Tom Siver Asked a Judge to Seal His Divorce Because He Might Run for Office Again. The Judge Said No.

The 57th District Court candidate told an Ottawa County judge his divorce file should be hidden in case he ran for office again. The judge kept it open. Here is what is in it.

Every candidate for judge asks voters for the same thing: trust me to read a court file fairly. Tom Siver once asked a judge to make sure voters could never read his.

I pulled the file from the Ottawa County Clerk. Siver v. Siver, No. 24-102263-DM. It is public because a judge said it should stay public, over Siver’s objection, about ten months before Allegan County votes on whether to give him a courtroom.

So here is what he wanted hidden.

The Motion to Seal

On December 31, 2025, Siver filed a motion under MCR 8.119 asking the 20th Circuit Court to seal the entire case. Michigan court records are presumptively public. MCR 8.119(I) allows sealing only when the person asking identifies a specific interest, the court finds good cause that outweighs the public’s right of access, and no less restrictive option such as redaction would protect that interest.

His ex-wife’s attorneys answered the motion paragraph by paragraph on January 7, 2026. Their response restates each of his grounds. He told the court he is an active practicing attorney in West Michigan. He said he had previously been a candidate for public office and may be one again. He said he had handled high-level criminal matters and had briefly closed his private practice because of unwanted adverse contact from the public. He said their daughter is a very private person who should not be subjected to public scrutiny if he again becomes a candidate. And he said his ex-wife should not be subjected to that scrutiny either.

His ex-wife was the one opposing the motion.

Her response pointed out that the motion offered no reason redaction would not protect the child, even though Michigan’s court rules already require courts to protect a minor’s name and other identifying information. It noted that the motion cited the wrong court rule for transmitting a sealing order. And it described the request as functioning as “a proxy for Defendant’s own desire to avoid public and political scrutiny.”

On January 14, 2026, at a hearing held by Zoom with both parties and counsel present, Judge Van Allsburg denied the motion to seal. The register of actions records the ruling in four words. A written order after the hearing entered March 2, 2026.

What Was Already in the File

The divorce was filed January 31, 2024. With the complaint came two verified ex parte motions, each signed by his ex-wife under penalty of perjury.

The first asked for exclusive use of the marital home in Hudsonville. It states that the couple separated in January 2023 because of what it describes as Siver’s toxic behavior, need for control, and verbal abuse toward her and their daughter. It says he called their daughter a “lazy bitch” because the house was not as clean as he required, and that his anger at times escalated to the point that she feared for her own and her daughter’s physical safety. It describes being woken in the morning by Siver berating her. It says he had a home of his own in Martin and that she needed a safe place to live with their daughter while the case was pending.

The second asked for a mutual order barring both parties from dissipating marital assets. It describes the estate as including a business and its accounts, real estate, and other high-value assets. It states that his past threats had included draining accounts, secreting money, and hiding personal and business assets from her as part of a divorce. It notes that Siver was the account holder for both her cell phone and their daughter’s, and that she feared he would cut off their phones in retaliation once he learned of the filing. It says his abuse got worse when he had a bad day at work as a practicing attorney.

Judge Van Allsburg signed both ex parte orders at 5:46 and 5:50 p.m. on January 31, 2024, the day the case was filed. She got the house. Both parties were barred from moving, hiding, or destroying assets, canceling insurance, cutting off utilities and phones, and deleting electronic data or communications.

Siver’s verified answer, filed February 8, 2024 through attorney Matthew Reens, admitted most of the complaint’s paragraphs. It disputed that their daughter lived only in Hudsonville, stating the couple had exercised alternating weeks through September 2023 and every weekend with him after that, at his home on 120th Avenue in Martin. By the time of the August 2024 judgment, Siver had withdrawn that answer and agreed the court could take the complaint’s allegations as confessed.

What He Said Under Oath About His Daughter

The consent judgment entered August 21, 2024 gave the parents joint legal and joint physical custody and reasonable parenting time, to be mutually arranged in the child’s best interests. Siver signed it on August 14, 2024.

The Uniform Child Support Order entered with it lists Siver as the payer and records 182.5 annual overnights with him, half the year. Applying the Michigan Child Support Formula to that split produced a guideline payment from Siver to his ex-wife. The parties agreed to deviate from the formula, and the order set support at zero.

Four months later, on December 17, 2024, Siver filed a verified motion of his own. In it, he swore that despite numerous efforts, he had not been able to exercise any parenting time since the judgment, and that “he has not had parenting time since March of 2024.”

Those two documents sit in the same file. One, signed in August 2024, records that his daughter spends half the year’s nights with him. The other, sworn in December 2024, says she had not spent time with him at all since March.

His December 2024 motion attributed the breakdown in part to his daughter’s reluctance to see him and to his ex-wife, alleging she refused to encourage contact and kept the child blocked on her phone. His ex-wife’s sworn May 2025 response gives a different account. It states that at a hearing on the February 2025 stipulation, the court cautioned Siver and asked him to back off his communication with their daughter, and that “Defendant engaged in the exact opposite behavior.” It states he had been directed by the court not to text their daughter and continued messaging her daily asking to meet in person. It says his texts and calls had become excessive enough to cause their daughter physical and mental distress. It states that Siver called his ex-wife derogatory names in front of their daughter. And it asks the court to require him to engage in and make progress in individual counseling before any joint counseling with their daughter.

The court has kept a path open for him. At the June 2025 referee hearing, the parties were directed to select a reunification therapist and start counseling immediately. At the January 14, 2026 hearing, the same hearing where the motion to seal was denied, Judge Van Allsburg granted Siver’s motion to pursue reunification counseling.

The Affairs

By those accounts, the engagement in place when the Lake Sixteen collision happened in June 2023 was a pattern, not an exception. He was engaged before his marriage was legally over, to a woman who four days after that collision left his house with a deputy at her side.

None of these sources is Siver’s ex-wife. Clutch Justice has never spoken with her. Everything in this piece attributed to her comes from her own filings in the public court file.

Michigan is a no-fault divorce state, and the judgment dissolved the marriage on the statutory finding that the marriage had broken down, so the filings Clutch Justice reviewed do not address infidelity one way or the other. The sources’ accounts stand on their own. Clutch Justice is not identifying anyone involved.

What He Agreed the Public Could See

Paragraph 71 of the consent judgment, which Siver signed, is a social media non-disclosure clause. It bars both parties from disparaging each other or publicizing details of the divorce, with one stated exception: details “other than those contained in the public file.”

The property settlement in this case was kept confidential and out of the judgment from the start. The parties chose what would stay private when they wrote the judgment. Everything else they left in the public file, and Siver signed a document acknowledging that the public file was public. Sixteen months later, as a possible candidate, he asked the court to take all of it back.

Why This Belongs in Front of Voters

A divorce is private until someone running for judge makes it a campaign issue himself. Siver did that in December 2025, when he told a circuit court that his candidacy was a reason the public should not see this file.

The 57th District Court hears Allegan County’s misdemeanor domestic violence cases. Its judges set bond conditions, including no-contact orders, and decide in preliminary examinations whether sworn accounts are strong enough to send a case forward. The office he wants turns on the same questions this file raises: what a sworn statement is worth, when a record should be open, and whether a person follows a court’s direction when no one is enforcing it in real time.

It also connects to what Clutch has already documented. Five months after the separation, in June 2023, Siver was involved in a jet ski collision on Lake Sixteen that left a woman hospitalized. Clutch Justice has learned that she was engaged to him at the time. He was still legally married. His wife would not file for divorce for nearly eight more months.

The county’s report on the collision never quotes a witness or her account. Four days later, as Clutch has reported, she left the house with a deputy sent to assist after she told the department she was afraid of him. The county has since certified that no record of that response exists.

This file now puts a sworn timeline around that summer. A marriage that had come apart in January. A fiancée by June. A daughter who, by Siver’s own sworn account, was spending alternating weeks at the house on 120th Avenue. And a candidate who, two and a half years later, asked a court to make sure none of it could be read.

What Fixing It Would Actually Require

The court rule worked here. MCR 8.119(I) put the burden on Siver, the less restrictive option of redaction was available, and a judge applied the standard and kept the record open. The problem is everything that happens before a voter would ever find it.

Michigan does not ask district court candidates to disclose the court cases in which they have been a party, and nothing on the ballot connects a candidate’s name to a family court file in another county. A voter in Allegan County would have to know to search Ottawa County’s register of actions, know the case type, and request copies from the clerk. Three changes would close most of that gap. First, judicial candidates should file a public litigation disclosure listing every case in which they have been a party, by court and case number, with protected information about children and victims excluded by rule. Second, when a candidate or sitting judge moves to seal a record in their own case, the motion itself and the ruling should remain public even if the underlying file is sealed, so that the request can be weighed by voters. Third, SCAO should publish a plain-language guide to MCR 8.119(I) for litigants, because the strongest argument against sealing in this file came from a parent who wanted the record open and had to hire counsel to keep it that way.

Here is where I land.

He did not ask the court to protect his daughter’s name. The rules already did that.

He asked the court to protect his.

The court said no. Now it is the voters’ turn.

Clutch Justice has asked Siver to respond to its reporting repeatedly. He has never responded.