I have a question related to a Motion for Contempt and other legal issues related to the same incident.
My husband and his ex agreed in their court-ordered Custody Agreement to share all medical information about their daughter as soon as it was possible. This week, my five-year-old stepdaughter was sent to our home from her mother’s with what looked like severely chapped lips, but he examined them later that evening an discovered that they were cold sores. Her mother has cold sores and knows how contagious they are (they took precautions while married so my husband didn’t get them), but none of the five other people in our house do; my husband notified her the next day by email. We were upset because she’d been in contact with the other three children (they had kissed on the mouth) and especially with her newborn brother, because his doctor told us the disease is extremely dangerous in infants and that he never should have had salivary contact with her even when she didn’t have an active outbreak, but we felt that it was no one’s fault and we couldn’t have prevented it.
Then her mother responded back that she knew because my stepdaughter had had them in the past and had spoken with her dentist about them, but we were never notified (she’d told us before that she had chapped lips and we never examined them; she said nothing about herpes). When she arrived at our house she had scabs, not blisters, which means she had to have had the outbreak for at least a day or two before she came here. In other words, her mother knew not only that she had the virus, but that she had an outbreak when she sent her to us, but she said nothing at any time.
We are now worried about our other children (we should know within 20 days if any of the other children caught it), and we must closely monitor the baby. I would like to know if this is grounds for filing a motion for contempt, and if anything else can be done in addition to this. The mother has now stopped talking to my husband and refuses to explain her actions (instead she’s claiming that he’s in contempt because his child support payment was a day late, although he has a bank statement that shows it was sent several days before it was due and delivered on the due date), which endangered all of our children. She’s withheld information before, but in the past it hasn’t ever been something that was actually dangerous; this seems to be slowly building up, and we need to do what we can to make it stop.