Already this episode seems weird. We are in court and although the film time is 102 minutes, it feels like I have come in mid show. So weird. Maybe it just started that way. I am loving the 80s music though. Anyway, we begin with Dan’s girlfriend being promoted from receptionist to paralegal. Um, as one does? And now that you guys have explained the red rose on his lapel he’s even more disgusting. At least she can type. Sort of. I’m kind of fine with both of them being dead. But I do feel a bit of sadness over Linda dying. She was just dumb and got a death sentence for it.
Betty was on to him from the start. And… back to the courtroom. I love the actor that is testifying but I can’t for the life of me recall his name. I want to say it is Dan something but my brain is fried and all my body wants to do is sleep. Then we are back to Linda and Dan. And the first big hookup. Betty finally tells her friends that she thinks Dan is cheating. They tend to not believe her. And she jokes about it. Betty and Dan take a “romantic” trip up the coast and then he ghosts her. Woah. Have your cake and eat it too? I’m sorry, I am totally kill them both and let God sort it out on this one. She catches him on the phone with Linda. She bought an eight thousand dollar dress. Good for her!
They Say It’s Your Birthday, Happy Birthday To You!
Next we see Betty going to her husband’s office to surprise him for his birthday. How does the secretary not know who she is? And there has clearly been a birthday party in his office without her. Betty goes home and starts burning all of his shit. I’m sorry, maybe I am a vindictive bitch but again, I am TEAM BETTY. She goes home and starts burning all of his shit. MORE POWER TO HER. When he finally comes home she say, “You want out? I moved you out.” He is such a POS. So much gaslighting!
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The guy on the witness stand testifies about Dan’s “gaslighting.” Sadly I know way too much about this. Wait Betty wants to have more kids with this fool? The secretary wants to quit. Dan basically tells her to butt out. Linda applies pressure too. Let’s not make her look like the good person too. Dan starts planning for a divorce. Dan moves out. WOW. I hate him.And of course I get an interruption for an EAS that doesn’t exist. Because, Spectrum Sucks.
The Breakup
Betty tells her girlfriends that Dan has left her because “he needed space and time” let’s just get to the part where she kills this jackhole. She’s in denial. Then off the family goes to the summer house and it is infested with rats. Dan tells Betty to handle it on her own. What a POS he is. As we say in the south, HE NEEDS KILLING. Dan then tries to steal the kids to live with him and it works. No wonder she killed him. He’a a fucking dick. Then he sends her divorce papers. He got temporary physical custody of the kids and her attorney sucks. Is that even her attorney or his?
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He has turned the kid against her. This is awful! What is he still doing with that rose on his suit. Dan finally admits that that he is in love with Linda. I kind of hate this show…
He played so many mind games with her. That will make your mind bad.
I remember the first time I heard about BB. It was before her first trial. I had picked up my Mom’s Good Housekeeping or Ladies Home Journal – one of those mags. The headline on the story was “What took Betty so long to kill her husband?“ Watch the series and you wonder why too
The actress playing Linda looks so much like “young betty”. I am loving this show so far. Too bad it ends up in a double murder.
The music is great..
You is old people. lol Because I love the music too!
Very true. I is old people
lol. Come sit by me.
Sure! Can you wait until I chug down my evening dose Metamucil ?
Metamucil is the TRUTH.
Trying to figure out who the actor is who plays the expert witness was bugging me so much. I finally remembered … it is Jeff Perry, who played Cyrus Beene in Scandal. FUCK! He is 4 years younger than I am! Damn, I always go around thinking these people look older than me! Not! They just seem like REAL grownups and I feel like the problem child.
I really miss Shondaland!
Sorry it was Cyrus and I love him!
Jeff Perry
Linda was no angel. She helped Dan gaslight and abuse Betty. Acted like she was the kids’ mother and no one needed Betty any longer. I remember this case before I was ever married and I thought they both got what they deserved. Sad thing is California courts are still as unfair as ever to the financially abused.
If it happened today, she would get Gloria Alread and go to a psyche ward for a while, then maybe get released. Or get a few years, then probation.
Betty contacted Gloria Allred and Marvin Mitchelson but never heard back from them. She also tried to hire Melvin Belli and Gerry Spence, two of the best known attorneys in this country, with no luck. She wrote in her diary that Belli’s assistant asked her “Can you afford it?”. Betty had a great attorney, Daniel Jaffe from Beverly Hills. He had the smarts to take on Dan Broderick but Dan was no dummy and so he refused to pay Jaffa’s $10,000 retainer. Betty made so many dumb decisions and the worst one in my opinion was not paying that retainer herself. She let her emotions cloud her judgement.
Yes to Linda. I remember reading that Linda and her friends harassed Betty with weight loss ads and the like, always hitting the “If you weren’t so old and ugly Dan would still love you.” button to cause Betty a lot of pain. All while Linda was sitting on top of everything Betty had worked for in the life Betty had built for herself and her own children. Linda seems to have reveled in and participated in Dan’s cruelty.
I really think Dan was a true sociopath. He was trying to kill Betty with his words and actions and he would have felt no guilt. Betty may have been nuts, but he definitely contributed to that. His kids support him now, but had he lived, they would have grown to hate his control.
I am sure you are right. As a murder victim, he is a sad memory to be honored. Were he a man still alive and gradually coming into focus as they matured and became spouses and parents themselves, it would probably be a different story. Plus, who knows how many women he would have run through their lives by now? Living through that with a parent gets old quickly.
During the trial, Betty’s attorney Jack Earley heard from a tipster that a cab driver named Paul Taylor had told her Dan wanted to get rid of Betty. Earley’s investigator Marion Pasas interviewed Taylor and learned the following: Taylor’s daughter was a client of Dan’s and Taylor met him when he went to his office to deliver a deposition. While waiting for the stenographer, the topic turned to wives. Taylor’s marriage had ended on a sour note and he was awarded custody of his children by getting rid of his wife “temporarily”. Turns out his wife had gone to jail for an undisclosed offense, apparently drug related. Dan then told Taylor that it sounded like something he also needed to do except he said “I need to get rid of Betty permanently”. Taylor said it could probably be arranged and they discussed it in greater detail with the cost running $500,000, except Dan wanted assurances that the murder couldn’t be traced back to him. When Taylor told him nothing was ever entirely risk free, the conversation ended and he never heard from Dan again.
This could have ended there except two more witnesses came forward to say they too had heard a man they believed to be Dan threatening to have his wife killed some years earlier. The prosecutor, Kerry Wells, might have been able to shrug off Taylor’s statement but she couldn’t ignore the two new witnesses because one of them, like Wells herself, was a Deputy District Attorney from Marin County named Charles B Smith.
Here is an excerpt from the book Until the Twelfth of Never regarding how Charles B Smith found himself involved in the Broderick trial.
Charles B. Smith, now thirty-two, entered this squalid drama because of a call made to Jack Earley by his onetime girlfriend, Teresa Naquishbendi. Now a suburban San Francisco housewife and mother of three, Naquishbendi, twenty-nine, had been folding clothes at home one day, she said, while she listened to the Broderick trial on TV. As she later told San Diego Union reporter Jeff Rose, she was only halfway paying attention, until she heard Betty mention taking ski trips with Dan to Lake Tahoe in the early eighties. Naquishbendi had also once taken a trip to Tahoe with Smith, then her fiancé. She was twenty at the time, and Smith was a twenty-three-year-old police officer about to enter law school. Naquishbendi stopped folding her clothes and studied the overweight, weeping blond woman on the TV screen before her. And the memories began to return. She knew this woman. She remembered seeing Betty Broderick and her husband in 1983 at Harrah’s casino. “She was dressed very nicely … in a long gown, not a hair was out of place … she carried herself like a queen. On TV, she certainly didn’t look like that, but, as far as the eyes and nose being in the right place, yes, it sure was [the same woman],” she said. Naquishbendi also vividly remembered being horrified at her boyfriend’s account of a conversation he had in the bar one evening with a handsome, well-dressed young San Diego attorney, who had bluntly told Smith that he was either going to drive his wife crazy or kill her. By now, the entire scenario recounted by Naquishbendi was beginning to strike both Pasas and Earley as almost too bizarre to be true. Pasas seized the phone. Deputy DA Charles Smith immediately remembered the incident as clearly as his former girlfriend did. What’s more, he spoke freely about it to both Pasas and to reporter Rose—and he was also willing to testify at the trial. Here is what Smith and Naquishbendi told Pasas midway through the trial, and Rose in a long feature interview after the verdict: Smith had been sitting alone in the bar, when he struck up a conversation with a stranger who said he was a San Diego attorney. When the discussion turned to Smith’s engagement, the attorney—whose name Smith never got—had warned him against marriage and bitterly proceeded to describe his own miserable relationship. He then told Smith that he was either “going to drive [his wife] crazy” or, “if that didn’t work, he was going to hire a hitman” to kill her, Smith said. The whole conversation had struck Smith as far more than just another idle, angry barroom diatribe by a husband fighting with his wife that night, which is why he later told his girlfriend about it. “It just got completely surreal … It was like something you saw in a movie where you overhear someone planning to kill somebody,” Smith told Jeff Rose. “It was so horrifying that my eyes practically bugged out.” Naquishbendi recalled details that Smith had forgotten. According to her, Smith also said that the man had even detailed his plan, saying he intended to drive his wife crazy by taking her money and her children through legal channels. And if that didn’t work, he spoke of having her killed “and making it look like an accident.” Naquishbendi had wanted to notify the police or hotel security immediately. But Smith wouldn’t let her, on grounds that the man in the bar, for all his loose talk, hadn’t actually done anything wrong. They would sound like fools. “I said, [talking] is not a crime,” Smith told Rose. Besides, he stressed, he wasn’t even sure of the man’s identity. But Naquishbendi remembered that when she had later seen the couple going into a show, she had tried to approach the wife to tell her what her husband had said. But, she said, when the man saw her and Smith, he had turned abruptly away, pulling his wife with him. Smith agreed that he had not wanted to cause trouble, to make a scene. But, he told Rose, he still remembers Naquishbendi’s last words to him, after the couple had vanished into the Harrah’s crowd that night: “She told me, ‘You will regret this … This is going to come back and haunt you”.
And then there was another witness who came forward, Steven Griffin, a friend of Linda Kolkena’s. He wrote Betty a letter during her second trial apologizing for his inadvertent role in the destruction of her marriage and he volunteered to testify at her trial. Turns out he had been renting hotel rooms to Dan and Linda. Linda had also asked him to mail an envelope with no return address to Betty (he refused) and Linda confided that she and Dan planned to wear Betty down, sooner or later, with their legal tactics.
NO SURPRISE, Judge Whelan ruled against allowing these witnesses to testify.
“Bets! Bets!” reminds me of “Teen! Teen!” in Diary of a Mad Housewife.
And, “Ken” too.
June, June, Hannah, June
My favorite!
I am loving seeing the 80’s fashion. In the 80’s, I rocked aqua net hair spray, feathered hair, blue eye shadow, frosted lips, baby soft perfume, shoulder pads, and collar up on the shirts. Someone throw an 80’s zoom party for all of us!
Linda was no angle. She enjoyed taunting Betty and taking over Betty’s roll as mom. She was caught up in Dan’s lies and joined Dan in the abuse. Christian Slater’s voice and mannerisms freak me out. He can come off extra creepy, and he is doing a great job playing Dan.
I am a Betty. My ex is Dan Broderick and his wife is Linda. Many times I wanted to kill them too (and still do), but didn’t because I wanted my kids to know I may only have 2 cents to my name, but I am not going away. I can’t buy things for my kids like their father does, but I think hugs are worth more than money. I don’t understand why Betty won’t humble herself in prison and play the game of admitting what she did was wrong to get out of prison and spend time with her children and grandchildren.
I would join that Zoom chat.
And I hate the Zoom chat!
You know you can still find Love’s Baby Soft (strange grammar) but it does not smell the same, alas.
“Blue Jeans” also! 🌈
I hate the Zoom chat too! How can I look so horrible and everyone else look so good. My parents who are in their 80’s look great! Sorry…HATE the Zoom chat but it’s a necessary evil, did I mention my parents are in their 80’s?
I have a little Betty in me too…being replaced is hard and the gaslighting is real. The crazy is a natural byproduct and I did some crazy shit. Why do some women go off the rails like I did for too long and some are easily able to transition to the next chapter? It’s the gaslighting! Dan was an ass and his replacement was too.
I’m not sure that her children or grandchildren want to spend any time with her.
Only two of her four kids support her, so you may be correct.
Betty is a scorpio with a powerful vengeance streak. Was also a Scorpio that’s most likely why neither threw in the towel.
I don’t think many actors would be able to credibly pull off what Christian Slater is doing with the role. He’s believably cruel and cold to Betty, but he has childlike happy puppy energy about anything flashy and new. It makes it possible to imagine how Betty could have found the happy puppy energy contagious and believed there was hope even though she felt crushed moments earlier. Somehow, the performance isn’t coming across as a split personality, and they didn’t do excessive character development.
Ugh yeah, she lost her mind because they took everything. I started listening to a podcast related to it and they minute they said Cali divorce was no fault deal I was like yup deserved.
I haven’t watched this series, watched the Meridith Baxter version numerous times in the past and all the news interviews etc back in the day. As I recall Dan contacted numerous good lawyers so when Betty attempted to find a good lawyer Dan had beat her to the punch and she couldn’t use them because of conflict of interest. He was a horrible man.
In 1983 Dan Broderick earned $1.2 million. HE decided Betty could live on $9,036 a month. HE earned $100,000 A MONTH and the, to quote Betty, “fuckhead” decided she only deserved $9,036. He later sent her a proposal where he would pay her $9,000 a month for one year and then $5,000 a month for seven years. This came out to a total package of $528,000 over eight years, less than half of what he earned the year they separated. He offered her NOTHING in community property. By the time they divorced he was earning well over $2 million annually.
I had to cancel my recording of this show…hit too close to home and makes me Uber sad. I remember Betty B and always felt SO sorry for her, even though she did kill 2 people.
I get that! I’m watching in phases or I will get back into my why did I stay so long and not see and act before I lost so much, mode. Mine wasn’t worth one day in jail though. I hope Betty has some kind of internal life she has salvaged inside.
What is the significance of the red rose on his lapel? I’m only surprised she didn’t kill them sooner.
I m interested in the red rose significance, too.
On his first day of work, Betty placed a red rose on his lapel and said was echoing what he said image = confidence = success. She had him wear a red rose everyday to work. It was their family motto.
Amazing acting, amazing script – big fan!!!
I have a question that’s been bugging me. I understand that CA is a community property state, so shouldn’t Betty have been entitled to half of all assets obtained during the marriage automatically? Whatnhappeed that she got such a lopsided settlement?
The conversation between Dan and his lawyer was pretty quick but hashed that out – any assets acquired after physical and intentional separation may be repaid out of community property funds, including the house Dan bought that he never moved into.
Dan transferred large sums of money to his brother Larry right before the separation. This money was shown as “losses on investments”. He dinged her for half. He bought Betty a house (it was in his name) and he paid off a lot of her bills, but he knew that in the end, his half would be deducted from her final settlement. Ironically, he failed to give her credit for half of the house he bought for himself. He stretched the divorce out over four years so the number of deductions from the final settlement was in the tens of thousands and then some. When it was all over, Betty walked away with $28,000 and a house she couldn’t afford to keep. Her court ordered spousal support of $16,000 didn’t cover the taxes, insurance and other living expenses. Don’t forget, he fined Betty every time she swore or did something he deemed offensive, and withheld money from her support, resulting in her barely having enough money to live on. At one point, she owed him $1,300. He had no legal authority to withhold this money and he damn well knew it. Betty fired all of her divorce attorneys and in the end, represented herself. By then, it was obvious she was in no condition to do so but given the entire legal community was tight with Dan, the judge allowed it and she was totally screwed. The court should have appointed someone to represent her. Dan blatantly lied about his finances but Betty naively believed the judge would see right through it, and do right by her. Instead, the judge favored Dan throughout the entire trial and Dan walked away with the kids, mansion, vacation homes, boat, law practice, retirement accounts and pretty much everything they had of value. The bitch Linda wouldn’t even give Betty her wedding China. After representing Dan in the first year of the divorce, his attorney Thomas Ashworth stepped down and became not only a judge, but a judge in the family court system where the Broderick war was unfolding.
She never had a chance. Dan and Linda put her through hell, they broke her spirit and kicked her to the curb. If Dan had done right by her, had given her the kids and her fair share of their wealth, I honestly believe she could have gotten through it and those despicable assholes would be alive today. After the trial was over but before the judge had ruled, Betty walked away from it truly believing she had won. That the judge was going to rule in her favor and award her custody of the kids, and the $25,000 monthly spousal support she had requested. She was happy. So happy and hopeful that she stopped leaving obscene messages, stopped obsessing over Linda, stopped referring to Dan as fuckhead and stopped talking about the divorce. For just a small blissful moment in time, she was once again herself, the Betty before the battle ravaged her soul. But alas, it was never meant to be and whatever sanity was left in her was forever lost.
Love this show. I can’t wait to see her kill both their asses they deserved it. He treated Betty like trash an messed with her mind an that’s a bad ideal for overthinkers like Betty. I would do the same
I was married to a Dan…ex #2. His downfall is I learned a lot during the divorce of ex #1. I just waited it out. I watched him and still watch him self destruct. Heck i got to see ex #1 lose 3 cars to his 2nd wife and she’s blind with no drivers license. Ex #1 was also a Dan just wasn’t married long enough to accumulate anything, 8 months of a marriage isn’t much time. But as the first divorce is the hardest, it takes alot to let those people just hang themselves.
What is the significance of the red rose in the lapel???
I believe someone explained it in the prior recap comment section.
Betty gave to him to wear on his first day of opening his own law office
Watched this and the original Stepford Wives yesterday. Bad idea! Marrying a lawyer on the 27th, and with the world falling apart, didn’t need anything else to make me paranoid. Oops!
Congrats on the upcoming wedding! Some of my favorite people are attorneys. So I imagine you did a good job picking. Don’t make him wear a red rose on his lapel though. 🙂
True story! Definitely going with a white rose, but no idea what I am wearing! Should be interesting.