Terry McMillan, the author whose celebrated romance and subsequent marriage to a man 23 years her junior became the subject of her best-selling fiction How Stella Got Her Groove Back, has filed for divorce after learning that her Jamaican-born husband Jonathan Plummer is gay.

According to a report in last Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle, McMillan, 53, filed for divorce in Contra Costa County Superior Court, claiming in court documents that the marriage was based on a “fraud” because Plummer lied about his sexual orientation and married her only to gain US citizenship.

“It was devastating to discover that a relationship I had publicised to the world as life-affirming and built on mutual love was actually based on deceit. I was humiliated,” the Chronicle reported McMillan as saying in her declaration.

Plummer, 30, countered in court papers of his own that McMillan has turned on him with a “homophobic” vengeance and is trying to force his return to an uncertain future in Jamaica. He wants to void the couple’s prenuptial agreement that would keep from him most of the millions she’s earned as a writer, the newspaper report said.

“He also claims he was denied his full share of royalties, as spelled out in the prenup, from How Stella Got Her Groove Back, the fictionalised account of a single mother’s torrid relationship with a Jamaican young enough to be her son that very much parallels the lives of McMillan and Plummer,” the Chronicle report said.

According to the newspaper, Plummer’s attorney, Dolores Sargent, said he has no interest in embarrassing McMillan or extorting money from her.

“All I want to do is settle the case in a way that’s fair to both parties … and that allows Jonathan sufficient funds to re-establish himself, and we have been blocked,” the Chronicle quoted Sargent.

But the newspaper report said court papers leave little doubt that McMillan believes Plummer was always motivated by money.

“Jonathan has manipulated me from the very beginning in his scheme to come to the United States, become a citizen and get rich through someone else’s effort,” McMillan wrote in one of her filings.

In fact, continued the newspaper report, McMillan says Plummer zeroed in on her precisely because of her celebrity status as an author whose earlier books included Waiting to Exhale, which sold some four million copies and was made into a movie.

According to the Chronicle, Plummer insisted in an interview that he didn’t know he was gay when he met McMillan in June 1995 at a Jamaican resort. Nor did he seize on her fame.

“I was a 20-year-old kid when I met her and had no idea that she was anybody other than an attractive, older woman,” the Chronicle quoted Plummer as saying in court papers.

The newspaper reported that McMillan, who was then 42, said she worried when she first met Plummer that he was interested only in her money. “But Jonathan was very charming and made me believe that he was crazy about me,” she told the court.

Said the Chronicle: The two eventually married in Maui on September 8, 1998, but not before Plummer signed a prenup that waived his rights to everything should they ever part, including “temporary and permanent spousal support and attorney’s fees”, according to court papers filed by McMillan.

The couple settled in McMillan’s $4-million Danville home and, according to Plummer, enjoyed a happy life until the last few years when the marriage started coming undone, the newspaper reported.

“He became less attentive, less charming, more distracted and absent from the home,” McMillan wrote in her declaration.

Plummer said he was spending long hours with a dog-grooming business in Danville that McMillan had set up for him a couple of years ago in apparent anticipation of a split.

It wasn’t until just before last Christmas, Plummer says, that the two finally split – after he revealed he was gay, the newspaper reported.

“I was kicked out of the house in December right after I told her,” he said in the interview.

In court records, however, McMillan says Plummer confessed to being gay only after she confronted him about all his hours of phone calls to a male friend living in Jamaica. She also says she later learned that Plummer was participating in online gay chat sites, the Chronicle story said.

The report said that based on the court filings, the disclosure quickly turned ugly. “McMillan obtained a restraining order to keep Plummer from their house, and she claimed she recently discovered that Plummer had embezzled at least $200,000 from her bank accounts before and during their marriage. (He admits in court papers “a gross error of judgment” in taking $62,000 without her knowledge, but said that he was financially dependent on her during the marriage and that he intends to pay it back.)” the newspaper story said.

But Plummer obtained his own restraining order against McMillan, alleging that she constantly harassed him for coming out of the closet, and at one point walked into his dog-grooming business and tossed a ceramic object across the room.

“She kept calling me, saying nasty things about me being gay, calling me a fag,” the Chronicle quoted Plummer as saying in an interview.

“She is an extremely angry woman who is homophobic and is lashing out at me because I have learned I am gay,” Plummer declared in a court filing last month, the report said.

But McMillan’s attorney, Jill Hersh, says her client “is anything but homophobic”.

“However, she feels betrayed and disappointed … that her husband is gay,” Hersh said. “And anything you have seen in the pleadings emanates from how she is experiencing the end of her marriage, and it doesn’t have to do with anything else.”

Hersh, said the Chronicle, also disputed Plummer’s contention that McMillan was seeking an annulment as a way to get him deported.

However, in pressing her claim of fraud, McMillan told the court that Plummer waited to tell her he was gay until he knew his application for citizenship was going to be approved, the newspaper said.

But Plummer, saying he understood why McMillan felt betrayed, explained that he was being truthful to himself and “didn’t want to hurt her anymore”.

On June 17, a Superior Court judge ordered McMillan to pay Plummer $2,000 a month in spousal support, plus $25,000 in attorney’s fees until a full trial on the validity of the prenuptial agreement and the annulment request is heard in October, the Chronicle report said.