Legal Question in Family Law in California
My boyfriend (actually my civil husband) is in contempt of court for failure to pay a court ordered spousal support and attorneys fees for his wife who he lives separated with for more than 5 years during a long divorce process..The court process goes too slowly, his wife and her aggresive attorney canceled several settlement meetings and has refused to solve the problem peacefuly, so there are multiple counts of contempt as the present. The court took a decision using not prover income but rather hearing evidence, and ordered him to pay $1000 a month alimony to her. The truth of the matter is that he doesn't have such income to pay such support. Based on false information the court believed, and my boyfriend now has years of built up unpaid spousal support. He does not have the money to pay this support and he cannot work in any meaningfull capacity, he is approaching 60.His divorcing spouse took it upon herself to remove in entirety very large sums of commuinty property bank deposits and converted it to only her name days after the seperation. She has so addimited this in open court to this deed in a prior hearing. This took place five years ago, to date no action has been taken by the court to compensate him for this misgiving. Also from the beginning of this process she has made a false police report to obtain a restraining order in an effort to kick him out of the family home at time of seperation. She still resides in the family home which is community property. So, she owes him an even bigger sum than he has to pay to her by court order. My questions are: 1) He has no money to pay to her so he will have to go to jail. What will happen after jail? He still will not be able to pay this support2) The opposing attorney has a lien (10 000) on my boyfriend sole seperate property, can the seperaty property be sold without my boyfriend's permissiion during his absence.3) Is there any way to avoid this potential jail time? Satisticaly speaking how often do people go to jail for not paying spousal support (with out minor children) in California? Can be helpful the fact that she stole money from the joint account?
1 Answer from Attorneys
Your boyfriend has clearly ignored his growing problems and is now in total crisis. He needs to hire an attorney immediately. If he is facing criminal contempt he also needs to ask for a public defender. Doing this without an attorney he is going to get screwed out of everything and go to jail.
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