The attacks in Paris on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket were a lot more like Team America than the usual Air France poster. In working on the Indiana chapter for our book on family law nationwide we encountered the old image of Paris:
Can the mother [of the child of a casual encounter] wait until the child is 19 and then file a lawsuit for child support retroactive to the birth? “She can actually wait until the child is two years past 19,” said [our interviewee]. He sent us a case that his partner handled, In the Matter of the Paternity of A.J.R., 702 N.E. 2nd 355 (1998). As in some other states, much regarding money flows between unmarried parents is not public. This appeals court case uses initials to refer to the litigants. The mother was a 33-year-old graduate student and the father was a 23-year-old undergrad who “engaged in sexual intercourse with each other during their [1983] stay in Paris.” [emphasis added] The father went to graduate school (with no taxable income) and then worked as a research fellow at low wages while the mother became a professor at the University of Minnesota. Just as the father was completing his professional training, in 1995, the mother began pressing the father for support for the 11-year-old girl. The girl was 14 when the trial court finally ordered to pay $6,760 per year in child support going forward plus $21,710 in retroactive support (starting two years prior to the mother’s filing of the lawsuit). The father was also ordered to pay for the mother’s “prenatal, delivery, and post delivery medical services,” plus interest going back to 1983. The mother had been on sabbatical in West Africa just after starting her lawsuit and the father was ordered to pay for her trip back to England for blood testing. The father was finally ordered to pay for 100 percent of the mother’s legal fees. The total amount of the order would have been roughly $100,000 in 2015 dollars.
The appeals court trimmed back some of the mother’s gains at trial, noting that the father had only recently begun earning a professor’s salary at the time of the lawsuit and therefore it was unfair to use that salary for calculating retroactive support. The appeals court also noted that the mother should pay her own legal fees because she earned slightly more than the father, had been working at a professor’s salary for 10 additional years, and did not have two additional children at home to support as did the father.
Our take-away from the appellate case: Don’t drink too much Champagne when you’re in Paris! And child support is retroactive to two years before a case is filed. [Unlike some other states where a mother can wait until a child is an adult and still collect full child support back to the child’s birth (actually more than full since judicial interest tends to be a higher rate than market interest) from a father who had been unaware of the child’s existence.]
Of course, the academics-turned-litigants came back to reality after they got back home from Paris but presumably they enjoyed a romantic time when visiting.
What do readers think? Is Paris’s image as a place for a romantic weekend seriously damaged by the recent shootings?