Jury awards $21.3M in damages in Colorado custody dispute involving false abuse allegations

The mother of the three children said in court filings that her ex-husband, Steven Herron, “concocted and cultivated a false narrative” for law enforcement officers, medical professionals, child-protective staffers and, ultimately, the judge overseeing the divorce, to “destroy her relationship with her children” and gain parenting time.

“I lost my family,” Cynthia Hayek of Steamboat Springs testified during the trial. “I lost — I had a great relationship with my kids. I lost that. It’s gone. I don’t think I’m ever going to get it back. I’ve lost respect for a system that I thought would help and protect me.”

Hayek’s successful lawsuit against the father is the latest controversy to hit Colorado’s family court system. Investigative reports by The Gazette during the past two years revealed a heavy reliance by judges overseeing divorce cases on sometimes incompetent, biased and even corrupt court-appointed parental evaluators to guide custody decisions.

Initial restrictions imposed by a judge on the mother’s parenting time in the Routt County custody dispute hinged in part on the recommendations of a controversial parenting evaluator, Mark Kilmer, who has since been barred by state court administrators from continuing to accept court appointments to make custody recommendations.

Despite controversies over Kilmer’s work in other cases, the Routt County judge who awarded full custody to Herron continued to say during a hearing last year that Kilmer did a solid job on the Routt County case.

Herron and Hayek divorced in 2016 and initially shared equal parenting time. Their custody arrangement would change dramatically after the ex-husband raised allegations of child sex abuse in September 2019, the same month that his ex-wife secured a $10.5 million settlement after she sued him, alleging she was owed money from the sale of a fracking company.

An oil and gas geologist, she successfully contended she was owed some of the roughly $90 million in profits her ex netted from the sale because she was entitled to participate in that transaction.

After that settlement, her ex, Herron, engaged in extensive doctor shopping as he pushed his allegations that his ex-wife’s new fiancé had engaged in sexual abuse, according to the lawsuit filed by the mother. The lawsuit claimed Herron provided false information to law-enforcement officers, child-protective staffers and medical professionals.

The mother’s lawsuit alleged that abrasions on the buttocks of one of her twin boys that Herron claimed was evidence of sexual abuse likely came from the child’s long bike-riding session while wearing shorts and no underwear. The lawsuit further claimed that Herron continually told the child that the child had been sexually abused, eventually persuading the child, 8 at the time, to falsely believe such abuse occurred.

Prosecutors filed criminal charges of child abuse against the fiancé. Child-protective staff in Routt County found that the fiancé sexually abused one of the children and physically abused another and further found that the mother had emotionally abused all the children, including an older daughter.

But a judge eventually dismissed a felony criminal charge, and prosecutors subsequently dropped a misdemeanor criminal charge. State human services officials also overturned the findings of abuse by child-protective staffers against the mother and her fiancé and reflected for reporting purposes in a state child abuse tracking database that the abuse allegations were "reversed and overturned."

The ex-husband continued to unsuccessfully push Routt County District Attorney Matt Karzen to prosecute his ex-wife’s fiancé, promising “a campaign contribution” if Karzen secured a felony conviction, according to an email from Karzen submitted as evidence during the defamation trial.

Despite the prosecutor dropping the criminal charge, Routt County District Court Judge Mary Hoak, the judge overseeing the divorce and ongoing custody dispute, on January 29, 2021, still barred Hayek, the mother of the children, from having any contact or parenting time with her twin boys, then 8, and the daughter, then 14.

The judge granted the father full custody after she found that the mother was “emotionally damaging” the children by disputing the allegations that her fiancé had shoved items up one of the boys’ anus and supplied pornography to the children.

The judge said during one hearing that she couldn’t assure the children would be safe — even if their visits with their mother were supervised — because the mother was “pursuing her belief for vindication.”

“Ms. Hayek needs to do the work,” the judge said when she announced she was barring all contact between the mother and her three children. “She needs to let go of this other narrative that she has, let herself go and engage in therapy with the therapist that she has who’s ready to do it.”

The judge also allowed the father to relocate himself, his new wife and the children from Steamboat Springs to Hawaii, brushing aside concerns raised by Hayek’s lawyer during one hearing that barring the mother from having any contact with her children, even by phone, may violate the mother’s constitutional right to parent her children.

“It’s the laws of the state of Colorado you got a beef with, not me,” the judge said during the hearing.

It didn’t matter that another judge had dismissed a felony charge of child abuse prosecutors had filed against the fiancé, Kenneth Hamp, due to a lack of probable cause. She still barred the mother from having any contact with her children even after Karzen, the district attorney in Routt County, dismissed in June 2020 the criminal misdemeanor charge of child abuse that remained pending against Hamp.

Nor did it matter that the mother of the children in August 2021 reached a settlement with the Colorado Department of Human Services. That settlement required the state agency to overturn November 2019 findings from Routt County’s child protective staffer Camilla Haight, who found the mother had emotionally abused the children and her fiancé had sexually abused one of the children.

“For those of us in the system, cases settle for a lot of reasons,” the divorce judge said during a hearing in February 2023, during which Hayek’s lawyer highlighted the DHS settlement that required the agency to overturn the original findings of abuse. Hoak at that hearing declined to lift her prohibition barring any contact between the children and the mother.

The mother and fiancé, undaunted, filed civil lawsuits against her ex-husband, accusing him of multiple instances of defamation and of manipulating child-protective staffers and law-enforcement officers into initially believing his assertions her fiancé was sexually abusing her son. The mother also has appealed Hoak’s rulings barring her from having any contact with her children, so far unsuccessfully.

Now, a Routt County jury, following a five-week trial, has sided with the mother and her fiancé, finding that a gross injustice occurred when the mother lost all contact with her children. The jury returned its verdict in November, the day before Thanksgiving, awarding $21.3 million in damages to Hayek and her fiancé.

Herron, the father, testified during the trial that the children and their mother have no relationship anymore. “I’ve never said their mother is alive or dead,” he testified, according to a transcript of the hearing.

The jury awarded to Hamp, the fiancé, $3.7 million in economic and non-economic damages and $10 million in punitive damages; and awarded to Hayek, the mother of the children, $3.6 million in economic and non-economic damages and $4 million in punitive damages.

The jury found Herron, the father, liable for $20.3 million of the damage award for multiple claims of defamation, conspiracy, outrageous conduct, abuse of process and malicious prosecution. The jury found Herron’s new wife, Christine, now separated from Herron, liable for $1 million in damages for a conspiracy claim.

Hayek and the Herrons declined comment. In court documents, Steven Herron’s lawyers have said he plans to appeal the damage award. They also filed motions with the trial judge seeking to reduce the jury’s findings on damages.

Investigative reports by The Gazette in the past two years revealed judges relying on inaccurate and biased reports by evaluators, putting children at serious risk by giving custody to abusive parents. The newspaper found instances where evaluators have shown apparent prejudice against one parent — usually mothers — questioning their credibility without proof and making assumptions about parenting without firsthand investigation.

Colorado’s network of custody evaluators has historically had little practical oversight, accountability, or opportunity for public scrutiny. Reports they submit to the court generally remain sealed, and the Department of Regulatory Agencies rarely chooses to investigate complaints made against evaluators’ professional licenses.

In one divorce reported on by The Gazette, an evaluator questioned whether a woman had complained about her ex-husband’s penis size, which the evaluator contended would put in doubt the woman’s ability to parent. The newspaper reported on how another evaluator fixated on whether a father in a custody case was a member of a violent gang because he had the nickname “Sleepy Melo” when it was the mother who was living with a convicted felon.

That evaluator went on to threaten another father as an unfit parent, warning in emails to lawyers on the custody dispute that he was worse than a murderer she claimed to have counseled who had put his victims through a woodchipper. State court administrators only barred that evaluator from accepting court appointments after the father convinced them the evaluator had lied about having a doctoral degree in psychology to obtain a license to practice psychology in Colorado.

Controversies over the parenting evaluation industry have grown so pronounced that state lawmakers last year created a task force to craft new domestic violence training requirements for judges handling divorce cases. In 2021, state lawmakers required evaluators to undergo new domestic violence training.

The Routt County judge in the Hayek and Herron divorce relied in part on the custody recommendations from a controversial parenting evaluator, Kilmer. The judge appointed Kilmer to issue a custody recommendation in August 2020 for the ongoing custody dispute.

Two years later, the state court administrator’s office would go on to bar Kilmer from continuing to do court-appointed parenting evaluations after allegations of bias surfaced from other parents following an investigative report on Kilmer from ProPublica.

Last year, a group of mothers filed a class-action lawsuit against Kilmer, who himself pleaded guilty of a misdemeanor assault charge and a misdemeanor harassment charge in 2007, after his then-wife said he pushed her to the bathroom floor, according to police reports. The charges were dismissed after Kilmer successfully completed domestic violence training.

A judge dismissed the class-action lawsuit against Kilmer, ruling that evaluators have immunity, protecting them from litigation.

Hoak, the judge who presided over the divorce in Routt County, said during a 2020 court hearing that Kilmer’s parenting evaluation of Hayek and Herron helped persuade her to keep in place restrictions she initially had imposed on the mother’s parenting time.

Hoak noted in her ruling that Kilmer had reported to the judge that “the mother needs to improve her awareness of and expression of compassion, empathy, or sympathy; the suffering that (her twins) especially have endured.” She added she agreed with Kilmer’s finding that any movement toward unsupervised parenting time for the mother “must be done with the utmost discretion, discipline and adherence to parenting time schedules that includes a professional team approach.”

The judge said during a March 2023 hearing that she still believes Kilmer’s work on the case was solid, despite Kilmer’s work in other cases prompting the state court administrator’s office to find him unfit to work as a parental evaluator and bar him from doing such work in custody disputes.

“I have no evidence that this — that his parental responsibilities evaluation was flawed,” the judge said during the hearing. “No one has brought that to me, and very frankly, it made sense in many ways.” She added, “You know, just because someone is suspended for work they did in one case, doesn’t mean they always did bad work.”

Routt County Chief District Court Judge Michael O’Hara explicitly refused to allow Herron to introduce Kilmer’s report in the civil litigation brought by the mother and her fiancé, noting the controversy over Kilmer and prohibition against him doing any more court-appointed custody reports.

Christopher Decker, the lawyer hired by Hayek to represent her fiancé, said Hayek spent significant amounts of money on the divorce proceeding and the lawsuit against her ex-husband.

“I asked her, I said, ‘Cindy, why are you spending literally many millions of dollars on this?’” Decker recalled. “And she was like, ‘I want the system to get this right. I want a jury to see what Steve Herron did, not to retaliate, but to expose it.’”

He said Hayek and Hamp still plan to get married. The two met when she and the children frequented the Truffle Pig restaurant in Steamboat Springs, when he was the general manager of the restaurant, which is located on the ground floor of the building where her penthouse residence is located. The lawyer said the couple are holding off on the marriage until Hayek’s daughter can walk her down the aisle.