I have long taken an interest in Dr. Rudolph Bee because he was one of the first to protest the corruption of Family Court here in Connecticut. His divorce broke out in the late 1990s just around the time when cases like this began to appear.
I came to know him through his website featuring the documents in his divorce which contained evidence of what happened in his case. Also, he wrote a letter to the Attorney General regarding the wrong doing and posted that online. Indeed, he was the first person to validate my own experiences of corruption in Family Court.
I always intended to write a story about Dr. Bee, but he passed away a few years ago and his family took down his website. Still, I did locate a copy of Dr. Bee's appeal to the Appellate Court in 2003, five years after his divorce case started and I thought that might be good to use as the basis for a discussion regarding his case.
To begin with, I'm a woman so it kind of goes without saying that I support child support, I support alimony. I think that it is only reasonable for a divorced father to provide health care for his underage children, and to maintain life insurance with your children as beneficiaries while they are underage, that is a no-brainer for me.
Dr. Rudolph Bee appealed decisions that required him to provide all these things, and personally, I have no patience for his complaint. He was always the primary wage earner and his wife worked for him, so what else did he expect, really. You have three young children and a wife who always depended on you. Then you get a divorce--you need to be paying for the family that always depended on you, and give us all a break about the complaining.
What bothers me when I read this Appellate document for Dr. Bee's case A.C. 21741 is the way these attorneys took this guy for a ride and took all his money. Who were these attorneys? It looks as though Attorney Eliot Nerenberg was for the Plaintiff, Mrs. Johanna Bee and Attorney Steve Dembo was Dr. Rudolf Bee's attorney.
Judge Caruso was the trial judge. I know a little about Judge Caruso--wasn't he the judge who was fired for feeling up female judicial employees?
Be that as it may, Dr. Bee filed an appeal that he wanted all the financial orders in his case revoked. The reason why Dr. Bee requested this was because at trial both attorneys failed to submit to the Trial Court Judge, Judge Caruso, copies of the child support guidelines worksheet which were required by then Practice Book Sec. 25-30 (e). This is the worksheet that determines what is the appropriate amount of child support an individual should pay based upon their income.
I was pulling my hair out when I saw that. Are you kidding me? BOTH attorneys forgot to file copies of the child support guidelines worksheet that is required by The Practice Book?
How could they possibly do this?
How?
Please tell me how that can ever happen?
If you were talking to me about attorneys who are idiots of the year, I'd say, yeah, well, you know how dumb some of these attorneys can be. But how could two of the top Family Law attorneys in the state of Connecticut, one of them a Connecticut Bar Association President (Attorney Eliot Nerenberg) possibly make a mistake like this?
Ok, well, maybe Steve Dembo just showed up for the appellate part of this case, but still, I'll bet that Dr. Bee was as finicky about his original attorneys as he was about any later ones he had.
The bottom line is that attorneys on this level do not just "forget" or "overlook" passing in one of the central documents you need to establish something as important as child support.
What is more, the judge wouldn't overlook it either.
Imagine you are the judge--you have maybe four really important documents that must be filled out in order for a couple to obtain a divorce. One of those important documents is missing.
What do you do? Do you just shrug your shoulders, go what the heck, and continue on with guess work?
No, you don't, not if you have any kind of common sense!
You return to court and send out an Order requesting that both parties submit their Child Support Guidelines Worksheet and wait until you get them before issuing orders.
How hard is that?
It is called "How to Avoid Getting Your Judgments Appealed 101."
This is what bothers me. As a litigant, attorneys will tell you that you have to obey rules, follow court orders, act in accordance to the proper procedures and then you go into trial court and the judge and those very attorneys will immediately proceed to blow off the rules, the court orders, and the proper procedures.
I was in trial court the other day waiting to have the judge sign off on an agreement between my ex and me. I wanted to hurry up the process a bit so I went to the Caseflow Coordinator and asked if we could get in front of the judge as soon as possible.
In response, the Caseflow Coordinator told me it is the rule that you must obey that before you see the judge you must go to family relations in advance. I said, why should I do that? In my case, in the last nine years, we haven't ever seen family relations. Why should we start now? And this is someone who knows our case and knows that what I'm saying is true.
This is the point. The rules are the rules until some attorneys or the judge pretty much blows them off. The rules are only the rules when they serve the attorneys to manipulate a case and get the kinds of results they want. Otherwise, forget the rules, the court orders, and the procedures. They are all up for grabs.
Bottom line in Dr. Rudolph Bee's case is that it looks as though Attorney Nerenberg, Attorney Dembo (if it was Dembo, as I have said) and Judge Caruso were all on the same page when it came to blowing off one of the most important financial documents in a divorce trial.
That must have been the result of one of those lovely in-chambers meetings which us litigants are not allowed to participate in! No wonder Dr. Bee wanted to appeal the decision.
If I had faced this situation, unlike Dr. Rudolph Bee, I wouldn't have bothered with Appellate court, I would have gone straight to Statewide Grievance or even Civil Court.
Of course, I might not have had better results, but perhaps I wouldn't have spent as much money as Dr. Bee probably did on the appeal!
So how did the Appellate Court rule in regard to this miserable failure of legal competence? It stated, "We conclude that a party who has failed to submit a child support guidelines worksheet as required by Practice Book Sec. 25-30 (e) cannot complain of the court's alleged failure to comply with the guidelines."
No? Ok, then. I'm not sure why not.
There were a few other things that interested me in this decision. For instance, the Appellate Court described Dr. Bee as dissipating the family assets. I thought for sure he had siphoned money off and put them in hidden accounts or headed off for a few Bermuda vacations during the pendente lite period. Instead, it turns out that he used whatever money that was involved to pay around $70,000 in attorney's fees. That was over and above the $35,000 in attorney's fees that he paid for his wife's attorney.
Isn't that typical? You do something you think is right like pay your attorney's fees and the court criticizes you for it and acts like you killed your grandmother or something!
It looks to me as though everyone, i.e. attorneys, was having a big party with Dr. Bee's money.
You might wonder how the attorneys did that, i.e. sucking money out of Dr. Bee.
I'll tell you how--by finding all sorts of reasons to expand further conflict!
For instance, part VI of the ruling talks about how the parties' attorneys were asked to submit supplemental briefs on whether the court had the right to order the defendant to make his kids the beneficiaries of his life insurance.
Can you imagine how much money it cost Dr. Bee for his attorney to do the research and whip up another brief on this particular legal point. Plus, I am assuming he was forced to, again, pay for his wife's attorneys fees when the wife's attorney wrote up a brief as well. So that means paying for two supplemental briefs.
That is a considerable amount of money when it gets down to it. And what was the conclusion of the appellate court?
The Court determined what it already knew I'm sure even without extra briefs, which is that it is not allowed to order Dr. Rudolph Bee to give his children anything beyond the age of 18. However, the court can order Dr. Bee to give money to his children as long as they are minors. And since Judge Caruso when he ordered Dr. Bee to maintain his children as beneficiaries referred to those children as "minors" that was a perfectly acceptable order.
I'm not sure if such an obvious conclusion required supplemental briefs and the thousands and thousands of dollars it took to create them, but there you have the story if you were wondering!
If I had been Dr. Bee's attorney, before going to appeal on that point, which is considerably expensive, I would have explained that it was not winnable and saved him the money!
But who am I to speak. I'm just a writer, not an attorney.
This is just the tip of the iceberg in regard to what happened with this terribly destructive case which caused harm and damage not only to Dr. Rudolph Bee, but to his family as well. I believe it caused Dr. Rudolph Bee untold emotional pain, the destruction of his faith in a just world and led to his early death. But, as can be said with so many of these cases, the attorneys got their money--that's for sure.
