Colorado’s troubled family courts: More bizarre twists in costly custody case
Cynthia Hayek said she initially was relieved when the judge presiding over her divorce decided on her own to appoint a lawyer to represent the interests of her three children and help guide custody decisions.
“I’m like, ‘OK, great. Maybe we can get other people looking at this case more carefully,’” she recalled.
In the end, Justin Bawden, the appointed child legal representative, became a major barrier to Hayek’s efforts to reunify with her children. Along the way, he ended up charging the divorcing parties $271,142.70, which included billing about $2,000 for an all-expense-paid trip to Hawaii that included his wife, Kiyomi.
The Gazette previously reported on Hayek’s divorce, one of an ongoing series of investigative articles by the newspaper on Colorado’s troubled child custody and family court system.
That initial report focused on how Hayek and her fiancé last November won a $21.3 million Routt County jury award in a successful defamation lawsuit. The jury awarded the damages after finding Hayek’s ex-husband, fracking tycoon Steven Herron, had corruptly manipulated their divorce proceedings through false and defamatory child sex abuse allegations against Hayek’s new fiancé to gain full custody of the children.
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Now, The Gazette is reviewing other aspects of the ongoing custody fight, focusing on Bawden’s influence on the eventual custody ruling, which the jury that decided the defamation lawsuit later found to be a gross miscarriage of justice and that Hayek now is making renewed efforts to overturn.
“I began representing children in best-interest cases in 2018,” Bawden said in a prepared statement to The Gazette. “The duties of that position require me to perform thorough interviews and investigation in order to represent a child’s best interests in various types of court cases. I have always strived to carry out these duties to the absolute best of my abilities. Given the emotionally charged nature of court cases involving the custody of children, one party or the other is often dissatisfied with the advocacy of a child legal representative, no matter how thorough their work.”
Bawden played a major role in the custody fight after Routt County District Court Judge Mary Hoak, the judge overseeing the divorce, decided on her own the children — twin sons, then age 8, and a daughter, then age 14 — needed to have their own legal interests represented.
The judge, without any request from the divorcing parents, appointed Bawden as a child legal representative to help guide her in making custody rulings in what had become a contentious case riven by allegations of child sexual abuse and counterclaims of defamation and manipulation.
Bawden had only been working as a child legal representative for about two years when the judge appointed him to the divisive case. Previously he had worked in Arapahoe County as a public defender for criminal juvenile defendants.
The Hayek custody battle was a case that became lucrative for him. He doubled the hourly rate he charged the parents up to $300, citing the complexity of the case. His work on the case would end up spanning more than three years, prompting complaints and legal filings from Hayek claiming Bawden was biased against her and had become a “parrot” of her ex’s positions and opinions.
Bawden ended up siding with Hayek’s ex, Herron, after he alleged Hayek’s new fiancé had sexually abused the children by shoving items up the anus of one of the boys and by supplying all the children pornography.
Hayek in court filings said the accusations were false and a devious tactic from her ex in keeping with what she claimed was deceitful and manipulative behavior she said she endured from him during their 19 years together. She said she left him after he propositioned their nanny.
Hayek and Herron divorced in 2016 and initially shared equal parenting time. Their custody arrangement would change dramatically after her ex raised the child sex abuse allegations. He began alleging the child sexual abuse in September 2019, the same month Hayek secured a $10.5 million settlement in litigation she filed against him that claimed she had been misled about the lucrative aspects of an investment their company made.
Her fiancé, Kenneth Hamp, was arrested and charged with felony child abuse in 2019 — just a day after he and Hayek announced their engagement.
Hayek, 54, an oil and gas geologist who also owns a clothing store, said she knew the sex abuse allegations were false. Her ex-husband, according to her account, corruptly concocted a fantastic tale as he sought a custody ruling that would cut her out of the lives of their children. She said he had blown way out of proportion an innocent rash one of her sons had gotten while riding a bike in a wet bathing suit.
Still, after the allegations were lodged with police and child-protection workers, Hayek moved her fiancé out of her Steamboat Springs penthouse residence. He moved into their Airstream for 10 months so he would have no contact with the children while she set about disproving the allegations.
Her efforts at overturning the arrest — and findings from child-protection workers in Routt County that Hamp had sexually abused the children and that she had emotionally abused the children — ended up becoming an impediment in the custody fight, though.
In one court filing, Bawden, as the child’s legal representative, told the judge that Hayek was emotionally harming the children by refusing “to set aside her strongly held narrative” that no child sex abuse occurred.
The judge had sharply curtailed Hayek’s parenting time, limiting it to four hours of supervised visits. When the parenting supervisor told Bawden she did not believe the children had been sexually abused and thought their father had falsified the allegations, Bawden successfully pushed to replace that supervisor with another parenting supervisor critical of Hayek.
“I told Justin, pretty much from the very beginning of when he came on the case, that I wasn’t seeing it,” said Terry Duffin, the former parenting supervisor. “These kids were not showing any anxiety at all. No hesitation. I told him the only place I was seeing it was when we tried to talk about their dad.”
She recalled that Bawden “didn’t want to listen to me, and the more I told him that I wasn’t believing the allegations, the more he didn’t like me, and he eventually tossed me off the case. He got somebody else who apparently told him what he wanted to hear.”
Bawden told the divorce judge that additional parenting time for Hayek should be restored only if Hayek would continue to engage in therapy and take parenting classes and learn to “place the needs of the children over continued focus on litigation and being right or vindicated.”
“Here’s the irony,” Hayek said. “When I’m in court, I have to swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. I had to put my right hand up. But they ask you to lie. They flat-out ask you to lie. They say, ‘Just say Kenny did this. You get your kids back. It’s that simple.’ And because I wouldn’t, I didn’t get my kids back. They are so myopic.”
In the end, the judge in January 2021 barred the mother from having any contact with her children, banning her from even sending them so much as a single text, let alone getting a chance to see them supervised or unsupervised.
Based in part on Bawden’s recommendations, Hoak barred all contact between Hayek and the children, despite another judge dismissing a felony criminal charge of child abuse prosecutors had filed against Hamp, Hayek’s fiancé, due to a lack of probable cause. And Hoak continued to stick to the no-contact ruling even though prosecutors dismissed in June 2020 a criminal misdemeanor charge of child abuse that remained pending against Hamp.
Hayek continued her efforts to overturn November 2019 findings from Routt County’s child-protection staffer Camilla Haight, who found the mother had emotionally abused one of the children and her fiancé had sexually abused one of the twin boys.
Haight’s findings never made any sense, Hayek said, noting that interviews with the children were rife with inconsistencies.
Haight found that one of the boys obviously was confused when he told her he believed his mother also may have sexually abused him, yet she still relied on his statements to sustain a finding of sexual abuse against the fiancé, Hayek pointed out. She added that Haight did not properly consider the boy’s statement that he knew he’d been sexually abused because that was what his father told him.
Herron initially took the boy to a doctor, claiming his son was complaining of a “wedgie.”
The boy later told investigators that his father was the one who told him Hamp sexually abused him.
“He said, ‘You have been sexually assaulted.’ And then he took me into my room,” the boy told detectives about his father, Herron.
In August 2021, Hayek reached a settlement with the Colorado Department of Human Services that “reversed and overturned” all of Haight’s initial findings of any abuse involving Hayek or Hamp.
Instead of vindication in her custody fight, Hayek continued to meet resistance from Bawden, the court-appointed child legal representative. He continued to argue in a court filing that Hayek “is not able to make the necessary changes in order to have healthy contact” with her children — an opinion the judge overseeing the custody battle continued to sanction.
At one critical juncture in May 2022, Bawden, unknown to Hayek, flew to Hawaii, bringing his wife along with him and billing the parents of the children for his travel.
Hayek later found out about the trip during a deposition of her ex. Emails her lawyers later obtained through a subpoena showed Herron telling Bawden where he could find the snorkeling gear at the family residence during the visit. When confronted, Bawden said the travel was justified because he needed to see the children in person to see how they were faring.
“He’s getting chummy with Steve about going snorkeling,” Hayek said. “And he never tells me he’s going to go see the kids. Never informed me later that he did or reported to me that he did. I found out later in a deposition, as it was blurted out accidentally.”
She and her fiancé sued Steven Herron in Routt County District Court, alleging multiple claims of defamation, conspiracy, outrageous conduct, abuse of process and malicious prosecution.
During discovery for that litigation, they discovered her ex-husband had continued to unsuccessfully push Routt County District Attorney Matt Karzen to prosecute Hamp, promising a “campaign contribution” if Karzen secured a felony conviction, according to an email from Karzen submitted as evidence during the defamation trial. Karzen had declined to prosecute and continued to take that stance after meeting with Herron and his new wife.
Hayek and Hamp also discovered that Herron, her ex, had engaged in extensive doctor shopping as he pushed his allegations that Hamp had committed sexual abuse, according to their court filings. The lawsuit claimed Herron provided false information to law enforcement officers, child-protection staffers and medical professionals.
After a five-week trial, the jury in November awarded Hamp and Hayek $21.3 million in damages, finding Herron liable for $20.3 million of the damage award and his new wife, Christine, liable for $1 million in damages for a conspiracy claim.
In a twist, Christine Herron and Steven Herron are now divorcing. She has filed documents in their divorce case in Hawaii alleging Herron himself is a sex addict, and that he sought to cover up his addiction during the defamation litigation by funneling $150,000 to her to “surreptitiously pay” for his sex addiction counseling and marriage therapy.
Christine Herron’s divorce lawyer has filed as an exhibit, attached to one motion, a purported 11-page, single-spaced letter she claims to have received from Herron in which he said he would prefer to stay married. In the purported letter, he states that if she still wants to leave, he will immediately give her $2 million and a 10% profit interest in his company in exchange for her “cooperation” in the defamation lawsuit “and not telling people about my addiction.”
“I am also requesting that you delete your ‘evidence’ as I now have a serious discovery issue,” that letter purportedly sent from Steven Herron to Christine Herron further states.
In one motion filed on Christine Herron’s behalf in the Hawaii divorce case, she pleads: “Without help from this court, wife will likely continually live to suffer the results of husband’s fraud, both on herself and on his ex-wife.”
Steven Herron, in response, has filed court documents in Routt County alleging that Christine Herron is trying to escape from a prenuptial she signed that restricted her to only receiving “a few hundred thousand dollars” in the event of a divorce. He said in that filing that the purported 11-page apology letter from him to Christine is fraudulent. He claimed the letter was concocted as part of what he claims are Christine’s continuing efforts to try to “extort” $7 million from him for what he calls baseless accusations.
Steven Herron did not respond to a request for comment.
Hayek has had no contact with her children for over three years. The twin boys are now 13, and the daughter is 17. Hayek has filed a court motion claiming the children are in “imminent danger” in her ex’s care. She is seeking to restore her parenting time, pointing to her successful defamation lawsuit and the divorce her ex is now undergoing as evidence she was wronged when her parenting time was completely suspended.
On Saturday, Hoak, the Routt County judge who has presided over this case, ruled that the verdict in the defamation lawsuit was “significant evidence” that Hayek’s fiancé did not sexually abuse the children.
“This court restricted the mother’s parenting time primarily on the mother’s belief that Mr. Hamp did not sexually abuse any children in this matter and issues that stemmed from that belief, basically, mother’s refusal to accept the allegations of abuse against Mr. Hamp,” Hoak further wrote in her ruling. “If the sexual abuse of one or more of the children did not happen, that finding removes the primary basis for the court’s restriction on mother’s parenting time.”
The judge made still another appointment, Stephanie Norris, a Commerce City psychologist, as a reintegration therapist to help repair the relationship between the mother and her children. She did not reappoint a child legal representative. Though the judge ordered reunification therapy to begin, the judge still has not restored Hayek’s parenting time, and Hayek still is barred from contacting her children.
Hayek received the ruling from her lawyer over the weekend.
She quoted Winston Churchill when asked her response: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
“Family Court tries to wear you down, both mentally and psychologically, emotionally and financially,” Hayek added. “That institution is there for attrition. Everyone is trying to wear you down. I couldn’t allow that to happen because if you’re doing it to me, you’re doing it to everybody.”