Custody cases are often referred to as “custody battles”. Lately when I hear this term, I have to chuckle to myself because a “battle” seems so mild and finite compared to what I have been dealing with since the night I fled my ex’s house with my newborn son.
A “battle” might be an appropriate title when the case is between two rational parents. If you are dealing with a sociopath in a child custody case, however, you are probably experiencing what feels more like a war. Some battles are won and some are lost, but it is never just ONE battle with a person like this. I am blessed to be able to share my war stories in hopes to give others ammunition that I didn’t have (and maybe even gather some tips/weapons from others who have been here before me).
My story begins…
The first time I walked into my lawyers office, I probably looked like a crazy woman (and to some degree that is how I felt). I still remember the black sweat pajamas and spit up stained shirt I was wearing that day. These were the only clothes I owned because they had been the ones I fled Lucifer’s house wearing (Lucifer is what I am calling the psychopath – Luc for short). My two week old son was in my arms, despair and fear were the written all over my face, and I was visibly shaking as I held out my hand to meet my new attorneys.
As I sat in their office and told my story, I felt their judgement and disbelief. They had seen so many scorned women come through their office with false accusations and unbelievable stories. To them, I was just another one of these women who was determined to get some sort of revenge on her ex. It took me nearly a year to convince them that we were not dealing with a normal and healthy man. That, in fact, we were dealing with someone who very likely had a dangerous personality disorder – a sociopath.
A little background:
Just a few short weeks after my son was born, Lucifer’s mask fell. After he threatened to kill me, me and baby boy fled the house and never looked back. In the weeks that followed that horrible night, I learned more about Luc than I knew about him in the whole two years we dated. What I learned was very disturbing and, frankly, continues to scare the hell out of me. I learned he had lied to me about everything from his name and age to how he made his money. I also learned that two of the most important women in his life died of unnatural causes. While a lot of terrible things seem to happen around Luc, he has yet to be convicted of any crimes.
Things I have learned from my Custody War:
- Family court is not about what is best for the child. It is only about dealing with parents. Every time I hear people talk about “father’s rights” and “two parents are better than one” I want to throw up. Again, these might be totally justified ideas when the father is not a sociopath. Family court is “one size fits all”. Judges are not interested in making sure the child is safe and healthy. They are only interested in making parents happy enough so they don’t have to deal with the case again.
- Sociopaths are very good at finding people who will lie for them. This includes professionals. Luc actually found a psychologist to take the stand for him and testify that while he was at risk for a mood disorder and “socially maladaptive”, she didn’t have any concerns about him. She said all of this after learning that he had lied to her about previously receiving a psych exam and about what he did for a living (among other things).
- The courts don’t recognize psychological abuse as abuse. After only a few months of supervised visits, the judge awarded Luc unsupervised visitation with my non verbal baby boy. The judge stated that unless baby boy was returned with cigarette burns on his back, the threshold for abuse would not be met. He noted that he didn’t think Luc was a good guy, however, unless Luc was arrested, he would be allowed unsupervised visits with baby boy.
- No matter how many mistakes a sociopath makes in family court, he will always be given the chance to try again. On the day of our initial trial, Luc showed up by himself with nobody to testify on his behalf and not a shred of evidence as to who he was. He believed that the mere fact that his sperm contributed to baby boy’s life was enough for him to be awarded at least joint custody. He wanted the court to make me pay him child support so that he could continue to sit at home and play video games all day. This behavior went on for several months. Luc even tried to get jurisdiction changed to his state after he had disappeared from baby boy’s life for three months without even a phone call. For a while, I felt like I was in court with Luc every other week. These trials were sport to him and he knew that the judge would keep giving him chances. He continued to drag out proceedings and not pay his attorneys, while I drained all of my resources trying to show the courts who his true motivation – money, power, and terror.
- Perjury might still be against the law, but don’t count on it being enforced. Luc is a pathological liar. Throughout the custody war, my lawyers were able to catch Luc in several lies. Let me just give you an example of one of the basic and most glaring lies Luc told to the court. About half way through the year, Luc’s age changed. The age he testified to at the original trial was false (even though he had managed to obtain an official drivers license with that fake age). When we were able to prove this lie through official Social Security and Department of Homeland Security records, he pretended as though he had never testified under oath to a different age. This ridiculousness continued throughout the custody war.
In the year since I left Luc, many people have questioned how I got myself into this situation. Here is the best answer I can come up with:
If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, he will jump out; however, if you put that frog in a pot of cold water and slowly bring it to a boil — before too long, you are going to have one dead frog. (In case it’s still not clear…I am the frog and Luc is the pot of boiling water)
The sad reality is that my war with Luc is far from over. Each day, I wake up wondering if I will end up like his older sons mother (in a grave). I have many days when I get discouraged by our terribly ignorant justice system. What is my silver lining, my ray of hope, and why I keep fighting? My baby boy. He is my guardian angel and the reason I wake up every day. I have been through a hell worse than I could ever have imagined in the last year, but I will do it all over again and for the rest of my life if I have to in order to save my son.
AnnieO: My initial custody fight started in the late 1980s and ran all the way through the 90s and part of the 00s, off and on. This was in Southern California. The initial court-ordered psychologist told me that she would writing her report in my favor, and my attorney based his case on that assumption. But my ex and his “father’s rights” attorney told her that they would sue her for defamation, etc., if she said anything negative about him. Her report, which she turned in just as the court hearing was about to start, despite the fact that the report was REQUIRED to be written and given to both sides ten days prior to the hearing was a masterpiece of mealy-mouthed doublespeak: “He’s a nice person, and she’s a nice person, and he’s a college graduate, and she’s a college graduate, etc. etc.”
The psychologist had told me privately that he was incapable of maintaining any long-term relationship, although she would not tell me what she had diagnosed him with. Even if she didn’t realize that he was a full-blown sociopath with an upper-middle-class background, the narcissism and ego-centrism should have been simply unmistakable to anyone with any training.
After a lengthy custody fight, we ended up with a very confusing 50/50 schedule. My ex went around telling everybody, including the children’s teachers, that the judge had realized how dysfunctional I was, since HE was awarded more school days than I was.
I tried for a couple of years to make the unworkable work (the schedule was very fragmented AND it “rotated,” so that it was impossible for the children to take piano lessons or enroll in a dance class or swimming, etc.) Finally, I went back to court and we were ordered back to mediation, and back to a different court-appointed psychologist than we had had in the prior round. That was when the psychologist told me that every time a couple came in a year or more after a custody decision had been reached, it was almost always the case that the person who had been eager to divorce thought that the custody schedule was working great, while the other person claimed it wasn’t working at all. He said that the 50/50 custody splits simply did not work as the children got older and had social lives of their own, etc., and that virtually all of the couples awarded 50/50 custody during the time that the courts were handing those schedules out had ended up relitigating, with the result that judges were no longer handing the schedules out in the first place, since they HATE it when couples come back for Round #2 and Round #3.
We ended up back at the mediator’s office, and purely by chance we ended up with the same mediator that we had had a year previously. The mediator asked me to say what I considered to be the BIGGEST issue in the custody case. I said that the children were enrolled in a subpar public school, and I want them enrolled in a private school.
The mediator then turned to my ex and asked him, “Well, what do YOU think of that idea?” My ex said, “Well, gee, I don’t know! I’m not totally opposed to the idea, but this is the first time that this has come up, and I haven’t had time to think about it. If we can get together with my attorney, maybe we can all sit down and work something out together that will be satisfactory to everybody.”
I was absolutely blown away, because we had been fighting about the children’s education for YEARS, and the court filings were filled to the brim with information about the children’s schooling. I said to the mediator, “I know that you see so many different couples over the course of a year that you can’t possibly remember us, but we were in here about a year ago, and he (my ex) said the VERY SAME THING — that sending the kids to private school was a brand new idea and he was open to the idea, but needed time to think about it. The mediator was silent for a moment, and then he said, “You know, I DO remember the two of you. And I DO remember you (my ex) saying that the idea of sending the children to private school was a new idea that you needed time to think about.”
The mediator then let us both leave, but my ex KNEW that he had been “outed” as a major-league gameplayer, and that the mediator’s report to the judge would highlight that fact, with devastating results when the judge’s ruling came out. So my ex settled out of court for a standard custody schedule, which meant that he had the kids every other weekend, and the kids started private school the next fall.
If I had it to do all over again, I would NOT fight my ex for custody. I would have let my ex “win” from the very beginning, and accepted whatever crappy schedule I ended up with. My ex would have bailed out on major custody time with the kids within a year or so anyway, and if he had not, the kids would have gotten tired of not being able to participate in any extracurricular activities, and he would have seen the writing on the wall and not fought an informal modification to make extracurriculars possible.
Fighting with my sociopathic ex only brought out the worst in both of us, and as all of you know, a court fight with an spath is hopeless, because they lie, they re-litigate crap that has supposedly been settled, they bring up the same baseless accusations of unfit motherhood with each new judge, each new mediator, and each new psychologist, and even when you “win” some little piece of something, it is only a temporary win. The money spent on litigation would have been far better spent on extracurricular activities and the cab fares that would have taken them to and from the activities. They could have had nicer, trendier clothing, gone on nice vacations, etc.
By the time the children are ten, they will be seeing the spath for who and what he really is. By the time they are twelve to fourteen, they will only be spending time with him on their own terms.
My prayers go out to anybody who is currently living through this sort of nightmare — life really does get a lot better as the children get older.
Charm4u – Your story is so awful – and so common among Lovefraud readers who share children with these predators. I do hope that your daughter sees what really happened at some point.
Welcome to Lovefraud.
After Spath got our daughter to live with him full time (even though it was supposed to be 50/50), he went to court and demanded that I pay him child support. He made 4 times as much as I did, but that made no difference in court!!!
He lied extensively about his income. He took and hid all of the marital investments. Since he worked at a major brokerage firm at the time, he lied and said that everything had been lost thru failed investments. The Court never required proof and just took his charming word for it!!!
The retired federal investigator that my attorney had me talk to said that I could ‘spend my last dime and my last dying breath’ trying to find where he hid the assets, but never find them because he worked at a major brokerage firm. He highly recommended that I just drop it and go on with my life. So, I did. However, once again there no consequences for Spath’s bad behavior. In fact, he was rewarded because he got to keep all of our money for himself!!!
Unfortunately, the judge that we had was well known for hating women. Spath was also able to negatively influence the judge against me. Ended up that the court ordered me to pay a ‘punitive amount’ of child support (according to my attorney). The amount was more than what was listed on the chart based on income.
When I paid monthly child support payments directly to Spath, he lied. He continually badgered and threatened to turn me over to the authorities. He tole more lies and convinced the authorities that I had failed to pay and was behind on payments. I had to spend extra time and effort every month proving that the payments had been made–and that they were all made on time!!!
You would not believe how quickly the people in that office were to automatically assume that you’re a dead beat and never paid. Rather than ‘innocent until proven guilty’.
My attorney put a stop to Spath’s antics by having me pay directly to the County Clerk’s office and pay the extra service fee every month (for 10 years)!
Truly an evil spath man, plus a very unfair court system.
🙁
Charm4u: It looks as though my previous post disappeared, but I just wanted to say that my own children are the same age more or less as your daughter, and my relationship with them has been very strained in the past, but is now slowly getting better.
If your daughter has children of her own at some point, that may help things along.
The hardest thing for me to deal with has been the fact that much of what the children resent about how I mismanaged their childhood was actually directly or indirectly caused by spath’s acts and omissions.
For instance, I was never able to buy them nice enough clothes, or take them on the kind of vacations that their friends and cousins enjoyed, because I was broke all the time. But if spath had paid child support (he made a six figure income, even in the 80s) our life would have been far more comfortable. The same can be said for spath’s refusal to settle ANYTHING outside of the court system, resulting in huge legal bills, and interfering with my ability to earn a living.
Because I worked and came home dog tired to all the housework, etc., I wasn’t too keen on driving them to a host of far-flung activities. They resent ME for this failure, but their father did not even visit or phone for a five-year period. He wasn’t around to do carpool duty, or to be “Dad’s Taxi” so he isn’t faulted at all in this regard.
Charm4u,
Hello, welcome. I’m so sorry you have endured such evil resulting in you being estranged from your daughter. You fought well. I sincerely hope she learns what really happened and you may be reunited.
Divorced from gaslighter,
It broke my heart to read that, in hindsight, you wouldn’t fight him if you had your time again. Yes, if we knew then what we now know…..
It’s so very sad to read the sacrifice that you both made. You did what you thought was right at the time ….and hindsight, well, it is a wise person who can see round corners.
Bless you. I admire your courage
Charm4u, welcome to lovefraud. When I found this site, I was so relieved that I was not the only one who had run into a monster like my ex. That being said, it is also sad to know there are so many of us. I am so sorry about your situation. I will pray for you that your daughter will find her way back to you.
Divorced From gaslighter: You mentioned that if you could do it all over again, you wouldn’t have fought him. I have heard so many mixed reviews about whether or not (or how much) to fight with these people. I have a question to pose to the crowd….(and I am considering writing about this in more depth):
Should I appeal a decision that gives my ex unsupervised access when I know how dangerous he is?
I know I am lucky because I have sole legal and primary physical custody of my son with my ex only seeing him once a week for about 3-8 hrs (alternating). That being said, my ex is also a dangerous monster who I know will hurt my son if given the chance.
I have been fighting him tooth and nail and now that he finally has unsupervised access, he has actually chosen to give up several of the shorter visits and is “holding out” for the longer visits. He seems to not be pushing for the order to be signed (changing the visits from supervised to unsupervised). I know he is lazy, but could it be that he won and so he feels satisfied? I know he can’t possibly WANT to hang out with a baby who cries at the very sight of him. (not someone like him)
So I am at a crossroads. I am not happy with the custody result given how terrible this man is and the fact that people keep dying unnaturally around him. On the other hand, I feel like I am constantly gambling when it comes to him because if I fight my lawyers are saying the courts could make it worse.
Thoughts?
cappuccinoqueen: It sounds as though your court case is in a “dormant” phase. My advice would be to leave things alone. Your ex may be trying to set you up by claiming that you are unwilling to let him see the child. “I love my little baby SO MUCH, but I only have little tiny scraps of supervised custody, and she keeps trying to take even that away from me! sniffle, sniffle”
Three to eight hours per week is very little from the court’s point of view. If the case goes back to court, he is far more likely to win MORE time than to lose part of the time he already has, unless he does something outrageous (DUI with baby in the car, etc.)
I understand that this guy is DEEPLY scary, but you probably can’t prevent him from eventually getting unsupervised custody, and if someone is determined to kill someone else, that can’t usually be prevented either.
You are in a horrible situation, but my inclination would be to show no emotion to him, and don’t ask for any increase in child support or help with daycare fees, etc. Most men are no good with babies, and if your baby cries every time the ex comes around, three hours must seem like three weeks. Remember that he doesn’t actually care about having a real relationship with the child. It is all about power and control.
Spend the three to eight hours doing the cleaning, laundry and errands, and make him think that you have come to accept the custody sharing. Because the child is SO young, there is an excellent chance that he will disappear.
If he stops paying child support, don’t go back to court right away. Look up your state statute for how long he has to be out of the picture for you to terminate his parental rights. I think that in Texas, it used to be six months. If this occurs, hire the absolute best attorney you can afford to terminate his rights UNLESS you think that he would go into a rage and become dangerous to you or the child.
You are in such a tough situation. There are no good answers.
May God bless you and protect you.
CapQueen~ Your story is so much like mine six years ago, except that you are armed with information that I wish I had. The spath also only had two four hour visits a week once the supervised visits were over. IMO I would leave things alone!! By fighting it, you are giving the spath the playbook of what is important.
The courts are under the false assumption that once a woman leaves an abusive relationship that the abuse ends and the man has every right to the children.
Unless you have compelling evidence that the spath is basically a lunatic murderer, you can give up any fantasy that the courts will restrict his parenting time. (Even though your gut tells you that is exactly what he is).
Some of this is such a crap gample. The judge, the court appointed psychologist, the attorneys and the spath. Sometimes we get lucky but there have been such an overwhelming horrific number of stories that have gone very, very wrong.
One thing that seems to be a constant is that if you try to restrict parenting time you then become the vindictive ex. The more time that goes by, the less that prior abuse has an impact, especially when they find a new wife/g/f to keep their cover.
The courts deal with so many dead beat dads that when a case comes along where the father is willing to ‘fight’ for custody, visitation, decision making and overall involvement in a child’s life, you can see how the court’s automatic presumption is to think ‘what a b*tch she is for trying to stop that.’
This is a really difficult situation. From my experiences, the LESS you are in family court, the better off you and your son are.
Please take care.
I would agree with everything AnnieO says, and add that the prevailing view in the Family Court system is that even if somebody is a horrible, violent, abusive spouse, it doesn’t mean that they can’t be a Top Notch parent. And if you claim that they are “unfit” and shouldn’t have unrestricted access to the children, then you are trying to turn the children against them for your own selfish, vindictive “private motives.”
CapQueen: Just to crystallize it all for you, I honestly believe that each time you walk out of the courthouse you will have “less” than when you walked in. A lot of lawyers are unemployed or underemployed at the present time, and many of them will promise to “fight for you” and “win for you,” and IMHO you have already won as much as you can hope to ever win. Play for time in order to hang on to what you have, and try to present yourself as being “above it all.” There is a decent chance that your ex will lose interest in both you and the child, and move on to his next victims if you don’t provide him with the drama he craves.
Thank you all for your advice. I think you have hit the personality on the head – all he cares about is the fight. Right now, even though I have done nothing but cooperate with the court, he has still managed to make me look like a woman who blocks access.
I imagine that if I went back, it would be just the same. Right now, he isn’t even trying to have the visits he has been granted. The position he has taken is that as long as he can blame someone else for not having a visit, he won’t have the visit. Does that even make sense?
For example, a couple of days before one of the supervised visits happened a couple of months ago baby boy was running a fever from a cold. I told the supervisor two days before the visit about the fever and said that if he still was sick I would take him to the doctor (to prove he was really sick and not be blamed) and then cancel the visit. She let Luc know about this and said the visit was “tentative” but not “cancelled”.
I called back the morning of the visit and told her that the fever had gone, but that he still had the cold. Though baby boy probably didn’t need to be running around a mall, I left it up to Luc whether to have the visit because he wasn’t sick enough to really need to stay home.
Luc proceeded to ignore the supervisors calls all day. Finally, the supervisor got in touch with his attorney. His attorney said that he hadn’t answered his phone because he was afraid of being harassed (I know…silly) and that he had been under the idea that I had cancelled the visit. The supervisor said that she never cancelled the visit. Luc swore that she did and then said it must have been a misunderstanding and that when he thought it was cancelled he immediately put his car in the shop. (So he claimed he didnt have a car to make the visit)
IMHO, this was a clear example that he didn’t really WANT to have a visit and as soon as he could have an excuse to not visit that didn’t come from him – he didn’t want to push for it.
So now, I just wait…and try to take care of my nerves and protect my son as best I can….and pray that Luc gets arrested for his crimes. You all are right. I don’t want to go back to court. I honestly don’t think I can handle more court time right now. I am emotionally wrecked from it.