Our client was facing multiple false allegations that were made by his children in the midst of contentious divorce proceedings.
Our client was falsely accused by his wife of molesting their son and daughter. The allegations came during their divorce and as a result of persistent negative influence the mom was exposing the kids to. He was being prosecuted in Fayette County and, unfortunately, our client had already been arrested and indicted prior to us getting involved in the case.
During our investigation, we were able to recover a multitude of emails and text messages that showed his wife’s history of control, vindictiveness, and attempts to alienate our client from his children.
Our client and his wife had been having marital problems for several years prior to this allegation. He had moved out of the house and was only having visitation with his youngest son. One day, according to his wife, the youngest son was having a meltdown because he didn’t want to visit him.
We uncovered evidence that the son was clearly conflicted by the negative accusations he had been hearing from his mom and older siblings. Text messages between our client and his son revealed this and the situation was aggravated by the fact that the youngest son was the only one still seeing our client. During that meltdown is when the daughter and older son allegedly told their mother that our client had inappropriately touched them.
We were able to show that the wife had a history of manipulative and controlling behavior. The evidence also showed that she had a history of alienating people when she did not like how she was being treated.
For the majority of our client’s marriage to his wife, she had suspicions that he was being unfaithful. She had even filed for divorce over 15 years prior because she thought our client was having affairs. They reconciled, but her suspicions worsened.
We sorted through thousands of texts and emails between our client, his wife, and even our client’s mother. These messages demonstrated that the wife was not only paranoid about our client’s infidelity, but also believed that her in-laws were conspiring against her. We found an email where she admitted to our client’s mother that she had set up an audio recorder to record his phone conversations. When her mother-in-law told her to “grow up” and that she was “very disappointed” in her, the wife decided to cut all three children out of their grandparents’ lives.
She continued to believe our client was having an affair with a co-worker. During our investigation, we found that she had created a fake email account which she used to send catfishing emails to one of his co-workers to get information on him. She even got a fake phone number and used it to send catfishing texts to our client to try to “catch him” cheating on her.
This distrust and dislike of our client starting rubbing off onto the kids. First, the daughter and oldest son signed affidavits in the divorce case stating that they no longer wanted visitation with their father. They cited no reasons and never visited him once following the divorce. It was clear from the beginning that she was going to do everything possible to keep our client out of the kids’ lives.
Then, the daughter’s texts to our client started to echo all the same complaints made by their mother. She would say that she can’t trust him and that he’s a liar. She would speak to her father just like her mother did – controlling every conversation, threatening him, and blaming everything on him. However, with all of her heated texts and venting of frustrations, there was never anything mentioned about molestation or inappropriate touching.
After these allegations were made, the police interviewed the youngest son. He said that he was scared to go visit with his father because his mom and siblings kept saying he did something bad, but they wouldn’t tell him what it was. He obviously had been exposed to the negative conversations about his father which ultimately resulted in the meltdown that took place on the same day the allegations were made.
Both the daughter and oldest son told the police that their father inappropriately touched them. In their interviews, the mom’s influence over them was obvious. Rather than focusing on the alleged inappropriate touching, the oldest son focused on the fact that their father had cheated on their mother and that he had a drinking problem.
The daughter said that “he would say like really degrading things [to me].” The word “degrading” isn’t a common one for 14-year-olds. She used the word again later in the interview when she said they were all scared to be around him “because of what he did and things that he said to us that were really degrading, and like took a toll over all of our self-esteems.” It seemed almost undeniable that this was the product of her mother’s influence.
We presented the prosecutors with all of the evidence of the wife’s behavior, the obvious influence she had over the children that created the motivation and atmosphere for making these false allegations against their father. In addition, we showed that our client passed a polygraph which supported his continuous denial of the allegations.
Ultimately, we successfully proved these allegations were false and were able to convince the district attorney’s office to dismiss all of the charges against our client.
Categories | Child Molestation Cases,