Steve Garvey’s Ex-Wife Sent to Jail for Contempt

Cynthia Garvey, the ex-wife of former Dodger Steve Garvey, was ordered to county jail for five days Monday for violating a child visitation order.

She was taken to Sybil Brand Institute, the county’s overcrowded maximum-security jail for women, after Superior Court Judge Frances Rothschild found her guilty of 43 counts of contempt and ordered her to begin serving time immediately on the first count.

A 126-day sentence--three days for each of the remaining 42 counts--was stayed pending a hearing on Nov. 3, according to her ex-husband’s attorney, Dennis Wasser.

Her attorney, Gerald Margolis, could not be reached for comment, although Wasser said Monday evening that three lawyers representing her were seeking an immediate appellate review.

The judge said Cynthia Garvey had “willfully” disobeyed a December, 1988, order requiring that the couple’s daughters, Whitney, 13, and Krisha, 14, spend Tuesday afternoons and every other weekend with their father, and that he be allowed to speak with them by telephone.

However, since the first of the year, Wasser said, “the only time Steve Garvey has seen his daughters is when they have been in court or in sessions with counselors.”

He said the first concern of the former first-base star for the Dodgers and the Padres was: “How will this affect my girls? I’d better go see them.”

Garvey, who now lives in Del Mar, was reunited with his daughters in Los Angeles late Monday, after being awarded joint legal custody. The couple was divorced in 1981. Since then, the former talk-show hostess has written an autobiography, “The Secret Life of Cyndy Garvey,” and begun to refer to herself as Cynthia.

The retired ballplayer, who now runs a marketing company and has his own radio talk show in San Diego, made news recently after two women announced they were expecting his children; he promised to provide financial and parental support. He married a third woman, Candace Thomas, last February.

Candace Garvey said Cynthia Garvey had been complying with the visitation order until last New Year’s Day, when her daughter told her that her father was engaged.