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Mental and Physical Cruelty

David Siegel: Let’s talk about the big ones that people of Chicago have hard times with: mental cruelty and physical cruelty. What are those grounds all about, and how do you prove them?

Jesse Barrientes: Mental and physical cruelty – and typically, when we do a petition, because we don’t know what’s going to happen – nobody’s going to agree and say that I’ve been mentally or physically cruel, and we do irreconcilable differences as an alternative ground. But let’s start with physical cruelty. I think that’s kind of explanatory – physical, that means, hey, I’ve abused you physically during the course of the marriage.” That could mean that I’ve beat you or I’ve slapped you or anything else.

We have probably another show where we can talk about orders of protection and domestic violence issues, and that transcends and gets into, crosses over the boundaries of civil and criminal, kind of court. You know, if somebody hit a spouse, you could certainly be charged with domestic battery, which is a crime. And so if you get into other things – so physical cruelty would refer to that physical aspect, and you would prove it by your testimony.

David Siegel: What about the less obvious one, where it’s a little bit tougher to prove, and that being extreme and repeated mental cruelty? What is that all about and what does it entail?

Jesse Barrientes: Mental cruelty is one of those interesting grounds. To be quite honest, I think that pretty much all of us have experienced some mental cruelty to some extent or another, and again, that also has to be without cause or provocation on the part of the other spouse. Those could be things where I berate you, and I tell you that you’re no good, and I tell you that you’re useless, and I don’t appreciate the domestic things that you’ve done around the house – you’ve watched over the kids, you’ve taken care of me and cleaned the house and cooked the meals, and I berate you. I also think – and we’ll talk about this other ground, adultery – I think that if you committed adultery and I know about this and you’ve flaunted it in front of me, I think that certainly would be a form of mental cruelty.

David Siegel: Right. How about some of the lesser ones, habitual drunkenness?

Jesse Barrientes: I think that’s pretty much self-explanatory there.

David Siegel: What about a communicable disease?

Jesse Barrientes: Well, that may or may not cross into the grounds of adultery, right? But if you didn’t have a communicable disease when we got married and now you have one – you know, Dave, I don’t know what to tell you. Obviously something happens there, so there’s interplay. But for the most part – and we’ll even talk about adultery – sometimes people feel so emotionally damaged, and they’re hurting, and they’re mad, and you go through all different kinds of steps when you find out about something like that, that they want that to be in the petition.

Generally, I try to – and again, we’ve talked about the mental and physical cruelty – and I think, like I said, in terms of adultery that’s a form of that. When you get into those things, sometimes they really want it in the petition because that’s what happened: you cheated on me, that’s the truth, that’s what happened; that’s what I want to go in the petition.

David Siegel: Well, I think it’s important for our Chicago divorce viewers to take away this fact, and that is that marital fault has no consequence in terms of division of property, allocation of debt, who gets what, how, and why. It might be in the documents that one party committed adultery and it might be kind of a touché kind of thing or an anger thing, but the court does not care in terms of how they decide the case.

Jesse Barrientes: That’s true. I’ve had some consultations that I could tell you, where somebody had proof, and when I say proof I mean proof.

David Siegel: Photographic proof?

Jesse Barrientes: Well, I don’t know. Maybe we can talk a little bit – no, we probably can’t talk that graphically about that. No, he had physical evidence, and had it saved.

David Siegel: Does he know Linda Tripp? Monica Lewinsky?

Jesse Barrientes: Sure. You know, we didn’t ask.

David Siegel: Let’s move on.

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