Popular Fantasy Author Claims Her Husband Poisoned Her To Gain Her Money

A well-known fantasy author has accused her husband of slowly poisoning her for years in order to gain her money in a case so sinister it could be the plot of a best-seller.

Sherrilyn Kenyon, who is known for her "Dark Hunter" series of novels, has sued her husband Lawrence Kenyon, his assistant Kerrie Ann Plump and her former IT specialist Paco Cavanaugh for up to $20 million, alleging her husband and Plump had been poisoning her for years through food and drink laced with toxins, according to The Tennessean.

Kenyon said she discovered the alleged poisoning after continuous health problems that prompted her to undergo medical tests. When the results came back they showed high levels of lithium, tin, barium, platinum and thorium.

"She said there's no way this could have happened naturally or environmentally," Kenyon told the paper of her doctors findings.

The Williamson County Sheriff's Office is currently investigating Kenyon's claims.

According to the lawsuit, Kenyon believes her husband of more than two decades slowly poisoned her over a three-year period to gain access to her life insurance and estate.

She alleges in the complaint that he "stood to gain millions of dollars upon her demise through life insurance and the value of her estate, including her copyrights and trademarks," according to the Washington Post.

The two are currently getting a divorce.

"I thought I had a happy marriage. Compared to what I was used to, he was awesome," Kenyon told The Tennessean.

The fantasy author has been vocal in the past about growing up in a home filled with physical and emotional abuse saying that while the marriage wasn't perfect it "wasn't like my mother and father, where they threw furniture at each other."

She turned to writing to create her own fantasy worlds where she was able to escape her troubled life at home.

According to a Instagram post the author wrote earlier this year, Kenyon eloped with her husband in 1990, marrying him in a goat pasture after leaving school.

"I thought (he) held the same family values, integrity, honor, and loyalty that I did," she wrote, also saying he had later filed for divorce "without warning."

In the last years of their marriage, Kenyon said she began suffering from unexplained nausea, vomiting, hair loss, broken teeth, trouble breathing and facial swelling. She now believes her husband and his assistant were poisoning her food and drink, according to the lawsuit.

She even claims that one occasion when she began vomiting on the floor that her husband told their son "she does that all the time, ignore it," the Post reports.

In a post to fans about the lawsuit on her website, she claimed the alleged poisoning had been part of a "deliberate" set of actions taken by her husband and his "helpmates" to gain access to her money.

"Rest assured, I am much better today as my symptoms have dramatically improved since this past March when it all came to light and the authorities were notified," she wrote. "Thankfully, I continue to get better every day."

Kenyon now believes her husband also skimmed hundreds of thousands of dollars from her over the years while he controlled the family's finances, The Tennessean reports.

In her note to fans, Kenyon also said that through the bitter divorce process her husband is fighting for copyrights to characters, series and books she created.

"Marriage should not give one person the right to steal a lifetime of work or the thoughts from another. Male or female," she wrote. "To lay claim to someone's mind and to their creativity is wrong. Yet that is what he's trying to do with the help of our court system."

Her husband has denied the accusations made against him in a statement through his attorney, Sean Aiello, given to The Tennessean.

In it, Lawrence Kenyon questions whether his wife made the allegations to have the upper hand in the couple's divorce.

"There is no question that Sherrilyn Kenyon is a brilliant fiction writer," it said. "It is apparent, however, that she has irreparably blurred the line between fiction and reality, and these astonishing and unsubstantiated allegations may stand as her best fantasy creation yet."

The statement also said no law enforcement agency has filed any charges that would support her claim.

"An unfortunate truth in domestic litigation is that some spouses go to extraordinary lengths to hurt their significant other and game the system to receive an unfair division of the marital estate, without concern for the legal ramifications of perjury and filing false claims."

 [Photo: Getty Images by George Napolitano/FilmMagic]