Los Angeles | A 43-year-old man is suing his wife with whom he has been married to for the past ten years after recently learning that his wife was in fact born a man.
Barney Redfield, 43, has filed for divorce and is suing his ex-wife, Helga Groeschlin, 46, for $2,000,000 on accusations of false pretenses as he believed all this time that she was a woman.
The couple had met in San Francisco at the time and had dated several years before tying the knot in 1997.
My coworkers started teasing me last year about my wife being a man after I had shown them a picture of her… They kept teasing me for months and that’s when I got suspicious and finally confronted her about this issue.
I was so convinced she was a woman, I even had a vasectomy weeks after we got married since I already had kids from a previous union and we had decided not to have any more” Redfield told the judge.
The defendant’s lawyer argued that there was no reason for Redfield not to have been aware of the original gender of his partner because he never underwent any transformative surgery.
“My client has never lied about her gender at birth, it just never came up as a subject. My client has never had any transformative surgery and has only used hormones which grew her breasts but her male genitals are still present » she explained in court.
In an odd twist, Redfield’s mother and children from a previous union pleaded in the defendant’s favor and claimed that they always knew that Helga was formerly a man.
“It was pretty obvious to us all. Helga is such a nice person and I always thought my son was gay anyway, so it wasn’t shocking to me,” said his mother in court.
The judge also asked the plaintiff how come he had never realized that his wife had male genitalia during the 10 years of marriage and 6 years of dating.
” I just thought she had a very large clitoris,” answered the plaintiff to the judge’s questions.
” I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable about it, I never asked any questions,” he added.
When confronted by her husband of ten years, Helga Groeschlin also admitted that she told him the truth and was shocked by his response.
She also told the judge that they frequently took showers together and that she had peed standing upwards in front of her husband on numerous occasions and that he had never mentioned anything about it.