No Need to Bifurcate Divorce and Civil Contempt Hearing

Tennessee case summary on bifurcation and contempt in divorce.

Erin Elizabeth Otto v. Timothy Jason Otto

No Need to Bifurcate Divorce and Civil Contempt Hearing

The husband and wife in this Hickman County, Tennessee, case were married in 1996 in Wisconsin, and spent most of the marriage in Tennessee.  They had five children, two of whom were minors at the time of their 2017 separation.   At that time, the wife moved back to Wisconsin as a result of the husband’s controlling behavior.  She filed for divorce in Tennessee, and there was considerable pretrial activity.  The wife had made several motions for contempt during the course of the litigation, and these were heard at the final hearing, which took place in 2020.  The husband’s attorney withdrew before the hearing, and the husband appeared pro se.  At one point, during the wife’s testimony, the husband gathered his belongings and left the courtroom, and did not return.  The trial judge concluded that he did so to avoid the potential for incarceration.

The trial court granted the wife a divorce and ruled on the other issues.  The court also found the husband guilty of civil contempt for willful violations of several of the prior orders.  The husband appealed the contempt ruling to the Tennessee Court of Appeals.  He argued that the trial court should have bifurcated the proceedings, and conduct one hearing for the divorce issues, and another hearing on the question of contempt.

The appeals court held that the trial court had not erred, because the husband was found in civil contempt, and not criminal contempt.  While it might have been necessary to bifurcate a case of criminal contempt, that was not the case here.  In addition, the appeals court noted that the husband did not show that he was prejudiced by the procedure employed.

The Court of Appeals went on to conclude that the husband’s position on appeal was frivolous.  Therefore, it awarded the wife her attorney’s fees on appeal and remanded the case for a computation of the amount of those fees.

For these reasons, the Court of Appeals affirmed and remanded the case.

No. M2020–00660-COA-R3-CV (Tenn. Ct. App. May 25,  2021).

See original opinion for exact language.  Legal citations omitted.

To learn more, see The Tennessee Divorce Process: How Divorces Work Start to Finish.