I was served at my son’s soccer game. My ex is petitioning for full custody and back support. We’ve had fifty-fifty since 2019, and there hasn’t been a cross word in three years. His filing says I’ve been “denying parenting time” since January.
He attached a log of eleven missed exchanges. Four of them are dates his own text messages show he canceled—including February 9th, where he wrote, “can’t do this weekend, take him.” Those texts are in the same thread his attorney used for the exhibit. They just cropped the screenshot above them. I sent the full thread to my attorney with the crop line marked.
At the hearing, the judge asked to see both versions side by side. Then she asked his lawyer why the submitted exhibit had been cropped immediately before the messages showing my ex had canceled those exchanges himself. His attorney said the screenshots had been “compiled from the relevant portions” of the conversation. The judge asked who decided what was relevant. There was no answer.
Then my attorney pulled the remaining seven dates and matched them against the parenting app. Five showed completed exchanges, one showed my ex arriving late, and the last showed that he had asked me to keep our son overnight because he had an emergency. Not one of the eleven entries supported his claim that I had denied parenting time. The judge denied the request for full custody and ordered the complete message threads to be submitted rather than the cropped screenshots.
