Bandy X. Lee's Blog, page 2

PRESS RELEASE — MOUNTING NATIONAL OUTRAGE OVER JUDICIAL MISCONDUCT BY JUDGE JANE GALLINA-MECCA

PRESS RELEASE — MOUNTING NATIONAL OUTRAGE OVER JUDICIAL MISCONDUCT BY JUDGE JANE GALLINA-MECCA

Critical Evidence Barred from the Judge’s Courtroom at AlanTChan.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Summary Video: The Unconscionable and Intolerable Story of What has been Done to Patricia Lee and Her Children

BERGEN COUNTY, NJ — Thousands of citizens nationwide are following the unfolding crisis surrounding Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca, widely described by advocates as one of the most abusive and corrupt judges currently on the bench. Her record has sparked outrage for consistent patterns of serious judicial abuse, ethical misconduct, and repeated disregard for constitutional rights.

One of the most urgent cases is that of Patricia Lee, her children, and her sister Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a world-renowned forensic psychiatrist. Despite years of efforts to protect her family, Patricia Lee has been trapped in a system that methodically denies her due process. Judge Gallina-Mecca holds secret hearings in Patricia Lee’s absence, withholds audio recordings and transcripts from her, and even fails to notify her of life-changing decisions made about her in her absence. These include her custody, divorce, and eviction trials, and most recently the hearing that authorized her removal by force.

These actions have produced catastrophic results: Patricia Lee’s abusive ex-husband, a violent criminal and twice-federally-adjudicated financial fraudster, has been awarded sole custody, child support, all marital assets, his legal fees, the marital home, and even control of Patricia Lee’s life insurance policy. Eviction from her residence of 10 years is now imminent — despite medical evidence that displacement could be life-threatening.

This case illustrates a broader pattern of judicial misconduct that has devastated countless families across New Jersey. Public demand for accountability is rising sharply, with more than 3,000 petitioners calling for Judge Gallina-Mecca’s impeachment.

Dr. Lee has most recently testified before legislatures in Arizona and Idaho, warning of the dangers of unchecked judicial authority and its devastating impact on children, families, and public trust in our justice system. Judge Gallina-Mecca has responded by attempting to silence her under threat of contempt, fines, and imprisonment — flagrantly violating core First Amendment protections.

Resources:
· Arizona Testimony of Dr. Lee
· Idaho Testimony of Dr. Lee
· ImpeachMecca.org
· AlanTChan.com

Only public outcry can save Patricia Lee and her children from her murderously violent, extremely abusive, and diagnosed psychopathic former husband, whom Judge Gallina-Mecca is protecting and enriching. For this reason, a special website detailing his dangerousness and publicizing the evidence that was barred from Judge Gallina-Mecca’s courtroom, as well as more reasons for the impeachment of a blatantly corrupt judge who has caused immense harm, has been set up at AlanTChan.com.

Media Contact:
Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div.
BandyLee.com
Phone: 917–328–2492
Email: bandy@bandylee.com

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Protective Order Abuses beyond the Pale

A Case Even Worse than That of Evelyn Nissirios

BREAKING: NYPD Detective Wilkinson Caught on Tape Admitting to Obstruction of Justice: “I Get Whatever I Want” From Judges Because of DA McMahon

The recording that rocked Staten Island: A detective admits the DA’s name is a golden ticket for felony charges — no due process needed.

July 30, 2025

By Frank Parlato

Detective John Wilkinson claims to carry the Richmond County judges in his pocket like so many nickels and dimes.

A Recording the DA May Not Want You to Hear

On July 21, 2025, NYPD Detective John Wilkinson spoke with attorney Lawrence Almagno. The conversation lasted three minutes.

But it exposed a rigged and illegal warrant operation tied to Staten Island District Attorney Michael McMahon.

It will be trouble for somebody — and likely not the target of the warrant.

In a recorded call, Det. Wilkinson tells the attorney that he is the case detective for a criminal contempt charge against journalist Richard Luthmann.

The complaining witness?

“It’s the Staten Island DA,” Wilkinson says.

“McMahon?,” Almagno replies.

“Yep,” Wilkinson confirms.

Then Wilkinson drops the line that changes everything.

“With the victim who it is… I get whatever I want.”

He means he will get what he wants from a judge. He means he will get the warrant signed no matter how false it is.

DA McMahon swore out a warrant as a victim claiming he was scared for his safety/life and that Luthmann was a “stranger” to him.

Both are likely perjury and the latter claim provably so.

Det. Wilkinson continues, “I ask for X, I get it. I ask for Z, I get it.”

Audio Player

What was X or Z ? A felony arrest warrant. And the use of U.S. Marshals to extradite Luthmann from Florida. Over what?

Luthmann sent McMahon, along with 33,000 other subscribers an automatically generated newsletter. It went to McMahon’s public email address. The email did not mention McMahon. It was written by Dr. Bandy Lee about a New Jersey judge. It contained no threats.

There is an unsubscribe button on the email, if McMahon wanted to get no more emails.

Instead McMahon, a long time political adversary Luthmann’s, said he was afraid for his life/safety.

This is not just a clown show. An innocent man’s liberty is at stake. This is classic racketeering led by McMahon with co-conspirator Wilkinson.

These two men must be insane to think they can get away with this — and bootstrap the US Marshalls into this — making it a federal racketerring case.

The Email That Triggered a Felony Warrant

On July 13, 2025, Luthmann’s Substack newsletter — This is For Real — sent out a post authored by psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee. The article discussed political psychology and mental health in public officials. It didn’t mention McMahon. It contained no threats.

Still, McMahon filed a criminal complaint, claiming he feared for his safety/life.

Luthmann NYPD Report 1

Luthmann NYPD Report 2

Luthmann NYPD Report 3

Staten Island District Attorney Michael E McMahon and NYS Attorney General Letitia James She may be called on to investigate him before this is over

Substack records show he had voluntarily subscribed to, read, and clicked on links in the newsletter for weeks. And yet he used the arrival of a singular email in his inbox at 10:51 am on a Sunday morning as a pretext for a criminal case. But he waited 24 hours before making the complaint — despite his claim he feared for his safety/life.

Wilkinson made clear the charge would be elevated. “Criminal contempt is charged as a felony,” he told Almagno. He acknowledged that contempt isn’t always a felony, but said plainly, “We, PD is gonna charge the felony.”

We know who Wilkinson is taking orders from.

We will know his station in life may change if he is charged with racketeering. He will be taking orders from someone other than McMahon and it may be within the gates of the US Bureau of Prisons.

This is serious felony conduct and Wilkinson has admitted it on tape.

He says he controls the judges in Richmond County- he and/or McMahon.

There are other troubling issues with this warrant. There is no evidence that Luthmann was ever served with an order of protection. No hearing. No notice. Just a claim and a detective ready to “do my thing.”

When Wilkinson executes this warrant, he signs a warrant on himself and McMahon.

This is hardly a joke.

The Fix Was In from the Start

Wilkinson also revealed that a special prosecutor would be assigned after the arrest. “There will be. Of course. We know that,” Wilkinson said, brushing off the procedural order of operations.

He offered to delay a few days before obtaining the warrant, but reiterated that the wheels were already turning. “It was going to be this week… I was going to get an arrest warrant and do my thing.”

The timing is telling. McMahon is under fire from Luthmann and others for past corruption, including Special Narcotics Part N court manipulation of criminal warrants and ties to political insiders. Prosecuting Luthmann would silence a critic and send a message to others. It worked before in 2018.

Staten Island Judge Charles Troia

If a warrant was signed against you in 2017 or 2018 by Staten Island Judge Charles Troia Chances are your civil rights were violated

This isn’t just a rogue detective making a loose comment. Detective Wilkinson brags he can “ensure” a judge signs his warrant. He’s not describing a lawful process. He’s describing a setup. The whole point of the Fourth Amendment is to stop law enforcement from acting like judge, jury, and executioner.

Wilkinson cut out the middleman — the neutral magistrate — and replaced it with a rubber stamp he claims to control.

Either Wilkinson lied — which is bad — or he told the truth, which is worse. If he can guarantee a warrant gets signed, we’re looking at collusion, institutional rot, and a mockery of due process. That warrant isn’t legal.

It’s a blueprint for obstruction of justice, civil rights violations, and fraud on the court. And if no one investigates it, then the rot isn’t just Wilkinson — it’s the whole system that lets him talk like that and still carry a badge.

Staten Island’s Justice System on Trial

The bigger question is how far this rot goes. Wilkinson made no secret that the fix was in: judges would comply, warrants would be issued, and the case would go forward, regardless of merit.

That places the Staten Island judiciary in the crosshairs, especially administrative Judge Raymond Rodriguez. In filed court documents, Luthmann accused Rodriguez of being too close to McMahon and of rubber-stamping politically motivated prosecutions. Rodriguez hasn’t recused himself.

Judge Judith McMahon (the DA’s wife) with her “friend of three decades,” Administrative Judge Raymond Rodriguez

Judge Judith McMahon the DAs wife with her friend of three decades Administrative Judge Raymond Rodriguez

The recording, now submitted to NYPD Internal Affairs and the NYC Department of Investigation, may be the first domino. If Wilkinson’s statements are true, Staten Island’s Warrant Squad operates more like a political enforcement unit than a law enforcement agency.

“If this can happen to me,” Luthmann said, “it can happen to anyone who criticizes the McMahons or their allies.”

A felony arrest over an email newsletter? A case built on an unsubscribed public document? And a detective who thinks the DA’s name is a blank check?

Thanks to a recording that was never meant to be public, we know how it works.

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Testimony to the Idaho Legislature, Part 2

My Rebuttal to “Criticisms” that Consist of Typical Tropes Used to Enable Family Court Violence

When I first became aware of Family Court atrocities, I wondered how it was possible that such widespread violence of such magnitude could be so understated, in either academic or activist circles. I soon learned that, since Family Courts and their ancillary “beneficiaries” are fiercely protecting illegitimate profits, they will pursue, persecute, and attempt to eliminate anyone with any potential to expose them. This includes trying to discredit and defame me. I was offered an opportunity to rebut a criticism of me presented to the Idaho legislature, which I did briefly in my letter, below, with more extensive annotations against the original letter, far below:

Dear Honorable Members of the 2025 Idaho Child Custody and Domestic Relations Task Force:

I have been most grateful for your responsiveness to the troubling and obviously pervasive pattern of rampant Family Court abuses, which have risen to the level of a national emergency.

Ordinarily, I do not respond directly to criticisms of my work or testimony, but I will do so in Dr. Y.A.’s case, not specifically but as illustrative of a deep-seated culture and pattern that mimics domestic violence and abuse, of which I have claimed Family Courts are an “industry”.

First, the defensiveness, the sheer length of argument, and the ad hominem attacks should reveal that it is not a typical scholarly response. The attempt to overwhelm the opposition with false information, to attack the credibility of messengers (namely, truth tellers), and to project one’s own behavior onto others is rather behavior commonly seen with abusers. Family Court defenders should know that gaslighting, coercion, intimidation, and diversionary tactics when their “optics” are threatened is not a valid way to do “science”.

I did not start out with Family Court reform. My area of expertise is general violence prevention, using a public health approach, and I have spent most of my career in criminal justice reform. I have authored over 100 scientific articles and chapters, in publications as prestigious as the Annals of the New York Academy of Science. I am a scholar, practitioner, and policy advisor — but above all an outraged human being. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that there is something very wrong in the Family Court world that shocks the conscience. I therefore speak directly to the human rights violations, child murders, loving parents’ suicides, and the coverup of what is essentially a child slave auction that is going on in the so-called “Family Courts.”

My personal glimpse into the practices, through my own sister’s divorce in Bergen County, New Jersey, was essential, because of the tightly-guarded secrecy of the Family Courts. If not, there would not have been a way for me to know: Family Courts use their insider knowledge to “fix” their cases and to create a semblance of following evidence, when bias, conflicts of interest, and incestuous selection of “experts” and the creation of nonexistent “science” is endemic practice. “Parental alienation syndrome” has been discredited repeatedly over four decades but continues to have a life of its own because of Family Court demand.

If I had to explain what “parental alienation” theory is, I would define it as a reinterpretation of existing, well-established science to assert the opposite. It serves the purpose of denying real child abuse and buttressing the perpetrator’s wishful thinking that he (or she) is the victim and not the offender. But this is criminal psychopathology, which should be treated as such and contained, not encouraged and “serviced”, as in Family Court, for up to 175 billion dollars in profit per year.

This is the reason I rely on death statistics. Family Courts aggressively guard their secrecy so that scientifically-rigorous outcome studies and investigative reporting are virtually impossible, but the sheer number of deaths that they produce, or the conditions ripe for murders and suicides that they coerce, make it obvious for anyone who cares to look.

I deliberately avoid using well-worn language, so that people can have a fresh look without the filters, but the data I am speaking to are from well-known, credible sources. I also wish to state that it is typical for Family Court proponents to attack the United Nations special rapporteur, the Center for Judicial Excellence, and the Leadership Council, but these are tremendous sources of excellent scholarship, admirable raw data collection against the odds, and a clearinghouse for existing scientific research, respectively. The reason why Justice USA started a comprehensive survey in all fifty U.S. states, and invited me to analyze the data, is because of the paucity of research that is available from the secretive Family Courts.

They also obstruct: the attacks against scholars, counter-reports to discredit influential reports, and generation of noise, presenting pseudoscience for obfuscation, is not science. It is much like the attacks against journalists that have occurred, such as Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca of New Jersey, who has also been written up in the Washington Post for ordering news outlets to “unpublish immediately” fact-checked articles that expose inconvenient truths.

I am disturbed that there is not just a cottage industry of poorly-trained “experts” favored by Family Courts, but now a seeming industry of so-called “scholars” who churn out publications but on close scrutiny do not hold up to scientific standards at all. For this, I would simply say: follow the money.

In summary, Family Courts have been enormously harmful to society, and I maintain that the corrupt culture it engenders is not conducive to reform from within, which has been tried for decades without success.

Respectfully submitted,

Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div.

—

Here is my more detailed rebuttal, in annotations:

To the honorable members of the 2025 Idaho Child Custody and Domestic Relations Task Force:

My name is Yaakov Aichenbaum. I have coauthored three scholarly works concerning misinformation about parental alienation and I have consulted and provided testimony on this topic in many states, the United States Mission to the UN Human Rights Council, the British House of Lords and more. I commend your committee’s charge to improve the family court system. It should be evident that meaningful change should only be based upon scientific and substantiated factual information and not upon unsubstantiated anecdotal accounts and emotional appeals that ignore solid science.

Unfortunately, many advocates in the domestic violence community (even those with robust credentials) have created a false narrative to promote legislative change and these advocates engage in a science denial campaign to advance their agenda. Likewise, some litigants whose cases were not decided in their favor assume the title of “protective parent” and place unjustified blame on the family court system.

Anecdotal claims and scholarly citations need to be vetted for their validity.

This esteemed committee heard the testimony of Ms. Bandy Lee at the June 7th hearing. Ms. Lee presented an extensive list of qualifications and accomplishments and she emotionally described her own personal experiences in family courts. Based upon similar representations in AZ, AZ Senator Finchem expressed his approval of her testimony and granted Ms. Lee a considerable extended time when she similarly testified at the AZ hearing. However, if we scrutinize Ms. Lee’s testimony, we will see that her testimony contained considerable misinformation and disinformation. In fact, Ms. Lee is very much part of the aforementioned science denial campaign.

First, it should be noted that even though Ms. Lee certainly has considerable experience with domestic violence victims, her accomplishments do not indicate that she has knowledge or qualifications to render scientific opinions about shared parenting research, parental alienation, and parent child conflict issues. In fact, the questionable sources she cites indicate that she is not proficient in these issues.

Nevertheless, she (like Senator Finchem) declared that parental alienation is a pseudoscience that has been rejected by the scientific community. Lee fails to mention that:

· The 2022 American Psychological Association’s Guidelines for Custody Evaluations in Family Law Proceedings (https://www.apa.org/about/policy/child-custody-evaluations.pdf) mentions over 20 times the importance of addressing alienation. It also mentions the importance of input from experts from diverse areas of specialties and the importance of differentiating between valid and false allegations of all types.

· Kaplan and Sadock’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, Tenth Edition, discusses parental alienation as a form of child maltreatment on page 3829.

· The AFCC and NCJFCJ issued a Joint Statement on Parent-Child Contact Problems in 2022 which says that parental alienation and false allegations are factors that should be taken into consideration in custody decisions (https://www.afccnet.org/Resource-Center/Center-for-

Excellence-in-Family-Court-Practice/afcc-and-ncjfcj-joint-statement-on-parent-child-contact- problems).

·

Authors of the DSM-5 chapter on “Other Conditions” explain that prenatal alienation is included in the DSM-5 under the diagnosis of Child Affected by Parental Relationship Distress (code V61.29). (https://www.jaacap.org/article/S0890-8567(16)30175-7/fulltext)

· A study found that the concept of PA was found to be material, probative, relevant and admissible in at least 1181 US appellate court cases between 1985 and 2018 (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-3...).

Certain domestic violence advocates have engaged in a science denial campaign to discredit parental alienation science. They claim that parental alienation is a deception that abusive fathers use to deflect domestic violence allegations. They call parental alienation junk science. Kayden’s Law was written with this intent and it is designed to prevent any possibility of parental alienation claims being admissible in court. Unfortunately, people sometimes make false allegations of alienation just like they sometimes make false allegations of domestic violence. Instead of collaborating to address all forms of abuse and developing protocols to identify false allegations of all kinds, certain domestic violence advocates have chosen to try to discredit the whole science of alienation. Regrettably, as the science of alienation has developed, the science denial tactics of these critics have increased.

Kayden’s Law is being promoted by advocates who have a long history of denying established science and misleading policymakers. They will no doubt tell you about a study from George Washington University and other “research” that shows that parental alienation is pseudoscience and is misused in court. They will not, however, share with you the weakness and/or outright fraud of these studies. This is documented in The Illusory Correlation Between Parental Alienation and Other Forms of Family Violence (Varavei & Harman, 2024. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijsw.12692).

I was part of an international team of researchers and clinicians that wrote three books which expose the vast misinformation and public policy deception that is espoused by many of the stakeholders who are promoting Kayden’s Law across the country, including Idaho. To date, the perpetrators of this misinformation have offered no rebuttal other than more ad hominem attacks and further science denial tactics. The books are available at:

· Child Safety First Report: https://bit.ly/3t5VuYx (Lee referenced this study from the Center for Judicial Excellence in her testimony)

· Challenging Parental Alienation: https://bit.ly/3NnYMgp

· Report of UN Special Rapporteur on parental alienation: https://bit.ly/3GHbgMG

Ms. Lee mentioned the Report of UN Special Rapporteur on parental alienation in her testimony. However, she failed to mention that this report is not the official policy of the UN Human Rights Council; rather, it was an unscientific report that was presented to the HRC and was subsequently critiqued for its many flaws at the link above.

Ms. Lee’s testimony was more benign in her Idaho testimony than in other states. In AZ she also accused the AFCC (the most prestigious US organization of judges, attorneys, mental health providers and more)

of being in collusion to highjack the family court system for monetary benefits. This science denial tactic conspiracy theory is preposterous and an afront to the many dedicated judges and other professionals who work in this very difficult field.

In AZ, Ms. Lee related that she is almost always excluded from providing testimony in family courts (see https://bandyxlee.medium.com/testimony-to-the-arizona-senate-de6013ea7be2 ). She opines the reason for this is the corruption of the family courts and their intransigence to permit Ms. Lee to expose this corruption. Ms. Lee does not entertain the possibility that her testimony is excluded because she lacks the necessary credentials to be an expert witness on areas of parental alienation, child custody and shared parenting and that she is outspoken in her misinformation as we will shortly see.

In Idaho, Lee cited various dubius studies and far-fetched facts:

Lee stated that if child abuse is alleged or suspected, custody is transferred, sometimes immediately, to the abuser (Silberg and Dallam, 2019). According to some studies, this happens up to three-quarters of the time (Leadership Council, 2023), but in my experience it has happened 98 percent of the time.

Silberg’s study is a very weak and controversial study. The Leadership Council is an advocacy group and does not conduct peer reviewed research that is reliable. It is also preposterous to think that when there is a concern of child abuse that in 98% of cases custody is transferred to the abuser.

Lee also cites Project Justice USA, which is a grassroots advocacy group that conducted an unscientific survey that is fraught with many biases, contradictions, and unscientific practices.

In other states Lee testified that:

A vast majority of contested custody cases are actually domestic violence cases involving the most dangerous individuals.

FACTCHECK: This is widely claimed by the DV community, but I know of no source for the claim. Advocate (and author of Kayden’s Law) Danielle Pollack frequently quotes this in her testimony from {(Jaffe, P., Zerwer & Poisson, Access Denied: The Barriers of Violence & Poverty for Abused Women and their Children After Separation (citing four studies, all of which found 70–75% of cases in litigation involved allegations of domestic violence)}, but this source does not mention this at all!

· Many fathers involved in contested custody cases kill their children, such that almost 20% of the nation’s child murders by parent have been the result of placement by the family courts (Center for Judicial Excellence, 2022).

FACTCHECK: The data from the Center for Judicial Excellence was not computed in a scientific manner. It has been greatly criticized in Child Safety First Report: https://bit.ly/3t5VuYx. This statement also demonstrates the logical fallacy known as baseline neglect.

· 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).

FACTCHECK: This figure was not based upon any empirical research. It was released by Silberg in a press release and has no factual basis. Its flaws are discussed in Child Safety First Report: https://bit.ly/3t5VuYx.

· In a disproportionate number of cases, the “protective parent” — usually the primary attachment figure for the children — loses custody.

FACTCHECK: This is based upon a study by advocate Joan Meier. This study has been widely criticized for research fraud and has failed replication at least three times.

A careful reading will demonstrate that Ms. Lee’s testimony (like that of many other advocates in the domestic violence community are presenting to legislatures) is fraught with science denial tactics such as attributing nefarious intent, conspiracy theories, slippery slope arguments, logical fallacies and more. I urge this committee to carefully scrutinize advocates like Ms. Lee and not take their word as gospel just because they have impressive credentials.

Family courts do need reform, better evidence-based practices and training. In our rush to improve the system, we must nevertheless be careful not to take rash and unjustified actions that accepts science denial tactics and lets emotional appeals override fact checking. Without careful deliberation and consideration of all expert opinions, Idaho children will be harmed in our efforts to protect them.

Yours,

Yaakov Aichenbaum Baltimore, MD

info@childsafetyfirstreport.com

https://www.childsafetyfirstreport.com/

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‘Molested by My Father, the Chief of Police’ — And Family Court Kept Her There

‘Molested by My Father, the Chief of Police’ — And Family Court Kept Her There

Child Sex Trafficking, Satanic Rituals, and the Depths of Human Depravity — All are Found in the Family Courts

Earlier this year, an explosive interview by the above title shook the Family Court world. Instead of rescuing children from abuse, Family Courts typically tie the protective parents’ (usually the mothers’) hands, force the children to be kept with their abusers, and help abusers cover up their abuse. This is what happens to almost 100,000 new children per year, year after year, resulting in immense injury and harm. The details of this case vividly illustrate why the public remains in the dark about the most unspeakable forms of child torture and child trafficking; why survivors can hardly speak about what has happened to them for decades, if not for life; and how Family Courts take advantage of the utter unbelievability of the atrocities they facilitate. Therefore, when an incredibly brave young voice arises so credibly and so compellingly as Courtney Tamagny, we must, as a society, believe and respond — for the odds she has overcome to come forward are immeasurable (not only is it psychologically hard, Family Courts aggressively threaten and destroy witnesses and whistleblowers, such that it is terrifying to do so). Yet, absolute secrecy and absolute impunity are what enable these utterly dark worlds of child exploitation to flourish. This is why breaking the silence is so important.

Daughter of NJ police chief accuses him, others of ‘ritualistic’ abuse, years of sexual assault: court docs

By Priscilla DeGregory and Alex Oliveira

Published July 10, 2025

The daughter of a New Jersey police chief claims he repeatedly raped her for more than a decade as part of a “ritualistic” cult allegedly involving their neighbors, according to a shocking lawsuit she filed.

Courtney Tamagny’s allegations against Leonia Police Chief Scott Tamagny, his neighbor Kevin Slevin and others have starkly divided the small Bergen County borough. Both men say that the claims were thoroughly investigated as high as the federal government and determined to be unfounded.

Slevin has even countersued Courtney for defamation.

But Courtney has taken her claims public — appearing on podcasts and social media to describe the alleged sex abuse in detail, and sparking a Change.org petition to suspend her top cop dad.

The 20-year-old claims her father and Slevin heinously abused her in their home, alongside “ritualistic” worshippers in the woods near their house — and that the father allegedly threatened to murder her mother if she ever spoke up, according to court docs.

“[Courtney was brought] into the woods in Rockland County New York, and there was what appeared to be other middle-aged men present with masks on their faces,” the lawsuit claimed. “She recalls there being fire and animals being burned, and they would chant as if ritualistic.”

“She was sexually assaulted in those woods by defendant Slevin, defendant father, and some of the other men present,” it further claimed.

The alleged abuse began in 2009 when Courtney was around 4 years old, with the lawsuit claiming it continued until 2020, when she was 15.

Both of Courtney’s sisters were also allegedly subjected to abuse, according to the lawsuit, with their father allegedly using drugs to sedate them before assaulting them when their mother was either away or asleep with earplugs in a downstairs bedroom.

The mother, Jeanne Tamagny, joined Courtney as a plaintiff on the lawsuit and is in the process of divorcing her husband.

Courtney also claims she suppressed memories of the abuse for years as a survival tactic, and that she only began recalling them after a visit to a doctor for genital pain.

The doctor asked her if she had been sexually abused, which brought back flashbacks, the suit claims.

Her therapist eventually reported the abuse to authorities in 2022, the court papers say.

She described those alleged memories in detail on the podcast “We’re All Insane” in April, claiming that generations of her father’s “bloodline” had been in a satanic cult alongside numerous neighbors in their North Jersey town — and that they ritualistically raped her and her siblings, and even allegedly trafficked children and burned them alive in their local woods.

Courtney claimed on the podcast that the neighborhood cultists had “tunnels” they would use to covertly operate their rituals, which allegedly included “taking kids’ blood,” “drum circles” and “burnings” that would last all night.

Courtney appeared on the podcast “We’re All Insane” and claimed a North Jersey cult was abusing trafficked children

“Burnings of animals, animal skins, humans as well,” she said on the show, claiming that much of the alleged violence was intended to terrify victims into silence.

“What scared us the most is ‘OK, we’re doing this to these people we’ve trafficked, why wouldn’t we do this to you? Because we just did that to this young girl or this young boy,’” she continued to relay on the episode, adding that the alleged cult was part of a national cabal of satanists engaged in child trafficking.

Other alleged cult activities she outlined on the podcast included sick “games” that always ended with kids being assaulted.

“We would go into the woods, and we would play ‘games’ which were not games,” she claimed on the show, describing something supposedly called “Hunter and Gatherers” where upward of 10 kids were released into the woods and allowed to hide — and then cult members would allegedly chase them down, incapacitate them and assault them.

“They made it as if it was a game and you could win,” she claimed on the show. “You weren’t going to win, you were always going to be hit, they just wanted you to look terrified and run.”

Courtney also claimed on the podcast that her father used his position in local law enforcement to trap her in a world of abuse, and that anytime she reached out for help, she was rebuffed.

In addition to suing her father and Slevin, Courtney also named the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office, the State of New Jersey, various state child protective services and others.

Chief Tamagny and Slevin have both vehemently denied the claims.

“It’s made up out of whole cloth,” Slevin’s attorney, Kevin Corriston, told The Post. “This entire complaint was previously investigated by everybody from Homeland Security, to the Attorney General’s Office in New Jersey, to the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office, and they found no basis at all for these outrageous allegations.

“Having got no satisfaction from law enforcement, she now decided to sue all the people who were involved in the investigation,” Corriston continued.

“These claims are on their face unbelievable. There is no way in the world that there was some sort of secret satanic child sex cult operating out of Riverdale, New Jersey. This is a fantasy made up in her mind,” he said, adding that Courtney’s allegations are “remarkably similar” to the plots in several books and movies in particular.

Slevin’s countersuit accuses Courtney of defamation, claiming her allegations have left him “exposed to public ridicule and held in disrepute,” and “extreme embarrassment and humiliation and severe mental distress.”

Chief Tamagny’s attorney shared similar sentiments, calling the allegations “completely false and defamatory.”

*Please help us to impeach Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca  — a judge involved in the above case. You can find more information at: ImpeachMecca.org . A full-page advertisement ran in a Bergen County, NJ, local newspaper, as below — and more are forthcoming!

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Testimony to the Idaho Legislature

By Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div., for the Child Custody and Domestic Relations Task Force

*Idaho is the first of a half-dozen states that will duplicate Arizona’s groundbreaking hearings, whieh are rippling through the nation. The video recording of Dr. Lee’s and Ariz. Sen. Mark Finchem’s testimonies is far below.

My name is Bandy Lee, and I am from New York City. I am a forensic psychiatrist and violence expert. I have 25 years of experience serving as an expert witness in approximately 200 criminal and civil court cases around the country, of which about 50 were in family courts across 22 states. I am also president of the World Mental Health Coalition and cofounder of the Violence Prevention Institute. I was a research fellow of the National Institute of Mental Health, and taught at Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School for 17 years before joining the Harvard Program in Psychiatry and the Law in 2021. In 2002, I helped the World Health Organization launch its landmark publication, The World Report on Violence and Health. In 2007, I helped coauthor the United Nations Secretary-General’s chapter on “Violence against Children.” I am a recipient of the National Research Service Award and author of the textbook, Violence (Lee, 2019), as well as of over 100 scientific articles and chapters on violence prevention. For clinical practice, I work in maximum-security prisons and specialize in treating violent offenders. I have worked with multiple city and state governments, as well as the U.S. Senate, on criminal justice reform and on implementing alternatives to solitary confinement. On family courts, I have testified before the legislatures of Arizona, Colorado, New York, Louisiana, Tennessee, Washington, and I am now very pleased to be in Idaho.

When I became aware of the situation in family courts, I had had two decades of serving as an expert witness in criminal and civil courts. I may never have learned about family courts but for my sister’s divorce in Bergen County, New Jersey, under a judge who is currently being referred for impeachment (M. B., 2024). Family courts, as a rule, operate under strict secrecy and do not like qualified experts — especially those who are independent. Therefore, I had no previous experience that could have prepared me for the family courts.

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 is the application more arbitrary, unjust, and unnecessary.

Family court judges were granted almost unlimited discretion with the law so that they might exercise benevolence (Spinak, 2023). However, without transparency and accountability, they have become some of the most powerful members of society exploiting the most vulnerable and powerless — and their courtrooms have become veritable centers of human rights violations (Silverman et al., 2004). Much like the prison system, which is another secret institution that conducts its affairs behind concrete walls with little oversight, brutality and violence flourish in the family court system behind court seals and judicial immunity (Stengel, 2011). Indeed, the combination of near-unlimited discretion behind closed doors and immunity are a deadly mix.

It must be noted how prevalent family violence is: 1 in 2.5 women and 1in 4 men experience physical violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime (Leemis et al., 2022). 1 in 4 children experience child physical abuse or neglect in their lifetime (Brown et al., 2023). Over half of female homicide victims are killed by a current or former male intimate partner (Jack et al., 2018), and more children die at the hands of their parents than any other relationship (Stöckl et al., 2017). It is therefore unsurprising that a vast majority of contested custody cases are actually family violence cases involving some of the most dangerous individuals in society. To deny — or worse, to exploit — family violence for profit can therefore be very dangerous.

In 1997, it was found that abusive fathers are more than twice as likely to fight for exclusive custody of their children than non-abusive fathers (Smith and Coukos, 1997), but the numbers are likely much higher now. Once granted custody, many go on to kill under family court “support” (Bartlow, 2017; Goldstein, 2013), such that almost 1 in 8 of the nation’s child murders by parent could be reduced if family courts had no role (Center for Judicial Excellence, 2025; Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2025). The problem has been worsening over time, although the exact numbers cannot be known, as routine record concealment makes it virtually impossible to track the true number of child murders family courts facilitate (Friedman, 2019). For every child murder, there are at least as many child suicides, and for every death hundreds of children are injured to the point of needing medical care.

Family courts label these cases as “high conflict,” but the actual situation is usually one-sided (Meier, 2023), with a criminally violent party using this “alternative” court system not only to escape prosecution but to “frame” the innocent victim (Summers, 2023). Indeed, by circumventing due process and placing the force of the law behind family violence, family courts have become centers where violent criminals can “DARVO” (“deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender”) (Freyd, 1997).

How does this happen? First, if child abuse is alleged or suspected, custody is transferred, sometimes immediately, to the abuser (Silberg and Dallam, 2019). According to some studies, this happens up to three-quarters of the time (Leadership Council, 2023), but in my experience it has happened 98 percent of the time. I will use my sister as an example, but the methods are astonishingly consistent across the country (Project Justice USA, 2025). My sister was on her authorized weekend to be with her children, and suddenly five policemen raided her and seized her children, based on a court order that was issued without warning or due process. She was not even given a reason for the first two years — and, now, four years later, she has still not seen or heard from them.

When she learned from academic and pediatric reports that they were missing almost half of school and ceased to grow even one inch in four years — which is extreme failure to thrive — she was rather barred from her constitutional right to their records. In her case, she did not even report child abuse. The children simply kicked, screamed, and tried to commit suicide rather than go to their father, who almost killed each of them by head injury. Yet, he now has sole, exclusive custody, and no prior adult who cared for them can have access to them. Once family court is involved, Child Protective Services must fall in line (Fonta and Maguire-Jack, 2015), the state registry is often blocked (or the number of professionals making reports does not matter), and police officers must follow orders (officers are often puzzled as to why they were dispatched in large numbers to an unarmed, loving mother simply parenting her children, as in the above case, at the same time as being ordered not to intervene in some of the most clear-cut cases involving evidence of egregious abuse; mental health professionals, also as front-line mandated reporters, encounter the same dilemma).

As shocking as my sister’s case sounds, it still counts among the milder ones I have seen, while serving as an expert witness in approximately 50 family court cases, evaluating all family members, and examining all the evidence. The effort it takes to get a child to the right parent is often insurmountable — in that almost no amount of evidence is enough, and no number of professionals warning is enough. Many loving parents are also professionally and financially ruined, charged exorbitant fees for evaluations, therapy, and supervised visits — and almost nothing gets their children back (Bassi et al., 2025). And when they cannot pay the “child support” and their abuser’s legal fees, they can be incarcerated (Cozzolino, 2018).

Transferring custody thus allows the perpetrator to conceal his abuse, as well as to achieve the goal of “tangential spouse abuse,” that is, abusing the children to torture the spouse (Stark, 2023). In my sister’s case, she experienced ten near-death episodes from stress, and went from superior functioning as a former high-level government executive to requiring round-the-clock, 24-hour care after an intensive care unit admission.

I have seen courts and court appointees seek out “pseudo-concepts” (United Nations, 2023) to try to justify these abrupt custody transfers, and this is where “parental alienation” and “reunification” come in (Meier, 2020). Family courts have essentially produced opportunities for an entire industry of theories and methods unheard of outside of family court (Saunders et al., 2011). Reunification camps can charge up to $40,000 for five days in a run-down motel (Hansen, 2022), and I have personally seen a master’s-level, so-called “expert” charge $500,000 for a fraudulent report, labeling the healthy, loving parent “mentally ill,” after just 15 minutes of interview, and then permanently removing the child on that basis — a widespread practice (Emery et al., 2005).

When there is child abuse, the most critical mitigating factor is the loving, protective parent (Cicchetti and Toth, 2005), but contact with that parent is often severed for many years if not for one’s entire childhood. The oxymoronic “reunification therapy” — usually done with an actively abusive parent — is contraindicated in regular mental health practice. These family court-confined practices maximize harm and not only embolden existing perpetrators but generate new ones, since roughly one-third of victimized children move on to become victimizers themselves (Kaufman and Zigler, 1987).

The public is unaware of this epidemic of violence occurring through the family courts, because judges threaten reporters and journalists to control their coverage. When a major magazine published an interview with me, the judge in my sister’s case issued an order for them immediately to “unpublish” the fact-checked article. When their legal department sternly rebuked her for violating the First Amendment, she rather returned to her drawing board and issued a second order! It turned out that even the Washington Post had shamed her 10 years ago for trying to order the takedown of another article (Volokh, 2015), but because of impunity, she remains undaunted, and her constitutional violations continue. The end result is that this magazine and others vow never to cover a family court story again.

It is no exaggeration to say that family courts are one of the deadliest places for women and children. Men can be victims as well. Family courts are a de facto “abuse industry,” annually bringing in an estimated 50 to 175 billion dollars (Berger, 2014) for sending almost 100,000 children a year (Silberg, 2008), year after year, to what psychologists call “soul murder” (Shengold, 1989). Countless loving mothers have also died prematurely (Thomas, 2023), without prior health conditions, or are beset with diseases seen nowhere else in medicine (Dalgarno, 2024). It is a serious public health problem that, unless immediately and profoundly reformed, will continue to cause great damage to our society and our collective future. Bold legislation that can set the standard for the entire country is greatly needed.

Dr. Bandy Lee before the Child Custody and Domestic Relations Task Force

(Video recording of Dr. Lee’s and Sen. Finchem’s testimonies: https://youtu.be/ZuXwW9UD03o.)

(There is a call to impeach the judge mentioned in Dr. Lee’s testimony, Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca: https://impeachmecca.org/.)

References

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

Bassi, S., Johnson, F., and Logan, L. (2025, June 2). California’s brewing kids-for-cash scheme: Parents pay hundreds to see their own children while unregulated industry profits from family court orders. Davis Vanguard. https://davisvanguard.org/2025/06/parents-pay-hundreds-supervised-visits-california/

Berg, M. T., Rogers, E. M., and Rochford, H. (2024). Perpetrator characteristics and firearm use in pediatric homicides: Supplementary Homicide Reports — United States, 1976 to 2020. Injury Epidemiology, 11(1), 37.

Berger, P. (2014). Divorce is big business. Hawaii Business, 60(2), 173.

Brown, C. L., Yilanli, M., and Rabbitt, A. L. (2023). Child Physical Abuse and Neglect. Treasure Island, FL: StatPearls.

Center for Judicial Excellence (2025). U.S. Divorce Child Murder Data. San Rafael, CA: Center for Judicial Excellence. https://centerforjudicialexcellence.org/cje-projects-initiatives/child-murder-data/

Cicchetti, D., and Toth, S. L. (2005). Child maltreatment. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 1(1), 409–438.

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

Cozzolino, E. A. (2018). Parents on Trial: Jailing for Child Support Nonpayment. Austin, TX: University of Texas.

Dalgarno, E., Ayeb-Karlsson, S., Bramwell, D., Barnett, A., and Verma, A. (2024). Health-related experiences of family court and domestic abuse in England: A looming public health crisis. Journal of Family Trauma, Child Custody and Child Development, 21(3), 277–305.

Emery, R. E., Otto, R. K., and O’Donohue, W. T. (2005). A critical assessment of child custody evaluations: Limited science and a flawed system. American Psychologist, 60(8), 887–902.

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.

Federal Bureau of Investigation (2025). Child Victimization, 2019–2023: Special Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-child-victimization-2019-2023-special-report

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.

Fonta, S. A., and Maguire-Jack, K. (2015). Decision-making in Child Protective Services: Influences at multiple levels of the social ecology. Child Abuse and Neglect, 47, 70–82.

Freyd, J. J. (1997). Violations of power, adaptive blindness, and betrayal trauma theory. Feminism and Psychology, 7(1), 22–32.

Frosch, D. (2024, August 24). A Court-Ordered Therapy That Separates Kids From a Parent They Love Stirs a Backlash. Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/us-news/reunification-therapy-custody-family-court-5b4e9279

Goldstein, B. (2013). What can be learned from court-assisted murder cases? Family and Intimate Partner Violence Quarterly, 5(4), 369–378.

Hansen, R. J. (2022, November 29). Reunification Camp Survivors Expose For-Profit Industry’s Relationship with Family Courts. Vanguard News Group. https://davisvanguard.org/2022/11/reunification-camp-survivors-expose-for-profit-industrys-relationship-with-family-courts/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Jack, S. P., Petrosky, E., Lyons, B. H., Blair, J. M., Ertl, A. M., Sheats, K. J., and Betz, C. J. (2018). Surveillance for violent deaths — National violent death reporting system, 27 states, 2015. MMWR Surveillance Summaries 67(SS-11):1–32.

Kaufman, J., and Zigler, E. (1987). Do abused children become abusive parents? American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 57(2), 186–192.

Leadership Council (2025). Child Custody & Abuse / PAS. Baltimore, MD: Leadership Council. https://leadershipcouncil.org/child-custody-abuse-pas/

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

Leemis RW, Friar N, Khatiwada S, Chen MS, Kresnow M, Smith SG, Caslin S, & Basile KC. (2022). The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2016/2017 Report on Intimate Partner Violence. Atlanta, GA: National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

M. B. (2024, June 19). Petition to Impeach Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca. Change.org. https://www.change.org/p/petition-to-impeach-judge-jane-gallina-mecca

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.

Meier, J. S. (2023). History of Domestic Violence. Baltimore, MD: Leadership Council. https://leadershipcouncil.org/history-of-domestic-violence/

Project Justice USA (2025). Renowned Forensic Psychiatrist Dr. Bandy Lee and Constitutional Lawyer Bruce Fein Join Nationwide Family Court Reform Initiative. Boulder, CO: Project Justice USA. https://www.projectjusticeusa.com/renowned-forensic-psychiatrist-dr-bandy-lee-joins-nationwide-family-court-reform-initiative/

Resource Center on Domestic Violence: Child Protection and Custody (2025). Facts. Reno, NV: National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. https://rcdvcpc.org/facts.html

Saunders, D. G., Faller, K. C., and Tolman, R. M. (2011). Child Custody Evaluators’ Beliefs about Domestic Abuse Allegations: Their Relationship to Evaluator Demographics, Background, Domestic Violence Knowledge and Custody-Visitation Recommendations. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/238891.pdf

Shengold, L. (1989). Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Silberg, J. (2008). How Many Children Are Court-Ordered into Unsupervised Contact with an Abusive Parent after Divorce? Baltimore, MD: Leadership Council. https://leadershipcouncil.org/how-many-children-are-court-ordered/

Silberg, J., and Dallam, S. (2019). Abusers gaining custody in family courts: A case series of over turned decisions. Journal of Child Custody, 16(2), 140–169.

Silverman, J. G., Mesh, C. M., Cuthbert, C. V., Slote, K., and Bancroft, L. (2004). Child custody determinations in cases involving intimate partner violence: A human rights analysis. American Journal of Public Health, 94(6), 951–957.

Smith, R., and Coukos, P. (1997). Fairness and accuracy in evaluations of domestic violence and child abuse in custody determinations. Judges Journal, 36, 38.

Stark, E. (2023). Coercive Control of Children. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Stengel, T. M. (2011). Absolute judicial immunity makes absolutely no sense: An argument for an exception to judicial immunity. Temple Law Review, 84, 1071.

Stöckl, H., Dekel, B., Morris-Gehring, A., Watts, C., and Abrahams, N. (2017). Child homicide perpetrators worldwide: A systematic review. BMJ Paediatrics Open, 1(1), e000112.

Thomas, E. (2023, September 4). Family courts: Children forced into contact with fathers accused of abuse. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-66531409

United Nations (2023). Custody, Violence against Women and Violence against Children: Report of the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and Girls, Its Causes and Consequences, Reem Alsalem. New York, NY: United Nations. https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/thematic-reports/ahrc5336-custody-violence-against-women-and-violence-against-children

Volokh, E. (2015, May 31). New Jersey judge orders newspaper to take down article. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/31/new-jersey-judge-orders-newspaper-to-take-down-article/

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Following ‘Five Books in Five Days’ on Gallina-Mecca, there will be ‘Five Ads in Five Days’ Coming…

Following ‘Five Books in Five Days’ on Gallina-Mecca, there will be ‘Five Ads in Five Days’ Coming Up — Stay Tuned!

Why Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca Needs to be Impeached

Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca is determined to drive my sister, Patricia Lee, out of her home at gunpoint on July 18, 2025 — even though she is disabled and her ex-husband, to whom Gallina-Mecca plans to reward the house, owes me more than the equity of the house ($1.9 million, whereas the house is valued at $1.3 million). Below are my demands to Gallina-Mecca, which will be published in a local newspaper this week, along with several other, full-page advertisements.

Patricia Lee was of perfect health and superior functioning, and her children (ages 6 and 8) were happy, healthy, and thriving under her care 5 years ago. Since entering Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca’s “court”, however, Patricia Lee and her previously prosperous extended family of professionals descended into a world of violent criminality, chaos, false arrests, and tragic loss. As one of the casualties, I make the following demands to the “judge” who caused it all.

Your Honor:

1. Please hold a hearing on whether Patricia Lee’s children were taken from her legitimately, legally, and constitutionally.

2. ⁠Please state why Patricia Lee’s two children were taken by a violent police raid, during their authorized scheduled time to be together, without warning, due process, or stated reason.

3. ⁠Please state how it is possible that Patricia Lee cannot see or hear from her children for even one second for the last 4 years, when she had never been separated from them since birth.

4. ⁠Please state how it is possible the children’s formerly absentee father, with no parenting experience, was the better parent to have full, sole custody after filing for divorce.

5. Please state why a pornography-addicted, substance-abusing, violent father — who was recently on a restraining order for almost killing each of his children by head injury (a restraining order that you inexplicably canceled without a trial) — having full custody is in “the best interests” of these children.

6. Please explain why all witnesses unfavorable to the violent ex-husband, including 6 world-renowned forensic experts who called him “dangerous”, are barred from your courtroom.

7. Please explain why all witnesses favorable to Patricia Lee, including 11 highly-qualified psychiatric experts who said she has “exceptional talent in parenting,” are barred from your courtroom.

8. Please explain why you fully embraced an unlicensed, unsupervised, and unqualified “associate counselor,” whose report completely contradicted those of 11 highly-credentialed psychiatrists and psychologists.

9. Please elucidate why the abusive ex-husband, who has a 17-year history of domestic violence and who intentionally misled the police with patently false allegations, in order to convince them to raid and seize Patricia Lee’s children, is considered an upstanding citizen in your courtroom — even after the police confirmed his lies and malicious prosecution.

10. Please elucidate why Patricia Lee, who never even had a parking ticket before entering your court — and was a former high government official, hailed as a “hero” for protecting the nation after the September 11 terrorist attacks — is accosted, accused, and threatened with incarceration in your courtroom like a common criminal.

11. Please elucidate why the financially-abusive ex-husband, who has a history of fraud that caused one employer to be fined $38 million and another to be hit with unprecedented federal sanctions — for which he was laid off — is granted all marital assets.

12. Please explain why the violent ex-husband, who almost murdered Patricia Lee at least 10 times, sending her to the hospital 8 times, once to the intensive care unit (ICU), is not being criminally prosecuted.

13. Please explain why 2000 pages of high-quality evidence is ignored in your courtroom, while you have admitted 600 documented lies and acts of perjury by your court-appointed guardian ad litem, who worked in near-daily collusion with the violent ex-husband.

14. Please explain why you would not allow Patricia Lee to attend her own trial, present evidence, or cross-examine witnesses, while you accepted the abusive ex-husband’s more than 1000 acts of perjury under oath as irrefutable fact.

15. Please explain why you have not allowed Patricia Lee to access the transcripts of her own case, especially the secret (ex-parte) meetings that you held with her abusive ex-husband, without notice to her.

16. Please explain why you have not allowed Patricia Lee to see the motions filed against her in her own case, which have been kept hidden from her under “court seal,” even though you have used these rulings to control, coerce, and relentlessly persecute and prosecute her, as well as to deprive her of her constitutional rights.

17. Please explain why you have not allowed Patricia Lee to see the secret orders that you used to falsely arrest two world-renowned forensic expert witnesses at an elementary school, where they were attempting to report child abuse to the school principal, as they are legally mandated to do.

18. Please explain why you have not allowed Patricia Lee to see the secret orders that you used to have six police officers falsely arrest her, without warning, in front of a dozen of her fellow parent volunteers, for doing the same volunteer work at school she was praised for doing for the previous 5 years.

19. Please clarify how Patricia Lee is denied her constitutionality-protected right to see her children’s academic and pediatric records.

20. Please clarify how it is possible that Patricia Lee’s children missing half of school and failing to grow even one inch — since you gave her abusive ex-husband sole custody 4 years ago — is not an issue in your court.

21. Please clarify why it is okay for the abusive father to recruit his 88-year-old, hepatitis-infected, feeble father to act as a surrogate mother and father for the children — so that he can lead a “singles” lifestyle — while it is a terrible thing for Patricia Lee, the loving mother who devoted her life, 24/7, to her children to speak to them for even one second, according to the “wisdom” of your court?

22. Please explain why you intervened outside of your jurisdiction with the head judge, who said on the record that you personally contacted her to convince her to keep the false criminal charges against me, which the prosecutor would later find absurd?

23. Please explain why you intervened with a municipal judge, again outside of your jurisdiction, to cause him to dismiss criminal charges for which probable cause was already found and posted against the violent ex-husband and his co-conspirator, your court-appointed guardian ad litem?

24. Please explain why another judge’s indictment of a pediatrician who falsified medical records and failed to report the child abuse she herself affirmed, had her criminal charges mysteriously removed without a trial?

25. Please illuminate why, after giving the abusive ex-husband authorization to tear Patricia Lee’s crying, screaming, and clinging children from her via 5 armed policemen, you are now positioning him to seize her house by bringing in the marshals, on July 18, 2025?

26. Please illuminate why, knowing of Patricia Lee’s stress-induced, life-threatening condition, for which she is now under 24-hour care and at constant risk of stroke — the remedy for which, according to 5 ICU specialists, is the return of her children — you are allowing the violent ex-husband, who is currently on a restraining order, to take not just the house but very possibly her life?

27. Please illuminate how your actions of ordering Patricia Lee to keep her $1 million life insurance policy — while paying the premiums herself since the divorce — knowing that her violent ex-husband collected the life insurances of both his mother and his sister recently, are not co-conspiracy to murder?

*Say “No” to judicial corruption and abuse, and add your signature to the petition to impeach Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca , which now exceeds 2800 signatories, to be submitted to the General Assembly very soon! Help us to turn the tide on Family Courts’ destruction of families, by holding accountable a now nationally-infamous judge, presented before both the Arizona and the Idaho legislatures !

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SERIOUS CORRUPTION AND VIOLENCE IN AMERICA’S FAMILY COURTS

SERIOUS CORRUPTION AND VIOLENCE IN AMERICA’S FAMILY COURTS — Press Release

DR. BANDY LEE PUBLISHES IMPORTANT BOOKS ON FAMILY COURT VIOLENCE

New York City

Contact: (917) 328–2492

New York Times bestselling author Dr. Bandy X. Lee scarcely remains silent when she sees dangers to the public. She taught at the Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School for 17 years, and has been a global leader in prison reform, community violence prevention, and reductions in structural violence. Her books have reached national bestselling status and have been used by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley and consulted as a definitive reference by former White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly. Her highly-acclaimed textbook, Violence, is considered the most comprehensive to date and used in universities worldwide.

Since 2022, Dr. Lee has been investigating and writing, perhaps for the first time in such depth, about the full extent of the corruption, injustice, and human rights violations in America’s Family Courts. She has been trying to sound the alarm about the tens of thousands of children who are being sacrificed every year, year after year, because of Family Court violence. A notorious Family Court judge, who is now facing impeachment proceedings, Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca, has repeatedly attempted to intimidate and threaten Dr. Lee with a scorched-earth campaign of unconstitutional censorship.

Despite all efforts to silence her and to force her into submission, Dr. Lee has now published a number of extraordinary books — five books in five days — including her her stunning testimony before the influential Arizona Senate Ad Hoc Committee on Family Court Orders. Through these books, readers can learn as never before about what is horrifyingly happening in the deep, dark recesses of the so-called “Family Courts.” These “Anti-Courts,” as Dr. Lee calls them, are entirely detached from the Law and need to be immediately greatly reformed or abolished, Dr. Lee concludes.

Because of the great importance of what Dr. Lee is exposing about America’s seriously corrupt Family Court system, celebrated Washington Constitution attorney, Bruce Fein, Esq., who has helped impeach three presidents, has joined with Dr. Lee in bringing legal proceedings against Judge Gallina-Mecca to protect Dr. Lee’s free speech. He will also be drafting the articles of her impeachment.

Judge Gallina-Mecca is now threatening to have Dr. Lee and her sister driven out of their home and subjected to unconscionable financial charges and possible imprisonment. Dr. Lee’s sister’s two children were seized by violent police raid from her four years ago, under false charges that were immediately dropped, but the children were never returned. As Dr. Lee wrote about what happened, entirely outside of constitutional bounds, dozens of similar victims of Judge Gallina-Mecca came forward, and the petition for her impeachment has exceeded 2700 signatures. Please read in Dr. Lee’s many publications about the grounds for the impeachment, as well as the criminal charges that should follow, in a judicial campaign that causes the Pennsylvania “Kids for Cash” scandal to pale in comparison.

Journalists and major podcasters are urged to review Dr. Lee’s new books and to interview her about the Family Courts. Dr. Lee can be reached at Bandy@BandyLee.com, and her website is BandyLee.com.

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Testimony to the Arizona Senate, Part 2

Question-and-Answer Session with the Ad Hoc Committee on Family Court Orders

Sen. Mark Finchem, Chairing the Joint Legislative Ad Hoc Committee on Family Court Orders

(Video recording of my testimony and question-and-answer session: https://youtu.be/gguHiveG9wA.)

The following is a transcript of the question-and-answer session that ensued, following my testimony to the Arizona Senate Ad Hoc Committees on Family Court Orders.

Dr. Bandy Lee:

The public is unaware of the epidemic of violence occurring through the family courts, because judges threaten reporters and journalists…. When a major magazine published an interview with me, [Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca repeatedly threatened them to] “immediately unpublish” the article…. The end result is that this magazine and others vow never to cover family court stories again.

[Since this testimony, several journalists have gotten in touch with me to share how they have been threatened, targeted, and exiled abroad — and of course there are also accounts of deaths of journalists. This explains why reports of murders and murder-suicides of children seldom mention family courts, even though their role in them is overwhelming.]

Sen. Mark Finchem:

Well, that is a mistake.

Dr. Bandy Lee:

Excuse me?

Sen. Mark Finchem:

As we have said earlier, Justice Brandeis….

Dr. Bandy Lee:

That is right.

Sen. Mark Finchem:

How about a little sunshine on this? And frankly, ma’am, you put more sunshine on this than many of the people that have testified over the last three hearings.

Dr. Bandy Lee:

Well, I have been in a lot of cases, and I have examined all the evidence. It is not insufficiency of evidence. It is not ignorance or incompetence. It is, quite despairingly, deliberate.

Sen. Mark Finchem:

I appreciate that, and we really have run out of time with you. I would let you talk the rest of the day, if I could get away with it. But we do have a couple questions for you, all right. At least I know everybody else is chomping at the bit! One major question for me is, in your professional opinion with all that you have heard and what you have clearly lived through — and I presume that your sister’s case is out of New York.

Dr. Bandy Lee:

New Jersey, actually. Bergen County.

Sen. Mark Finchem:

Okay. Same old, same old, to us out in the West. Do you think or believe that judges have been taken in by this — I am going to call it psychobabble, but you called it pseudoscience, pseudopsychology — almost in a “Bengali” kind of way, where they just totally disregard a mountain of evidence in front of them for the shiny object in the room, that has somehow overtaken the thought process of the judge. Could you speak to that?

Dr. Bandy Lee:

I would say the direction is actually in the opposite, that judges go looking for experts who will give them whatever theory that will allow them to give the children to their abusers. “Parental alienation,” for example, is one which has been used as a tactic to divert, to deflect from, and to deny abuse allegations. I would actually say that it is a pretext for predatory alienation of the good parent.

Sen. Mark Finchem:

Okay. Have you ever heard of AFCC?

Dr. Bandy Lee:

Yes, unfortunately they are quite driven by the “parental alienation” theory, and I believe that is because it brings in profit.

Sen. Mark Finchem:

Well, all right, you jumped right to the next question. Good…. I will go ahead and put it out there. It occurs to me that this organization, from everything that I have seen and read, really has a profit motive that it is driven by not necessarily a best interest of the child. Would you agree with that?

Dr. Bandy Lee:

Yes. And actually, very distressingly, not only is this prevalent in all 50 U.S. states, I would say — and I have personally been in cases in about 20 to 30 states — it has been used as a business model exported abroad, to the point where the United Nations Human Rights Council put out a major report in 2023 alerting about this family court problem as a public health crisis, because of the model that has been exported from the U.S. to abroad.

Sen. Mark Finchem:

I presume that that report is online that we can pull it out?

Dr. Bandy Lee:

Yes.

Sen. Mark Finchem:

Okay, if you would, could you give us the report title to that, so that we can pull that in?

Dr. Bandy Lee:

Yes. It is by the UN special rapporteur on violence against children and women.

Sen. Mark Finchem:

Okay. We will definitely make that part of our report. One last question I have, before I turn it over to my colleagues. Have you heard of something called, “COBI”?

Dr. Bandy Lee:

Yes.

Sen. Mark Finchem:

What is your opinion of Court-Ordered Behavioral Intervention?

Dr. Bandy Lee:

I find it to be coercive. In fact, I call it torture, and it is intended to inculcate in children that what they saw, heard, and have experienced is untrue, and it is a form of thought reform, in my view.

Sen. Mark Finchem:

You know where that comes from, right, “COBI”?

Dr. Bandy Lee:

No,

Sen. Mark Finchem:

Phoenix, Arizona.

Dr. Bandy Lee:

I see!

Sen. Mark Finchem:

Thank you, ma’am. Thank you. Representative Keshel?

Rep. Rachel Keshel:

Yes, thank you, Mr. Chair. So have you ever been called as an expert witness in an Arizona family court? Because I know you said 20-some states.

Dr. Bandy Lee:

Yes, in fact I have.

Rep. Rachel Keshel:

Okay. With what you are hearing today from these people in your experience with the Arizona courts, do you feel that the judges are considering actual forensic evidence in any of these cases?

Dr. Bandy Lee:

In my experience, no. I will have to honestly say that out of 50 cases, only one went the right way after unbelievable amounts of argument and fighting, actually. I usually come in after things have gotten bad, but I have to say that no amount of evidence matters. A 4-year-old who is claimed to have been raped, a positive rape kit, three medical professionals having interviewed her and called her “credible”, burn marks, all kinds of injury marks…. It was still considered “unsubstantial”, or whatever CPS says in these cases.

Sen. Mark Finchem:

Ma’am — I am sorry, doctor. Are you now or have you ever worked with a U.S. attorney having to do with cases related to this? And I will have a follow-up question to that related to your field of expertise.

Dr. Bandy Lee:

I have not. I have tried to reach out to a number of authorities, including law enforcement, and my experience has been that they have been either unresponsive or protective of the judges.

Sen. Mark Finchem:

Do you know what racketeering is, ma’am?

Dr. Bandy Lee:

Yes, and I believe that a lot is going on with the faculty courts.

Sen. Mark Finchem:

Representative Fink.

Rep. Lisa Fink:

Thank you. Dr. Lee, thank you for coming. If you would not mind sending me your testimony, there is a lot there that I need to digest. There is quite a bit there, but one of the things that has gone back and forth is this “parent alienation,” and they have bankrupted families. What I have heard, yes, they are trying to change the mindset of the children. When I first heard of it, I thought of reeducation camps like North Korea, the way I was listening to that. But I have heard people say, “Well, no, actually you need to take that into consideration.” No, you do not. From your professional opinion, is “parent alienation” truly a syndrome or a clinical diagnosis at all?

Dr. Bandy Lee:

Not at all. It is not taught in any mental health educational program. It only exists in family courts, and the cases that are labeled “parental alienation,” if they were to come out of family court, they would just be clear-cut child abuse and domestic violence, without any ambiguity, and they would be adjudicated in a matter of weeks in criminal court.

Rep. Rachel Keshel:

Mr. Chair. To that point, have you ever witnessed in any of the states that you have testified in that there are judges that disregard the whole “parental alienation,” because I feel like they are using, taking real physical abuse versus the abusive parents saying, “parental alienation.” Are you seeing — I guess I am looking for hope today — have you seen any judges within the family court that see that for what it is? Or is it just so much the standard that, do you kind of see what I am saying?

Dr. Bandy Lee:

Well, I have actually seen a lot of judges move away from that phrase because of the stigma around it. Not so much because they denounce it, as all the major health associations have done, but because it was first “parental alienation syndrome” in the 1980’s that got so much criticism and lack of scientific support, that it started to be turned into other types of terminologies. Whatever they call it, it is a pretext, as I said, for predatory alienation of the good parent.

Sen. Mark Finchem:

It seems like the squishy balloon, no matter where you grab it, it’s always kind of morphing into something else, like a balloon tie.

Dr. Bandy Lee:

Yes. One thing I wish to say is that, in terms of solutions, education of the public is extremely important and also open courts. But I would not so much emphasize education of judges, because if the incentive to give the children to the wrong parent is still there, then no amount of education, no amount of correction of theories, will help.

Sen. Mark Finchem:

So, two observations. One, the court is incapable of being a super parent. It has seized that responsibility. The second is — and I know we need to move on to the rest of our witnesses — it occurs to me that there is quite literally no test, right up front, to establish — and we have got this in Arizona law, 25-403 — 12 factors that are supposed to be considered in the award of parenting time, in the award of custody. Yet, the court took it upon itself under Gutierrez to say, well, temporary orders do not count, because they are just temporary. Yet, they can go on for a child’s lifetime until they age out of the system.

Dr. Bandy Lee:

Exactly. I think that is the goal, that the children are taken for no reason at all. In my sister’s case, she was given no reason. They were taken by force, by a police SWAT team, and I believe that was to maximally traumatize and maximally incapacitate her and the children’s ability to fight back. And then there is no….

Sen. Mark Finchem:

I am sorry, did you say that the child was taken by a SWAT team?

Dr. Bandy Lee:

Yes.

Sen. Mark Finchem:

From a mother….

Dr. Bandy Lee:

… who was simply carrying out her parenting time with them….

Sen. Mark Finchem:

… unarmed in her home….

Dr. Bandy Lee:

With no warning, no concerns about her parenting ability whatsoever. It was only the father who was on a restraining order earlier for slamming his children’s — at this point, the 7-year-old son’s — head against a window, almost crushing his skull, and yet [Guardian ad Litem Evelyn Nissirios overrode the objections of eleven psychiatric experts, other forensic and medical experts, and numerous parents and teachers she did not even interview, to send the children to their violent abuser]. He was just in the process of regaining parenting time, and that was when the custody was switched.

Sen. Mark Finchem:

This is quite an indictment of the system, ma’am.

Dr. Bandy Lee:

… And no plenary hearing, going on for four years.

Sen. Mark Finchem:

All right. Thank you very much for your testimony. We will be in touch. Thank you.

Dr. Bandy Lee:

Thank you very much.

Sen. Mark Finchem:

Thank you, ma’am.

*Please sign the petition to impeach Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca , which now exceeds 2700 petitioners! She exemplifies Family Court abuses of authority, hiring of hitwomen like Evelyn Nissirios to kidnap children for their endangerment, persecute the good parent who tries to protect them, and intimidation of journalists! Help us to continue the national momentum to hold Family Court judges accountable, so that we may save our children!

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Testimony to the Arizona Senate

By Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div., for the Ad Hoc Committees on Family Court Orders

My name is Bandy Lee. I am a forensic psychiatrist and violence expert with 25 years of experience serving as an expert witness in approximately 200 criminal and civil court cases around the country, of which about 50 were in family court across 22 states. I am also president of the World Mental Health Coalition and cofounder of the Violence Prevention Institute. I was a research fellow of the National Institute of Mental Health, and taught at Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School for 17 years before recently joining the Harvard Program in Psychiatry and the Law. In 2007, I helped coauthor the United Nations Secretary-General’s chapter on “Violence against Children,” among other international documents on violence prevention to help governments implement prison reform and other violence reduction projects around the globe. I am a recipient of the National Research Service Award and author of the textbook, Violence (Lee, 2019), as well as over 100 scientific articles and chapters. For clinical practice, I work in maximum-security prisons, treating some of the most violent individuals our society produces.

Yet, nothing prepared me for the family courts. We do not ordinarily think of family courts as sites of violence, but by denying or, worse, by exploiting the existence of domestic violence and child abuse, family courts have become one of the deadliest places for children and the adults who try to protect them. I commend you for addressing this serious issue and for calling out family court abuse as the national emergency that it is. I have testified before the legislatures of Colorado, New York, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Washington, and I am very honored to be here.

I will be submitting a more scholarly written testimony with empirical data to back my assertions, but for now I will not mince words: family courts are a danger to society and, unless dramatically reformed, they need to be abolished altogether for the safety of our children and their loving families. This may sound extreme, but when an institution causes far greater harm than good — indeed, sends close to 100,000 children per year to their soul murder (Silberg, 2008), if not actual murder — then such an intervention is necessary.

Despite my 25 years as an expert witness for the courts, I did not know about the family courts. Since learning about them, I have tried to take as many family court cases as possible. However, while I am considered a highly-qualified expert in criminal or any other court, only in family court am I unwelcome. In fact, judges often try to find almost any reason not to admit me. This is because they as a rule are not looking for qualified experts; they seek poorly-trained or compromised, so-called “experts” who will fix the results in the direction they desire — that is, the opposite direction of which the case should go (George Washington University, 2018). Unfortunately, sending children to their abuse, rape, battery, murder, sex trafficking (Sprang and Cole, 2018), and pornography production (Salter and Wong, 2024) has become a lucrative business.

I would not have known about family courts, except for my sister’s divorce. One moment, her children are thriving under her care, with perfect physical and psychological health, and she is praised around the neighborhood for her parenting skills, consulted by other parents and teachers. The next moment, their previously absentee father files for divorce, and her children are seized in a police raid without warning on her legitimately-assigned weekend with them, and the violently abusive father who almost killed each of his two children by head injury gets sole custody, and the mother has not seen or heard from the children she raised from birth for the next four years. What reason did the family court give? She was supposedly “mentally ill” — even though no licensed professional ever raised any concerns. Subsequently, she has been evaluated by eleven world-renowned psychiatric experts, some of them consultants to the United Nations, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the International Criminal Court, who all unanimously said she has “excellent mental health” and “exceptional talent in parenting,” but none of this mattered. Only one unlicensed and unqualified associate counselor — Tara Devine — with a non-social work master’s degree contradicted them all, and this is the singular report the family court judge accepted.

In addition to these so-called “experts”, family courts make use of guardians ad litem. In my sister’s case, the guardian ad litem lied or perjured 600 documented times, and even co-conspired with her ex-husband to attempt to cause her demise, hospitalizing her in the intensive care unit, but to the end Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca only protected her. In fact, the judge now appoints this guardian ad litem, Evelyn Nissirios, in almost every case she presides over….

After participating in approximately 50 family court cases, I have come to learn that my sister’s situation is not unique. Cases may vary widely, but family courts all across the country produce almost identical results when abuse is involved — which is the vast majority of custody cases. That is, custody is almost invariably taken from stable, nurturing parents who are well-bonded with their children, to be given to their abusers — under unscientific pretexts such as “parental alienation” (Meier, 2020). The more clear-cut the cases, the more draconian this formula (Dreyfus, 2023), and the stronger the evidence the good parents present, the more retaliation they face. I have not once seen supervised visits be applied to the dangerous parent, and if the children resist, as healthy children do, they are sent to “reunification camps,” which are in truth reeducation torture camps (McElwee, 2024)….

I have often compared Family Courts to the prison system I have studied for decades. Medieval barbarism that civilized society cannot imagine happens within them. Those who enter are grievously maltreated, and all manner of human rights violations occur with no accountability because of a lack of transparency. Torture is routine, and even murder goes unpunished — only, family courts are worse, since the targets are innocent children. In family courts, judges have the authority to “seal” their cases, and this essentially gives them Star Chamber-like secrecy. What usually occurs within is unmoored from the law (Summers, 2023). The exceptional discretion that family court judges have was granted so that judges could exercise benevolence with vulnerable families, but a 120-year chronicle has shown that it has rather regularly been used for malevolence (Spinak, 2023).

When tragic deaths happen all too often, the public assumes that there must have been extenuating circumstances or that these institutions are doing their best under difficult circumstances. They do not imagine that family courts actually facilitated the deaths, or even forced them on families that mobilized all their resources to prevent (Goldstein, 2013). I have come to call family courts “anti-courts,” where case fixing replaces fact finding, pseudoscience is given precedence over established science, conflicts of interest replace the requirement of impartiality, and the greatest injustices done to families are committed in the name of “justice”.

Instead, prisons and family courts, because of their secrecy and impunity, have become magnets for violent, sadistic, and psychopathic individuals who relish exercising power over others. Those who do not “go along” with the culture are threatened and ousted. Prison guards may be seen as poorly-trained individuals from similar backgrounds as the prisoners, but family court players are even more dangerous, since they are driven by a 50- to 175-billion-dollar industry (Berger, 2014), hidden beneath the power of being called a “court”.

The Center for Judicial Excellence (2025) has tracked 990 children murdered by a divorcing or separating parent over a 17-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, over the objections of the mother (Bartlow, 2017). It is possible that up to 1 in 8 child murders by parent may be reduced with the abolition of family courts (Department of Justice, 2005). And for every murder, there are many more suicides, and for every death, there are hundreds of injuries that require medical attention (World Health Organization, 2002). 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.

Even if the children survive, they 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, nationwide study of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) (Felitti et al., 2002). Not only that, when the “protective” parent loses custody for simply bringing up the abuse — which family courts universally take as false, even though false allegations are exceedingly rare (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2010) — the children are stripped of the primary mitigating factor that could help them heal from the abuse: their primary support. 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 dollars in 2018 (Klika et al., 2020).

The public is unaware of this epidemic of violence occurring through the family courts, because judges threaten reporters and journalists to control their coverage. When a major magazine published an interview with me, the judge in my sister’s case issued an order for them immediately to “unpublish” the article. When their legal department sternly rebuked her for violating the First Amendment, she rather returned to her drawing board and issued a second order! It turned out that even the Washington Post had shamed her 10 years ago for trying to order the takedown of another article (Volokh, 2015), but because of impunity, she remains undaunted and her constitutional violations continue. The end result is that this magazine and others vow never to cover a family court story again.

Recently, the United Nations (2023) issued a major Human Rights Council report, decrying the public health crisis that has emerged from the U.S. model being exported around the globe, but nothing has changed within the U.S. — if anything, family courts have stubbornly “doubled down” on their practices and become even more severe.

What is the solution? Correction is not going to come from the source of the problem. There needs to be significant judicial oversight at nationwide scale, and I am encouraged that Arizona is leading the way. Oversight may occur in the form of open courts, actual accountability, journalistic reporting, access for scientists, and whistleblowing protection for experts. Education of the public is essential; I am doubtful of the utility of educating judges, unless the incentive to give children to the wrong parents for the proliferation of profits is removed.

Absolute immunity must not be allowed where there is corruption, fraud, and routine felony crimes such as child abuse, kidnapping, and even murder. Judges and their court-appointed personnel must be indictable like everyone else when they cause the deaths of children and their loving parents. Too many previously healthy young mothers are dying of suicide, heart attacks, “broken heart syndrome,” cancer, and other medical conditions seen almost nowhere else (Dalgarno et al., 2024). If this system of utter impunity, gross abuses of power, and rampant criminality, concealed under self-imposed secrecy cannot be eliminated, we must consider abolishing family courts altogether. Family violence cases are not complicated, and they can be adjudicated quickly in criminal courts, instead of being drawn out for years if not decades in family courts, for the sole benefit of court players. If not, family courts have the potential to become the scourge of our society, as they have already become the epicenter of the greatest crimes being committed against innocent children and loving parents on U.S. soil.

Dr. Bandy Lee before the Joint Legislative Ad Hoc Committee on Family Court Orders

(Video recording of testimony at around 4:50:30: https://www.azleg.gov/videoplayer/?clientID=6361162879&eventID=2025061002.)

(Please sign the petition to impeach Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca: https://www.change.org/p/petition-to-impeach-judge-jane-gallina-mecca.)

References

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

Berger, P. (2014, August 1). Divorce is big business. Hawaii Business Magazine. https://www.hawaiibusiness.com/divorce-is-big-business/

Center for Judicial Excellence (2025). Child Safety First: Preventing Child Homicides During Divorce, Separation, and Child Custody Disputes. San Rafael, CA: Center for Judicial Excellence. https://centerforjudicialexcellence.org/2023/07/17/cje-releases-child-safety-report/

Dalgarno, E., Ayeb-Karlsson, S., Bramwell, D., Barnett, A., and Verma, A. (2024). Health-related experiences of family court and domestic abuse in England: A looming public health crisis. Journal of Family Trauma, Child Custody and Child Development, 21(3), 277–305.

Dreyfus, H. (2023, August 19). In the child’s best interest. ProPublica. https://www.propublica.org/article/both-parents-agree-child-is-being-harmed-who-will-courts-believe

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.

Friedman, G. (2019, September 18). Fatal Court: ‘The Harm to Children in the Nation’s Family Courts Has Reached Crisis Proportions.’ Deseret News. https://www.deseret.com/2019/9/17/20805882/fatal-family-court-parental-rights-custody-battles-child-deaths-harm-center-for-judicial-excellence

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

Goldstein, B. (2013). What can be learned from court-assisted murder cases? Family and Intimate Partner Violence Quarterly, 5(4), 369–378.

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.

Lee, B. X. (2025). Dr. Bandy Lee files lawsuit with impeachment initiative to bring transparency to Star Chamber-like family court. Medium. https://medium.com/@bandyxlee/dr-bandy-lee-files-lawsuit-with-impeachment-initiative-to-bring-transparency-to-star-chamber-like-312f695f62fb

McElwee, J. R. (2024, August 25). A court-ordered therapy that separates kids from a parent they love stirs a backlash. Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/us-news/reunification-therapy-custody-family-court-5b4e9279

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.

Raphael, J. (2020). Parents as pimps: Survivor accounts of trafficking of children in the United States. Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence, 4(4), 7.

Silberg, J. (2008). How Many Children Are Court-Ordered into Unsupervised Contact with an Abusive Parent after Divorce? Baltimore, MD: Leadership Council. http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/med/PR3.html

Salter, M., and Wong, T. (2024). Parental production of child sexual abuse material: A critical review. Trauma, Violence, and Abuse, 25(3), 1826–1837.

Spinak, J. M. (2023). The End of Family Court: How Abolishing the Court Brings Justice to Children and Families. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Sprang, G., and Cole, J. (2018). Familial sex trafficking of minors: Trafficking conditions, clinical presentation, and system involvement. Journal of Family Violence, 33, 185–195.

Summers, H. (2023, July 6). Family Court Files: Parental alienation ‘used to silence claims of abuse.’ Bureau of Investigative Journalism. https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-07-06/family-court-files-parental-alienation-used-to-silence-claims-of-abuse

Thomas, E. (2023, September 4). Family courts: Children forced into contact with fathers accused of abuse. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-66531409

United Nations (2023). Custody, Violence against Women and Violence against Children: Report of the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and Girls, Its Causes and Consequences, Reem Alsalem. New York, NY: United Nations Human Rights Council. https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/thematic-reports/ahrc5336-custody-violence-against-women-and-violence-against-children

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2010). Child Maltreatment 2010. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research/index.htm

U.S. Department of Justice (2005). Family Violence Statistics. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/fvs03.pdf

Volokh, E. (2015, May 31). New Jersey judge orders newspaper to take down article. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/31/new-jersey-judge-orders-newspaper-to-take-down-article/

World Health Organization (2002). World Report of Violence and Health. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9241545615

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Addendum

One Thing Terrorizes Family Courts like Nothing Else: Exposure of TRUTH

My message went out prematurely, before I could finish my announcement below:

*I have been invited to give my testimony to the Arizona Joint Legislative Ad Hoc Committee on Family Court Orders tomorrow, June 16, 2025, and I hope to see many there! I will be doing so in both my expert as well as personal capacity. I will be calling national attention to the movement to impeach Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca , which now exceeds 2600 petitioners, to be submitted to the General Assembly this week! Help us to turn the tide by holding accountable one of the most notorious judges who exemplifies the unacceptable corruption and cruelty of the Family Courts, all around the country!

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