Ellen Gay Niermann

Gay was hired as my divorce CFI. Not only did she not do as the judge asked her to determine extremely important and critical information during a nasty custody battle, she lied about her involvement, her due diligence as research and findings as well as charged a completely absurd amount of money f...or a few hours of actual work. Avoid her like the plague, unless you like wasting your time and money.

Short and sweet: This has been the most unethical, sexist, man-hating experience of my life. Clearly her drinking, and biased opinions are more important than these children she's subjecting to abuse in each case she fails to "inspect". Do NOT waste your money. A year into it, and 1 hour total spent ...talking to either side, and no actual investigation after. Hiring her is like letting a sociopathic killer into your home. She'll destroy everything, and not even care.

We tried to go into the family investigation process with an open mind and thought of it as a fair way to resolve the dispute we were having over shared parenting time. Gay took a shocking six months to complete her report, which was completely biased in the mother's favor and full of discrepencies. ...We asked for more time with more stability for the children. Her recommendation was for a much more irregular schedule completely in the mother's favor. There is nothing going on in our home to suggest that there should be less time given and after what had seemed to be a positive visit, we were surprised to read her report which had a completely negative slant. It honestly seemed that since it had taken her so long to visit the mother and then write the report that she had forgotten who we even were and what we had to offer the kids and just wrote the same biased recommendation she gives everyone. On top of this she was unprofessional by being repeatedly late, did not return phone calls, and just generally disorganized. If you are a father, find a different investigator who will actually consider that you might have something positive to offer your children.

Gay provided a completely biased report in my case. After minimal interaction with both parties (1 hr. per side and some 10 min phone calls) she came to very inaccurate conclusions and made unfounded recommendations to the court. It the position she is in when children are involved I believe the impo...rtance of ethics and doing due diligence is paramount. The communication was none existent and emails sent were not taken into account or even viewed. The report itself seemed very rushed with many misspellings and grammatical errors which to me say she didn’t even review it before submitting it to the court. Talking with witnesses whose testimony was cited in the report said the conversations they had with Gay were not portrayed accurately. Selective statements were used in the report to support an opinion she obviously had prior to submitting to the court. She is not qualified to make these kind of judgments.

Although, she recommended my children stay with me, she was bias in court. She made statements that were inappropriate and I quote, "I would have sided with you but there were circumstances." That does not indicate that she was neutral and represented the children. I gave here information that she ne...glected to address, and she did not include in the report that were detrimental to my kids well being. She would not respond to emails but she does respond immediately when it came to money. She always made excuses about her ear infection and cold so she couldn't hear very well or understand very well. I don't know if that's a ploy, but I've had viral colds but it didn't last for 4 months. She lied on the stand about not seeing documents or that she was talked to about documents that were presented by other parties. I would not recommend her.