Kuebler v. Kuebler

1

MEGHAN MARIE KUEBLER, also known as MEGHAN MARIE O'NEIL, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. PAUL ANDREW KUEBLER, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 362488

Court of Appeals of Michigan

May 11, 2023

Washtenaw Circuit Court LC No. 15-002753-DM

Before: BOONSTRA, P.J., and GADOLA and YATES, JJ.

BOONSTRA, P.J.

Defendant appeals by right the trial court's order changing custody of the minor children BK and SK from defendant's sole legal custody to joint legal custody and awarding plaintiff additional parenting time. We vacate the trial court's order and remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

I. PERTINENT FACTS AND PROCEDURAL HISTORY

This case has a lengthy and contentious history, both in the trial court and in numerous prior appeals to this Court.^[1] In an opinion issued in a previous appeal a panel of this Court summarized the history of the parties' relationship and divorce as follows:

Plaintiff and defendant married in 2010. Early in their marriage, the parties lived in Connecticut, and they both worked on Wall Street in New York City. Defendant was an investment banker, and plaintiff worked as a statistician. At some point, defendant, who had both a law degree and an MBA, lost his investment job, and he changed careers, switching to law. Plaintiff also changed careers, deciding to pursue a doctorate degree in sociology. The parties moved to Michigan-despite plaintiff's reluctance-in 2014 when defendant accepted a position in the federal prosecutor's office. Defendant currently works as an assistant United States attorney. Following the parties' divorce, plaintiff finished her doctorate degree at the State University of New York Albany, and she now works at the University of Michigan as a research investigator and research scholar.

The parties have two children together: BK and SK. Plaintiff filed for divorce in November 2015. Eventually, pursuant to a consent judgment of divorce entered on April 21, 2017, defendant received sole physical and legal custody of the children, and plaintiff received supervised parenting time at Catholic Social Services. The reasons for the supervised parenting time were plaintiff's mentalhealth problems involving manipulation and alienating behavior, such as fabricated ideas of child abuse. The divorce judgment provides that plaintiff "has a serious personality disorder, and serious problems with manipulation that will require much psychotherapeutic effort." The treatment directives in the divorce judgment specified that the long-term goal was for plaintiff to "be able to present believable evidence that her mental health is being properly treated and that she is not endangering the children by the kind of alienating behavior that Defendant reasonably fears. Fabricated ideas of child abuse are dangerous not only to Defendant, but to the minor children's burgeoning self-concept."

The divorce judgment was agreed to after both parties were evaluated by Dr. Pamela Ludolph, Ph.D., a court-appointed psychologist, and Dr. Elissa P. Benedek, M.D., a psychiatrist. Notable to plaintiff's arguments on appeal, Dr. Ludolph diagnosed plaintiff with borderline personality disorder. Dr. Benedek, though not definitively diagnosing borderline personality disorder, also concluded that plaintiff exhibited borderline personality "traits." Undisputedly, plaintiff has a long history of mental-health problems, and she has also been diagnosed with major depressive disorder related to events in late 2014 and early 2015. By the time of the parties' divorce, plaintiff's depression was in remission, but, according to Dr. Ludolph and Dr. Benedek, likely to reoccur. Dr. Ludolph recommended treatment for plaintiff. The divorce judgment expressly incorporated Dr. Ludolph's mental-health determinations and treatment recommendations, including requirements that plaintiff treat with a psychologist, a psychiatrist, and take any medication as prescribed.

With regard to defendant, when evaluating the parties, Dr. Ludolph noted that defendant had problems with anger, and under the divorce judgment, defendant was also ordered to seek mental-health treatment. When evaluating the parties, Dr. Ludolph also considered the parties' respective parenting skills and their relationship with each other, and she opined that, given the acrimonious relationship between the parties, coparenting would be "impossible." In view of the parties' respective strengths and weaknesses, and their inability to coparent, Dr. Ludolph recommended that defendant receive sole physical and legal custody.

As noted, the divorce judgment mentions plaintiff's "alienating behavior" and "fabricated ideas" of child abuse, which everyone agreed can be harmful to children. In this regard, over the last several years both before and after entry of the divorce judgment, plaintiff has made various complaints about defendant, including allegations of child abuse, all of which defendant denies and none of which have been substantiated. Plaintiff first accused defendant of physically and sexually abusing BK in 2017 during the divorce proceedings. Plaintiff's claims were investigated by police; BK was forensically interviewed; and the claims were not substantiated. Despite her allegations of child abuse, plaintiff, at other times, admitted that the children were "safe" with defendant, including during her testimony at a recent evidentiary hearing.

Plaintiff has also, at various times, accused defendant of domestic violence against her. Since the divorce, plaintiff has more recently filed for, and then withdrawn, requests for personal protection orders (PPOs), she has accused defendant of breaking into her home to steal her passport (which she later found in her house), she has written to the State Bar Commissioner, she has posted about defendant on Facebook, and during a parenting-time visit, she attempted to photograph SK's genital area in an effort to establish that SK had sexually transmitted genital warts when, in actuality, SK had a common childhood condition called "molluscum contagiosum," which is more commonly referred to as "water warts." [See Kuebler v Kuebler, unpublished per curiam opinion of the Court of Appeals, issued November 18, 2021 (Docket Nos. 354327, 355934, and 356641, and 356709), pp 2-3.]

In December 2017, plaintiff filed a motion titled as a motion to "move parenting time." Substantively, she sought unsupervised parenting time and a substantial increase in the amount of her parenting time. Plaintiff's basic position was that a change in parenting time was warranted because, contrary to Dr. Ludolph's diagnosis, she did not have borderline personality disorder. She supported this assertion with opinions from a licensed social worker as well as her therapist, Dr. Melody Vaitkus; both opined that she did not have borderline personality disorder. Dr. Philip Saragoza, a psychiatrist, likewise stated that plaintiff did not have borderline personality disorder, although he noted examples of plaintiff "engaging in deceit/manipulation." Following the filing of this motion, the parties engaged in almost three years of litigation, both in the trial court and in multiple appeals to this Court. Ultimately, following an evidentiary hearing, the trial judge, Judge Archie C. Brown, denied plaintiff's motion, concluding that plaintiff had failed to establish proper cause or a change of circumstances to revisit the issue, when plaintiff's manipulative and alienating behavior had not improved but actually "worsened" over time.

Plaintiff sought delayed leave to appeal the trial court's denial, which this Court granted. On appeal, this Court affirmed Judge Brown's decision, detailing at some length plaintiff's behavior, including her fabrications about defendant and her efforts to malign him, and the potentially harmful effects of such behavior on the children. See id. at 8-14. This Court focused on plaintiff's observable conduct, recognizing that "[a] particular diagnosis, or lack thereof, does not necessarily make a parent inherently fit or unfit to see his or her children." Id. at 13. But, this Court explained, "[i]n this case it was-and remains-plaintiff's manipulative and alienating behavior, including her fabricated allegations of child abuse against defendant, that warranted the supervised parenting-time arrangement provided in the judgment of divorce." Id. This Court issued its previous opinion, resolving the appeals from Judge Brown's orders, on November 18, 2021.

In the meantime, in January 2021, the case was reassigned to Judge Tracy E. Van den Bergh. In March 2021, while appeals in this Court remained pending, plaintiff again moved the trial court to modify custody and parenting time, seeking joint legal and joint physical custody of the children. According to plaintiff's newest motion, the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs, Bureau of Professional Licensing (LARA) had recently filed an administrative complaint against Dr. Ludolph that included allegations that an expert hired by LARA had concluded that Dr. Ludolph's evaluation of plaintiff was professionally incompetent. In her motion, plaintiff argued that the LARA complaint provided grounds for questioning Dr. Ludolph's diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. Because the LARA complaint was filed after the evidentiary hearing before Judge Brown, plaintiff asserted that she could not have presented this information to Judge Brown and that it constituted a new proper cause or change in circumstances.^[2]

Following the filing of plaintiff's newest motion, Judge Van den Bergh entered several interim orders changing parenting time and effectively changing custody, without holding an evidentiary hearing and without complying with the procedures in the Child Custody Act, MCL 722.21 et...