Carmen María Montiel - Stolen Identity

My family lawyer had negotiated the same type of agreement for another famous person in town, the wife of the late hand doctor and my former neighbor.

I was given the standard Texas child support of $2,500 a month for two kids, when Alejandro makes over a million dollars a year. He claimed my oldest daughter and $2,500 for my support. After working for him for almost twenty years, he fired me two days after he was kicked out of the house by the court.

Alejandro had to pay all utility bills, mortgages and charge cards. The charge cards were all in my name. He failed to pay all the bills as ordered, my credit was ruined within months, and all the charge cards were lost. I had no means to access money. I could not afford the maid that I needed to help me take care of my children. I was spending a lot of time in court with my lawyers, plus we had a house of over 18,000 square feet with terraces, patio and pool space that needed to be cared for.

However, my attorney walked out of court acting like he got the deal of the year, while Alejandro was high fiving his lawyers outside. This was my lawyers’ second failure. The first was when they withdrew the protective order that the judge granted me on July 23, 2013.

I had hired supposedly the best attorney in town. However, he brought another lawyer into the case because he and the judge assigned to hear my case hated each other. My attorney needed to take a step back, so his presence would not negatively affect the outcome of the case. The second attorney had left on vacation when we had to go to the protective order hearing on August 6 in another court, the domestic violence court. This was a big ace in our hand because it was going on Alejandro’s record and would give us the upper hand. However, my attorney withdrew the protective order a day before the hearing without my authorization or a signed agreement. He said the deal he negotiated was much better than any granted in court.

However, he agreed to let Alejandro in the house the day we were supposed to be in court in order for him to pack his possessions—something he did not do when the court ordered him to leave. By my maid’s account, he only packed enough for two weeks because he said: “She is just mad; she will get over this in two weeks maximum. I am coming back.”

Once the pressure from the protective order was gone, Alejandro felt secure that he was back on top of the situation.

He came home with the Suburban. He had crashed his Mercedes CL63 Turbo driving while drunk, but of course paid off or reached an agreement with the other person not to call the police. Later, he ended up in a punching fight with the owner of the Ferrari since insurance did not cover the car’s full repair because the insurance had already paid a total loss for his car in January 2013, for another drunk driving accident by himself. Alejandro showed up with two of his employees from the office with each driving a pickup truck. They came to ransack the house. What Alejandro was not counting on was that my lawyers had put a 6’5” tall bodyguard inside the house.

Alejandro came in all confident, but stopped and went pale once he saw the bodyguard. Obviously, his plan changed when he saw that I was protected.

“Good afternoon, sir,” the bodyguard said.

“Good afternoon, Carmen María Montiel,” Alejandro said without a word to the bodyguard, like calling me by my unmarried name was a way to hurt me.

In fact, I was looking forward to gaining my name back. I had asked for it in the divorce lawsuit.

He went straight to the study to get papers. The bodyguard advised him: “Sir, you are here to pack your clothes. That is it.”

Alejandro’s face told it all. He was not accustomed for anybody to tell him what to do. He always does as he pleases.

He went to where I put the mail.

“Sir, again, you cannot take anything but your clothes.”

Once again, he was furious this was happening in front of his employees. I can only imagine how he planned this with them… and now he has been humiliated in front of them. The Boss!

His employees looked at him like they were waiting for an order. It was not possible that he brought his office employees to pack his underwear. Alejandro was agitated and furious. He was perspiring and very pale. His Middle Eastern coloring had disappeared from his face.

“I only have two hours. How can I pack in such a short time?”

“That is why, sir, you should not waste time on things you cannot take, and pack your clothes,” the bodyguard said.

I walked out of the room and advised the guard I had outside the house ever since Alejandro left not to let anybody put anything in those three vehicles that I had not approved first.

Alejandro had never packed before. He asked for luggage. I sent his secretary to get the bags in the attic. He packed his underwear and socks with his secretary and billing specialist. When he went downstairs, so did I. His billing specialist said he needed the computer.

“Sir, please do not address her,” the bodyguard said. “You are here to get the doctor’s clothes and that is it.”

Alejandro left in less than an hour without most of his clothes still. It is obvious he came for something else and, once he could not get it, he left angry.

This irresponsible move from my lawyers messed up the temporary injunction orders that freeze all the financials. Every time I left town, Alejandro broke into the house with the excuse that he did not have all of his things. It took a court order in his criminal case for assault charges to stop that in January 2014.

Alejandro had a falling out with his first lawyer, the one during my deposition who paid a lot of attention when I started talking about the physical abuse. He changed from being relaxed, lying back in the chair, to an upright position. He believed me!

Months later, a friend of mine interviewed this lawyer for her divorce. She was married to another Middle Eastern man, and he told her: “I know the ways of these men.”

The attorney in charge of Alejandro’s divorce case filed a motion to postpone the divorce trial from January to March, and another to move it from March to later in the year. After taking all the money I had, my family lawyer fired me, forcing me to find a lawyer in an emergency move. I hired an African American woman. I liked the idea of getting someone who was not part of the “Good All Boys Club,” a wild card.

I did not know at the time the game that was played in family court. As soon as Alejandro’s attorney knew about my change of lawyers, he did not want to move the trial further out. He was blocking his own motion. He called my new lawyer and tried to sweet talk her into a bad, I mean really bad, settlement. Her answer was: “Give me the discovery and we settle.”

By the time I got a new attorney, I had already hired a forensic accountant to look into Alejandro’s financials after the separation. Because of Alejandro’s extreme mishandling of his financials, she got suspicious and referred me to a bank investigator that could find any bank account Alejandro had by himself or with any entity. And bingo! We found several.

Since they did not want to move forward with the trial date change, my lawyer agreed to go to mediation. I was mad, because how can you have a real mediation when we are missing so many parts of this puzzle? But we went.

On the day of the mediation, it was the women against the men. Alejandro, his lawyer and the mediator were all men. The mediator was from Cuba, or at least his parents were. He came and told me that Alejandro was talking about all of my supposed issues.

“Really?” I said. “Has he mentioned his? Because he has assault charges, anger management therapy, double identity in Venezuela and more. We can sit here all day and talk about it, along with prostitutes or dead patients, for example.”