What to do first

If you've been served divorce papers, and especially if you've been falsely accused of domestic violence, the first thing to do is GATHER.

And here's what I mean.

Do a search of every communication with your spouse and your children and make copies. This means search your email, texts, messenger, and any and all forms of electronic communications and make hard copies of every com between you and your spouse or you and your children for as far back as you can search.

So invest in a decent black and white laser printer. You're going to need it.

Next, dig up every form of non-electronic communication you can find: birthday cards, notes, letters, etc. It's especially helpful when those cards, notes, and letters, are in the original hand of the sender. Keep the originals but make extra copies of these.

Also make a PDF of everything and store it on your computer, but preferably iCloud or a similar cloud service. In addition to iCloud, I also use iDrive.

Next you'll need a way to organize all these files. You will probably end up placing these comms into folders that make sense to you, but I recommend beginning each file with the date (Year-Month-Day). 240101_FileName = Jan. 1, 2024. This format automatically sorts the files by date beginning with the year, then the month, then the day.

Don't concern yourself with how this or that file will be used in your case. Just get the stuff and organize it. Court decisions turn on facts, and there's hardly a better fact than a written communication.

Emails are pretty easy to get and to authenticate - which we'll talk about in another post. However, texts are not so easy.

With Facebook Messenger, you'll need a special app to download the communications from a particular thread. It's been a while since I used this and it has changed, so best just to research how to download an FB Messenger Comm.

For iMessage, texts, What's App, I used IMazing. This app allows you to download everything from your phone. In addition to all past texts, you'll want to continue to do this on a monthly basis.

I also used a call recorder. And this was critical to ultimately winning my case. There's lots of them out there, so just research what will work best with your particular phone. My wife never answered any of my calls in my efforts to speak with my children, but I recorded every "no-answer" call, saved it to my computer, and made a call log of every unanswered call.

As the court had ordered her to permit a regular schedule of communication with my children, I was able to demonstrate via my call log that she had violated the court order which led to the court finding her in CONTEMPT. I never had to produce the recordings, however, that's only because I said that I had "a recording of every call" and could produce it.

And there's nothing better than winning a CONTEMPT order because while the court expects a bunch of back and forth between divorcing spouses, they don't like it when their orders are ignored. I used that initial finding of Contempt as well as at least two more warnings for CONTEMPT, over and over again, and in the end, I really believe that that is what brought the house down in my favor.

That brings up another point. Once litigation commences, NEVER communicate with your spouse - if you can help it - other than in writing. In my case, I was not calling my wife to speak with her, I was calling her to speak with my children, which is what the Court had ordered. However, in case you have to speak with your spouse, or in the event that she/he calls you unexpectedly, be familiar with your call recording app so you can record the call.

Additionally, I purchased a handheld recorder that I still keep in my pocket at all times. This also proved to be an invaluable tool, especially when my son called me with descriptions of how his mother was treating him. I was able to use those recordings and their transcriptions to present them to the court.

I also got, and still have, a subscription to an online video storage app called VIMEO. I either video or audio recorded every call with my children (calls ordered by the court). I then uploaded them to VIMEO, created a google spreadsheet, and then linked each call to the date, time, and other relevant info about the calls.

I'll have more to say about some of these apps and techniques that I used, but the bottom line is DOCUMENT, DOCUMENT, DOCUMENT. The courts don't care how much you cry and sob, they can only rule on facts, and you have to have them.

YOU have to have them. Not your lawyer. Your lawyer can only present what you give him or her. Unfortunately I had some very bad lawyers at the outset, but by the time I was on my fourth lawyer, I knew what I was doing. You don't have to wait that long.

A short story.

In November 2018 I filed a motion for Christmas visitation to visit my children where they lived with their mother. Their mother not only filed an answer severely limiting my visitation (under supervision only) but filed declarations from four of my adult children urging the court not to permit visitation at all, accusing me of domestic violence, child abuse, and sexual molestation of the children.

That's a pretty steep hill to overcome. However, due to what I just told you to do, I had cards, emails, and messages from those same children which painted a very different picture of me, their father. I put together a declaration countering their accusations and used their own emails, cards, and letters against them, attaching hard copies to my reply as exhibits.

It was a 60 page reply (a DECLARATION) and my attorney did not want to file it. His exact words were: "How much of this do you want the judge to read?" My exact reply was "How else is a father to defend himself against allegations of abuse by his own children." The attorney shrugged, made a few edits, and then filed it.

Seven days later my attorney called me sounding triumphant. He said "I think we turned this case around." The court had not only granted me unsupervised visitation for two weeks, but also overnight stays. The was critical. Because if there was even the slightest evidence that I had abused my children, sexually or otherwise, the court would NOT have given me unsupervised visitation let alone overnight stays.

Though it would take four more years (a delay due to many complications including COVID), this "turn around" was the catalyst that beat down the false allegations and gave me my children back.

However, not only did I have to functionally "force" my then-attorney to file what I wrote, I had to have the hard data to back up my declaration - and that was actual hard copies of communications from those same children who were only now accusing me of things that were in absolute contradiction to things they had written me in years past, and some, only months before.

In closing there are two more things I want to mention. I didn't particularly want the judge to read everything I wrote, only just enough for him to see that my wife and adult children were lying.

What I really wrote wasn't for the judge to read, but for my wife and adult children to read. Once they saw the hard copies of those exhibits - their own writings to me over several years - then I knew I would turn the tables since they had NOTHING to back up their damaging harangues. (Why they did this is the topic of another post).

And the second thing is this.

I didn't understand the law or the process at that time, so there wasn't much I could do to move my case forward in the courts. But what I could do was research and organize those comms and it gave me a sense of power. I was finding EVIDENCE.

Yes, it made me sad, all the same, to read such kinds words from my children and my wife from years gone by and to contrast those words with what they had filed in court, but beyond my sadness, this research gave me hope. And that hope would come to fruition.

And more importantly, in the meanwhile, it gave me something to do instead of just waiting for the calls from my lawyers which never came anyway.