silently underwater, never to rise again, de facto unfit parents to their surviving children, based on a few seconds of tragic inattention? And if so, are they still unfit parents, a full seven years after the tragedy?
I don’t pretend to have answers. I’m just saying, from what I just read, I feel like the judge in the divorce case believed Terrence’s version of events, hook, line, and sinker, without giving Eleanor’s version of events, and her desperate pleas for him to listen to her, a moment’s sincere consideration. And, in light of what we’ve since learned about Terrence, one of the world’s most notorious liars, I feel in my bones Eleanor was probably given a raw deal.
In Eleanor’s version of events, she had the stomach flu the day Oliver died and could barely keep her eyes open. Eleanor testified she “begged” and “pleaded” with her husband to stay home and help her with their children, since the weekend nanny, Celeste, had called in sick. “But Terrence told me to ‘suck it up, Buttercup,’” Eleanor testified in a deposition, an excerpt of which was attached to a motion in the malpractice case. “So that’s what I did. I put the boys down for their regular morning nap, the same as always, set an alarm so I’d wake up before them, the same as always, and then, I crawled into bed and crashed.”
Tragically, when Eleanor woke up and went to check on her boys, she found Reed still fast asleep in his crib... and Oliver nowhere to be found. She testified she looked high and low for her missing son, becoming increasingly panicked, and finally found him in an unthinkable spot. The poor woman described her desperate dive into the swimming pool. She testified about how she pulled Oliver from the water and tried frantically to resuscitate him... But it was too late. She testified, “I had no idea Oliver knew how to open the lock we’d put up high on the sliding door. He’d pulled up a chair to reach it. He’d never done that before!”
A week after Oliver’s death, Eleanor tried to commit suicide. She was hospitalized thereafter for a week, and, then, sent to a long-term “mental care” facility in Los Angeles for the better part of a year. While she was away, Terrence was Father of the Year, according to him. Although, according to Eleanor, it was Amalia, not Terrence, who cared for Reed during this period. But since nobody called Amalia as a witness in the divorce case—yet another grievance for Eleanor in the later malpractice lawsuit—the divorce judge, once again, sided with Terrence, even going so far as to praise him for being Reed’s “rock” during this time.
Poor Eleanor. She testified in the divorce, “I fully admit I wasn’t capable of caring for Reed during the first year after Olly’s death. But I knew Amalia was there for him, and that I needed to focus on getting better so I could get out and be a good mother to him. So that’s what I did. I got the help I needed. And then I came home and took care of my son for the next six years. I’m not a perfect mother, but who is? Judge, I want to be with my son. I want to be his mother. Please, please, let me do that.”
It wasn’t enough to convince the judge. Not when Terrence, a man regarded as a “pillar of the community” testified that Eleanor was “useless and non-functional” when she returned home from her year away, and then remained that way for the entirety of the six years preceding the divorce.
In the end, Eleanor got bitch-slapped at every turn by Terrence and his team of lawyers. And then by the divorce judge. And then she got bitch-slapped again in the legal malpractice case. The same way, it seems to me, if I’m reading between the lines correctly, she’d gotten bitch-slapped by Terrence during their marriage.
After the judge in the divorce case granted Terrence full legal and physical custody of Reed, Eleanor swallowed a bottle of pills. It was the same thing she’d done after Oliver died seven years prior. And, again, it ultimately led to her institutionalization in a shitty facility in Los Angeles. Against all odds, she bounced back after about a year and came out with her boxing gloves on. She filed a legal malpractice action against her divorce attorney, the one I’ve just read, as some sort of last-gasp attempt to