There’s a scary side to all those bizarre cases before the courts

WE ARE approaching the silly season when zany stories get big play because the politicians who are supposedly running the country are off on holidays.

The courts have not shut down yet, so court cases have been getting inordinate space recently.

In the Territorial Supreme Court of Canberra, Australia, this week, the lesbian parents of twins lost their lawsuit against their doctor for the cost of raising one of their toddlers. The pair employed the doctor to help one of them to have a child through IVF (in vitro fertilisation).

The sperm of a Danish donor was used, and this resulted in the birth of twin girls, now aged four. The two women sued to get the doctor to pay for the cost of rearing one of the girls.

The couple, who have a combined income of more than Aus $100,000, sued for $380,000. The court was told that the birth mother of the twins had lost her capacity to love and the couple’s relationship suffered as a result of the difficulties of raising two children.

The woman who gave birth to the twins had previously signed a form stipulating that up to two embryos would be implanted, but she said she changed her mind just before being sedated and asked for only one.

In his defence, the doctor claimed that parents commonly feel a new baby involves a certain loss of their own personal freedom. The case got considerable publicity in Australia, but there seemed to have been little sympathy for the two women. The court ruled against them and also awarded costs against them.

The New York State Supreme Court ruled this week against Tricia Walsh Smith, 52, a former British actress who had some parts on the Benny Hill Show and has since written a number of plays. Her husband had been trying to get her to quit the marital apartment on fashionable Park Avenue. She responded by posting videos on YouTube lambasting him.

She had a video professionally made in the apartment in which she denounced her husband, a wealthy Broadway producer and theatre-owner. Before the start of their 13-year marriage, they signed a prenuptial agreement specifying that if he died, she would be paid $500,000 annually for the remainder of her life out of his estate. His two daughters would get the remainder of his multi-million dollar fortune.

Tricia Smith did not have any legal claim on their marital apartment. Her husband could order her out within 30 days if he had grounds for divorce. In the event of a divorce, both agreed she would get a payment of $750,000. She stated on the video that she and her husband had never had sex together because he suffered from high blood pressure. Nevertheless, she said, she found condoms, porn movies and Viagra in his room.

At one point during the video, she telephoned her husband’s office and asked his secretary to ask her husband what he wished her to do with the porn, condoms and Viagra. Tricia Smith’s six minutes on YouTube may have won her notoriety, but she got little sympathy.

Her husband sued for divorce on the grounds that the video amounted to “spousal abuse”.

The judge agreed with him. The court granted the divorce, ordered her to leave the apartment within a month and told the husband to pay her $750,000 in line with their prenuptial agreement.

In Scotland, a Catholic monsignor sued for unfair dismissal because he was ousted from his post after it was disclosed that he had been having affairs with two women. When a Sunday newspaper exposed the affair with one of the women earlier this year, the other woman went ballistic.

She went to his bishop and disclosed that she had been having an affair with the monsignor for 18 years.

The bishop promptly suspended the monsignor. Maybe the monsignor should have read the works of William Congreve, a former student of TCD, who famously wrote in 1697 that “hell had not fury like a woman scorned”.

Max Mosley, 68, the Formula One boss, was the centre of attention in the British tabloids this week. He won £60,000 in damages against the News of the World for violating his privacy by publishing details of his part in a sado-masochistic orgy. It published pictures of his being spanked by women dressed as prison guards.

Mosley happened to be the son of Britain’s notorious fascist leader of the 1930s, Oswald Mosley. The newspaper sought to justify publication on the grounds that this involved more than harmless “hanky spanky”, but the judge ruled that Mosley had a “reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to sexual activities (albeit unconventional) carried on between consenting adults on private property”.

Of course, the real winners in all of this are the lawyers as the legal costs awarded against the newspaper are estimated at £450,000.

This month our own courts have witnessed some really bizarre cases that would be a match for those in any other country. A Dublin woman was awarded £90,000 last week in the High Court for invasion of privacy over articles published in Ireland on Sunday about an affair that she was having with a parish priest. Her estranged husband had hired a private investigator.

The court was told that her former husband had threatened to release the transcripts of telephone calls if she did not hand over the family home to him for £20,000.

The judge accepted that the woman’s relationship with the priest only began after the break-up of her marriage, and the court was told the woman had legitimate concerns about her husband’s relationship with a young man, with whom he now lives. She now lives with the former parish priest who has applied to be laicised.

The media was captivated also by the case of Sharon Collins who was found guilty of hiring a Las Vegas poker dealer to kill her partner and his two sons.

ANOTHER case involved a Limerick woman who was charged with drink driving and driving without insurance. She sought the sympathy of the court by explaining that she was very distressed at the time. She said that she left her home in a huff after she caught her husband in bed with her mother. The court was told she was shattered by the discovery.

The story took a bit of a twist, however, with the subsequent disclosure that her husband was actually in jail serving a prison sentence on the night in question and could not possibly have been in bed with her mother.

Last week, the Court of Criminal Appeal reserved judgment in an appeal by a Donegal priest against his conviction on two charges of rape and indecent assault of a 13-year-old girl in the sacristy of the church in 1985.

! If told that these were the plots of daytime television drama, most people would probably suggest that nobody would ever believe such stories. But these are actual court cases.

What does this say about where our society is going? Many would probably argue that the public should not read such trashy cases, but they are a reflection of life, whether we like it or not. And they are a warning of the direction in which society is currently going. Scary, isn’t it?