My son’s father petitioned to have my new husband barred from all exchanges. He says my husband is “hostile and unsafe around the child.” He attached photographs of an argument in a parking lot. The photographs are from a Walmart lot on March 14th. My husband was in Ohio on March 14th—he was at his father’s funeral, and there are forty people who watched him carry the casket.
The man in the photos isn’t him. It isn’t anybody we know. My attorney requested the metadata, and it came back with a date two years earlier and a location eleven hundred miles from here. Then we traced where the image had come from. It was a public post from a completely unrelated incident, uploaded two years before my husband had even met me. The original post still had the date and location attached.
My son’s father’s attorney initially said the photographs had been “provided by a concerned witness.” My attorney asked for the witness’s name. They couldn’t provide one. Then the judge asked my son’s father where he had obtained the photographs. He said he didn’t remember. The judge reminded him that the petition specifically said he had “personally observed” the conduct shown in the photographs.
That changed everything. My attorney submitted my husband’s funeral program, the church records, photographs from the service, and statements from people who had been there. Then he submitted the original source of the photographs, showing they had nothing to do with my husband or our child. The judge dismissed the request immediately and ordered the photographs preserved as evidence. Before we left, the judge asked my ex one final question: “Who told you this was your husband?” He looked at his attorney, and neither of them answered.
