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Roy Rochlin\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
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There are a slew of\u00a0tragic details about Dr. Phil’s first wife, Debbie Higgins McCall<\/a>, including her seemingly contentious relationship with the TV therapist. It is well known that\u00a0Phil McGraw, a.k.a Dr. Phil, has been married to his wife, Robin, for decades\u00a0\u2014 and there have been many\u00a0strange details about their relationship<\/a>\u00a0that have boiled to the surface over the years. But what’s even stranger than his current relationship is his previous one. The story of\u00a0McGraw’s marriage and divorce from McCall<\/a>\u00a0is riddled with hostility and adultery. And as McCall revealed to the Kansas City Star in 2002 (via\u00a0The Stockton Record<\/a>) and\u00a0in the 2005 biography\u00a0“The Making of Dr. Phil: The Straight-Talking True Story of Everyone’s Favorite Therapist,”<\/a>\u00a0the relationship fizzled out roughly three years after tying the knot.<\/p>\n According to McCall, who seldom spoke to the press about her marriage to the relationship and family therapist before\u00a0she died in 2014, McGraw was a different man as a husband than he was as a boyfriend, and he even admitted to cheating on her. After neighbors confessed to her that they saw McGraw bring home another woman, McCall said she approached him about it, per the biography. \u201dWhen I confronted him about his infidelities, he didn’t deny these girls and told me that it had nothing to do with his feelings toward me, to grow up, that’s the way it was in the world,\u201d she\u00a0said<\/a>. While his philandering was seemingly the nail in the coffin, many other details of their relationship led to their ultimate split.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Dr. Phil’s messy love story with Debbie Higgins McCall<\/p>\n
Jamie Mccarthy\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Phil McGraw and his ex-wife, Debbie Higgins McCall, perceived the end of their marriage differently. In a 2002 interview with Newsweek<\/a>, the “Dr. Phil” star considered their relationship to be a mutual mistake. “I was the big football player, and she was the cheerleader. This was just the next thing to do,” he said of their decision to marry, adding of their divorce, “We never had a cross word. We just sat down and said, ‘Why did we do this?'” However, according to those who watched their relationship crumble, it wasn’t quite as simple as he made it out to be.<\/p>\n
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