Revenge: A dish best eaten, hot or cold

Mark and Tracey Bridgwood's marriage has been on the rocks for some time. And now, so is The Rebel - the yacht that was, until recently, their pride and joy.

Mrs Bridgwood advertised the yacht for £40,000, although it had been valued at £100,000, in the hope of making a quick sale.

Seeing the advert was the rag to Mr Bridgwood's bull. In a fit of pique earlier this week, he climbed on board The Rebel, took an axe to the seacock, and scuttled the vessel. It lies on the riverbed in Dartmouth and will cost £10,000 to salvage and £30,000 to repair. "It was a beautiful boat", Mrs Bridgwood told the Daily Mail, "and he sunk it. There was an argument between us, but if you want to know why he did it, you'll have to ask him." What seems to have been in Mr Bridgwood's mind was revenge.

The couple are embroiled in divorce proceedings. This summer, Mr Bridgwood, an unemployed builder, started to sail his yacht to the Caribbean, where he was hoping to work. But he about-turned, returning to Britain to try to save his marriage. Mrs Bridgwood wasn't keen. What's more, she told him about her new boyfriend.

1/5: Sinking your own yacht. Not smart.

Seeing Red

Lady Sarah Moon is a modern-day icon for imaginative avengers. When Lady Sarah discovered her husband's philandering ways in 1992, the red mist descended, and she set about making him pay.

First to feel her bile was Sir Peter Moon's collection of bespoke Savile Row suits. With a pair of kitchen scissors, she cut one sleeve off each of the 32 jackets. Next on the chopping block was her husband's gleaming BMW. She ruined his ride by pouring five litres of white paint all over it. Sir Peter could not really complain - it was parked in his mistress's drive at the time.

However, Lady Sarah's revenge was most creatively directed at Sir Peter's wine cellar.

Imagine the delight of the couple's Chelsea neighbours when they awoke to find, alongside their morning milk, bottles of Sir Peter's vintage claret. And still feeling the need to expiate her fury, Lady Sarah then ripped up favourite pictures and items of clothing belonging to Sir Peter, before finally piling up the debris of her husband's possessions into "a big sculpture".

"I'm normally quite in control of my emotions," said the aristocratic vandal after the event. "In fact I am quite shocked by what I have done."

5/5: Wine next to the milk. Inspired.

The Lady was in Tramp

Pamella Bordes made a name for herself in the late 1980s as a high-class call girl. Not only was she the lover of the then Sunday Times editor, Andrew Neil, she was also the escort of the then minister for Sport, Colin Moynihan.

When her relationship with Neil hit the news stands in 1989, she fled the tabloids by flying to Bali, Hong Kong and South Africa. Neil felt he had had quite enough publicity, and ended the affair. Outraged, Bordes returned and let herself into Neil's flat in Onslow Gardens, scrawled obscenities over his mirrors, poured his single malt down the drain and cut up six of his expensive suits and shirts.

2/5: Neil got off lightly. But tell that to his tailor.

Sin Like Flynn

The BBC producer Mike Flynn had a bad 1998. And a bottle of cheap wine. Which might go some way to explaining why he went on a rampage and destroyed a £35,000 Mercedes and a £15,000 Lotus belonging to his ex-wife's new boyfriend.

Flynn covered the cars in five litres of white pebbledash paint and a tin of creosote, and then phoned a national tabloid to brag about it.

"They're in for a hell of a shock when they come down in the morning. Ha! Ha!" he ranted to the journalists, before realising the error of his ways. "Oh God, I am going to lose my job. Maybe I could say it was just an accident."

Too late, Mike. Much too late. The police were already involved, and would arrive the next day to take him in for questioning. Flynn's divorce had cost him the £250,000 family home and his £40,000 Piper Cherokee aircraft. But he was still living in the three-bedroom cottage next door to his ex-wife, Jacque, and her new boyfriend, Alan Newton.

In a later interview, Flynn would explain: "I came across a tin of white paint which was totally full and I thought, 'Oh sod it', and I lost my temper. It made a lovely gurgling sound as the paint came out. I was feeling total satisfaction."

Someone who was feeling less satisfaction was Flynn's ex-wife, who described him as "a head case".

4/5: Only a meeja avenger would phone a paper.

Cut and run

The Daily Mirror once called John Wayne Bobbitt's member "the most famous penis in the world". 'Twas not ever thus. Mr Bobbitt's soon-to-be-famous accessory was once just an everyday - no doubt perfectly serviceable - boxer-dweller.

But all that changed on a cold, early morning in 1993 when, after an unsuccessful drunken fumble with his soon to be wife, he woke to find the sheets drenched with blood and his manhood missing. His wife, Lorena, who had used a 12in steak knife to enact her grizzly revenge, ran away immediately, and threw the offending item out of her car window. It was recovered from the roadside, and, famously, re-attached in its rightful place.

But what had driven Lorena to such an extreme course of action? "He always has an orgasm and doesn't wait for me", she said. "It's unfair." Lorena was acquitted of malicious wounding, but was forced to spend 45 days in a mental hospital. The couple divorced, and little has been heard of Lorena since.

John Wayne, on the other hand, has lived the American dream. He went back under the surgeon's knife, enlarged his penis, and became one of the country's most famous porn stars.

3/5: A psychotic revenge with a lousy excuse.

Findusgate

Fleet Street can be a brutal place. Just ask Rosie Boycott. In 1998, Boycott was just starting out as editor of the Daily Express after a troubled thrash at editing The Independent and The Independent on Sunday.

Once at the Express, Boycott decided changes were in order. One casualty of her editorial scythe was James Hughes-Onslow, a journalist. But he refused to go quietly, and ruminated upon a suitable revenge for his erstwhile editor. Boycott thought no more about it until she noticed an odd smell in her house. She called in a pest control expert who found a rotting packet of fish fingers in her bathroom. The culprit? Hughes-Onslow, who had visited the flat 10 days earlier posing as a potential buyer. On fingering the saboteur, Boycott had a serious sense of humour failure and threatened to sue in what became known in newspaper circles as Findusgate. Hughes-Onslow has since denied the allegations made by Boycott, claiming that he was "an innocent prawn in the game".

2/5: Pungent but harmless fun.

Love pool

In 1997, Donald Pedler, a 61-year-old businessman from Edinburgh who had emigrated to Australia, was enraged that his wife, Joyce, was leaving him for her first husband. To teach her that "enough was enough", he waited until she had gone on holiday and sneaked back into the house.

He poured poison on her rose garden, and wrote unprintable messages on the bedroom walls. He also ripped several pages out of Mrs Pedler's antique bible, highlighting passages that warn against the sin of infidelity.

But the crowning glory of Pedler's spree was when he took £10,000 of designer clothes from Joyce's wardrobe, including her 39 beloved pairs of Italian shoes, and threw them in the swimming pool. And then he threw her wedding dress in a ditch.

Pedler would later claim in court that he did not mean to cause such extensive damage, and that he did not know the pool was full of toxic chemicals.

"I thought the clothes could be hung out to dry - the same as if they had been put in a washing machine." But every single item of clothing had been ruined. The swimming pool "was just a jumbled mess of black, murky slime," said Mrs Pedler.

3/5: Loses a point for the feeble apology.

The first wives club

Debbie met her husband, Phil McGraw, in 1966 at Shawnee Mission North High School in Kansas. He had gone into the health spa business by the time they were married, four years after first meeting, and they embarked on their brief marriage. They, without having had children together, and the two have seen little of each other since.

But the couple's private life became very public years later, when Mr McGraw, now known across the US as Dr Phil, Oprah Winfrey's sidekick, denied that his first marriage had ended because of his infidelity. Debbie begged to differ. And, to make her point, she set up her own website. It's called the1stmrsphil.com, and on it, she makes it plain how she viewed the couple's breakup.

"We dated for four years," says Debbie. "We married... we divorced do [sic] to unreconcilable conditions. (That means he screwed around.)"

Online, you can check out Debbie's helpful links, including "About Divorce - Quick Tips" and "How To Survive Infidelity". It's the sort of publicity that the now remarried Dr Phil could do without, but The National Enquirer won't let this story die. And, as in all the best revenge stories, the avenger knows what will hurt its victim. What better way to hit back at an aspirational media junkie than through creating a website that receives tens of thousands of hits a day?

1/5: A mild dish served tepid.