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| Donna Andersen and James Montgomery Now: Where the Married to Evil Couple Ended Up. |
Donna Andersen has spent decades rebuilding her life after her marriage to James Montgomery left her facing financial ruin and a very different reality from the romantic future she thought she was entering. The couple’s story, revisited in Investigation Discovery’s Married to Evil episode ‘Too Good To Be True’, begins with an intense courtship in the late 1990s and ends with divorce, bankruptcy and a complete break between the pair. Montgomery later died in 2021, while Andersen went on to turn her experience into work helping others recognise manipulative behaviour.
Andersen’s life before Montgomery was already well established. After graduating summa cum laude from Syracuse University in 1978, where she studied journalism and psychology, she built a career in publishing and advertising.
She worked as an editor at Atlantic City Magazine before establishing her own advertising business, Donna Andersen Copywriting, in 1983. Her work eventually expanded into magazine writing, press releases, newsletters, brochures, website material and multimedia projects.
Then came James Alwyn Montgomery in 1996, and according to Andersen’s account, the relationship moved at extraordinary speed. Montgomery reportedly wrote poetry for her, contacted her repeatedly throughout the day and sent romantic faxes. After only about a week of meeting in person, he proposed. It was, by any reasonable measure, a remarkably fast route from first meeting to marriage. Romance apparently had decided that patience was overrated.
Montgomery presented himself as an Australian from Sydney with an impressive professional background, claiming to be a Hollywood scriptwriter, Special Forces operator and entrepreneur. Andersen later said he made a point of praising her abilities and encouraged her to put money into a business venture that he suggested would benefit both of them.
The marriage eventually became a financial disaster for Andersen. Around a year and a half after they married, she discovered what she said was evidence that Montgomery had been involved with at least six other women, including one woman with whom he had a child. Andersen also alleged that her savings had been depleted and her credit cards pushed to their limits during the relationship.
She eventually filed for divorce and claimed Montgomery had taken thousands of dollars from her. Recovering financially, however, proved far harder than ending the marriage. Andersen ultimately declared bankruptcy, leaving her to rebuild a life that had been badly disrupted by the relationship.
Montgomery reportedly remarried the mother of his child only around ten days after Andersen left him. The marriage that had once been presented to Andersen as a shared future had therefore disappeared remarkably quickly. Life, unfortunately, did not provide a refund policy.
James Montgomery died in New South Wales on February 16, 2021, according to the information featured around Andersen’s story. He was 2021’s part of the timeline, while Andersen’s story continued in a very different direction.
Rather than allowing the experience to remain simply a painful chapter in her past, Andersen used it as the foundation for a new career. In 2005, she launched Lovefraud, a platform focused on educating people about sociopathic behaviour and helping those who have experienced manipulation understand what happened to them.
Her work later expanded through Lovefraud Education and Recovery, a non-profit organisation designed to support survivors and provide information for professionals dealing with people affected by manipulative relationships. Andersen has also contributed to scientific research, co-authored papers and presented work to the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy.
Her story has subsequently appeared in a number of television documentaries and programmes, including Who the Bleep Did I Marry?, Deadly Women, Love, Honor, Betray, ABC News 20/20, My Life Is a Lifetime Movie, The Ricki Lake Show and Handsome Devils. These appearances helped make Andersen's experience part of a wider conversation about relationships in which one partner's presentation and behaviour can be dramatically different from reality.
Andersen has also become a published author, with eight books associated with her work, covering subjects including recognising warning signs, understanding sociopathic behaviour, recovering from damaging relationships and dealing with manipulative people. Her writing reflects a particularly practical direction in her post-Montgomery life: instead of simply recounting what happened, she has spent years trying to help other people recognise similar patterns earlier.
Lovefraud has also developed into a community for people seeking information and support. Andersen has said that she has collected more than 10,000 survivor cases involving sociopaths and manipulators, giving her an unusually large body of real-world experiences to draw upon in her educational work.
Today, Donna Andersen lives in the Greater Philadelphia area with her husband, Terry Kelly. The pair married in February 2005, marking a striking contrast with the relationship that had previously left Andersen financially and emotionally exhausted. Rather than disappearing from public view, she has remained active through her writing, research and educational work.
What makes Andersen's current life particularly interesting is that her story did not end when her marriage to Montgomery did. She transformed an experience that once left her bankrupt into a long-running body of work about recognising manipulation and rebuilding after difficult relationships. There is something almost fitting about the fact that the woman who once had her financial security dismantled eventually built an entirely new professional identity around helping others avoid similar situations.
My take is that the most compelling part of Andersen’s story is not simply the extraordinary speed of the romance or the financial problems that followed. It is what happened afterwards. Plenty of television documentaries are built around the dramatic collapse of a relationship, then quietly move on once the credits roll.
Andersen did the opposite. She turned the aftermath into decades of research, writing and education. That gives the story a slightly unusual second act, and arguably a more interesting one. Her experience with Montgomery clearly shaped the direction of her work, but it would be too simplistic to define her entire life by one failed marriage.
She had already built a career before meeting him, and she subsequently built another substantial chapter afterwards. The irony is almost impossible to miss: a relationship that left her financially ruined eventually became the reason she developed a platform dedicated to helping people spot trouble before it costs them everything. It is a much more satisfying ending than simply asking where the ex-husband went.
For viewers watching Married to Evil, Donna Andersen and James Montgomery’s story is therefore less about where the former couple ended up and more about what Andersen built after their marriage fell apart. Montgomery’s story ended with his death in 2021, while Andersen continues her work and private life with Terry Kelly. What do you make of Andersen’s decision to turn such a difficult experience into a career helping others? Share your thoughts on whether you think that was the strongest part of her story.