LUTHMANN NOTE: I keep coming back to Patrick Feeney’s explanation: “She hands all things to the press.” That explains his discomfort. It doesn’t explain why the court should receive fewer financial records. Michelle paid the self-proclaimed hedge-fund hotshot $300,000 under a court-approved agreement. The result must be grounded in complete, accurate disclosures. That is what the Connecticut Supreme Court said in Billington: fraud on the Court unwinds all. Patrick disputes the portfolio and the apparent financial lies. Fine. Let the evidence resolve that dispute. Protect confidential information through precise orders. Thirteen years of hearings have already consumed enough money and an entire childhood. Connecticut should decide what must be produced and why. A gag request cannot answer an accounting question. Neither can another year on the docket. This piece is “Crypto Questions Gag Request,” first available on Frank Report.
This may look like a private fight between two people who should have moved on years ago. In a way it is. But I’m not writing about it because of who Patrick and Michelle Feeney are. I’m writing about it because of where they’ve been fighting: Connecticut family court.
Not all of that is the court’s fault. It takes two people who won’t stop to keep a case going this long. But the court let it go on, one motion and one hearing at a time, for thirteen years. And it shows something anyone thinking about family court should know: a parent willing to keep fighting, whose sworn numbers about his money don’t add up, can get away with a lot for a very long time.
Here’s how it happened.
Before a Stamford judge granted Patrick and Michelle Feeney’s divorce in February 2013, their case had 27 entries on the court docket.
Since then, nearly 400 more have been filed. Contempt motions. Emergency custody applications. Requests to move hearings. Guardians, evaluators, therapists, and lawyers – and all of them get paid.
Their son was two when the divorce became final. He’s almost 16 now. He has never known his parents to be outside of court cases over him and the money to support him.
Connecticut’s family court has let this one run for thirteen years. Why not? Everyone was getting paid.
But now it may come to an end. After all the lawyers, therapists, guardians, and others who make their living from family court fights have been paid, both parents now represent themselves.
And the boy is only two years from aging out.
The latest and perhaps last round is about money: whether Patrick hid it, and whether Michelle is allowed to talk about it.
Patrick Feeney wants a Connecticut judge to fine his former wife $2,500 every time a story like this one runs.
On August 5, Patrick asked the Stamford court to stop Michelle from talking to reporters about their custody fight until the case ends.
Michelle asked for his financial records. He opposed the request. In a September filing, he explained why: “she hands all things to the press.”
Investigative reporter Richard Luthmann, a Frank Report contributor, obtained some of the documents.
Among them is a cryptocurrency portfolio screenshot showing about $1.01 million, at prices that date it to January 2018. Michelle filed it with the court in July 2021.
Patrick disputes whether the screenshot is real and whether the account was his.
Four years later, in 2022, Michelle agreed to pay him $300,000.
Michelle, a psychotherapist with her own practice, was raising their son. She was paying for his school, his doctors, and his baseball. She wanted to take him to California, where her mother was dying.
Patrick’s price for saying yes was $300,000.
Patrick might say he was giving up time with his son, and that the money paid for travel so he could keep seeing him. But the travel had its own fund, $15,000 a year, which Michelle paid for as well.
Michelle says Patrick found a way to make money on that too. When he flew out to California to see their son, she says, he stayed in the cheapest motels he could find so he could keep what was left of the $15,000.
If that’s true, it means Patrick spent time with his son in whatever room cost the least and pocketed the difference. The money was meant to keep a father close to his boy. Michelle says he treated it as another way to profit.
A year later, he told the court he was being “financially abused.”
Patrick and Michelle divorced on February 19, 2013, without a contest.
Michelle had primary custody. The boy was two.
Patrick would see his son every other weekend, one weekday night, and on holidays.
The marriage was over, but they were still the boy’s mother and father.
Twenty-three days after the divorce, Patrick asked the court to hold Michelle in contempt. It was denied. Six weeks later, he asked the court to change the orders.
Over the years, the docket shows Patrick has filed 11 emergency applications for custody. Michelle has filed four. In the spring of 2023 alone, Patrick filed three in six weeks. Judge Ronald Kowalski denied all three.
On August 20, 2025, Judge Jennifer DeCastro-Tunnard denied another emergency application from Patrick. Nine days later, he filed again, and Judge John Cirello granted it, giving Patrick temporary sole custody.
In that application, Patrick said Michelle had taken their son out of Connecticut, blocked his contact with the boy, failed to enroll him properly in school, neglected his medical needs, and cut him off from friends.
Michelle denies all of it and says school and other outside records prove it false.
They sold their Stamford house in November 2012. Patrick got $69,794. Michelle got $45,262.
In January 2013, Michelle’s lawyer filed a motion saying that Patrick had not paid “any financial support whatsoever” for their son in the six months since they separated.
Patrick had worked in finance for years. He spent about twelve years trading at hedge funds, including a Millennium Capital Management unit. Then he worked two years as a senior trader at J. Goldman & Co. in New York. That job ended in February 2012.
In August 2014, he asked the court to lower his child support. He reported no income. He said his crypto startup was not making money. In a sworn application asking the court to waive his filing fees, Patrick reported no monthly income and said he was living on retirement savings. He listed $3,500 in the bank.
The court dismissed his request to lower child support in October 2014. He filed another request to change the orders on October 28.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Patrick founded Bitcoin Nation LLC in November 2014 and sold it to PeerNova, a California company, in January 2015. The sale price isn’t public. Three months before he started the company, he had told the court he had no income.
One thing that raises questions about those claims is a screenshot Michelle obtained. She says it came from Patrick, and it shows his portfolio worth $1,010,045.
The largest holding is $215,000 in cash. It shows 9.2 bitcoin worth $145,630 and about 135 Ethereum worth $133,250. The rest is in smaller coins, including NEO, XRP, and Litecoin.
The screen doesn’t show a date. The prices do. Bitcoin at $15,847 and Ethereum at $987 put it in early January 2018, near the peak of the crypto boom. That month, Patrick wired Michelle $25,000. She called it child support. He called it a gift.
When Michelle’s mortgage lender asked for a gift letter, Patrick signed one calling the $25,000 a gift toward her Easton home. In an email to Michelle, he also complained that the bank wanted to know where the money came from: “this is why crypto will ‘rule’ eventually.”
He had helped her buy a home, and he was irritated by the bank’s questions.
Patrick deserves credit for the $25,000. It was real money, and it helped Michelle buy a home for their son. Whatever else the two parents disagreed about, this helped give the boy a place to live.
But it’s not the whole picture.
Michelle’s exhibit calls it child support. Patrick’s gift letter calls it a gift. If it was support, it wasn’t a present. It was money he owed his son.
The payment also shows that Patrick could send at least $25,000 in January 2018. The disputed screenshot shows far more, at prices from that same month.
His complaint about the bank says something too. A man annoyed that a bank asked where his money came from now doesn’t want a court asking the same question.
In September 2020, Patrick signed a sworn financial affidavit. The form warns that lying on it can bring criminal charges.
Patrick said he worked at Backflow Prevention Specialists, earning $1,480 a week, and made $61,795 the year before.
He listed $8,000 in a Chase checking account and two retirement accounts worth $56,500. He valued his business, The Real McCoy, at $1,000, reported about $10,000 in equity in a 2018 Jaguar, and listed a $13,100 debt he said Michelle owed him.
He listed no stocks, crypto, or cash in a brokerage account.
Less than two years later, his income went lower on paper. In April 2022 child support worksheets, Patrick used a gross income of $1,096 a week, about $57,000 a year.
Here’s the fair question.
Bitcoin lost about three-quarters of its value in 2018, while many smaller coins fell further.
If Patrick kept the same coins until September 2020, they would have dropped from about $795,000 to roughly $200,000. The crash explains most of that drop.
It doesn’t explain the $215,000 in cash. Cash didn’t crash.
And crypto came back. At today’s prices, the Bitcoin and Ethereum on that screen alone would be worth about $1.14 million, four times their January 2018 value, if Patrick held on to them.
So where did the money go between January 2018 and September 2020?
Patrick may have lost money trading, spent it, or never owned the portfolio at all. Bank and crypto exchange records could show which it was.
Michelle wants those records. She says she has a right to know. By her account, she has paid Patrick far more than he ever paid her, and for most of the boy’s life, she worked and supported him.
Patrick wants to limit how many records he must hand over and keep them out of the press.
Michelle also says Patrick missed a January 4, 2022, court deadline to produce financial records and never updated a financial affidavit he filed in November 2021. That month, crypto prices were at their all-time high. The docket shows he filed an affidavit on November 9, 2021.
Michelle’s exhibit estimates that the portfolio would have been worth about $4.3 million in November 2021 if he had kept the same coins.
In Connecticut, a judge sets child support by looking at what both parents earn and own.
Each parent must swear to it on a financial affidavit. If a parent hides money, the judge works from false numbers, and the other parent pays more than their share.
Patrick told the court he had no income in 2014. He asked to pay less child support. In 2020, he signed a sworn affidavit stating he had $8,000 in the bank.
In 2022, when Michelle wanted to move their son to California, she agreed to pay Patrick $300,000 in advance child support. She also agreed to put $15,000 a year into a travel fund and to cover most of the boy’s medical, school, and activity costs.
A judge approved the deal on July 20, 2022. Seven weeks earlier, Patrick had filed a new financial affidavit.
That same year, Patrick’s child support worksheets listed his income at $1,096 a week. If Patrick had more money than he told the court, Michelle paid him $300,000 based on false numbers.
Earlier in 2022, Michelle had also told the court Patrick owed her $5,736 in child support, $38,295 for his share of their son’s activities, and $21,706 in fees for the boy’s court-appointed guardian.
She withdrew those claims in May 2022, when the two sides settled.
If those debts were real and the settlement wiped them out, Patrick came out of 2022 with the $300,000 and nearly $66,000 in claims against him dropped.
In 2023, a year after Michelle agreed to pay him $300,000, Patrick asked the court to make Michelle pay $20,000 for his lawyer. He also wanted her to pay $2,375 for their son’s baseball.
“I cannot be financially abused any longer,” he wrote.
Five years earlier, a disputed screenshot showed a million-dollar portfolio. Now Patrick wanted his ex-wife to pay his lawyer.
Connecticut courts can order the wealthier parent to pay the other parent’s lawyer. After thirteen years, bills add up.
In his court papers, Patrick claims he earns less than Michelle.
Michelle estimates the family has spent about $1 million on lawyers, evaluators, and guardians. That is money spent while their son was growing up. It paid for people to argue, investigate, evaluate, and advise.
Michelle says most of her share went to two things: fighting Patrick’s repeated efforts to change the custody arrangement he agreed to when they divorced, and trying to get him to pay child support.
The docket backs up the first part. Since the divorce, Patrick has filed more than two dozen requests to change the orders, including 11 emergency applications for custody. Michelle has filed about half as many. Both have filed about 20 motions asking the court to hold the other in contempt.
Since August 2025, the boy has lived with his father under a temporary custody order.
Michelle has already paid Patrick $300,000 in advance child support.
If the court has to set support again, it needs to know what both parents can really afford.
The boy still needs the same things he needed before. His home has changed. The responsibility to provide for him has not.
Michelle wants the bank and crypto exchange records because the two sides’ stories can’t settle this.
If Patrick’s sworn statements were true, the records will back him up.
If Patrick left money off, the judge will have to decide whether the orders built on those numbers were wrong. That includes the $300,000 deal.
The issue is not whether Patrick once had a fortune. The issue is whether the court had the true numbers when it decided who pays what.
In his September opposition, Patrick says the screenshot did not come from him and that he did not give it to Michelle.
He does not admit that the image is real, that the account was his, or that the date and values are accurate.
Michelle tells a different story. She says Patrick texted her the portfolio himself and showed it to other people, while bragging about his money.
Patrick’s objection is not a flat refusal to show his finances. He argues that Michelle hasn’t shown enough evidence to justify the broad search she wants.
His proposed order would still let the court, lawyers, and accountants see the records, while limiting what he has to hand over and keeping it from reporters.
Whether the smaller set of records would answer the question remains in doubt.
Michelle has asked the court to reopen the money side of the case, saying that Patrick hid money. She filed motions to reopen the judgment in February and August 2026.
Her request relies on Billington, a 1991 Connecticut Supreme Court decision that lets a judge reopen a divorce settlement if one side lied about money. No court has found that Patrick hid anything.
Michelle has also appealed a ruling to the state Appellate Court.
Reporters sent Patrick written questions in July and twice in August 2026. They asked whether the portfolio was his, how he paid for it, and whether he told the court about it.
He answered once, saying he would not “comment on active, open litigation that involves a minor in Family Court.”
He wrote that Michelle is “manipulating” reporters “in order to cyberstalk and harass me,” and called the reporting part of her “domestic violence abuse of me.”
He didn’t answer the money qu…
