You know the conventional wisdom: “The best revenge is living well,” “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” etc. But when it comes to infidelity, sometimes taking the high road just won’t cut it. Here’s how five women got back at the cheaters in their lives.
She had sex with his best friend.
Miranda, 37, Ohio
I met my then-boyfriend back when I was a college student in Los Angeles in the mid-2000s. He was a friend of a friend, and we went to the same parties. I went to community college; he went to USC. We were both so busy. The relationship was like, “Hey, I’m free between classes, are you? Let’s go eat.” Or on the weekends, “I’m going to a party, want to come?” He made me laugh. My last ex had been very controlling, and not having to worry about someone breathing down my back when I wanted to hang out with friends was just nice.
I found out he was cheating because my friend saw him making out with a girl at a ska rave. My friend took a picture and sent it. Cell-phone cameras were a newer thing back then. The first picture was very grainy, so my friend took two. The first one, I was like, Was that him? The second one, I was like, Okay, that’s him.
I wasn’t even hurt. I was just mad. I was like, You son of a bitch. Here’s the thing: I had been planning to break up with him, but his birthday was coming up and it felt mean to do it before. I was getting to a point where I just wanted to do my own thing, live my life, and occasionally have sex. And he was getting to a point where if I didn’t respond to a text in a day, he’d be like, “Are you ignoring me?”
His friends were throwing him a big birthday party at his apartment. So I decided to sleep with some other guy at his party and break up with him that way. I knew what I was going to do, but I didn’t know who I was doing it with.
The party was crowded. There were at least 40 or 50 people. I dressed really nice, I had my makeup on, I had a nice perfume, my cleavage was showing — he enjoyed that. Everyone was having fun and drinking. We’re all just chilling, and I’m looking around to see who I’d be willing to sleep with. Who would hurt him the most? Then I saw his best friend. I was tipsy, and so was he.
My ex was taking shots in the kitchen. I approached his best friend and started grinding on him. He started grinding back. I was like, “You want to go to the bedroom?” He said, “Yeah, let’s go.”
So we went and slept together. I took a selfie. Back in high school, we had issues with guys leaking naked photos to friends, so we had a habit of taking naked selfies from the neck down. I have very distinct birthmarks that my ex recognized, and he could recognize his friend’s boxers because they had a Looney Tunes pattern. I sent the picture from his friend’s phone — I figured that was the bigger punch in the face. I knew he wouldn’t see it till the morning ’cause you’re busy drinking and passing out. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote, but I think I said, “Oh, tell the girl who you went with to my friend’s rave, now you’re single.”
He was mad. He spammed my phone for a week. He was mad at his friend, too. Now, I realize I should have apologized to the friend for using him, but back then, I was like, I don’t give a shit, and let’s be honest, he would fuck everything if he could. After a week, my ex stopped texting me. I knew he was still talking shit because some of my friends were like, “He’s so mad you sent him that and that you cheated on him.” I was like, “Well, he can get over it.” L.A. is so crowded, and I never saw him again and then I moved away. As much as I wish I hadn’t done it now, I was satisfied. I was absolutely amused.
She told the other woman he gave her an STD.
Chelsea, 36, Arizona
I met him when I was 32 and working as a kindergarten teacher in New York City. It was a summer romance, long distance. He lived in rural Virginia. I was visiting family down there, and we matched over Tinder. We had our first date by the docks under a strawberry moon, and I was like, I’m crazy about this guy.
He worked in construction and a bunch of other jobs. In the beginning, it was like a country song. Lots of going to the beach and long drives to the farmlands and getting drinks by the water. He’d come up to visit me in the city, but more often, I’d go down and visit him because it was so beautiful there. It hadn’t been long, five months, but we were both really in love. And then fall started.
Looking back, there were signs from the first date. He lied about his age to make himself one year older because we had a three-year age gap. I caught him in that lie on the first date, and he told me, “I just forget my birthday all the time.” I said, “Nobody does that.” Little by little, more lies happened. He had a friend who was a woman who he said he met doing renovations in her apartment building. Later, he admitted he met her on Tinder. I started keeping a note on my phone of all the lies I caught him in. One of his best friends was a girl. I hung out with his friends all the time but never saw her, and when I did, it was usually because we ran into her unplanned. I started thinking, Why is that?
Everything soured in October. I was visiting him and happened to peek over his shoulder while he was on Snapchat. She’d sent a selfie — I couldn’t see what it was — and he sent that sweaty fire-face emoji. I confronted him, and he apologized. He said it wasn’t okay. We had a big thing about it, but it was fine.
The next week, I went to visit him again. I was sleeping in his bed, and his roommate barged in at 3 a.m., dead drunk. He sees there’s someone in the bed and didn’t know I was going to be visiting and was like, “Who’s in the bed with you? Is that Ashley?” I felt like I was slapped across the face. Why would he say that? Why wouldn’t his first instinct be that it was me? I thought the situation was weird, but I looked through his phone and found nothing.
Eventually, he invited me and this woman to a Halloween party at his house. I got there first. I was wearing one of those glow-in-the-dark skeleton suits. It was tight. My ex said, “You look so skinny.” With work and the stress of this, I’d lost 12 pounds. I was miserable. Then she walked in and the atmosphere changed. You could feel it. Everyone looked at her, then at me. I was like, Oh, it happened — it happened. He didn’t get up to greet her; he just looked away. She took a picture of me and started texting someone. I was like, She’s texting someone I’m here, I know it.
Everyone at the party was acting so weird. They were aware it was an awkward situation. Finally, Ashley pulls me outside. My ex’s guy friends start coming up to us trying to break it up. Ashley told me she wanted to talk to me girl to girl. She starts out saying, “I love you guys together. You make him a better person.” I’m thinking, I’m not my best self, I’m miserable. She says, “I really respect what you guys have. For that reason, every time I sleep over, I sleep on the couch.” I’m like, “You’re having sleepovers? What are you talking about?” She thought I’d thank her. I told her, “He said you never slept over.” And she looked at me and said, “Are you officially boyfriend and girlfriend?” I said, “Yes, this entire time.” She flat-out said, “I fucked him last night.”
I dropped to my knees. My ex came out that moment, and I was like, “So you fucked her?” He said, “Yes.” I knew he’d cover it up with lies, so I asked her to come to my car. I locked the doors and put my phone on record so she could tell me her side of the story in private. They had been cheating nonstop the entire time, even during his previous relationship.
I obsessively check for STDs, and I checked twice the first week of dating him. But later, I realized something wasn’t right. I kept getting yeast infections and BV. Finally, a doctor diagnosed me with HSV-2, and I knew it was him. I made him get tested, and it came back positive.
I looked at her and said, “You know he has herpes, right?” And she looked at me and screamed. Every time I was sad, I’d replay that audio. I was like, “Mm-hmm, yeah, and now you have it. He knew this whole time and intentionally did not tell you.” She lost her mind. She cried and screamed. After that, we got out of the car, and I yelled at him in front of all his friends — “You gave me herpes!”
I kicked a hole in his bedroom wall. He said nothing. I was like, “I was going crazy, I lost 12 pounds, you made me think it was all in my head.” I packed up my car and left. I deleted him, and we never talked again. Some people say no revenge is the best revenge, but I’m glad I had that experience. And I knew he had that hole in the wall and that every time he saw that spackle, he’d think of what he did.
She stockpiled cash and then disappeared.
Leonora, 32, Missouri
My ex and I are security agents and met in 2017 while working in the South. He transferred there from New York City, and I transferred from the Midwest. I liked making sushi and brought it to work sometimes. He’d ask me about it, and I told him I’d bring him some. Eventually, he took me out for sushi on what turned out to be our first date. Before him, I had a few experiences that weren’t great. Somehow, he gave me the impression that he was different. He seemed kind and generous, and I believed him.
We didn’t live together, but he spent several nights at my place because it was closer to work. I found him a little clingy and felt like an asshole for seeing things that way. Here I was, presented with someone who wanted to be in my sphere of the universe, and I was thinking, This is too much. A year after we started dating, he had to move back to New York City for family obligations. It felt convenient to end things at the same time. I didn’t want to do long distance or relocate to New York because of how expensive it is. I explained to him, “This was wonderful, but it ends here.”
We remained friends on social media and kept in touch and eventually reconciled. He told me he could work on giving me space. In 2022, we decided to give things another shot. He got his own condo in Queens and invited me up. We had a good time. He told me he loved me, and it slowly turned into a romance again. I’d visit him every six weeks or so. Eventually, he told me, “Hey, for $600 a month, you can rent from me.” I thought there was no way I’d get a chance to move to NYC on my salary, so I wound up moving in with him. We liked to do cute couples’ stuff: going to Central Park, going on walks, trying all the different restaurants in our neighborhood. Whatever we were doing, as long as we were together, it worked for him.
I never doubted his loyalty for a minute. I never wanted to look through his phone or do the math of when he was coming home. But one day, we were sitting on the couch and he got this random text I happened to see. It was a picture of a girl with her legs splayed open, saying something to the effect of, “Hey, baby, how are you?” I thought it was spam, but instead of looking at me and rolling his eyes, he wrote back, “Who is this?” That’s where the seed of doubt was planted.
I worked afternoons; he did morning shifts. By the time I got off from work, he was often sleeping so he could get up at midnight. One night, I got home and he was asleep in the bedroom. His phone was in the living room, unlocked. After 20 minutes of seeing it there, I just went for it. I was like, Let me make sure I’m not kidding myself here. I went to Google Chrome, and there were exactly 16 tabs open for escorts. I grabbed my phone and took pictures of everything I saw. I’ve been cheated on before and was confident he was going to deny and delete it all, so I said, Not this time. I went into his saved passwords and saw an escort review website. I went into his messages and ultimately put it together that he was spending thousands of dollars a year on escorts.
After I took a few hundred photos of his messages and all these websites, I woke him up and confronted him. He told me he never did anything with these women and just liked to look at the ads and masturbate. He pretended it was just porn to him. I started mentioning bits and pieces of things I’d discovered in his Google Maps timeline: He’d gone to the addresses in the ads; he’d called these phone numbers. Two weeks prior, when he was visiting his daughter out of state, he’d tried to do that there.
There was no redeeming him at that point. He tried to win me back. He told me he was going to go to therapy and read all these books about sex and porn addiction. In the moment, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. But I knew I wasn’t spending $2,500 on a one-bedroom in New York City. I come from the Midwest, where rent is $750 on a bad day. I was like, I’m not moving out of this guy’s apartment until he kicks me out. I gave him the impression things were okay while I decided what I was going to do next. I played the game. I even continued having sex with him. I already saved on rent and started saving everything I could from my job and working overtime.
I stopped volunteering my credit card for groceries. I let him pick up the tabs. I never offered to pay extra when things went wrong or he needed repairs, which I used to offer. I know he went to a therapist. I saw him reading all the books.
I amassed a large sum of cash. When I was in the Midwest, there was a condo building in a downtown area that I’d been interested in. They were very affordable, under $85K for a two-bedroom unit. I was saving so quickly I realized I could buy one of them in cash within a year. Through my employer, I can move anywhere in the states every six months. I kept saving. I told my boyfriend I was going to Detroit to see my grandmother, which was a lie: I was going to see this property.
One day in the spring, I rented a car and stuffed a few suitcases with my clothes. The hardest part was finding on-street parking. I loaded up the car while he was at work and took off on a 20-hour drive. When I got to my destination, I had a little Airbnb set up to stay in before closing on the condo. I stayed there, transferred my job, everything was good to go. While he was at work, I switched the sim in my phone to a new number and blocked him on every conceivable social-media account — email, Spotify, Disney+. I changed my passwords on everything he had access to. Saying good-bye to him for the last time, I felt a very happy anger knowing that, 12 hours from then, his whole world would blow up and he’d be completely clueless and have nowhere to go for answers. I took some sadistic enjoyment from that. At least I got to live in the city for a minute.
She let frogs loose in his house.
Emily, 28, Virginia
I met Jason when I was 19 and he was 21. We were both attending community college in Texas. Honestly, I didn’t really like him at first. He was always following me around and wouldn’t leave me alone, like, “Oh, let me take you out to lunch,” “Let’s do this,” “Let’s do that.” I had a boyfriend at the time. That’s how I warded him off. But then that boyfriend didn’t work out, and Jason was like, “What if you just gave me a chance?” I was vulnerable, and my frontal lobe wasn’t fully formed.
It was a toxic and codependent relationship. We were with each other all the time because I was too young to go to bars and Jason was on probation for trying to sell coke at a party, so he couldn’t go to them anymore. Three or four months into the relationship, I found out I was pregnant. He was so mad at me for not keeping the baby.
A month later, I was at a party and an acquaintance came up to me and said she and Jason were hooking up behind my back. She said he told her I was cold and frigid, and she felt bad for him. Then she wandered off. I went over to a friend’s house after that because I was so upset and I didn’t want to cause a scene. I told my friend what happened and she said, “Oh, girl, he’s been cheating on you with literally everybody.” She showed me screenshots from my other friend, Tina, who had confessed to her that she and Jason were hooking up the whole time we were together.
I saw red. When I eventually asked him if he’d cheated on me, he denied it and tried to gaslight me. I stood my ground and moved out into my own place, and he said he was glad I was leaving.
For a week, I sat on things. I knew I wanted to get back at him in a significant way, but I didn’t want to go to jail or sleep with any of his friends; none of them were attractive, and it didn’t feel original. But Jason had a huge fear of amphibians. If he saw a frog on the sidewalk, he freaked out. So I decided to put frogs in his house. I still had a key to his apartment, so it wouldn’t be breaking and entering. What was he going to do when he saw them, call the police?
There was a park in town with a pond and a lot of small wildlife. My best friend and I went there late at night. She held the flashlight. I had a Tupperware container. We’d sneak up on a frog, and I’d put the container over it really quick, scoop it up and put the lid on. I think she caught one with her bare hands.
I knew Jason was working a shift at the restaurant where he was a busboy, so we went over to his apartment and released all three frogs. We left giggling. The next day, I didn’t hear anything from Jason. I was like, Did he see the frogs or not? So I called him. He thought I was trying to have a heart-to-heart. He was like, “I’m so sorry for cheating on you! Come over, we can talk it out.” I was like, “Oh yeah, sure!” He thought we were going to make up or whatever.
He lets me in and sits me down and apologizes: “I’m really sorry. I should have realized. My actions weren’t the best …” He’s going on and on. Meanwhile, I’m looking around the apartment. He said, “What are you looking for?” I was like, “Oh, the frogs.” He was like, “What frogs?”
As soon as he said that, one of them jumped out of the closet. I’ve never heard a man scream so loud in my life. He was like, “Oh my God, did you come in here and put frogs in this house?” I was like, “Yes, I’m just glad to see they’re okay.” He ran out with tears streaming down his face and refused to come back inside until the frogs were gone. While I caught them, I heard him on the phone with his mom: “She put frogs in the apartment! I can’t go back there! What do you mean? I can’t call the police!”
There was the frog that jumped out of his closet, one behind his couch, and one under his bed. I caught them all and released them outside onto the second-floor balcony. I hope they lived a very long, happy, froggy life.
I walked past him on the stairwell and told him, “Okay, you can go up there now.” He was like “I don’t know if I can! You have emotionally scarred me for the rest of my life!” I said, “Okay, well, at least we’re even now.” And then I left. It was petty, but I got a lot of satisfaction out of it at the time. Now he’s in his 30s, lives with his parents in Las Vegas, and wears clown makeup unironically. (He popped up on my Instagram. I’m nosy, so I looked.)
She signed him up for spam calls.
Tina, 38, California
I started dating John right before COVID hit, and we were on-again, off-again for about three years. A week before this happened, we had plans to go on a trip together.
I had a best friend, let’s call her Nancy. She and I had been friends since sixth grade, so close her mother joked that I was her second-favorite daughter. She moved to Oregon for nursing school. Every time she came back to our hometown in Northern California, she felt like her friend group had dropped her, so I always made an effort to include her in things. I’d invite her out to happy hours with me and my boyfriend over group texts.
One weekend, she came down for a music festival. I drove her around and hosted her, got her tickets, and gave her a sundress because she didn’t pack enough clothes. I had hung out with her and John together before, but I never thought she would ask him to get a drink while I was at work the next day. There was a time, a year before, when we were broken up and I was talking to Nancy about it. She said, “Oh, he’s so amazing. You should give him another chance.” Sarcastically, I was like, “If you think he’s so great, you should date him.”
Nancy goes back to Oregon the next day and then she texts me: “I had drinks with John on Monday night, and we ended up hooking up. I’m so sorry. It seemed completely innocent at the time to grab drinks, but I should have talked to you about it first.” Referencing our conversation from a year ago, she told me, “The moment there was flirtation, John said we couldn’t do anything without talking to you. Like an idiot, I referenced that time we talked about why you should give him another shot and you told me I should date him. In hindsight, I realize that was a stretch and you didn’t necessarily mean it that way.” I got the text at work. I had no words.
I confronted my ex and then both of them tried to blame me. Nancy said, “Well, you gave me his number.” And that was his response, too. I’m like, “Motherfuckers, I included you in a group text. Are you serious right now?” I told John not to contact me again and that I hoped it was worth it.
Six weeks later, Nancy reached out to me saying she wanted to respect my space but missed our friendship. Her message made me cry. I heart-reacted to it. After that, we just had small nonsense talk about life: clothing, weight lifting. She wished me a happy birthday. I wished her on hers, but she didn’t respond. I had stopped following her on Instagram, and my ex was very anti-social-media and wanted to stay off the grid and delete his Google history. When a mutual friend sent me a photo of the two of them in Hawaii together, my jaw dropped. I forwarded it to Nancy and told her, “Don’t keep in touch.” Then I blocked her.
That’s when the revenge started. Every time you visit a site and they offer you a discount code while you shop, they ask for your email. I have a burner email, but they also want phone numbers to text you codes or sign you up for subscriptions. I’m like, I’m not putting my phone number in there. But I knew whose number I could put in there: John’s. I’m a crazy plant lady; I visited a million botanical websites with promotional codes and signed him up for everything. I started signing him up for more and more stuff. There were times I’d come back from work at 3 a.m. and couldn’t sleep, and I’d be like, Oh, let’s see what the Jehovah’s Witnesses are doing this week, and signed him up for that. I signed him up for online counseling and therapy and wrote, “I’m a narcissist, I need help.” It was so satisfying because he hates being on any mailing list. Getting blown up with spam calls — I know it was irking the shit out of him.
I signed him up for everything. Never shopped at Old Navy in my life, I signed him up. Lowe’s, Home Depot, Safeway rewards. We have lots of tourists around here, so I signed him up for tourism groups. I signed him up for men’s choirs and gay pub crawls. I signed him up for Planned Parenthood, STD testing. It fucked up my social-media algorithms, but whatever popped up, I’d sign him up. I did it solidly for a couple of months. Now, I just use John’s number when I want gas and need a five-cent discount code at Shell. I don’t know how much I’ve saved, but I’ve been doing that shit for two years now. I’ve always wondered if it notifies him that the discount was used at a gas station in my Zip Code. I wonder if he knows it’s me and shakes his head.
Names and identifying details have been changed.
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