How dare a judge tell me to GET A JOB!
Last week a judge told unemployed Danielle to seek work, as he refused her a share of her father’s fortune. Now read her furious rebuttal and decide if he was right
AS FAR as she is concerned, at least, the past few years have been tough for Danielle Ames. After all, she cares for two boisterous teenagers, an infirm grandmother and her own sick mum.
And the small business that she runs with her partner, a picture-framing shop on the edge of North London, is struggling.
If that seems hard, however, on Thursday her life grew unimaginably worse – because that’s when the 41-year-old became a national byword for indolent greed.
A judge roundly dismissed her claim for a £300,000 share of her late father’s will and told her that, rather than moaning, she should get a full-time job. Her poverty was, he said, a ‘lifestyle choice’.
It was a devastating verdict. It means she will get no share of her father Michael’s estate, and faces a huge legal bill and financial ruin.
Her father’s £1million legacy, including a smart house in Hertfordshire and a share in a successful glazing business, will instead go to Elaine Ames, his second wife and partner of 30 years, who, said the judge, needs it for her retirement.
No wonder Danielle seems close to tears when she agrees to meet in the tiny, barely stocked framing shop. As she knows all too clearly, she has quite a reputation to live down.
In an excoriating ruling, Judge David Halpern accused her of ‘gilding the lily’ when she told the court her father had promised to leave her the family business.
He said she had ‘exaggerated’ the strength of her relationship with her father and had no moral claim on his money. ‘I conclude that her lack of employment is a lifestyle choice,’ he told Central London County Court. ‘That alone is sufficient to defeat her claim.’
It was a comprehensive defeat – and a hurtful one, rubbing salt into a painful family wound which, in Danielle’s view, is the real story.
TODAY she is determined to have her say and, despite the risk of further criticism, hits back with an angry denunciation of the judge. She believes not only that he got it wrong, but that his comments show him to be woefully out of touch with the lives she and millions like her lead, struggling through hours of domestic drudgery and full-time parenthood to make ends meet.
Rather than having no job, as the judge claimed, she insists she has a least three. ‘I just burst into tears when I read the comments,’ she says. ‘He pretty much called me a liar.
‘The picture he’s presented of me is so not the reality and he failed to see that my stepmother was being greedy and selfish.’
What’s wrong, she asks, with seeking some share of her father’s fortune? Especially when it was built on a business originally set up by her maternal grandfather.
And when Danielle points out that it is she – not her 63-year-old stepmother – who has to care for her father’s elderly mother, she certainly seems to have a point.
She lives with her partner and their two teenagers, Daneka, 13, and Levi, 19, in a small house in Enfield, North London, crammed with the paraphernalia of family life. She says they survive on an income of £800 a month, plus family credits.
Is she a shirker, an unemployed chancer trying to get a free slice of a deserving widow’s legacy? She insists the opposite is true, and she spends her days shopping, cleaning, cooking and helping relatives – not to mention working in the shop whenever her partner has to step away.
‘The judge acted as if I’m sitting at home on my bottom,’ she said.
‘But he has no idea. As well as bringing up two children, I am the main carer for my father’s housebound 87-year-old mother and my own mother.
‘I’m always at the beck and call of someone. It is a sad day when being a stay-at-home parent and carer for the family is looked down upon.
‘I am actually taking some of the burden off the state because I don’t believe in living off benefits. I don’t even claim benefits as a full-time carer because I think it’s my duty to look after my relatives. Besides, my pride wouldn’t let me.
‘It’s not the way my parents brought me up – they were always happy to help, but I had to do something to earn it.
‘I’m not someone who can waste time. I did all the paperwork for my dad’s shop from 2003, when I had
my second child, until the day he died of a heart attack.’
Danielle was a small child when her parents’ marriage fell apart through her father’s philandering.
Still, he remained a constant in her life, helping with homework, paying for driving lessons and kitting her out for college when she left school to do a beauty course.
As his businesses thrived he continued to be generous. He even helped set her up in a picture-framing business in the 1990s.
But when she gave birth to her daughter prematurely in 2003, Danielle says her father persuaded her to stop working, leaving her partner to run the business while she became a full-time mother.
‘Dad paid me to help with his paperwork and later on he found this shop for us to rent, but it doesn’t make enough for one salary, let alone two. I help out when I can, but it has been hard since dad died.
‘He was old school. His philosophy was that he didn’t mind helping me and the children, as long as he saw us helping ourselves.’
She claims he had often told her, his only child, that she would be ‘generously looked after’ in his will, telling her: ‘One day all this will be yours’ – meaning his successful glazing business. That is what she had expected after her father died suddenly in 2013, aged 63.
Instead, she was shocked to find that the entire estate had been left to her stepmother.
Hurt and perplexed, she launched a legal challenge to the will.
‘I went to court because it didn’t seem fair that everything my father had built up should go to Elaine’s family. Her children and grandchild will inherit what essentially began with my mother’s family, while my children have nothing at all. How can that be considered right?’
The estate includes the £650,000 home in Woollens Brook, Hoddesdon, where Elaine lives, and a valuable stake in the shop in Enfield from which the glazing business Hond and Langer trades.
For her part, Elaine told the judge her husband would have been ‘incandescent with rage’ had he lived to see Danielle trying to claim a share of his money.
She insisted he had deliberately left his daughter nothing, as he believed grown-up children should ‘look after themselves’.
Danielle said: ‘All my son has as a keepsake of his granddad is his uniform from the shop and my daughter Daneka kept his chewing gum tin. Elaine has held on to everything, including sentimental heirlooms from our side of the family.’
Yet it was Elaine’s evidence that clearly impressed the judge – who ruled it was her husband’s right to bequeath his money as he wished.
Does Danielle agree? ‘Absolutely,’ she says. ‘And yet, there remains a niggling feeling in my mind that he might have left another a will in his safe at the shop. I saw him very often because his shop was close to mine and he came for lunch with the children most Saturday afternoons after closing up.
‘So it’s hard for me to accept that he would have wanted to see his step family inherit everything. It just does not seem like the way my dad would leave his financial affairs. His mistress at the time also said that he told her he had made another will.’
Danielle acknowledges she was never particularly close to her stepmother. ‘I had nothing against her at first because she was kind to my children, but in my view she became very nasty after he died.
‘I never wanted to go to court. I had hoped to settle with Elaine.
‘It’s not that I wanted half or anything near like that. I just wanted something for my children. I don’t know where the £300,000 claim as “reasonable provision” came from, but I guess it was my lawyers.
‘We had a joint settlement meeting last December where Elaine offered me £50,000 on her death but my barrister declined that. We also put in an offer just before trial asking for £50,000, but she refused.
‘She clearly didn’t want to give me anything – not even family heirlooms which should be passed on to my children. I had to beg her to see his body before the cremation and she only grudgingly relented on the day before the funeral.’
Clearly there is a wealth of anger on both sides. Danielle’s 70-year-old mother Charlene – who divorced Michael in the 1970s – hovers about clucking and fussing as we speak. Her anger, too, is palpable. She describes the judgment as a travesty and says her daughter is neither lazy nor a scrounger.
‘She went back to work within weeks of giving birth to both her children. It broke my heart to read news reports suggesting that she should get a job.
‘When I divorced my husband he told me that our daughter would get everything. Especially as the business was started by my father in 1937. Michael and I kept in touch over the years and he always promised that Danielle would be provided for if anything happened to him.
‘I’m disgusted that the business started by my parents has gone to someone else’s family.’
For now, Danielle is resigned to the fact that she must move on and make the best of things. She has a substantial legal bill hanging over her – as things stand, she must pay Elaine’s £35,000 costs.
‘It’s a mess,’ she says. ‘But I have no regrets that I stood up for myself and my children. The judge got it massively wrong, but people who knew my dad knows that he was a good man who would not have left me and my kids financially strapped. Elaine also knows the truth and I hope she can live with herself.’ Last night Elaine declined to comment.
I have a feeling he may have left a second will