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In Minor Jurisprudential Miracle, Someone Is Actually Charged For Lying In A Family Law Case

Every once in a while, you catch the glimmer of a rainbow on the horizon.

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Mercifully, most of my work these days is in business litigation, environmental litigation, and appeals. But as a young lawyer, I cut my teeth in family law. My first solo trial was actually a divorce case. In those days, I developed a useful little canned speech. I still pull it out in the occasional family law case that I take on as a favor to someone or as pro bono work when presented with a particularly compelling sob story. Feel free to steal this if it helps your practice:

Client: How can [he/she] get up on the stand and just lie like that? I thought there were perjury laws. I thought being under oath meant something. This is not what I expected the court system to be like.

Me: You know how often I hear this from my clients after court about the other party lying under oath? Every single time. And believe it or not, [he/she] is over there talking to [his/her] lawyer right now and saying the exact same thing about you.

Client: What do you mean? I told the truth!

Me: When two people witness an event, each remembers it differently, and the memories actually change over time. You have the version you remember, there is the version [he/she] remembers, and then if there had been a video camera in the room, that would be a totally different third version. Both of you are probably telling the truth in your own minds. If you want to waste your time talking to law enforcement about a perjury prosecution, go for it, but you don’t want to pay me to be involved in that. Don’t worry though, I made [him/her] look like an idiot on cross-examination, and that’s what matters for our purposes.

That made sense to people. Witnesses in family law cases take the oath, but prosecutions for breaking it seemed about as real to me as Leprechauns.

Every once in a while, though, you catch the glimmer of a rainbow on the horizon, and think maybe, just for a second, there’s a Leprechaun sitting at the end of it. Almost a year ago, while NASA astronaut Anne McClain was floating around on the International Space Station and going through a bitter divorce, her estranged wife Summer Worden accused her of wrongfully accessing Worden’s bank account online from space. Like in every family law case, these accusations got blown way out of proportion, and Worden filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission accusing McClain of identity theft. Worden’s family also got involved for some reason (rarely a good idea in marital dissolutions — the family is usually more vindictive and less stable than the principal) and lodged a similar complaint with NASA’s Office of Inspector General.

This drama got a lot of press. The New York Times touted it as perhaps “the first allegation of criminal wrongdoing in space.” But it turns out this was all just the regular, old, ground kind of crime.

An indictment unsealed last week revealed that Worden has been charged with two counts of making false statements to federal authorities, and is facing up to five years in prison on each of the counts as well as a fine of up to $250,000. Specifically, Worden stands accused of lying about when she opened the account that she claimed McClain wrongfully accessed and about when she reset her login credentials (McClain claimed all along that she was simply accessing a shared account to make sure the couple’s finances were in order using the same login credentials she had used during their entire relationship). Worden also allegedly made a false statement to NASA’s Office of Inspector General while being interviewed.

So, there doesn’t seem to be a space crime here, but this case is remarkable for another reason: someone is actually getting charged for lying in a family law case. Are the alleged lies any worse or any more egregious than those that arise in every family law case ever? Absolutely not. But when you escalate your family squabble into outer space by involving two federal agencies, well, you’re kind of asking for it.

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This astronaut-adjacent federal indictment notwithstanding, criminal consequences for lying in a family law case are extremely rare. Still, you shouldn’t be willing to bet five years of your life (or, you know, the well-being of your children) that your self-serving recollection of reality is indisputably the right one. Because it never is.

Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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