Cathy Bernardini | Former Wife of Mike Rinder

Cathy Bernardini had been married to Mike Rinder for 30 years when he abandoned her and their two grown children without a word.

TRANSCRIPT:

Most of my adult life I was with Mike Rinder. And in 2007 he went to the UK— he went off to England for a work-related trip and he didn’t return on the day he was expected. I didn’t hear anything from him at all and tried to contact him, because he didn’t show up and couldn’t find him. So I of course was concerned that something had happened to him or he was sick or something like that. And then days went by, didn’t know where he was, didn’t hear anything. And ultimately, like within the next week, he made contact with another person who’s an associate of mine but not a family member or friend, even a close friend, to inform them that he wasn’t coming back and that he had left.

There was no direct phone call to me. He could have picked up the phone and called me easily or an email directly to me or any communication to me or anything. It was just—I think the email was literally three lines long. There was nothing in it other than, “I'm leaving. Do you want—ask Cathy if she wants to come. Send me my stuff.”

When we did finally get to see Mike, despite what he was purporting—that he wanted to be in communication with us and that we were not communicating when it was him that was not communicating—he was not happy to see us. The look on his face became one of hatred. It was really strange and like “Wow, what’s happening here?” He was not happy to see us.

All of a sudden it was like he turned animal. He suddenly—it was in a split second and it was shocking to me—in a split second he suddenly changed and started growling at me. At the same time he grabbed my arms and crisscrossed them in front of me and had his thumbs stuck particularly in my right forearm and had his car keys. And he’s quite large compared to me and his hands absolutely engulf my arm, and he’s very strong. And my instinct was to move, and every time I tried to move—Mike tightened the grip every time I tried to move and then was pushing my, pulling my arms down as if to sort of push them against my body so I also couldn’t move my legs. And I was screaming to stop. And he put his face right up against me and he was like this—rrr, like this, and he stuck his eyes right up to my eyes. And he was so hateful, it was evil, vicious. And it was as if he was letting it all out all of a sudden, what he really always probably felt and wanted to make sure that I got how much he hated me and he wanted to hurt me.

I really couldn’t move my arm after that for quite some time. Had extensive physical therapy for two years, which slowly I was able to regain movement starting with my hand and working up my arm. And at this point in time I am in pain every day. It goes in degrees from worst to best and I still am doing various handlings on it every day so that I keep the circulation going and so I don’t have as much pain. But I won’t apparently regain full use of my shoulder or that arm. So I am what they term “functional.”

The true Mike Rinder is the one that when his own child, his brother and his wife come graciously to meet with him to communicate, he turned on me and turned into a wild animal and attacked me an permanently damaged my shoulder and my arm; tried to hurt his brother; then takes his girlfriend to break into his own mother’s residence to paw through her stuff—for whatever reason I don’t even know—photograph it and even give that data to the press, is so unbelievable and so not normal. It’s that Mike Rinder. That is part of Mike’s modus operandi. That is what his apparency is and under that there’s some other agenda and some other way he’s thinking how he’s going to get you, how this is, as long as it benefits him, then that’s the way it is. He’ll say, he’ll do anything if it benefits him. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about his own mother.

He is obviously making up stories and lying beyond anything you could ever imagine to the point where he’s weaving a web of delusion and has convinced himself of this too. It’s like someone you find in an institution that’s living in their own world, when in the real world actually the facts are so totally different you can’t even imagine how did they come up with this. That’s Mike Rinder.