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The question of how wealth should impact child support payments will be coming to a courtroom in California this week.
Two of the now-adult children of California real estate developer Donald Bren, whose estimated $12 billion fortune earned him 16th place on the Forbes Magazine list of the 400 richest Americans, are, in tandem with their mother, suing their father for retroactive child support payments.
According to the Los Angeles Times, lawyers for the children say Bren paid their mother $10,000 a month per child in child support payments under a private arrangement. Moreover, the Orange County Register reports that Bren paid an additional $6 million as part of a court mandated settlement earlier in the decade, bringing the total paid to $9 million in all. Either way, it sounds like a lot of money — till you realize that Bren was likely spending between three and four million dollars a month on maintaining his billionaire’s lifestyle, which included multiple private plane and residences.
The children — who are 22 and 18 — say they were entitled to $400,000 a month, a figure that represents ten percent of Bren’s monthly income. Continue reading »
A High Court judge in the U.K. ruled on Friday that the non-biological lesbian mother of a 10-year-old boy is not required to pay child maintenance to her former girlfriend. The couple had not entered into a civil union and therefore Justice Moylan said the non-biological mother could not be deemed a legal parent, despite being a “social and psychological” one.
Moylan said, “I have come to the clear conclusion that those against whom orders can be made… are confined to those who are a parent in the legal meaning of the word,” Lemondrop U.K. reports. The judge does not consider the non-biological mother a legal parent despite the fact that she won a court order for shared residence with her son. Moylan said the shared custody might appear “persuasive” in the argument for her to be defined as a legal parent, but “the mere obtaining of parental responsibility is clearly not intended to make someone a legal parent when they would not otherwise be such.” Meaning, for example, that a grandmother who is granted the temporary custody of her grandchild does not suddenly become the child’s legal parent.
So the non-biological mother in this case, known only as B, has a right to see her son, but not a responsibility to pay child support. Hmm… that’s sticky. How can we normalize same-sex parenting if we don’t hold gay parents to the same legal standards as hetero parents? Continue reading »
John Nelson, like so many others, was a victim of the economic meltdown our country is trying to deal with; he lost his job and was out of work for a year, before finding another, lower-paying position. Nelson is also a divorced father, ordered to pay child support. After he was laid off, Nelson filed for a reduction in his child support obligation, but it took more than a year to get a court date and then, when he finally did get to make his case before a judge, the judge actually increased the amount Nelson had to pay, leaving him with just $58 per week to live on.
A judge has come up with a creative way to solve the deadbeat parent situation: he sentences dads to Father’s Days in jail for not paying child support. Moms who don’t pay up get consecutive Mother’s Days in the slammer.
Judge James Flannery of Warren County, Ohio, says jail overcrowding makes it hard for him to enforce lengthy sentences, so he came up with this alternative. Continue reading »
The mother of twins born via insemination with sperm from a donor bank has lost a bid to get child support from the anonymous sperm donor.
Anyone else saying “well, thank heavens?” Continue reading »
I read all the way through the story about the priest, the stripper and their newborn daughter. And nowhere in it is there a punchline.
But there is the story of a man in a job known for its vows of poverty who is now being sued for child support. Continue reading »
Worried that kid really doesn’t look like you? Quick, it’s time to head south – way south. The State of Mississippi will be offering free paternity tests to fathers (or suspected baby daddies anyway) on certain days throughout the month of September.
Why now? Turns out it’s all about the dough. Continue reading »
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