Yogagirl
you'll never know if things would have been different had you not gone to court. My gut tells me it wouldn't have. There'd been a lot of nastiness before you reached that stage, so even if your ED and husbands' family did regard the court papers as antagonistic, that doesn't explain all that went on before.
It seems to be a common factor with this estrangement, our AC use our words and/or actions following the CO against us, but they don't accept that we'd already been CO so it's therefore irrelevant in their desperate self justification for the 'reasons' they give for C us O in the first place.
Well it's taken me 4 years as it 4 years ago that I bought a journal to write in and leave for our GC; now I'm writing it for 2, but today I began writing and it felt good. I decided to write it in my own hand because I think its more personal that way. It seems silly to refer to it as a memory box as we have so few memories of eldest GC, none of the youngest and of course they'll have none of us.
I have a lot of things in a box to sift through including the correspondence we've had with ES; all emails of course because he's always refused to talk to us and the recent posts on here have got me thinking.
They begin when our GC was just 6 weeks old, we were already picking up that something wasn't quite right and were desperate to sort things out. They provide a very sad and at times unsettling account of the deterioration of our relationship. I can't of course remember everything he's written to us but I still remember how terribly hurtful and cruel his words were, are and always will be; I still remember how those emails of his made us both feel then, feel now and more than likely will always make us feel.
There's a clear distinction, a strong juxtaposition between our emails to him and his to ours, it's really quite chilling. Yes, we've said things to him that we felt needed to be addressed, but only ever the truth; things that I'm sure he'd rather have not read, but never with nastiness and cruelty, always with love. I don't just say that because we loved him at the time of their writing, still do of course, but because we told him so, in every thing we ever wrote to him, we told him that we loved him.
Not once in all that correspondence is there a kind word for us, not a single one and that's saying something because his emails are long, pages and pages long.
You asked the other day Yogagirl how an AC whose destroyed their family can ever be welcomed back, I still don't have an answer for you but what I have realised today, without even reading those emails again, just by thinking of what they contain, is that I can never welcome back our ES.
Letting go of him is the hardest thing I've ever had to do but it's the only thing I can. Like you, we've imagined, believed that she was standing there behind him, telling him what to say, that that's why he wrote what he did. Even though we know he's written them because they contain the language he would use, they're written in his style, in a format that he, not she, would use we'd still tell ourselves it was all down to her.
But they weren't were they, they weren't all her and nothing from him. He typed them, sent them from his email account, he hit the send button and sent that verbal poison to his own parents. So that's why I can never welcome him back, not just because he's no longer the lovely young man he used to be but because of the man he's become.
after saying such a terrible thing 
But it seems she was worried about me and even called the police to help!