it.   (Shutterstock)

Love might be a battlefield, but divorce for one New Jersey couple adds a definite element of playground free-for-all: As the Daily Record reports, Francis and Diane Wagner divorced in July 2014, with the latter agreeing to pay the "nonworking" former $186.04 a week for six years in order to get out of the 10-year marriage, as she didn't have money to afford a divorce trial. Diane Wagner is now fighting cancer and says she's financially strapped, though a judge dismissed her motion to reduce alimony payments, which she says she pays "religiously." She also religiously fills in the memo line of the weekly checks with notes such as "bum," "loser," and "alimony/adult child support." Francis Wagner, apparently unamused and fragile, is suing her for harassment and infliction of emotional distress.

"As far as I'm concerned I can write anything I want on the memo line because it's a note to myself," Diane Wagner tells the Daily Record. "I was the victim in that marriage. What more blood does he want from me?" She says she learned this spring that her ex's law firm had posted a check with her surname redacted to Facebook crowing that "we put a stop to that harassment." Months later, she says, the firm sent her a cease-and-desist claiming that "your writings are causing my client severe emotional distress and have led to him having sustained heart attacks in recent weeks." Wagner subsequently altered her tactics, filling in the memo line with "FOAD," which she says is an innocent notation to herself and not the rather more colorful acronym for "F*** off and die" one might imagine. (More divorce stories.)

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