Lost Custody
Ex took me to court for custody. He did not get physical custody in the divorce, but the judge gave him a way to earn equally shared custody (which is bizarre, but I digress).
The judge flat-out told him from the bench that violation of the custody order at all would nullify his chances at custody. It took him less than a week to do exactly that by introducing our children to his new fiancee before the divorce was actually final.
He also stopped paying child support and alimony and a ton of other things. He fired his first lawyer the day before the divorce finalization hearing and went into the hearing asking for an extension only for the judge to explain we were at the legal due date,
And that he’d heard the ex had a wedding already planned and would likely want to get divorced first. Anyway, we were back in court a year later with him going for custody (not the last time that happened).
The Friend of the Court recommended (again) no custody and barely more than supervised parenting time. We had tons of evidence. He had the best father’s rights attorney in the whole area, and the case just went weird.
I was interrogated on the stand for over half an hour about my knitting and spinning (yarn) and how my hobbies took me away from my children while I did them in the same room as we watched movies and how I spent child support money on yarn but also how I had yarn the ex had paid for when we were married.
I still have no idea what that was about. His second wife claimed she was going to vomit in front of our very pregnant FOC referee and then switched between crying and yelling on the stand.
He called the kids’ principal as a witness when she was the one who had banned his second wife from the school for harassing and threatening the kids’ teachers and also testified that he had almost zero contact with the school and their teachers.
The real kicker: His last piece of evidence was an email to him from his first lawyer telling him not to violate the court order by introducing the kids to his fiancee the day before he did on our daughter’s birthday.
He claimed on the stand that the email said he could do just that and that doing so was not a violation of the order. My lawyer took that apart beautifully, and then the referee started in and eviscerated him.
He lost all physical and legal custody after that. As my lawyer often said, just when she thought she had a handle on how bizarre our case was, he’d go and do something out of deep left field. Story credit: Reddit / Greyeyedqueen7