Pro Tem Commissioner with a Vengeance

To date, my worst experience in King County family court was August 4th, 2011.  I was having an endless summer of court dates after I finally had to petition for minor adjustments and modifications to our parenting plan.  This little spark sent my ex and his new wife over the edge and created an expolosion of retaliation.  Part of the retaliation was a first motion of Contempt alleging 7 violations.  All of these were from the prior 2 years.  My attorney, Christine Hook, did a wonderful Memorandum showing how none of these allegations were backed by any legal guidelines or RCWs.  The most notable of the allegations was a series of text messages that i had supposedly sent to my 11 year old daughter 4 months earlier.  The only “evidence” they had of these text messages was a blurry and completely ineligible picture supposedly of my daughter’s phone.  His declared his evidence to be his own typed up version of the texts that i had supposedly sent her.

In early July, I found out from the mother of a friend of my daughter’s that my ex’s step son had been inappropriately examining and viewing both my daughter and her friend.  As my daughter revealed more, i became very concerned because of the shame she was displaying.  I informed my ex via email that i knew about what had happened and that we needed to work together to get her some help and determine exactly what had gone on.  He refused to work with me and said I would need to wait until he returned the children from his 2 weeks at home vacation time starting in 2 days.  I told him i would not let her be around this step-brother until we figured out what happened.  I went on getting my daughter in to see our family doctor and a therapist.  This has been a long, slow healing process of which i continue to see new ways that this has negatively impacted my daughter.

My ex ended up filing another contempt motion against me for not allowing him his chosen vacation time, during which time my daughter was getting medical help and i was advised to keep her away from her stepbrother by multiple professionals.  Due to a combination of delays where my ex failed to confirm his first contempt hearing and he did not receive my response for the continuance, both of these Contempt motions ended up being heard together.

This brings us to August 4th, where we were in front of Pro Tem Commissioner Leslie Savina.  We end up being last on the docket as usual, since my ex makes it a practice to check in just minutes prior to any hearing to lengthen my attorney’s time and increase the bill.  My attorney did not know anything about her, but was told she typically handles DV cases so we thought this would go well.  When Ms. Savina was handling the other cases before us, it was pretty clear she had not thoroughly read through any of the documents.  She was even confusing motions between Adjustments and Modifications, which is a major difference when dealing with child support.  At one point, she held up a huge stack of documents and told the attorneys of one case to excuse her unpreparedness as she had been reading the docs at 11pm the night before.

I still didn’t feel concerned, nor did my attorney.   Our case should have been open and closed.  There was no evidence, and certainly withholding a young girl from an alleged child suspect of sexual abuse was for good cause.  When i saw that it was a woman, i told me attorney to be prepared.  My large 240 pound, shaved head, 6’2″ ex always cries in front of women judges and commissioners.  I timed it, within 20 seconds of speaking he started sniffling and crying; apologizing profusely to Ms Savina for his emotions and her having to read such lengthy documents that i had submitted.  I also knew immediately that something was wrong.  She looked at him empathetically and darted evil scowls towards me.  My ex has the most uncanny ability to appear to be a victim, though i am just 5’2″ and have wrinkles embedded in my face from laughing and smiling.  I guess what i’m saying is that i don’t look mean or cold; my boss even tells me i need to stop smiling and laughing so much in meetings.  “uh oh”, I thought; she believes him.  This man that I have found no less than 100 lies in all of his court documents and depositions; honestly, it would be easier to count the true statements, like his age or sex.

My attorney tried to speak and was cut off nearly every time with, “that is hearsay.”  Which made us all seem to believe that she had not read the 3rd party declaration from the mother of the other girl that had been victimized and allegedly touched by this boy.  In all fairness, we could not thoroughly dispute all the claims due to the King County mandated page limits.  We were only allotted 40 double spaced pages of declarations to dispute all 8 of these contempt allegations.  There were over 10 declarations from 3rd parties that we could not submit, because they brought us over page limits.  Still, there was no legal basis for the contempt charges as they did not meet the criteria or have purging mechanisms.

In the end, Ms. Savina apologetically told my ex that she could only find me in contempt of 2 of the 8 charges.  The text messages and not allowing him the vacation time.  When my attorney brought up that there was no evidence for the text messages, Ms. Savina claimed that my ex and his new wife’s recount of the texts was enough.  Ms. Savina also stated that she beleived i purposely made up the allegations of the step brother to interfere with the father’s time.  My purging mechanism was to provide all 3 children for a week of vacation the end of August.

All my friends and family in the courtroom that day sat dazed and in shock for minutes.  My attorney was literally dumbfounded.  She told me would should do a reconsideration and include medical records when i received them. This was the beginning of the worst times in court for my children.

The effect of having these contempt charges against me has colored every ruling afterwards and permanantly tarnished my character in the courts.  I was just being a mother and trying to do whatever i could to protect my daughter.  This woman has caused me to now have an anti-harassment protection order against me.  This has been used by my ex and his wife to have me flee from my kids’ school events, extracurricular activities and exchanges.

I keep replaying this day in my mind and wondering how any woman could have ruled the way she did.  I researched Leslie Savina online and found that she works as a legal advocate to ensure representation of low income people in court.  This seems to be a clear bias against me and for my ex, who is pro se and whines about how he has been unemployed for over 2 years; to start off with, he should actually look for a job.  Additionally, I found a very interesting article written by Leslie Savina that clearly shows another bias she has against specifically young, aggressive women attorneys.  She obviously is one of those insecure women, that wants to evoke her power and hold other women that threaten her to higher standards than that of a man.  Being that i walked in with an aggressive female attorney and the fact that i am employed in a large technology corporation that employs mostly men, this really left nothing but a big hole for her to bury us in.  I was shocked that this type of discriminatory article exists and is written by a pro tem commissioner.

Here are the highlights:

“Since that long ago hearing (when women lawyers were more of a rarity in court) I’ve had many opposing counsels. The ones I’ve enjoyed the least – okay, the ones who have made me seriously consider a career move – are the young women who learned their trial practice skills watching “Conan the Barbarian” re-runs. There seems to be a prevalent myth among recent, female, law school graduates that to be successful in a male-defined field, you had to litigate like a guy. This was loosely translated into being aggressive, uncooperative, curt, and (did I mention?) rude.”

http://www.law.washington.edu/PService/Voices/011Savina.aspx