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?

I forwarded the email to Mr. Harrison without comment and he called me within an hour saying this was more evidence of the family pattern that enabled Kyle’s behavior for years.

That weekend Uncle Robert called and said he’d been talking with Aunt Linda and Ella about everything that had happened. He said they wanted to form a support group for those of us dealing with the aftermath of Kyle’s theft and our parents’ enabling behavior. We started meeting every Thursday night at Uncle Robert’s house, just the four of us at first, talking about the crazy things our parents said to defend Kyle and reminding each other that we weren’t wrong for expecting consequences.

Ella brought her notes from years of watching Kyle manipulate different family members and we started documenting patterns we’d all observed but never connected before. Aunt Linda made coffee and listened while we vented about the latest guilt trip attempts from my parents. Uncle Robert shared stories about cases he’d worked where family members enabled destructive behavior until it was too late and how important it was to maintain boundaries even when it felt cruel.

Those Thursday meetings became the only place I felt sane during those weeks of legal proceedings and family pressure.

5 weeks after filing the lawsuit, Kyle’s financial disclosure documents arrived in a thick manila envelope that Mr. Harrison walked me through page by page in his office. Kyle had no assets at all. No savings account, no retirement fund, no property. Nothing of value except a 7-year-old car with a broken transmission sitting in my parents’ driveway.

He owed about $70,000 to various online gambling sites and personal loan companies, plus another 8,000 on credit cards he’d maxed out. His employment history showed he’d been working part-time at a call center for the past 4 months making minimum wage, averaging maybe 20 hours a week. Before that he’d been unemployed for 6 months, living with our parents and supposedly looking for work. The disclosure listed every debt, every failed payment plan, every account sent to collections.

Mr. Red Harrison spread the papers across his desk and explained that even winning the lawsuit wouldn’t mean we’d actually recover any money. We could get a judgment against Kyle that would follow him for years, maybe decades depending on the state laws, and we could garnish his wages if he ever got a real job. But the reality was that collecting from someone with negative net worth was basically impossible.

He showed me the math: how wage garnishment typically takes maybe 10 or 15% of someone’s paycheck after taxes and other mandatory deductions, and how Kyle’s part-time minimum wage job would yield maybe 30 or $40 per month at most. At that rate it would take over 400 years to recover the $200,000.

Mr. Harrison said we could pursue the judgment anyway because it would legally establish what Kyle did and create consequences that would affect his credit and financial future, but I needed to understand that actual money recovery was not going to happen anytime soon.

I sat in that office staring at Kyle’s financial disclosure and had to decide whether continuing the lawsuit made any sense at all. The whole point had been to hold Kyle accountable and recover at least some of Grandma’s money for the family. But if there was nothing to recover, then what was the point of spending more money on legal fees?

I called Uncle Robert from my car in the parking lot and explained the situation, reading him some of the numbers from the disclosure. He was quiet for a minute then said it wasn’t really about the money anymore; it was about making sure Kyle faced legal consequences for what he did instead of just skating by with therapy and sympathy like always.

Ellis said the same thing when I talked to her that evening: that if we dropped the lawsuit now then Kyle would learn once again that he could do terrible things and face no real consequences.

We met at Uncle Robert’s house the next Thursday and talked through all the options, the three of us sitting around his kitchen table with coffee and the financial disclosure papers spread out between us. Uncle Robert said that in his years as a cop he’d seen too many cases where family members let things slide because pursuing justice seemed too hard or too expensive, and then the person just kept doing worse things because they knew they’d get away with it.

Ella pointed out that we’d already spent the money on the retainer and filed the lawsuit so stopping now would mean Kyle won by simply being broke and pathetic. I realized they were both right that this had stopped being about money recovery somewhere along the way and had become about establishing that actions have consequences even within families.

Mom called me two days later and said she had something important to tell me, that she’d been working with her therapist and had what she described as a breakthrough. Her voice sounded different, less defensive and more tired, like she’d been crying recently. She said she was starting to recognize how her favoritism toward Kyle had damaged both of her sons over the years. How she’d held me to impossible standards while letting Kyle get away with everything because she was afraid of losing his love.

She apologized for all the double standards, for the way she dismissed my accomplishments while celebrating Kyle’s failures as learning experiences. For making me pay for the scraped garage door while buying Kyle a new truck after drunk driving. She went through specific examples from our childhood and teenage years, acknowledging things I’d pointed out dozens of times but that she’d always denied or minimized.

The apology felt genuine in a way I’d never heard from her before, like she was actually seeing the pattern instead of just defending herself. She cried while talking about how she’d enabled Kyle’s behavior for so long that she’d helped create the person who could steal from his dying grandmother and how she needed to take responsibility for her part in that.

But then she said she hoped that now that she was acknowledging all of this I would consider dropping the lawsuit and letting the family move forward together. She said she understood why I was angry and hurt and she accepted that she’d caused a lot of that pain, but continuing to pursue legal action against Kyle would just create more damage and prevent any healing from happening.

She wanted us to focus on being a family again, on supporting Kyle’s recovery while also building a healthier dynamic where both her sons felt valued and loved.