An eastern Jackson County court found it easy to blame a domestic-violence victim
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(Read part one of this story here: How does a mother lose custody of her child to a man the courts know has beaten her? In Eastern Jackson County, it’s not that hard)
Part Two of Two
In the spring of 2014, Christy DiMaggio lugged her file-cabinet suitcase to the law offices of William Quitmeier, in North Kansas City. She explained that, in the span of a year, she had gone from having full custody of her 5-year-old son to being allowed to see him for only a few hours once every two weeks with a court-ordered supervisor present in the room. She felt that she wasn’t getting a fair shake from what she viewed as the clubby crowd of lawyers and judges who make their living in eastern Jackson County. So she’d come to Quitmeier, an eastern-Jackson outsider. The former mayor of Parkville (1991-2002), Quitmeier works mostly in North Kansas City.
“I reviewed the facts of her case, and I saw that she had tried to litigate the case herself, and I assumed that’s why she lost,” Quitmeier tells me. “Even so, I thought it was very unusual that the judge” — James A. Kanatzar — “would give her only supervised visits. She had no history of drugs or alcohol abuse, no history of neglect. Nothing. And the father had pled guilty to domestic-violence charges. I just couldn’t see it.”
Quitmeier took the case. The deadline had passed for DiMaggio to appeal Kanatzar’s December 2013 ruling. But in April 2014, Zaroor was involved in a fight at a Lake of the Ozarks strip club called Gentlemen’s Quarters. One of the responding officers recognized Zaroor — he knew that Zaroor was on probation and was not permitted to drink alcohol. Zaroor was given a breathalyzer test. He failed and was arrested, and he spent the night in jail.
Then, on August 24, 2014, Zaroor was involved in a vehicle collision at the Lake of the Ozarks. According to witnesses at the scene, Zaroor approached the driver of the other car, a woman, and began screaming in her face. When another man on the scene tried to intervene, Zaroor “placed his hands around [the man’s] throat in a choking manner,” according to both the female driver and the male witness. When police came to arrest Zaroor, he threatened to “have [the officer’s] badge” for violating his rights. He also yelled about the “police state” at the Lake of the Ozarks.
Nick, the child of Zaroor and DiMaggio, was in Zaroor’s vehicle at the time.
Based on these events, Quitmeier filed a motion to modify the custody arrangement.
“I assumed the judge would sign off on a substantial modification of custody,” Quitmeier says. “The guy just keeps getting arrested. At the very least, I assumed he [Kanatzar] would lift it to where Christy didn’t have to do supervised visits.”
Quitmeier was wrong.
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The general narrative of injustice that DiMaggio alleges is as follows:
• DiMaggio was in an abusive relationship for four years, during which time her abuser, Joseph Zaroor, was twice convicted of assaulting her.
• Hope House, a local domestic-violence shelter, referred DiMaggio to a Blue Springs lawyer named Michael Spiegel to represent her as she sought custody of her son with Zaroor, Nick.
• Shortly after she retained Spiegel as a lawyer in early January 2013, he began sending her intimate messages. They began a sexual relationship in February 2013.
• Four months later, DiMaggio broke off the sexual relationship with Spiegel. At that point, she says, she began to doubt Spiegel’s commitment to the case.
• Around this time, the guardian ad litem representing her son — Jennifer Oswald Brown, whom DiMaggio says Spiegel told her was a good friend (of his) when DiMaggio retained him — became unreceptive to DiMaggio’s concerns about her son and his father.
• DiMaggio eventually attempted to represent herself in the custody battle, despite her lack of a law degree or legal experience.
• Judge Kanatzar, who had previously worked with Spiegel in the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office, refused to admit evidence that would have helped DiMaggio at trial.
• Kanatzar then awarded sole legal and physical custody of Nick to Zaroor, despite Zaroor’s extensive and well-documented history of violent behavior.
There are, of course, several other views of DiMaggio’s circumstances.
As Kelli Wulff, the lawyer who represented Zaroor in the custody battle, later put it in a response to a bar complaint that DiMaggio filed against her: “Since the [December 2013] entry of judgment, Ms. DiMaggio has filed complaints about her attorney, the Guardian ad Litem, myself and the Judge who entered the Judgment.” In other words: Maybe the system isn’t what’s broken and out of control. Maybe what’s broken and out of control is Christy DiMaggio.
Some of DiMaggio’s claims are verifiable. Zaroor’s long history of domestic violence is a plain fact. As noted in the first part of this story (“Midjudged,” November 26), he has been convicted four times. On dozens of occasions, police have been summoned to domestic disturbances involving Zaroor with at least four women.
DiMaggio’s record is not spotless. She was once arrested for hitting Zaroor in the face, though Zaroor never filed charges. And in 2013, she pleaded guilty to criminal charges on a welfare-fraud case brought by the state of Missouri. She’s also currently a defendant in a civil suit for the same offense.
E-mails reviewed by The Pitch (documented in part one of this story) strongly support DiMaggio’s claims that Spiegel, who is married, pursued a sexual relationship with her almost immediately after she hired him as counsel.
On behalf of DiMaggio, attorney Lynne Bratcher filed a legal malpractice suit against Spiegel in March 2014. The suit was dismissed last month — without prejudice, meaning that it can be refiled, as DiMaggio intends to do — so that Missouri’s Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel could review the bar complaint that DiMaggio has filed against Spiegel. (Presumably, DiMaggio has a better chance of winning the civil suit if the OCDC rules in DiMaggio’s favor on the complaint.)
Spiegel’s version of events, told by his attorney, Jim Morrow, in response to DiMaggio’s bar complaint, is much different.
“As the case progressed, Mr. Spiegel realized that Ms. DiMaggio was not being honest with him or the guardian ad litem about Mr. Zaroor. She had been fabricating stories about Mr. Zaroor and the case. She was also taking action on her own with regard to the minor child that was causing serious concerns with the guardian ad litem and damaging her case. On multiple occasions, Mr. Spiegel informed DiMaggio to stop acting on her case, but she refused.”
Spiegel’s attorney goes on: “At times, she [DiMaggio] would tell him [Spiegel] that she and Zaroor had reached agreements on issues and he would start preparing paperwork based on said agreement. Ms. DiMaggio would also inform Mr. Spiegel that she and Mr. Zaroor were getting back together. When this did not work out for her, she filed multiple orders of protection against Mr. Zaroor. All were denied or not followed through with by Ms. DiMaggio. Additionally, Mr. Spiegel received several calls throughout the course of the case where Ms. DiMaggio would tell him to settle the case and to give Mr. Zaroor whatever he wanted to include sole custody. She would then call back and change her mind.”
DiMaggio says it’s true that, at one point, she told Spiegel that she didn’t want to continue the fight, and then changed her mind. “I said, ‘Let him [Zaroor] have Nick. I can’t keep doing this. He’ll get arrested again, and I’ll get him back.’ But that was partly because I felt like Michael [Spiegel] wasn’t fighting for me anymore. Joe was being a bully and tormenting me at the custody exchanges. I was maxed out. I’m not proud of it. But I think anybody would have been after four years.”
DiMaggio and Zaroor’s toxic relationship makes it difficult to corroborate every claim they have made about each other. Each has accused the other of withholding parenting time in violation of court orders. Though he did not respond to a second, more specific line of questioning, Zaroor initially told The Pitch that for DiMaggio, the situation with their son has “never been about custody — it’s always about money.”
DiMaggio says Zaroor’s strategy for avoiding legal repercussions for his behavior is to bribe and blackmail the women he abuses (including DiMaggio).
And DiMaggio made several strategic errors in the summer and fall of 2013, none of which endeared her to Jennifer Oswald Brown, the guardian ad litem on the custody case. It’s well-known among family-law lawyers that if the GAL — a court-appointed advocate who is there to represent the best interests of the child — is not on your side, you’re in trouble. At some point, Brown apparently came to believe that DiMaggio was neither responsible nor trustworthy enough to be Nick’s primary custodian.
Brown did not respond to requests for comment. But her dim view of DiMaggio as a mother may have had to do with DiMaggio’s making frequent calls to Brown to detail the ways that she felt Zaroor was proving himself to be an unfit father (refusing to administer medication to Nick, insulting DiMaggio at the child exchanges, getting into trouble with the police with his new girlfriend).
“Nobody was paying attention to what Joe was doing — not Michael, not Jennifer,” DiMaggio says. “And that’s how Joe operates. He creates these nightmare situations and then acts like you’re the crazy person. And from the outside, I can see how it looks like that sometimes. You lose your cool. But that’s exactly when I needed attorneys helping out for me and looking out for me. And Michael wasn’t there for me. And Jennifer wasn’t paying attention.”
There was also the matter of the swingers cruise.
Zaroor and DiMaggio, while together, were members of Lifestyle Lounge and a few other private online swingers clubs. So were many of their friends. In August 2013, DiMaggio was offered a free, two-week trip to Greece — a cruise for rich swingers, essentially — with a friend from Arizona. “It was a totally free vacation to Greece with a friend whose wife couldn’t go,” DiMaggio says. “It was not some kind of prostitute type of situation.”
At that point, the custody arrangement was one week on, one week off. DiMaggio says she suggested to Zaroor that he instead take the first two weeks of August, and she would take the last two weeks. He agreed, she says, and she left for two weeks.
A hearing on the temporary custody was set for August 28. Before DiMaggio left, Spiegel asked her where she was going. She refused to tell him.
“It was none of his business,” DiMaggio says. “He said it was because he needed to be able to tell the judge why I was leaving Nick with Joe for two weeks. But really he was asking because I had broken off our relationship, and he was jealous.”
When DiMaggio returned, she told Spiegel where she had been. At the August 28 temporary-custody hearing, Brown referenced the cruise as part of her recommendation for why DiMaggio should have only every-other-weekend visitation rights. DiMaggio views this as Spiegel’s violating her attorney-client privilege. “How else could she have known?” DiMaggio says.
At the August hearing, DiMaggio says, Spiegel intended to play the 911 calls from two occasions when Zaroor assaulted her. It was the first time that Kanatzar would be hearing any evidence on the case. DiMaggio asked to leave the courtroom while the tape was played because she didn’t want to relive the trauma. When she returned, she learned that Spiegel could not get his laptop to play the audio. The judge never heard it.
Before the second day of the hearing, Spiegel privately accused DiMaggio of being dishonest on the stand, though she says he never specified what he was referring to (nor does Spiegel’s attorney specify in his response to DiMaggio’s bar complaint). Spiegel told her that he felt he had to withdraw from her case.
“He left her in the lurch,” Bratcher says. “He does one day before the judge, and then he leaves her unrepresented for the rest of the trial.”
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DiMaggio attempted to represent herself for the remainder of the hearing. It didn’t go well. Brown recommended that the temporary arrangement be modified so that DiMaggio would have only every-other-weekend visitation rights. Kanatzar agreed. A final hearing on the custody matter was scheduled for December.
In October, DiMaggio met with a new lawyer, Scott Richart. He took a look at her case, she says (Richart declined to comment), and advised her that, because the GAL had clearly become unsympathetic to DiMaggio’s version of events, the best DiMaggio could probably hope for was to settle for every-other-weekend visitation rights. He agreed to represent her in the settlement.
Shortly after this, Nick was returned to DiMaggio for a weekend with a cough and a rash on his face. She took him to his pediatrician. “It maybe wasn’t anything major, but he obviously needed some kind of medical attention,” DiMaggio says. The pediatrician told her to apply some ointment to Nick’s face.
The next day, she says, Nick had a 101-degree fever and was balled up and crying. She took him into the same pediatrician’s office but saw a different physician. This doctor recommended blood work and an X-ray at Children’s Mercy Hospital for what turned out to be a minor finger fracture. According to the medical records, Nick told the doctor, without DiMaggio in the room, that Zaroor had pricked his finger with “a shot” as punishment for being bad. The doctor then made a hotline call to Missouri Department of Social Services based on this.
At Children’s Mercy, while Nick was being seen, DiMaggio met privately with a hospital social worker, who gave her instructions on where and how to make a police report that would initiate a forensics interview over Zaroor’s possible abuse of Nick.
DiMaggio says she tried to contact Brown regarding all of this but heard nothing back. On the day that DiMaggio was supposed to return Nick to Zaroor at the Lake of the Ozarks, she instead filed a police report there. She didn’t give Nick back, in violation of the court order — a big no-no. Two days later, Brown filed an emergency motion in which she aggressively advocated that sole legal and physical custody be given to Zaroor until the December hearing. DiMaggio would be allowed to see Nick for two hours every other week, with a court-appointed supervisor present in the room.
If you have read through the story this far, you have possibly concluded that Christy DiMaggio is a tornado who whirls drama around all who cross her path. You may have concluded that she has only herself to blame for having her son taken away.
But Barry Goldstein, a lawyer who has represented domestic-violence victims for 30 years and who speaks and holds judicial workshops on the topic of domestic violence’s role in custody issues, says it’s not uncommon for abused women to come across as unbalanced in custody battles.
“The context to all of this is the custody court system is broken,” he says. “For a variety of reasons, courts often err on the side of helping abusers and putting children at risk.”
He goes on: “The problem is, domestic violence became a national issue in the late 1970s. At that time, there was no research available on the topic, and the courts had to develop their own practices to respond to it. And at the time, it was thought that domestic violence was the result of mental illness or substance abuse. So the courts turned to mental-health people for guidance. But they’re not experts on domestic violence — they’re experts on mental illness and substance abuse. The dynamics are completely different. So courts developed practices that are bad for those being abused. And now there’s substantial research that says we should change those practices. But the courts have been slow to do that.”
A recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention argues that domestic violence should be considered an example of child abuse. It finds that children who are exposed to domestic abuse live shorter lives and suffer more illness and injuries throughout their lives.
A study known as the Saunders Report, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice, finds that most judges, lawyers and evaluators in custody actions who have not had specific domestic-violence training more often side with abusers.
“For example, GALs,” Goldstein says. “They’re generally trying to do the right thing, in my experience, but they usually don’t have the training. And so they often get manipulated by the abuser. And the abuser is usually the one who has control over the money in a relationship, so he’s the one with the means to pay the GAL. And so there’s a bias there, too. [DiMaggio struggled to pay GAL fees to Brown.] And so you have a mother who is emotional and angry, which is a normal reaction when you’ve been abused by somebody. But court professionals without the necessary training see that and think it’s something wrong with the mother, that she’s unstable, that she’s a bad parent. And if she reports abuse, they think she’s behaving irrationally. And that’s how you end up with a harmful outcome for the child.”
Compound DiMaggio’s well-documented history of being abused by a domestic partner with her claim of an improper relationship with her attorney, and the signs that Goldstein is talking about show the path by which her son was taken away from her.
But that’s not how the folks in eastern Jackson County were looking at the situation in December 2013.
By the time the December hearing came around, DiMaggio had again decided to represent herself. She trusted no one, she says, especially not lawyers. (Richart was not interested in representing DiMaggio in anything beyond a settlement.) Two weeks before the hearing, Zaroor’s attorney, Kelli Wulff, opened a deposition in which DiMaggio was without counsel by asking how long DiMaggio had worked as a prostitute, presumably referring to her relationship with Spiegel. DiMaggio got up and left, which did not help her cause. (DiMaggio subsequently filed a bar complaint against Wulff, which reached a Missouri Supreme Court disciplinary hearing before being denied.)
During the hearing, Brown and Wulff laid out convincing reasons why Zaroor should be given sole legal and physical custody. In the transcript, DiMaggio comes across as naive and, at times, belligerent. Despite a working knowledge of legal procedures (won by years of court dates with Zaroor), she is obviously unqualified to represent herself in a legal action. Kanatzar refuses to admit certain evidence about Zaroor’s history of domestic violence and lectures her about speaking at moments when she is not allowed to speak.
In awarding Zaroor sole legal and physical custody, Kanatzar declared that DiMaggio had repeatedly and unjustifiably withheld Nick from Zaroor. In his written decision, he cites the Children’s Mercy incident as an example of DiMaggio lacking the ability to perform proper function as a mother: “Respondent subjected the child to examination by several medical providers until she found a provider who was willing to make a report to the Jackson County Children’s Division.”
Kanatzar was unmoved by Zaroor’s history of domestic violence. In his decision, he writes: “…It is difficult for the Court to determine the credibility of the domestic violence testimony. Further the only substantiated claim of domestic violence was Petitioner’s guilty plea in the state of Arizona, and it is unclear to the court whether or not this one incident establishes a pattern of domestic violence. … It is the intent of the legislature to avoid sole custody to perpetrators of domestic violence but the language does not preclude an award of sole legal and sole physical custody to that parent if the Court finds it is in the best interest of the child to do so. It is a balancing act and based on the evidence taken as a whole, despite his perpetration of domestic violence, the court finds that based on the behavior of [DiMaggio], it is in the best interest of the child to be placed in the sole legal and sole physical custody of [Zaroor].”
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Things might have ended there, had Zaroor’s scrapes with the law not continued.
In addition to the strip-club dustup and the road-rage episode cited at the top of this story, Zaroor also failed a drug test (testing positive for cocaine and ecstasy) in 2014. And he caused a disturbance at the Office of Probation & Parole in Eldon, Missouri, that required an employee to sound the building’s alarm bell.
A week after that incident, an Arizona court petitioned to revoke Zaroor’s probation, citing the road-rage arrest; the presence of guns in Zaroor’s home during a November 2013 visit by Camden County police; refusing to sign a release on a hair-follicle test on October 6, 2014; testing positive for cocaine, amphetamines and marijuana on June 5, 2013; and the breathalyzer failure at the GQ strip club. Zaroor was arrested in Missouri and put on a bus back to Arizona, where he served several months in jail this year.
Prior to this, DiMaggio had hired a lawyer at the Lake of the Ozarks in 2014, seeking a modification of the custody agreement; she hoped to have her next custody hearing in Camden County instead of Jackson County because both Zaroor and Nick now lived in Camden County and because Zaroor’s offenses had occurred in Camden County. But Kanatzar did not allow the case to be transferred out of his courtroom.
When Quitmeier, DiMaggio’s new attorney, got a motion to modify custody in front of Kanatzar after the road-rage incident, Kanatzar ruled again that DiMaggio deserved only supervised visits.
“Again, there’s no evidence that Christy neglected or abused the child,” Quitmeier says. “And yet the judge still gave her supervised visitation. I was blown away by that.”
When Zaroor was in jail in Arizona earlier this year, though, DiMaggio was able to petition the court for custody of Nick.
“We filed an emergency petition,” Quitmeier says. “Joe’s in jail, the child is staying at the lake with the stepmom — the stepmom, whose kids, by the way, a Circuit Court judge in Camden County says Joe can’t even be in contact with. I mean, think about it. Joe can’t be around his own stepkids at the lake. And he’s only allowed supervised visitation with his child that lives in St. Louis. Meanwhile, he has sole custody of Nick? Because why? Because Christy was overly concerned about the health of her child? Because she didn’t give Nick back to a man she believed was putting him in harm’s way? Come on.”
Kanatzar gave DiMaggio custody of Nick on a temporary basis while Zaroor was in jail. Nick stayed with DiMaggio from May until July. At one point, DiMaggio took Nick to the Rainforest Café at the Legends. But crossing the state line is a violation of the court order, and at the custody hearing after Zaroor was released, his attorney pointed to the Rainforest Café trip — there were photos on Facebook — as one of the reasons to return custody of Nick to Zaroor.
(Through a Jackson County spokesperson, Kanatzar declined to comment, citing Missouri’s Code of Judicial Conduct, which “generally prohibits judges from making public statements on evidence in pending or impending cases.”)
In his ruling, Kanatzar chastised DiMaggio for taking the child out of Missouri and for denying Nick access to a phone call from Zaroor from jail. But he lifted the supervision requirement for visits. DiMaggio is now allowed to have Nick for the entirety of every other weekend.
It’s a small victory. DiMaggio says she hopes that by coming forward, she will draw attention to the need for a national domestic-violence registry, much like the one that exists for sex offenders. She hopes to start a conversation about the victim-blaming tendencies that lurk within the family-law system of justice. And she hopes that other victims of domestic violence will come forward with their stories of injustice.
“I’m not playing the victim,” she says. “I don’t want that role anymore. I just want my son. And I want justice.”
♦
