Candidate maintains innocence
Responding to allegations against him filed in court, on Friday embattled Justice of the Peace candidate Edwin R. Jonas III defiantly stated that he does not owe $700,000 to his ex-wife in unpaid child support, and upholds that in actuality, he was awarded custody of his children in 1991.
“I was a single dad running my kids from practice to orthodontists to school, feeding them, doing everything and then trying to take care of my ex-wife who had this crooked judge order enormous amounts of alimony,” Jonas contends.
Regarding his background in court, Jonas attributes that to his personal history of ruffling feathers as a legal crusader who took on corrupt judges in New Jersey while a lawyer earlier in his career.
Jonas stopped practicing law in New Jersey in 1995 and left for Florida, “because it’s pretty obvious they’re going to retaliate against me for taking on the judges,” he says.
According to Jonas, one New Jersey lawyer told him, “you’ll never practice in this state again” for testifying against such high profile judges, to which Jonas responded, “well, we can’t leave these corrupt judges on the bench.”
Ten years after Jonas stopped practicing law, his ex-wife and her lawyer filed an ethics charge against him. Jonas says the lawsuit was probably motivated “because they figure, ‘we’ll get him because he won’t come to New Jersey.’”
Jonas says that a court order demanded that he put $130,000 into a trust.
“As it turns out- and I’ve got testimony from the United States Tax Court- of the attorney for my ex-wife, who admits that they never created the trust and I had the records to prove they embezzled it from the beginning,” says Jonas.
“I have a lawsuit for over $1,000,000 plus punitive damages in New Jersey and within a very short time there will be a second and a third action against her for fraud on the court, both in New Jersey and here [in Montana],” said Jonas.
“She was given $1 million, she stole it all, and has the audacity to come out here to Polson and say she’s owed money,” he added about his ex-wife.
According to Jonas, Ron Waterman, his attorney from Helena, has filed papers in court showing how much money Jonas’ ex-wife received. However, Jonas claims that, “[Judge] McNeil would never give us our day in court. He denied our motion to let them have this bogus judgment and now they executed them. So not only do I not owe her any money, [but] there will be claims against her for what she’s done to my career, and what she’s done to [his Rollins business] Blacktail Mountain Ranch.”
As for his candidacy for Justice of the Peace, Jonas maintains that, “I’m a guy that will clean up the county. You can go back to New Jersey and ask the people, ‘Ever hear of a lawyer that will take on the judges?’ and I’m the only one.”