Tina’s heart was broken and her retaliation was brutal. The public humiliation Bette was made to endure as she begged an unrelenting Tina for forgiveness was exacerbated by Tina taking a new lover. Within weeks of the break-up she started dating Bette’s nemesis Helena Peabody while carrying Bette’s child.

Together the scorned wife and her sociopathic lover set the course to bring vengeance on Bette Porter that would destroy what little was left of her life. Bette was beaten, battered and broken. Admittedly some of the damage was a result of her own self-destructive behavior but much was orchestrated by Helena Peabody.

Bette came close to taking her own life, but once she learned of Tina’s pregnancy she rebounded. Her hope that one day she would have a rightful place in her daughter’s life kept her in the fight. She gave Tina her space, and she suffered Helena’s wrath but she kept her resolve and it finally paid off. In the ninth month of her pregnancy Tina saw how depraved her life with Helena had become and she broke off the affair. She finally acquiesced that Bette was her daughter’s intended ‘other mother’ and they agreed to form a new partnership to co-parent their child.

Tina moved back into Bette’s house to have the baby, but the tenuous reconciliation ended six months later when Tina declared that she was developing feelings for men again. Tina had only been with men prior to her relationship with Bette, and Helena was the only other woman she’d had sex with since.

If losing Tina to a man wasn’t enough of a blow to everything they stood for in their lesbian relationship, Tina also decided that Bette wasn’t a suitable parent for her daughter. She’d rather raise her biracial child in a family where strangers would assume she was adopted, than with the woman with whom she’d created a baby who reflected both their heritage.

Tina’s vindictiveness didn’t end with leaving Bette; she also used Bette’s bond and love for Angelica as a weapon to punish her. In her desperation to save her daughter from growing up in a house where she would be made to feel like an outsider without a sense of belonging Bette had resorted to kidnapping and fighting for sole custody.