I have included Rita’s application in the image gallery below and will address the accusations in the following paragraphs. In addition, I have included two other applications for reference. The first is the eight-page application Rita’s attorney, Tonia Torquato, had filed against her estranged husband. The second is the application of the estranged wife of Tonia’s boyfriend, who is mentioned frequently in Tonia’s application. This application is also much more extensive and detailed than Rita’s.
In applying for the Protection from Abuse order (PFA), Rita made many false allegations on the form the Women’s Resources Center gave her to establish that I had been abusive. She claimed I slapped her, but she later testified this was me smacking her hip as she slept to wake her, as discussed previously. She also claimed that I had been making unwanted sexual advances “almost daily”; she had told me she might reconsider the divorce if I was more affectionate with her. If I did anything “unwanted” during this time, she certainly didn’t say anything to me about it. She said I would use verbal abuse if she rebuffed my advances. This allegation is certainly not true, as the kids were always around, and I would never verbally “abuse” their mother in front of them. I can’t think of any time that I verbally abused anybody in my family. I think I’ve only been verbally abusive to anyone a few times in my life and never towards a family member. I certainly have never been upset about having sexual advances rejected, which rarely happened with Rita–it was me denying her most of the time. To this day, I have no idea how she could describe anything I did as “verbally abusive.” I certainly wasn’t yelling and screaming at her, and I can’t remember ever calling her a derogatory name. I don’t recall ever being angry when we lived together after she filed for divorce.
She also said I would make threatening or harassing phone calls when she was away. I undoubtedly do not recall making any threatening or harassing phone calls to her while she was away, or ever. Although I suppose some of the telephone calls with her that summer after she’d taken the kids to Michigan without me were not particularly pleasant, especially after she kept telling me she was coming back to Pennsylvania and failing to do so. I likely threatened to get law enforcement and the courts involved, as I had researched my parental rights.
She also claimed I threatened to injure myself, which I most certainly did not do. I have certainly thought about it, and I will talk later about why I considered hurting myself but not killing myself–I hate that medical doctors and psychologists assume they are the same. I think the PFA application refers to an anxiety attack I had a few months after she filed for divorce and while we were still living in the same house. The anxiety stemmed from the realization that I would likely live alone for the first time in my life. I wasn’t worried about taking care of myself, as I could certainly do that. I was more concerned about simply being alone, feeling lonely, and possibly dealing with an anxiety attack. It took several years for me to adjust to and appreciate living alone, but I do prefer it that way now. The anxiety attacks have essentially disappeared, and I think that has a lot to do with not having Rita around complaining about everything and fighting with the kids.
In the court petition shown in the image gallery that asked to have me evicted from the house, she claimed I attempted suicide by cutting my left wrist and an “indention” on my head. She also claimed I’d “destroyed” my office during this episode. There is a hint of truth to this, and thinking back on it, I have to laugh. I was in my office at Penn State when the panic started and decided I needed to get out and walk to relax. I was pretty shaky and tripped over the strap on my bag. To catch my balance, I put my hand against a swivel recliner I had in my office. It didn’t swivel easily, but I put enough force on it for it to start to rotate. I was really off balance at this point and grabbed a shelf on the bookcase on the far right in the image to stop my fall. Unfortunately, the bookcase wasn’t attached to the wall, was very top-heavy, and it started to tip over. By the time I let go, it was too far over and continued to fall. Fortunately, my desk and the swivel chair prevented it from falling directly on me. I just got showered with dozens of books. See the image gallery for a picture showing the chair turned the other way at the time of this incident and the bookcase. At that point, the events had so rattled me that I just called Rita. The petition says she showed up 45 minutes later, which is odd because we lived about a five-minute drive from my office, and I recall Rita arriving not long after I called. She immediately drove me to the hospital, not because I had injured myself in any way, but to have me admitted to the psychiatric ward. I didn’t think that was necessary, but I was too frazzled to protest. In hindsight, I think she did this for purely selfish reasons, i.e., to force me to move out of the house. I recall they kept me at the hospital for a couple of days until they realized I was okay. When my attorney notified me of the petition, I took pictures–these are contained in the image gallery–of my head and wrist, showing that there were no cuts on my wrist or an indention on my head.
In hindsight, this petition should have been my warning that Rita would play dirty by distorting the truth and blatantly lying; I had no family in the area with whom to stay. However, I do not remember seeing it until my attorney gave me copies of her files many years later. It appears there was a hearing scheduled for October 2, 2012, but the court postponed it until December 20 for some reason. I don’t recall anything about this hearing and suspect it didn’t occur because, on December 21, Rita filed a praecipe to discontinue the divorce complaint.
