The Tiffany stationery letter
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The Tiffany stationery letter was the device John Kiriakou used to break a deadlock in his first divorce.

The deadlock

Kiriakou could not file himself. He had assumed that because his former wife and children were in Ohio he could file there, and only learned after waiting out what he believed was a one-year cooling-off period that filing required Ohio residency, which he did not have.

His wife would not file either. In Kiriakou's account she liked things as they were: she was in total control of nearly everything, and especially of him. Maintaining the status quo kept the money coming in and let her live as she wished, while Kiriakou could not move on, could not consider a new relationship and could not even think about dating anyone.

He had begun paying support voluntarily before any court order, calculating the figure himself with a calculator on one of his last days in Athens. He notes that it came within $25 of what the court eventually calculated, and that the judge, who said she had handled thousands of divorces, remarked that she had never before seen someone calculate the child support, pay it, and have it land so close to the court's own figure.

The advice

Kiriakou asked his attorney Mary Jane Stevens what he should do, and whether he should file in Virginia instead. Stevens warned him off Virginia, the laws there were vastly different, she said, and they would take him to the cleaners and he would lose everything.

Her recommendation was to write a nice note telling his wife that he was cutting her child support in half, effective immediately.

The letter

Kiriakou says he tried to be a little bit insulting about it, in a passive-aggressive way. He happened to be in New York, stopped in at Tiffany's, and bought Tiffany stationery with the company's name printed on the back.

On that unnecessarily expensive paper he wrote that on the advice of counsel he was hereby cutting her child support payments in half, effective immediately, and signed off with best regards.

She filed for divorce the very next day. Kiriakou telephoned Stevens, who told him she had said so.

What followed

The filing did not end the litigation. Kiriakou says his former wife challenged literally everything, requiring separate suits over whether his parents could collect the children, over the hours of collection and return, and later over whether his parents could see the children at all while he was posted to Pakistan after 9/11. He describes spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and says the process felt like a siege.

See also

- Mary Jane Stevens
- Greek Community Of Warren Ohio
- The custody standoff
- John Kiriakou
