Mark D. Grand appeals from a judgment against his ex-wife that awarded him more than $40,000 in damages. Grand contends that the trial court erred by determining his right to damages instead of deciding the amount that he was due. He also claims that the court failed to award damages that he properly established at trial. For the reasons that follow, we vacate the judgment below. At the time that Grand married Ginni Hope in 1994, she had two young daughters, Rachel and Shana, from her former marriage to Daniel McDonald. Shortly after marrying Hope, Grand filed a petition to adopt Rachel and Shana, and in June 1995, his petition was granted. During the next several years, Grand helped support Rachel and Shana. At some point, the couple adopted twins. When Grand and Hope divorced in December 2000, the divorce decree ordered Grand to pay monthly child support of $1,400 for Rachel and Shana to be offset by Hope’s payment of $400 in child support for the twins. In September 2001, after Grand obtained custody of Rachel, his net obligation fell to $850 per month for the support and maintenance of Shana.
More than seven years after adopting Rachel and Shana, Grand filed a “Complaint for Damages for Fraud” against Hope in November 2002. Grand alleged that Hope had made fraudulent misrepresentations about McDonald, her ex-husband, which induced him to adopt Rachel and Shana. Specifically, Grand claimed that Hope had “fraudulently represented” that she did not know how to contact McDonald and that McDonald had abandoned the girls. Asserting that he had detrimentally relied on Hope’s misrepresentations, Grand sought “actual damages for the amounts that he paid for the support and maintenance of Rachel and Shana based on Hope’s fraudulent misrepresentations that their biological father had abandoned them.” Grand sued to recover a total of “approximately” $104,786, which he claimed to have expended for Rachel and Shana during his marriage to Hope and in child support subsequent to their divorce. In addition, Grand sought punitive damages for his ex-wife’s “willful misrepresentations as well as for the vicious and unconscionable nature of her misrepresentations.”
