Location: Puerto Rico
**This is so incredibly long, I am so sorry.**
I don’t know how much if this is just family drama and could be solved by just going telling her off and going no-contact, or if this could go the legal route. For context, my partner and I have been together for two years now. We have twins on the way and life has been perfect! Except for the sudden obsession of his sister with our lives. She was already a control-freak when I got with him, but we didn’t see it that way. She actually helped my partner come back from a financial rough patch. She even helped him manage his entertainment company… or so we thought. This began last year, when we’d been planning a show for over a year and the date was just right around the corner. Ticket sales reached $20k+ and we were really excited until she showed up to the studio and announced she had cancelled the show without asking ANY OF US. She said that ‘it didn’t make enough’ so she pulled the plug on it. We’d seen the sales beforehand and knew that wasn’t true, but she said that was actually because she had bought the tickets herself to give to others, but nobody wanted them. Tough to believe, given how my partner is relevant here on the island, especially in the comedy scene.
So, no problem. Fine. We’ll go smaller. We got another theater, cut our losses on the marketing of the first one, and we finally do the show months later.
And we didn’t make money. We were looking at $10k, roughly. Only to learn that she had spent all the money on t-shirts, posters, etc. Not to sell forward, but GIFT to others. Again, without telling us. The little of the earnings we were left with went into paying the dancers, tech, actors, etc. We find out months later that the money we thought we made actually came out of her pocket bc she got into (possibly legal) trouble: she told the seller she would sell the tickets herself, physically, rather than digitally. She ended up gifting the tickets, no payments, no taxes no nothing. We were suspicious when ticket company hadn’t called us or made any deposits. Presumably, what little money was made came out of her pocket. Or somebody else’s.
So we decide to start cutting her off from the company because we’re losing big time and we don’t know how much she’s lying about and how much of what she tells us is true. We stop telling her what business/shows we’re doing, with who we’re doing it, we’re not giving her their phone numbers or contacts and we’ve definitely stopped telling her how much money is involved in these dealings. Everything is mostly fine, nothing we couldn’t just tell her to stop poking at and after getting an attitude, she’d stop. That is, until I get pregnant.
My partner has his company and works as a producer, but he’s also a teacher. We don’t make big bucks on average. His sister has political ties with the dept. of education (being a political figure herself) and INSISTS on doing things her way. “I can speak to my friend and squeeze you into this position instead” “Give me (X) document, I’ll do it for you” (9/10 out of ten it was something personal, like his social security, ID, certificates alongside his portfolio) and it starts pissing me off. BAD. My partner sounds like he’s been taking the backseat but he keeps telling her to stop, that he’s doing it himself. The pot came to a boil when she came to our house unannounced. My partner and I had just gotten out of the shower and she starts spamming our phones saying to open up, that she’s here with my partner’s nephews to give us ‘gifts’.
What ensued was a tense and uncomfortable conversation about my baby shower. She’d already make snide comments about my pregnancy, like telling me I need to start wearing a bra or ‘my tits will get ugly’, that ‘I don’t need this many sonograms’ when I in fact do, bc twin pregnancy is high risk and that’s not her problem anyways, saying that i ‘could die during childbirth bc of x condition’ if i don’t watch what I eat…. i started this pregnancy at a nice 105lb and my doctor is surprised its been so smooth. She’s so fucking weird for that but I digress, the story is almost over.
She wanted to take control over the baby shower. “Give me the invitations, who’s coming?” “Who’s cooking?” “Don’t do it in your house, it’s all dirty and you’d need a whole team of people to clean this place up. It’s too small anyways.” (it’s… a penthouse. and it is very much clean?) and other things, like doing it in this other place that she prefers. She starts getting red in the face and her eye starts twitching when my partner and I start telling her no and that she’s being overbearing. Anyways, baby shower rolls around. Security had me and my partner as the sole residents of the place and if people wanted to come in, they’d have to call us to authorize visitors.
A week passes and we stop receiving calls when we’d order food. We thought it was weird, but that maybe the guards were being lazy. I find out last night that she had actually changed the resident list somehow and taken me off, giving her access to come in unannounced. Thankfully she doesn’t have the door keys. My partner told me that this behavior isn’t new and that she had done it with previous partners at a worse scale, back when she did have it.
But not with me. That’s fucking psychotic and I’m sick and tired. I told him to speak up but he doesn’t feel comfortable. He thinks that slowly distancing ourselves from her is the best course of action. I personally don’t think that is possible and I’m starting to feel more than a little concerned. I’m considering getting the locks changed, too. She doesn’t pose any immediate danger, but she’s proven to be a compulsive liar and control-freak. I don’t want to deal with this post-partum nor have my kids anywhere near her. Lately she’s started telling us that she been in the process of getting a CDA certificate to start her own daycare and “be able to take care of children”. My partner thinks it’s another one of her dead-end endeavors, but I’m much more wary. I don’t want this woman anywhere near my kids or in whatever fuck-ass daycare she wants to start. I don’t want her in my life period. She’s nuts.
What can I do? I don’t want to force my partner to go no-contact but he’s not as concerned about this behavior towards our home and the pregnancy as I’d like him to be. I told him already that if she changes the residents list with security again or shows up unannounced, I’m calling the cops. But there has to be something more subtle and effective. The cops aren’t going to stop her from being a controlling weirdo, she’s not violent. I’ve thought about a restraining order? Idk, something about harassment? There has to be something that makes her stop, or scares her into stopping because conversation is going nowhere. My partner and I aren’t legally married just yet and I’m trying as much as possible to respect his relationship to his family and be empathetic towards whatever mental health history they have. But it’s not fair to him for her to breach his boundaries like that. And it’s definitely not fair to me. I’m really concerned. What can I do?