Mom Who Previously Abducted Kids to Germany Gets Visitation But Must Post Bond

Tennessee child custody and military divorce case summary.

Gehlen Liebetreu v. Sandra Liebetreu

The mother and father in this Montgomery County, Tennessee, case were married in 2014, while the husband was serving in the U.S. military in Germany.  The mother was a German national.  The father was transferred to Ohio the following year, and the parties had two children.  They moved to Tennessee in 2019.

In May of that year, the mother and children went to Germany to visit family, while the father was fulfilling military duties in Arizona.  In August, when the mother had stated that she planned to return, the father went to Germany to assist, but the mother announced that she and the children would not be returning to the U.S.

The father went to court in Germany to secure the children’s return.  The German court agreed, and the mother was ordered to return the children.  Upon his return to Tennessee with the children, the father filed for divorce, and asked to be named primary residential parent.

The trial court, Judge Ross H. Hicks, named the father primary residential parent.  The court made a finding that the mother had unlawfully abducted and retained the children in Germany, but awarded her two months of unsupervised visitation per year.  The trial judge, however, imposed a condition that the mother must post a bond in the amount of $50,000 to exercise this visitation.  She was also ordered to surrender the children’s German passports.

After some post-trial motions, the father appealed to the Tennessee Court of Appeals, and argued that the trial court should not have granted the mother unsupervised visitation.

The appeals court began by noting that details of custody and visitation are within the trial court’s broad discretion, and won’t normally be reversed in the absence of an abuse of that discretion.

In this case, the trial court had recognized the prior abduction, and allowed visitation in Germany only with an “abduction prevention order,” as allowed by Tennessee statutes.

The father argued that the mother had a high risk of abduction, and that the bond and other requirements were insufficient to deter her.

In the lower court, when the mother had attempted to lower the bond amount, the father had argued that the requirement was “completely appropriate.”  The appeals court looked upon his argument on appeal as a change of position.

The appeals court conceded that the mother’s past actions warranted scrutiny, but agreed with the lower court that the conditions imposed were sufficient to deter future abductions.

The mother had been awarded attorney’s fees for one of the father’s post-trial motions, and in this regard, the father’s appeal was somewhat more successful.  The appeals court reversed this portion of the lower court’s award.  The father also requested his attorney’s fees on appeal, but this was denied.

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

No. M2021-00623-COA-R3-CV (Tenn. Ct. App. Mar. 18,  2022).

See original opinion for exact language.  Legal citations omitted.

To learn more, see Child Custody Laws in Tennessee and our video, How is child custody determined in Tennessee?

See also Tennessee Parenting Plans and Child Support Worksheets: Building a Constructive Future for Your Family featuring examples of parenting plans and child support worksheets from real cases available on Amazon.com.