How men feel when paternity tests come back negative

NEWSDAY recently spoke to two men who experienced a range of emotions after each learned a child he thought he had fathered was not his.

They shared their stories about how they resolved the situation.

Newsday spoke to the men after the Fathers’ Association of Trinidad and Tobago revealed statistics from one lab that showed one in three men who took paternity tests turned out not to be fathers of children they had believed were theirs. Their names have been altered to protect the privacy of the innocent children involved.

Jervon Thompson’s story began when he was in his early 20s, and was living with a woman.

After she got pregnant and gave birth, she told him not to sign the child’s birth certificate – but he ignored her, because he was excited and proud to have a son. And Thompson loved the baby from the first time he saw him.

“When the child came along, I named my child (John), I do everything a father supposed to do. I was a man, that was my son!”

When their son was seven, he and the mother broke up and parted ways. They went to court and the mother sought a maintenance order which was granted by the magistrate, which he paid for several years.

“I stopped paying it because me and she came to an understanding, and I started to deal with she directly outside the court, because I thought it was two big people reasoning and a child involved.”

During that time, he had met another woman and they had a daughter and got married.

Then he discovered there was a warrant out for his arrest for non-payment of maintenance, since he was not paying the money through the court.

He said he went to the La Brea police station several times to give himself up, but there was always an issue that resulted in the officers not detaining him.

A few times, when he gave himself up, he practically begged the police to arrest him, because he did not want them going to his home at night with guns, hauling him out of his bed “like a criminal” and frightening his daughter.

Still, they did not accept his surrender and, as he predicted, the police went to his house to arrest him a few times, but he was not at home.

Eventually, he gave himself up to the police in Point Fortin. The case went to a magistrate and he was soon out on bail.

He said one day his wife told him “something wasn’t feeling right” about his arrangement with the other child’s mother. So he, his son and his wife went to a facility in San Fernando and he did a paternity test.

A week later, he got the results. He was not the father, but he kept on caring for John.

He said the news shook him – he hadn’t expected it. For hours, he contemplated why the other woman had lied to him and why she had put him through the stress of a warrant and going to court.

He recalled when he told his family about the paternity-test results, his mother said she knew he was not the father, but had chosen not to tell him because she saw how attached he was John.

“The only thing going through my head at the point in time is: if my son needed a kidney, a blood transfusion, or any kind of medical thing…I can’t donate something. That was my hurt there, when I got to realise he wasn’t my child.” Thompson, 45, did not tell John about the test results because he did not want to hurt the child – but he found out anyway, when he was about 13 or 14, when his mother told him.

Thompson assured John he would always be his father.

However, because he had already made payments to the child’s mother outside the court arrangement, he used the test result as a way to show he had no legal responsibility for the boy, to avoid being arrested. He took the test result to the magistrate’s court – but the mother refused to accept it.

The magistrate ordered them to go to the probation department and set a date to take another paternity test through the court.

Thompson agreed to pay $1,800 for a second test and gave the necessary information to the court, but the mother never provided hers.

By that time, the court said he owed $35,000 in maintenance and allowed him six months to pay it.

He did not pay and was due to go to prison, but his lawyer fought it.

The magistrate kept postponing the matter, as the mother told the court she had a witness to support her case, though she never brought the witness.

After two years of going back and forth, his lawyer decided to take the matter to the High Court. But the mother never appeared in court, so the case of the warrant and the $35,000 Thompson was said to owe was dismissed after about two months.

Thompson claimed the court ordered the mother to give him back some of the money for the paternity, test but she never did. The judge asked if he wanted any compensation, and he said no.

“I tell them I don’t want anything. I just wanted to forget about this court thing, because it was taking a toll on my family life at that point in time – so much so that my wife and I ended up separating. We weren’t getting time for one another. It was just work, pay the lawyer and court. I never get a chance to really enjoy myself with my wife and my daughter.”

Despite all this, Thompson said, in his mind, the boy is his son, who had always spent time with him and his family – and continues to do so, even as an adult of 24.

“He’s not mine – but between me and him, we don’t study that. My entire family accept him since he born up to this day, and I do the same from day one up to this day.

“Up to this day I don’t know who his father is, but he (John) is not really too keen to know, because he already knows me.

“He never turn his back on me, he always show me respect, and I don’t intend to turn my back on him.

“I look at him as a blessing. The Father (God) put me there, because the mother not too stable, to take care of the child.”

Thompson said he never got an apology or an explanation for why his “son’s” mother caused the police to issue a warrant for his arrest, but said her attitude was dismissive and her only concern seemed to be the money.

Simon Harry said his paternity problems had been ongoing since 2011.

In his case, he did not meet his alleged daughter, now 23, until earlier this year, and it was the child’s grandmother who was trying to get him to pay maintenance, while the child's mother was unaware of the matter against him until recently.

He explained when he was 19, a co-worker told him about his sister-in-law, who was living “under duress” at her mother’s house, and asked if she could stay at his home. He agreed, they soon became intimate, and they discovered she was pregnant.

However, Harry had suspicions that the baby was not his, so when she was born, he asked for a paternity test, which was declined, resulting in their breakup.

They separated and he had no further contact with the child.

Eleven years later, he saw a notice from the Social Welfare Department in Arima in a newspaper, asking if anyone knew of his whereabouts. He went into the office and the staff told him he had to appear in the magistrates court.

There, Harry was told his “daughter” was “sickly” and that her grandmother was caring for her and wanted custody.

“I didn’t want to say anything, because after all them years passed and I couldn’t find them, to ask to do a test in front of the court, I felt the court would look at me as if I was trying to run from my responsibility.

“So I went along with it, gave her custody of the child – and the magistrate decided to slap the maintenance on me.”

He said he did not pay the maintenance because he worked a minimum-wage job and, by that time, he had another child for whom he was paying maintenance. He kept asking the grandmother to allow him to have a paternity test done, but she kept refusing to allow a sample to be taken from the child.

Again, Harry moved and changed jobs, and it was not until 2020, when a police officer stopped him at a roadblock that he found out the grandmother had warrants out for his arrest, for failure to pay maintenance.

When he went to the Arima Magistrates Court, he was told he owed $50,000 over 18 years and was given time to pay it off. But as a single parent still working a minimum-wage job, he could not afford to pay that, or to go to jail.

He said it was only by coincidence that in January he met the young woman said to be his daughter.

She and her aunt had business at his workplace, and the aunt pointed out Harry as her father. She approached him, and he asked her to do the paternity test. She agreed, and the results showed he was not her father.

Harry said even though he had had suspicions, the results left him feeling confused. He felt trapped because of the maintenance debt that had built up over the years, while at the same time relieved that he finally knew the truth.

Harry is currently before the magistrates court, trying to get the warrants dropped and his $50,000 maintenance “debt” dismissed.

He said the child’s mother did not know anything about her grandmother’s machinations, and even asked her mother to drop the case against him, but she refused.

He added that the situation was emotionally taxing for the “daughter,” as, in a matter of weeks, she had met her “father,” found out her grandmother was using her to get money from him – and then found out Harry was not in fact her father.

When Newsday contacted the young woman’s mother, she said she did not wish to speak about that time in her life, as she had moved on, got married and had other children.

But she did say she knew there was a 50/50 chance Harry was the father, so she did not protest when he initially “took responsibility” for the baby.

She added that she did not know about her mother demanding Harry pay maintenance, or the warrants for his arrest, until years later, when she got a summons to appear in court.

Harry said, “All of this could have been avoided if a test had been done in the beginning. I really didn’t ask the court, because up to now, when I go before the court, I hear how the magistrates speak to me – as if I’m trying to hide from my responsibility.

“I learned from other single fathers to ask for a test.

“They look at us like deadbeat dads, and come back at us hard. They will spite us and make us pay more money.

“I finally got a lawyer, and she told me that some of the magistrates have a problem with men and maintenance, and one of them stood in my matter.”

He added that the ordeal had ruined three of his relationships. He said his wife did not like his name appearing in the newspaper, as it made him look guilty. They ended up divorcing.

Afterwards he tried to move on, but said the police kept telling his then partners there were warrants out for his arrest. In the end the situation was too stressful for both of them.