Firm obtains substantial award for retroactive child support, plus $180K in attorneys’ fees, in long running divorce modification litigation
Following eight days of trial over a two-year period, a Massachusetts Probate and Family Court judge ordered a father to pay over $319,000 in retroactive child support and awarded $180,000 in attorneys’ fees and costs to the prevailing mother.
Gary O. Todd, Richard M. Novitch, and Gabrielle Denby of the firm represent the mother.
In addition to the retroactive award, the judge modified the divorce judgment to require the father to pay 10 percent of his income above $800,000 for additional child support. The judge also removed from the original divorce judgment the cap on the father’s income used for child support calculation purposes.
The judgment accounts for the father’s establishment of a venture capital fund following a job loss and his “disingenuous” representations to the court – in an attempt to terminate his support obligations – regarding his employment status and job search efforts while he was creating the fund.
He continued pursuing the termination of his child support obligations even though as the litigation proceeded the evidence demonstrated that his yearly income had more than quadrupled since the time of the divorce.
The judge also determined that the mother should have sole legal custody of their two minor children due to the father’s prolonged and incessant verbal abuse of the mother and his combative approach to co-parenting.
The judge found that the father “was unable to separate his anger at [the mother], the terms of the agreement into which he entered, and the Court, from the needs of the children. At a time when the children needed finality and parents who were able to co-parent in a respectful, calm, cooperative and mature manner, [the father] repeatedly threatened, degraded, and attacked their mother in an attempt to advance his own financial gain.”
The judge awarded attorneys’ fees based in part on the father’s substantial discovery violations that prolonged litigation, as well as his bad faith and implacable pursuit of modification in the face of clear evidence of an improvement of his financial conditions.