Bandy X. Lee's Blog, page 12

Evelyn Nissirios — Unlikely to Step Down from Illegitimately-Attained School Board Position

Evelyn Nissirios — Unlikely to Step Down from Illegitimately-Attained School Board Position

Wherever She Goes, Whatever She Does, She Corrupts

This writing on Evelyn Nissirios is by request. Since my article about her saga at the Saddle River School Board, many have reached out to me — just as many of her victims contacted me after I wrote about her abuses in one Family Court case. Destructive individuals have a distinctive pattern. Since they are often deceptive in initial presentation, it is important to call them out when their pattern surfaces and to hold them to account to stop the victimization. They also cling to illegitimately-attained positions — as with Nissirios’ “doubling down” in the face of intense uproar.

Here, I note what I learned from someone in local government. I was told of Nissirios’ backroom deals and manipulations to advantage her child, and the offer of illegal activities under “legal” cover as a selling point. She promotes herself as an “ethical” lawyer, but this is a device, much like her use of Family Court connections to conceal felony crimes. With her on the School Board, the Board unprecedentedly resorted to threats and intimidation; for example, it called the police on a mother, for the first time in its history, in relation to a bus controversy that Nissirios herself largely caused. In another incident, a child being playful with his friend was reported as a bullying incident, and the Board enacted the most severe punishment possible, compromising his future educational prospects. With all but Nissirios’ fingerprints on these actions, it appears that, like a tail wagging the dog, she has been weaponizing the Board to her own ends. There are other characteristic accounts of her backstabbing to harm others and to elevate herself.

I also learned that Nissirios was not elected even for her first term. Residents overlooked the matter because she was new to the district, and they trusted that the other four Board members would keep her in line. During her three-year term, however, the residents became so unhappy, part of Kunal Bhatia’s opposition to her was to get her out! The public was rather kept in the dark when the president of the School Board, Jon Peros, remained silent about the fact that he moved to Florida and enrolled his children in Florida schools three months before the election; people found out only because he did not show up to Board meetings. He resigned his seat with timing that would miss opportunities for a special election, and the thirty-day deadline for the Board to fill his seat would fall on the day after the general election. Incidentally, the election results were not yet in by that date, but Nissirios resigned her position anyway and took the seat, even though, had Bhatia not won, it would have created the absurdity of her having to fill two seats at once! The election finagling, in this manner, was much more extensive and calculated than one might imagine.

Of note, I am not a journalist but a psychiatrist, noting these patterns for what they say about Nissirios’ character. I am a mandated reporter with a duty to notify the public against dangers to its safety and wellbeing, especially to children. The remarkably consistent, accumulated accounts from Saddle River are in line with at least a half-dozen, detailed reports of Nissirios’ unspeakable, stomach-churning acts of cruelty against children in Family Court, all hidden under “court seal.” Why she is so vindictive against innocent children, and apparently against the community she is supposed to serve, remains an enigma, but at the very least, the public has a right to know about the danger she poses.

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The Faustian Bargains of Family Court

[My brother-in-law, a disciple of Alan Dershowitz, was enticed into committing felony crimes by a Family Court that promised him everything. However, whereas it told him that falsely alleging “parental alienation” would deflect all investigations into his violent abuse, it did not tell him that the price of Family Court “protection” was all his personal assets. Now, he is entrapped in the snares of an organized criminal enterprise, having to expend inordinate amounts to keep up his false façade — and his wife inordinate amounts to defend herself — and already half the equity of the house is gone, while they are not even a fifth way through….]

Dear [Brother-in-Law],

It didn’t have to be this way.

Apparent reward enticed you, and you took the bait, wasting divine gifts that were already given to you.

You are now caught in a predatory system with criminals who promise you everything, only so they could skin you and the rest of us alive. This is how they “earn” their living. Was it really worth your while to betray the family who devoted itself to you, and to trust strangers instead? You know that you are not going to get out, and the rest of us are not going to get out, for as long as you don’t let go (and they know you won’t, since it involves admitting that you were wrong). They sized you up, and they know the old you is not smart enough to cut his losses. But is the new you, too?

Even if you are deranged in your denial that you’re being used, surely you can see how much this is costing you (and Patricia, since everything I am giving her is a loan to both of you)? You will lose the house, your savings, and everything you have before you see a drop of what they “promised”.

This court is making a fool of Patricia, but even more so of you. And your children will never forgive you for what you have done. When they grow up, they will remind you of your treachery, and no amount of coercion, brainwashing, and rescripting of reality will change this fact. If you believe otherwise, you underestimate your children. When you need them the most, they will remind you of what you have done, and you will not have the children you wanted to take care of you at old age. They will hate you for the rest of your life for depriving them of their loving mother, just when they needed her the most.

I offered my help to you in the beginning, but you chose the path of ruin instead. It is not too late to repent your hate and war and to come clean to your family. As painful as this may seem, it is the only way, and your doing so will bring surprising forgiveness and healing. Otherwise, all the criminal charges, the family court exposure, damages charges, and national infamy will all catch up with you. You will have had the potential to have everything, but have lost everything for chasing after a mirage.

Are you capable of choosing love, peace, and redemption? Do these words mean anything to you?

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Banana Republic Methods on Saddle River School Board Mirror Family Court

Evelyn Nissirios at the Center of Two Heated Controversies

Family Court corruption not only undermines democracy but flows into other areas to damage society, and Evelyn Nissirios and the Saddle River School Board saga is a prime example. If not for Family Court “protection”, Nissirios would have been charged with felony crimes and sentenced to years, if not decades, in prison long ago. However, Family Court is an “alternative court” that not only shields child predators from prosecution but grants sole custody of child victims to their victimizers so that they can extort “child support” from the loving parent, character-assassinate witnesses, and enlist the illegitimate backing of schools, the police, and even a pediatrician in one particular case. As a consequence, there is no one left — or willing, for who would dare defy court orders? — to protect the children. Nissirios’ role is to ensure that these autocratic methods operate smoothly, and therefore it is no wonder that she is so eager to cling to power through the School Board, that she would use any means to hold onto her seat, despite losing an election.

[Of note, the “Photo Courtesy of Evelyn Nissirios” in the Bergen Record looks nothing like the real Nissirios. She has an icy cold, glaring stare that is zombie-like in indifference to the suffering of innocent children and betrays her scheming, conniving, and Machiavellian ways. I tried to make a depiction in the sketch below, for which I own the copyright:]

Evelyn Nissirios, Courtesy of Bandy X. Lee

In Family Court, the principle of power rules over all other principles, including the law, and players such as Evelyn Nissirios are rewarded, not punished, for their crimes against children. Their rewards in Family Court have a ripple effect, such that Nissirios has been able to accumulate positions and accolades — without suspicion that she rose to her stature for her willingness to engage in the trafficking of children to their abuse and torture. How is this possible? Family Courts are the one judicial branch that is not bound by the law, so that they might use the flexibility for benevolence — but in practice they overwhelmingly abuse it for malevolence. And having the power to conduct all sessions in total secrecy, they have become the congregating place for malevolent actors like Nissirios, who has shown her whole life purpose to be posited on power. This is how Family Courts have become such deadly places for children and their loving mothers.

Carrying this ethos, there is no doubt that Evelyn Nissirios’ presence has corrupted the Saddle River School Board. Now, this Board acts as an institution the way Nissirios acts as an individual — so far removed from reality that, even when threatened, she shows no response. Here are some of the similarities I have personally observed:

1. Disdain for Petitioners through Nonresponse. When I wrote to the School Board in February 2023, as a mandated reporter regarding the first set of children I witnessed Evelyn Nissirios abusing, I already suspected irregularity. I wrote to John Peros, then president of the Board, and was met with total silence, despite following up at least four times, asking for acknowledgment of receipt of the material I sent to him: an explanatory cover letter, a timeline of events, an affidavit, and a medical report. To the time of his resignation, he never responded. This is especially egregious, since a school official is also a mandated reporter, and his failure to respond or to investigate credible evidence of child abuse can carry criminal liability. However, this is the same manner with which the Family Court shielding Nissirios has responded to my mandated reporting: instead of investigating my claims, it stonewalled any testimony, threatened and intimidated me, a well-credentialed psychiatrist, and obstructed all investigations, including those of the Child Protective Services — which not only breaks the law but exemplifies institutional betrayal (hence the reason for ). Since then, I have learned of many more instances of Nissirios’ child abuse and torture — spanning multiple families throughout the state — and she does this because she can, under the protection of Family Court. In my view, the School Board similarly ignored its obligations because it could.

2. Deflection of Allegations, Even Serious Ones. The Bergen Record notes regarding Evelyn Nissrios: “A Board of Education incumbent defeated in November’s election has been appointed to the unexpired term of a fellow trustee.” Apparently, Nissirios was previously identified for her role in a dispute over bus routes carrying children in grades six to eight to a middle school in a neighboring town, since there is no middle school in the district. True to form, Nissirios seems to have abused her authority to preserve the bus route to her own home, which was not even shortened, while another route was eliminated altogether. These kinds of abuses of power, personal conflicts, and “friends helping friends,” as one member of the public put it, are not only common but the very operating code of Family Courts. In addition, the Board is plagued with parents filing complaints with the state Education Department, questions about a 78,000-dollar feasibility study, and now Nissirios’ illegal appointment. Regarding this latest defiance of election results, Board President Emily Kaufman stated: “We hope that having two members who received such confidence from voters will help unite the community.” It would be hard to conjure up more extraordinary levels of semantic obfuscation, deflection, and double speak — evocative of Family Courts’ consummate “spins” to explain child custody switches away from the beloved parent to imprisonment with the child abuser, as being “for the best interests of the children.”

3. The Holding of Anomalous Hearings. When I was invited to view a recording of the Saddle River Board of Education meeting, I had to wonder what country this was in, reminiscent of how it felt with the handling of almost any matter in Family Court. As an outsider looking in, it was astonishing to me how draconian and defensive the Board’s posture was, when this was a small meeting in a small community over one school. Cold, bureaucratic methods of enforcing strict adherence to rules, such as, “Your three minutes are up!” and citing loopholes in the law to justify its actions, rather than addressing grievances, exceeded in austerity any courtroom I had attended in my twenty-five years of practice as an expert witness — with the exception, of course, of Family Court. Almost no question was directly answered, citing “confidentiality issues,” “following proper procedure,” or more hoops to jump through: “Please provide me with the data [on the Board’s own web site] you were looking at; until then I cannot answer.” The Board did not display half the intelligence of the highly-educated members of the audience, much like Nissirios, who pretends she knows better than the multiple doctorate medical professionals she has opposed, with only a no-name law school degree. My subjective impressions were echoed in the objecting expressions of frustrated community members in attendance, who complained of: “the perceived lack of transparency and the lack of ethical process”; “premeditated or orchestrated actions in order to manage questions, information flow, or the compilation of the Board”; rules that are “disrespectful towards parents”; circumvention of elections by excluding “two qualified candidates that were here”; a lack of response regarding the school’s “plummeting … rank,” “lack of diversity,” and “escalating costs”; the Board’s “sham election”; and “two policies going on,” namely the openness the Code of Ethics promises and what the Board actually practices.

N.B.: Finally, members of the public broke out with objections to the process, of which I cite only a small sample below. No matter how egregious the accusations or how outraged the objectioner, the answer always was: “Is there anyone else who would like to comment?”

“I do not know if you will even clarify what you will answer, or we are just wasting our time by coming here and giving our comments, and nothing is being done or not even an answer is expected by us. What are we supposed to do? Are we just wasting our time coming here, or is there going to be any response from you guys?” [The room erupted in applause, but the Board merely responded, again: “Is there any other comment?”]

“I do not know what we are doing, wasting two and a half hours, where it is not an exchange. This is not how any business meeting on this planet works, how any efficient business meeting on this planet works. And at nine-thirty, I am really questioning why I am sitting here.”

“I provided comments [on the lack of diversity and escalating costs], and I do not get a response. I keep providing the same comments over and over again, as do many of the community members, and it is like it is going on deaf ears…. I have said multiple times, ‘Does the Board think that diversity is important?’ and it is just completely dismissed. There is no response. You go onto the next subject.”

“Putting aside, Emily, you and I had a conversation last week…. I think what I took away from that conversation was, my opponent lost by a small margin, so the community wanted her, too. I am sorry, elections and Democratic processes do not work like that. They do not work like that in this community, they do not work like that on Main Street in Washington, DC. There is an election. If you lose by one vote, you lose by one vote.”

“It was stated tonight by your counsel that you went back to the New Jersey Board of Ed., and they confirmed everything is correct. That may in fact be the case, but you do not provide that transparency…. Rather than wasting tax dollars and filing OPRA requests, getting your lawyer involved, [can the Board] today with your legal counsel just agree that whatever questions you asked the New Jersey Board of Ed., you will release those questions and the New Jersey Board of Ed.’s response, as far as what you have said, [to prove that] the process you followed is completely ethical?”

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Evelyn Nissirios, an Accused Child Predator, Attempts to Remain on School Board against Fierce…

Evelyn Nissirios, an Accused Child Predator, Attempts to Remain on School Board against Fierce Protests

Child Predators’ Attraction to School Settings Mirrors Family Courts

I received an inquiry regarding Evelyn Nissirios, children’s “guardian ad litem,” who has flaunted “judicial immunity” in order to commit crimes against children with impunity. Often, child predators seek out access through schools, just as they do through Family Courts, and it is important to detect them and to set limits on them, bringing criminal charges where appropriate, in order to keep children safe. Apparently, after losing an election to the School Board, Nissirios took the extraordinary step of inserting herself back onto the Board, and vehement protests ensued. Her drive for power in defiance of all rules and the Board’s protection of her, even at this level of opposition, are mirror reflections of what happens in Family Courts and is ominous for society. Below is my response to being asked about my federal lawsuit against her:

Dear Mr. — :

Thank you for your inquiry.

I am glad that someone is interested in addressing the dangers of Evelyn Nissirios being anywhere near children. As a forensic psychiatrist, I have especially serious concerns about the predatory traits she has shown. She has demonstrated, through her role as guardian ad litem in multiple legal cases, signs of enjoyment in sending crying, screaming children to their abuse while separating them from loving adults. Her attempts to cling to power with respect to the Board of Education are congruent with her apparent, intrinsic joy in her hidden agenda of having power over children. Furthermore, the lack of response, even acknowledgment, of my communications to the Board of Education has further raised concerns for me about how serious the Board is in protecting children. You will see below a series of attempts at communication I made earlier this year.

Also attached are: my letter of concern to Mr. [President of the Board]; an early article on Ms. Nissirios; an affidavit describing the child abuser she assisted; a medical report by a world expert confirming that, by transferring the abused children to the sole custody of their abuser, Ms. Nissirios was engaging in torture; and an unpublished article documenting my interviews of several more of Ms. Nissirios’ victims (unpublished because it relates to criminal charges we are now bringing against her).

For greater context, you can refer to this fact-checked article, which mentions Ms. Nissirios:

https://cafemom.com/parenting/catherine-kassenoff-domestic-abuse-mothers

This article is meant to educate the public on the very dangerous features that Ms. Nissirios exhibits:

https://medium.com/@bandyxlee/guise-of-humanity-bd7500ddd8e7

You have permission to share any of this material with anyone who may be in a position to intervene, including the attachments, as I believe it is important to stop exploiters of children such as Evelyn Nissirios, who are a danger to the most vulnerable members of society, to the community, and to the public at large — and yet are not held accountable because of the judicial power she wields (no doubt also to appoint herself to positions for which she is unqualified).

Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.

N.B.: Below is a small sampling of comments from the recording of a public meeting the inquirer shared with me:

“I am here to express the perceived lack of transparency and the lack of ethical process, in which the previous president’s position on the Board of Education has been filled. As I and many of my fellow [School District] residents see it, the Board of Education trustee members of [School District] have engaged in a series of premeditated or orchestrated actions, in order to manage questions, information flow, or the compilation of the Board. What the ultimate objective of these perceived actions are can be debated, but at a minimum, they impede transparency and thus erode public trust. It is believed that there should have been ample time to run a special election when Mr. [President] resigned his seat. Many residents believe that the resignation announcement was delayed, so that the Board could select their preferred candidate. Thirdly, Ms. Nissirios submitted an application for the vacant spot while she was still a trustee and the results of the election that she ultimately lost were not known. Under the New Jersey Board of Education rules, as I read it, she was not eligible to participate, and thus her candidacy for the vacant spot should not be recognized…. Additionally, the November election voted [Name] as a new member of the Board of Education, which unseated Ms. Nissirios. Simultaneously, [the President’s] resigned seat is now ‘conveniently’ filled by Ms. Nissirios. We have lost trust in the educational track of our children. Furthermore, during the December 6 special meeting, where the Board deliberated on the selection to fill the vacancy in private, it seems Ms. Nissirios ‘conveniently’ resigned her seat, in advance of the rest of us even knowing your decision. That has to be ‘perfect’ timing of events, because you cannot hold two seats at once, and what foresight does she have? Was that part of the advice counsel gave you, before you conducted this process? This action feels premeditated, orchestrated, raising the question of whether the interview process was a complete sham, or just a backup to keep Evelyn in the event she lost the election, which she did.”

“It was appalling to me, because what I heard was, ‘Let’s give her a chance.’ Well, the chance was given: it was a three-year term. I believe the full term was completed…. I do believe that there needs to be an incredible degree of accountability that needs to be induced into this Board. That was the basis of me running, and that is why I am here speaking, not necessarily against you guys as a collective whole but against this particular decision, which does not sit with me…. It is concerning to me that this Board continues to stick with the same, and it does feel like it is friends helping friends.”

“If I had known, coming in, the applicants, I just feel like, maybe it was a little bit of an unfair chance for others, because it is an election, we do vote…. Listen, I have nothing against Evelyn…. I just feel like, she had her chance.”

“Every year you agree to [the School Board] Code of Ethics, where you all agreed that you will vote to appoint the best qualified person available, and that you will refuse to surrender any independent judgment or use anything for the gain of threat. When I look at all the candidates,… I really do not care who it is. I just expect the best, 100 percent. When I look at one of the candidates, which is Dr. [Name], I see somebody who comes in as an Eagle Scout, an Iraqi War veteran, an Ivy League dental degree, an Ivy League master’s degree, an MBA, sits on the board of governors of a college, funds six separate educational endowments, mentors students at Bergen County Academy, is a keynote speaker in local high schools on the danger of fentanyl, has eight children that attended [District School], has a multiracial family, and has a special needs child and is exceptionally versed in that critical part of the educational paradigm. So, I am wondering, what was more qualified, from an independent perspective, about [Evelyn Nissirios]?”

“We are a democracy. I get defeated, I should take a rest. I can come back at some stage, but let the new blood come. Let a new beginning happen, because people have spoken. We do not live in a Banana Republic. I am a law professor, and I teach legal ethics, and some of you are lawyers…. One principle that has been taught to us, whether we practice or not, is … our commitment to ethics, our commitment to the Constitution, our commitment to the processes of democracy…. I close by making a plea to Evelyn, that she please step aside.”

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

Dangerous Personalities Buttress One Another in a New Jersey Family Court

[Murder cases are disproportionately connected to Family Courts, and yet because of extreme secrecy, this connection is seldom detected, let alone accurately depicted (also, what is unknown about Family Courts is that judges can interfere with law enforcement and unduly pressure the press). An independent investigation into a shocking number of murders 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 as litigants cry, and a reprehensible subculture of depraved delight in further victimizing victims of domestic violence. Details will follow once the evidence submission is complete.]

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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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