After TikToker Brandie Chambers (@brandiechambers) caught her husband cheating while doing laundry, their marriage of 10 years fell apart. She met her husband when she was a teenager, and they got married when she was 19. He was 23 or 24 at the time.
Now, she is 33 years old and is reflecting on their marriage and divorce. Looking back, she believes she was way too young to get married, and their relationship wasn’t as happy as she thought it was.
They were unable to have children, so they decided to adopt. They went through the whole process and paid tens of thousands of dollars to try to adopt a baby, resulting in six failed adoptions.
“I think that was the universe protecting me, like making sure that this man and I did not have a baby, so we would not be together for the rest of our lives,” said Brandie.
“But at the time, I was really heartbroken, really sad, but I still thought everything was okay with us, like I didn’t know any different.”
One day, when they were just 15 days away from adopting a baby, one of her clients canceled their hair appointment, so she decided to go home early and get some laundry done.
“I typically didn’t do the laundry,” Brandie admitted. “He did the laundry at our house because our house was like an old ranch house, and downstairs was where the laundry room was, and it was kind of creepy, so I didn’t like going down there.”
But since it was daytime, she felt comfortable enough to take care of the laundry. The dryer had a clear glass front door, and she spotted what looked like a plastic gift card stuck on the door. Thinking it was just a used gift card to a pizza place, she stuck it on top of her laundry pile to bring it upstairs and throw it away.
However, the card flipped over, and she saw that it was from Kennesaw Inn. She looked up the hotel and discovered that it was 20 minutes away.
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She called him, asking why he was at a hotel. He kept declining her calls, saying that they could talk about it later since he was at work.
He tried to claim that the card was trash he had found outside her hair salon and was planning on throwing it away. She drove to his workplace and confronted him.
He admitted that he had been cheating on her and was in love with someone else named Zoe. The affair had been going on for three years.
She told him not to call her or come back to the house. She called her parents, who came from Florida to help her figure things out.
“I go and get a protection order because it turns out he had trackers on my car,” said Brandie. “He had cameras set up in our house so he would know when I was coming and going to make it easier for him to cheat. He had started posting on social media, like death threats toward me, so it got kind of scary.”
She had a protection order against him for the next two years, but it didn’t really stop him from doing what he was doing. His younger sister, who was actually one of Brandie’s best friends, helped her go through all his devices to look for evidence of his cheating.
Apparently, he and Zoe had gone on a bunch of trips together, including the Bahamas, that Brandie had been unknowingly paying for.
Brandie’s sister-in-law found Zoe and her parents on social media. Brandie messaged the parents, telling them that Zoe was underage when she started having an affair with her adult husband.
The parents responded, apologizing for what their daughter had done. Then, they broke the news that Zoe had had a baby two years ago. Zoe was only 16 when she got pregnant and 17 when she gave birth. Brandie’s husband was 29.
They signed away their parental rights, and Zoe gave the baby to her youth pastor. She had originally wanted to keep the baby, but he told her that they could get back together if she got rid of the baby. So, that’s what she did.
Brandie had to call the adoption agency and tell them that they could no longer adopt. She moved out of her house because Zoe and her husband kept driving by. She moved into an apartment in 2019, and the pandemic happened soon after.
In 2020, she got on Facebook dating and met her current fiancé, Greg. She got pregnant within two weeks of meeting him, all while she was still in the middle of getting divorced.
It was a long process because her ex didn’t want to compromise on anything, but it eventually ended. Her ex-husband is now married to Zoe, and his family no longer talks to him.
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
