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Giving a Judge Naked Pictures of Your Ex-Wife Is a Bad Argument for Child Custody

The judge stopped just short of calling the sad dad an asshole.
Justin Ling
Montreal, CA

Very sad man! Photo via Flickr user er madx

It is a pretty ballsy legal strategy to attach naked pictures of your ex-wife to a legal application in family court.

And, yet, that's what one Ontario man tried last month.

The judge was superduper not impressed.

"Do nude pictures of parents help judges decide who should get custody?" asked Justice Alex Pazaratz in his March 29 ruling. " A silly question? Why then, on this motion for temporary custody, has the Applicant father attached to his affidavit a series of sexually explicit 'selfies' of the mother, retrieved from her discarded cell phone?"

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The answer, it seems, was: This was a dick move.

The ten-page ruling does consider the welfare of the couple's two children, but also spends quite a bit of time wondering what the hell the dad was thinking when he attached "full page color photographs of the nude mother in sexually provocative positions" to his custody application.

"If the objective was to humiliate the mother, undoubtedly the father succeeded," Pazaratz wrote.

The legal fight was what you'd expect. The father contended that the mother was unfit, couldn't support the children, and was preoccupied with her new boyfriend. The mother countered that she's a stay-at-home mom and is doing perfectly fine at looking after the two—an eight-year-old boy and 16-month-old girl—and that the father is inventing problems in order to win custody.

But that regular bullshit, with the kids caught in the middle, wasn't enough for the dad.

So how did he get the nudes?

"In mid-November 2015—after separation—the parties were living under the same roof but in different units," the judge writes. The eight-year-old son went down to his visit his dad's apartment who, then, "suddenly heard the boy screaming in the bedroom. The boy was very upset because he had come across sexually explicit pictures of his mother while playing with her cell phone."

Worst. Nightmare.

The dad "filed the pictures with his affidavit, so the court would understand how badly the child had been traumatized by the images."

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Uh huh.

"He blamed the Respondent." (The mom.)

Of course he did.

The judge, obviously, had none of this.

In what has got to be one of the most sarcastic legal rulings I've ever read, Pazaratz writes:

"The nude photographs and salacious texts submitted by the father merely confirm what I would suspect of most other adults on this planet: The mother has a sex life. Big deal."

The dad also submitted 89 pages of her text conversations ("Light on grammar. Heavy on anatomy"), which the judge called "the litigation version of 50 Shades of Gray."

Here's the kicker: Saddad's lawyer "speculated that the [mom] must have spent so much time 'sexting' in 2013, that possibly she neglected their son."

You know what it's like: You get so busy sexting that you forget to feed your child.

The judge also went on to point out that the dad knew what was on the cellphone, and kept it in his room, where the boy found it.

"Besides—even if [he] blamed [her] for the child seeing nude images of his mother, there was no need to actually attach color enlargements to his affidavit. He could have summarized his version of events in a single paragraph. All he had to do was refer to them as 'nude selfies,'" the judge wrote. "I think most judges would have understood."

The judge (who is awesome) had the files destroyed. And while he did order the mom to give the dad more visitation time, he also forced the dad to hand over the cell phone and forbid him from sharing the images.

So there you go, sad middle aged men. Don't go sharing photos of your naked ex-wives with judges. Just go back to listening to that Phil Collins tape.

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