Christensen v. Christensen

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Christensen v. Christensen

EUGENE CHRISTENSEN v.
MADELYN CHRISTENSEN
(AC 46470)
Alvord, Elgo and Seeley, Js.

Syllabus

The defendant, whose marriage to the plaintiff previously had been dis-
solved, appealed from the judgment of the trial court denying her postjudg-
ment motion for modification of child support and custody and granting
the plaintiff’s postjudgment motion for contempt. She claimed, inter alia,
that the court improperly determined that she had engaged in parental
alienation. Held:

The defendant’s challenge to the trial court’s ruling on her motion for modifi-
cation was moot, as there was no practical relief that this court could afford
the defendant because the challenged custody order had been superseded
by an order of the trial court issued after the appeal had been filed.

This court declined to address the merits of the defendant’s claim that the
trial court improperly granted the plaintiff’s motion for contempt, as the
defendant failed to provide an adequate record for review.

This court dismissed the defendant’s claim with respect to the trial court’s
order that she pay attorney’s fees incurred by the plaintiff for the preparation
and prosecution of his motion for contempt, as the appeal challenged only
the reasonableness of the fees sought, which had not yet been awarded,
and not the court’s decision to award fees and, thus, was unripe for review.

Argued February 18—officially released April 29, 2025

Procedural History

Action for the dissolution of a marriage, and for other
relief, brought to the Superior Court in the judicial dis-
trict of Ansonia-Milford where the court, S. Richards,
J., found the defendant in default for failure to appear
and rendered judgment dissolving the marriage; there-
after, the court, Tindill, J., denied the defendant’s post-
judgment motion for modification of custody and child
support and granted the plaintiff’s postjudgment motion
for contempt, from which the defendant appealed to
this court. Appeal dismissed in part; affirmed.
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Christensen v. Christensen

Madelyn Christensen, self-represented, the appellant
(defendant).
Nicole R. Concilio, for the appellee (plaintiff).
Opinion

PER CURIAM. In this postjudgment marital dissolu-
tion action, the self-represented defendant, Madelyn
Christensen, appeals from the judgment of the trial
court resolving several motions filed by the defendant
and by the plaintiff, Eugene Christensen. Specifically,
the defendant claims on appeal that the court erred in
granting the plaintiff’s motion for contempt and denying
the defendant’s motion for modification on the basis
that it (1) improperly determined that she had engaged
in parental alienation, (2) did not give her the opportu-
nity to cross-examine the plaintiff, and (3) abused its
discretion in awarding the plaintiff attorney’s fees. We
dismiss in part the defendant’s appeal and otherwise
affirm the judgment of the trial court.
The following facts and procedural history are rele-
vant to our disposition of this appeal. The parties were
married in 1997 and have four children together, three
of whom are minors. The plaintiff commenced the
action for dissolution of the parties’ marriage in June,
2015. The defendant failed to file an appearance, and
the court rendered a judgment of dissolution, which
incorporated the plaintiff’s proposed orders, on Octo-
ber 21, 2015.
On October 20, 2021, the defendant filed a motion
for modification of child support and custody, seeking
sole custody of the parties’ minor children. On October
26, 2021, the plaintiff filed a motion for contempt, alleg-
ing that the defendant had violated the court’s orders
with respect to parenting time. In the motion, the plain-
tiff sought an order requiring the defendant to pay his
attorney’s fees for the prosecution of the motion. A
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Christensen v. Christensen

hearing subsequently was held before the court, Tin-
dill, J.
On March 9, 2023, the court issued an order granting
the plaintiff’s motion for contempt and denying the
defendant’s motion for modification, and, among other
orders, it set a parenting schedule. As to the defendant’s
motion for modification, the court stated that it had
considered the seventeen factors delineated in General
Statutes § 46b-56. It stated that factors three, seven,
eight, fifteen, and sixteen weighed most heavily in its
decision and concluded that it was not in the children’s
best interests to award sole legal custody to the defen-
dant.
With respect to the plaintiff’s motion for contempt,
the court found that the plaintiff proved by clear and
convincing evidence that the defendant wilfully had
violated the parenting plan and issued the following
order: ‘‘The defendant shall pay the reasonable attor-
ney’s fees and costs incurred by the plaintiff for the
preparation and prosecution of his motion for contempt
. . . . Counsel for the plaintiff shall provide the defen-
dant and file with the court an affidavit of fees and
costs by the close of business on March 15, 2023.’’ On
March 16, 2023, the plaintiff filed an affidavit of attor-
ney’s fees. Therein, the plaintiff’s counsel averred that
she had charged $8835 in fees related to the plaintiff’s
motion for contempt and specified that her rate was
$300 per hour. The affidavit was accompanied by a led-
ger.
On March 28, 2023, the defendant filed a motion to
reargue. Therein, she sought ‘‘to reargue’’ the plaintiff’s
attorney’s fees on the basis that she could not pay her
own counsel because she was providing financially for
the children. She further stated that the amount of time
counsel spent on the motion, including time charged
with respect to the plaintiff’s continuances and work
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Christensen v. Christensen

on other matters, was unreasonable. She represented
that she had emailed the plaintiff’s counsel asking for
‘‘a more clear bill’’ that she could understand but that
she did not receive a response. After initially granting
the motion to reargue, the court vacated that order and
denied reargument. This appeal followed.
In her appellate brief, the defendant requests that
‘‘the decision made on March 9, 2023 . . . be over-
turned . . . . ’’ She devotes much of her brief to her
argument that the court improperly determined that
she had engaged in parental alienation. She raises other
contentions, including that she ‘‘was not given the
opportunity to cross-examine the [plaintiff].’’
To the extent the defendant challenges the court’s
ruling on her motion for modification, we conclude that
her claim is moot. ‘‘Mootness implicates [the] court’s
subject matter jurisdiction and is thus a threshold mat-
ter for us to resolve. . . . It is a well-settled general
rule that the existence of an actual controversy is an
essential requisite to appellate jurisdiction; it is not the
province of appellate courts to decide moot questions,
disconnected from the granting of actual relief or from
the determination of which no practical relief can fol-
low. . . . An actual controversy must exist not only at
the time the appeal is taken, but also throughout the
pendency of the appeal. . . . When, during the pen-
dency of an appeal, events have occurred that preclude
an appellate court from granting any practical relief
through its disposition of the merits, a case has become
moot.’’ (Internal quotation marks omitted.) Thunelius
v. Posacki, 193 Conn. App. 666, 685, 220 A.3d 194 (2019).
In the present case, following the filing of this appeal,
in January, 2024, the defendant filed another motion
for modification of custody. On October 28, 2024, the
parties reached an agreement, which provided that
‘‘[t]he parties shall share joint legal custody of the three
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Christensen v. Christensen

minor children . . . [and] the [defendant] shall have
primary physical custody . . . .’’ The agreement also
modified the visitation schedule to take into consider-
ation two of the children’s preferences. The court,
Figueroa Laskos, J., accepted the agreement after find-
ing it fair, equitable, and in the best interests of the
minor children. On October 28, 2024, the court ruled
that the agreement ‘‘shall enter as an order of the court,
as of today’s date, as to custody.’’

The court’s October, 2024 order accepted the parties’
agreement regarding custody, the same issue that was
decided by the court in its March, 2023 order. Conse-
quently, the March, 2023 order as to custody has been
superseded. Thus, we conclude that there is no practical
relief that this court can afford the defendant with
respect to her challenge to the court’s March, 2023 order
on the motion for modification of custody, and this
portion of the defendant’s appeal is moot. See Santos
v. Morrissey, 127 Conn. App. 602, 605, 14 A.3d 1064
(2011) (appeal challenging earlier ruling on custody
was moot in light of subsequent order addressing same
issues).

To the extent the defendant challenges the court’s
ruling on the plaintiff’s motion for contempt, we decline
to address the merits of that claim because the defen-
dant has failed to provide an adequate record for review.
‘‘As the appellant, the [defendant] has the burden of
providing this court with a record from which this court
can review any alleged claims of error.’’ (Internal quota-
tion marks omitted.) Park Seymour Associates, LLC v.
Hartford, 230 Conn. App. 565, 572–73, 330 A.3d 640,
cert. denied, 351 Conn. 918, A.3d (2025). Prac-
tice Book § 61-10 (a) provides: ‘‘It is the responsibility
of the appellant to provide an adequate record for
review. The appellant shall determine whether the
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Christensen v. Christensen

entire record is complete, correct and otherwise per-
fected for presentation on appeal.’’ ‘‘The general pur-
pose of [the relevant] rules of practice . . . [requiring
the appellant to provide a sufficient record] is to ensure
that there is a trial court record that is adequate for an
informed appellate review of the various claims pre-
sented by the parties. . . . It is not an appropriate func-
tion of this court, when presented with an inadequate
record, to speculate as to the reasoning of the trial court
or to presume error from a silent record.’’ (Internal
quotation marks omitted.) Meineke Bristol, LLC v. Pre-
mier Auto, LLC, 227 Conn. App. 64, 73, 319 A.3d 826
(2024).
In the present case, the defendant has not provided
us with the full transcripts of the relevant proceedings.
The defendant provided only excerpts of proceedings
on certain dates: two brief excerpts from January 12,
2022; a four page excerpt of the partial testimony of
one witness from July 11, 2022; and an eighty-four page
excerpt from August 4, 2022, that included the plaintiff’s
testimony on direct examination and a portion of the
defendant’s testimony. The record reflects that the pro-
ceeding was not complete at the conclusion of the
August 4, 2022 hearing, and the court’s March 9, 2023
order stated that ‘‘[t]he evidentiary hearing on the plain-
tiff’s postjudgment motion for contempt regarding the
parenting plan . . . and the defendant’s postjudgment
motion for modification of the parenting plan . . . was
held on March 9, 2023.’’ The defendant did not provide
this court with any portion of the March 9, 2023 tran-
script.
We cannot rely on the defendant’s characterization
of the evidence or review only select portions of evi-
dence on which she relies. See Meineke Bristol, LLC
v. Premier Auto, LLC, supra, 227 Conn. App. 74–75
(‘‘In connection with a claim that requires this court to
review the evidence presented at trial . . . we must
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Christensen v. Christensen

consider the evidence as a whole, including evidence
of a testimonial nature. In the absence of a complete
transcript, we would have to resort to speculation to
resolve [the appellant’s] claim that the court erred in
determining that it failed to prove its breach of contract
cause of action.’’). Accordingly, we are unable to
address the merits of the defendant’s claim because
she has not provided this court with an adequate record
for review.

The defendant’s remaining claim is that the attorney’s
fees sought by the plaintiff are unclear, and the defen-
dant is unsure whether the fees are restricted properly
to the plaintiff’s motion for contempt.1 Our review of
the record reveals that, although the court ordered the
defendant to pay ‘‘the reasonable attorney’s fees and
costs incurred by the plaintiff for the preparation and
prosecution of his motion for contempt,’’ and the plain-
tiff thereafter filed an affidavit of fees, no award of
attorney’s fees has been issued. Moreover, because the
defendant’s appeal challenges only the reasonableness
of the fees sought, not the court’s decision to award
fees; see Spinnato v. Boyd, 231 Conn. App. 460, 483
n.12, A.3d (2025) (noting that defendant may
appeal from final determination court makes as to plain-
tiff’s requested fees); Iino v. Spalter, 192 Conn. App.
421, 457, 218 A.3d 152 (2019) (‘‘[the] postjudgment
determination [of the amount of the attorney’s fees]
will be a separately appealable final judgment as to the
reasonableness of the fees awarded’’); the defendant
may raise that challenge following the court’s determi-
nation as to the requested fees. See Allen v. Allen, 134
Conn. App. 486, 503, 39 A.3d 1190 (2012) (holding that
court exceeded its discretion in awarding attorney’s
1
The defendant argues: ‘‘The fees appeared to be very high. I believe that
there were fees on there that are not a part of this motion but other issues
before the court.’’
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Christensen v. Christensen

fees for efforts unrelated to contempt action). Accord-
ingly, we dismiss the defendant’s claim with respect to
attorney’s fees on the basis that it is not ripe for review.
See Rheaume v. Rheaume, 156 Conn. App. 766, 772, 115
A.3d 1116 (2015) (‘‘[T]he rationale behind the ripeness
requirement is to prevent the courts, through avoidance
of premature adjudication, from entangling themselves
in abstract disagreements. . . . [I]n determining
whether a case is ripe, a trial court must be satisfied
that the case before [it] does not present a hypothetical
injury or a claim contingent upon some event that has
not and indeed may never transpire.’’ (Internal quota-
tion marks omitted.)).
The appeal is dismissed with respect to the defen-
dant’s challenge to the trial court’s ruling on her motion
for modification of custody and the defendant’s claim
regarding attorney’s fees; the judgment is affirmed in
all other respects.