ATLANTA – The wife of R&B singer Usher was surprised when the entertainer filed for divorce earlier this month and claims the two were intimate less than a week before he moved to end the marriage, according to court documents.
Tameka Raymond, 38, disputes Usher's claims the couple have been separated since July 2008. She said in court documents filed Monday in Fulton County Superior Court that she "had every reason to believe her marriage was intact" and that two were "intimately together as husband and wife as recently as June 6."
Usher, whose real name is Usher Raymond IV, filed for divorce June 12, claiming there is "no reasonable hope of reconciliation" and the marriage is "irretrievably broken." He is seeking joint custody of the couple's two sons, 1 1/2-year-old Usher Raymond V and 6-month-old Naviyd Ely Raymond.
Tameka Raymond has three children from a previous marriage. She said through her divorce attorney, Randy Kessler, that she has been a faithful wife and loving mother during the marriage.
In Monday's filing, Tameka Raymond asked a judge to ensure that Usher continues to support his family while the divorce works its way through the courts, including paying her legal fees.
The couple married in August 2007 in a lavish ceremony. About 200 people attended their wedding at resort built in the style of a 16th-century-style French chateau on 3,500 hilly acres outside Atlanta.
A call to Usher's divorce lawyer was not immediately returned Tuesday.
Before the two married, Usher had a string of romances, most notably his three-year relationship with Chilli from the group TLC.
The Grammy-winning artist's hits include "Confessions," "Burn," "You Make Me Wanna" and "Yeah!"

DETROIT – Gunmen in a green minivan opened fire on a group of teenagers waiting at a bus stop near a Detroit school on Tuesday, wounding at least seven including two who were in critical condition, authorities said.
At least five of the teens, including the two in critical condition, had just gotten out of summer classes at Cody Ninth Grade Academy when they were shot at the nearby bus stop, said Detroit Public Schools Police Chief Roderick Grimes.
Two gunmen, possibly three, emerged from the green minivan and "asked for a person by name" before they "opened fire at the crowd," Detroit Police spokesman Rod Liggons told WXYZ-TV.
The students' names and ages weren't immediately released.
"We have confirmed the name of several of the students, but we have to make sure we talk with the parents," Detroit Public Schools emergency financial manager Robert Bobb said at the scene of the shooting on Detroit's west side.
Bria Wilson, 15, was standing at the bus stop when she heard the gunfire. Wilson said she was facing away from the shooters and ran away after the shots were fired. She said she saw a 16-year-old male friend lying on the ground, bleeding.
"They were so close — it almost hit me," said Wilson, who was heading home from summer school classes at Cody Academy.
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Associated Press writers Ben Leubsdorf and David N. Goodman contributed to this report.
(This version CORRECTS RECASTS; UPDATES with details, witness quote, other comment; corrects that shootings were at a 9th grade academy, not Cody High School; ADDS byline, contributor line.)

FAIRVIEW, N.J. – For five years, immigrant day laborer Leo Chamale wired money twice a month from New Jersey to his family in Guatemala. Recently, he stepped up to the money transfer window for a different purpose — to ask that his family send some of his savings back to him.
"I hadn't worked for five months, and I was two months behind on rent, so I had them send $1,500," the 21-year-old Chamale said in Spanish. "My mother said, `That's a lot of money!'"
With the U.S. economy in a ditch, money transfer agencies have been reporting a decline in the wages immigrants are sending back to their home countries. Now, it appears some immigrants are going a step further — asking their relatives to wire them money back.
"We've never seen this before," said Marlen Miranda, manager of Peerless Travel in Fairview, which runs a money transfer service. "I mean, one or two people might receive money for a special reason, but not this quantity of people."
Miranda said she has seen her customer base dwindle from 200 people to 75 who regularly use her money transfer services each month. Of those 75, Miranda said, about 20 now come in to receive money instead of sending it home.
"They can't send them much, because the economy in their countries is so bad," Miranda said. "Sometimes people only receive $20 from home."
It is not clear how much money is being sent back to the U.S. or how widespread the phenomenon is. Large money transfer agencies, such as Western Union, said they do not disclose how much money is sent or received by their field offices. Banks in foreign countries often track only money sent into the country by their citizens living abroad.
But clearly, these "reverse remittances" — as the money wired back to the U.S. is called — are extremely small when compared to the money immigrants send home.
Immigrants working in the U.S. sent more than $50 billion back to their native countries last year, according to the World Bank, which predicts the amount will drop 5 percent in 2009. Mexico's central bank said remittances sent to that country are down more than 18 percent in the past year, and registered their biggest decline on record in April.
Alejandro Tejada, manager of Tenares Communications, a Western Union office in Passaic, said he, too, has noticed money flowing in reverse, into the U.S. — a phenomenon he rarely, if ever, saw before.
It began around late March, Tejada said, after a tough winter in which construction projects and other ventures that usually employ immigrant day laborers ground to a halt.
World Bank economist Dilip Ratha said he devised his own measure of how much money is sent back to immigrants living in the U.S. and other countries. Analyzing foreign currency deposits in the Dominican Republic, Mexico and India from February 2008 to January 2009, Ratha found that immigrants from those countries tapped into their savings accounts — money they had previously wired home — at an accelerated rate as the global economy worsened.
The amount of foreign currency on deposit declined 7 percent in the Dominican Republic, 12 percent in India, and 6 percent in Mexico during the 12-month period, Ratha said.
Nevertheless, "people are sending far, far, far more back home than what they are taking out," he said.
Ratha said the surge in money wired back to the U.S. will not last long.
"The ability of, let's say, a Mexican family or a Nepalese family to be able to send dollar remittances to maintain somebody to pay for living expenses in the U.S. or in Europe is very weak, because they are very poor," Ratha said. "And the savings that are there of the migrants are also not very significant in most cases — so those savings will run out very quickly."
Standing on a street corner a recent morning in Palisades Park, looking for work, Chamale said he is now hoping to earn just enough for a plane ticket home.
"I was forced to ask for money from home during the winter months," he said. "After that, I said to myself, `That's it — I'm heading back to my country.'"

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