Frankly, it comes off as quibbling. I regard the woman who split up a marriage as a home wrecker. An immoral woman. Cold-blooded and selfish. And she seems to have hitched the church to her particular wagon--be the accessory to a divorce, yet the innocent party as she appears before the altar with her newly-annuled, newly-Catholic "husband."
He took one set of vows before God, and he had children of his body. Now, because a Catholic woman wants things to be neat and pretty for her "sacrament," the true wife gets completely dissed by the church. Her children, too. That's what any onlooker would conclude.
Frankly, it's a heckuva way to deal with divorce and the church.
I wouldn't for a moment exclude the possibility that the declaration of nulliy may have been in error. Canonical judges make errors sometimes. Sometimes people lie to Truibunals. All of this sort of thing is excruciatingly commonplace in the breakup of a marriage, whether the whole agony of it is dragged through civil or ecclesiastical courts, or both.
However it is no reflection on the Church if people are dissing this man's original wife, and his children. The Chrch did not do that. The Church published no record of moral judgment against this woman, and said no disparaging word about the children.
This whole "she was called a whore, and her children bastards" thing is attributable to stupid or hateful onlookers. It has nothing --- nothing --- to do with the deliberations of the Tribunal.
The Church respeted her and her husband enough to treat their nuptial relationship seriously and try to evaluate the soundness of their vows on the basis of their own testimony ()hers as well as his.) She woud have had a canonical advocate: these things are not railroaded through on the insistence of one party only.
And a Declaration of Nullity does not mean their whole life together was a nullity. It just means that their vows involved some defect with the result that their marriage was not canonically whole from the start.
It is relly unjust to blame the Church for the damage done by slanderous gossip, by rash judgment, by ignorant and vicious tongues.
Some people dig their way to hell with their mouths.