Man Sues Ex-Wife, True Father of Kids She Told Him Were His

ORANGE —  For more than nine years, David Reese did all of the things that he thought a father should.

He sent the children to private schools, paid their medical bills, enrolled them in dance lessons and planned family vacations. And when he and his wife, Rebecca Reese, separated in 1992 with the intention of dissolving their 17-year marriage, David Reese says he paid child support and scheduled regular weekend visitations.

Then last year a bomb fell. In an angry telephone conversation during a dispute over child support, Rebecca Reese informed her ex-husband that his children, now ages 9 and 5, weren’t biologically his. Genetic testing showed she was right.

“I was horrified,” said Reese of Orange. “I was stunned.”

Even more stunning though, he said, was a ruling by a Riverside County Superior Court judge that Reese was still their legal father with all parental responsibilities and obligations, including child support.

Reese and his lawyer have appealed that decision.

And this week they went a step further. In a lawsuit filed in Santa Ana Superior Court, Reese, 39, accuses his ex-wife and the admitted father of her children of fraud, demanding reimbursement for the more than $200,000 he says he spent on raising the kids from birth, indemnity from all future child support payments and an additional $1 million each for emotional distress.

“David relied upon the representations . . . that (the children) were his biological children and held himself out to be their father,” the suit maintains. “He expended time, energy, care, emotion and money on the children; established emotional and psychological bonds with them; and performed all acts that a father generally would toward children.”

John L. Dodd, Reese’s lawyer, said Rebecca Reese “essentially defrauded David by lying to him as to who the father of the children is. They are the (natural father’s) children and he should be required to live up to that responsibility.”

Rebecca Reese, who lives in San Jacinto in Riverside County and works as a recreation director in a convalescent home, said of the lawsuit: “I just feel it’s nonsense. I’ve been in and out of court for 18 months. This is a very private situation and I wish very much not to exploit my children nor the situation.”

Lee O’Conner, the La Habra grocery clerk named in the lawsuit as the children’s biological father, said Friday night that he had fathered the children at the request of Rebecca Reese, a longtime friend.

“All I did for them was a favor because they couldn’t have any kids,” said O’Conner, 38. “That’s the extent I had to do with it. I thought (David Reese) knew about it all along.”

While acknowledging his paternity, O’Conner, who is single, said he rarely sees the children now and keeps in touch with their mother only intermittently.

“I don’t want to be their dad,” he said. “I wasn’t there while they were raised. I just don’t feel like a father to them.”

And while he has sympathy for the children, he says, he is in no position to assume financial responsibility for them.

“Unfortunately (the Reeses’) relationship failed, and Dave tried to bail out of the situation, so I might have some problems with the lawsuit,” O’Conner said. “It’s too bad for the kids that things didn’t work out.”

Reese, meanwhile, said that he hasn’t seen the children he said he still loves since last June and stopped paying child support in May after he couldn’t find work as a contractor.

Four months ago, he remarried. Eventually, he would like to re-establish contact with the children he once thought were his, perhaps in “some kind of big brother or stepfather relationship,” he said.

“I feel deeply hurt,” Reese said. “It was the greatest deception that ever was; nothing worse can happen to a man. If you can’t have faith in your wife, what can you have faith in? It seems like our whole life was a lie.”