My boss once told me that, “Jeffrey Dahmer doesn’t marry Mother Theresa.” In my experience, truer words have never been spoken. I often remember them during initial client meetings and then later as things go wrong.
Theresa Anderson walked into my office and appeared to be a self-possessed, in-control kind of woman. While a bit intense, she seemed normal enough. She had married her second husband, Jeffrey Anderson, 3 years earlier and thought she was going to live the sweet life. Her first marriage had ended bitterly, but she came out of it with a six-year-old boy. Jeffrey was also on his second marriage and had an eight-year-old son by his first wife. Together they had beautiful 1-year-old little girl.
Some where along the line things started falling apart. From Theresa’s point of view, Jeffrey changed, “He just stopped caring about his family! He wanted to hang out in the garage drinking beer all of the time.” The decent toward divorce began picking up speed when she confronted him about it. “We began arguing regularly. They would start off with me asking him to join us in the house and he would reply with some thing rude and it would get worse,” she recalls. After much prodding, she revealed deeper problems, “He would call me names and swear at me and I would yell back. But the children never saw any of this.”
Most people wouldn’t survive long in an atmosphere as charged as the one Theresa described to me. Eventually she left Jeffrey. According to Theresa, she packed the bare essentials and walked across the street to her parents’ house with the children in tow. When Jeffrey returned home and discovered she was gone, he went crazy. Theresa said he started destroying the house and everything in it. She claims, he stood in the lawn and screamed curse words towards her parents’ house. He called her cell phone and threatened to harm himself if she didn’t talk to him in person at the house. Against all advice and her own better judgment, she went to see him.
Theresa explained that Jeffrey had calmed down by the time she got there and their conversation started out well. When she refused to return home, he began making wild accusations about affairs and abuse by her. She became so frightened that she ran to the family car, a brand new Ford Expedition, and locked herself inside to get away from him. Her parents called the police and the two were separated, however neither was arrested. Not surprisingly, Jeffrey has a very different version of the story Theresa tells. Two days later Theresa was in my office and the next morning I filed their divorce.
Although Jeffrey had never been arrested for violence in the past and Theresa had never complained of his aggressive behavior, she was convinced that he was a threat to everyone around him including himself, her and the children. She demanded that he undergo a psychological evaluation.
There are numerous types of psychological evaluations that can be used in a divorce proceeding. Some resemble couples counseling; a professional counselor meets with both parties either separately or together. Others are essentially a series of personality tests with a report explaining the results. With all types of evaluations, the findings, and occasionally recommendations from the counselor or psychologist, are reported to the Court. Judges tend to pay close attention to reports from the couples counseling style of evaluation and even more attention to any recommendations made by the counselor. Sometimes a counselor’s recommendation ultimately decides the case as the judge assumes they are more familiar with the parties and acting as a professional to assess the situation.
I warned Theresa that if we pushed for Jeffrey to undergo a psychological evaluation, his attorney would immediately counter and ask that Theresa also be evaluated. It has been my experience that Judges like to make things “fair.” Maybe they’ve heard my boss’s thoughts on Jeffrey Dahmer and Mother Theresa.
The other thing to know is that psychological evaluations are expensive. Psychologists charge by the hour and they aren’t cheap (hey, they have student loans to pay off!). Generally the Court orders that the party getting tested pay for his/her own evaluation. If both are being tested, they each have to pay and the charges can range from $500 to $1500 each.
Theresa is a good storyteller. Keep in mind that I never believe 100% of what my clients tell me, but from what she was saying there was enough there that I thought her request for a psychological evaluation was valid. I filed the proper motions and waited for the fireworks. Sure enough, the other lawyer went ballistic and demanded that both parties be tested. The judge agreed and ordered that they have a psychological evaluation done with a specific psychologist who would complete an evaluation more along the lines of a personality test. He gave the psychologist the freedom to choose if he would make a recommendation.
They each met with the counselor four times. The counselor administered a number of different tests and roughly six weeks later, submitted his findings. By this time, I had gotten to know my client better and the results of the tests didn’t surprise me. However, the commentary and recommendations he made shocked me.
The results from the tests showed that Jeffrey was verbally aggressive and had a personality that could be verbally and emotionally manipulative and abusive. However, the evaluation did not indicate that he was a danger to himself or others. The psychologist’s commentary on Jeffrey showed that he was somewhat impressed with Jeffrey’s scores and thought the charges made by Theresa did not match up to the character and personality the tests showed.
On the other hand the psychologist was not impressed with Theresa. “The results of the MMPI-II test indicate that Mrs. Anderson has an exaggerated and inflexible sense of personal virtue.” The psychologist also noted that, “Theresa appears to be highly manipulative of the people and situations around her and appears to be very capable of controlling those she loves and has the most contact with.” To make matters worse he found that “it appears she has an increased, even extreme need for affection and attention and if she feels this impossible need is not being met, will act out in an inappropriate manner to illicit a response. The response she gets does not have to be affection at this point, she is only seeking a response.”
When the dust settled the psychologist, an expert that the judge holds in high regard, felt that while Jeffrey had acted mildly inappropriately, Theresa had caused the entire scene and could not be trusted. Theresa’s case went from being a powerful juggernaut, with a poor abused woman, to a weak, floundering case of an emotionally damaged woman forcing the people around her to act out her drama.
Needless to say, Theresa did not take this well. She ranted and raved about how the psychologist was a liar; and that she was sure her husband had tricked him or cheated on the tests. She demanded a trial by jury in which she expected to exonerate herself. I explained the costs and preparation associated with a trial; and she told me she would get back to me soon. A few months later, I called to find out what she had decided. She managed to shock me, yet again, by announcing that she was back with Jeffrey and everything had been worked out. She asked me to drop her case and refund any money she had left on retainer. I explained that a high percentage of “reconciled parties” end up ultimately heading back for divorce after failing to completely reconcile. I told her that we could drag out the proceedings for a few more months to see how things were working out down the road, but she refused. So I filed the appropriate paperwork and left Jeffrey and Theresa to wedded bliss, or so I thought…
Read more...
Posts
