This article was originally published on Heatstreet by Kieran Corcoran on April 11, 2017.

A man has been granted a divorce after arguing in court that his wife was controlled by Satan via demonic possession.

The unnamed Italian was allowed to separate from his wife after a court in Milan was told of her “inexplicable behavior” – including fits, levitation and superhuman strength.

According to a report on Italian news site TheLocal.it, the man claimed his wife had been exhibiting bizarre symptoms for the past 10 years which were beyond the powers of medical science to explain.

A priest and a monk were called as witnesses. One claimed that the woman, in the grip of a demonic force, picked up an entire church pew with one hand and threw it at the altar.

 

The court heard that attempts to exorcise the demon had been unsuccessful.

The judge reportedly agreed that the incidents could not be explained by any known illness, and granted the couple a no-fault divorce.

Italian marriages are notoriously difficult to dissolve – there was no divorce law at all until 1970 and the legal requirements are still more extreme than elsewhere.

Ten years living with a demon-woman, however, is apparently enough to qualify.