Murky Kansas custody case of ‘shared parenting’ lobbyist shows why bill is a bad idea
Fifty-fifty parenting by divorced couples sounds up-to-date and perfectly reasonable.
So reasonable, at first glance, anyway, that the Kansas Senate recently voted 39-1 for legislation that would, when parents can’t agree, assume an even division of custody is the correct split for every temporary parenting plan.
But it isn’t — couldn’t be. And the epic, way-over-the-top custody case of the main proponent of the bill shows not why family courts should presume 50-50, but on the contrary why they can’t afford to presume anything.
The legislation, which is racing toward passage, will get a hearing in the House on Monday afternoon. Its most energetic and effective lobbyist has been Ron Holm, of Kansas City, Kansas, who has given a number of interviews alleging that he has been cheated out of equal parenting by his unreasonable ex-wife and an unreasonable system. “He was key,” says state Sen. Dinah Sykes, a Lenexa Democrat and the only “no” vote in the Senate.
A municipal judge found Holm guilty of domestic battery in August of 2015. On appeal, a jury in Wyandotte County overturned that verdict the next year.
The voluminous court record in his custody case — there have been 59 hearings — illustrates why the bill he’s pushing can’t work, rather than why it’s necessary.
Holm’s oldest child, 19-year-old KellieLynn Mancuso, who changed her name when she turned 18 and had a no-contact order against her father, has never given an interview before. Nor has her mother, Holm’s ex-wife, Kimberley Mancuso, or Kimberley’s current husband, Brian Mancuso, of Olathe. In fact, they said no one had ever reached out to interview them before.
“I’m hesitant, out of fear of reprisal,” to say much, Kimberley Mancuso said. Her daughter is not: “He checked every box for every kind of abuse,” she said. “I’d get pushed across the room, thrown into things.” Daily life “was like walking on eggshells.”
“She probably at this point maybe even believes that stuff,” Holm said when asked about his daughter’s comments in a phone interview. “She’s convinced herself that it’s true,” though what she says he did is “absolutely false.”
In his testimony in Topeka, Holm has presented himself as the victim of “false and baseless accusations,” who has “experienced the complete loss of a living daughter due to pathogenic parenting.”
As for the abuse allegations involving Holm and his ex-wife, the court transcripts show that soon after Holm told her that he had feelings for another woman, when she was 19 weeks pregnant, things got physical as she was buckling their then-5-year-old twins into car seats for his scheduled weekend visit with them.
Her attorney described the incident this way: “He snaps, shoves her in the area of the stomach. And there’s pictures to support this.” Photos entered into evidence do seem to show bruises that look like handprints. “I have no idea,” where those bruises came from, Holm told me. “I didn’t lay a hand on her.”
He claims that the allegations were a strategically aimed “silver bullet” designed to assure that she got custody.
In court, Holm’s attorney described the same scene this way: “She actually shoved past him to get into the car. When he did the exact same thing, tried to shove back to get into the car, he was trying to buckle his own kids in, she screamed assault.”
The two judges in the case have had to order Holm to do basic things like give his daughter her epilepsy medicine on time and stop messaging his ex-wife in the middle of the night. He says the issue of medication was the court making a big deal out of him giving her one dose a little late. “That one still blows my mind.”
He accused a number of witnesses of lying, accused a day care center of falsifying records to favor his wife and accused a doctor’s office of falsifying his signature on the frozen embryo transfer that resulted in the child Kimberley was carrying when the marriage ended. After a handwriting expert testified that it was in fact his signature, he said he hadn’t known what he was signing.
Holm even accused the original judge in the case, Charlotte Alvey, of being such a close friend of a witness — the children’s counselor — that they often vacationed together. The counselor testified that the two had never met, and Alvey said in court on the day that she recused herself that it was a “total falsehood” that he intentionally threw in the air “so I’ll get off the case.”
The point is that whatever the truth of Holm’s or any marriage and its dissolution, just those complicated facts that he admitted in court strongly argue against the bill he’s pushing.
What judge in the world would see his contentious situation and presume that a 50-50 split is the best starting point for his four children? Even Holm seemed to acknowledge that: “Obviously, you’ve seen my case. Shared parenting in my situation may not be the best idea.” On that we do agree.
The bill is not about him at all, he says, but for the grandkids he doesn’t have yet.
Tolstoy knew that one size does not fit all when he wrote the famous opening sentence of his 1877 novel Anna Karenina: “All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Parenting plans are supposed to mitigate whatever unhappiness children are dealing with as their parents are splitting up. They are supposed to do what’s best for the children, which could not possibly be the same in every case.
And can you imagine where the assumption that 50-50 is the right answer would lead? Why would any parent agree to any compromise ever again, when all he or she would have to do to get evenly shared custody is refuse to cooperate?
Sykes, the odd woman out in the Kansas Senate, talked to judges, attorneys, divorced parents and their children about how this would work. Even if you’re trying to do a perfectly even split, she concluded, 50-50 is not only impractical but would lead to a wellspring of unintended negative consequences. Though the bill is meant to apply only to fit and loving parents, in reality, it would make abuse harder to prove, and harder than it already is to escape.
That’s why the Kansas Coalition against Sexual and Domestic Violence strongly opposes the legislation.
Wichita family law attorney Charles Harris, who chaired a Family Law Advisory Committee that looked at what other states have done after an earlier attempt to pass the measure, testified earlier this month that the bill would automatically reduce child support between 66% and 75%. “Clearly, for some proponents, this is an unstated goal.”
And unlike earlier versions of the measure proposed in Kansas and legislation in other states, the bill as currently written “imposes mandatory shared residency even in situations where abuse or substance issues are present,” Harris said.
The measure’s original sponsor, former state Sen. Steve Fitzgerald, made the point that it would make abuse harder to prove when he first introduced the legislation. Fitzgerald, who retired in 2018 but is vividly remembered for his comments comparing Planned Parenthood to a Nazi concentration camp and saying transgender people suffer from “insanity,” presented the higher bar for proving abuse during a custody dispute as a positive: “If you’re going to accuse somebody of things like spousal abuse” or of a drinking or drug problem, he said, “where is your evidence and is that evidence really convincing?”
Many divorced men do want to be more involved in their children’s lives, and it’s not hard to empathize. “I still support the bill,” said state Sen. David Haley, “because I want committed, loving fathers not to be discounted,” as he feels he was after his own divorce.
“It’s a shame to say it has to be 50-50 — maybe it’s 60-40 — but it shouldn’t end up as in my case 90-10.”
Haley said he’s open to “tweaking” the measure to prevent “this law from disintegrating into something that allows abuse.”
But this bill needs more than a tweak, because it does allow abuse.
Ron Holm’s organization, the Kansas Family Preservation Coalition, the only entity that he lobbies for and a group that he says is “still in its infancy,” has a website that is nothing more than a photo of parents in silhouette, holding hands to form a bridge over their children. Which is a perfect metaphor for this gauzy but deceptive legislation.
