I’m trying to wrap my head around this WSMV investigative report about part owner of the Predators Herb Fritch and his beef with Frank Monroe, the husband of a woman they both ... um, shall we say, had interests in. Let’s take Fritch’s identity out of it for a second and just try to get to the gist of the story, as reported by WSMV.
There’s a guy. He employs a woman. They become friends. As friends do, he takes an interest in her daughter and watches out for her. At the same time the daughter is becoming involved with a low-level criminal, she also becomes pregnant. At some point, before the babies are born, she and the criminal get married, though I can’t tell if this is before or after she got pregnant.
So — and this is important — unless the criminal does something to prevent it, because the criminal and the daughter are married, he is the legal father.
Then the guy offers the criminal a bunch of money to just sit back and let the criminal’s name go on the birth certificates and to never talk about it happening.
Shenanigans ensue, and now the guy seems to have dumped a bunch of money into the situation to make it as easy as possible for the criminal to remain the on-paper father.
Accusations and lawsuits are flying. Which is good, fun gossip.
Except that Herb Fritch is in his mid-70s now and rich as all get out. And the criminal he’s embroiled with is, to put it mildly, not rich as anything. So it seems like we might view this as a rich guy paying a down-on-his-luck guy to pose as the father of the rich guy’s children. Which is very strange. But what’s even stranger is that no one knows if the rich guy even is the children’s father.
The reason we have these presumptive fatherhood statues — which automatically assume that the man in the marriage is the father of any children who come out of the marriage — is ultimately for the benefit of the children. It’s to give them two parents with legal obligations to support them. Let me be clear: This is to protect the children.
It doesn’t mean married men can’t contest paternity. Just that, if they don’t, they’re going on the birth certificate.
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Fritch seems to have paid a lot of money for the maintenance and support of the kids. At least from what’s publicly available. And he seems to have stepped in financially when Monroe couldn’t.
So, yes, he’s probably contributing less than he would if he were the legal father and had court-ordered child support, but Fritch is contributing quite a bit. Again, this is weird. If he doesn’t want to be legally obligated to support the kids, why is he doing so much to make sure the kids are supported?
OK, but here’s what I fundamentally don’t understand.
Can you legally make agreements to harm your children? Because if there’s a possibility that the kids are Fritch’s, then both men who could be the children’s fathers made a deal with each other to give the kids to the guy with fewer resources. And that deprives the kids of the potential resources they would get if their father is the rich guy.
Think of it this way. If these kids were just randos on the street, and the courts were deciding which guy would make a better foster parent for them, the rich guy with resources and a stable family who is esteemed in his community is going to be the obvious choice over the guy with the criminal record who bounces from job to job. That’s just objectively the better situation.
And if the kids were found to be Fritch’s, not only would they be owed appropriate child support commiserate with his wealth, but they’d also be among his heirs. So this isn’t just a matter of getting them properly taken care of as long as Fritch is alive. It’s a question of whether they should be taken care of after his death. There’s a lot of money for the kids at stake here.
So how is it that, when it comes down to familial responsibility for these kids, one guy is allowed to sell his potential interest in the children to the other guy without anyone who represents the interest of the children weighing in? How is that what’s best for the children? How is this legal?
Fritch supposedly had Monroe sign a nondisclosure agreement to save himself from embarrassment. But what would be the source of the embarrassment? That he had an affair? People have affairs. That his affair partner was so young? Old men do that all the time. That the potential affair partner is Black and thus the children are? Fuck him, if that’s the case. That his wife might find out? She’s not stupid.
The actual embarrassing thing, the thing that should cause shame every day of his life, is that his lawyer acknowledges, “Frank Monroe is a convicted felon, has a history of drug abuse and medical records show he has been diagnosed with significant psychiatric problems,” and yet Fritch, who at the very least is a family friend of these children, gave Monroe money to stay with them.
Whether or not Fritch is their actual biological father, he is someone who cares about this woman and her mother — supposedly — and yet, knowing what he knows about Monroe, he seems to have given him money to go on their birth certificates, thus tying them to him for their whole childhoods. Who does that?
I hope that every time Fritch has to deal with Monroe, every time he gets frustrated or embarrassed or exasperated, he remembers that he is a grown-ass man who kept these children in this man’s orbit knowing this is how he is. And I do hope it is embarrassing for him that we now know that’s the kind of person he is.
