Bandy X. Lee's Blog, page 12

How Family Courts are the Handmaidens of Murderers (and Other Violent Offenders)

Dangerous Personalities Buttress One Another in a New Jersey Court

[Murder cases are disproportionately connected to Family Courts, and yet because of extreme secrecy, this connection is seldom detected, let alone accurately deciphered. An investigation into a shocking number of murder cases connected to one particular court has revealed: routine removal of permanent protective orders, regular “custody switches” to the known violent abuser, a guardian ad litem unflinchingly sending children to their torture, a judge “laughing” while litigants cry, and a reprehensible subculture of depraved delight in others’ victimization. Details will follow once the evidence submission is complete.]

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The Symbiosis of Violent Perpetrators and the Family Courts

What Happens to Dangerous Personalities when Family Courts Enable Them

One way criminal personalities seek to escape accountability is by playing the victim and “framing” actual victims with their own guilt. Thus, it is critically important that criminal investigations are not just cursory, or an innocent party if not the victim will be convicted. Skilled prosecutors and those who work within the criminal justice system must hone their critically-important understanding of criminal psychology. Forensic psychiatrists such as myself take this knowledge one step further to measure the degree of psychopathology by the degree the perpetrator engages in “projective identification”: the adamant denial of characteristics and actions one cannot tolerate in oneself by displacing them onto another — usually one’s opponent.

This can be seen in the abuse of the phrase, “parental alienation,” in Family Court: an unheard of concept elsewhere but a panacea formula for Family Court purposes. All a violent perpetrator has to do is to allege “parental alienation” — a common, wishful belief on the part of perpetrators that a child’s rejection is because the other parent is making up stories about him and “coaching” the child, rather than because of his own actions — and Family Court will take care of the rest! How? By enforcing predatory alienation against the acutal victim.

Whereas I agree with the many professional associations that have denounced the phrase and the United Nations’ recommendation that governments ban it, the phrase is less important than the underlying predatory intent to escape criminal accountability through “DARVO” (“Denying, Attacking, and Reversing Victim and Offender”). DARVO is a playbook criminal offenders use when confronted, or in order to escape being confronted in the first place. This drive is so strong in predators, eliminating their ability to use the “parental alienation” concept will simply displace their efforts onto another pseudo-concept.

This is because, it is one thing if institutions do not recognize or miss their psychological dynamic, but a whole other matter if they share in it, stoke it, and produce more criminal personalities through the harms they inflict. Family Courts, by building an abuse industry around this psychological tendency in violent perpetrators, are aggressively imperiling children and threatening society — for profit. It is, indeed, criminal deflection and human rights abuse for sale.

Over the decades, I have found it frightening and alarming that the criminal personalities I used to encounter only in prisons and in jails are increasingly occupying positions of authority in society. They gravitate toward power but do not know how to handle it, abusing it to wreak havoc on society, communities, families, and individuals. Lately, we have seen how the corruption of the U.S. Supreme Court has made it a shameful entity that eliminates rights, rather than defending them, as is its original role. However, no other institution goes as far as the Family Courts — since no institutional corruption is as depraved as the systematic destruction of innocent children.

So far, in my short foray into the Family Courts (two years and about two dozen cases), I have not met a single “judge” who does not rely on deception, abuse of process, and abuse of power. First, they “seal” everything they do. Then, they interfere with and control Child Protective Services, appoint “guardians ad litem” to do their dirty work, and elevate unqualified “experts” to generate fraudulent reports that rubber-stamp their decisions, fabricate false “evidence”, and concoct a counterfeit narrative.

As in the street gangs I have dealt with most of my career, outliers of these dubious practices are punished: this is why female judges are often worse, for they must prove their loyalty to this system of male privilege by being more “male” than the men (more accurately, Family Courts are a system of violent offender privilege, since loving men are victims, too).

So far, in my experience, 100 percent of abused children have gone to their predators: a five-year-old rape victim, a four-year-old returning with marks of daily battery, an infant with venereal disease, and a child who is given to his loving parent’s murderer. These are the milder cases, since, if loved ones tried to protect the child, they may lose contact with the child altogether, be incarcerated, or be killed.

One hundred percent of supervised visits have been applied against the wrong parent (I have concluded that “supervision” in Family Court exists to prevent evidence). 100 percent of restraining orders have been issued against the wrong person (I have decided that “restraining orders” in Family Court exists to keep witnesses from interfering with the abuse). And 100 percent of Family Court-connected “experts” deviate from standard practice (that is, they ignore and deflect child safety issues, which are ordinarily the number one concern in all other settings). If a loving parent tried to protect her child from violence by hiding or fleeing, a truly impressive sum of detective force, full SWAT teams, combat gear, and rifles is mobilized (if we mobilized this kind of force anywhere else, there would not be a criminal left!). But we know from Uvalde, Las Vegas, or Charlottesville that this does not happen with real threats; its sole purpose is intimidation.

This is how Family Courts have become “monster factories” that rival prisons. In my view, Family Courts are worse, since today’s child victims are tomorrow’s adult predators.

A conservative estimate has shown, already several years ago, that more than 58,000 children per year are being sent to their abusers and predators. Hundreds of children are unnecessarily dying every year in the United States alone, as a consequence of Family Court. This is without even mentioning the unspeakable suffering and the “soul murder” that occurs with child abuse. As children have begun speaking up, “reunification camps” have proliferated, which are intended literally to torture children until they recant the abuse and to “rewire” them into accepting abuse as love and love as abuse.

Destroying these children, the parents who love them, and fixing the results with false “evidence” does not change reality. This is why I launched my federal lawsuit against Family Court players who exceeded their authority to interfere with my medical fact finding, and since doing so, even more stories of their victims have surfaced, including torture and even murder.

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The Kafkaesque Family Court, Part 3

Continued from Part 2 of ‘ The Kafkaesque Family Court ’

4. Order a Psychiatric Evaluation

Now that “parental alienation” has been alleged, the children taken, and the court records “sealed”, ordering a psychiatric evaluation is the fourth step in the Family Court formula for a total custody switch. Everywhere women say that they accepted the requirement of a psychiatric evaluation, “because it was supposed to be just a formality”; “because I knew I never had any problems”; and “because they insisted on it so much, I thought I would get it over with.” Yet, the “psychiatric evaluation” — seldom performed by a psychiatrist — would almost universally seal their fate of permanent separation from their children. Since they were often the children’s primary caregiver, this separation would be the equivalent of a “life sentence” for the children (since the trauma they suffer translates into a lifetime of inner torture) and a “death sentence” for the mothers, occasionally fathers (their children being lost to them, as if they were dead, is a fate worse than death for a loving parent — and a shocking number actually die). I realized that there was a reason I never had a Family Court case in my twenty-five years of working as an expert witness for the courts; Family Courts do not use the same experts as the other courts but have their own “pool” they like to draw from. This “pool” consists of some of the most poorly-trained, unqualified, and unscrupulous “professionals” I have encountered in my career, charging five to twenty times my fees, while sometimes holding only a master’s degree in an unrelated field, and producing the kind of reports I could never have imagined…. Yet I, who have received only deference in all other courts for having the highest-level training from the best institutions in the country, Family Courts look for every excuse to “disqualify” — if they even allow me to get to the point of being vetted, which is seldom….

In this case, the children’s guardian ad litem was charged with finding a psychiatrist, but the first psychiatrist she chose — who is known for doing fraudulent evaluations and charging exorbitantly for them — recused himself, no doubt in fear of my easily finding him out, being in the same field as he. Then, for the next nineteen months the guardian ad litem could not find a single “qualified” psychiatrist, in a state that has almost a thousand licensed psychiatrists! (not only that, for court consultations, an expert can be from any state in the union). At one time she tried to say she had a psychiatrist, but to prevent another recusal, the mother had to be blindfolded and escorted by chaperone to a third, clandestine location, to be evaluated by an unknown “psychiatrist”, whose identity and credentials she or her lawyer could never know, even after the report was complete — in other words, there would be no way of knowing if this “psychiatrist” were indeed a psychiatrist and not some random person off the street! After nineteen months, the best guardian ad litem could come up with was a charlatan psychiatrist who spewed verbal obscenities on almost every reality TV show, and when an actual court testimony surfaced, the examiner had to redirect him, because he confused the victim with the murderer he evaluated! This incompetent “psychiatrist” charged a 20,000-dollar retainer, which, for a litigant also suffering from financial abuse by her spouse, was unaffordable (for comparison, I usually charge 5000 dollars).

During this long delay, the mother came to consult her own psychiatrists and doctorate psychologists, resulting in nine psychiatric evaluations — none of whom the Family Court would appoint and all of whom the guardian ad litem, without any mental health background herself, rejected. A sampling of the evaluations follows. Dr. M.S. of Columbia University, world-renowned for his expertise on personality disorders, reported that the mother has “excellent mental health” and “exceptional talent” for parenting. Dr. I.J., private practitioner in her resident state, confirmed that the mother did not have any mental health concerns. Dr. C.K. of Columbia University, a nationally-renowned child psychiatrist, confirmed the mother’s “excellent parenting skills.” Dr. G.D. of the University of Oregon, a seasoned forensic child psychiatrist, documented “alarm” at the “invariably highly detrimental” separation of the children from the mother. Dr. S.B. of Cornell University, a seasoned forensic adult and child psychiatrist, corroborated the mother’s “robust” psychological development and “natural talent” for parenting. Dr. B.R., a forensic psychiatrist consultant to the U.S. Supreme Court and the International Criminal Court, as well as coauthor of the United Nations protocol for documenting torture, concluded that the mother had “strong” mental health but was nevertheless suffering torture with her children, following a thorough review of all their medical records. Dr. C.L., president of the state chapter of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts and a forensic psychologist, wrote a 96-page report on the mother’s fitness as a parent, warning that the father posed a risk for “tangential spouse abuse” through the children. Others were more direct regarding the father: after performing numerous collateral interviews, Dr. M.S., one of the world’s top authorities on psychopathy, diagnosed the father with full-blown psychopathy and warned that he posed a danger to the children. Dr. B.R., a psychiatrist instructor at Harvard Law School, confirmed the diagnosis of psychopathy and the father’s dangerousness to the children. Dr. M.H., medical director of Physicians for Human Rights, peer-reviewed and confirmed the diagnosis of psychopathy and the father’s “physical and psychological abuse” of the children. Even Dr. K.W., a Family Court-protected pediatrician, initially admitted that the children were being abused and recommended a psychiatrist — but later retracted her conclusions upon intervention (and possible intimidation) by the father and the guardian ad litem.

The guardian ad litem suppressed all these reports by highly-credentialed and qualified psychiatrists and doctorate psychologists, in favor of a singular “assessment” that opposed their complete consensus: that of an unlicensed “associate counselor” who negated a diagnosis she was unqualified to make in the first place. This was particularly consequential, since the father’s diagnosis, psychopathy, is one of the most debilitating, dangerous, and untreatable disorders known to psychiatry, marked by a lack of conscience and a drive to harm even one’s own children. Known as a “mask of sanity,” the stark contrast between public persona and hidden destructiveness has made it a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” syndrome. Instead of holding criminal personalities accountable on the basis of fact finding and not just superficial impressions, as courts of law are supposed to do, Family Courts actually incentivize, reward, and exploit dangerous predators’ skillful deceptions regarding their criminality and violence: they have a mutual interest in covering up damning evidence. This Family Court judge, for example, aggressively obstructed all investigations and suppressed any evidence that compromised the father. She refused to admit impeccably qualified, top experts on spurious reasons, and when one of them sent in his report directly to the Court, she ordered it destroyed and stricken from the record. When at least three medical professionals from unrelated settings attempted to make a mandated report, the Child Abuse Hotline admitted to all of them that there was a block on the case, apparently arising from the Court. Indeed, the Family Court had earlier instructed the children’s pediatrician not to speak to any medical professional regarding this case, which the pediatrician astonishingly heeded and informed us that she was doing so. The Family Court judge, additionally, closed down at least three Child Protective Services investigations, on one occasion by granting the father full access to the confidential records of an ongoing investigation against him; the case closed within six days (on all three occasions, the agency notified the father but not the mother that it was closing the case). Finally, when two forensic psychiatrists made an appointment with the school principal to report their findings of child abuse, the Family Court judge orchestrated with the father and the guardian ad litem to arrest these doctors before they could meet with the principal, under secret “court order” that not even the prosecutor has seen at the time of this writing. In this manner, preventing independent investigations, while concocting false “evidence” through the control of so-called “experts”, emerges as part and parcel of the formula based on which Family Courts “fix” custody outcomes.

5. Force ‘Reunification Therapy’

Now that the children are taken from their primary parent on the basis of “parental alienation,” the court records “sealed”, and a “psychiatric evaluation” ordered, the fifth and last step in the Family Court strategy for an illegitimate custody switch is “reunification therapy.” Much like the “psychiatrists” in the above case, who seemed ready to “sell” expertise that was fit for Family Court purpose, entire cottage industries have arisen around the Family Court practice of “reunifying” child victims with their victimizers. Most of them do not involve psychiatrists — which explains why The guardian ad litem had such a difficult time locating a “psychiatrist” who could do a simple evaluation of someone whom nine top experts of the nation, if not the world, cleared through a medical consensus as having “excellent mental health” and no barriers to parenting. This is without going into the fact that the mother, as the New York State governor’s “righthand woman” after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, was at the time given not only security and mental health clearance to be chief Ground Zero coordinator of all First Responders, as well as the FBI, FEMA, and the mayor’s office, but to design and run mental health programs for thousands of firefighters and medical personnel, following the greatest attack on U.S. soil in the history of the nation. The mother’s ability to serve as a backbone for the frontline of the nation’s mental health, following its most traumatic experience in recent memory, as entrusted by the New York State governor, may have to do with her upbringing by a respected child psychology professor who sacrificed her career to devote herself to her children — as the mother of this case would come to do herself. Furthermore, coming from a family of three generations of doctors, the mother knew not to agree to just any “evaluation”, much less one by a no-name appointee of a Family Court that unconstitutionally — as some of the top Constitutional scholars of the country confirmed — took away her children without any reason it could confidently state. In this context, “reunification therapy” (essentially, child brainwashing) was the Family Court’s last resort.

It is unknown what kind of “therapist” the children had been seeing for almost two years, at the time of this writing. Neither the mother nor her lawyers were allowed to have the name or even the qualifications of this “children’s therapist.” All the mother knew was that, within weeks of complaining to the licensing board about the first Family Court-mandated “therapist”, who charged exorbitantly while performing nothing resembling therapy but instead locked the children in her office and traumatized them, she was forced to recuse herself from the case. However, because the case remained with the same Family Court, the judge simply replaced this “therapist” with another, only under more draconian and covert circumstances. The mother came to find out that there even was a therapist, about seven months after they started, when she was arrested at the school without warning, just weeks after the principal complimented her for her five years of consistently active volunteer work, which included cofounding and directing important projects. She was arrested on the basis of another secret “court order” that apparently said she was not allowed on school grounds when the children were present, until “therapeutically recommended by the children’s therapist.” Upon learning this for the first time, the mother seized the opportunity to demand a meeting with the children’s therapist, but of course the intent was never to have her see the children’s therapist and never to have her reunite with the children, and therefore the guardian ad litem refused to allow this to happen for fifteen months as of the time of this writing.

The extreme end of “reunification therapy” — “reunification camps” — has become a matter of much controversy in the United States, and California has banned it. “Viral” videos have exposed “gangs of thugs” forcibly abducting children from their homes and from loved ones, strongarming them into a truck, handcuffing them, and driving them away — as one would only imagine happening in Afghanistan, Guatemala, or Peru. The worst kinds of abuses, heaping trauma upon trauma, are happening under “legal” cover of the Family Courts. Because Family Courts have become so untouchable, carving out a “niche” that federal courts cannot interfere with, with such unlimited “discretion” that appeals are seldom successful, and exerting power over almost any other body through “court orders,” they can do almost anything and never be held accountable. They set the narrative, they decide what is evidence, and they force the “treatment”, whatever the consequences — they decide what information can be known, too. As videos are the only way the public has found out about these abuses and are met with outrage and disbelief, social media postings have become the first thing Family Courts prohibit. These children, simply for having disclosed abuse, are thus abducted, hidden away from their safe, nurturing parent for months if not years, and literally tortured to their premature “natural” deaths, if not murdered. Many disbelieve that this can be happening in a civilized, law-bound society, but it is not one instance but tens of thousands per year, and it is not one death but hundreds per year.

The mother of the above case could not even watch the public videos because they were “triggering”: her children were similarly seized, not by thugs but by a “SWAT team” of police, without warning, based on a “court order” she had not seen, responding the father’s fraudulent police report. Secondary damages are also common with the judicial transfer of children to their abuse: in the above case, their former babysitter cried every day for months, unable to enjoy activities in her own life, and their maternal grandfather, who was hitherto highly active and healthy, scootering with the children before they were taken, became emotionally and physically debilitated for the first time in his life. Cousins, many of whom are medical professionals knowledgeable of the harm that results from child abuse, especially in the context of separation from their primary supports, are in mourning. It did not take long for the entire family to recognize that no legal solution existed for this travesty of justice, and everything from “court seals” to “court orders” were serving Family Court, not the families and certainly not the children the Courts were deliberately destroying….

*The above is a prelude to my upcoming book, The Dangerous Case of Family Courts.

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The Kafkaesque Family Court, Part 2

Continued from Part 1 of ‘ The Kafkaesque Family Court ’

3. Seal the Case, Break All the Rules, and Intimidate the Lawyers

Sealing the case is the third step in the Family Court formula for stealing children. American courts are open to the public for a reason: the nation’s founders believed that the right to a public trial is fundamental to ensuring transparency, fairness, and justice and for holding state actors accountable in cases of abuse of authority. Family Courts are exceptional in that they are allowed to blanket-seal their procedures, on their say-so alone, “for the protection of children.” Family Courts are also exceptional in that they are granted wide discretion with the law, supposedly to meet the unique and individual nature of “each family’s needs.” Above all, Family Courts are exceptionally given the authority to remove children from parents, for society acknowledges that this is sometimes necessary for children’s safety. However, the largely unknown reality is that these three conditions combined — total authority, no accountability, and no transparency — has resulted in Family Courts’ regular removal of children from fit parents, to transfer them deliberately to their predators, committing unspeakable human rights violations and allowing criminality and violence to flourish with impunity, away from all scrutiny of civilized society.

In my sister’s case, the Family Court created a “sealing order” to muzzle the mother from mentioning anything to anyone about her children. This was ironic, since the Court on the one hand insisted that there was no abuse, and on the other invoked the tightest “seal” reserved perhaps for the most heinous acts of sexual abuse. Most people did not believe me when I stated that the “court seal” sealed the records from the mother herself, preventing her from accessing transcripts, orders, and motions against her in her own case — so that she could not file any cross-motions or appeal any decisions — but the actual situation went further. The court “seal” prohibited her from talking to anyone about what is happening to her, even in private — and certain aspects about her case even with her lawyer! After she fired her lawyer and decided to represent herself, the lawyer could not — and eventually did not — give her her own file. More suspiciously, this “seal” seemed only to apply to the mother, since the father had access to all sorts of orders and documents she had not seen.

The Family Court constantly threatened the mother with incarceration with respect to the “seal”. She had to stop posting anything about her children on social media, for an innocuous comment such as, “Today is my child’s birthday,” could count as a breach of the “seal” and land her in jail — without any standards or limits, everything in this manner was based on whim. The “seal” also covered anything that anyone else might say about her situation — for which the Family Court blamed her alone. For example, if I wrote about my own personal eyewitness accounts of her children being abused, in ways are not only protected under the First Amendment but legally-mandated for a medical professional like myself, the Family Court judge could punish the mother based on her far-reaching, all-encompassing interpretation of the “court seal” — even though my articles did not contain a single piece of information I obtained from the mother (but some of it, incidentally, from the father’s lawyer!). When a third-party critic of Family Courts, unknown to both myself and the mother and without informing us, wrote an article about her case based on a lawsuit she filed against the children’s guardian ad litem — and wrote with more details than anything we knew — the guardian ad litem fined the mother almost 27,000 dollars!

The mother never received a copy of the “sealing order.” This was illogical, since a sealing order would only apply to orders subsequent to its issuance, and thus she demanded a copy of it. The Family Court, which had constantly been chastising her for breaching the “seal”, suddenly had trouble giving her any information about the original order. “It was a long time ago!” “Why don’t you have a copy?” “It’s in every file!” Only weeks later, the guardian ad litem enunciated a date: “I have in my billing records that I spoke to [the mother] on October 15, 2021, and she should know that that was when I told her about the Court’s sealing order.” Then, all of a sudden, the Family Court judge, the father’s attorney, and the guardian ad litem all repeated the same date, as if repetition created reality. But the mother knew this was a lie: the date happened to fall between two other court orders, one from two days earlier and another from three days later, which were almost identical to each other, with neither mentioning a “sealing order” happening in between. Further, the mother resided in a state of one-party consent laws for recording conversations, and she had recorded the entire ninety-minute conversation with the guardian ad litem. On no occasion did the mendacious the guardian ad litem mention anything about a “sealing order” — she had again lied, much like her more than 187 lies to the Court and counting, which were being documented with the local police.

Now that the mother had a date, October 15, 2021, she returned to the clerk of court, who confirmed that there was no order in her records for that date. She called several times and had me call as well; the clerk of court and her assistants all agreed that there was no such order and there could not be one if not in their system. The mother returned to the Family Court and demanded a copy: the original order should have a statement of reason for the “seal” if it is legitimate, and that the Court did not notify her, so that she could not appeal it in time, mirrored the father’s manner of filing for divorce but deliberately withholding notification to her for months, so as to compromise her defense through deceptive means. A month since her initial request, all of a sudden, everyone connected to the Family Court simultaneously produced a copy of the “sealing order” — including the lawyer she fired a month earlier for not returning any messages or calls!

A note needs to be made about this lawyer: like every other Family Court lawyer the mother had — and she had to go through several — this lawyer changed her demeanor 180 degrees upon entering the case. Far from defending her, the lawyer refused to file any motions and simply sat through all the critical deadlines — as seemed to be her unspoken role for the Family Court. Firing this lawyer did not improve the mother’s case. Other lawyers who showed an effort to mount a defense were just as immediately shouted down: “I almost had a heart attack!” exclaimed one, who entered the case fervently but fell silent after the first session. We would indeed come to hear about lawyers who lost their licenses for trying to defend their client in Family Court; Family Court judges are said to have total control over their autocratic fiefdoms called “courts”, and lawyers must comply, regardless of who hired them. Therefore, when the lawyer the mother fired for never responding to her immediately sent in a copy of the “sealing order,” unsolicited, via FedEx, a month after her firing, this was all but confirmation to the mother that some kind of collusion was happening behind the scenes. Indeed, when the mother tried to seize the opportunity to try to get her file from her previous lawyer, the intractable unresponsiveness resumed.

Having received a copy from three different sources, all within a day or two of one another, the mother returned to the clerk of court, who told her that the October 15, 2021, order was just recently “manually entered” — four months after the supposed “issuance” date! Having been a respected government official before becoming a mother, in charge of the entire Ground Zero coordination after the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York City, the mother was never one to overreact or to be groundlessly paranoid. Yet, even she could not help but see that there was something undeniably suspicious. Indeed, two years of research has led me to the theory that these illegitimate gag orders and all-encompassing “court seals” are the reason why this travesty of justice in the Family Courts is not more widely known, and why victimized parents cannot defend their own cases, let alone mobilize. Indeed, I believe that there is nothing more threatening to Family Courts than sunlight, and there is nothing more terrifying to their protected litigants than accountability. Whereas those entrapped in the system are many — child abuse, domestic violence, and divorce are very common across all fifty U.S. states — they are isolated from one another and threatened with gag orders, “court seals,” incarceration, and hospitalization, as Family Courts abuse the full “discretion” available to them without oversight to strip litigants of their legal rights, their children, their health, and their belongings, and to use the very systems in place to protect victims of violence against those very victims.

4. Order a Psychiatric Evaluation

Now that “parental alienation” has been alleged, the children taken, and the court records “sealed”, ordering a psychiatric evaluation is the fourth step in the Family Court formula for a total custody switch. Everywhere women say that they accepted the requirement of a psychiatric evaluation, “because it was supposed to be just a formality”; “because I knew I never had any problems”; and “because they insisted on it so much, I thought I would get it over with.” Yet, the “psychiatric evaluation” — seldom performed by a psychiatrist — would almost universally seal their fate of permanent separation from their children. Since they were often the children’s primary caregiver, this separation would be the equivalent of a “life sentence” for the children (since the trauma they suffer translates into a lifetime of inner torture) and a “death sentence” for the mothers, occasionally fathers (their children being lost to them, as if they were dead, worse than death for a loving parent — and a shocking number actually die). I realized that there was a reason I never had a Family Court case in my twenty-five years of working as an expert witness for the courts; Family Courts do not use the same experts as the other courts but have their own “pool” they like to draw from. This “pool” consists of some of the most poorly-trained, unqualified, and unscrupulous “professionals” I have encountered in my career, charging five to twenty times my fees, while sometimes holding only a master’s degree in an unrelated field, and producing the kind of reports I could never have imagined…. Yet I, who have received only deference in all other courts for having the highest-level training from the best institutions in the country, Family Courts look for every excuse to “disqualify” — if they even allow me to get to the point of being vetted (which they try to prevent at all cost).

This is how it unfolded for this case: more than two years passed since the mother had seen or heard from her children, since their being abruptly taken by force, never to return to the mother who raised them all their lives or the only nurturing home they had known. They so far passed three Holiday Seasons, two birthdays each, and one graduation without their beloved mother or any of their relatives and former babysitters on the mother’s side — essentially all their former caregivers. The mother was anxious for an evidentiary hearing and repeatedly submitted evidence, but nothing resembling due process occurred; nothing approaching any purposeful activity occurred through repeated court meetings, either. All that the Family Court seemed interested in was stalling time — and for children aged seven and nine, this was an extraordinary stalling of time.

The last time the mother had access to her children’s school and pediatric records, which was a year and a half ago, her daughter had gone from perfect attendance to missing almost one-half of days of school since the abduction. She had also suffered a shoulder injury that an orthopedist noted was neglected for months; tests were ordered, but no follow-up occurred. Both children were average height and weight before the abduction, but now they were the smallest in their classes. Photographs that other parents smuggled to the mother showed her daughter prematurely wearing eyeglasses and with facial deformities characteristic of high stress hormone release. Her son lost so much weight, people said he looked like a “cancer patient,” and his inappropriate, ill-fitting clothes (as they outgrew their unworn, plush and abundant clothing waiting for them at home) made him an obvious target for bullying. An occasional insurance bill that arrived revealed frequent emergency room visits, botched Strep throat therapy, premature dental surgery, untreated severe seasonal allergies, and improperly handled Covid exposure. These prodigy children, who read 400-page novels by age five, memorized encyclopedias by age six, and conducted science experiments by age seven, previously of perfect emotional and physical health, were deteriorating by every objective measure — and this was despite the father and the children’s guardian ad litem doing everything they could to conceal everything.

The guardian ad litem initially stated that the mother needed to write a message to the children in order to see them again — but then ignored her numerous emails and rejected 100 percent of messages the mother proposed. In the interim, the guardian ad litem sent her own messages to the children: “Your mother wants nothing to do with you”; “Your mother has abandoned you”; “You will not see your mother for a long time”; “Your mother no longer loves you,” etc. It was clear from her messages that this guardian ad litem had no intention of allowing the children to see their mother (her consistent pattern also became clear from a half-dozen other litigants who similarly suffered under her and reached out to me, based on my articles). Soon, in accordance with the Family Court “playbook”, the requirement ratcheted up to a “psychiatric evaluation.” Even though an evaluation was never a requirement for the mother to see the children she successfully raised all their lives, much like the “sealing order,” this was supposedly determined “long ago,” in a “court order” she has not seen but which was supposedly dated several months back from when she first heard that it was a requirement.

The children’s guardian ad litem was charged with finding a psychiatrist, but the first psychiatrist she chose — who is known for doing fraudulent evaluations and charging exorbitantly for them — recused himself, no doubt in fear of my finding him out, since we are in the same field. Then, for the next nineteen months, the guardian ad litem would not be able to find a single “qualified” psychiatrist….

(To be continued, and coming up next: 5. Force ‘Reunification Therapy.’)

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The Kafkaesque Family Court

Dissecting the Mechanisms of Family Court through My Sister’s Case

I use my sister’s story to analyze how Family Courts operate, because I am a firsthand witness to all the events and can add a layer of objectivity — which is necessary in a culture where even the violent abuse and fear of murder by women and children is disparaged as the mother’s being a “disgruntled litigant” or as “wishing to gain an edge” in a divorce. Ordinarily, the law reflects the values of society, and courtrooms attempt to implement the law; certainly, there are idiosyncratic judges, but this has been my expectation from twenty-five years of experience as an expert witness to the courts. In Family Court, I quickly learned that something was amiss: a “normal” divorce turned into a life-or-death battle, trying to protect children from death was “mental illness,” and a father had absolute authority, regardless of lack of merits — and, above all, a mother was not allowed to speak about what was happening, even to her own sister.

This story is also relevant, because it could be any number of women’s stories. The women in my investigations had tremendously different walks of life, from different regions of the country and the world, but their course through the Family Courts was almost identical. How can they come from such diverse backgrounds, professions, and nationalities, and have similar, if not the same, outcomes? It has much to do with the Family Courts’ “playbook”, implemented in all fifty U.S. states and exported abroad — which I outline here using my sister’s story:

1. Allege ‘Parental Alienation’

The first step in the playbook of gaining advantage in a divorce, when there are children, is to allege “parental alienation,” or an equivalent concept. Abusers typically know or are instructed to do this as part of a formula for the reversal and ricochet of any accusation of abuse. This is apparent from the fact that fathers may begin with different stances or preferences at the beginning of a divorce but soon make the same underlying accusation. In this case, the husband, who is a corporate lawyer and disciple of the notoriously crafty lawyer Alan Dershowitz, he knew to use this phrase immediately upon his filing for divorce.

The fact that there was no basis for the allegation did not matter. The mother’s parenting skills were even something he had been boastful about to others. His wife was reputed to be “the best mom” among the conscientious moms who moved to her suburban neighborhood with the specific intent to raise children, and her lunches were the talk of the town for the attention and care they exemplified. Many marveled at her ability to connect with children, and some left their own with her, stating that she was the “only mom” they could trust as much as themselves.

He, too, “trusted” the mother so much, he abandoned child rearing entirely to her, to the point where his new sets of friends believed he was single. These children hence grew up happy, healthy, and thriving but for the one lack of missing their father. The mother tried everything to arrange for him to spend time with his children — bedtime stories, weekend trips, vacations — but he was simply never available. He only had the time to appear for five-minute “photo ops” with the children before celebrations or special occasions, long enough to make a record that he was there, and then immediately disappeared without telling anyone.

Even the divorce was not the mother’s idea but his: he was livid that she had “stopped praising” him, when I was astonished to find that she was simply depressed from twelve years of enduring his emotional, psychological, sexual, physical, and financial abuse and his need to control every aspect of her life. I had to become reacquainted with my own sister at this time, after he had spent years isolating her from family and friends. Now, he was restless: he had several younger mistresses, and he was due for a change — matching his habitual overhaul of friends every few years, switching to younger and younger crowds, as was evident in the pictures of birthday and New Year’s Eve parties he attended.

Up until marriage, the mother had supported him, paying all his expenses when he claimed to be a struggling filmmaker (this turned out to be a ruse; far from “sacrificing” his career for an artistic passion, he had a pattern of going from one job to another, sometimes in a totally different field, in order to “launder” his image when his deceptive ways were exposed). As it became his turn to support the family, with the arrival of children, the father plunged them into a level of poverty the mother had never known; despite living in a big house in a well-to-do neighborhood, she subsisted on cereal in order to give her growing children adequate nutrition. Later, the mother would come to learn that the father had been lying about his income and stashing away 29/30 of his million-dollars-a-year salary, while pleading poverty and taking hundreds of thousands from her family of origin.

This reveals what “parental alienation” is really about: financial gain. In this father’s case, he was initially counting the days to leave the marital house, even contracted to rent out a single’s room, announced to everyone his date of departure, and factored nothing about the children into his plans — until someone advised him that he could turn his divorce into a money-making venture by alleging “parental alienation.” In addition to being a formula for denying abuse and avoid criminal prosecution, it was a way to perpetrate secondary spousal abuse (while continuing child abuse) and to extort “child support” for doing so!

2. Seize the Children

Seizing the children is the second step in the Family Court formula for fixing a case. It does not matter what excuse is used — usually there is none — but the goal is to remove the children from the loving parent so as to isolate them with their abuser. This achieves several goals: it conceals any evidence of abuse; it helps to “turn tables” on the victim, making the innocent parent appear guilty; it effectively allows a new norm to solidify as the “status quo”; and it entrains malleable children into a state of learned helplessness and of acceptance of abuse as normal. This removal can happen abruptly, as in this case, or gradually by building a record of “faults” against the mother — whether factual or not — but it is always injurious and traumatic. As horrific as this may sound to anyone outside of Family Court, the severance of parent-child bonds is part of its casual, routine practice.

In this mother’s case, it happened this way: a couple months prior to secretly filing for divorce, which the father did while deceiving his family that he would not, the father suddenly started imposing himself on the very children he never cared for before. After years of spending all his afterwork hours and weekends on singles’ activities, taking singing lessons, going to “wine tasting” dinners, partying, watching movies, and indulging in pornography, he of course had little idea how to be with children. Starting on the father’s first day of “parenting”, cries and screams reverberated through the house, and the 7-year-old instantly reverted back to diapers, while the 9-year-old became permanently suicidal. Cuts, bruises, bloody shirts, and a broken bone were ordinary occurrences under his watch, but when the father caused his 7-year-old a head injury by slamming him against a window with a wooden chair, he came to be placed on a temporary restraining order (also, when daughter was an infant, he almost killed her by flinging her in the air to land head first on a concrete floor).

That is when the Family Court aggressively intervened. First, the Family Court judge mandated the children to visit with their father over the restraining order! The children immediately developed stress-induced canker sores, panic attacks, vomiting, immobilization, and even dissociation (departure from reality because of stress), but she ruled that they be taken involuntarily by police if they resisted, and they were. Violent fights, self-injurious behavior, and then a suicide attempt ensued, when they tried to set the house on fire, stating that even a few hours with “that maniac” — their father, whom they called “the scariest person” — were “torture” and “worse than death.” When the mother took them to the emergency room after their suicide attempt, she was punished severely for doing so, and the judge’s appointed guardian ad litem intercepted all follow-up appointments to stop them from seeing a psychiatrist, as several medical professionals were recommending at the time.

I finally decided to document the children’s psychiatric decline, in order to create a medical record in the midst of this denial of medical care. In less than a month, the guardian ad litem exceptionally met with me and their mother to announce her prohibition against my having contact with them again. Her demeanor in that conversation gave away that she was no children’s “guardian ad litem”: without any background in child health or psychology, she had no regard for medical expertise; had no curiosity about the wellbeing of the children of whom she was in charge; and had no intention to let me to speak but only declared her decree. I have dealt with numerous guardians ad litem in my career, but it was clear that, contrary to her role as a reporter to the court, this woman had no interest in facts; she was doing what she did because she could. The abuse of authority became clear when the Family Court stonewalled any testimony from me, a firsthand witness of the father’s daily abuse for fifteen months, and prohibited Child Protective Services from interviewing me, even canceling an already-scheduled interview!

None of these attempts to rescript reality changed the father’s actual abuse, of course, and the children, like any healthy human beings trying to avoid their own maltreatment, continued to protest. As the situation kept escalating, the father’s solution was to kidnap them, falsely claiming that the mother was “absconding” with the children when it was her weekend with them, as he himself agreed to and guardian ad litem assigned. He alone making a false police report would not have gotten anywhere, but he had a “guardian ad litem” willing to lie to buttress his false claims — she would come to lie to the Court almost two hundred documented times at the time of this writing — and a Family Court judge willing to seize, if not orchestrate, the opportunity to issue an “emergency order,” authorizing a raid. A “SWAT team” of police officers would invade the mother’s space, tearing her clinging and crying children from her by force to deliver them to their abusive father. The charges against the mother were dropped almost immediately when the father’s and the guardian ad litem’s lies to the police were exposed, but the children were already taken, and the Family Court judge had no reason to return them. The Family Court had accomplished its goal: this would become the new “status quo” by which the mother, all her side of the family, and all other former caregivers, including babysitters, would have no access to the children for even one minute for more than two years at the time of this writing.

Given that seizure of children from their primary caregiver was the goal, the truth did not matter. The Family Court judge continued to repeat the father’s lie that the mother was “absconding”, stating that her being found in a hotel twenty minutes away from home in the same state, in truth to help her children de-stress in a pool, was “proof”. Yet, not only was this well within her rights, the father and the guardian ad litem had themselves caused the exigency: the children were suicidal after the father secretly took them to an out-of-state resort, hours away, on the previous weekend — in actual violation of court directives — having stolen their passports from common possession. He was discovered only because the children secretly called their maternal grandfather, in such “terror” that the grandfather rushed back from Canada, fearing for his grandchildren’s safety, only never to see them again. The children were also protesting against being forced to go to the Court-mandated “therapist” at this time, and the “therapist” had just locked them in her office when they refused her “therapy”, causing them to cry. When the mother complained that the children were acutely suicidal after each visit with this “therapist”, the guardian ad litem accused the mother of “interfering with the therapeutic process” — no doubt actually meaning, “interfering with our theft of your children.”

3. Seal the Case, Break All the Rules, and Intimidate the Lawyers

Sealing the case is the third step in the Family Court formula for stealing children. American courts are open to the public for a reason: the nation’s founders believed that the right to a public trial is fundamental to ensuring transparency, fairness, and justice and for holding state actors accountable in cases of abuse of authority. Family Courts are exceptional in that they are given the right to blanket seal their records, on their say-so alone, “for the protection of children.” Family Courts are also exceptional in that they are granted wide discretion with the law, supposedly to meet the unique and individual nature of “each family’s needs.” However, the reality is that this lack of transparency has combined with a lack of accountability — to yield a culture of unmitigated abuse of power without scrutiny, free to destroy children and families indiscriminately with complete impunity.

(To be continued.)

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How Family Courts are the Handmaidens of Murderers (and Other Violent Offenders)

Dangerous Personalities Buttress One Another in Jane Gallina-Mecca’s Court

[Murder cases are disproportionately connected to Family Courts, and yet because of extreme secrecy, it is often difficult if not impossible to find out what happened. An investigation into several murder cases arising from a particular court gives a clue: routine removal of permanent protective orders, regular “custody switches” to the violent parent, and a reprehensible pattern of depraved enjoyment of others’ suffering. Details will follow once the evidence submission is complete.]

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‘What is Wrong with Evelyn Nissirios?’

This is a Question Many Have Asked Me as a Forensic Psychiatrist

[I took this article down, because I have been alerted to my physical safety, given the methods of the Family Courts. I will await the actual proceeding of criminal charges before re-posting.]

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What will Happen in Jane Gallina-Mecca’s Court? — Reprise

What will Happen in Jane Gallina-Mecca’s Court? — Reprise

Legislatures around the Country are Catching on — Will New Jersey be Next?

Legislatures all around the country are slowly catching on that Family Courts are in fact centers of organized crime. The latest was the New York State Senate, which held a historic hearing on November 1, 2023. My testimony was just one among many impressive, impassioned ones that overflowed in time (they overran the 2:00 p.m. scheduled closure time to last beyond 5:40 p.m. — an unheard-of occurrence for senate hearings!). Senators and judiciary overseers sat with faces transfixed for the entire duration, and mouths agape at the atrocities that are occurring through the euphemistically-named, “Family Courts.”

A common theme ran through the hearing: Family Courts are overwhelmingly domestic violence or child abuse cases, where violence “increases multiple times,” once families enter the Courts. Family Courts “favor abusive and manipulative persons”; “[incentivize, enable, and reward] unethical and illegal activity”; cause “women [to kill] themselves, men [to kill] mothers and children, and even judges; and are “built on the backs of the families they destroyed.” Indeed, one of the senators brought up the twenty-four homicides since 2016 of children judges had placed in dangerous environments against urgent warnings by protective parents (children are dying everywhere, whenever Family Courts are involved, regardless of region). It is clear that children are exploitable, and Family Courts exploit them for profit with total impunity.

Thus, the other side is that Family Court personnel are “driving new cars, dining out, and moving into new homes funded with the liquidated assets, homes, retirement savings and college funds of the children and families trapped in these courts,” as they “[abuse] helpless litigants, usurping parental authority, and preying on families with zero accountability.” And no matter how much harm they heap, they can hide all evidence under “court seals,” deflect allegations by blaming “disgruntled litigants,” and totally financially and emotionally deplete victims until they can no longer legally fight back.

Who would ever imagine Family Courts are doing this? Only direct witness will allow the average person to believe.

My direct witness occurred with Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca, who is the most representative of the above prototype I have personally observed, and an independent investigation, just begun, has already uncovered more than one murder. She is exemplary of what has caused a mother to testify: “My son has said, ‘Dad is going to kill us. Mom, help us please!’” All of Judge Gallina-Mecca’s cases are strictly under seal, nominally “for the protection of the children,” but in truth for the protection of herself from accountability for her brutal crimes against children. Family Court judges are engaging in nothing less than the trafficking of children to their torture and death — and they do so because they can.

Despite her doing everything to hide her criminal misdeeds, including concealing vital case information from the innocent litigant, Judge Gallina-Mecca’s formula is not difficult to decipher: First, in cases of child abuse, immediately take away the children from the fit parent, making up any reason to do so. Second, cover up any real abuse, so as to hand the children to their abuser. Third, deny access to everyone the children were previously attached to, since maximal coverup goes with maximal harm. Fourth, drag on time, since every child’s month is an adult’s decade! (how efficient and convenient). Finally, put the children through thought reform “therapy”, and “reunification camp” if necessary, to make them recant the abuse and denounce their prior caregiver. Along with “gag orders” against the loving parent (or, if they do not work, place the parent under conservatorship or incarceration to discredit anything she says), the silencing of all victims will be complete.

I know this, because I literally saved the life of a mother, and by extension perhaps her children. It is a case in which Judge Gallina-Mecca is refusing to make a ruling: an initial trial date in July was moved to August, and then September, October, and now mid-November 2023. Who knows if she will rule? (the measure seems to be whether or not the children and the mother have yet been “broken” — since there is never an evidentiary hearing, and the children remain exactly as they were abruptly and violently extracted from the fit parent, loving home, and all previous primary supports, without reason). This particular divorce has been ongoing for over three years, but others speak of six, nine, or even twelve years!

Observing Court-connected players is how I have learned of her methods (naming the players is crucial, not only as a mandated reporter, but the reason our First Amendment guarantees free speech is because transparency is a chief means of combating government corruption and oppression — as well as others who are “in” on the profit-making):

‘Child Therapist’ Barbara Maurer

As the Family Court-mandated children’s “therapist”, she charged exorbitantly high rates, with barely a non-social work master’s degree. Since the predatory father was paying the bills, she did not have to return calls, did not have to protect children — even after they became suicidal because of the father’s abuse, and they were always more suicidal, not less, after her sessions. Under Court protection, she could break all laws around mandated reporting, since she could care less about the young lives under her “care”. She was eventually caught abusing the children herself and was removed from the case by her licensing board. But this did not matter: Family Court simply mandated another “therapist”, this time without allowing anyone who could protect the children to know the identity.

‘Guardian ad litem’ Evelyn Nissirios

More brutal than a street gangster, this guardian ad litem “for children” from the start worked only for “the best interest” of the monied predator of children. After effectuating a violent police raid for made-up reasons to tear crying and clinging children from their mother at the onset of their weekend together, she lied to the Court over 177 documented times to cover up her crimes. She imprisoned the children with a man who was coming out of a restraining order for almost killing each of them on different occasions — the same man the children used to vomit or become immobile with panic before visiting, because he was “the scariest person,” with whom spending time was “torture” and “worse than death.” Ms. Nissirios buried suicide notes, suicide attempts, emergency room visits, and letters to the Court asking to fire her, so that she could send them to their real torture.

‘Judge’ Jane Gallina-Mecca

That the Family Court “Judge” was the orchestrator of these grotesque acts is evident from the fact that she endlessly appointed needless actors, simply to increase the number parroting her concocted narrative. As Judge, she could “fix” the evidence for “selling” the children to their predator by: refusing to hear medical testimonies; obstructing all Child Protective Services (CPS) investigations; forbidding the children from seeing a psychiatrist but mandating them to false “therapists”; falsely arresting potential witnesses of the children’s abuse, including renowned medical professionals; and discarding or destroying as many as nine psychiatric reports in order to declare a fit mother “mentally ill” — based on the only “qualified” report Evelyn Nissirios selected, by an unlicensed “associate counselor” Tara Devine, who contradicted all nine, highly-credentialed psychiatrists.

The Father

The hirer of Jane Gallina-Mecca will be named in an upcoming book, a documentary, and a national television series. A corporate lawyer and student of Alan Dershowitz, he hid his extensive background of psychopathic abuse and neglect, in order to marry into a family he could exploit financially and to improve his social standing. He attempted murder on his wife five times, twice with the assistance of his hired hand. He is also a criminal mastermind in financial fraud, and, unlike Allan Kassenoff, his firm protects him. After all, he pulled off a scheme where his former boss was fined 38 million dollars but he got off scot-free. He pled poverty to extract money from his in-laws, while stashing away 29/30 of his million-dollar salary. He was on a restraining order for almost crushing the skull of his 7-year-old son and nearly killing his daughter by head injury as an infant, shortly before he was permitted to kidnap both of them so as to extort six-figure “child support” from the mother (his real interest, and the Court’s interest, in the children).

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Testimony to the New York State Legislature

By Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div.

My name is Bandy Lee. I am a forensic psychiatrist and violence expert who taught at Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School for seventeen years before transferring to Columbia University and Harvard Medical School. I am cofounder of the Violence Prevention Institute and president of the World Mental Health Coalition. I have served as an expert consultant for several states including New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Alabama, and California, and for several countries including Ireland and France, on prison reform and violence prevention programming. I helped author the United Nations Secretary-General’s chapter on “Violence against Children” in 2007 and have led a project group for the World Health Organization Violence Prevention Alliance since 2011. I am a recipient of the National Institute of Mental Health’s National Research Service Award and author of the textbook, Violence (Lee, 2019), over 100 peer-reviewed articles and chapters, and over 300 opinion articles on issues related to violence prevention. My clinical practice specializes in treating violent offenders, and I have served as an expert witness for criminal and civil courts in approximately 70 cases and for family court in approximately two dozen cases.

As wars are being waged in Europe and in the Middle East, it is important to note that wars are waged in households every day. We know, at least, that the trauma and the mental health effects are equally severe. For a significant percentage of women and children, the home is the most dangerous and deadliest place to be. That family courts are failing to recognize abuse, but routinely sending children to their abusers and severing contact with their primary caregivers, aggravates this harm and is currently one of the greatest human rights emergencies on U.S. soil — especially since this has lifelong and intergenerational repercussions.

Yale Law School’s Robert Cover said: “Interpretations in law … constitute justifications for violence” (Cover, 1986). Nowhere does this seem truer than in family courts, and nowhere does the application seem more deadly, arbitrary, and unnecessary.

Family court judges are granted wide “discretion” with the law, initially with good intentions, but the lack of oversight and the power to conduct all proceedings in secrecy have — much like the prison system I have studied — led to disastrous results. That a world of brutality and violence flourishes not only in prisons behind concrete walls, but also in courts of law behind sealed records and gag orders, is disturbing beyond anything I have witnessed in my 25 years of forensic practice — especially since the victims are innocent children.

The statistics are stark. Three-quarters of women in the U.S. who are killed by their abusers are murdered after they leave the abusive relationship. Of the approximately 100,000 contested child custody cases each year in the United States, a vast majority are actually domestic violence cases involving the most dangerous individuals our society produces. Abusive fathers are more than twice as likely to seek sole custody of their children than non-abusive fathers, and family courts award them joint or sole custody almost three-fourths of the time (https://rcdvcpc.org/facts.html). Many fathers who are thus granted custody kill their children, such that a sizeable portion of the nation’s child murders by parent are the result of placement by family courts.

The Center for Judicial Excellence (2023) has tracked over 940 children murdered by a divorcing or separating parent over a fifteen-year period in the United States. A detailed study of 175 child murders by fathers in relation to contested custody showed that family courts had in many cases given the access they needed to murder their children (Bartlow, 2017). For every murder, there are many more suicides, and for every death, there are hundreds of injuries that require medical attention. Yet, these numbers are an undercount, as near-universal record concealment, sometimes against the litigants themselves, makes it virtually impossible to track the true number of child murders family courts enable.

Deaths are only the extreme end, since the “soul murder” that children endure with the experience of abuse is unseen from the outside. More than 58,000 children a year are ordered into unsupervised custody by their physical or sexual abuser following divorce in the United States (Silberg, 2008). These children are maximally exposed to lifelong psychological and physical illness, substance abuse, relationship problems, vulnerability to future abuse, as well as decades of loss of life, according to the highly-respected, federally-funded nationwide Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) studies (Felitti et al., 2002).

Not only that, in a disproportionate number of family court cases, the “protective parent” loses custody for simply bringing up the abuse, thus stripping the children not only of their primary attachment figure and primary support, but the greatest mitigating factor of abuse. The result is that there is no greater tragedy for growing children, no greater loss for loving parents, and no greater danger to societal safety — as we are breeding the next generation of perpetrators.

Family courts’ denial of abuse allegations is highly consequential, since child abuse and neglect are extremely common. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one in five Americans are sexually molested as a child, one in four are beaten by a parent to the point of leaving a bodily mark, and all these children experience some form of emotional abuse. Five children die per day from abuse in the United States, and four will have involved a parent. One in three couples engage in physical violence, and one out of eight children witness their mother being beaten. Almost one in three abused and neglected children will later abuse their own children, continuing this horrible cycle of abuse — and the trend is worsening, with family courts being more than a small contributor.

Child abuse not only affects the current levels of violence in society but has measurable impacts on the levels of heart disease, cancer, obesity, high blood pressure, mental illness, substance abuse, crimes, suicides, and life expectancy (Petruccelli et al., 2019). The economic cost of child abuse and neglect in the United States was estimated at $592 billion in 2018 (Klika et al., 2020).

In spite of all this, a U.S. Department of Justice-commissioned study found that “domestic violence is frequently undetected in custody cases or ignored as a significant factor in determinations of custody and visitation” (Saunders et al., 2011). Furthermore, biases against women, children, and allegations of abuse endemic in family courts help dangerous individuals, especially men, to weaponize the courts to further their abuse. Family courts have essentially crafted a subculture that sharply deviates from the norm, quickly turning child custody disputes into a surreal, upside-down situation where abuse does not exist, violence is “good” for the child, and attempts to protect children are labeled as “mental illness.”

Popular yet unscientific theories such as “parental alienation” that thrive in family courts but nowhere else are designed to defeat mothers and children reporting abuse. This hypothesis, originally based not on research but on the personal biases of Richard Gardner, has been debunked scientifically and denounced by reputable professional associations as well as the United Nations Human Rights Council (United Nations, 2023). Yet, this “pseudo-concept” continues to dominate as a tactic abusers use to manipulate family courts and is being exported internationally at alarming rates. It enables the abuser to portray that child sexual, physical, and psychological abuse is made up and the children rejecting him are “coached” by the primary caregiver to “alienate” him, rather than being a survival mechanism against his harmful actions.

According to a notable study by Dr. Joan Meier (2020) of 240 electronically published court opinions, when courts believe a father’s claim of alienation, fathers win about 95% of the cases regardless of whether or not the mother claimed abuse. If there were domestic violence reports, they won almost three-fourths of cases, and were especially successful with child sexual abuse reports (four-fifths). Indeed, the study found that courts disbelieved 94% of the child sexual abuse reports when, in fact, studies have repeatedly established that not only is deliberate false reporting rare — as little as 0.1% (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2010) — but that child abuse is greatly underreported. False allegations of “parental alienation,” on the other hand, are almost exclusively on the part of the abuser.

As a result, whether through ignorance or willful blindness, bad decisions have become the norm in family courts. A major National Institute of Justice-sponsored family court outcomes study came to the astonishing conclusion that if all family court custody decisions were reversed, they would be more correct (George Washington University, 2018). A cottage industry of lawyers and poorly-qualified “experts”, backed by abuser groups (which call themselves men’s rights or father’s rights groups) has developed because in domestic violence cases, the abusers usually control the money, and it is more lucrative to help the abusers. The most dangerous abusers use children as pawns to torment protective parents or to gain child support, seize marital assets, and even institutionalize protective parents, with shockingly high rates of success. The greatest casualties are the children, who suffer immeasurably and not only lose the opportunity ever to reach their full potential but in large part become the next generation of angry murderers and rapists, not to mention destroyers of their own lives.

What is the solution? Leaving court reform to court officials has been unproductive, as the sheer magnitude of the problem is more likely to be met with defense and denial. There are also insurmountable financial incentives not to reform. Instead, there needs to be meaningful judicial oversight at nationwide scale, which can begin with New York State. It may occur in the form of transparency, accountability, journalistic reporting, and expert whistleblowing of actual litigant experience. Absolute immunity must not be allowed where there is corruption, fraud, and felony-level crimes such as kidnapping and complicity in murder. Judges and their court-appointed personnel must be indictable like everyone else when they cause the deaths of children and their loving mothers (or fathers), which is allowed to occur at alarming rates (Thomas, 2023). A system of impunity, abuse of power, and self-imposed secrecy has proven not to work. According to Justice Louis Brandeis (1914), “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants” for institutional abuses.

References

Bala, N. M., Paetsch, J. J., Trocmé, N., Schuman, J., Tanchak, S. L., and Hornick, J. P. (2001). Allegations of Child Abuse in the Context of Parental Separation: A Discussion Paper. Ottawa, ON: Department of Justice Canada. https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/fl-lf/divorce/2001_4/pdf/2001_4.pdf

Bartlow, R. D. (2017). Judicial response to court-assisted child murders. Family and Intimate Partner Violence Quarterly, 10(1), 7–54.

Brandeis, L. D. (1914). Other People’s Money: And How the Bankers Use It. New York, NY: Saint Martin’s.

Center for Judicial Excellence (2022). U.S. Divorce Child Murder Data. San Rafael, CA: Center for Judicial Excellence. https://centerforjudicialexcellence.org/cje-projects-initiatives/child-murder-data/

Cover, R. M. (1986). Violence and the Word. Yale Law Journal, 95, 1601–1629.

Fang, X., Brown, D. S., Florence, C. S., and Mercy, J. A. (2012). The economic burden of child maltreatment in the United States and implications for prevention. Child Abuse and Neglect, 36(2), 156–165.

Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F., Nordenberg, D., Williamson, D. F., Spitz, A. M., Edwards, V., and Marks, J. S. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245–258.

George Washington University (2021). Draft Summary: Overview of Family Court Outcomes Study. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice. https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/302141.pdf

Klika, J. B., Rosenzweig, J., and Merrick, M. (2020). Economic burden of known cases of child maltreatment from 2018 in each state. Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal, 37, 227–234.

Lee, B. X. (2019). Violence: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Causes, Consequences, and Cures. New York, NY: Wiley-Blackwell.

Meier, J. S. (2020). U.S. child custody outcomes in cases involving parental alienation and abuse allegations: What do the data show? Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, 42(1), 92–105.

Petruccelli, K., Davis, J., and Berman, T. (2019). Adverse childhood experiences and associated health outcomes: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Child Abuse and Neglect, 97, 104127.

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An ‘Alternative Court’ of Unspeakable Criminality, Violence, and Abuse, Part 2

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