Earlier this year, basketball star Michael Jordan filed a civil lawsuit in Pennsylvania against Lisa Miceli, seeking to have Miceli permanently prohibited from contacting him, his family or his representatives. Miceli is allegedly Jordan’s former mistress and mother of a four year old son, whom she claims is Jordan’s. Jordan’s lawsuit argues that Miceli has violated a 2005 no-contact agreement by sending him and his attorneys hundreds of e-mails and voicemails, including some which were threatening or violent.

Miceli claims that she and Jordan had an intimate relationship from 1999 until 2003, when she became pregnant. She gave birth to a son in 2004. A paternity test conducted in 2004 ruled Jordan out as the child’s father. Jordan submitted to second paternity test in 2005, which again ruled him out as the father. Jordan agreed to take the second paternity test if Miceli agreed not to contact him again if the test indicated he was not the child’s father. It is this agreement that Jordan now claims Miceli violated.

According to the Erie (PA) Times-News, Miceli recently filed her official response to Jordan’s lawsuit. In that response, Miceli challenged the validity of the previous paternity tests and asked the court to address her allegations of paternity so that she could move on with “child support, custody and visitation issues for the best interest of the child.”

When the parents of a child are unmarried at the time the child is born, the courts must actually establish legal paternity of the child before there can be any judgment of child support, custody or visitation. This will often be a simple procedure where the father merely admits that he is, in fact, the child’s father. If there is no admission, however, the court will order a DNA test which compares the alleged father’s DNA to the child’s DNA. This can be done by blood test but is quite often done by buccal swab – or a quick scrape of the cells and saliva from the inside of your cheek. The samples are then sent to an independent lab and compared. DNA tests can determine (or rule out) parentage with almost 100% accuracy.

Reports indicate that Jordan’s two paternity tests were processed by completely different labs but both determined that he was not the father of Miceli’s child. There has been no public indication as to Miceli’s basis for arguing that the first two tests were invalid. The Pennsylvania judge has not yet been asked to rule on her redundant paternity request.