Suing for Love: Charles

"Bonnie is one of the best manipulators I have ever met. She cheated on me between five and six times. It just ripped my heart out," says Charles. "Bonnie has seas

onal bipolar. Every spring, Bonnie would take off and leave me ... Whenever Bonnie came back from her little jaunts, she would promise me it would never happen again." He moved in with Bonnie after what he claims was "a little romp" she had with her boyfriend. "I was upset. I think she wanted me to move in to calm me down. When I moved in with her, it was settled that it would stop. But nothing did. Her boyfriend would phone and ask if she would have sex with him," he claims. He says that he and Bonnie broke up four times. "I was angry, and I told Bonnie I would ruin her and her boyfriend."

 

Bonnie maintains, "I had no affairs while I was with Charles. I had a good friend who would call me, and Charlie was jealous."

 

Charles admits that while he dated Bonnie he kept a dairy about his day-to-day life. "If she ran off with her boyfriend, it was in the chronicles. If she got a phone call from him, it was in the chronicles," he shares. "Out of nowhere,

she told me that her boyfriend had AIDS. I was flabbergasted. I wrote it in the chronicles."

 

Charles says that he sent The Bonnie Chronicles to Bonnie, and the book only fell into the wrong hands when she initiated it. "Bonnie went to her bosses and told them that a psycho had written a book. They contacted me, and they requested it," he explains. "I'm not the son of a bitch she makes me out to be."

 

Bonnie sued Charles for defamation, and when he showed up in court for the trial, he was surprised at what he saw. "I have never seen a lawyer walk into a courtroom with his arms around his client. I think she was sleeping with this lawyer to get what she wanted," he says. "I'm broke and poor. I have absolutely no money to pay Bonnie. Everything that's happened to me, no one man should bear. I would very much like to get my life back."

"What the hell is this?" Dr. Phil asks Charles, holding up a copy of The Bonnie Chronicles.

"It's a diary," he replies. "I always gave her a copy of the diary every year and always asked her to go over it, check it out and see if there's anything in there that wasn't right, and only one time did she ever send it back to me with a complaint."

"A lot of people keep diaries. They just don't usually publish them," Dr. Phil points out.

"I never published that," Charles refutes.

"Isn't an element of defamation that you have to have distributed it in some way? It has to have gone to people?" Dr. Phil asks. "Wasn't that an element of the jury charge in this case?"

"I didn't distribute them to everybody," Charles says. "She took the diary to her mother. She had her mother read it, and then she blamed me for giving it to her mother, and I never did. And, I'll take a lie detector test for that."

"Did you give it to the school?" Dr. Phil asks.

"You know, I think I might have sent them one," he says.

 

"Did you threaten her?" Dr. Phil asks.

"Oh, I definitely did that," Charles admits.

Dr. Phil reads some comments Bonnie claims Charles made to her, including, "'Don't **** with me. You won't like the results. You be very careful how you talk to me. You should be quiet and very careful with me.'"

"If it's in there, it happened," Charles says.

"Why would you say those things to somebody?" Dr. Phil probes.

"Mad. Angry. Hurt. Betrayed. All those wonderful things you get when you're in love," he says.

"Are you still in love with her?"

"Not even a little bit," Charles says.

Dr. Phil turns to Bonnie and asks, "What do you think about what he's saying?"

"It's a continuation of his lies," she says. "I think he has a mental disorder where he believes, in my opinion, that everything is true."

Facing Charles, Dr. Phil asks, "Do you think it's normal to be doing all of this?"

 

"We go down the road of life, and we learn. I don't know what else to say," he replies. "I told the jury the same thing. Mistakes were made. I should have been more than happy when she left."

 

"I can't imagine why you lost," Dr. Phil quips.