Ex not following court order

[dadinma]

In January, My ex and I went to court to review visitation of my 6 year old daughter. My ex refused to give me a full weekend because she takes daughter to church on Sundays. We went to mediation and I agreed to take Friday night to Saturday night (far less than the average) with the agreement that I would have phone calls with my child every Tuesday and Thursday.

Our order states that father may call the child on Tuesday and Thursday evenings between 6:30pm and 7:15pm. If she is not available at that time, daughter will call the father when she comes home, before bed.

Tuesday, February 20-Called my daughter several times and got no answer. Finally called from a friends cell (number she didn't recognize) and she answered the phone. She told me that my daughter was gone for the night. Refused to tell me where she was.

Thursday, February 22- Called several times. No answer. No call back.

Tuesday, February 27- Called several times. Left a message. No call back.

This is now three consecutive phone calls that I have missed because ex did not follow the rules.

1.What can I do about this? I want to file a contempt, but I don't want to look petty in court.

2. How long should I let this go on before I do something about it?

3. Should I send her a certified letter first, and remind her of what the order says?

[socrateaser]

>1.What can I do about this? I want to file a contempt, but I
>don't want to look petty in court.

Very hard to enforce telephone privileges. I would go back to court and ask the judge to order that the other parent ensure that the child calls you by cell phone, so that if she fails to do so, you can subpeona her phone bills and prove no calls occurred (or that they were too short to be meaningful).

Otherwise, you'll never be able to prove that the other party isn't answering, unless you get some disinterested third party to make the phone calls for you.

>
>2. How long should I let this go on before I do something
>about it?

No longer.

>
>3. Should I send her a certified letter first, and remind her
>of what the order says?

Waste of time. She knows what she's doing.

[Sunshine1]

with this issue.  A friend of mine had this very problem so the judge said that the mother must make the phone calls from her cell phone to the father's cellphone so that both parties could prove that calls were being made.

But , after awhile she would call and then talk to him for 15 minutes and THEN tell him the kids were not there.  So then when she called he would answer and she would start talking to him and he would ask if the kids were there and she would reply no or you aren't going to speak to them...and he would hang up under the 1 minute mark.

Judge was on to her so he made the calls more frequent. EVERY Mon, Wed, Friday, and Sun. and she had to initiate the calls.

She couldn't comply, and it showed on the phone bills.

So Soc's advice on the phone bill is dead on, they want to SEE the evidence.

[notnew]

I kept detailed logs of every phone call and the result. I had two years of records showing somewhat regular contact at times and a LOT of denials.

Mother stated they weren't home, out at the store, blah, blah, blah - made a lot of excuses.

The Judge (female) didn't buy it and found her in contempt.

Result? Slap on the wrist. Clarified with mother exactly what the order meant in court and required her to pay my filing fees (I was pro-se). She had an attorney and he ended up looking like a real ass.

I had requested that my child call me too, but Judge said that would be difficult to maintain and indicated it was better to keep the responsibility on the parent. My phone contact improved dramatically for quite a while.

Now my child is in full blown PAS and she is a teenager - we don't talk a lot and I haven't seen her in months. Another matter altogether.

Just wanted to say that in my case, the logs worked. In hindsight, I would have not waited so long to file. I would think that 3 months of records would show a pattern.

Also, if he has his phone bills detailing phone calls (in our case it was a long distance call) and you can clearly see the number dialed and the length of the call being 1 minute. Stands to reason you didn't get to talk to anyone. However, I only used my logs as evidence, not the phone bills.