A Chinese woman accused her ex-husband of getting her addicted to hormone-based drugs that have ruined her life, after wrongly suspecting that she had cheated on him.

Liu Chang, a doctor from the Chinese province of Shandong, first accused her ex-husband, who is also a physician, of slowly poisoning her in 2019. At the time, Liu posted on social media that her spouse, Gao Zhisen, had been secretly administering her hormone-based drugs since 2016, and that they had caused her physical disability and severe second-degree injury. The couple divorced in 2017, and Liu has been fighting to bring her ex-husband to justice ever since. Despite efforts to have Gao answer for his alleged crime, Liu only managed to get a court date earlier this month, four years after her first revelations.

“I have become disabled and severely depressed because of this incident, he has destroyed my life,” Liu Chang recently told reporters. “I don’t want money and I’ve given up on civil damages. He has ruined my life and I just want justice.”

Liu claims that she started feeling unwell in October 2016, more than a year after marrying Gao Zhisen. She was experiencing blurred vision, leg cramps, serious weight gain as well as unusual cracks in her skin. She went to a fellow doctor for a checkup and was told that her symptoms looked like those of someone who had taken too many hormone-based drugs over a short period of time.

Only Liu hadn’t taken any hormone-based medication. It was at this point that she recalled her husband giving her some “cold medication” a couple of months before. The couple separated soon after, but in September 2017, the woman’s mother found a large stash of medicine, including seven dexamethasones (a hormonal drug), at their former home. After Liu accused Gao of poisoning her, the couple divorced in December 2017.

Liu reported the case to the police after the divorce, but she was told that there was not enough evidence to warrant an official investigation. For the next few months, she tried appealing to different authorities, but it was only in 2019, after posting her story on social media that things really started happening.

In March 2022, the police finally notified Liu Chang that her “case was eligible” for filing and that they finally starting an investigation. Gao was arrested in April of last year, but claimed that the dexamethasone was used to treat a condition Liu had and that he couldn’t have poisoned her since they both “drank the same glass of water and the same carton of milk”.

Gao also told police that his ex-wife had had an affair with a local official during their short marriage, which Liu denies. Authorities now believe that his suspicion could be the motive behind the alleged poisoning.