I heard this story on a podcast and it sounds so dumb I can’t possibly believe this is a real story.
So it happened in California in the 00s. The male story-teller had a female friend who had gotten a divorce from her husband and they shared custody of the child. Apparently he paid child support until the ex-husband found out his wife was dating a black man, so because he was racist not only did he refuse to pay any more child support he then began to actively get sole custody of his child because he didn’t want his child raised by a black man.
The story-teller claims he paid $5,000 total to hire an attorney for the woman to not only get him to resume paying child support, he also managed to get the child to be taken as sole custody for the mother.
My biggest problem with it, is why does the $5,000 lawyer get involved? If the ex-husband refuses to pay child support, wouldn’t the state automatically get involved? It’s already established he had paid child support prior to the racist incident. So how exactly does the new lawyer force him to start paying again that the state couldn’t already do?
The OP is a little confusing because there are so many uses of “he,” but I think:
my bolding
The first “he” here is the friend of the mother? The second is also the same friend, but I presume this means that the mother and her attorney were successful?
IANAL, but YouTube is awash with videos of custody disputes and many also have questions of failure to pay child support.
If the ex-husband is actively attempting to gain sole custody, the ex-wife is definitely going to need a lawyer to prevent that from happening. While they are doing that, it only makes sense to include the issue of nonpayment of child support, which I presume will help the mother’s case. As part of working on preventing the father from gaining sole custody, they would very well attempt to gain full custody.
Agree w @TokyoBayer’s parsing of the OP’s writing & the underlying situation.
In many states the agency charged with enforcing the child support orders is … nobody. There is no child support police. Or if there is, it is grossly under-funded and has nowhere near the people and power needed to deal with more than a tiny fraction of the total problem of nonpaying ex-spouses.
So the way you get anyone official’s attention is you take the deadbeat to court. Using your lawyer. Then the judge decides whose wages need to be garnished or whatever. It’s insanely unjust and inefficient, but it makes government bureaucracy smaller and therefore increases Freedumb.
My impression was that the sentence should be parsed this way:
The story teller claims that the ex-husband paid $5000 total to hire an attorney in an attempt to get full custody. But his legal manoevers backfired and the end result was that his ex-wife got a legal ruling forcing the ex-husband to resume child support payments. Further, the judge saw the ex-husband’s actions as reprehensible and gave full custody to the mother.
I think your are interpreting the term “for the woman to not only” incorrectly. It’s not a description of why the attorney was hired, it’s part of the narrative flow. An attorney was hired by the father, but the end result was that the mother got payments restored and full custody. Otherwise the story doesn’t make sense to me.
The last paragraph of the OP. If you go back through all of my posts, there are no final paragraphs in any of my posts which rereading would be meaningful.
The comment was directed at @Telemark who obviously understood my message and agreed me.
I think that the story is that Mother’s friend hired an attorney to represent Mother in her dispute with Father. The Attorney (which cost Friend $5,000) secured a child support order as well as full custody for Mother. Which was the opposite of what Father wanted.
I’m more curious about this part:
Payment of court-ordered child support may or may not be actively enforced by a state agency. But, you can’t unilaterally “get sole custody,” that’s kidnapping. And that’s something that the state might take more seriously.
And, if custody (and child support) weren’t addressed in the divorce (and it was all voluntary), then that could answer the OP’s question regarding why Attorney was necessary.
Yeah, as I said above, I’ve watched some YouTubes (which obviously DON’T make me an expert) on custody hearings. Typically these legal channels pick train wreaks so it’s like watching Jerry Springer, but my impression is that things are much better if you have a lawyer representing you.
And even when it is supposed to be actively enforced by a state agency , that agency may give priority to enforcing support orders that will remove a child from public assistance. Way back when my sister was supposed to get child support , she couldn’t get help from the government agency because she wasn’t eligible for public assistance. She would have had to hire an attorney to get a court order to garnish his pay, any tax refund etc.
In other words, the state agency’s mission is not about helping vulnerable children, but about getting people off public assistance rolls. Not taking care of children, but saving the government money.
Exactly. The enforcement agency is entirely about saving precious taxpayer dollars. Which is also why its budget is so small. It only makes a “profit” for government if it pushes more people off assistance than it costs to operate.
To be fair , my nephew was not exactly a “vulnerable child” since my sister was capable of supporting him without the $50 or so a month the deadbeat was supposed to pay,