We all remember Michele Rollins, right? She was the state GOP establishment’s choice to take replace Mike Castle in Congress in 2010. But like Mike Castle himself, she lost to a teabagger candidate named Glen Urquhart. As you may recall, Michele Rollins is the widow of John W. Rollins Sr., who made his money in pest control, truck leasing, outdoor advertising, and other businesses here in Delaware and elsewhere. When John died twenty years ago, she inherited a nice fortune, as did Ted. Michele has gone on to run Rollins Jamaica Ltd, the holding company for the Rose Hall vacation resort. In 2010, Rollins reported her family fortune to be between $92 million and $350 million dollars. While most of that money is held in trust for the children of John Rollins, Michele Rollin’s personal 2009 income still ranged from $1.6 million to $13.3 million. So, she is, by all accountants, a wealthy woman who can afford to take care of herself and her family.
Last week, we received a tip from an Alabama legal and political blog called the Legal Schnauzer. It seems they have been following the divorce of Ted Rollins from his wife. Ted Rollins is the son of the late John Rollins and step son of Michele. I’ll let them take it from here:
Ted Rollins [is] the CEO of Campus Crest Communities and the focus of our reporting about a troubling divorce case he launched in Alabama.
[M]ichele Rollins is Ted Rollins’ stepmother. And that means Michele Rollins is step-grandmother to Ted Rollins’ two teen-aged daughters, who live in Birmingham with their mother, Sherry Carroll Rollins. And as we reported recently, Sherry Carroll Rollins and her daughters are on food stamps, largely because of an extraordinary divorce judgment Ted Rollins received in Shelby County, Alabama[.] […]
With the apparent help of his lawyer friends at the powerful Birmingham firm of Bradley Arant, Ted Rollins managed to get a divorce judgment that requires him to pay the whopping sum of $815 a month in child support (plus $500 a month in alimony). This for a man whose company completed a $380-million IPO last year on Wall Street, a guy who has the use of multiple private jets.
If you do the math, and check federal guidelines, you see that the $1,315 a month in support for three people qualifies for food stamps. That Ted Rollins, what a guy!
So a rich grandmother and her rich step son are allowing these girls and their mother to live on food stamps. In fact, Ted Rollins manipulated the legal system and misrepresented his considerable assets so as to lower his child support and alimony payments as much as possible. Wait a minute, you are saying. Perhaps Michele is unaware of what her step son has done, and perhaps she would be more than willing to help her grandchildren out if she were aware of the situation, because, you know, rich Republicans are generally a generous people. /snark. Well…
In an e-mail dated September 20, 2011, I presented a series of questions about the Rollins v. Rollins divorce case, and its aftermath, to Ted and Michele Rollins. One of the questions involved the fact that members of their family tree in Alabama are on food stamps. I received no answers to my questions.
I suppose it is comforting to know that the rich treat their own family as horribly as they treat the rest of the 99%.