As a result, emotional bonding, which has no legal meaning, has
increasingly become paternity's lone, most important defining component-a
psychological tie with no legal standing. And the new legal fights over
custody and child support for out-of-wedlock children are confronting the
courts with complex new issues related to paternal bonding.
Actor Robert De Niro, for example, would normally have reaped an
economic bonanza when he recently came up negative on a paternity test. A
California judge ruled that the actor could promptly stop paying $3,000
monthly child support to his ex-lover's 10-year-old daughter.
But De Niro unexpectedly found himself having to fend off his
ex-lover's demands for more money nonetheless. Her lawyer threatened to
appeal, saying De Niro should not stop paying for this girl because she
had "bonded" with him.
"She called him 'father.' She had believed he was her father," the
lawyer said. He added that "bonding, not biology...is what this case is
all about now."
Not only mothers but even out-of-wedlock children have lately asked
the courts to affirm their new rights to paternal bonding as well as to
money. Engelbert Humperdinck's 15-year-old daughter, Jennifer Dorsey, for
example, recently hired her own lawyer and appealed for court mandated
visits from her famous father. Her lawyer argued that her school work had
suffered, and that she has endured severe emotional distress from
paternal-bonding deprivation-what a psychologist termed "the lack of a
full parental environment."
Humperdinck--the "English" singer reportedly born in Brooklyn with
the legal name "Dorsey" and said to have boasted of fathering at least 50
out-of-wedlock children--had paid child support. But he has repeatedly
refused his daughter's requests to meet him. Dorsey's lawyer argued that
because courts can order visiting-rights for parents, they should do the
same for children.
But other unwed fathers can't so easily tune out an ex-lover's
clamorous demands that he both pay up financially and own up emotionally
for his putative child. John Avildsen has spent the last 11 years locked
in a litigation impasse with Myraslawa Prystay over his refusal to bond,
and reluctance to pay for, the out-of-wedlock child that she insisted on
having, but whom he never wanted, and had pleaded with her to have
aborted.
The stricken but still striking Ukrainian-born former model, now in
her mid-forties, already had an out-of-wedlock toddler by another man
when she met the then-divorced Avildsen. And Prystay admits that they
never lived together and that he never even proposed marriage. But she
justifies her inability to go through with the abortion she initially
promised Avildsen she would have, saying "I loved John. I loved the
baby."
Avildsen settled with Prystay before son Ashley Avildsen's birth.
He has since paid her more than $78,000 under its terms. But they have
continued to battle over her demands for more chad support and her
perennial "hope" for paternal bonding despite Avildsen's continued
display of utter disinterest in her or even in Ashley. "I have no proof
that he's my son," Avildsen said, staring icily past the freckled,
blue-eyed, look-alike boy at a recent trial.
But while Prystay "burns candles" and waits for Avildsen's
bonding-seeming more like Madame Butterfly than either Mia or Murphy
Brown-Avildsen has continued to accuse her of using her countersuits,
appeals, and copious tears-in which she paints herself as a classic
wronged woman whom Avildsen "led on" - as a "shakedown."
A taped segment from a Larry King show about fathers that his
lawyer played at their recent trial suggested that Avildsen's fears were
not unfounded. "He's worth millions. The guy should spring for $100,000,
$150,000," a lawyer representing Prystay at that time told Larry King.
"I'm going to make [Avildsen] support this kid in as grandiose a manner
as I can," the lawyer said.
Avildsen's fears seemed all the more founded considering that the
lawyer who uttered these threatening-sounding words had also represented
Sandra Jennings, the mother of actor William Hurt's out-of-wedlock
son.
Hurt, unasked, really had bonded with Alexander Devon Hurt. He had
voluntarily paid child support, and a large part of Jennings' living
expenses. But Jennings sued Hurt to prove she had been his common-law
wife because she was hoping for more. If found legally wed, she then
planned to divorce him and sue the actor for at least $200,000-reportedly
more than three times the amount he was already paying.
Prystay has adamantly denied all such accusations of using her own
unending litigation as a similar attempt at extortion. "I would rather
John be a father to Ashley than have a million dollars for his child
support," she told me at the trial.
The outcomes in these various cases suggest that, even when they
win, women still mostly end up as losers. And most mothers leave the
courts with neither money or love.
Reportedly, though Engelbert Humperdinck's daughter has not only
been awarded added child support but actually received it, she says she
would gladly take no money if she could only have a relationship with her
father. The judge in the Hurt case ruled against Jennings. And though the
judge ruled in favor of Prystay, who can now sue Avildsen for more money,
he has vowed to appeal. And a recent decision in a Tennessee custody
fight over seven frozen embryos could potentially boost Avildsen's
chances of winning that or future appeals.
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