*Not a fan fan of the way he wrote this. I think he should stick to sports, but here’s some of #3
Michelle Troconis was 42 when she met Fotis Dulos, in 2016. She had been all over the world, worked various jobs, been involved in affairs and breakups, married, divorced, and had a child, yet here she was, in the middle of life, behaving no differently than she might have at 20, sleeping with a married man, a father of five, moving into his house before he was divorced, engaging in the sort of love triangle that invariably ends in disaster...
Fotis and Michelle probably met in a hotel or spa, being habitués of high-end resort life. They looped the same wheel of mountains and beaches, dining rooms, and marble lobbies. It was only a matter of time before the dealer placed the jack of diamonds beside the queen of hearts. A lift line in Colorado, say—Troconis owned an apartment in Vail, according to Crimefeed—at the foot of one of those preposterously named black-diamond runs, Genghis Khan or Dragon’s Teeth...
Michelle Troconis had led a similar, all-over-the-world kind of life, the wayward existence of the wealthy. Though South American—Spanish is her first language; she often uses a translator in court—she was born (in 1974) in Tennessee, according the Daily Mail, while her father, Carlos Troconis, a cardiac surgeon, was in residency at the children’s hospital in Memphis. He later worked in Italy and the Dominican Republic, according to the Daily Mail, but spent most of his career in Venezuela, where Michelle grew up in the 1980s. Her mother, Marisela Arreaza, is a counselor...
What did Michelle Troconis look like in her natural habitat, at a beach hotel or on a ski slope, in a bikini or Moncler snowsuit? It’s hard to get a sense, because these days you only see her on the way to or from court, surrounded by lawyers, reporters, and cops. She looks run-down, put-upon, although, during one court visit, she flashed a smile as she entered a conference room and you got a sense of the kind of fun she must have been for Fotis. She has long dark hair and wide-set, almond eyes, high cheekbones, and a hard, angular face. She looks pampered. She looks like the citizen of that nation that exists everywhere and nowhere, above and beyond all other nations, a republic of the first class and top drawer that exists beyond restriction and border. She looks rich.
She had done some work for Fotis at the Fore Group, fixed up the Web site and so forth. The fact that all this was happening while Jennifer was trying to raise her children only added to and complicated the pain.
The marriage had not been good for a while. There was estrangement, distance between the couple even when they shared a bed. Jennifer knew Fotis had been running around, cheating. His Facebook page was filled with pictures of women, various and sundry, clinging to him, or smiling happily into the smartphone.
Why did it take her so long to ask for a divorce?
Because she’d been afraid of how Fotis would react.
“I know that filing for divorce, and filing this motion will enrage him,” she wrote in divorce documents. “I know he will retaliate by trying to harm me in some way.... During the course of our marriage, he told me about sickening revenge fantasies and plans to cause physical harm to others who have wronged him.”
But there was no way to ignore the affair with Troconis. When Jennifer confronted him in March 2017, Fotis admitted the affair. He said he’d been involved with Troconis for about a year. He said he had real feelings for her...
Divorces feed on their own blood. The worse one is, the worse that’s said in court. The worse that’s said, the worse it gets. It’s a negative-feedback loop, a spiral. For the first few months, the Dulos parents continued to share custody. Fotis got his kids for family dinners and Greek lessons and water-ski practice right up to the moment Jennifer learned that Michelle and her daughter were living in the Farmington house. From that point, the divorce shifted from mildly to historically contentious. “There were,” according to the Stamford Advocate, “more than 300 motions filed by the estranged couple during their contentious divorce battle.… Data shared with Hearst Connecticut Media by the Judicial Branch in July 2019 showed that the Dulos’ divorce case could be among the most litigious of all divorce cases in Connecticut.”
For Jennifer, there was one overriding issue: custody. She did not want her children living in the same house as Michelle Troconis and her daughter, did not want those families mingled. In arguing her case, Jennifer cited Fotis’s “history of controlling, volatile and delusional behavior,” telling the court that she feared for her children’s safety. As the nanny told police, Fotis had tried to run Jennifer over with the car and had chased her through the house. Jennifer said Fotis told her older children that she had hired someone to break his legs. Questioned about this, Fotis corrected his wife, saying that what he actually told the children was that their mother “could have hired someone from the Mafia to break his legs.”
By the end of 2018, Judge Donna Heller of the Connecticut State Superior Court was presiding over the case. Judge Heller appointed a psychologist to monitor the family. Fotis’s visits with his children were observed by a court-appointed counselor, who reported to the judge. There were between 20 and 25 such fishbowl sessions. There is pathos in the picture one gets of Fotis playing basketball with his kids as a social worker takes notes.
Judge Heller established certain redlines, which Fotis promptly crossed. One was about Troconis. She was not allowed to be present during any of Fotis’s visits with his children. Fotis brought Michelle anyway, then told his kids to lie about it. Naturally, Jennifer found out—what’s worse than asking a child to be disloyal to his or her mom?—and Judge Heller restricted Fotis’s visitation rights. According to the Stamford Advocate, “The judge concluded that Fotis Dulos was pressuring his children to lie in order to advance his argument, and that in at least one instance, his actions constituted ‘emotional abuse.’”
In March 2018, the judge awarded Jennifer “sole physical custody of the children and the final word on all decisions involving them,” according to the Hartford Courant. She also ordered Fotis to undergo regular therapy until he “understood the ramifications of the improper requests that he has made of the children to lie on his behalf.”
Fotis became increasingly desperate in these weeks, angry, then paranoid. He believed that Jennifer, her lawyer—a Greenwich attorney named Reuben Midler—and Judge Heller were conspiring against him. He filed a complaint, asking that Judge Heller be removed. He said she was biased against him because he was Greek. When Fotis asked that his children be in Farmington on the weekend of April 28, 2019, to celebrate Greek Easter, Judge Heller said no. According to Jennifer’s lawyer, some 15 members of the Troconis family would be present.
“Then the children will not have Easter,” said Fotis. “That’s great.”
“Your Honor, I am sorry, but why do I always get the raw end of the stick?,” Fotis asked Judge Heller on another occasion. “I really want to see my children. I have spent two percent of the time with them since January. I’m not Charles Manson...”
Murder in Fairfield County – Air Mail
