Hellish Breakups and Happy Divorces on All’s Fair

On the podcast All’s Fair, Hollywood’s go-to divorce and family law attorney Laura Wasser hosts fascinating discussions about love, relationships, and how to handle it when they have to end. On this episode, she welcomes us to her own book club, sitting down with the authors of two valuable volumes about breakups: Carrie Goldberg’s part memoir, part true crime story, and part manifesto Nobody’s Victim, exploring the brave new world of victim rights, revenge porn, and predators; and Benjamin Heldfond and Nikki DeBartolo’s Our Happy Divorce, a book they worked on together to describe how they handled the breakup of their marriage, co-parenting with their exes’ new spouses, and more.

Carrie became a victim rights attorney because she had a scary experience herself: She dated a guy for less than two months before he became very controlling, so she broke up with him. “He told me he was going to spend the rest of his life destroying mine,” she says. Months of hellish behavior followed: he filed false police reports about her, even getting her arrested at one point; showed her naked pictures she had given him and threatened to send them to judges, attorneys, and co-workers; called, texted, and messaged her family and friends telling them she was pregnant, and much more. Carrie tried to file a restraining order, but the judge told her her ex was within his First Amendment rights to “express himself this way;” only three states had laws that protected the victims from this kind of harassment at the time. She “became the lawyer I had needed,” starting her own firm to advocate for the victims of predators and online harassers. 

Benjamin and Nikki had a very different situation: they were married and had a child, and then they decided to get a divorce. At first, Benjamin says, he was ready to make Nikki’s life hell, until he thought about their child, Asher. He realized that he was starting down a road of destruction that he may never be able to return from. So he invited Nikki out to coffee and apologized. From there, they decided to approach every situation with one thing in mind: “What’s the best thing for Asher.” It took the ego and emotion out of their interactions, he says; when they both started seeing other people, they each had a knee-jerk, negative reaction, but were able to realize that it was a great thing for their kid to have other people in his life who cared about him, for him to have a happy home to live in no matter who he was with. Though it took some time, they were able to strike a healthy balance in their modern family, and have a lot of tips to share about how to duplicate their success. Get more fascinating details about the legal implications of Carrie’s work, how Ben and Nikki built their new normal, and much more on this episode of All’s Fair.

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