I have many to many relationship between User and Organization. I want to delete user from all his organizations when the user is being deleted, so this is basically what I came up with: class User { ... def beforeDelete() { def user = User.get(id) Organization.all.each { it.removeFromMembers(user) it.save() } } } This surprisingly doesn't work because User.get(id) returns null even though the user with the given id is in the database, when I look at the log, no sql statement is even executed. So I tried to use load() method insted. ObjectNotFoundException is the result then. So I tried this as I was quite desperate: def user = User.find("from User as u where u.id = ?", [1L]) This, for some reason, works. But now, the line with it.removeFromMembers(user) throws NullPointerException. I tried to put this logic in my UserController and it works! Why is this? Why can't I do this in domain classes? This makes beforeDelete hook (and all the others too) pretty useless.