We won

My grandson gets to stay with his dad in Seattle. The mother folded on the morning of the third day of trial. We settled on an even division of residential time, joint decisionmaking in all respects, and if the mom wants to move, later, she has to make her case in arbitration.

Last September, she brought a motion for a restraining order against my son, to keep him away from his child, alleging the usual hot button issues, including the damning spectre of sexual misconduct.

This forced us to request the appointment of a parenting evaluator, and the parenting evaluator could not possibly have been more biased.

Going into trial, we had an unmarried dad, a mom who claimed he was basically uninvolved in most of the decisionmaking for the child, sexual misconduct allegations, a parenting evaluation that was designed to promote the mother's dream to move away for grad school somewhere, and a father had a couple of vulnerabilities that they could exploit. And everybody, including my son's trial lawyer, was pressuring him to settle and just move to Pittsburgh with the mom. Nobody gave him a shot in hell of winning.

So what happened?

1. We proved that this laundry list of concerns the mother raised last September, which she claimed justified her effort to keep my son and grandson separated, she'd known about before she planned a three week trip to Ingushetia with some grandiose idea of filming a documentary.

2. In particular, the self stimulating behavior she used to justify her concerns about sexually inappropriate behavior at my son's home, and which justified her efforts to seek out the opinion of sexual assault counselors to raise speculation about dangers at my son's home, turned out to be on the following timeline:

a. Grandson starts self stimulating behavior in February 2004, an incident of which was spontaneously filmed, and saved, with the creation date of Feb 2, 2004. Mom knows about it immediately thereafter.

b. Mom buys tickets to go to Ingushetia to film her grandiose documentary, in May, 2004, planning to leave son with his dad while traveling to dangerous and war torn region.

  c. Dad claims he sees fresh cut marks on mom's arms July 2, 2004.

d. Mom cancels trip, and two weeks later takes son to get sexual abuse exam based on the self stimulating behavior and the movie she knew about five months earlier and which weren't enough of a concern for her to avoid planning a trip on which she could easily have been killed, leaving her son alone with his dad.

e. Mom uses sexual misconduct allegations to try to keep father and son separated.

3. When the mother, and her attorney, realized my son still had a copy of this movie, that it was created five months before the mom acted on her "concerns," that the mom, with knowledge of it, planned a dangerous trip abroad, and only after my son saw fresh cut marks on her arms did she act on these concerns, they were screwed. It was obvious they were manufacturing sexual misconduct claims. Judges rightly hate that. Rarely, though, is it possible to prove so convincingly that these claims are manufactured.

4. The parenting evaluator had become so much a partisan that she was willing to testify that my three year old grandson could maintain his emotional bond with his father via telephone, and a two day visit every month. There simply is no research supporting that, an abundance that falsifies that claim, and every judge who has tried a few custody cases knows all about it. Once the parenting evaluator demonstrated her willingness to so far depart from any semblance of objectivity, the rest of her recommendations became equally suspect. There is a lot more to this part of the story. I stayed up until 5 am the day before my son's lawyer cross examined her, preparing the cross examination. It was absolutely devasting, reducing the parenting evaluator to speechlessness and caricature.

So the mother's house of cards was built on the parenting evaluator. Once she was taken out of play, and the mom was shown to be a manufacturer of sexual misconduct concerns, she had nothing left to tar the dad with. She needed to tar him, because she had to make him look worse than she did, with her 16 year history of cutting herself, her suicide attempts and ideations, her Borderline Personality Disorder characteristics, and the fact that her own son still doesn't want to return to her care from his father. She was trying to nibble around the edges with all sorts of stupid crap, and it wasn't going anywhere.

And even through the first day of trial, my son's lawyer was pushing him to settle. I kept pushing him to fight. He did. Nobody ever expected the outcome we got. Otherwise, he would have been pulled around the country by a BPD mom for the rest of his days, spending his childhood being her caretaker. And the only reason we had to fight this as hard as we did is because there is still so much cultural and social bias in favor of single moms and so strong a cultural and social bias against recognizing fathers as a source of nurturing.

The main reason I decided to go to law school was because my own son had been so severely screwed by a judicial system that was not equipped to protect him. I hoped I would be able to prevent the same thing from happening to other children. To my chagrin that has happened rarely. The efficiency the system needs to process the enormous volume of cases that must be resolved does not permit it. The amount of resources required to fight the case the way we had to fight this one is absolutely prohibitive in nearly every case. If I had to bill the time I spent on this case to a client, it would have been well over $100,000. That's what it took to save my grandson. And this is, by far, the best and most important thing I have done, or ever will do, as a lawyer.

So far as the settlement terms are concerned, they are precisely what I asked for a year ago, when I practically begged the mother's lawyer to sit down and talk about this case, so we wouldn't have to spell out her history in court pleadings. Her answer: "you are not a psychologist."

So, one year and $50,000 later, there we are.

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