Refresher on the closed hearing presided over by Judge Heller:
As a four-hour hearing wound down in Stamford family court last March and Jennifer Farber Dulos and her estranged husband Fotis Dulos were fruitlessly trying, through their lawyers, to agree on a n…
www.courant.com
7/7/19
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Meehan [guardian] said Dulos at that point had had 10 supervised visits with his children totaling about 48 hours.
“Not speaking for Ms. Dulos, but Ms. Dulos’ concern is that dealing with Mr. Dulos is like dealing with a bouncing ball. He sends an itinerary, he sets for a procedure she prepares for that and then shortly before, during or while in, something changes,” Meehan said.
But he also made it clear that the children wanted to see their father.
“The children are very vocal. They have vocalized their position as to what they would like to see. All of them want more time with their dad. They want to see their father. They have vocalized that to me,” Meehan said.
Dulos complained that he hadn’t seen his children in three weeks at that point other than in family therapy sessions. He asked the court for “makeup time” because the children were begging for it. Dulos also believed the restrictions keeping the children from seeing Troconis and her daughter were unnecessary as was barring his children from coming back to his home in Farmington.
“Michelle and [her daughter] have been wonderful to the children. There’s absolutely no evidence they have done anything wrong or they have spoken badly about Jennifer or anybody else,” Dulos said. “I want the children to come back to their home. They are asking for it. They’re asking to see their rooms. They’re missing their home. They consider this to be their home, and they have voiced that many times in family services therapy.”
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40 different motions
The hearings on the custody motion ended in October 2018, but it wasn’t until March of this year that Heller issued new orders — the ones that Dulos’ attorney, Norm Pattis, referred to in court last month as being beneficial to his client.
Heller set up a schedule allowing supervised visitation for Dulos to see his children every other weekend, seven hours at a time, starting on March 30. She kept many of the previous restrictions in place, including no contact between Troconis and the children.
But as with other orders in this case, it was immediately challenged by the other side, causing even further delays in the case.
On April 25, the date of the last hearing held before Farber Dulos’ May 24 disappearance, the couple argued about whether Dulos’ drive to and from New Canaan should count as part of his visitation time and where he should pick up and drop off the children. The hearing was long, prompting Heller to suggest that they visit family relations, which Midler dismissed as just another level of bureaucracy.
“There needs to be some mechanism for addressing disputes that do not require the court’s intervention, because if that is the case, then this case will be here five years from now,” Heller said, according to transcripts. “There are probably at this point forty different motions, and we could shut down the courthouse and not hear any other case and spend the rest of 2019 hearing and deciding those motions.”
The hearing ended with Midler arguing strenuously against Dulos getting the children for the Greek Orthodox Easter weekend on April 28.
“This is a piece of self-interest litigation that’s being driven by the defendant, because he has other concerns than the healing of the family; he’s more concerned with the problems back at” Dulos’ home in Farmington, Midler said, according to court transcripts.
[Farber-Dulos attorney] Midler raised concerns about how the children would be supervised during the weekend, saying 15 relatives of Troconis would be there in addition to another 20 to 30 people that are usually invited.
“We’ve had problems with children going missing in action before while visiting there, so this would be totally unworkable, it is not appropriate,” he said.
Heller didn’t adjust the visitation schedule to allow the Easter visit. She said she was waiting to get the custody report from Dr. Herman, which was overdue.
“Then the children will not have Easter,” Dulos said. “That’s great.”
Herman submitted his custody report to Meehan on April 24. A week later, Midler filed a motion asking the judge to remove Meehan as the guardian because he claimed Meehan had allowed Michael Rose, Dulos’ new attorney, to see it before the judge issued an order on how it would be distributed. It was Rose’s copy that was found in Dulos’ home after state police searched it last month.
Meehan asked Heller to investigate how Dulos ended up with the report. Heller ordered copies of the reports returned to Meehan and said attorneys could only look at it and take notes in his presence.
The motion to remove Meehan was never acted upon. Family law experts have said the motion to remove the guardian so far into the case was unusual.
Forensic exam
After Herman’s report was finished, he testified about it in a closed courtroom, but Midler could not complete his cross-examination once Herman left the witness stand and refused to return to court. Because of that, the sealed report is not officially part of the family court file, though Pattis is arguing in criminal court to have it unsealed.
Midler, who had recommended Herman, had emphasized the importance of the report during the previous hearing.
“We’re talking about one week, and when you consider the importance that many people attach to a custody evaluation that it may very well cause one or the other party to change their position,” Midler said.
While the details of Herman’s report haven’t been released publicly, no one disputed Pattis when he said in court two weeks ago that it was favorable to Dulos. But whether the report ever officially becomes evidence in the divorce case is now uncertain, which Dulos would have been well aware of as he played basketball with his sons on May 22.
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patch.com
