LUTHMANN NOTE: Patrick Feeney wants Connecticut to protect him from the consequences of being Patrick Feeney. With divorce proceedings now in their thirteenth year, Michelle questions his financial disclosures, journalists examine the record, and suddenly he needs protection from the conversation. This is a schmuck’s idea of vindication: keep the accounting unresolved and put the person demanding it under restraint. The advantage is obvious. Silence Michelle, and the financial dispute becomes harder for the public to follow; postpone the hearing, and the answers remain out of reach. Judge Joseph Vizcarrondo can break that arrangement or become its latest facilitator. Neither Patrick’s embarrassments nor delusions are a constitutional exception. This piece is “Shut My Ex-Wife Up, Judge Vizcarrondo.”
STAMFORD, CT – Patrick Feeney’s calendar has two speeds: emergency when Michelle speaks, postponement when his financial story faces scrutiny. Thirteen years after their divorce decree, the proceedings that began in the first Obama Administration tap along.
Self-proclaimed crypto-guru Patrick has secured yet another delay in answering questions about his million-dollar crypto account holdings, while demanding a court order that would muzzle his former wife, restrict her contacts, and bury the case’s financial records. It is a disgraceful use of a courthouse, and Connecticut keeps providing the venue. Patrick gets more time before his finances are tested. Michelle gets a November 4 hearing on whether her dealings with journalists amount to abuse.
On October 26, Judge Joseph Vizcarrondo III granted Patrick’s continuance request, which invokes medical testing and childcare obligations. The other pending motions, excluding Michelle’s Billington challenge to financial orders, have moved to January 15, 2027. The Billington motion was scheduled for September 24, then November 10, and now has no scheduled hearing.
Patrick’s “relief-from-abuse” application moves on a separate track, with a November 4 hearing at 9:30 a.m. Patrick wants a full no-contact order and protection for himself and his household, including his partner and two children. He also wants Michelle forbidden from discussing the case “with anyone except her attorney.” She represents herself pro se.
Which brings us to the judge. Is Vizcarrondo being hoodwinked by Patrick’s performance, or is he crazy like a fox, allowing Patrick to commit himself to claims that will collapse under examination? The distinction will matter only if examination actually happens. Another continuance gives Patrick breathing room. An unscheduled financial challenge gives Michelle no endpoint.
Patrick’s money problem did not arrive with the latest article. In 2014, he sought reduced child support while reporting zero income and describing a pre-revenue virtual-currency startup. His fee-waiver application disclosed retirement-funded expenses.
Years later, a portfolio image displayed approximately $1.01 million, including $215,000 in cash. Yet, his September 2020 affidavit listed $8,000 in checking, retirement accounts, and other assets, but no crypto.
In 2022, Michelle agreed to pay him $300,000 under a relocation-related advance-support arrangement. Frank Parlato’s examination lays out the financial history behind the questions Patrick would prefer to contain. The Billington inquiry would, among other things, ask whether the Court was induced to accept and order the agreement based on Patrick’s fraudulent inducement and fraud on the court. If so, the court has the power to unwind the tainted rulings, order a full forensic accounting, and punish Patrick accordingly.
Michelle says Patrick supplied and displayed the portfolio. His September opposition disputes its origin, authenticity, and ownership, but does not unequivocally state that he had no crypto holdings or that the September 2020 financial affidavit was honest. He further argues that Michelle has not “established the threshold” for postjudgment fraud discovery. Patrick’s position is one the court can adjudicate. However, it does nothing to reconcile his financial history.
The apparent dishonesty Michelle identifies must be tested against actual accounts, transfers, business interests, and sworn disclosures. If the portfolio belonged to him, its acquisition and disposition are crucial. If it did not, his denial can be tested against Michelle’s account of his boasts and communications.
Instead, Patrick has coupled his attack on her evidence with demands to restrict the records and silence the person seeking them. Our earlier reporting in “Million Dollar Mystery” examined that strategy in August. The questions still remain as the shore houses are shuttered and the ski lifts begin their churn.
Patrick has had more than a decade to know what he owned, what he earned, and what he disclosed. Now he gets additional time before that story is tested, while Michelle must defend her right to discuss why she thinks it stinks.
The new application identifies its target with unusual clarity: a series of articles published by The Family Court Circus and Frank Report. Patrick names “The Divorce That Never Ends,” “Patrick Feeney’s Million Dollar Mystery,” “The Mark Fuhrman Box,” and “Connecticut’s Crypto-Nanny,” then presents Michelle’s participation as cyberstalking and coercive control.
I am among the journalists he attacks. He is asking the state to treat a source’s cooperation with reporting about perhaps the longest-running family court case in America as grounds for restraining her.
Patrick denies financial fraud, the psychiatric characterizations, the reported 2015 assault, and the racial epithet attributed to him. He describes distress, possible employment consequences, and fear that publicity about crypto could attract criminals. He sounds like the Russell Crowe character in the 2001 movie, “A Beautiful Mind.”
Yet his own application concedes the missing connections. He states that there is a “vehicle” with “tinted windows” sitting outside his house, but he cannot produce the license plate or a police report, or establish that the unfamiliar vehicle he describes is connected to Michelle or the journalistic publications. Further, he is not claiming their son has already been bullied because of the articles, and he has not established that an employer rejected him because of them. Those are gaping holes in a document asking a judge to impose substantial restrictions on Michelle’s constitutional rights.
His financial-abuse narrative has a similar problem. Patrick complains that Michelle has not made monthly support payments, then acknowledges he has identified no separate monthly support order requiring them. He alleges other unpaid expenses, which have their own enforcement questions.
Stacking complaints does not repair the gaps between them. The court must determine what Michelle actually did, what obligation she actually violated, and what evidence supports the alleged danger. Patrick’s capacity to describe an alarming possibility is no substitute for actual evidence.
Patrick’s pro se pleas to the court read like a comic book on acid. He begins by professing respect for legitimate journalism and constitutionally protected criticism. Then, under the heading “Gag Order,” he asks the court to “bar and banish” Michelle from disseminating any information about the case, “past, present, or future,” to third parties. He wants her prohibited from discussing it with anyone except her attorney. Elsewhere, he writes: “I seek sealing the whole case, especially financial documents to protect myself and our Son.”
The expansive demand gives the game away. He wants the questions buried with the records through a demand for unconstitutional censorship in the language of family protection. A prohibition covering every conversation about an entire case, regardless of source, subject, or sensitivity, cannot acquire constitutional legitimacy merely because Patrick puts it beneath a protective heading.
The Supreme Court’s Seattle Times Co. v. Rhinehart decision upheld a good-cause restriction confined to discovery while leaving independently obtained information unrestricted. Patrick’s proposed ban obliterates that distinction. Protecting particular confidential records does not require granting him control over Michelle’s account of her own life.
And the irony is that what’s good for the goose isn’t what’s good for the gander. Patrick himself spoke to reporters in a clumsy attempt to diffuse the questions about whether he called reporter Rick LaRivière a “Nigger.” Patrick denies saying it.
Patrick also seeks continued sole custody through high school graduation, with Michelle receiving one weekend a month and alternating holidays. His no-contact request includes exceptions for lawful litigation, parenting duties, emergencies, and court-authorized purposes; the separate gag demand sweeps across the case itself. No supplied order establishes that those demands have been granted. November 4 is when Michelle must confront them, while her financial challenge remains unscheduled, according to the docket.
Patrick has found a way to make the woman asking questions answer first.
Judge Vizcarrondo knows something about unwelcome coverage. Parlato reported in May 2024, citing court sources, that marshals escorted him from his courtroom amid reassignment to civil court. Now he is handling a case that offers a test of judgment beyond judicial temperament. Our September coverage traced an earlier scheduling accommodation that produced a postponement. On October 26, he granted another. If this is strategic patience, the strategy needs an evidentiary destination.
The earlier Family Court Circus coverage describes a marriage dissolved in February 2013 and a conflict Connecticut has kept processing ever since. Their son was two when the divorce became final. He has grown up while motions accumulated, professionals intervened, agreements failed to deliver peace, and temporary arrangements acquired the durability of permanent ones.
A system that consumes thirteen years without producing reliable finality should be deeply embarrassed to entertain a demand that the public stop hearing about it.
Perhaps Judge Vizcarrondo is letting Patrick assemble the record that will defeat his own demands. Maybe he’s giving the “Crypto Bro” just enough rope to hang himself with. If so, he should require evidence, resolve the discovery threshold, and give the financial challenge a date.
If he instead permits Patrick to keep postponing scrutiny while advancing a blanket gag, the practical result will be judicial assistance to the very conduct Michelle is challenging. Patrick wants time for himself and silence from her.
Connecticut has already supplied plenty of the first. It should be ashamed to supply the second.
