MY PRO-BONO FAMILY LAW CASE

This week I won some major victories in my pro-bono (free) family law (child custody and support) case. My client is a dad who was the victim of two of the most malicious and litigious divorce lawyers in the bay area, and a completely wicked and delusional ex-wife. Though I am not a family law lawyer, I have managed to succeed where some of the most prominent family law attorneys on behalf of my client have failed. The judge has agreed to dismiss a supposedly "neutral" vocational expert, who was completely biased against my client, and apparently exclusively serving the interests of the ex-wife. I also succeeded in modifying my client's support obligations. But most importantly, after four years of unsubstantiated lies being told in court about my client, I feel based upon the words of the judge in this case, that she is finally beginning to understand the injustice and the complete alienation of my client's children that my client has suffered over the past four years.

If you are a man who has no career, financial resources or potential, you may ignore this article. Some such men often father multiple children with multiple women without ever supporting those children. Because the women understand that they will never work or earn in a meaningful way, they are not pursued aggressively for support. However, if you are wealthy, successful, or have the potential to amass wealth, you may be pursued relentlessly by an unreasonable spouse, her lawyers, the Court and government agencies, for support far above and beyond that which any reasonable right thinking person would expect. So has it been with my client. After raising and providing for the child of his wife from her first marriage, (with that child receiving no support from her biological father - a former drug addict and petty criminal), the wife, who never pursued the first husband, now relentlessly and ruthlessly fabricates all manner of misrepresentations of domestic and financial abuse, in order to isolate my client from his children so that she might maximize her child support and gain other advantages in the case.

This article is written from a man's perspective since my client is a man. Some of this would apply equally to women. However, men have become fodder in family court for much injustice. Many in the Court system are much too quick to accept that the woman is automatically the victim and the man a villain. If the woman is petite or frail in appearance, the stronger the presumption. If the man is black and the woman white, Asian, or light skinned Hispanic...well, you may use your imagination.

I promised myself that I would never practice family law. I despised the family law course in law school and the pretense of a "no fault" divorce system, which becomes extremely adversarial and conflict driven between the parties once the issues of child custody and child and spousal support are raised. Some law students, keen on establishing family law practices, are inspired by their own messy divorces, and thus would potentially be bringing a great deal of personal baggage to their practices. There are certain family law lawyers who (as I once heard a colleague eloquently state), have never met a woman who was not raped, or a child who was not molested. Their own personal issues poison their cases and their clients are driven to tell the most outrageous and unsubstantiated lies. If your spouse falls into the hands of such a lawyer during your divorce/custody and support proceedings, you will be in deep trouble, and will need an extremely dedicated lawyer to save you. Further, do not be so naive as to believe that the Court will see through the lies. If the lies are repeated loudly and frequently enough to the judge, regardless of whether or not those lies are even the subject of a particular hearing, or are supported by any evidence, and your lawyer is not aggressively rebutting those lies, there may develop a tacit acceptance of the lies by the Court, who may then come to despise you. This was done effectively to my client with the first judge in the case, prior to my entry into the matter. This judge was willing to believe anything he was fed about my client and acted in a manner towards my client that has baffled and confounded me.

Yet, in spite of all of these systemic ills and my own personal distaste, I could not ignore the complete and total injustice which was repeatedly being dealt to this particular man prior to my tenure on the case. For example, while he was not working, and while in the process of looking for a job, the Court "imputed" $300,000.00 per year to him in child and spousal support. He had just completed about a year of paying (out of community funds which he earned exclusively) $20,000.00 per month, until the community finances were spent. Thereafter, pursuant to the imputation, he was ordered to pay $10,000.00 per month in support to his former spouse and children. So whats the big deal? If he's not working, he can't pay right? Wrong! In California, he may pay dearly. Child and spousal support arrearages quickly accumulate to the point that the Department of Child Support Services (DCSS) gets involved as a collector. DCSS does not care about your financial difficulties or about injustices which you, the debtor have suffered. Their job is to GET THE MONEY, and if you do not have the money, to make your life a living hell. How do they make your life a living hell? Well, for one, they get the DMV to suspend your license; they get the US Department of State to suspend your passport; they garnish 50% of your wages. After taxes, payment of your spouse's attorneys and experts' fees and debt accumulated by your spouse's wanton use of community credit cards, you end up with a pittance. This is how very eminent and formerly wealthy men end up in studio apartments, while making six figure salaries. You can even be jailed for contempt, if opposing counsel succeeds in persuading the Court that your failure to find work is as a result of your own refusal to work (you need not have actually refused to work, the judge simply needs to be convinced that you have). You can literally be made a slave to another person in this State and in this free country, while that person sits around and refuses to work or retrain herself.

Surely, you say, the Court would not allow a person to collect spousal support indefinitely from her spouse while she refuses to retrain herself and/or find work. What you should understand however, is that the Court often does not listen to the parties themselves but rather, relies upon certain court appointed experts to make decisions about what should be done. Thus, as in my client's case, the spouse goes to psychologists and tells the psychologists that she was abused, and is having nightmares and flashbacks as a result of the abuse. The psychologists are paid by my client's spouse, and do not perform any independent investigation or evaluation as to whether what she is saying is the truth. They simply accept her incredible stories as true and in fact create a myth in their own minds of the other spouse as a monster based on the stories they have been told. If she claims she is having nightmares and flashbacks because of the alleged abuse, she is promptly diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The Court appointed expert reads these partisan psychologists' reports and accepts this PTSD diagnosis as sound science, then confirms to the Court that the subject has PTSD and thus, cannot be expected to work. She takes the PTSD diagnosis to the government and receives SSI, since she is now "disabled." Once the court appointed expert declares her unfit to work, the Court will refrain from requiring her from showing the Court any work efforts. She has thus effectively created an entirely fictitious disability which is accepted as real by all. The question then becomes; if she does in fact have PTSD, who caused it? She will stress that the husband (someone like my client) must be a horribly abusive person who has terrorized his poor, frail wife into the same disorder soldiers suffer as a result of their participation in combat. However, it is the easiest thing in the world for a woman to game this PTSD strategy, if she is wilful and hateful enough to do it. There further, are an army of professionals with respectable credentials who would stand before the Court and assert (without any evidence but the word of their patient) that the wife was abused by her husband. These people pay no attention to the consequences of their pronouncements to the Court and do not really care to know the truth.

Further, if she can pump the children up enough, prior to a screening process called an emergency screening by a court appointed psychologist, to tell the screener that they are afraid of their father, or that their father beats them, the emergency screener may massively overreact and place the father under supervised visitation. Supervised visitation means that every time the father is to interact in any way with his children, it must be in the presence of a paid court appointed "visitation supervisor." Who pays this professional? You guessed it - the husband since the wife has no marketable skills and suffers from "PTSD." If the community still has money, it is paid from community funds, however, we all know who actually earned that money. Now bear in mind that the emergency screening process might take less than an hour, and in some cases could last minutes. After supervision is imposed against the father, the mother remains unsupervised and every day, tells the children what a horrible person their father is. Her family assists her in filling them full of hatred, while the father under supervision, can say nothing to the children related to the case, or to refute the brainwashing which is being done by the spouse and her family. Eventually the children become so filled with unreasonable hatred towards their father that supervised visitation becomes impossible since the supervisor herself declares it impossible to secure the cooperation of the children. At this point the father's parental rights are practically (though not legally) terminated with regard to his children. Remember, he is under a restraining order with regard to his wife and children, and so, cannot even contact the children's school to determine how they are progressing academically.

All of these things and more happened to my client before I was his lawyer. He paid his lawyers well over $200,000.00 for his legal representation (while simultaneously providing money to his spouse from his earnings, characterized as community funds, to pay a team of law firms and experts on his wife's side of the case). Yes, if you are wealthy, or were once wealthy, you can essentially be forced to pay for expensive lawyers to bash your own skull in on your wife's behalf. My client's former lawyers were a puzzling group. One was a very skilled and well meaning criminal attorney who effectively shot down a number of criminal allegations my client's spouse tried to make against my client in an effort to hang a criminal record around his neck. However, he did not fully appreciate the dysfunction or willfulness of my client's spouse, nor the greed and manipulativeness of her attorneys. The next lawyer was a family law lawyer, who is reasonably well known in the county where my client resides. This lawyer however, was grotesquely under prepared at certain critical hearings in the case, and was unprepared for the onslaught and willfulness of opposing counsel. The final lawyers before I took over were a prestigious and venerable family law firm, brought in because this man was being so badly mauled. This firm, pushed a fair amount of paper (for indeed I inherited over 20 boxes of litigation materials). However, for over $200,000.00, my client had not bought a deposition of the his former spouse, nor of the vocational evaluator who, while posing as a "neutral" evaluator, was apparently working exclusively on behalf of the ex spouse and her lawyers. I had to intervene in the case while these lawyers were still on the case to extract the necessary depositions. With these deposition transcripts, I have finally been able to expose the vocational evaluator's bias and the ridiculousness and falsity of all of the ex spouse's allegations against my client. By the way, when my client was out of money, these lawyers on both sides of the case bailed.

I have represented immigration clients from the administrative asylum office, to the trial court (where I have conducted the actual trial), all the way through the 9th Circuit Court of appeals, for under $30,000.00, sometimes over as much as a ten year period. Yet these lawyers, for fees in the six figures have been unable to achieve the results I am getting working for absolutely no compensation. Please understand, I am not complaining about not being compensated, since every dedicated lawyer has to go on a crusade for justice every now and then. I am simply complaining about lawyers who charge exorbitant fees, but do not conduct the critical depositions or cross examine vigorously when they have a wealth of impeachment evidence and when the chips are down.

I have learned the following, which I would like to pass on to you based on this, my one and only family law case:

1. If early in the relationship you detect that your fiance is unstable and/or dishonest, do not marry her. If you discover the dishonesty or instability in the course of the relationship, GET OUT IMMEDIATELY.
2. If your spouse constantly encourages your children to disregard your authority and is constantly negative towards you in the presence of the children GET OUT. Particularly if you are a hard working dad who spends less time with the children than your spouse. The children will hate you and will be used against you in divorce and custody proceedings.
3. If you are an educated and gainfully employed person, contemplating marriage to someone without marketable skills or education and without the motivation to ever acquire those skills DO NOT MARRY THIS PERSON. Alternatively, if you must marry such a person, make sure that you have an IRON-CLAD PRENUPTIAL AGREEMENT, drafted by a very good lawyer. Men should not romanticize this issue of "prenuptial agreements." In other words, do not be guilt-tripped into the notion that you are expressing a lack of love or trust by insisting on a prenup. You have a lot to lose in California if you err and marry the wrong person. Be pragmatic. There are countless men in California paying spousal support for indefinite periods of time, to women who hate and vilify them; who alienate their children against them and who view the man as a welfare institution for their own benefit.
4. Do not stay in a bad marriage for the sake of the children. You will simply prolong your suffering and your children's suffering, and with each passing year, will become more and more intertwined with that person, in a manner which may render your extrication from her affairs and support increasingly difficult or impossible.

There are very few places men who have suffered as my client has suffered can go for assistance or support. Society is simply reluctant to discuss these injustices to men. It is as if our culture has decided that men are only important to their families insofar as they can provide financial support. The man's desire to nurture his children and his very right to his own liberty and happiness, are overshadowed by that which would extinguish such nurture and happiness, and therefore his very motivation in life.

You will be happy to know that this client is a particularly optimistic individual, who in spite of all of this, has found ways to find happiness and fulfillment in life.

This article was written with the permission of the client.

Duane M Hamilton, Esq.