A California woman was forced to pay $22,000 in spousal support to her ex-husband, who was convicted of raping her daughter, and is now fighting his efforts to resume the payments.
Carol Abar said her young daughter was raped by Ed Abar for 16 years, and although she filed for divorce when she found out about the assaults, she was forced to pay $1,300 in alimony to her husband per month.
Carol Abar paid her ex-husband until last year, when he struck a plea deal in the criminal case, agreeing to plead guilty to one of five rape charges, according to LosAngeles.CBSLocal.com. He was sentenced to more than a year in jail, and the judge temporarily stopped the spousal support.
Now that he is out of jail, Ed Abar has filed to reinstate the payments from the mother of the girl he assaulted.
“Every time I wrote that check, I cried because I felt like I was paying the man that raped my daughter,” Carol Abar told CBS 2. “The judge told me I had no proof. It was my word against him. He had been raping her since she was little. Since I got married to him.”
Carol Abar said that her ex-husband is asking for $33,000 in past due support in addition to resumption of payments in the future.
Under California law, when deciding spousal support, the court will take domestic abuse between couples into consideration, but child abuse is not specifically mentioned in the law, LosAngeles.CBSLocal.com reported.