Mother Loses Custody Battle Because of Crazy Voicemails

The consequences of not being on your best behavior in a child custody battle can devastating for you and your family.

I want to remind you that when you are going through a family law case whether it be a divorce case, a custody case, a spousal maintenance case, you have to remember that all eyes are on you.

You are under a microscope and if you go into your trial or evidentiary hearing and you have done something to act crazy, expect that to be Exhibit A or Exhibit 1 in the evidence against you.

It seems like common sense but I can’t tell you how many divorce and custody cases where I have witnessed one of the spouses act crazy. It could even be determined that you have a borderline personality disorder which would pretty much not give you a very good chance of losing custody.

So here are 2 examples of actual cases:

Example One:

Right now I am going through a child support trial where the mom has become angry because in one of the earlier trials the court ruled more in the father’s favor. So she has now gone on a campaign to smear my client. She has gone to the IRS, she has contacted the sheriff’s office including the head sheriff, Joe Apaio and if you don’t know him, he is notorious for punishing dead-beat dads, and my client is not one of them but she has contacted him regardless. She has gotten in touch with Veteran Affairs in Washington DC and she is going around to every agency who will listen to get my client in trouble. When in fact he is doing everything he should be doing and had every right to seek sole custody. This is a clear example also where the fathers rights were upheld and rightly so.

So when we go to trial you can bet we are going to present to the judge as evidence everything she has been doing to smear her husband, it is just going to make her look crazier and that is not going to help her credibility.

During a divorce and custody case things can get really ugly really fast which more times than not results in a spouse not being on their best behavior ie acting crazy.

Example Two:

My client was the Father who was fighting for custody of his son and the mother was being very disrespectful of my client. She would call him vulgar names and leave him terrible voicemails on his phone. So at one point my client began recording these messages and we used that at trial.

What ended up happening was that the court ordered that my client, the father would get sole custody and decision making rights for his child because the mother was clearly not capable of co-parenting. So that behavior ended up biting her in the bottom.

So the point is you have to make it a habit to be on your best behavior at all times. But it shouldn’t just be happening when your case is pending. It should happen before and after the custody case, especially if you share children in common.

It could affect your relationship with your child in the future and how your child thinks of you and your relationship with the other parent and you are modeling how you want your child to behave when he or she gets older.

So remember when going through your family law case. “Crazy is as Crazy does”