Chapter 13 - The Paternity Rumor
As the criminal trial approached in the autumn, Monica’s desperate attempts to secure financial assistance from our extended family began to take a darker, more venomous turn.
During a Sunday dinner with my aunts and uncles—who had all been briefed on the security footage by my brother-in-law David—Monica launched a vicious character assassination against me.
She claimed that the real reason I had destroyed Greg’s business was because I had been secretly in love with him for years, and he had honorably rejected my advances.
She even dared to suggest to my Aunt Evelyn that Thomas wasn't Mia’s biological father, hinting that my daughter was the product of an illicit affair with one of Thomas’s wealthy colleagues.
Aunt Evelyn, a retired school principal with zero tolerance for slander, immediately stood up from the dinner table and poured her glass of iced water directly over Monica’s head.
"You are a wicked, pathological liar, Monica Bennett, and everyone in this family has seen the video of what you did to that poor little girl in Florida," Aunt Evelyn declared loudly.
"Rachel has spent five years paying your mother's mortgage and funding your husband's fake business while you paraded around town acting like royalty!"
Aunt Evelyn called me that very evening to report the conversation, apologizing profusely on behalf of the entire Bennett family for the monster my sister had become.
I thanked her for her loyalty, but I felt no anger or shock at Monica’s desperate lies; a drowning person will try to drag anyone down with them just to stay afloat.
The next morning, I instructed my attorney Sarah Jenkins to add a formal claim for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress to our pending civil lawsuit against my sister.
May you like
We included certified copies of Mia’s DNA parentage reports from Thomas’s probate file, proving beyond a shadow of a legal doubt that Monica’s claims were entirely malicious fabrication.
When the civil sheriff served Monica with the new lawsuit at her cramped apartment building, her neighbors watched as she collapsed onto the concrete stairwell in hysterical tears.
