The accounts went to Mr. Craig first. The accounting was ordered to follow.
Ms. Rodrigues argued her appeal without a lawyer. She filed an opening brief and a 600-page appendix. Her ex-husband, Mr. Craig, filed no brief and did not argue. On January 22, 2026, she wrote an open letter to the Sixth District Court of Appeal about the unequal treatment. As far as she knows, she is the only person ever to have written an open letter to a California appellate court.
The trial court handed Mr. Craig every community asset while promising an accounting would follow, yet it never explained how it conjured its arbitrary $208,357.99 offset. At the final hearing, Mr. Craig himself admitted it was simply “the number that the Court came up with.” The appeals court itself wrote that the record “does not disclose how the court valued each account as of the date of trial.”
On appeal, rather than holding the opposing party accountable, the appellate court shifted the burden entirely onto Ms. Rodrigues. It commanded both parties to calculate an offset using figures it arbitrarily told them to assume—numbers detached entirely from the trial court’s own orders—while never once requesting Mr. Craig’s missing exhibit. Even more egregiously, after oral argument, Ms. Rodrigues formally asked the court for permission to supplement the record if anything was missing, and the court refused.
The court then affirmed the judgment, claiming the burden of showing error rested solely on her shoulders. It did this even though Mr. Craig filed no respondent’s brief and did not appear on appeal.
This outcome reflects a stark double standard. Ms. Rodrigues—a woman of color—was held to an impossible standard, expected to supply every single page, including Mr. Craig’s missing documents and irrelevant filings, just to chase fabricated figures. Meanwhile, Mr. Craig—who is white—was granted total credibility without an expert witness, an accounting in the record, or even an appearance. Compounding this bias, the trial judge went so far as to brand Ms. Rodrigues a “looter” for money spent on basic survival and rent—deploying a loaded, predatory term deeply rooted in racialized tropes of criminality and lawlessness to criminalize a woman of color managing household expenses.
“Malingering.” Ms. Rodrigues has an auditory processing disorder and uses a real-time captioning screen in court. In November 2023 her expert testified that she passed the effort measures built into her testing to detect malingering. The trial judge kept using the word anyway, a medical slur for someone accused of faking a disability. On June 21, 2024, he told her, “I think you’re malingering today by intentionally trying to look at the screen.”
Her arguments on appeal
- Bias. The trial court’s rulings were biased and procedurally deficient, including on disability and race (brief, p. 23).
- Spousal support. It was wrongly denied for half the length of the marriage (p. 24).
- Separate property. Her forensic accountant raised her $61,381 claim and traced $19,000 she brought into the marriage through three accounts. At the June 21, 2024 hearing the judge said he recalled denying it but would go back and check his order, and the money was just given to Mr. Craig (pp. 37–41).
- The bank accounts. All of them were transferred to Mr. Craig, including about $60,000 in frozen community assets (pp. 44–51).
- Sanctions. They were punitive and violated her due process rights, and the court gave no itemized breakdown of how the sanctions and credits produced the $208,357.99 offset (pp. 51–52).
