Divorce dispute: Court allows wife to accuse husband of destroying marriage by cheating with men

A wife embroiled in a bitter divorce battle has won the right to accuse her husband in court papers of concealing a preference for men and engaging in conduct that allegedly destroyed their 28-year marriage .

However, the Cape Town High Court in the Western Cape ordered that dozens of allegations be removed because they were repetitive, inflammatory or amounted to unnecessary detail rather than material facts.

Acting Judge Greig allowed the woman, identified only as M.P., to substantially amend her divorce pleadings so she can place her version of the marriage before the trial court.

The couple, identified as J.P. and M.P., married in January 1993 out of community of property with the accrual system and have two children. J.P. filed for divorce in August 2021, claiming their relationship had simply "gradually grown apart."

When M.P. initially responded in February 2022, she accepted that the marriage had broken down irretrievably but disputed that it had happened gradually. Instead, she said her husband had suddenly announced that he no longer wanted to be married and intended taking a year-long sabbatical.

Years later, after changing attorneys twice, she sought permission to rewrite her defence and counterclaim entirely. The proposed amendments transformed the case from one about an abrupt separation into one alleging that the marriage had never functioned normally because her husband preferred men and had engaged in affairs stretching back to the early 2000s that ultimately caused the relationship to collapse.

One of the husband's strongest objections was that his wife was attempting to change her version of events nearly four years after the divorce proceedings began.

The judge agreed that she was presenting a materially different case but found that she had given a sufficiently credible explanation.

According to her affidavit, previous attorneys had advised her to rely on the conventional reasons commonly pleaded in divorce cases. Only after consulting her latest legal team did, she realised that her husband's conduct could be relevant to maintenance under the Divorce Act.

She said discussing what had happened during the marriage was emotionally overwhelming.

She described herself as a conservative and religious person who had been too ashamed to confront what she called years of humiliation, particularly regarding her husband's alleged sexual orientation and requests she found degrading. She said she had wanted to shield her children, relatives and wider community from those experiences.

The judge said there was little reason to reject that explanation at this stage of the proceedings.

Rejecting the husband's argument that alleged misconduct dating back many years could not have contributed to the eventual breakdown because his wife remained married to him, Greig remarked that many people stay in unhappy marriages for years or even decades.

A central issue was whether allegations about a spouse's sexual conduct still matter in a legal system that no longer requires fault to obtain a divorce.