Fatherhood

The Connecticut Appellate Court affirmed the grant of summary judgment on claims arising from findings that the defendant had falsely claimed that plaintiff had fathered her two children.

The plaintiff is a Kuwaiti citizen who has served as Kuwait’s Ambassador to Austria and as its Permanent Representative to the United Nations International Organizations in Vienna since September, 2013. The defendant is a citizen of Morocco who maintained residences in Morocco, Austria, and Greenwich, Connecticut.

The parties met in 2001 and subsequently began a romantic relationship. Despite that ongoing relationship, the defendant married Ahmad Al Saad in 2007. The defendant at that time represented to the plaintiff that Al Saad was homosexual, that her relationship with Al Saad was not sexual in nature, and that they married only for family and social reasons for Al Saad’s benefit.

DNA confirmed that the plaintiff had not fathered defendant’s two children.

The parties married in Kuwait in 2013. Between 2007 and 2015, the plaintiff transferred more than $187 million to the defendant while under the misapprehension that S was, in fact, his child.

Unbeknownst to the plaintiff, the defendant began a romantic relationship with Mohsine Karim-Bennani in 2014. The defendant became pregnant and again represented to the plaintiff that he was the biological father, though she knew that was false. As the defendant admitted in her June 6, 2019 response to the plaintiff’s interrogatories, she ‘‘knew the paternity of each of her biological children from the time she was first aware that she was pregnant with each of her biological children.’’ (Emphasis added.)

The award below was, as they say, not chicken feed

The court thereafter entered an order awarding the plaintiff $192,111,387.20 on the fraudulent misrepresentation count, trebled damages pursuant to General Statutes § 52-564 on the statutory theft count that totaled $576,335,551.60, and $6,250,000 on the unjust enrichment count with respect to the defendant.

The court concluded that the claims were not barred by the statute that precludes a cause of action predicated on adultery

Section 52-572f provides: ‘‘No action may be brought upon any cause arising from criminal conversation.’’ Historically, criminal conversation was a common-law action synonymous with adultery…

The operative complaint in the present case does not include a criminal conversation count, nor does it include the word adultery. The three counts at issue in this appeal—fraudulent misrepresentation, statutory theft, and unjust enrichment—all are rooted in the defendant’s knowingly false representations to the plaintiff that he was the biological father of S and N. The defendant nevertheless insists that those causes of action contravene the proscription of § 52-572f and argues that the trial court, in not enforcing that proscription, committed an error that was obvious and not debatable.

We cannot agree with that proposition. The defendant has provided no authority in which a Connecticut court has held that actions for fraudulent misrepresentation, statutory theft, or unjust enrichment contravene § 52- 572f.

(Mike Frisch)