Custody Battle Hit All the Hot Buttons

Two parents decide to call it quits and have to wrestle over custody of their child. That story unfolds every day in courtrooms across the country with little notice from the public or media.

But a Long Beach case, in which a couple battled over whether the mother could leave town with their 10-month-old daughter to attend Harvard University, touched a public nerve like few such cases recently. It drew the attention of everyone from commentators to movie producers.

Why?

There were obvious elements that made the story irresistible to the media: telegenic young parents, an adorable baby, the tantalizing juxtaposition of a woman on welfare and the most prestigious university in the country.

But the case also tapped into a reservoir of public passion, experts say, for a much more elemental reason: It was a classic tale of nearly every cultural divide in America--a conflict in pristine condition.

A Long Beach family law commissioner wrote what may be the end of that tale Tuesday. He ruled that Gina Ocon, 21, who has a scholarship to Harvard, would be allowed to take her daughter, Bailey, back to Massachusetts this fall.

The child’s father, Tommaso Maggiore, had argued that he and his family could better care for the child. But the commissioner said Maggiore had demonstrated “irresponsible behavior” with arrests for two alcohol-related offenses.

Questions swirling around the case swept across issues of class, sex, law and morality.

Why couldn’t Ocon attend a local school like UCLA and keep Bailey close to her father? Why couldn’t Maggiore move to Cambridge to let Ocon reclaim the scholarship she had earned?

What kind of mother is she if she is relying on a welfare check instead of finding a job? What kind of father is he if he hasn’t ponied up the court-ordered $214 monthly child support payments? (Maggiore has paid more than $1,000 in child support since the case was publicized last week, a district attorney’s spokesman said.)

“It’s a veritable social Rorshach test,” said Stuart Fischoff, a professor of media psychology at Cal State L.A. “As a result, people could choose any dimension of it that resonated with them . . . and feel totally righteous in their argument.”

The issue “taps into all the hot buttons of social concerns,” Fischoff said--welfare, children born out of wedlock, fathers’ rights.

“But the minute you take a mundane, painful issue and put it on television, it takes on extraordinary significance,” he said. “It really has become a movie of the week.”

Ocon has been inundated with calls from film and talk show producers. For them, the story has a built-in audience. Anyone with children worries about losing them somehow. And in a mobile society where an estimated 30% of marriages end in divorce with split child custody, there is a growing number of parents who have painful, first-hand knowledge of such a loss.

“This is emotionally charged because it forces us to compare who suffers the greatest hardship in bearing children,” said USC family law expert Scott A. Altman.

“Fathers see a system already biased against them, denying them custody, demanding that they pay child support and now facilitating interference with visitation,” Altman said.

“Women see themselves as bearing the greatest burden in caring for children, facing employment discrimination, and then being told that they are bad mothers when they try to improve themselves through education or seeking a better job,” he said. “It’s a direct insult.”

For parents who may have suffered through custody battles themselves, even many years earlier, the case sounded all too familiar.

“It opened up all the wounds,” said Susan Stiver, who helps run a Long Beach support group for noncustodial parents, mostly fathers. “The memories start coming back. It may sort of heal, but there’s always that sadness, the missing out on those years.”

And even for people who never had to endure a divorce or a custody fight, the arguments set forth by Maggiore or Ocon were a sudden challenge to deeply rooted beliefs grounded in religion, family values or individual experience.

“What you have here are constructs,” said Century City psychologist Lilli Friedland. “You should never be on welfare. You should keep a child if you possibly can. You should work hard.”

But this case, she said, “caused people to question. You feel a psychological tug here and a religious tug there. Everybody’s talking about it.”

Some observers may have responded to the case because they were struck by the fact that Maggiore and Ocon were unmarried and planned to stay that way. To hear both parties tell it, Ocon’s pregnancy was the result of a summer romance after her freshman year at Harvard.

“This was a casual sexual relationship,” said Janet Bowermaster, a professor at the California Western School of Law in San Diego. “That’s a little frightening to a lot of people on both ends. To men who inadvertently father children, they’re going to lose control of their offspring. To women who inadvertently get pregnant, they’re subject to a lifetime of control by a man they never intended to be in a long-term relationship with. All this could accidentally happen.”

Beneath a universal fear that unexpected circumstances could ruin a person’s future plans, experts suggest, there is also a deeply held belief in second chances.

Ocon, the argument goes, deserves a second chance to fulfill her potential at Harvard despite the fact that she is an unwed mother.

And Maggiore, by the same logic, deserves a second chance to fully participate in his daughter’s life despite his run-ins with the law. (He was arrested twice in December, once for drunk driving and once after being found passed out in a car.)

Others just as sincerely believe that the case is about sacrifice. A talk-radio host asked listeners what they had given up for their children.

One caller, identified on the air only as Sylvia from Whittier, said she quit her job to avoid having to put her child in day care. “I go crazy every day, but I don’t regret it one minute,” the caller said. “I don’t think I could leave my kid in day care for that long.”

And the author of one letter to The Times wrote: “Ocon wants to be treated as an adult, but fails to realize she cannot have it all. The decision to have this child and raise her means that she has to forgo other opportunities; that’s what parenthood is about.”

Coupled with the wide interest in the case, the fact that it hinged on such vague legal terms as the child’s “best interests” meant that there was no clear answer.

“It needs Solomonic wisdom,” said Cal State L.A.’s Fischoff, “and no one seems willing to cut the baby in half.”