My daughter’s father sued for retroactive support the month she turned seventeen. He’s never paid a dollar, and now he’s claiming I never asked. He says he was unaware of any obligation until 2024. The county has a support file opened in 2008. He was served then, he responded then, and his signed answer from October 2008 is three pages long and admits paternity. That document has been sitting in a courthouse for seventeen years.
I paid nine dollars for a certified copy. And when I read the last page, there was a handwritten line above his signature that nobody had ever mentioned to me. It said he had been informed of the support order and had been given the opportunity to provide his employment information. His signature was directly underneath it. I brought the certified copy to my attorney, along with every payment record from the county showing exactly one payment had ever been made—and it wasn’t made by him.
His attorney argued that the old file didn’t prove he understood what he owed because the original order was “unclear.” My attorney asked the court to pull the complete 2008 docket. The clerk found the original order, the service affidavit, his response, and a receipt showing he had personally picked up a copy. Then she found something else: a letter he had filed six months later asking the county to lower his obligation because his income had changed. He had written the letter himself and referred to “my monthly child support.”
The judge read it twice. Then he looked at my daughter’s father and asked why he had claimed he didn’t know about the obligation until 2024 when his own filing from 2009 discussed the exact amount. He had no answer. The judge dismissed his claim for retroactive support and ordered the county to calculate the arrears under the original order. Seventeen years after he signed the paperwork, the record he’d forgotten about became the one thing he couldn’t explain away.
