My “Golden Child” Brother Gambled Away My Dying Grandma’s $200,000 Life Savings. My Parents Are Now Paying For His Defense While Calling Me A Traitor For Filing A Lawsuit. Am I The Jerk For Refusing To Forgive Him?

Suddenly they had money available to pay a criminal defense attorney to help Kyle avoid consequences for stealing $200,000 from Grandma. The hypocrisy was so extreme I couldn’t even process it at first. Mr. Harrison said this was actually helpful information because it showed my parents had resources they’d been claiming they didn’t have.

It also demonstrated their continued pattern of enabling Kyle’s behavior by protecting him from consequences. He said we’d respond to the motion and push forward with the case regardless of their financial support for Kyle’s defense.

The discovery process started 2 weeks after that, with Mister Harrison sending formal requests for Kyle’s financial records, employment history, bank statements from the past 3 years, and documentation of any assets he owned. Kyle’s attorney Richard Crane responded with boxes of disorganized papers that we had to sort through page by page.

I spent three evenings at Mister Harrison’s office going through Kyle’s bank statements and credit card bills, highlighting every transfer and cash withdrawal. We found receipts for restaurants I knew Kyle couldn’t afford on his call center salary, payments to online gambling sites under different names, and cash advances from multiple credit cards that were never paid back.

Mr. Harrison scheduled Kyle’s deposition for 6 weeks out and requested that he bring documentation of his current employment, living situation, and any money he’d received from family members in the past year. That’s when we found the transfer to Britney’s account.

It showed up on a bank statement from 3 months before Grandma died. $40,000 moved from one of Kyle’s accounts to an account in Britney’s name with a memo line that said, “Payment for business consulting services.”

I called Britney immediately and asked if she knew anything about $40,000 Kyle gave her last year. She went quiet for a long moment before asking what I was talking about, and I explained what we’d found in the discovery documents. Britney said Kyle told her it was from his business profits and he needed to park the money in her account temporarily for tax reasons.

She thought it was legitimate business income and had already spent about 15,000 of it on a car repair and helping her mom with medical bills. I told her the money came from Grandma’s accounts and she started crying on the phone, saying she had no idea and she’d return every penny she had left.

Mr. Harrison said Britney wasn’t legally responsible since she received the money in good faith without knowledge of its source, but her willingness to return it showed Kyle had been lying to everyone about where Grandma’s money went. Britney transferred the remaining $25,000 back within 2 days and provided a written statement explaining how Kyle had deceived her about the source of the funds.

3 days after that conversation, my phone started blowing up with text messages from Kyle. The first one said he was sorry for everything and he knew he’d messed up badly and he just wanted a chance to make things right. The second message, 20 minutes later, said I was destroying his life and making it impossible for him to focus on recovery.

The third message said, “If I really cared about family I’d drop the lawsuit and give him space to heal.”

Over the next week I got maybe 30 messages that alternated between apologizing and blaming me for tearing the family apart. Kyle said I was being vindictive and cruel, that I was choosing money over my own brother, that Mom was crying every day because of what I was doing to him. He said the lawsuit was preventing him from moving forward with his life and that I’d regret this when he relapsed and it was my fault.

I didn’t respond to any of the messages but I took screenshots of every single one and backed them up in three different places. Mr. Harrison said they were perfect evidence of Kyle’s continued manipulation tactics and his lack of genuine remorse for stealing from Grandma. He said the pattern of alternating between apology and blame was textbook manipulator behavior and would be useful if we ended up in front of a judge.

The messages kept coming for another week before finally stopping. Then Mom called me on a Tuesday night and I could hear her crying before she even said hello. She begged me to drop the lawsuit because it was killing her to watch the family fall apart like this. She said Kyle had learned his lesson and was getting help and that continuing with legal action was just about revenge not justice.

I let her talk for maybe 5 minutes before I interrupted and asked her a direct question. I said Kyle stole $200,000 from her dying mother-in-law and let Grandma live in terrible conditions while he gambled the money away. So did she think that deserved consequences or should Kyle just get therapy and move on with his life?

Mom got quiet for a moment before admitting that what Kyle did was wrong. But then she said he was sick and punishing him wouldn’t bring Grandma back or recover the money. She said I was choosing money over family and that I’d regret destroying these relationships when it was too late to fix them.

I realized right then during that conversation that my mom was never going to hold Kyle truly accountable for what he did. Maintaining a relationship with my parents meant accepting their version of reality where Kyle was a victim of disease rather than someone who made deliberate choices to steal from a dying woman. I told Mom I needed space to think about what kind of relationship we could have going forward, and she started crying harder, saying I was abandoning the family just like I’d abandoned Kyle.

I ended the call and sat in my car for 20 minutes trying to process what had just happened.

Two days later I got a formal email from Dad with the subject line “Family Decisions and Consequences.” He wrote that if I continued with the lawsuit against Kyle, they would consider me to have chosen to remove myself from the family. The email listed all the ways they’d supported me over the years: the tuition help for my first year of college before I got scholarships, the car they’d co-signed for when I was 22, the times they’d let me stay with them between apartments.

Dad said this was how I repaid their love and sacrifice: by attacking my brother when he was at his lowest point and needed family support the most. He said I had one week to decide whether I wanted to be part of this family or continue down a path of bitterness and revenge.