marriage counseling

How to Make a Marriage Work: Try Extortion

It’s only Tuesday and already we’ve learned so much about marriage this week! We hope everyone is taking notes. First, Stephanie Seymour and billionaire Peter Brant showed us that true love can withstand extramarital dalliances, drug allegations, and art theft if there’s no prenup. And now, former Deloitte partner Steven Klig and his wife, Ellen, have another lesson in love. Things seemed pretty grim at first when FBI agents showed up to their home in Great Neck to arrest Klig, the husband, for trying to blackmail an ex-lover into sleeping with him again. But then Klig, the wife, saw the light. “It [the marriage] was just beginning again. I got my husband back and my children got their father back,” she wrote to the judge who will sentence her husband Friday. Before the bust, Steven had been withdrawn. But now the couple have renewed their vows and are seeing shrinks to “really work at keeping the lines of communication open.”

What are some of the things the Kligs have been discussing over these reopened lines of communication? Well, there was the fact that Steven threatened to circulate a video of him and his former fling in flagrante. Things were probably a little tense on the therapist’s couch the day the newly(re)weds communicated openly about the e-mail where Steven told his ex-lover that his face would be blurred out, but “You, on the other hand, can be seen very clearly having the time of your life being fucked by me.”

In what was likely a prelude to their vow renewal, Steven blamed his misdeeds on a sleeping disorder, telling the judge, “I was in a world that existed somewhere between insanity and sanity.” If you’re looking for that liminal space, you may be able to find it at Disney World, from which Steven sent some of the threatening e-mails while on vacation with his family.

Lusty lawyer bust turned marriage around [NYP]

How to Make a Marriage Work: Try Extortion