Kelly and Joyesh Raj had nothing but optimism and hope going into their marriage in 2011. And they seemed like a perfect match. Both grew up in Midwestern families steeped in the practice of medicine. Both envisioned skipping town to a vacation condo in Naples, Florida. Both wanted to build a house in Bay Village. “And we knew we wanted to have children,” Kelly said. “That was our goal: to start a family and live happily ever after.”
They were married on July 8, 2011, in a small ceremony on the beach in Naples. Two years later, after settling near Joyesh’s plastic surgery offices close to Crocker Park, their daughter was born. Two years after that, their son followed. Then the good times came to an end.
Kelly calls the time a blur. “The bottom line was we got married,” Joyesh told me, “and soon thereafter, you know, the marriage was not working.”
In December 2016, five days before Christmas, Joyesh filed for divorce in the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas Domestic Relations. In the preceding months, the two threw themselves into what’s called posturing and planning. They each shopped around for the right attorney.
Despite some contentious moments, by the time Raj v. Raj popped on the docket of Judge Leslie Ann Celebrezze, the two sides seemed to agree the divorce could be resolved in a timely manner, if not a somewhat amicable one. But assets had to be divided, alimony had to be decided on, as did a parenting plan for their children. Who would get the condo in Naples? How much money would Joyesh have to pay Kelly in spousal support, or vice versa? How would the kids, barely ready for kindergarten, be shuffled between Joyesh’s house and Kelly’s townhome?
Though the Rajs’ divorce order came on February 23, 2018, more than two years after Joyesh originally filed, what happened after could easily be described as one of the most tedious tennis matches in the American legal system. Joyesh contested the amount of child support he owed. Trial dates to figure out a parenting plan were cancelled and rescheduled over four years. All five judges in Cuyahoga County Domestic Relations recused themselves out of conflicts of interest. And the case dragged on, and on.
The Ohio Supreme Court has set guidelines recommending Domestic Relations judges and the attorneys involved wrap up all divorce cases involving children in no more than a year and a half—about three years if parenting and support details need hammered out. Raj v. Raj, after millions racked up in lawyer fees and hundreds of motions filed, has, as of November, been going on for nine.
Ask any judge, in criminal or civil, and they’ll tell you that the engine fuel of the legal world is what’s called trial date certainty: If we can’t solve this thing ourselves, or rely on our prenuptial agreement, the court will—on this specific date in the future—solve it for us. “That’s supposed to be your light at the end of the tunnel,” former Ohio Supreme Court Justice Michael Donnelly told me over lunch in July. “But for those who have ever been through a contested divorce, the reality is far from that. That it can be endless.”
Donnelly, who has over three decades of experience in the justice system, has, since he left the Ohio Supreme Court in 2024, been investigating reasons why some cases stretch on interminably. The culprits for many of these drawn-out examples, Donnelly has come to find, is not solely sour grapes, negligent judges or complicated financial matters, but the attorneys themselves.
“What if your business model is built on delay?” he said. “Like, resolution doesn’t help your firm because once you resolve, you cut my hourly pay.” Donnelly dabbed his finger on the half-inch-tall stack of docket papers that is Raj v. Raj, sitting next to two expanding file folders holding documents from other drawn-out cases. “That’s the heart of all this,” he added. “A system that allows endless litigation.”
Talk to any magistrate in the region, any reporter who’s covered local courts, any divorce attorney in Northeast Ohio, and they’ll probably tell you that no lawyer has mastered the art of delay in Domestic Relations more than the one Kelly Raj hired in September of 2022.
And that man is Joseph Gregory Stafford.
***
Joe Stafford’s reputation depends on who you ask, and what side of the courtroom they’re on.
There is Joe Stafford, the “bulldog” of divorce lawyers, hired by hot-tempered exes hoping to resolve matters on the most favorable, and sometimes most painful, terms. There is Joe Stafford, the legal brainiac, the workaholic with a photographic memory who, as one client told me, “says everything you want to hear.”
There is also Joe Stafford the “troll,” the “asshole,” the “bully,” the “fear-monger,” and “the devil.” He is, as a former opposing client who said Stafford “destroyed” his life in 2018 told me, “the most crooked, manipulative, backhanded, coercive, smarmy weasel without a modicum of decency.” Stafford, the person said, “is a JACKBOOT THUG.”
What most would agree upon, no matter what side of the courtroom you sit in, is that he is feared. “We all have a saying,” one lawyer told me. “Stafford comes and the attorneys run.”
There were 7,618 filings for divorce in the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas last year, according to a state data dashboard, of which about 92 percent were cleared and closed within the state’s suggested time guidelines. That leaves, amongst the five judges and their magistrates, some 50 “over-age” cases a month that lag behind for a handful of reasons: exes can’t agree on custody or fight over allegations of hidden bank accounts; judges are reassigned out of conflicts of interest; acrimonious couples fight bitterly over every detail.
A good deal of those cases involve Joe Stafford. As of July, his firm has 270 active cases in Domestic Relations going this year, according to records from the Cuyahoga County Clerk of Courts. And 127 active cases (before or after the divorce decree) of more than three years, dating all the way back to Flanagan v. Anders, filed in March of 1990. There are 17 that stretch five years, 51 that stretch six years, 56 that stretch seven, 17 that stretch eight. (Joe found the 270 count inaccurate yet refused to provide a better number. “That’s impossible! Not even close,” he told me.)
So, how does that happen?
More than a dozen lawyers, judges, social workers, guardians ad litem, past employees and former clients who spoke to Scene, largely on the condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation or to protect their clients, said that Stafford has, more than any attorney in town, built a legal practice that places delay above every other tactic. What all accuse Stafford of doing over the years is filing motions of continuances—requests to the judge to reschedule a hearing—for just about any reason: discrepancies over one line in a prenup, a claim that a client is “sick,” that an opposing client changed lawyers too many times. Or, in the most widely used practice, to simply reschedule a trial date on maybe the most cluttered calendar in Cuyahoga County. The average high-profile attorney in Cuyahoga County family law has, Scene found from public records, around 21 active cases in Domestic Relations. As of July, Joe Stafford alone had 124. (“It’s under 100,” Joe told me.)
And Stafford doesn’t stop when judges say no, lawyers who fought against Joe and who spoke to Scene on the condition of anonymity said. On five cases analyzed for this article, chosen primarily based on their length, Stafford appealed a judge’s denial of a request for a continuance anywhere from three to seven times per case. (Nearly all of those appeals were denied.)
And when court filings don’t cut it, several attorneys who’ve fought against Stafford told me, he resorts to more extreme measures. He’s alleged to have pulled fire alarms. He’s wheeled in shipping carts stacked high with banker’s boxes to taunt the opposition. All while billing his clients, several divorce lawyers told Scene, anywhere from $700 to $1,000 an hour.
“With smaller firms like us, we don’t have the resources. Our clients don’t have $90,000,” one lawyer who refuses to even “touch” a Stafford case told me. “Joe will go on quests to distract from the overall goal of going to trial and getting divorced.”
It’s a reputation that Joe has built over the last 40 years, since 1985 when Stafford passed the Ohio bar and received his license to practice law. Growing up a middle child with three brothers and one sister, Stafford moved from Dayton to Cleveland in 1982 to study at Cleveland State. He finished law school in two years. By the early 1990s, Joe had set up a firm, Stafford & Stafford, with his younger brother, Vince, that would quickly become the go-to choice for the bitter ex-lovers of Northeast Ohio, and one no opposing counsel wanted a piece of.
In a 2006 feature, Scene delved into the brothers’ hard-earned reputation. Hardly anyone—lawyers, judges, magistrates, clients—would go on record in fear of angering the duo, though all hoped someone else would have the courage. “I don’t want to be in a public fight with these guys,” one lawyer told Scene at the time. “It’s bad enough being in a private fight with them.”
There were the dozens of disciplinary charges lobbed by the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association, and the dozens of times Joe Stafford was acquitted of said charges.
And the hallmarks of what clients and critics say Stafford continues to do to this day. In one of those early disciplinary cases, Judge Christine McMonagle, who later sat on the Eighth District Court of Appeals until 2011, sharply criticized Joe Stafford’s approach. Though Stafford was a skilled litigator, she said, he costs couples unnecessary time and money and pushes families further apart. “Is he aggressive? Yes,” the judge said. “Does he fail to file motions that are appropriate to a case? Never. Does he fail to object? No.” But when it comes to moving cases efficiently through the system and managing conflict, “he is not a good lawyer,” she said.
But the Staffords’ tactics wouldn’t go unpunished forever.
In January of 2011, a five-count complaint was filed to the Ohio Supreme Court’s Disciplinary Counsel accusing Vince of misleading the court during evidence-gathering that “obfuscated and hindered the truth-seeking process.” Vince was barred from practicing for a year and a half.
That October, the Counsel received a similar set of complaints about his brother. Joe, the disciplinary panel found, violated the state Rules of Professional Conduct six times when he waited two years to respond to (and even acknowledge) an ex-husband’s counterclaim about his and his ex’s prenup, a move that prolonged the case of Tallisman v. Tallisman “into a years-long war, replete with extensive, bitter battles over every minute detail.” Stafford denied he should be singled out. Every other lawyer in town, he told the panel, did what he did.
To use the industry’s saying, Stafford’s ticket was pulled. He was barred from practicing law in any shape or form for one year, until March 8, 2013. “However, Stafford’s circumstances—namely his role as an attorney in a contested-divorce proceeding,” the Counsel wrote, “are certain to recur.”
In the eyes of the Ohio Supreme Court, they did. In November 2023, a decade after Joe got his license back, he was accused of filing a frivolous appeal—an appeal that, they wrote, serves “only to delay” justice—after the Ohio Supreme Court rejected his 11th motion for continuance for a client. This, of course, was after a decade of litigation, of three judges and who knows how much billed out.
By the time it appeared before the Ohio Supreme Court, the whole thing was moot. That appeal, Joe’s third on Richmond v. Evans, was thrown out for simply not being allowed in the first place. (“The granting or denial of a motion for a continuance is not a final, appealable order,” the judges reminded Stafford.) Joe, along with two of his firm’s employees, Nicole Cruz and Kelly Tauring, were sent back to the office with a reprimand. By Thanksgiving, the three of them would earn the legal world’s scarlet letter and were deemed vexatious litigators. Or, to use the common legal dictionary definition, lawyers not “operating in Good Faith.”
Donnelly was on the court at the time. He recalled the decision, unanimous amongst all seven justices, with an almost childlike gratification. “Our standard operating procedure was, like, ‘Deny, deny, deny the appeal. Just deny the appeal. This is not a fight,’” he told me. “But finally, after seeing enough of that, we decided to take action.”
***
Jason Jardine met Crystal in the halls of Albion Junior High. After high school, he followed Crystal to Baldwin Wallace, where she studied accounting. She followed Jason to Cincinnati, where Jason trained to become an embalmer. They would eventually take over Jason’s family’s business, Jardine Funeral Home, and raise a family. They married in 1996 and had three kids. They opened, and managed, four businesses that would come to be worth millions of dollars.
Which is why, when the relationship fell apart and the Jardines began planning to get divorced in 2017, each felt compelled to hire a powerhouse lawyer. Both agreed, as did their kids, that their home in Hunting Meadows had devolved into chaos. “It wasn’t a peaceful household,” Crystal told me. But both sensed that their business, the livelihood that linked them together, would exacerbate what should’ve been otherwise a clean settlement.
Hence why, shortly after consulting with him in 2019, Jason made sure to hire Stafford before his ex-wife could.
“He’s sharp. I mean, he’s super smart, right?” Jason told me from a visitation room in one of his funeral homes in Independence. He barely blinked as he spoke, as if he was imitating Stafford’s high-octane focus. “No one will believe I said this, but Joe has colleagues of his, well-known people that say he has a good moral compass for right and wrong. He’s a fierce, fierce competitor. So, I mean, you can’t be all good and lovey-dovey when you’re in a fight like this.”
By the time Jason and Crystal went to trial in March 2023—three years after filing and following four motions for continuance—the Jardine Funeral Home and its finances rose to the foreground. Both claimed to me the other was hiding (and stealing) funeral funds undisclosed to accountants and to the court, which had by then assigned a receiver, Mark Dottore, to monitor the business while the two sort out their case.
But Jason, like anyone else in high-profile divorce, had by then become an armchair attorney himself. (As did Crystal.) Believing that Dottore was mismanaging funeral home payouts (and charging him for “dinner meetings” at the Capital Grille), and hearing rumors of an alleged relationship, Jason hired a private investigator to keep tabs on Dottore and the judge he was appointed to report to, Leslie Ann Celebrezze. The golden circle run by Celebrezze and Dottore, along with forensic analysts and opposing lawyers, Jason believed, were hemorrhaging money from the family business from a man who was doomed to be locked out of it until his case concluded. Crystal thought the whole thing a spectacle. “It was a sideshow,” Crystal opined. She laughed. “Its own delay tactic.”
County records show more than half a million in court-ordered payments to Dottore’s pocket from Jason since 2017. Absolutely needless in Jason’s mind. “This wasn’t fraud within a case,” Jason told me. “This was fraud by the court. The court shook me down for money to give to their friends.”
Jason’s hunch gave Stafford good ammo when they appeared in Celebrezze’s courtroom on May 21, 2024. Joe immediately played a highlight from hours of footage collected by the PI: a man, balding and in a soft-blue shirt, leisurely pecking a five-foot-two blonde woman on the sidewalk outside Delmonico’s Steakhouse in Independence.
“Okay, there we have it, Mr. Dottore,” Joe said, after the video ended, the hearing transcript reads. “So, just to be clear, that’s you, correct?”
“Yes,” Dottore said.
“Definitely you?” Joe said.
“No question about it.”
“So, the judge, Judge Celebrezze grabs your face, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And kisses you on the lips, right?”
“Yes.”
“And your claim is you always do that with Judge Celebrezze, you kiss her on the lips, right?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s because, according to you, you’re Italian and that’s what Italians do, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” Joe said. “Tell me the last time you kissed Judge Boros on the lips? Did Judge Boros ever come to you house, Mr. Dottore?”
Order is called for in the room.
Stafford explained. “What I’m doing is setting up the dichotomy of what you’ve done in the case, and what went on in the past to demonstrate fraud by the court,” he said. “Because judges don’t do those things that Judge Celebrezze did.”
That proceeding, which resulted in the Ohio Supreme Court kicking Celebrezze off Jardine v. Jardine, is a first in the history of Cleveland Domestic Relations: Joe Stafford and his client accusing the court of an improper relationship and benefiting from years of mismanaging a divorcing couple’s assets—a delay of its own, if you will. Celebrezze herself is now, as of October, facing both a disciplinary hearing by the Ohio Supreme Court and an ongoing criminal investigation by the FBI.
But do judges really want to stretch out any of the thousands of cases on their docket? When I posed that question recently to Administrative Judge Diane Palos, she held more of an assembly line take on solving complex cases: every so often an oblong product clogs the conveyor. “There’s a small part of the population that would rather pay their lawyer and drag a case out than pay their spouse,” Palos said. “So those people make this court look bad for everybody else.”
Jason Jardine completely disagreed. “Why would I want to do any of this? Get me the fuck out,” he said. Halfway through our meeting, he gleefully showed me months of text messages he’d fired off to Dottore in a fury, accusations of misbehavior that read more like taunts before a boxing match than ex parte banter. “These are hardcore crimes. Colluding and conspiring,” Jason said. “I’ve been irreparably harmed and it’s been intentional.”
In September, about two weeks after a yet another hearing (the seventh in the Court of Appeals), I met with Crystal at a west side Starbucks to gauge her side in a divorce that’s lasted almost a fifth of her life. As one might expect, the conversation shifted to her kids. How, she told me, her oldest isn’t speaking to her. (Or his siblings.) How another moved to Florida. How a separation that seemed like the right pathway to clearing family dynamics only drove everyone further into the muck.
“I just want it all to be done with,” Crystal said. “Like, it’s so difficult to live like this, to move forward. And I want the relationships with the kids, with my kids to be better.”
She started sobbing and put her head into her palms. “I don’t have control anymore,” she said. “I just want it all cleared up, so I can finally take a deep breath, and regroup. It kills me that my kids don’t talk to each other. I know there’s not going to be, like, the full family unit anymore, but at least I can try and work on getting it back.”
Crystal breathed, then wiped her eyes. Her mind, as it did for the umpteenth time during our meeting, fell on her ex’s lawyer. “I’m not throwing in the towel, though, and obviously they know that,” she said. “But somebody at an upper level in the courts has to stop Stafford and his team from what they’ve been doing.”
“Like I said from the beginning,” she added. “It’s not just me.”
***
Those who do find themselves walking into the Old County Courthouse off Lakeside Avenue often wonder why it is so deafeningly quiet. After clearing by a metal detector and K9 unit, you take a bronze elevator up to the third floor, a floor that zigzags like a gigantic figure 8. Behind the gilded signs of judge names—CELEBREZZE, PALOS—you might find a hearing in action. “Marriage Over?” a nearby brochure reads. “Divorce like there is a tomorrow.” But more than often, aside from attorneys clicking on laptops or the faint berating of mid-cross examinations, the only sounds of chatter come from the corner offices of the judges and magistrates themselves.
And it’s here, on July 10, 2012, where Lisa DiSiena made that same walk up to the third floor. DiSiena was a scheduler for Judge Rosemary Grdina Gold in Court Room 1A, so she often fielded calls from lawyers and their clerks who played the chaotic dance of setting hearings. But a little after eleven that morning, DiSiena got a different call. It was from an unknown number. The man, DiSiena recalled, sounded professional, almost too professional. “There will be a bomb that will go off at 11:30 today at the Cuyahoga County Courthouse,” he said. The line went dead.
Down the hall was another divorce attorney in trial when the judge announced the building had to be evacuated. By 11:12, bomb-sniffing dogs would swarm the hallways. “I swear to you, I actually said, when that bomb threat come through, I said, ‘Did Greg need another continuance?’” they recalled from their office recently. “I swear to God I said it. I mean, the pressure that guy was under—I couldn’t even imagine.”
By that day, Gregory Moore was well into a role he probably never thought he’d find himself in. Four months earlier, after his boss temporarily lost his license, Moore was catapulted from being a mid-career litigator to being the face of Stafford Law. Moore was 38, married and living in a nice house in Sagamore Hills. He had the combed-back hair of a sharp downtown attorney, but he didn’t have the Stafford build: Moore was five inches shorter, about 30 pounds lighter. But here he was, tasked with managing and steering one of the largest and wide-reaching Domestic Relations caseloads in the state. One lawyer who knew Moore at the time told me his cases ran “north of 200.”
And Moore, according to those who sparred with him, wasn’t shy when it came to tactics of delay. He filed last-minute continuances due to overlapping trial dates—in Medina County, Lake County. “I was there one time when Greg faked a heart attack in the bathroom,” one lawyer told me. “The administrative judge at the time wouldn’t let him leave.” Soon after, Moore apparently stopped with that angle. The judge, I was told, made Moore prove his emergencies with medical records.
So, according to the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office, Moore switched to bomb threats. He made one January 18, 2012, the same day his underling was to go to trial. (Which was rescheduled for the day after.) He made one that May, to a scheduler at the Lake County Courthouse, at 8:30 in the morning on a Tuesday. And he made that call that sweltering day mid-July, the same day Moore was set to appear for three cases in front of three different judges. The same day, Detective Paul Soprek’s report noted, Moore’s motion for continuance was denied. One he’d requested, Soprek wrote, “due to having a case in Medina County at the same time.”
By the end of the year, Moore was exhausted. Judges across the region caught on to his frivolous motions and refused to allow continuances without proof. “Judges got all strong because Joe or Vince were no longer there,” one lawyer told me. “So, they start holding Greg’s feet to the fire—and he was a disaster.” Come January, Moore’s spoofed call ploys were over: he had learned that the prosecutor’s office was looking into the bomb threats. Those charges, of Inducing Panic and Telecommunications Fraud, would later lead to Moore to pleading guilty in court four years later.
Come March 2013, Aliza Sherman was equally irate, if not more. A Cleveland Clinic delivery nurse with four kids, Aliza had hired Stafford Law to defend herself against her ex-husband, Sanford Sherman, a wealthy physician. Joe assigned Moore to the case. But years passed with it in purgatory. By March, Moore had filed four motions for continuance and two motions for extension of time.
It’s possible that, on March 24, Aliza reached out to Moore to verify they were really showing up in court. It’s possible that Aliza loathed Moore by then and wanted to fire him. It’s possible she felt lodged in limbo. Whatever the case, Aliza reached out to Moore that day, according the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office, and was invited to meet at the Stafford Law offices on a snowy afternoon in the black behemoth of a building that is Erieview Plaza.
Aliza arrived a little after four o’clock. It was freezing, so she waited in her car on East 12th. The plan was to meet at five, so Aliza got out of her car, and waited in front.
“Will u be here soon? Kind of cold,” she texted Moore at 5:14 p.m.
“Been here,” Moore said.
“Doors locked. I thought u would text me when u got here,” Aliza said. “Been in car 45 min. Too cold. Text me when door is open thx.”
Minutes later, around 5:21, as she was waiting in front of Erieview, a person in a black parka and grey pants charges her. Their face is covered. A struggle ensues. A knife is brandished, and Aliza is stabbed 11 times and dies alone in the middle of East 12th. Surveillance video from a nearby mechanic captures the killer running through the building’s alcove, a figure that teeters as they sprint towards East 17th.
This May, after years of investigation, the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office charged Moore with a dozen counts of crime, including kidnapping, conspiracy and five counts of murder. Moore, they claim, had used the law firm’s Verizon hotspot to text Aliza without the nearby cell tower revealing his location. He or an “unnamed individual” killed Aliza, they posit, to “hinder, impede, or obstruct a function of government.”
“The purpose of Aliza Sherman’s kidnapping was to obstruct Judge Rosemary Grdina Gold from conducting the trial in the divorce case of Sanford Sherman v. Aliza Sherman,” the indictment reads. “This goal was designed to be achieved by causing Aliza Sherman to be unavailable to attend proceedings due to serious physical harm and/or death.” Aliza, it turns out, was scheduled to be with Moore in Gold’s courtroom the day after she was murdered.
And Stafford? Joe had just filed a motion to be reinstated to the Ohio bar. That Friday, five days after Aliza was killed, he got his license back.
***
“Honestly, I thought you’d be a lot taller,” Joe Stafford told me, walking into his office off Lakeside Avenue at the beginning of October. “But, oh well. Here we are. What can I help you with?”
It comes as no surprise that sitting down with Stafford is no cakewalk. He doesn’t do interviews. He’s in trial this week, trial the next. He’ll email you hundreds of pages of court documents with the assumed expectation that you will master their contents. And he will certainly do his darndest to gather dirt: scour your voting records, monitor your social media. He’ll know your party, your address, your age. He’ll even perform impromptu therapy. “You have a fear of commitment,” he told me, knowing I’ve never married. “You have intimacy issues.”
Joe Stafford is 65, and he is a towering man. He wears medium-length white hair and resembles a late-career Ted Danson if Danson sported a plumper forehead and curved chin. (“I’ve been called a little troll of a guy,” Joe said.) The evening we met, Joe wore a pressed white shirt buttoned up to the neck, with “JGS” stitched beside a red-and-blue tie. As Joe speaks, and that he does, the room listens, as if his voice is a vortex unto which all nearby gravity tilts its attention.
And it’s hard to find an area of conversation that doesn’t devolve into some kind of argument. Whether that be how many cases he has (“I don’t keep track. It doesn’t matter”), how much he makes (“Just because you bill doesn’t mean you get paid”), why he doesn’t take pictures (“It keeps me alive”), why lawyers speak ill of him (“Why are they hiding in the shadows? Speak it to my face!”), or why cases he’s involved in take five, six, seven, eight years to wrap up. Those are outliers, he says, at a firm that settles “95 percent” of their cases. And those outlier cases, in his mind, are riddled with bad actors and corruption beyond his control.
It’s the Cleveland developer who has hidden millions in assets from the court, Joe says. It’s the computer programmer who would rather pay his attorney seven figures than pay spousal support to his ex-wife. And it’s that shady receiver Mark Dottore, in Joe’s mind, that had just about snatched away a multi-million-dollar funeral home business for his client Jason Jardine.
“I was like, ‘Get Dottore off the case! Get that motherfucker!’” Joe recalled, sitting at a conference table overlooking East 9th at golden hour. He’d refused to let me record our interview, so it was one of the cases Joe allowed me to scribble notes on. “I file an appeal because the judge lied to us. What they’re mad about is, maybe I call them out for something” they’re doing wrong, Joe said. His voice rose to a fervor. “Connect the dots! You have to connect the dots!”
But why so long? It was painstakingly hard to get a clear, concise answer from Joe that didn’t seem like a retaliatory defense. Everyone divorcing their spouse has a narrative—and no one more refined than the rich and entitled, he argued. Guardians ad litem and forensic psychologists clog the system, he said. One past client, Joe vividly remembered as he held back tears, was “near suicide” when she called her attorney up in the middle of the night. That hearing had to be delayed. A motion had to be filed.
Which is probably the best way to sum up Joe’s sense of self. He believes, as ardently as one can believe, that he spends 70 to 80 hours a week—fighting how many active cases for however many people for however many years—advocating for clients so long because it is the morally right thing to do.
“I’ll never capitulate just to get a case over with. I mean, name one case, one case, where I’m representing” the oppressor, Joe said. He sat back in his chair. “The cases that I’m on, I’m on the side of the angels.”
***
What may be the most ironic thing to Kelly Raj is that this summer, out of the past seven, was the best summers for her children in years. There were birthday parties, new iPhones, Sunday French toast breakfasts, bike rides around the Metroparks, spontaneous trips to the condo in Naples. All amidst a background of two parents navigating a divorce without a clear, definite end. “It goes back to the same feeling you always have,” Kelly told me. “That you’re screaming into this chamber when no one is listening.”
But this, as both Joyesh and Kelly have divulged to me, is just the system set in place. The system is paying a parenting coordinator who takes weeks to respond to an email. The system is being watchful of one’s tone on Our Family Wizard, the app for divorced co-parents. The system is failing to accept a parenting agreement after two guardians ad litem, two custody trials and claims of hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid child support. And, of course, the system, is putting one’s faith in a fair resolution.
“Obviously it’s hard on the kids, because they’re in limbo,” Anna Tyrrell, the only parenting coordinator on the Cuyahoga County roster sheet that would speak to me, said in a phone call. “It’s hard to be your best self when you’re under that stress; they’re living with stressed parents. They feel it. But they don’t always have the words for it.”
But the system is self-aware. As Chris Schmitt, the head of the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association, reminded me in a recent interview, anyone pissed about their long case or trial delays can file grievances with his organization or the Ohio Office of Disciplinary Counsel. As long as that delay, Schmitt said, is clearly to benefit the lawyer, not the client. “Filing a grievance over what we would consider a normal delay,” he told me, “is not something that we’re going to pursue.”
And in her most recent State of the Judiciary address, on September 11, Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Sharon Kennedy nodded to the fact that, although judge backlogs around Ohio were at a five-year low, there still was work to be done in Domestic Relations.
“One of the solemn responsibilities we bear in the administration of justice is to ensure that justice is timely delivered,” Kennedy told the room of judges. “When cases languish, justice delayed becomes justice denied.”
It was hard to gauge if all this meant much to Kelly Raj when we met recently, at Huntington Beach in Bay Village. It was August, and Kelly seemed to be relieved, if not elated, that she finally had someone to talk to in person. Her kids had a dozen things that needed taken care of. Joe wasn’t replying to emails on time, Kelly told me. A trial date for December for finances loomed, even if Kelly wasn’t sure it was going to happen. (“Hell if I know,” Joyesh said.)
Same goes for Joyesh. “We’ve had guardians ad litem all come to the same conclusion that this is a volatile situation,” he told me. “But again, nobody will take it to trial because Stafford’s on the other side. So, meanwhile, my kids suffer.”
At the park that day, Kelly and I walked around as the conversation cycled from optimistic to despairing. Kelly’s eyelids grow heavy when she’s wary, but it seemed like she was too far in to let tears fall. We sat on a bench near a playground and talked as young mothers parented their toddlers or preteens as they tromped around the jungle gym.
Kelly brought up a story. It was January 2023. Her daughter was turning 10, so a party was planned. But by the weekend after, Kelly got dispiriting news: her daughter already had a birthday celebration.
“And my friends are like, “Well, accept it. You’re divorced. Accept it,’” Kelly told me. She took a breath. “It is as if I do not exist. I’m invisible. And the process and the system is enabling that to continue.”
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