Thursday, April 16, 2015

Worse Custody Ruling Ever, Not Quite


August 13, 2014 | 8:14pm

“Gossip Girl” star Kelly Rutherford says she feels betrayed by Uncle Sam.

“My own country won’t protect the rights of my own children,” said the beautiful blond actress, fuming, after storming out of a Manhattan federal courtroom briefly Wednesday to compose herself as she suffered a big setback in her bid to keep her son Hermés, 7, and daughter Helena, 5, in the US.
Manhattan federal Judge Andrew Carter Jr. said he wouldn’t interfere with a California state judge’s 2012 order requiring the kids to live with their father, Rutherford’s ex-husband Daniel Giersch, in France. Although Carter won’t officially issue his written opinion until Friday, he said he doesn’t believe he has jurisdiction to issue any type of order prohibiting the children from returning to France once their summer vacation ends next week.

The couple has 50-50 custody, but as Page Six reported Wednesday, Rutherford, 45, of Manhattan, claims her kids are basically being “deported” through an odd legal fluke.
Giersch, a German citizen living in France, was expelled from the US for alleged visa fraud and failure to pay taxes.

Since he can’t visit the children in the US, a California state judge ordered that the children should remain with him during the school year. A cash-strapped Rutherford over the past two years has flown more than 40 times to France to see her children.

In another legal rarity, Rutherford’s legal team – which is working for free because the actress has already gone bankrupt shelling out $1.5 million in legal fees – recommended the government take steps to allow Giersch back into the US so that he’d no longer be able to dance around the legal loopholes allowing him to keep the American-born children in France.

Carter agreed to “facilitate” the plan, at one point allowing Giersch’s and Rutherford’s lawyers to meet in his robing room to discuss the idea. However, it was unclear afterwards if Giersch wants to pursue getting his US visa back.

“He has benefited by doing nothing,” said Michael J. Wildes, a lawyer for Rutherford. “This case underscores the blind spots in our law. We have a broken immigration system.”

A composed Rutherford said afterwards that she was thankful the judge and feds agreed to help broker an agreement with her ex. However, a half hour earlier she was noticeably upset after briefly leaving the courtroom.

She said her children as US citizens have a right to be educated in America and that “something like this would never happen” in any other country– especially “Germany.”

She also said the legal system is unfair because her children – “who are US citizens” — are being “forced” to leave America while she’s stuck paying taxes to help support the children of parents “who illegally crossed our borders.”

Rutherford filed suit on August 5 against US Attorney General Eric Holder and other federal officials, seeking a court order declaring the California ruling “unconstitutional” so that her children could remain in the country.

“No similar case could be found where children who were born and raised in the United States were deported from their own country, where their mother still resides, to accommodate the demands of a non-citizen parent forbidden to re-enter the United States,” the suit says.

Carter, however, said the children aren’t being “deported” in the official sense and that he believes their constitutional rights are not being violated. He said the “state court made a determination that the children should be with the father” and that he’s “convinced” he doesn’t have jurisdiction to overturn such a ruling.

Rutherford’s lawyers said they’d consider taking the case to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals once Carter’s dismissal is official. However, time is running out because the children are required to return to France on August…

This poor woman has just lost her final court appeal...

Well this was heartbreaking, but a good lesson to other mothers.   

“STAY OUT OF COURTS WITH THESE ONGOING CUSTODY FIGHTS.  
THE COURTS ARE NOT YOUR FRIEND”

Sadly, our courts have been overrun with mens rights nuts and crazy gender neutralized feminists who are always looking to demonstrate that men and women are completely the same by removing children from their mother’s custody. 

Of course, right on schedule, the children were immediately dumped off on Giersch’s mother who has a permanent residence in Monaco.  I wonder if they’ll even speak English by the time they come back to the US which will probably happen when they are adults…

BTW, after six months or so of residence in another country, state, whatever, Giersch can re-file his court papers in the children’s new place of residence and get himself legally declared sole custodian and then this poor woman won’t even have the fiction of “50/50 custody” to comfort her.

Although Ms. Rutherford appears to believe this is the only time this situation has happened, I have heard of a number of mothers having their children legally relocated to other countries with court approval.  So in some sense the children are lucky, especially her daughter.  She could be living in the mid-east right now, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, anywhere.  Fortunately they are living in a stable European country, their grandmother is caring for them and I assume they will be in a proper school at some point.

Someone commented in another article about this decision that it was “the worse custody ruling ever”…but I must disagree.  The worse custody ruling ever was when a California female Judge returned two children to OJ Simpson even though they had been living with loving grandparents for almost a year during his murder trial.  There was no reason to overturn the stable environment they were already living in, OJ could have visited them on schedule like non-custodial parents everywhere do, he could have retained parental rights w/o upsetting the stability of the childrens' lives.   How many mothers do I know who lost custody with that exact rationale, many.

If I live to be 100, I will never get over that custody ruling...

“Best interest of the children”  it’s laughable really when you look at many of the rulings coming from these courts…

I was actually waiting for this to happen to Halle Berry when she started this whole court fight to move to France with her daughter.

Halle was very, very lucky that time, I hope she doesn’t repeat this error of judgment by attempting to go back to court on other issues in the future.  It could end badly for her.

Anyway I reiterate:  stay away from courts mothers please.

2 comments:

Susan Olson said...

Rutherford acted like a fool and really shot herself in the foot with these stunts she keeps pulling in the courts. That said, I am not a Rutherford fan, but I do not side with the ex-husband either. I've read the court papers, and Kelly really played dirty in her quest to keep Giersch from the kids. At the same time, I think a lot of Ruterford's actions were based on a very real fear that Giersch would kidnap the kids (at least in the beginning), and he may really have been involved in strange activities that the courts ignored or did not investigate properly when they made excuses for his hesitant "overly technical" court testimony. They even excused this by saying he feared Kelly would use his court testimony against him????? That makes absolutely no sense, and that is apparent to anyone who can see that the court was overly preoccupied with Rutherford's behavior, work schedule, and childcare arrangements while ignoring red flags about Giersch's testimony, and where this dude gets his money. The court allowed Giersch to take the kids to Monaco because they believed he is the parent who would better facilitate a relationship with the other parent. However, I do not think that was necessary because any refusal on Kelly's part to send the kids to visit him in Monaco would have made this a Hague Convention case, and Giersch would have been able to enforce visitation and/or get custody reversed. In other words, the outcome may have been the same as the current situation anyway. Unfortunately for Rutherford, she played right into Giersch's hands by ignoring court orders, following bad legal advice (or ignoring good legal advice), and all Giersch had to do was sit back and let her destroy herself because she acted like such a fool. As it stands, Rutherford should just let him keep the kids because this ongoing court fight is not in their current best interests especially as they grow older. They seem to be taken care of by Giersch, but it is sad because they really looked like they loved and missed their mother, but the fighting is getting ridiculous, and they already have adjusted to life in Monaco.

NYMOM said...

Yet men pull stunts like this everyday of the week and twice on Sunday and rarely if ever lose custody of their children because of it...

Suddenly Judges always seem to get 'religion' when women attempt to use these same tactics.

Yes, it's terrible what Rutherford did, if she did it, but I don't think the solution was to ship the kids out of the country because of it. It's just lucky that their father was in a decent country for the kids to live in and had his parents to help him. Not that this would have stopped many Judge from shipping these kids somewhere else as ordinary women who marry foreigners face this scenario every single time they enter a court in a custody dispute...