Dave Davies: Who's the abuser in love gone bad?

RUPTURED marriages can lead to nasty things: bitter arguments, personal threats, physical violence. Men and women involved often turn to cops and the courts for protection and for justice, generating thousands of lawsuits, protection orders and criminal charges every year.

But the legal system can be abused, too. All it takes is a sworn statement about events to which there are no witnesses to get your ex slapped with a protection order or even arrested.

A few weeks back, Denise Bentley, a 10-year city-prison guard, showed up at my desk with a stack of papers and a story. She said that she's paid thousands of dollars in legal bills and lost her job and health insurance because of a series of fabricated charges by her ex-husband, Frederick "Bud" Waters.

She says that Waters has repeatedly accused her of threatening and physically assaulting him.

I sat down with Waters, who seems like a reasonable man. He insists that Bentley has indeed assaulted and threatened him numerous times.

But the fact is that Bentley has been cleared of every accusation so far, and a veteran Philadelphia detective testified under oath in February that she believes that Bentley is the victim of false accusations.

Bentley has a clean employment record at the prisons and the respect of many supervisors who came to court to testify to her character.

But because she's a prison guard, the charges from Waters often have resulted in her suspension from work until things are cleared up.

She's currently out of work because of the latest accusation, which comes not from Waters himself, but from his new wife, Davora Hassan Waters, a police officer. More on that shortly. Here's a quick summary of Bentley's saga:

* In March 2005, when Bentley and Waters were estranged but still living in the same house, Waters called 9-1-1 and said that Bentley had hit him with a drinking glass. Bentley said that it never happened, that she went into their kitchen after police arrived and saw Waters with a cut on his forehead.

Bentley was arrested, but the charges were later withdrawn. Detective Roy Simonds concluded that the drinking glass had Waters' fingerprints, not Bentley's, according to court testimony. Waters said that the case fell apart because he didn't show up for the preliminary hearing.