Legal Question in Family Law in Texas
I am unhappy in my marriage and im planning on filing for divorce but my husband is an immigration officer and has threaten me to take my baby away if i ever divorce him. i am legal here and so is my family, however i was molested by my brother as a child but i never told anyone and my husband said, that is reason enough for a judge to give him custody of our son. i dont want to loose my baby. could he take him away?
1 Answer from Attorneys
He says the judge would take your baby away because you were a VICTIM of child molestation?! That's ridiculous. If you'd been the perpetrator, that might be a different story, if it could actually be proved up in court at this point, which is unlikely anyway. If you've literally got a baby, the way that's typically handled is to award custody to the parent who's been the primary caregiver to date, with short, frequent visitation by the other parent (not usually overnight, at first). That increases gradually until the child is three, at which point, if something else can't be worked out, the standard custody and visitation guidelines will go into effect. So you should be awarded custody unless your husband has either been the baby's primary caretaker, or you have some major issues that would prevent you from being able to provide your child with a safe, loving environment (criminal or psychiatric problems or alcohol or drug abuse, typically). If he's actually dumb enough to try to bring up what happened when you were a child, that is very unlikely to make the judge happy with him, and if you've got an attorney, they should be able to keep any evidence about that out altogether via a motion in limine, because it's just not relevant to your divorce and custody proceedings. Good luck.