Patricia A.W. Ruth v. Harry Theodore Fletcher, 237 Va. 366 (1989)

CASE: Man sues woman for intentional infliction of emotion distress when he finds out he is not the father she led him to believe he was.

FACTS: Defendant became pregnant as a result of a single, random sexual encounter with a bartender at the bar in which she worked, but told plaintiff that he was the father. He questioned this, but she angrily told him he was the father and that he should not raise the question of the baby'a paternity again. He became emotionally attached to the child, as did his parents. The child called him "daddy" and he visited often and provided child support for a time. Defendant, after encountering the bartender randomly and seeing the resemblence between him and her son, began having doubts about the boy's paternity, but did not share these doubts with the plaintiff. When the child was 4, the defendant and her new husband initiated adoptions proceedings. The defendant filed affidavits asserting that the plaintiff was not the father of the boy, but that the bartender was the father. Ted requested a blood test, which confirmed this. Ted's visitation rights were terminated by court order. He sued for intentional infliction of emotional distress and won a judgment of $35,000; she appealed.

QUESTION: Whether a man who was told by the mother of a child born out of wedlock that he was child's father and acted as such for the first four years of the child's life can sue the mother for intentional infliction of emotional distress after a blood test proves that he is not the child's biological father and his visitation rights are terminated where the mother angrily dissuaded him from scientifically determining he was the child'f father, where the mother permitted the man's name to be placed on the child's birth certificate as the child's father and where the mother only sought to reveal the truth when she and her new husband initiated adoption proceedings.

COURT SAYS: Trial court erred; finding for the mother.

HOLDING: Trial court erred in entering judgment in favor of a man who sued a woman for intentional infliction of emotional distress where the woman led the man to believe that he was the father of her illegitimate child for the first four years of the child's life before revealing that he was not, in fact, the biological father of the child and terminating his parental rights because the facts were insufficient to prove that she set out to convince the man he was the father and to cause him to develop a relationship with the child so that, in the end, he could hurt him by taking the child away forever.

WHY NOT NEGLIGENT INFLICTION OF EMOTION DISTRESS? Courts in Virginia did not then, nor do they now, recognized a cause of action for negligent infliction of emotional distress absent a showing of physical injury. See Hughes v. Moore, 214 Va. 27, 31 (1973).

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