Help With Divorce Attorney Fees

My name is Jennifer Price (D’Amico), and I am asking for help with attorney fees in my divorce case. My soon-to-be-ex-husband was abusive during our marriage and his actions during the divorce have prolonged the case, significantly increasing fees from my attorneys – I have now spent more than $20,000 simply to try to legally remove myself from my abuser and move on with my life. I have managed to get this far due to the incredible kindness and generosity of friends and family, but as the case drags out resources are dwindling and I truly do not know how I will pay for next month’s legal fees.

My ex and I married and bought a home in Colorado together in 2014. Throughout our marriage his financial, emotional and at times physical abuse increased. In July 2019, a disagreement over taking out the recycling escalated and he violently assaulted me, resulting in a traumatic brain injury and broken nose. I lied to the doctor about the cause of my injuries and refused loved ones’ urges to press charges out of a hope that it was all an accident, he didn’t really mean it, and so on. Over the following weeks he refused to take responsibility for his actions, and my worsening physical and mental symptoms resulted in losing my job. I finally realized I was unlikely to survive if I stayed much longer and fled – my mom and a close friend helped me get my cats and personal possessions out of the house while he was at work, and I moved back to my home state of Pennsylvania in late August.

Before the assault I was finishing up my master’s in social work as a straight-A student and working as a residential case manager for the previously homeless, but afterwards my head was in such shambles that I felt unable to return to my field right away and worked as a server at a local restaurant throughout the pandemic. I tried two different semesters to finish my final three classes online but found that focusing had become utterly impossible; both times I was forced to withdraw, and eventually had to drop out of my grad program.

Finally, in the summer of 2021, I felt ready to both return to social work and deal with legally separating from my ex. I got a case management job and filed for divorce in Pennsylvania in August, hoping to finally get on with my life. Unfortunately, neither was to be. I worked at two different local agencies and found that everything I had gone through now made the work far too triggering to handle, and my intense internal response to the vicarious trauma my work induced actually began making me ill. I started having migraines and absence seizures that resulted in my having to go to the ER for a CT scan and subsequent epilepsy study, finding that I have developed functional neurological disorder. My health forced me to leave my job, and I fell back on working in restaurants as a cook. Meanwhile, despite repeatedly begging my ex to please just cooperate so we could get the divorce over with and asking only for half the equity of our home and nothing else, he refused to comply with any court paperwork. He eventually led me on a wild goose chase to his alleged attorney who was not in fact representing him in the divorce case, but who did suggest I file in Colorado instead to compel him to cooperate and to get my fair share of marital assets. A year after hiring my PA attorney I gave up and dropped the case here.

In August 2022 I contracted with an awesome, trauma-informed family law firm in Denver that specializes in domestic violence cases and filed for divorce for the second time, in Colorado. My ex initially cooperated, providing some of his basic financial information, but refusing to acknowledge or document a large amount of assets. After viewing my own financial documents, he filed a motion in November to make me complete a 'vocational evaluation’ as he “believed I was voluntarily underemployed” and thus trying to appear poorer on paper. This caused my attorney a considerable amount of extra work, costing me approximately an extra $10,000 in legal fees for that matter alone given the fact they had to build a legal defense explaining that his own actions caused my underemployment. Since then, he has stopped responding entirely, to the point that his attorney left the case due to hearing nothing from him since November. He has now missed a court date and caused two scheduled mediation dates to be cancelled, and at every step his refusal to participate results in longer delays and more fees on my part.

At this point, I have no choice but to continue on and keep paying more attorney fees every two weeks, or I will lose everything I have fought so hard towards. I have been without health insurance and unable to pay out-of-pocket for therapy for much of the time since I fled, so reaching a settlement and moving on is also the only way I can hope to receive proper mental health services to heal from the trauma I have suffered. Thank you for reading my story, and if you are able, please consider contributing. I truly appreciate anyone who can help in any way – thank you so much.