HELL HATH NO FURY
LIKE A BILLIONAIRE SCORNED
Chapter 26
I headed down to the bank and signed the signature card. Sandie’s banker, Scott Runyan, was a pencil-necked paper-pusher type –– a real paste-eater. His hair was deeply parted to the left side, and combed over like a 1950’s Norman Rockwell painting. What a cheese ball, I thought. I hated bankers.
“Scott, what’s the balance in the account right now?” I asked, curious to see if Sandie had kept her word.
“Hmmm… let me see.” He started clicking away on his keyboard. It seemed to take hundreds of keystrokes to pull up a bank balance. This was worse than checking in at the airport.
“Hmmm….” He squinted, studying the black screen in front of him.
“Oh, here it is. The balance is $406,000.32.” He wrote it down on the back of his business card, and gingerly set it on the desk in front of me.
I got up, shoved my hand towards him. “Thanks for all your help, Scott. Go ahead and rip up that signature card. I don’t need it” I said, squeezing his pale little hand until his face looked a little pained.
“Uh, yeah, thanks Mr. Baker. Have a good one!” he said, cheerily.
I filed for divorce later that day. Sandie was served with papers the next morning. Curiously, I didn’t hear from her. I half expected a phone call, a sobbing message, something.
Within 72 hours, all hell broke loose on my life, in a way that I could have never prepared for. I guess denying her offer of $20,000,000 was not the best idea.
The first call I got was from the girl at the riding arena where I kept my horses. She was frantic. “Adam, some men came by and took your horses, and all your saddles and tack. They said they were Sandie’s attorneys, and all the stuff belonged to her. I couldn’t stop them.” I went nuts; I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
I yelled at the poor girl for the next five minutes in a verbal tirade, berating her for letting it happen. Sandie knew that riding my horses was the one thing that I really enjoyed, so that was the first thing she wanted to take from me. I would have never thought Sandie would act like this. There was no reason this divorce shouldn’t be amicable. We both had gone our separate ways, and we knew it.
By the end of the day, my attorney received a five page letter from her attorneys stating that Sandie was “firing me” from my position at our ranch (my ranch!) and that I was no longer welcome at the property, or any of our properties, for that matter. In addition, Sandie would immediately cease paying for health insurance on Erik, Melanie, Brittney, Cody, and Korbin, and on me, and on any of the shared expenses she and I had created. The list of our intermingled properties, expenses, and assets was so long I couldn’t discern what every bit of the “letter” from the attorney meant, nor what the implications were long term. I basically understood it like this: Sandie wanted a war.
For the next two weeks, I received daily deliveries of various partial personal items from all of our homes –– my ski clothes from the Deer Valley house, my surfboard from Hawaii, my work boots, gloves, and cold weather gear from the ranch in Oregon. Each delivery would be accompanied with an email from Sandie, with statements like “Couldn’t bear to see your stuff at the ranch anymore” and “Didn’t think you’d need your surfboard since you won’t be going to the Hawaii house again.”
Her attorneys had gone into full combat mode by the end of the month, demanding to know our position and what assets we planned on fighting for, whether we were sticking to the prenup, etc. They immediately started collecting affidavits from everyone I knew. The most shocking of which was an affidavit supplied by my best friend, Aaron Rust.
My attorney Stephen called me as soon as it hit his inbox. “Adam, you have a real problem. We just got an affidavit signed by Aaron Rust. Some of the stuff in there is pretty damning to the case. Check your email and call me.”
I pulled up my email and opened the attachment. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. In his own words, Aaron had fabricated and twisted several of our “misadventures” into fantastical stories of me womanizing at Maxim parties and carrying on secret adulterous affairs all over the country.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. In fact, Aaron was the one who kept a piece of “pussy on the side” at every city we frequented. He’d often use his job working for Sandie and me as an excuse to get away from his wife and go out of town, even when he had the weekends off. I personally knew of at least 17 women Aaron had slept with since he’d worked for me, one of whom was my very own sister, Monet.
Aaron was a compulsive cheater. He’d confided to me about how his father came out of the closet when he was 17 years old, after being married for over 25 years. Aaron said he was tortured by the other kids in their small, religious community in Utah. The news had affected Aaron on many levels, and it was obvious that he was in a perpetual struggle to confront his own fears of homosexuality. He always talked about how glad he was he hadn’t “inherited “the gay gene” from his father.
To make up for this, he was constantly reaffirming to himself (and every other guy out there) that he was, in fact, heterosexual, by banging anything with a pulse. His wife, Jessie, was a great girl with a fun personality. They had two little boys, and from what I could tell, Jessie was a decent wife. I could never bring myself to say anything to her about Aaron’s womanizing, and I felt guilty about that over the years. It just wasn’t the way guys did things. Aaron’s affidavit was the first from many “friends” who started to choose sides in our rapidly dissolving marriage. Not surprisingly, I found that most of my so-called friends chose Sandie’s side (they all assumed there would be money in it for them) over a friendship with me.
Over the next few months, several of my “good time” buddies stopped coming around altogether. I guess they sensed the free ride was over, along with the “free vacations” and “free cruises” and “free dinners” they were all frequently treated to. It was a harsh reality to come to terms with. I always thought that these people genuinely liked being around me, and were true friends. Man, was I an idiot.
Things started to change, and my rapidly decreasing bank account couldn’t keep up with the lifestyle I’d become accustomed to. At first, I didn’t feel like I should have to adjust my lifestyle, so I racked up my line of credit and my cards to the max, pulled all my cash out of my stocks and investments, and continued living the “life” I’d been living for the past 6 years.
Jen and I travelled nonstop. We had flown the planes and helicopter all over the US, sometimes just for the sake of going. Every day was about having fun, escaping from the life back in Utah where Sandie’s “people” were constantly harassing us.
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