TRANSCRIPT:
I was married to Tom DeVocht for almost 20 years. I was also his senior for several years. So I know him very well.
We had a long relationship. We—it wasn’t like we were married for a short time, and we had our ups and downs. And I really put a lot into keeping that relationship going, and I’m sure he’s never had any person in his life give him that much care, that much attention, that much time.
My family gave him quite a bit. My mother dressed him in beautiful suits. He went with us on vacations. They sent us around the world. There was a lot of give, give, give to Tom DeVocht. And he took, took, took. And that was kind of his pattern, his pattern in many ways. He would take and take and drain off others like a vampire sucking blood.
And that was sort of the pattern, and it went on for many years. And I constantly was forgiving things that he would do that just didn’t make any sense—spending my money like water. I had quite a big inheritance from my grandmother and he would just spend it. And I’d turn around, I’d go, “Where did all that money go?” “Oh, we did blah, blah, blah.” And it was just gone . And to him, again, it was—nothing was a big deal. But that just gives you sort of a flavor of the criminality of this guy. He would take and steal and lie whenever he could and con in order to get what he wanted.
He’s a con man. He’s always been a con man. I married him in 1986. We were both very young. I was 20, he was 22. And it was sort of carefree. However, he came from a very different background than me, and I ignored it because I didn’t even consider it was an issue. However, right from the beginning, almost immediately, the lies started. On our wedding day, my grandmother gave us quite a bit of cash. And it had been placed in a purse, and I had tucked it away to take with us on our honeymoon. And I later found out that he had a friend who he owed money to for a previous girlfriend’s engagement ring that he had bought her. And he literally went, during our wedding, snuck into that purse, took out the cash and, at the wedding, paid back the friend for the previous engagement ring to someone else. So that’s the kind of schmuck he was. And of course, he never said anything. My mom and my grandmother, right before we left to go on the honeymoon, wanted to make sure we had everything and all the cash was in order. And when they found that there was cash missing, they were beside themselves; couldn’t figure out what could have happened. Meanwhile, he didn’t say anything but he had stolen it.
Ten, twelve years into our marriage, as a gift, my grandmother bought me a beautiful car. And it was a convertible, it was black, it was beautiful. And I had gone away, and I was away for a couple of months. And while I was gone, Tom sold the car. He never told me. And I arrived back home, and I don’t know where Tom was but my girlfriend picked me up at the airport, and she took me to the apartment where we lived.
And we get to my apartment and I get out of the car and I look, and where my car is normally parked, it’s not there. And I turn to her and I say, “Where’s my car?” And she just went totally white, like utterly, just all color out of her face. I said, “Where’s my car?” And she looked at me and she goes, “He didn’t tell you?” I said, “What are you talking about?” She said, “Tom sold your car. You didn’t know?” Well, needless to say, I was at my wits’ end. And when I went to confront him on it, he was like, “Well, what’s the big deal?”
And worst of all that, not only did he sell it for a little bit of money, not even close to what it was worth, but he had already spent over half of it. That’s the kind of guy he was. And never once apologized. He was a total and utter criminal—nothing more, nothing less.
You know, the person in my life who I was always closest with was my grandmother. And when she was in the hospital at the very end before she died, it was the strangest thing, but it was kind of like she wanted to have a personal talk with me at the end just before she was going. And she was quite old. She was 92 when she died, almost 93. And in the hospital she said to me, “Jen, I just—I’m not so sure about Tom.” And it was so out of the blue, I was a bit stunned. But she repeated it and she said, “I don’t trust Tom. Be careful.” Now this is after we had already been married close to 20 years by that time. And she’d never said anything like that to me before. But she really wanted me to know, on her deathbed, that she was worried about me. And it was the one thing that she was leaving with concerned—was she didn’t trust my husband and she wanted me to be careful.
And my grandmother was right. Look, he turned around not long after she left— after she had given him so much and done so much for us—Tom started telling lies about me, telling lies about my family. And really, he isn’t capable of giving back what’s been given to him. So, though he had been given so much throughout our 20 years of marriage, he turned around and stabbed all of us in the back and betrayed my family.
