What if a Child Made the Allegation in a Custody Dispute? Attorneys Christopher Combs and Joshua Boardman from Combs Waterkotte discuss everything you need to know about Illinois sex crime charges, including sexual assault, sexual abuse, rape, and more.
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Interview Transcript
Scott Michael Dunn: What if a child made the allegations in a custody dispute?
Christopher Combs: That often happens.
Joshua Boardman: Yes, you see that a lot and whenever those types of circumstances hit my desk, you look at, okay, what is the temperature of the relationship between the parents that are now largely in dispute over the custody determinations. How old are the allegations? I’ve got a custody case going on right now where there is an allegation of sexual abuse from 10 years before and in the meantime they’ve had multiple children and have moved and have been kind of this big happy family and not to discredit, but there are certainly questions as to, okay, you take the kids out of the house and then you file that allegation or report that allegation and so that’s not to make a determination at this point, but it lends itself to at least an analysis of credibility and during custody cases, disputes, modifications, you do have to be suspicious of motives and add that as part of your overall view of the evidence.
Combs: Sure, I mean you have a 15-year-old alleged victim who’s now saying that she’s having dreams of when she was 5 or 6 of something happening. Again, not to say that it’s just completely unfounded, but we’ve got to really look at that through a different lens.
Dunn: Manipulative tactics could plant those types of thoughts.
Combs: You see a lot of parents coaching their kids in these family law cases and it’s really nasty. It can get really nasty quick.
Boardman: But, we can engage psychologists, we can engage therapists, we can engage psychiatrists. There’s a lot of things that we can do.
