Because of that judgment from Shelby County Circuit Judge D. Al Crowson, who could not lawfully hear the case, Sherry Rollins and her two daughters are on food stamps. As for Ted Rollins, his ties to the highest levels of the Alabama legal community, through Bradley Arant, apparently paid off big time.
How well did those ties pay off? Let's consider the math. Ted Rollins' efforts to reduce his family-support obligations actually began in South Carolina--and that is where Michele Rollins entered the picture. A South Carolina judge issued a temporary order calling for Ted Rollins to pay $8,355 a month in overall support. Upon a motion to reconsider from Ted Rollins' lawyer, that amount was reduced to $4,500 a month.
How did Ted Rollins justify the motion for reconsideration? He more or less blamed it on Michele Rollins, stating that she controlled his trust account with an iron fist. Here's how a court order dated October 17, 2002, sums it up:
[Mr. Rollins] also presented evidence that he is among nine (9) contingent remainders to his deceased father's marital trust estate and that his access to this possible source of funds is permanently restricted to the discretion of his deceased father's widow who does not intend to give him an advance.
I don't claim to be an expert in estate law, and marital trusts can be a tricky subject because they come in several varieties. Something, however, seems incongruent here. We have Ted Rollins stating in court that access to his trust funds are strictly controlled by Michele Rollins. But we have Michele Rollins stating that the trust funds for John Rollins' children are inaccessible to her.
Could Michele Rollins have control over her late husband's trust without having access to it? Does that make sense?
This much is clear: Ted Rollins got one heck of a deal by shifting the divorce case against him from one state to another. It looked at first, in South Carolina, like Ted Rollins would be paying somewhere in the neighborhood of $8,300 a month in family support. By the time the case was finished in Alabama, he was paying $1,315 a month ($815 in child support, $500 in alimony). And the Alabama court, in its final judgement, never mentioned any marital assets--businesses, property, investments, etc.--to which Sherry Rollins might have been entitled to a share over 14 years of marriage.
I'm not a mathematician, but it looks like the unlawful shift of the Rollins divorce case to Alabama helped reduce Ted Rollins monthly support bill by about 640 percent. And that doesn't count any marital assets that should have been divided up, but were not.
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