Hi all,
I intend to file a Notice of Contempt Motion on Monday, due to repeatedly not being granted access to my children recently, as per a current court order. Any advice would be appreciated. To follow is a bit of a background. (I live in London.):
In 2003, when we separated, I agreed to grant my ex-wife interim sole custody.
In 2004, I was granted joint custody, due mostly to an Office of the Children's Lawyer Clinical Investigation that recommended such.
My ex-wife immediately moved to St. Thomas (a half-hour drive away), in order to disrupt my access. I filed a Notice of Contempt Motion at that time and I also asked for sole custody. At a summary trial, the issues were narrowed to: "1) Is my ex-wife in contempt? 2) Can she switch the children's school so that they could attend where she was now living: in St. Thomas?"
The judge fell just short of finding her in contempt (I was told that, since it was the first contempt motion against her, she would not be found in contempt, anyway), but the judge prevented my ex-wife from taking the children out of their London school for the rest of the school-year (six months) and the judge also reinforced other access that my ex was cheating the children and me out of.
We went to trial on all of the issues in the summer and although the judge agreed that her move to St. Thomas was in violation of the previous court order, the judge did nothing to hold her accountable. The joint custody status remained intact.
In 2006, I finally gained access to doctor files and Children's Aid Society files, which had been illegally withheld from me since 2004, when I had been granted joint custody. The files contained irrefutable proof that, immediately after I had granted my ex-wife interim sole custody, she took my daughter to two different doctors and alleged that I had sexually assaulted my daughter. Neither doctor believed the allegation, so I was never accused of the crime.
CAS had been made aware of the false allegation in 2003, however, and the CAS files showed that low-ranking CAS workers had covered up what my ex-wife (and her mother) did to my daughter, which included injuring my daughter in order to try to make the sexual assault allegation more believable.
On November 8, 2006 I filed an official complaint with a senior CAS worker, showing him the clear evidence of the assault that my ex-wife and her mother had inflicted on my child, as well as the evidence from the CAS files that showed that low-ranking CAS workers had covered up the assault. I asked the senior CAS worker: "Given what you have before you, what do you propose to do to fix what has gone wrong?"
NINE DAYS LATER, CAS filed a Protection Application against me. They did not allege that I had ever directly abused or neglected my children. Rather, they claimed that the litigation (which they were causing to drag on by virtue of - for two years - refusing to release to me files to which I was legally entitled to receive) was traumatizing my children.
Almost two years later, it has become all the more clear that the Protection Application was filed ith the primary purpose of invoking the publication ban that is inherent with all Child & Family Services Act matters.
When the Protection Application motion was originally heard, the judge (who had been the CAS' lawyer for 15 years before becoming a judge) granted what CAS requested while admitting that he had not even read my responding materials. A month later, he changed his "only supervised access" order to "half supervised, half unsupervised". The judge also admitted that he was now aware that my ex-wife had been sabotaging my access, so he ordered that all of my children were to be brought for access, with the only justified reason for missing access being for medical reasons.
Needless to say, his order has not at all been followed. I was unable to see my children yet again today, which was the third (weekly) visit that has been missed in the last five weeks. There are other visits that have been missed and not made up either, some going as far back as being missed during last winter.
In addition to filing the Notice of Contempt Motion, I think that it is time for me to bring a Private Information before a Justice of the Peace. (A "Private Information" is one where a party attempts to have charges laid where the police have refused to do so.)
As of right now, I intend to attempt to have sexual assault and mischief charges laid against my children's mother and grandmother, as well as having six CAS workers and four different police officers charged with Obstruction of Justice and Accessory After the Fact, since that is the number of CAS workers and Police Officers who are aware that the sexual assault was committed, but they all chose to attempt to cover up the crime instead of following their duty of having criminal charges laid against the perpetrator.
If there is anyone with experience in this regard that is willing to offer any advice, it would be appreciated.
Brad C. |