Two things come to mind, although I’m not sure I’d say they were savage.

There was a couple in the process of divorce. The police were called as the result of a domestic dispute in which the husband dragged the wife over a gravel road, badly abrading her legs. He was arrested and the wife got a restraining order.

But that’s not the savage part. As part of the divorce, their house went on the market. She would call him, insisting that there jobs around the house to be ready for the sale. He would come over, more often than not an argument would start, she would call the police and he’d be arrested for violating the restraining. This probably happened four times. There started being jail time for him.

Finally the police began catching on to what she was doing. As I recall, there was some consideration given to arresting her for deliberately setting him up.

The end result was that he moved all the way to the other side of the state and didn’t accept calls from her.

The other story was a couple with one son who divorced relatively amicably. All was fine until he remarried. Apparently his first wife, who herself had remarried, didn’t think he should do the same.

So when their son was of an age to go to college, the ex-husband assumed that was the son would attend the state university where he worked. Tuition was free for the children of employees and it was an excellent school with lots and of options for study. This was a plan made well before the divorce and he had no reason to think anything had changed.

But when the discussion of college started, his ex-wife informed him that their son would not be taking advantage of free tuition but wanted to go out of state to a school at a cost of nearly $40,000 a year in tuition alone.

Unable to resolve this on their own, they ended up in court. Even though there was nothing available at the out of state school that wouldn’t also be available for free tuition. The ex-husband went to court confident that the judge would see reason.

The judge ruled that their son had the right to go to school where he wanted and, per their divorce agreement, he was on the hook for all expenses.

So his retirement was put off for six years and he ended up with a second job to pay for his sons school.