My MIL did this before I ever met DH, but it set the tone for her future relationship with DH and me. This story is over 15 years old, so it may have some inaccuracies, but this is it as best as I can recall.
His mom and dad got divorced when he was 16 or so. It was a bitter, nasty divorce and MIL tried to take FIL to the cleaners. DH really went through a tough time with it, having to switch schools his senior year and had to move to another town, then she got together with a guy who was really awful to DH and his younger brother.
Anyway, MIL always told DH that FIL wouldn't pay child support and she constantly bad-mouthed FIL to DH, filling him with lie after lie.
When it came time for DH to go off to college, MIL told DH that it was in the divorce agreement that FIL would pay something like 80% of tuition and MIL would pay 20%, although she cried that she couldn't afford even that. She claimed that FIL refused to pay, so DH had to come up with the money on his own. He took a full time job and tried to put himself through school. After a while, he realized he just couldn't swing it, so he tried getting student loans, which as you may or may not know, at his age he couldn't do it on his own since he was considered a dependant. He tried getting his mother to help him with a student loan, but she gave him this whacked story.
She said that she had taken FIL to court over the college issue and the judge decreed that she couldn't apply for the student loan until FIL paid his share of tuition. She told DH he just had to do it on his own or drop out. Again, he would have gladly gotten the loans himself, but he couldn't until he turned 24/25 or whatever age it is that you're no longer a dependant.
Fast forward to our marriage and he told me this whole thing. I told him that it was totally messed up and couldn't be accurate -- no judge would make a stupid ruling like that. I ended up talking to FIL's wife and we got to talking about it and FIL totally
flipped out when he found all this out. It turned out that he had been
paying the tuition all along but was sending checks to MIL. She took all that money for herself, and told FIL that DH dropped out because of his grades.
When DH tried to find out his mother's side of the story, all she would say was that he just didn't understand her point of view. What's to understand??? Oh, and to add insult to injury, about a month after all this came to light, MIL decided to go back to college herself and just raved on and on to DH about it.
There are plenty more stories where that came from too.
