A word from The Parent Trap's divorce attorney
Breaking my silence.
This is the case I think about the most. It’s stuck in my craw for 40 some-odd years, even though I’ve been retired now for over a decade.
I always tried to lead with empathy in this job. You’re not seeing anybody at their best, for the most part. On top of that, the success rate on couples who meet on a cruise is so low that it’s effectively zero. You’re dealing with people who don’t have a great track record, decision-wise.
(There was also an allegation of domestic violence involving a thrown hair dryer, though the husband never pressed charges. At the same time, in my experience, a woman wanting to end a marriage so soon after having a child indicates a pretty unlivable situation with their spouse.)
Let me be perfectly clear: none of this was legally unsound. Emotionally, mentally, morally—you can make up your own minds about all that. But it is not illegal to decide you never want to see your child again. People do it every day.
What I was really dreading was the custody battle. Precedent would see custody defaulting to the mother, but since she lived a 13-hour flight away from the primary state of residence, that could get tricky. But it turns out, my dread took me in the wrong direction entirely.
I’ll tell you what chilled me to my core, is how they decided which twin each of them would take. This is where I thought they’d surely break down and realize just how kinda out of proportion everything had gotten, maybe wind down a bit, regroup. But these characters just doubled down! It was like neither one of them could back down and both of them had to escalate. It was the ugliest combination of ego and pain and absolute dumbshittery I’ve ever seen. At one point, the wife saw the husband comforting one of the babies and decided that was the baby she wanted. It got to the point where flipping a coin was the least ruinous option. I wonder sometimes if those kids ever found out that the first 12 years of their lives were determined by an acrimonious coin toss.
I kept tabs on them for a while. I worried about those babies. There’s just so much you could never have predicted with this family, up to and including this half-a-Sophie’s Choice situation. But the twins finding each other from halfway around the Western world at a summer camp in Maine? That one takes the cake. That…someone scripted that. It’s too big a coincidence to be anything other than divine (or demonic) intervention.
After that happened and the couple remarried (WOW, by the way), I stopped keeping tabs. You have to detach at some point. But I’ve never stopped wondering how those girls turned out. Maybe it was all smooth sailing for them after all that chaos. I certainly hope so.