Thomas Meehan had a 40-year career in the parenting evaluation industry that finally came to an end after a string of complaints that ranged from accusations of price gouging to obsessive focus on a woman’s sexual history with her husband.
In September 2019, he agreed to permanently relinquish any license to work as a social worker in Colorado, bringing an end to his disputed evaluation work and heading off a move to revoke his license by the state licensing board.
He said he stands by his work and claims he was the victim of coordinated effort by disgruntled parents to unfairly drive him out of business. He said he didn’t find doing parental evaluations difficult.
“They’re a piece of cake for me,” Meehan told The Gazette.
In 2016, a divorcing couple from Colorado Springs thought the custody evaluation for their 11-year-old and 9-month-old boys by Meehan, a licensed social worker in Denver, would only cost $7,000, split between each parent. They said they were shocked after his court appointment to learn of new payment demands, including a charge of $57 for simply dropping off payment checks at his office — at his insistence.
After the parents paid what they thought was their entire $7,000 obligated fee, Meehan demanded more money for additional evaluation work, according to a complaint filed with the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies (DORA). “How badly do you want to see your kids?” Meehan asked the father, as motivation for an additional $10,400 in pay, the father claimed in the complaint.
Meehan and his evaluation team would go on to inform the judge that they would be “unable to provide a completed, comprehensive evaluation and recommendations.” In the end, after receiving more pay, Meehan filed a report anyway that the divorcing parties believed “was hastily written and retaliatory,” the father’s complaint stated.
Meehan’s regulatory complaint history includes a 2017 allegation that while doing one parental evaluation, he had an “excessive focus” on the sexual history a woman had with the man she was divorcing. The woman, who was fighting her husband for custody of their two children, said Meehan “berated” her after reviewing pornographic photos, sexts and sex videos of the woman the husband filmed during the marriage that he provided Meehan. The woman complained that during her evaluation session Meehan described in explicit detail the material, which she thought would never be shared with anyone but her husband.
An associate of Meehan’s, who conducted psychological testing for the evaluation, later corroborated the woman’s account, stating to a regulatory investigator that he told Meehan he was “not comfortable” viewing the material and knew the matter had become a “painful situation” for the woman. Meehan said the husband believed his ex was working in the escort industry.
In contrast, the woman said, Meehan glossed over her husband’s felony domestic violence conviction and additional arrests for violence, slanting his parental evaluation report to make her husband into “some kind of victim” who had an unhappy childhood.
Another woman said Meehan failed to promptly disclose after his appointment as a parental evaluator in her divorce case that he had a conflict of interest because her law firm had represented him on a litany of issues over the years, including his own divorce.
Meehan had developed an adverse relationship with the law firm after it stopped representing him in the divorce. The firm dropped him as a client months after his appointment as a parental evaluator, which meant he was being represented by a lawyer at the firm at the time of his appointment. State law requires conflict of interest disclosures from parental evaluators within seven days of their appointment, and the woman said she tried in vain to get him removed from the case.
The woman said Meehan’s evaluation turned harshly critical of her ability to parent her 4-year-old daughter after she filed for bankruptcy and listed Meehan as one of the people to whom she owed money. She said Meehan made no attempt to schedule any sessions with her when he updated his report while he did meet with her husband, who reported Meehan drank a beer during their meeting. She added that Meehan’s evaluation forced her to settle her custody arrangement on more favorable terms for her husband, and that she had to move back to Colorado from Miami.
Still, another mother said Meehan showed bias after a judge appointed Meehan to do an updated parenting evaluation. Another judge had limited the father in the case to six hours of supervised parenting time due to his psychological damage to the children. A transcript of a recording of a January 11, 2017 parenting evaluation session with the mother depicts Meehan pushing hard to find the mother an inadequate parent. He grills the woman as he tells her he doubts her parenting ability and believes she is a narcissist. One small segment of the 57-page transcript after Meehan asks her how she feels:
“I’m feeling like I want to comfort my children, like, I know this has been very hard for them” the woman told Meehan
“You look anxious, and you look disorganized, and you sound disorganized. So what are you feeling?” Meehan shot back.
“Tom, I’m sorry,” the woman replied. “Like, I’m trying to tell you how I’m feeling, and yet you’re telling me that’s not how I’m feeling. So I’m trying to tell you.”
“I’m trying to give you feedback,” Meehan said.
“I’m telling you that I –” the woman said.
“You look anxious,” Meehan interrupted.
“Okay. I look anxious. I don’t know.”
“And you’re all over the place talking to me. So what’s going on?”
The woman forwarded the recording and a transcript of the evaluation session to state regulators and told them that she had never “felt this relentless line of questioning” from other therapists. Her oldest daughter reported Meehan harshly questioned her too, prompting her to hang up on him when he kept pressing her to falsely accuse her mother of abusing her.