http://nypost.com/2013/11/07/psychologi ... alds-suit/
Dad ‘unfit parent for refusing son McDonald’s’
By Julia Marsh and Reuven Fenton
November 7, 2013 | 11:08am
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Dad ‘unfit parent for refusing son McDonald’s’
A Manhattan dad is not lovin’ McDonald’s right now.
Attorney David Schorr slapped a court-appointed shrink with a defamation lawsuit for telling the judge deciding a custody battle with his estranged wife that he was an unfit parent — for refusing to take his son to the fast food joint for dinner.
“You’d think it was sexual molestation,” Schorr, 43, told The Post Thursday. “I am just floored by it.”
Schorr says in his Manhattan Supreme Court suit that E. 97th Street psychiatrist Marilyn Schiller filed a report saying he was “wholly incapable of taking care of his son” and should be denied his weekend visitation over the greasy burger ban.
Schorr, a corporate attorney turned consultant with degrees from NYU and Oxford University, had planned to take his 4-year-old son to their usual restaurant, the Corner Café on Third Avenue, for his weekly Tuesday night visitation last week.
But the boy threw a temper tantrum and demanded McDonald’s. So he gave his son an ultimatum: dinner anywhere other than McDonald’s — or no dinner.
“The child, stubborn as a mule, chose the ‘no dinner’ option,” the disgruntled dad says in the suit.
“It was just a standoff. I’m kicking myself mightily,” Schorr said.
“I wish I had taken him to McDonalds, but you get nervous about rewarding bad behavior. I was concerned. I think it was a 1950s equivalent of sending your child to bed without dinner. That’s maybe the worst thing you can say about it,” he said.
Adding insult to injury, he said: “My wife immediately took him to McDonalds.”
Upon reflection, Schorr said he should have remembered that mother knows best.
“The first thing I did was I questioned myself,” he recalled.
“Had I done something wrong? I did what any 43-year-old Jewish man would do — I told my mother. I said, ‘My God, did I do something wrong here?’
“Even my mother, the strictest mother in the world, said, ‘Why didn’t you just take him to McDonalds? What were you thinking? You know that this is a divorce situation.’”
Before dropping his son off at his wife’s E. 84th Street building, Schorr says he tried to make light of the situation by horsing around with him and trying one last time to change his mind about dinner.
But the son apparently tattled on his dad and his wife flipped out and called the shrink, according to the suit.
Schorr claims that Dr. Schiller only interviewed the child and his mother and never asked for his side of the story before telling the court she was gravely concerned about Schorr’s parenting.
Bari Yunis Schorr sued her husband for a divorce in 2011, just four years after they married in a lavish ceremony at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan.
She recently filed motions asking the judge to punish her husband for flouting court orders and for a judgment on nonpayment of child support.
Her attorney, Louis I. Newman, declined to comment on the McDonald’s matter.
“It’s a litigation between Mr. Schorr and Mrs. Schiller,” Newman said.
In the past two and a half years that he has had partial custody of his son their time together “has run smoothly without incident” save a scraped knee, Schorr insists in the suit.
He wants the shrink to return the $2,750 he paid for the evaluation.
Dr. Schiller told the Post she could not comment on the details of the incident. She only sad, “I am conducting a forensic evaluation on this matter. I will be issuing a confidential report to the court and the matter will be tried by the court.”
The custody trial resumes in December when the judge will ultimately decide if Schorr is fit to parent his son.
Additional reporting by Lorena Mongelli
