Bandy X. Lee's Blog, page 7

A Major National Newspaper Finally Places the Family Court Abuse Industry on Front Page!!

A Major National Newspaper Finally Places Family Court Abuse Industry on Front Page!!

It Should be Headline News Everywhere that Family Courts do Not Protect but Profit from Abuse — with Deadly Results

An astonishing event has happened: the Family Court abuse industry has made the front page of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ)! And then a week before was an article in the Independent. I have said all along that the U.K. is ahead in reporting the abuse industry: people were up in arms when nineteen child homicides in Family Courts were uncovered, and the government finally forced Family Courts to open to reporters. But in the U.S., where a thousand children have been murdered, nothing has been done — until now. I hope this article will herald a turning point, since unconscionable human rights violations have been able to continue largely because of a media blackout — and judges’ ability to threaten and harm reporters, if they dare to cover the issue. In other words, the more severe and egregious the crimes, the more they have been covered up through gangster-like techniques of intimidating reporters. Therefore, the WSJ reporting is huge!! Below is only the tip of the iceberg, of course, but it brings out the stark reality of “reunification therapy” camps, which are in truth torture camps. Far below is a recent article in the Independent, another exceptional piece of reporting that highlights the decimation of women (which is often the true, hidden goal of destroying the children they care for). Hence, I document here the publication of two extraordinary articles in the span of less than ten days:

A Court-Ordered Therapy that Separates Kids from a Parent They Love Stirs a BacklashA controversial treatment used in custody fights can keep family members apart for years against children’s wishes. ‘It all absolutely destroyed me.’August 25, 2024By Daniel Frosch

PHOENIX — Tori Nielsen was 16 when she and her 12-year-old brother were whisked away from their mother at the Maricopa County courthouse by four strangers in a white minivan on the morning of May 27, 2021.

The strangers wouldn’t tell Tori and her brother where they were going, she recalled, as the siblings held hands and cried in the back seat. After hours on the interstate, they arrived at a hotel somewhere by the ocean. The strangers, three men and one woman, barricaded the door to their room with furniture so they couldn’t leave, Tori said.

The next morning, she remembered one of them saying: “You’re going to have a meeting with your father now.”

“At night, the children were moved into a hotel room with their father and his girlfriend, said Tori, recalling how the hotel phone was removed from the room so they couldn’t try to call their mom. Their cellphones had been confiscated the day they were taken from Arizona.”

What Tori didn’t know was that a judge had ordered the children to attend a four-day family reunification program in Ventura, Calif., with their father. The judge determined it was the only way to repair their relationship, damaged during a decadelong custody battle, court documents show.

The children had been living mostly with their mother, Angela Nielsen, and resisted seeing their dad because of his temper, Tori said. But court-appointed evaluators determined that Nielsen was poisoning the kids against their father. She was suddenly barred from contacting her children to ensure they no longer rejected their dad.

It would be around two years before Tori and her brother saw or talked to her again.

“I tried to numb myself to what was happening. It was like surviving,” said Tori, who moved back in with her mom the day she turned 18 in May 2023. “But that only worked for so long because it all absolutely destroyed me.”

Tori’s father declined to speak about his family’s situation, saying he was focused on being the best father to his children.

The treatment the Nielsens underwent is part of an industry of intensive “reunification therapy” that has sprung up during the past decade and is ordered by family courts to settle custody fights. Services like Building Family Bridges, where the Nielsens were forced to go, use videos and exercises to try to break a child’s pattern of rejecting a parent. The child is then ordered to live with that parent for an extended period and barred from having contact with the other parent. A battle has erupted over the approach in courtrooms and statehouses across the country.

After Tori told her story at a hearing with Arizona lawmakers earlier this year, the Republican-led legislature passed a measure prohibiting courts from ordering any reunification treatment that cuts off a child from the parent they prefer unless both parents agree. It was signed by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs in April.

Utah, New Hampshire and Tennessee approved similar proposals this year. California and Colorado passed laws restricting reunification treatment in 2023.

Some legal experts and family advocacy groups say the treatment is too extreme and traumatizes children. Child-abuse researchers have raised concerns that the operations, which can cost families tens of thousands of dollars, are unregulated and use pseudoscience to sway courts into believing they can help kids and parents.

“Children are being court-ordered into costly, unregulated reunification treatments or ‘camps,’ which force them into contact with a parent who they often fear for good reason,” said Danielle Pollack, policy manager for the National Family Violence Law Center at George Washington University, which supports restricting the treatment.

But supporters say it’s a last resort during the worst custody disputes, when one parent wants to re-establish a relationship with a child who has shunned them. In these cases, they say, the other, favored parent must be temporarily cut off during the reunification process, to keep from interfering.

“The whole goal here is to ensure a child has a happy, healthy relationship with both their parents,” said Demosthenes Lorandos, a psychologist and attorney who has worked with Building Family Bridges.

disputed theory

Only about 10% of divorces in the U.S. involve significant conflict over custody arrangements, and just a fraction of these need to be decided by a judge, according to Robert Mnookin, a Harvard University professor who studies divorces.

It’s in these cases that the idea of parental alienation syndrome emerged in the 1980s with the late child psychiatrist Richard Gardner.

Gardner posited that a child can be brainwashed by one parent into rebuffing the other during custody fights and even persuaded to make up abuse claims. He testified in numerous cases, recommending in extreme circumstances that a child be taken from the “alienating parent” who had custody and placed with the “rejected parent.”

Gardner’s theory spurred fierce opposition from some mental-health professionals and family-law experts, who said it dismissed children’s legitimate abuse allegations and was being weaponized by mostly fathers seeking custody of kids living with their mothers. Parental alienation syndrome has never been officially recognized as a diagnosis by major medical or psychiatric associations.

Because custody cases are mostly sealed, information is limited on how frequently courts mandate the treatment. Researchers say programs like Building Family Bridges are likely ordered by judges only in especially contentious cases — perhaps as many as several hundred over the past few years.

There has been limited research examining their effectiveness or safety, said Jean Mercer, a professor of psychology who studies the programs and believes they pose serious risks for children.

“We don’t know the simplest things — like how often the mother is alleged to be an alienator, and how often the father is alleged to be an alienator,” Mercer said. “What we do know is there are potential dangers for the kids, like PTSD, and depression and anger at how they were treated. This can be extremely frightening for them.”

Matthew Sullivan, a psychologist and supporter of reunification treatment, said courts typically don’t order the programs until after less intensive interventions have failed and multiple evaluations by experts. Effective treatment seeks to challenge dysfunctional behavior exhibited by the child and both parents, he said.

“These are pretty awful situations on all sides,” said Sullivan.

Costs can range from $8,000 to around $40,000 for the programs, according to documents viewed by the Journal. There are also hourly therapist fees for the “aftercare” program that the so-called alienating parent must typically complete before seeing their children again.

Judges may order the rejected parent to pay the bill up front. In some cases, the favored parent ends up paying a portion.

‘Burst into tears’

The website for Building Family Bridges greets people with a silent video showing what appears to be a teenager on a couch having an intense conversation with a parent. A clipboard-toting counselor looks on.

Describing itself as the “gold standard” of family reunification services, Building Family Bridges says it can help families who therapists and courts thought were beyond reach.

“This innovative four-day workshop helps children reunify with a parent they claim to hate or fear,” the site says.

The site quotes unnamed parents and judges lauding its success. It also cites a study by a former workshop leader that says out of 83 children who had participated in Building Family Bridges, a “significant number” repaired their relationship with the parent they’d previously rejected.

Tori Nielsen’s experience was far different

After arriving in Ventura and spending a sleepless night together, Tori and her brother were ushered across the street to a Crowne Plaza hotel, she said.

In a conference room, their dad, his girlfriend and several Building Family Bridges staff members were waiting. One introduced himself to Tori. She later learned from speaking with other children who’d gone through Building Family Bridges and from a picture she found online that this was Randy Rand, a founder.

Staff read aloud the court order and laid out rules, Tori recalled. The children couldn’t contact their mother for 90 days. If they tried to leave or didn’t participate, they could be sent to a wilderness camp, she said. Bringing up incidents from the past was forbidden. If someone did, staff told Tori that they would stop them by saying, “Moratorium!”

The first two days were spent watching videos that appeared aimed at shifting the kids’ memories about their parents, Tori said. One focused on “The Monkey Business Illusion,” a psychological study that aims to show blind spots in people’s perception of events. The second two days were interactive, with the group writing down traits about themselves and family members.

Rand declined to comment on any specific cases and described parental alienation as “complex, painful for those involved, and nuanced.”

“The Building Family Bridges methodology is available for severe parental alienation cases and continues to be an effective tool for families,” he said.

Lorandos, the psychologist who worked with Building Family Bridges, said he’d observed its workshops and trainings. He likened their work with children who had rejected one parent to deprogramming people who’d been in a cult.

“There’s a lot of re-education around things your dad, for example, may have said about your mom that are not true,” he said.

At night, the children were moved into a hotel room with their father and his girlfriend, said Tori, recalling how the hotel phone was removed from the room so they couldn’t try to call their mom. Their cellphones had been confiscated the day they were taken from Arizona.

“One morning, I woke up and went to the bathroom, and I just looked in the mirror and I thought about what was happening and I burst into tears,” she said.

Immediately following the workshop, Tori and her brother were required to vacation with their dad, who took them to San Diego. Under the court order, they then returned to live with him at his home in the Phoenix suburbs.

Angela Nielsen lived just a few miles away. But under the no-contact order, she couldn’t interact with her children until she completed Building Family Bridges’s “aftercare” curriculum.

It included writing out explanations on why she was forbidden from contacting her kids and why the court had intervened to protect them.

Nielsen said she worked for countless hours on the responses. The therapist administering the program for Building Family Bridges said they were insufficient and that Nielsen was combative, documents show.

The therapist wrote that Nielsen drafted multiple iterations of answers but refused to acknowledge that she’d “ever engaged in any parental alienating patterns.” She therefore couldn’t move onto the program’s next level.

In another report, the therapist noted that while the children’s relationship with their dad was “close and healthy,” they missed their mother and desperately wanted to see her. The report said Tori would prefer to live primarily with her mom, and felt more supported and happier living with her.

These emotions, while normal, were also examples of the kids’ own alienating beliefs, the therapist wrote.

“I would get so upset and so down,” Nielsen said. “Like why can’t I pass this program? I would spend entire weekends working on these questions. I just wanted my children to come home.”

Now staying with her dad and his girlfriend, Tori buried herself in activities: cheerleading, a mentorship club, time at her boyfriend’s house. She stayed “neutral” toward her father, trying to get along with him, hoping it would speed a chance to see her mother, she said.

Her dad’s mood swings continued to upset her, Tori said. And she developed panic attacks, overcome with nausea and shakiness.

On her closet mirror, Tori marked off the days that passed. Just after midnight on May 7, 2023, her 18th birthday, she packed her belongings and told her dad she was leaving. He asked if she was certain she wanted to leave like this, she recalled. Her brother implored her not to forget about him. It broke her heart.

“I kind of just showed up at my mom’s house that day,” Tori said. “We just hugged and cried. It was a surreal and relieving moment, but it was really hard because my brother wasn’t there with me.”

Troubled histories

Concerned by reports of children being traumatized after being removed from a parent to attend reunification programs, Danielle Pollack’s group at George Washington University has been working with lawmakers to limit them.

Kayden’s Law, passed by Congress in 2022, provides federal funding to states that restrict reunification treatment not shown to be effective, and trains judges on how best to evaluate abuse allegations in custody fights.

The law was named after Kayden Mancuso, a 7-year-old Pennsylvania girl who was fatally beaten by her father after a judge allowed him unsupervised visits despite warnings from her mother about his violent history.

“These camps are not about protecting our children or bringing families together. They manipulate children and pass on exorbitant fees to families,” said Arizona state Sen. Shawnna Bolick, a Republican who sponsored the recent measure there.

Supporters of more restrictions note that while the reunification industry includes some well-intentioned therapists, leading proponents have come under scrutiny.

Randy Rand of Building Family Bridges was disciplined by the California Board of Psychology in 2009 for misconduct in two cases, records show. In one, the board found Rand blatantly sided with the father in a custody case he was supposed to be impartially mediating. In a separate case, Rand recommended a permanent custody change without ever interviewing the child, which amounted to gross negligence, the board said.

Rand’s license was placed on probation for five years unless he agreed to have his practice monitored, take an ethics course and pay a $43,000 fine. His license is currently inactive.

In board filings, Rand denied wrongdoing.

Rand said he does not lead Building Family Bridges workshops and serves as “administrative services director.” He said he occasionally provides support to the licensed mental health workers and legal professionals running the sessions.

Linda Gottlieb, who runs the Turning Points for Families reunification program in New York, is the subject of a lawsuit filed in New York state court in March. In the lawsuit, an Ohio woman, Tricia Singer-Romohr, sued Gottlieb for violating rules on deceptive and unfair trade practices, alleging she falsely represented parental alienation as a scientifically accepted disorder that her program could cure.

A judge ordered Singer-Romohr’s two children to participate in Gottlieb’s program in 2021 after determining she was manipulating them into rejecting their father and after hearing testimony from Gottlieb. Singer-Romohr, who had primary custody, was initially barred from contacting her kids for 90 days until Gottlieb determined she was supporting the kids’ relationship with their dad.

In court filings, Singer-Romohr included copies of letters that Gottlieb required she write to her children. Her letters included recollections of good times the kids shared with their dad, and encouraged them to have a loving relationship with him while apologizing for making them feel like they shouldn’t.

Gottlieb told Singer-Romohr that wasn’t enough, according to emails from the filings. After Gottlieb said Singer-Romohr wasn’t complying, the no-contact order ultimately got extended for around 900 days, according to the suit.

Attorneys for Singer-Romohr referred to the lawsuit when asked for comment.

Gottlieb, a marriage and family therapist and social worker, wouldn’t comment on the case. In legal filings, she said parental alienation was widely accepted by courts and that she favors lifting no-contact orders as soon as it’s “clinically advisable.” Gottlieb asserted that it was the judge who extended the no-contact orders and she never made any recommendations about them. In court filings, her lawyer said Singer-Romohr didn’t object to Gottlieb’s involvement until she disagreed with the outcome of the case.

“I think my entire profession, including what I do, has been unfairly criticized with deliberate lies,” Gottlieb said in an interview.

‘Unnecessary and sad’

The house where Tori lives with her mother is cluttered with court documents that have been the weapons in her parents’ war.

Three years since the two children attended Building Family Bridges, Tori’s brother still lives solely with his dad. The aftercare program is effectively on hold, Nielsen said. Earlier this year, a judge granted her four hours a week of supervised visitation with her son.

Tori, who is heading to college in the fall, sees her brother about once a month at her dad’s house and occasionally accompanies her mom on her visits. She leaves feeling despondent.

Among boxes of court filings, several cards and letters are displayed from both kids, expressing how much they love their mother and want to spend time with her. Somewhere in the boxes, there’s a photo of the entire family from more than a decade ago, before the divorce and its aftermath.

Tori, who was 6 when her parents split, said it’s surreal to see them all together. She struggles to understand why her father pursued reunification treatment as a solution. She wants a positive relationship with him. But if anything, the past three years have driven a deeper wedge between them, she said.

“I always asked my dad, ‘Can we please figure this out ourselves and stop involving the courts?’ It all seemed so unnecessary and sad. We could all have gotten along,” she said.

“None of this ever had to happen.”

(The original article is published here: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/reunification-therapy-custody-family-court-5b4e9279?st=q9k56tiw0odemhd&reflink=article_imessage_share.)

‘It’s not like you were beaten’: The horrifying misogyny vulnerable women face from the judge’s benchDomestic abuse survivors warn that — inside the secretive family courts — they are being ‘retraumatised’ by the legal system, and say judges are the worst offenders.16 August 2024By Athena Stavrou

“Domestic violence is a 50/50 thing.” “It’s not like you were beaten.” “Maybe one day you’ll be able to forget what happened.”

These are just some of the shocking comments that vulnerable women say they have been forced to face in court — from the judges tasked with deciding their families’ futures.

They say the comments show a problem with misogyny in the secretive family courts that not only subjects them to further trauma — often in a courtroom with their abuser present — but leads to rulings that can even leave them legally required to face the perpetrator.

Now campaigners are calling for judges who sit in the family courts to undergo further training so they have a proper understanding of the complexities behind domestic abuse, including coercive control, when deciding on cases including access to and custody of children.

‘Reinforcing the coercive control’

Emma* broke up with her partner after 10 years, during which she says he controlled her money and would bill her for “costs” — including when she was on maternity leave raising their child. He was investigated by police for coercive and financial control but, despite this, she faced hours of questioning over money in court after he brought a case against her.

She said she had been put into debt even before the process started, because the assets under her name meant she did not qualify for legal aid despite them being controlled by her ex-husband. She said: “I have assets on paper, but my ex-husband has trapped the capital in those assets [in property], so I am thousands in the red while he controls the assets that I have no access to, because his name is on the mortgages despite the first property being one I bought many years before I knew him.

“Initially his barrister spent a lot of time attacking me on the finances and the money. He focused on the fact that [my ex-husband] was paying for things while I was on maternity leave. So it’s reinforcing the coercive control, it’s reinforcing that you should somehow be grateful that he’s controlling the money.

“The judge was not challenging things that should have been challenged, such as victim-blaming from my ex-partner’s barrister and reinforcement of outdated and sexist attitudes. They were quite happy to just take my husband’s word for everything.

“I was attacked by a barrister for four-and-a-half hours, and the trauma just came right up to the surface that entire time.”

‘The system is abusing them’

A 2020 report published by the Ministry of Justice found that the courts were putting domestic abuse victims and their children at risk of additional harm yet little has been changed since.

Family court cases, which often involve parental disputes concerning the upbringing of children, are anonymised and closed to the public, placing a shroud of secrecy around proceedings. But campaigners say this is also leading to a lack of accountability.

Solicitor Rachel Horman-Brown, who has worked within the family courts for 30 years, said domestic abuse victims face a “lottery” when it comes to who hears their case.

“Some clients feel effectively the system is abusing them and colluding with the perpetrator or minimising the abuse,” she said.

The lawyer said that judges often avoid investigating domestic abuse as it takes up time and resources in a stretched legal system.

“While official guidance has caught up and has recommend that the court takes [domestic abuse] seriously, the reality isn’t quite there,” she said.

“It’s sad we have a system that which judge your case gets put in front of will change the outcome.”

Ms Horman-Brown said more training needs to be offered to judges to deal with domestic abuse.

“This infects all participants within the family system. Judges are the top of that pyramid of power within it,” she said.

“For the judge to make a comment the victim feels is unfair or minimising abuse, hurts so much more than if it was said by a lawyer or social worker.

“That person wields so much power and it really is terrifying for victims if they feel judges don’t understand domestic abuse. It’s something they find really traumatic.”

‘Where can you feel safe?’

Following a decade-long abusive relationship, Sally* was taken to court by the father of her child for visitation rights.

The 31-year-old informed the judge of his abusive past and provided evidence. She requested an investigation but says the judge told her it would have to be shelved “because she didn’t think it was fair”. She added: “What does she mean it’s not fair? It sounded like she didn’t believe me. He did this to me for 10 years, what makes you think he wouldn’t do it to my son?”

She added: “Because she dismissed the abuse, I now have to call him every week and I myself have to drop my son off to him every six weeks.

“It makes me feel sick every time. My stomach turns, I absolutely hate it.”

A campaign launched by Riverlight — which provides support for abuse survivors — has brought to light testimony from victims of their experience during family court proceedings. Survivors were invited to submit testimonies, which also included judges rolling their eyes at mentions of gaslighting and saying: “If you are so afraid of him and we are to believe what you’ve said, how can you sit near him in court?”

The Judicial College, which is responsible for training of judges, said all family judges and magistrates complete an induction and training that covers domestic abuse.

But Riverlight founder Roda Hassan is calling for more to be done. She said: “Victims and survivors constantly tell us that they often feel more abused and victimised by the court system itself than the perpetrator. If you can’t feel safe in a court of law where this happens, then where can you feel safe?”

(The original article is published here: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/family-court-judges-misogyny-domestic-abuse-b2595125.html.)

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Victims of Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca, Unite!

An Impeachment Petition is in Process, and We Need Your Testimonies!

It did not take long to collect almost a thousand signatures on the petition to impeach Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca. The question many may rather ask is, Why did it take so long to do it? The most unthinkable things happen and have happened for a long time in Family Courts, because judges are given unlimited power over families with no accountability. What occurs within Gallina-Mecca’s secret chambers illustrates this fact: her court sells children! It is a lucrative, modern-day slave trade, where she has condemned hundreds and hundreds of children to unspeakable suffering, to a fate worse than death. And yet she gets away with it through draconian “court seals,” which litigants cannot breach on pain of imprisonment — although she may put them in prison anyway, along her path of destroying loving, devoted parents and sometimes their supporters, in order to eliminate witnesses (what the public may not recognize is that, in Family Courts, there is no due process; incarceration happens regularly — increasingly universally — without a trial, without limit, and without the possibility of bail). Gallina-Mecca uses the excuse of “court seals,” preposterously claiming them as needed “for the protection of children,” when they are the only thing that allow for her monstrous crimes against children and adults who love them to continue. She wields them against loving parents so that they cannot access transcripts or other court records in order to defend their children and themselves, or so that she can hold secret, ex-parte hearings without telling them that these hearings even happened. She also uses it to isolate her victims, and to prevent them from speaking to their supports — when even mass murderers are permitted to speak to whomever they wish — as she financially bankrupts and psychologically breaks them. Those who have experienced this judge know that her court is not a court, but a criminal enterprise that has contempt for courts and the law. Murderers literally get away with their crimes in her “courtroom”, as she encourages if not facilitates their violence, and innocent people suffer terribly at the hands of ignorance and greed. Yet, Gallina-Mecca is an archetype, replicated throughout the country and increasingly exported around the world.

We can stop these abuses at one of the epicenters. If you have not yet signed the petition below, please do so, at this link. If you are a victim of this judge, we need your testimony at the time of our presentation of the petition to the New Jersey Senate and to Governor Phil Murphy, who appointed her. Many of you have reached out to me based on my articles, and you can do so confidentially at this address. Your testimonies will also remain confidential.

Petition to Impeach Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca

Started by M B

We are more than 30 mothers (and one father) who are in enormous pain, as our children have undeservedly become victims of a system that was designed to protect them. Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca of Bergen County, New Jersey, is at the epicenter of our grievance, as she has egregiously mismanaged each of our cases, resulting in our children being trafficked to their abusers. The Judge’s abuses of authority have created unimaginable horrors for many families.

It is said that the judiciary forms the backbone of our society, sworn to uphold justice and protect our rights. The Judge’s repeated failure to conduct thorough investigations, failure to hold violent abusers accountable, but rather rewarding them with sole custody of their victims, child support payments, and no obligations to the parent who raised these children has turned our lives into living nightmares.

The issues are not isolated and reflect a larger, egregious pattern of abuses of authority. We reached out to renowned forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Bandy X. Lee, M.D., who had the following to say:

“As a specialist in dangerous personalities, I must alert against a predatory personality pretending to be a judge and devouring the lives of innocent children and adults. She is running an exploitative operation of stealing children from healthy and successful parents to ‘sell’ them to their abusers, who are often their rapists, batterers, and attempted murderers. She seemingly drags out cases only to maximize harm and to induce ‘trauma bonding’ (separating children from their primary caregiver and isolating them in a life-or-death situation with their abuser, so that they cling helplessly to the latter to stay alive).

“Judicial immunity was never meant to be impunity. As an expert witness for the courts for twenty-five years, I have encountered hundreds of judges — but never have I met a judge so outlandish in treating everyone with disdain, who dehumanizes litigants to dangerous degrees, and who treats clear-cut evidence and qualified witnesses with such contempt. She shows respect for no fact or law that interferes with her ability to ‘fix’ her predetermined rulings and to perform what can only be described as show trials.”

We have been wrongly labeled as “disgruntled litigants,” but the desire to protect our children from destruction is only a natural response of loving parents. With great hope, we call on the New Jersey State Legislature to take immediate action, conduct a transparent investigation, and impeach the Judge if found guilty of these crimes. No judge should continue to preside over cases where she can commit atrocities against children and families and remain unaccountable to the law.

We implore fellow Bergen County residents, those affected by similar judicial negligence, and empathic citizens across the country to support us in our plight. Please sign this petition to help us remove this Judge from her position and to protect our children and families.

Please reach out to give your testimony at this address , so that we can present your story among many others with the petition to the New Jersey Senate and to Governor Phil Murphy.

Already, the comments section on this petition contains horrific stories, mirroring many others in the Robing Room :

I, too, had the unfortunate NIGHTMARE of encountering Judge Mecca five years ago in regard to my daughter. She has DESTROYED my family by taking away my parental rights through allowing my daughter to be placed in the custody of her alcoholic, abusive father who is a retired cop in and out of rehabs with suicide attempts as well. Judge Mecca unjustly took away my rights to handle her schooling, 504, medical care and treatment to which she has been left with NO SUPPORTS since 16 years old; because of a negligent father who loves his alcohol more than his children, and has his own untreated SEVERE mental health issues as well. “Judge” Mecca was FULLY aware of this! As an adult, now 21, my daughter has dropped out of high school as an HONOR STUDENT, doesn’t have her GED, didn’t go to college, doesn’t leave the house or go out and make friends, doesn’t have a job or independence, has crippling social anxiety, and other UNTREATED mental health issues by fault of her Father and his negligence. Instead, she’s become her alcoholic father’s “caregiver” and was recently just left in the dark (STILL living with him)with no electricity for 3 months under his “care”. Not only were my hands tied by Judge Mecca when she was a minor/ teenager, but also now because she’s an adult. Her and her Father’s relationship dynamic is unhealthy and codependent. Judge Mecca fully was aware of the situation and my concerns — as well as NJDCPP — and permitted it anyway, even going against the recommendations of the State’s forensic psychologist. All of the responsible offenders from DCPP, my daughter’s attorney they assigned her, and Judge Mecca (which work together and aid each other in this tyranny) deserve hard prison time and a VERY HOT ETERNITY IN HELL!!! I have a broken heart as a Mother, and a now destroyed relationship with my daughter because of all of them — including my abusive ex husband which is why I divorced him after 17 years and was given FULL custody of BOTH of our children with good reason. This should never have been reversed or happened, nor was it deserved or beneficial to my daughter in ANY way. It was SEVERELY damaging and I’m STILL VERY CONCERNED FOR HER WELL BEING. I obviously have concerns about permanent damage to her now which I DON’T take lightly!!! No child should be allowed to be manipulated by a parent or be allowed to choose a parent to live with that’s highly dysfunctional with no structure or rules — who had a DUI crashing the family car (as a retired COP yet), and restraining orders to protect the ex wife (me) and the kids with good reason. My heart goes out to other parents that have been affected by this fraudulent, psychopathic, cold, careless, negligent, and criminally depraved and predatory “judge.” Hopefully this petition will not only get her terminated and barred from the legal system permanently, but will put her away in the criminal system for a VERY long time which she deserves!!!! I think an orange jumpsuit would complement her well, along with her courthouse/DCPP cohorts.

Here is another:

My daughter who turns 3 years old this August, has only gained 2 lbs. 5oz. In the last year, her BMI is 14, and severe injury after severe injury weekly and not only did this judge refuse my pictures and evidence be admitted into the litigation but allowed conflict of interest, perjury, and ordered my one year old to take the Covid vaccine, which is not good for her age and went against my daughter’s pediatrician’s word saying she didn’t need it, while also allowing her mother, who was failing for several illicit drugs and substances that her pediatrician also advised against the continuance of breast feeding with all those harmful substances in her mother’s system, to continue breastfeeding against my daughter’s pediatrician’s wishes, and even after I said I would provide formula and/or breast milk from a breast milk bank for the mother to continue to breastfeed, with all those harmful substances in her system due to a formula shortage — what a joke! Also, DYFS, DCPP refused to act, because they already messed up and didn’t want to admit their failings but told me, “E — , you have a bad attitude, and we don’t like it, and until it changes, you will have your parenting time only in this office, and only supervised by our employees!” I asked if it was a joke and was told to leave if that’s what I thought, by the way I have these statements on recording, which they didn’t like, and reached out to the head of DCF of NJ, Ms. Better, a tyrannical, appointed criminal, who hung up on me and told me, “Do what they tell you to!” This is a disgusting abuse of power and needs to end now. Just look at the initial injury my one year old experienced at the hand of her mother and the DCPP, who said, “This is normal for a one year old!” Absolutely disgusting, but this is the only channel I have left. Please let the public take action, and give power back to where it belongs. I have been dealing with this for the last 2.75 years, and my daughter suffering atrocities that can only be rectified with the help of the public…. Thank you all, please hear my truth!

And there are more.

New Jersey recently permanently removed a municipal judge for misdeeds that are the minimum for Gallina-Mecca: ex-parte communications, illegal fraternizations, and verbal abuse in the courtroom. Gallina-Mecca’s excesses with judicial privileges and protections go further to include at least one highly-publicized murder, as well as a half-dozen more of which I have been told — and yet the Advisory Committee on Judicial Conduct (ACJC) refuses to investigate her after more than two dozen reports, one outlining one hundred seventy violations of the Code of Judicial Conduct. In my sister’s case, the dramatic descent from her peaceful life as a thriving, successful community member and a mother of two healthy and happy children, to losing her children, suffering the greatest tragedies conceivable, and literally fighting for her survival at almost every moment, vividly illustrates the enormity of the abuses. Even her emergency plea to gain access to her own transcripts, to defend her very life against Gallina-Mecca’s appointed guardian ad litem who almost killed her, was denied. Gallina-Mecca and this guardian ad litem work as a team, and almost everything they do consists of abuse of court process, court connections, and conflicts of interest — with no compunction whatsoever. The guardian ad litem truly ludicrously stepped out of bounds when she had one of Gallina-Mecca’s subordinate judges approve a protective order against her own victim whom she almost killed, in order to extend her harassment and control. When my sister tried to apply for a protective order against the guardian ad litem, her assaulter who almost killed her, the same judge denied it without a hearing. It is a sad fact to recognize that these “courts” do not serve justice but mete out the greatest injustices, even to the point of multiple unjust deaths.

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Family Court ‘Officer’ Enlists Court Crony to Issue Protective Order to Harass and Suppress Speech

Court Officer Abuse of Protective Orders, Created for Domestic Violence Victims, against Their Own Victims!

Just when you thought there could not be any new low to the Orwellian Family Courts, a guardian ad litem (GAL), who harassed a mother to a life-threatening condition and stole her children — in co-conspiracy with her violent spouse — now took out a protective order against her victim in order to harass her anew!

The motive is apparently retaliation and control, since the mother’s divorce case ended on May 16, 2024, and the protective order went into effect on June 8, 2024. Despite an absentee husband, the mother had led a happy and healthy household in an affluent neighborhood with two thriving, prodigy children, before calamity and destruction gratuitously rained down on them, 100 percent of the GAL’s own making. The story of my sister is an all-too-common one of those who enter the Family Courts — and it almost never ends.

My sister, Patricia Lee, has not been able to see her children for three years. Before Family Court, she was lauded for her parenting skills and reputed to be “the best mom.”

Family Court Judge Michael Antoniewicz of Bergen County Family Court, subordinate of Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca, the judge protecting the GAL, approved the protective order for “cyber harassment” and “stalking”, even though the mother had not contacted the GAL for over a year. Nevertheless, almost no Family Court process is not use of the rules of the court to abuse the court. Few encounter the kind of gangsterism and criminality as they do in the predatory Family Courts, where lives are easily destroyed and lost. The below is reported by Richard Luthmann and reproduced with permission:

GAL Evelyn Nissirios Accused of Weaponizing the NJ Courts Through Targeting, Judicial AbuseAllegations in Federal Lawsuit: Misconduct Lead to Health Crisis

Aug 02, 2024

By Richard LuthmannFree Speech Under Fire: Protective Orders Raise First Amendment ConcernsCustody Battle Controversy: Father Gains Custody Amid Allegations of Abuse and NeglectGAL Evelyn Nissirios Accused of Weaponizing the New Jersey Courts: Targeting Patricia Lee in Judicial Abuse Case

Evelyn Nissirios, a New Jersey attorney and Court-appointed Guardian ad Litem (GAL) allegedly weaponized the legal system against Patricia Lee, resulting in a severe health crisis and her children being snatched, raising serious legal questions.

Lee filed a case in New Jersey Federal Court. This article highlights the controversy, allegations, and potential legal ramifications.

Background

In November 2021, while serving as GAL for Lee’s children, Nissirios allegedly harassed Lee to the point of causing life-threatening stress-induced high blood pressure, landing her in the emergency room on November 10, claim documents filed in Newark Federal Court.

Two days later, Nissirios allegedly orchestrated a police raid that took Lee’s children without warning. A police report indicates that Nissirios misled authorities by hiding key information and lying about medical appointments. This incident triggered ongoing legal battles for Lee.

Bandy X. Lee, a renowned forensic psychiatrist and violence expert, and sister of Patricia Lee, claims Nissirios has and continues to abuse judicial power to issue protective orders against her and her sister, suppressing their First Amendment rights. This outlet distributes some of Dr. Lee’s commentary on the Family Courts and other issues.

Dr. Lee has joined her sister and is suing GAL Nissirios and others. They claim Nissirios and others conspired to falsely deprive Patricia Lee of the custody of her children and knowingly placed them in the hands of an abuser.

A Legal Battle Unfolds

The November 2021 police raid was just the beginning of Lee’s legal struggles. Lee lost custody of her children to their father, Alan T. Chan, an absentee parent with a history of alleged violence. Despite lacking evidence of wrongdoing, Chan retained custody, raising concerns about the children’s well-being.

Reports indicate that since Chan gained custody, the children have suffered physical injuries, missed school, and lacked access to adequate medical care.

Patricia and Dr. Lee have repeatedly claimed GAL Nissirios and Chan should now face criminal charges for their actions during the police raid. However, these charges are hard to pursue due to unwarranted protections by the New Jersey Family Court.

Dr. Lee alleges that Chan’s actions resemble “tangential spouse abuse” and that he manipulates the legal system to gain custody of the children and avoid financial obligations.

Recent Developments

On July 8, 2024, police served Patricia Lee with a protective order for alleged “cyber harassment” and “stalking,” despite her having no recent contact with GAL Nissirios. Dr. Lee also received a protective order, despite living at a separate address.

These actions appear to target Lee, given her history of severe stress responses to police visits. Dr. Lee contends that these orders are designed to suppress her free speech rights.

The courtroom abuse, the Lees claim, extends to Judge Michael Antoniewicz, who approved the protective orders. Despite evidence to the contrary, Judge Antoniewicz accepted Nissirios’ testimony, which Dr. Lee claims contained numerous documented and clear-cut falsehoods.

Judge Antoniewicz allowed Nissirios to present outdated evidence from October 2021, which should not have been admissible. The stress of the hearing pushed Lee back into a severe medical crisis, the court papers allege.

First Amendment Concerns

Dr. Lee argues that the protective orders are a cover to suppress her right to free speech.

In court, an article by Paul Boyne on the “Family Court Circus” website was cited against her. The state police had already investigated and cleared Dr. Lee of involvement in this article. Boyne now sits in a Connecticut lockup awaiting trial on multiple charges, including violent threats against several judges.

Dr. Lee maintains that her public and truthful writings are being misused as evidence against her. The protective orders represent a desperate attempt to censor her work.

Attempts by Patricia Lee and Dr. Lee to file a protective order against Nissirios were denied without a hearing. Judge Antoniewicz rejected their application, raising questions about judicial impartiality.

Dr. Lee claims these actions are part of a coordinated effort to suppress dissent, involving bringing her and Patricia Lee into the same case to extend illegitimate jurisdiction over Dr. Lee.

This outlet contacted Attorney Nissirios’ law office requesting comment. As of press time, no response was received.

Looking Ahead

The allegations against Evelyn Nissirios highlight serious concerns about judicial misconduct and abuse of power in the legal system. The use of protective orders and potential judicial bias warrants a thorough investigation.

Patricia Lee’s ongoing battle underscores the risks of unchecked authority in the Family Courts. It also raises implications for First Amendment rights and legal ethics.

Stay tuned as this story develops.

(The original article is published here: https://luthmann.substack.com/p/gal-evelyn-nissirios-accused-of-weaponizing.)

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My Proposal to a Family Court Judge, Jane Gallina-Mecca

Life is Cheap in Family Court. But will Family Court Itself Survive Exposure? My Proposal Letter Asks this Question

Honorable Judge Gallina-Mecca:

I am writing to you because your “guardian ad litem” [henceforth GAL], for the second time, nearly killed my sister. Fortunately the emergency room tested her for a heart attack and a stroke and found her to be negative, but this is unacceptable. Just as you cannot ignore your favored litigant, Alan T. Chan, owing me almost $850,000.00 (eight hundred fifty thousand dollars), you cannot turn a blind eye to [GAL] co-conspiring with Alan T. Chan to try to murder his wife and my sister, Patricia Lee. You have chosen this as your jurisdiction, and you are responsible.

GAL has tried multiple times to harm Patricia Lee physically — in addition to raiding her in the most violent fashion possible to rip her crying, screaming, and clinging children away from her. GAL is now under criminal charges for her first life-threatening assault.

Now that I have finally, at long last, heard everything from my sister — because of GAL’s frivolous and absurd “protective order” against her — I can see why you, in a naked effort to undermine and sabotage Patricia Lee’s defense, have denied my critically-needed testimony against Alan T. Chan and prohibited my sister from discussing anything with me about her case.

Unheard of in American jurisprudence, you barred a defendant from choosing her own support for three years — as you systematically isolated, bullied, and tried to break her psychologically, including by not allowing her to see her children for even one minute or to talk to them over the phone for three years. You have also allowed your favored litigant, in collusion with GAL, to co-conspire to cause his wife’s “medical” demise.

You took a system entrusted to you by the Constitution and governed by the Laws of New Jersey — and violated that system to commit unconscionable acts against vulnerable children and their innocent mother.

When this case started almost four years ago, Alan T. Chan, who suddenly decided he needed to take possession of his children for financial advantage in his divorce, had a restraining order against him for causing serious bodily injury to both of Patricia Lee’s children.

Now, my sister and I are facing Family Court Judge Michael Antoniewicz — under your direction as chief judge of Bergen County Family Court — who granted a bogus, fabricated, trumped-up temporary protective order for GAL, for “harassment” and “stalking”, when my sister’s last contact with GAL was by email almost a year ago, in relation to her own litigation. He made his intentions clear when my sister, truly afraid for her life, tried to file for a protective order against GAL — and he denied it without a hearing. His indefensible decisions can only be to stop me and my sister from telling the truth about the egregious violations of human rights and public trust of this Court.

This is because, once the Court of Public Opinion hears what you have done, in giving full custody of my sister’s children to their abusive father — against their desperate pleas — the public will plainly see for itself that you have condemned two children to a life of unspeakable suffering, as well as physical and mental trauma from which they may never recover.

Everyone who has seen photos of my sister’s children has commented that they look like they have been interned in a concentration camp. They were of average height and weight when they were living with their mother — and since you gave full, sole custody to Alan T. Chan, three years ago, they stopped growing. Both are now the shortest students in their respective classes, still fitting into the same clothes they were taken in, because their father is too stingy to buy them new clothes, let alone feed them.

My sister has submitted to you reams and reams of evidence from psychiatrists as well as from many other sources that overwhelmingly and convincingly prove that Alan T. Chan is not only unfit to parent, but is also likely to be physically violent and mentally abusive. Your decision to give full custody of Patricia Lee’s children to Alan T. Chan is based on the recommendations of GAL who is documented to have lied to this Court over three hundred fifty times — and, as is coming to light, has perjured herself over two hundred times in this case alone. These are serious, felony crimes.

GAL’s relentless three-year campaign was to advance the false narrative that Patricia Lee was not mentally fit — despite ten highly-qualified mental health experts stating the opposite. The purpose of the false narrative, of course, was for GAL and yourself to justify auctioning off her children to the highest bidder: Alan T. Chan.

You defined my sister as “contumacious”, which means “disobedient”. Is it “disobedient” for a devoted mother to fight for the return of her children, against this Court’s defiance and desecration of the U.S. Constitution and all logic, rationality, human decency, and natural law — to condemn two children to a fate worse than death? You have unwaveringly, without exception over the past four years, granted absolutely everything Alan T. Chan asked of you, and at the same time consistently denied every reasonable request Patricia Lee made to this Court.

Also, in coordination with GAL, you suppressed all incriminating evidence against Alan T. Chan and denied the testimony of ten psychiatrists and psychologists who deemed my sister to be mentally fit and stable, with “excellent mental health” and “exceptional talent in parenting” — after interviewing numerous friends and parents who know her — a job GAL never performed. And when GAL could not find a single compromised psychiatrist who would fraudulently declare Patricia Lee to be unfit, she lied that my sister refused a psychiatric evaluation, falsely placing her in “default”.

It is obvious to anyone who knows Patricia Lee that she is an exemplary, devoted, nurturing, and loving mother, which is why they nicknamed her “the best mom” — lauded by all the mothers and teachers in the neighborhood — prior to the unconstitutional abduction of her children without cause or due process. Shame on this court!

This court turned a blind eye to the pathetic reality that Alan T. Chan had to recruit his 87-year-old, hepatitis-infected father to care for the children and to act as a surrogate mother and father — because Alan T. Chan is constitutionally incapable of doing so. And yet, despite his being an unfit parent in every conceivable way, you will be granting him full custody of Patricia Lee’s children. Do you truly believe that your decision will not shock the conscience of any reasonable person outside the fantasy world of this court?

You were entrusted with the sacred responsibility to protect innocent children. Instead, for reasons too scandalous and hideous to mention, you decided to sell them to their abusive father….

Your sorry attempt to continue hiding the abuses of your court by “sealing” the proceedings of the case against Patricia Lee, who has not been permitted to see motions or transcripts in her own case — yet another example of your abuse of authority — and the extreme unconstitutional isolation in which you have intentionally placed her for the last three years, will be explosive for the world to discover….

[My proposal to Jane Gallina-Mecca remains private for now. Gallina-Mecca is representative of the so-called “Family Courts” in this country, which view victims of domestic violence and child abuse as “opportunities” for predatory plunder. It is the largest child trafficking business in the country, sending 60,000 children per year to their torture, rape, battery, and murder. They are the main supply source for pedophilic sex rings and child pornography production. In order to attract perpetrators of abuse, they promise them custody of their victims, as well as rich financial rewards. Judges and guardians ad litem then “fix” the cases through their own criminal activity, which they conceal under “court seals.” The practice has become so lucrative, there are hardly exceptions: almost no victim child goes to the right parent, at least in my experience as an expert witness — for that would be a loss to the 50- to 175-billion-dollar industry! Nearly a thousand children have been murdered through this arrangement, and mothers are dying at alarming rates, just as my sister almost died recently from GAL’s harassment — through a Family Court-issued “protective order,” of which she, an actual victim, was denied. Those who enter a Family Court and feel as if they are now in the grips of a Mexican cartel should know that they are neither alone nor unique — only, they may be warned that Family Courts are actually more brutal, carrying the title of “Courts”, being government-subsidized, and weaponizing “the Law” without limit. The reason “Family Courts” are terrified of exposure is because they are not real courts — and their whole criminal enterprise would crumble if the world only knew the truth of their atrocities.]

… You will not be a Family Court judge forever. One day you will retire, and you will reflect every day of your retirement on what you have accomplished during your life. You will have the chance to reminisce on one of two things: You will either see the horrified faces of hundreds of children you have condemned to a life of unspeakable suffering and a fate worse than death. Or you will … see the happy, joyful, smiling faces of children in which you honored your sacred duty to protect and provide the safest environment for innocent and vulnerable children.

The choice is yours….

Yours truly,

Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div.

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Free Speech Violation Disguised as a Protective Order

My Affidavit Reveals the Lengths to which Family Court Actors will Go to Hide Their Violent Crimes and ‘DARVO’ (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender)

AFFIDAVIT OF BANDY LEE

I, Bandy Lee, duly sworn upon oath, declare the following statement is true to the best of my knowledge:

1. I am a forensic psychiatrist and expert witness for the courts with twenty-five years of experience. I am also a faculty member of the Harvard Program in Psychiatry and the Law. When I consulted a preeminent constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School with all the evidence I had, he agreed that [Guardian ad Litem, or hitherto “GAL”] and the court of Jane Gallina-Mecca were violating the U.S. Constitution. He even wrote a personal letter to Gallina-Mecca, urging her to keep with the Constitution, but she ignored it.

2. In January 2022, alarmed at [GAL’s] and Jane Gallina-Mecca’s due process violations and contempt for the Law, I informed them that, unless there was a change of course, I would go public with their deeds. They merely responded that I am “not a litigant,” and conveyed no concern. Indeed, I would come to discover routine, reckless endangerment of lives under Gallina-Mecca, with at least one death widely publicized. [GAL] herself has boasted “absolute judicial immunity” regarding her deeds.

3. I have worked for the past two and a half years to expose [GAL] as a corrupt court official who endangers the lives of the very children she has been entrusted to protect. Without remorse, she has harassed, falsely arrested, orchestrated false police raids, and co-conspired to intimidate witnesses — and invariably gave custody to the physically or sexually abusive parent in virtually all cases in which she participated.

4. [GAL] is now abusing a new statute that allows for a protective order against “cyber harassment” and “stalking”. How is telling the truth harassment? Her petition is a naked attempt to circumvent the First Amendment, and a rebuke she received from legal departments of major news outlets, for her and Gallina-Mecca’s “presumptively unconstitutional prior restraint against ongoing publication.” The Washington Post previously reported on Gallina-Mecca’s illegal interference with the press. [GAL’s] goal is clear: to bend the law backwards to make my constitutionally-protected speech a threat of physical harm, so that she can prey on vulnerable children with impunity.

5. [GAL] lies or misleads multiple times in her certification. Most notably, she concocts a connection between me and a third author, unknown to me, who advocates the Second Amendment, displays stacks of ammunition, and places her picture behind crosshairs. Her dramatic display belies the fact that she already knows there is absolutely no connection between me and this author, because when this article was first published on February 4, 2023, [GAL] immediately called the state police. The state police did a thorough investigation and concluded that there was no basis whatsoever for her making a connection with me. At the time, she assumed that I wrote the article. My very first article on [GAL], dated February 17, 2023, clearly postdates that article, as I cite the article and denounce any violence (see Exhibit A).

6. [GAL] has refused to acknowledge that multiple agencies and individuals are investigating her and Jane Gallina-Mecca’s crimes, as the above-referenced article makes clear. Instead, she has harassed Patricia Lee for any random party that revealed about her case. She even used this false attribution to force Patricia to pay almost $27,000, without an investigation, when the judge recommended $5000 ([GAL] stated that the only way she would accept $5000 is if my sister would stop any future articles from being published — a power my sister clearly did not have). The absurdity of [GAL’s] taking out a protective order against Patricia, when Patricia has never posted or said anything negative about [GAL] — her last communication was an email related to her litigation, dated July 23, 2023 — reveals [GAL’s] total lack of credibility.

7. Lest we forget — my sister had her screaming, crying children literally pulled from her arms by a “SWAT team” of five police officers, in a blatant kidnap orchestrated by [GAL] and her abusive husband. [GAL] assigned her to be with her children that weekend, when they went to a nearby hotel to access a pool, as the children were suicidal after their father had secretly taken them to a faraway resort the weekend before (they called their maternal grandfather in terror — which is how we learned that he violated court directives by taking them out of state without permission).

8. Instead of protecting these children, [GAL] has not only co-conspired with their abusive father to abduct and isolate them but has harassed, intimidated, assaulted by false police raid, and almost caused the death of Patricia Lee. Patricia developed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) only after [GAL’s] raids, when she did not have this diagnosis even after thirteen years of domestic violence and coercive control. [GAL] is solely responsible for abducting her previously healthy and happy children from their devoted mother to isolate them with the father who almost killed each of them by head injury and was placed on a restraining order shortly before [GAL] transferred them to his sole custody, to their precipitous medical decline ever since.

9. Additionally, [GAL’s] request for a gag order constitutes a curtailment of my rights and privileges as a physician. I am a mandated reporter, legally required to report child abuse at any medical suspicion, and to repeatedly report ongoing abuse. I have encountered obstacles every step of the way because of her and Jane Gallina-Mecca’s interferences with Child Protective Services and the Child Abuse Hotline. Gallina-Mecca has also shielded [GAL] from investigation by the Office of Attorney Ethics.

10. [GAL’s] greatest fear is exposure of the truth. She has conjured up an implausible false narrative that she is being physically threatened because of a “tweet” from someone whom I have never met nor contacted. I am a New York Times bestselling author with an X audience of over 100,000. Of my thousands of posts, if one erratic response was all [GAL] could find, then the protection of life I endeavor to provide clearly outweighs any unintended harm. Since my articles, judicial reformers have called upon me to testify before seven different State legislatures about Family Court abuses. Almost forty other victim litigants of [GAL] have come forth to share with me [GAL’s] pattern of transferring thriving children from devoted, nurturing parents to abusers (who use the children to extort “child support” or for other money-making schemes). A documentary film is underway with their testimonies.

11. What Evelyn [GAL] is calling “stalking” is the fact that the Saddle River community, protesting her remaining on their Board of Education — despite her being voted out in November 2023 — invited me to report my observations to the Board. Several of the above victim parents offered to testify, which we were in the process of arranging when [GAL] filed for her abusively frivolous protective order.

12. The irony is that the one who needs restraining is Evelyn [GAL], not myself or my innocent sister. [GAL] has constantly harassed my sister for my articles, when my sister has never been my source of information. I write about my own witness, what independent investigators tell me, and what I read about in articles such as the one [GAL] cited, which often have more information on my sister’s case than myself. Additionally, [GAL] has violently assaulted or arrested both of us through false police raids by lying to the police, after which all charges were dropped. One violent raid almost killed my sister, for which the State of New Jersey criminally charged [GAL] as of March 26, 2024 (see Exhibit B). She even perpetrated a violent police raid against a parent of the Saddle River community — which shocked a community unaccustomed to such violence by a Board of Education member in its history. Many who are familiar with [GAL’s] and Jane Gallina-Mecca’s gangster-like ways have warned me that my life is in danger. I have taken down several articles in response to their cautioning, and others have told me, in no uncertain terms, that my public presence was keeping me alive. There is at least one reporter who died while confronting Gallina-Mecca. [GAL] gets her way through weaponization of the police, threats, intimidation, and constant lying. She lied in her certification that no criminal charges exist. Her more than 350 lies to the court and multiple counts of felony perjury have been submitted to authorities. The rest is being handled through federal litigation.

13. This protective order is therefore a subterfuge for an illegal “cease and desist” order from my publishing or speaking the truth. [GAL’s] desperate strategy, under Jane Gallina-Mecca’s tacit approval, is to deny my First Amendment rights of freedom of expression. Bringing under public scrutiny their abuses of power, in government betrayal of public trust, is the very purpose of the First Amendment. By claiming a false “threat of harm,” they intend to hide their public harm; to negate our federal charges; and to undermine the petition for Gallina-Mecca’s impeachment that over thirty of her victim litigants have organized, gathering 700 signatures in three weeks. This is why they are using a fellow judge in the Bergen County Family Court system under Gallina-Mecca’s supervision as chief judge, to silence my free expression. Both [GAL] and Gallina-Mecca have a track record of trying to exert control over me, first by pulling me into my sister’s divorce case (even as they denied me my testimony), and now through a frivolous protective order, which is but a perversion to restrain victims’ ability to challenge perpetrators. Their obvious intent is to stigmatize me, to justify future assaults against me, and ultimately to endanger my life. Before moving forward, there must be an unsealing of my sister’s court records, which should reveal that the seal itself, secretly issued and backdated by four months (for which we have proof), was not to protect children but to cover up [GAL’s] and Gallina-Mecca’s egregious, predatory exploitation of them and the adults who love them.

Signed and Notarized,

Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div.

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Why Almost No Reporting on Family Courts is Accurate

The True Degree of Depravity and Corruption in the Family Courts is Nearly Impossible to Grasp

I could not believe what I was reading when I came across an abominable article by the Free Press. Despite claiming to have “spent more than eight months speaking to dozens of people and reading hundreds of documents,” the reporting made a fundamental, fatal error: to trust Family Court rulings. This is the equivalent of walking into a Nazi concentration camp and believing that everyone there is guilty and deserves to be there, just as the Nazi guards say. There is simply no chance that any “investigation” under this lens will be accurate, and the blindness to the horrors of the Family Courts makes this article appalling. A simple, cursory research of the sheer numbers of children and mothers who are dying in Family Court should have sent alarm bells ringing, rather than reducing everything to a “tempestuous union” or an “ugly domestic dispute.” The article should have begun with how Family Courts have become a “law-free zone” as a result of decades of lack of transparency and no oversight and are the equivalent of organized crime. The fact that 98 percent of abused children are given to their abusive parent in my own experience, and a National Institute of Justice-sponsored study showing that it would be more correct to overturn every custody decision by Family Court, makes clear whom the good parent and victim was: the (as is usual) mother without her children. It is a telling sign that one has fallen into abuser gaslighting — not to mention that the deceased parent had no say for this “investigative” article — when frivolous rhetoric replaces the very real and utterly serious crisis of children being ripped from their primary caregivers to be “sold” to their torture, rape, battery, and murder (one-fifth of child murders by parent may be attributable to Family Courts setting up the conditions). In this egregious context, I was very happy to see that WeSpoke published a rebuttal letter:

An Open Letter to The Free Press on “A Wife’s Revenge from Beyond the Grave”WeSpoke responds to The Free Press article in an Open Letter

July 8, 2024

WeSpoke first heard that The Free Press was working on an article about Catherine Kassenoff’s tragic case in April 2024. Grieving her loss, the WeSpoke community was eager to speak to any national media organization willing to cover the abuses in the U.S. family court system, which has been largely ignored by mainstream media.

The divorce industry is a $50 billion dollar a year business that remains largely unregulated and unscrutinized by the public, with proceedings and processes that are closed to public view, ostensibly ‘for the protection of children and families’ but which far too often seem to act as a cover for delay, dysfunction and profiteering off the backs of vulnerable families. WeSpoke has seen the abuses in the system play out repeatedly, and has spent years and countless hours attending to its victims and pleading with legislators, government agencies, civil rights organizations and the mainstream media to address what is happening to families who naively step into our family and matrimonial courts seeking help, many who seek to escape troubled and abusive marriages, only to find themselves trapped in litigation for years, and decimated, both financially and emotionally.

The article’s author, journalist Francesca Block, approached us (and others who knew Catherine personally) under the pretense of writing about “Catherine Kassenoff’s divorce and the battles she faced in the New York Court System.” WeSpoke agreed to be interviewed not only for the article, but also for The Free Press’ new podcast in production on these issues. After all, Catherine helped to found WeSpoke in 2022, and many members knew Catherine well and followed her case contemporaneously. We witnessed her heartbreak on a daily basis, as the children she raised were taken from her. We knew Catherine as a remarkably intelligent lawyer who practiced at the highest levels of her profession as a former federal prosecutor and special counsel to two New York State governors. We knew her as a mother who fought valiantly to regain custody of her daughters and to reform a system that she found appalling as an attorney.

Yet The Free Press has sought to re-write Catherine’s career and life, presenting her as an unwell and unfit mother, and vindictive spouse, and they largely ignore the issues with the matrimonial system that helped compound her family’s pain. Whilst we recognize there are multiple sides to every contentious divorce story, nothing prepared us for this one-sided piece presenting Catherine’s estranged husband Allan as the ‘true’ victim of abuse and an allegedly baseless social media driven smear campaign.

“A Wife’s Revenge from Beyond the Grave” was released on a Saturday morning in July with the initial tagline “the juiciest read you could have at the beach this weekend.” We are disappointed that The Free Press considered the preventable and premature death of a mother and lawyer, as well as three young girls’ lives irrevocably upheaved, as a “juicy” and “wild” read. They have since revised their tag line at the time of this printing.

The Free Press chose to publish their article the day after a $150 million dollar defamation lawsuit filed by Allan against a blogger (Kassenoff v. Harvey) was settled on July 5, 2024 on confidential terms. The next day, the defendant in that lawsuit, Robbie Harvey, posted a public retraction of his earlier criticism of Allan to his 2 million followers, a remarkably broad mea culpa that presents like a coerced hostage video as he reads from a script, and then goes on to suggest Catherine was the primary perpetrator. Notably, all comments were turned off on Harvey’s posts on TikTok and Instagram.

Although Francesca Block’s theme points to the dangers of one-sided social media vigilantism, ironically her article omits key facts and contains limited details about the role Allan may have shared in driving the intense and expensive conflict with Catherine, and of course Catherine is no longer here to defend herself. Although we can’t know the ins and outs of their combative relationship, we do know that Catherine’s ex, a seasoned lawyer himself, reportedly spent over $3 million dollars on various family court professional fees as their divorce dragged on for over four years, and that Allan and Catherine were in fact still married when she passed away. We also know that the well-paid family court professionals in the Kassenoff case helped the court determine that Catherine, who everyone concedes was the former primary caretaker of the family’s children with no criminal or substance abuse in her past, should no longer play a role in her young children’s lives, and that any future interactions with her own children would be at the court’s behest. The author does not pause to consider how confusing, devastating, painful and humiliating this outcome might have been for Catherine, as it would be for almost any parent. The author also skims past any curiosity over why such eye-popping fees were required to arrive on a custody determination in one single family’s lives, breezily implying the expensive acrimony was simply due to Catherine’s ‘vindictiveness.’

Perhaps most disappointingly, Block brushes aside the outsized role that ‘neutral’ psychological evaluators and their confidential reports played in this case, as they have been in many other acrimonious custody cases in U.S. courts. In 2021, after a 2-year study, NY’s Blue Ribbon Commission suggested a moratorium on the use of these evaluations in New York courts, finding that they were rife with bias and with no proven benefit to children or families. We had hoped this author might highlight the disturbing use of these questionable evaluations in our courts, including letting The Free Press readers know that a select group of mental health professionals are routinely assigned by judges in contested custody cases and paid shocking sums of money by litigants (reports for a single family may garner $50,000 or more in fees, and a family has almost no choice but to pay), and that they make potentially life changing determinations for children based on largely unknown, vague and oblique standards that have been challenged as lacking in scientific validity and based on ‘hearsay upon hearsay.’ We know that some of these court appointed evaluators have come to tragically flawed conclusions, where a child is murdered during a contested custody case, like Kyra Franchetti was. Anecdotally, we have repeatedly found that women’s parenting imperfections are focused on and pathologized in these evaluation reports, while men’s faults are more often whitewashed and forgiven.

Coincidently, Mary Richardson Kennedy, first wife of presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr., died by suicide in 2012 during her divorce in the same Westchester County courts, where custody was switched from Mary to the father. The Kassenoffs had the same court-appointed forensic evaluator as the Kennedys, who determined in both cases that the father should have full custody, even though the mothers were the children’s primary attachment figure.

Despite the concerns about psychological reports used in custody cases like the Kassenoffs, the author quickly pivots to unblinking support of the forensic psychologists’ findings in Catherine’s case, assuring the reader that the confidential reports that determined that the mother of three should not be in her children’s lives were ‘neutral’ and ‘thorough.’

Block omits evidence and facts showing that what occurred in the Kassenoff divorce is far from uncommon; in fact, it is emblematic of a systemic problem, not just about one couple’s “brutal divorce.” What happened to Catherine by the courts during her divorce is happening every day to mothers and children around the country. Family Court is riddled with incompetence and failure to protect, all under the cloak of “in the best interest of the children.” Many women don’t make it out alive (see Mothers Lost.) For the District Attorneys, State Attorney General and the FBI to turn a blind eye to all the complaints and calls for investigations into the operations of these courts is unconscionable. We even called for New York legislators to step in and exert their power to investigate the courts by launching a Moreland Commission, when we testified in the Public State Senate Public Hearing in 2023.

The Free Press claims that their journalist spent 8 months researching this piece. To us, this represents a deeply disappointing missed opportunity. The press is very much needed to assist the public in understanding a basic function of its courts — divorce — and just how poorly that function is performed and how unaccountable the courts are for their abysmal service. The press could do a tremendous service to the public by sunlighting these issues, how our current legal system incites and incentivizes conflict, often rewarding it, and its devastating effect on families.

Our community knew Catherine, and her goal was not revenge as this reporter claims. Her goal was above all — not to lose the children whom she loved deeply. At her death, Catherine stated her hope for the future: to spur investigation and reform of the family courts across the country. Let’s not fail her in death, as she was failed in life.

In closing, we want to speak to all of the women who may be trapped in the family courts who are reading this: The Free Press article does not accurately express the situation in the courts for women. We hear you, we see you. Don’t let their article dishearten you or provoke any sense of hopelessness. Women are gathering, women are speaking, and we will overturn this beast of a system together.

The WeSpoke Community

(The letter was originally published here: https://www.wespoke.org/news/openletterthefreepress.)

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Free Speech Violation Disguised as a Protective Order

My Affidavit Reveals the Lengths to which Family Court Actors will Go to Hide Their Violent Crimes and ‘DARVO’ (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender)

AFFIDAVIT OF BANDY LEE

I, Bandy Lee, duly sworn upon oath, declare the following statement is true to the best of my knowledge:

1. I am a forensic psychiatrist and expert witness for the courts with twenty-five years of experience. I am also a faculty member of the Harvard Program in Psychiatry and the Law. When I consulted a preeminent constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School with all the evidence I had, he agreed that [Guardian ad Litem, or hitherto “GAL”] and the court of Jane Gallina-Mecca were violating the U.S. Constitution. He even wrote a personal letter to Judge Gallina-Mecca, urging her to make a correction, but she did not, and now she is under federal litigation, along with [GAL].

2. In January 2022, shocked at [GAL’s] and Jane Gallina-Mecca’s lack of due process and contempt for the law, to engage in extreme human rights violations, I informed them that, unless they corrected course, I would go public with their deeds. They merely responded that I am “not a litigant,” and conveyed no concern. Indeed, I would come to discover routine, reckless endangerment of lives under Gallina-Mecca, with at least one death widely publicized. [GAL] herself has boasted “absolute judicial immunity” regarding her deeds.

3. I have worked for the past two and a half years to expose [GAL] as a corrupt court official who endangers the lives of the very children she has been entrusted to protect. Without remorse, she has harassed, falsely arrested, orchestrated false police raids, and co-conspired to intimidate witnesses — and has invariably given custody to physically or sexually abusive parent in virtually all of the cases in which she has participated.

4. The main question is: How is telling the truth harassment? [GAL’s] petition is nothing but a naked attempt to circumvent the First Amendment, through semantical obfuscation, and the rebuke she received from the legal departments of major magazines and news outlets. She and Jane Gallina-Mecca were reprimanded for their “presumptively unconstitutional prior restraint against ongoing publication.” An article in the Washington Post reported Gallina-Mecca’s illegal interference with the press in the past. [GAL’s] goal is clear: to bend the law backwards to try to make my constitutionally-protected speech a threat of physical violence, so that she can continue preying on vulnerable children with impunity.

5. In her certification, [GAL] lies or misleads many times. Most notably, she concocts a connection between me and a third author who advocates the Second Amendment, displays stacks of ammunition, and places her picture between crosshairs. Her dramatic display belies the fact that she already knows there is absolutely no connection between me and this author: when that article was published, she immediately called the state police. After a thorough investigation, the state police concluded that there was no basis whatsoever for her making a connection. At the time, she assumed that I wrote the article. My first article on [GAL], dated February 17, 2023, clearly postdates that article, as I cite the article and denounce any violence (see Exhibit A).

6. [GAL] has refused to accept that multiple agencies and individuals are investigating her and Gallina-Mecca’s crimes, as the above author demonstrates. Instead, she has harassed and intimidated me and my sister for any random information that got out on her case. She used this false attribution to sanction my sister with almost $27,000, when the judge recommended $5000 ([GAL] said that the only way she would accept $5000 is if my sister would stop any future articles from being published — a power my sister clearly did not have). The absurdity of [GAL] taking out a protective order against my sister, when my sister has not posted or said anything negative about [GAL] — her last communication was an email related to her litigation, dated July 23, 2023 — reveals the total lack of any semblance of credibility of these bogus charges.

7. Lest we forget — my sister had her screaming, crying children literally pulled from her arms by a “SWAT team” of five police officers, in a blatant kidnap that was fully orchestrated by [GAL] and her abusive husband. This occurred after [GAL] specifically gave her custody time with her children that weekend, at which time they went to a nearby hotel to access the pool, because they were suicidal after being secretly taken to a faraway resort by their father the weekend before (upon which the children called their maternal grandfather in terror — which was how we found out that the abusive father violated court directives to take them out of state without permission).

8. Instead of protecting these children, [GAL] has not only allowed their abusive father to abduct and isolate them but has harassed, intimidated, assaulted by false police raid, and almost caused the death of the mother. The mother developed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) only after [GAL’s] raids, when she had not acquired this diagnosis even after suffering thirteen years of domestic violence and coercive control. [GAL] is solely responsible for abducting her previously healthy and happy children from their primary caregiver and devoted mother to isolate them with their abusive father — who almost killed each of them by head injury and was placed on a restraining order shortly before [GAL] transferred them to his sole custody, to their extreme medical decline ever since.

9. Additionally, [GAL’s] violation of my First Amendment rights through a false claim of “threat” constitutes a curtailment of my rights and privileges as a physician. I am a mandated reporter, legally required to report child abuse at any medical suspicion, and to repeatedly report it if the abuse is ongoing. I have encountered obstacles every step of the way because of her and Jane Gallina-Mecca’s interferences with Child Protective Services and the Child Abuse Hotline. Therefore, I am acting on my conscience when I am speaking for the scores of children [GAL] has victimized, all to their verifiable decline.

10. [GAL’s] greatest fear is that the truth will be revealed. She conjures up an implausible false narrative that she is being physically threatened by randomly picking a “tweet” from someone whom I have never met nor contacted. I am a New York Times bestselling author and a public intellectual with an X audience of over 100,000. Of the thousands of posts I make per year, if one erratic response to my articles was all [GAL] could find, then it is only proof that the benefit and protection of life I try to provide far outweigh any unintended harm. Since my articles, judicial reformers have called upon me to testify before seven different State legislatures to help protect children from Family Court abuses. Almost forty other victim litigants of [GAL] have come forward and shared their stories with me, which has familiarized me with [GAL’s] decade-long pattern of transferring thriving children from devoted parents and nurturing homes to hand them to abusers (usually, an abusive father who is paying her to steal the children, whom he would then use to extort “child support” or other, sometimes extreme, money-making schemes). A documentary film is underway with their testimonies.

11. When the Saddle River community, which was protesting her remaining on their Board of Education despite their voting her out (she was voted out in November 2023), invited me to report to the Board my observations, several of the above victim parents offered to testify. We were in the process of arranging these testimonies before the Board when [GAL] filed her protective order.

12. The one who needs a protective order against her is [GAL], not myself or my innocent sister. [GAL] has constantly harassed my sister for my articles, when my sister has never been my source of information and never has prior knowledge of any of my publications. I write about what I have witnessed myself, what independent investigators have told me, and what I read about in articles such as the one [GAL] cited, which often have more information on my sister’s case than I myself knew. Many who are familiar with [GAL’s] and Gallina-Mecca’s gangster-like methods have warned me about my own physical safety. I took down several articles in response to their cautioning that my life could be in danger, and others have told me, in no uncertain terms, that my public presence and free speech were keeping me alive. There is at least one reporter who died while confronting Gallina-Mecca, and [GAL] is known for her violent police raids, which she even perpetrated on the Saddle River community, much to their shock (it had never in its history experienced such violence by a Board of Education member against a parent). One violent raid almost killed my sister, for which the State of New Jersey criminally charged [GAL] as of March 26, 2024 (see Exhibit B). [GAL] lied in her certification that no criminal charges exist. Because of an error in a recent probable cause hearing (where the judge did not hear the amended charges), these charges are being resubmitted. [GAL’s] lies to the police have been submitted to the Bergen County prosecutor, in addition to her more than 350 lies to the court and multiple counts of felony perjury, just in my sister’s case. The rest is being litigated in federal court, including her and Gallina-Mecca’s violations of my First Amendment rights.

13. This is not a protective order against a “threat”. This consists of a “cease and desist” order from publishing or speaking the truth, in a desperate attempt by [GAL], under the tacit approval of Jane Gallina-Mecca, to silence me and my sister so as to deny our First Amendment rights of freedom of expression. They are falsely claiming the need for a protective order to suppress our rightful criticism of their extreme abuses of judicial authority, by which my sister’s two children were illegally and unconstitutionally abducted from her without due process; to negate our federal charges; and to undermine the petition for impeachment against Gallina-Mecca that over thirty of her victim litigants organized, which has gathered almost 600 signatures in just three weeks. This is also why they are using a fellow judge in the Bergen County Family Court system under Gallina-Mecca’s supervision as chief judge, to silence me in my writing and expression — thereby preventing me from bringing their illegal and unconstitutional abuses of authority under public scrutiny. For all these reasons, the protective order against me and my sister should be dropped.

Signed and Notarized,

Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div.

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Evelyn Nissirios — Desperate to Avoid Prosecution, Tries Harassment and Retaliation

Evelyn Nissirios — Desperate to Avoid Prosecution, Tries Harassment and Retaliation

When Threats and Intimidation do not Work, Evelyn Nissirios Goes for Harassment and Retaliation, but Her Victims are Determined to Get Justice

There is nothing I would love more than to stop writing about Evelyn Nissirios; yet, there is never a quiet day for anyone forced to engage with her. Her unending acts of harassment now include frivolous restraining orders. She served both myself and my sister — the latter whom she almost killed via violent police raid. How ironic!

Nissirios organized the raid through a false police report, within hours of being notified that my sister was suffering from a life-threatening medical emergency. Nissirios told multiple provable lies in this report, for which a civilian complaint has been filed. Her lies and acts of perjury in court exceed 350 counts over three years, for which another civilian complaint has been filed. Nissirios thus operates through constant lying, as dozens of litigants under her have testified on video record. And now, she has lied again in order to harass with false restraining orders!

Nissirios is charging my sister, a litigant she herself repeatedly assaulted, of “cyber harassment” and “stalking”. This is bizarre if not delusional, since my sister never messaged her outside of formal emails in the course of her litigation, which ended months ago. The State of New Jersey has rather criminally charged Nissirios for harassing my sister, for the episode that landed her in the emergency room. She could have died from life-threatening high blood pressures, as a direct result of Nissirios’ actions, she was told. Two days later, during a second life-threatening episode, soon after she informed the court, Nissirios took that opportunity to maliciously prosecute and to violently assault her, through police raid — in co-conspiracy with her violent husband, who had been plotting and attempting her “medical” demise for months.

Nissirios’ criminal charges were published earlier, at her community’s request (in the context of her ongoing contentious battle while illegitimately remaining on a Board from which her community voted her out). Below are the criminal charges the State has issued against her co-conspirer and my domestic violence-offending brother-in-law:

I also do not understand why I would receive a restraining order, or how I have “cyber harassed” her. If she is referring to my articles, they are well within my First Amendment rights, as the legal department of one of the magazines she helped harass has clarified:

this order requires that the [referenced article] must “be immediately removed, deleted, and unpublished”…. [Magazine] is not a party to this lawsuit, had no notice that such an order was being sought, and almost certainly is not subject to the court’s jurisdiction. In addition, it appears obvious to me that even if the order expressly covered the [Magazine] article, it would functionally be a presumptively unconstitutional prior restraint against ongoing publication.

I, too, was not under any jurisdiction other than my own federal lawsuit against her. Furthermore, my articles are not intended for Nissirios but for the public. How else would her potential victims learn about her deadly deeds, when she hides behind so respectable a title as “officer of the court,” or “member of the Board of Education,” all the while co-conspiring in child kidnapping, child rape, child torture, and attempted child murder on a daily basis, month after month, year after year, with impunity? If she believes I am defaming her, she knows what legal recourses she has; I more than welcome — and am eager to have — any opportunity for discovery!

Finally, I do not understand how I could have “stalked” her. If she is referring to my one appearance before her Board of Education, that was by invitation. On February 7, 2024, her community invited me to attend a public meeting of the Board, which Nissirios refused to leave, despite the community voting her out. The community recently invited me to return — on July 17, 2024 — to confirm that Nissirios has criminal charges (the Board insisted she did not, even after I emailed them multiple times over several months about her charges). No revelation seems sufficient for them to let her go, regardless of the community’s wishes, and recently even the Board member the community had voted in to take her place resigned. Perhaps she was trying to prevent this meeting from happening through her restraining order.

The irony is, if anyone, I should be the one filing for a restraining order against Nissirios and her accomplice, Jane Gallina-Mecca! I am the one harassed and threatened for being a whistleblower and a witness, and given their track record of abuses of power and connections with multiple deaths, including that of a reporter, I should be the one fearing for my life! (indeed, I have notified everyone that, should something happen to me, these two are the culprits — in all my career treating the most violent individuals society produces, and even warning against a dangerous president, I have never felt my life so endangered as under these two).

In the end, I can only conclude that these restraining orders are more evidence of Nissirios’ criminality. In my twenty-five years of specializing in criminal psychology, I have found that desperate criminals always frame their victims with their own crimes. Does Nissirios believe that only nuisances to herself are “harassment”, and that her victims are simply supposed to “roll over” when she steals their children and condemns them to fates worse than death? This is the typical structure of a warped criminal mind, upon reaching the end of her crime spree.

*This is the nineteenth article informing the public of Evelyn Nissirios’ criminal acts of violence against children, which she has covered up through extreme abuses of authority. As long as the child abuse, torture, rape, and battery continue, these articles will not end. Now, Nissirios is trying to stop them through harassment and retaliation. The Saddle River Board of Education, which has been protecting Nissirios by illegitimately keeping her on the Board — shockingly, even after the community voted her out  — has been a co-conspirator in her crimes against children, by shielding her from accountability. However, all this is coming to an end. If Nissirios feels harassed by my meager articles, how is she going to cope with the books, the documentary, and the television series come out, where she will be a principal player and archetype? In the meantime, many are suffering the most unspeakable pain of seeing their children destroyed. Please sign the petition to impeach Nissirios’ accomplice, Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca, which has now exceeded 500 signatures! Several of Nissirios’ victims will participate in presenting it to the New Jersey Senate.

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New Amended Federal Lawsuit against Jane Gallina-Mecca, Evelyn Nissirios, and Michael Piacenza

My Sister Joins My Complaint against State Actors who Destroyed Her Family, Just to Coddle One Sick Man

The federal judge in my case gave me leave to amend my lawsuit, and thus I took the opportunity to add Michael Piacenza as defendant and my sister as plaintiff. It now begins:

This is a civil rights action against employees of the state … who conspired to deprive a mother, in violation of her right to the procedures of a fair trial, of custody and of access to her two minor children for the “crime” of trying to pursue justice for them. In the process, the defendants illegally: conspired to have the mother’s sister, a qualified psychiatrist, arrested in order to prevent her from investigating reports of the children’s deteriorating health; conspired to have the mother herself arrested on false charges; threatened the mother‘s sister with prosecution in the hope of deterring her from further investigation; deprived the mother, a self-represented litigant, access to the transcripts of her own state court action, thus preventing her from adequately defending herself; and barred her and her sister from publishing any comments about her case in violation of their rights to free speech.

I will not say more about an active lawsuit in progress. However, what I have learned about Family Courts more generally through my investigations I must write about as a scholar of violence. Family Courts are a destructive and violent, mafia-like enterprise committing the greatest human rights violations on U.S. soil, through extreme abuses of unwarranted, vastly-expanded judicial authority. Human rights authors have been warning against them for years if not decades, and finally last year the United Nations Human Rights Council issued a damning report.

Yet, Family Court abuses are not widely known. I noted before that enclaves of medieval barbarity exist even in civilized society, such as behind the concrete walls of jails and prisons. Gladiator fights, gang rapes, and serial murders happen regularly in prisons, because it is known that there will be no consequences; prisoners, who have no real voice, are fair game for unspeakable brutalities, usually far worse than anything they committed. What has been most shocking for me to discover — in my lifetime of studying violence — is that even worse than what is occurring in prisons is happening to another group without a voice: children. An even more depraved world of savagery exists behind the self-imposed “court seals” and secrecy of the so-called, “Family Courts.” And these innocent children committed no crime.

This is how it usually works: an overwhelming majority of women and children presenting to Family Court are victims of domestic abuse. They never suspect that the abuse will escalate a thousandfold upon entry into Family Court, because they believe it is an actual “court”. By the time they recognize the reality, that they would suffer the greatest injustices ever imagined, they have already been demolished — so that they cannot be witnesses. In any criminal court, an abuser’s lack of remorse would be punished, and his delusion (common in criminal psychology) that his accusers have “mental problems” or are trying to “alienate” the children from him would be nipped in the bud. In Family Court, however, this abuser pathology is precisely what is coddled and used to make “fair game” out of children. Child theft, a crime warranting the death penalty in some states, is routine practice in Family Court, since stealing children from the loving parent and then “selling” them to the abuser is a lucrative, 50+ billion-dollar business of human trafficking and a modern-day slave trade. Whenever objections are raised, Family Courts can hide behind the narrative that it was merely a “contentious divorce” and those who complain are merely “unhappy litigants.” With one in four children subject to severe physical abuse, and one in five to sexual abuse — and over one million of them being processed through the Family Courts every year, pedophilic sex trafficking gangs operate along the lengths of the East and West Coasts (and I recently heard in the Midwest, also), waiting for Family Court-generated fodder.

I clarify that I have not verified the pedophilic sex rings myself, but insiders almost universally know about them: “a trafficking ring known as ‘the barber shops,’ a group that populates the corridor of I-95 across the country.” What I witnessed, however, is that Family Courts have sent 100 percent of abused children to their abuser in the forty or so cases I have engaged in as an expert witness. About half of them, in my experience, are trafficked to others for sexual abuse, photographed, and videotaped, and there is no age limit: four-year-olds, two-year-olds, and even infants. It happens in broad knowledge of the Family Courts, since the loving parents continue to bring evidence — enough for immediate conviction in any criminal court — petitions, and pleas to the Courts, for which only they, and never the perpetrators, are punished. The abuser may rape, batter, and even murder the children they are granted custody of, but even after children die, there are no consequences in Family Court (instead, supervision, fines, and imprisonment are only applied to the loving, innocent parent). Indeed, studies are beginning to show that Family Courts commonly facilitate the murders of former partners or of children — this is almost never reported on, because of threats and even possible death.

My sister’s own distorted divorce apprised me of this warped situation of the Family Courts. At first, she seemed to be undergoing a normal divorce, with her philandering and substance-abusing husband deciding to leave, so that he could live with his girlfriend, since she was no longer “praising me enough.” Then, all of a sudden, he wanted custody of the children he never cared enough to spend five minutes with before (this is common, as the predatory Family Courts spot abusive personalities instantly and entice them into taking the children as their “ticket” to financial windfalls through “child support,” all marital assets, the house, and legal fees — and indeed my brother-in-law has demanded six-figure “child support,” no alimony for his wife, the house, and all his legal fees, despite making a million dollars a year). Sadistic personalities discover that, through Family Court, they can torture, imprison, and maybe even murder their ex-spouse with impunity — and indeed my brother-in-law attempted to “medically” murder my sister six times, three times in collusion with the Family Court. He also nearly killed his son by head injury, the way he did his daughter when she was an infant, and was on a restraining order just before the court negated it and gave him sole custody. He has been duly diagnosed of psychopathy, which is a contraindication to parenting, but in Family Court this is all the more “qualification” to have the children!

In this manner, a domestic violence victim who enters Family Court ceases to have any Constitutional rights, any freedom, any right over her children, or any right over her past, current, and future earnings. Evelyn Nissirios, the “children’s guardian ad litem” is in place to ensure that the sale of children occurs “smoothly” for herself (for the children, it is the most abrupt and brutally traumatic transfer imaginable, by police raid). The “judge”, Jane Gallina-Mecca, is there to force “appointed officers” on litigants and then to order their payment, liquidating assets at the rate of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. And to intimidate witnesses, they recruit school “principals” such as Michael Piacenza, who entrapped and then falsely arrested two physicians trying to report child abuse (the abusive father was caught on camera orchestrating the entire arrest behind the scenes at the school, during a mandatory conference from which the Family Court excused him but not the mother), and on another occasion falsely arrested the mother for doing routine volunteer work, without telling her that she was not allowed to do what she had done the previous five years, either when he greeted her in the hallway or when he complimented her for her service (he was caught on camera lying to the police that there was a “second court order,” while there was not, when the officer refused to arrest her based on what he had). However, their plans backfired, when their trumped-up charges us were dropped, but Nissirios and my brother-in-law ended up with criminal charges instead. The three defendants probably also thought my sister would be easy to railroad, having the countenance of a submissive Asian wife. Nevertheless, the collusions are endless, as the Division of Child Protection and Permanency and the Child Abuse Hotline are constantly tampered with, which is why Family Courts are referred to as organized crime, or a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) scheme. Below are my latest correspondences with the court:

July 1, 2024

Judge Gallina-Mecca:

This is an eighth [communication] you are receiving, as a result of your refusal to hold Alan T. Chan accountable in his intent to commit a financial heist by fraud upon the court. I request again: please do your job, and enforce accountability. Your task as judge is not to co-conspire in child abduction and abuse, not to co-conspire in financial theft and fraud, and not to assist in a violent spouse’s attempted murder as his hired hand, but to administer the Law….

Sincerely yours,

Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div.

In response, I received the repetitive and mechanical answer that I am “not a party to this matter.” What is noteworthy is that the response came from the judge’s administrative assistant, and my last several messages bounced back from her clerk, indicating that the clerk has been missing for over two months, until the end of her term. An automatic message states simply that she is “out of the office” and does not state why she would be out for this length of time, to the end of her clerkship. This clerk came across to me earlier as exceptionally conscientious and intelligent, and therefore I strongly suspect that she has joined the many compassionate lawyers and judges who enter Family Court and then are ousted, pressured to leave, or quit their professions altogether, so horrified are they by what they have seen. I have written one last note to the administrative assistant, as below (what will seem very obviously wrong to the average reasonable person, is what is “right” in the upside-down “Family Court):

Ms. Castro:

I am indeed not a litigant, as Ms. Gallina-Mecca seems mistakenly to believe. I am a fact witness whom she has:

- illegally blocked, intimidated, harassed, and arrested by secret order;

- violated the professional rights and privileges of, so that I could not fulfill my medical duties;

- intervened with every agency in every way possible, so that I could not report child abuse;

- violated the First Amendment rights of, by abridging my freedom of speech, interfering with the press, and prohibiting my right peaceably to assemble with my own sister.

[Ms. Gallina-Mecca is the one who] forced me to become a party of her case, in order to exert control over me. Does she really believe there will be no consequences?

It has been seven weeks since the trial. We are waiting for her final order with bated breath.

Thank you very much,

Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div.

*Victims of Jane Gallina-Mecca are mobilizing with a petition calling for her impeachment — and have collected 400 signatures in less than two weeks! If you care about saving the lives of children and adult victims in a Family Court, please sign here . Thank you!

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My New Amended Federal Lawsuit against Jane Gallina-Mecca, Evelyn Nissirios, and Michael Piacenza

Now, My Sister Joins My Complaint against State Actors who Destroyed Her Entire Family, Just to Coddle One Sick Man

The federal judge in my case gave me leave to amend my lawsuit, and thus I took the opportunity to add Michael Piacenza as defendant and my sister as plaintiff. It now begins:

This is a civil rights action against employees of the state … who conspired to deprive a mother, in violation of her right to the procedures of a fair trial, of custody and of access to her two minor children for the “crime” of trying to pursue justice for them. In the process, the defendants illegally: conspired to have the mother‘s sister, a qualified psychiatrist, arrested in order to prevent her from investigating reports of the children’s deteriorating health; conspired to have the mother herself arrested on false charges; threatened the mother‘s sister with prosecution in the hope of deterring her from further investigation; deprived the mother, a self-represented litigant, access to the transcripts of her own state court action, thus preventing her from adequately defending herself; and barred her and her sister from publishing any comments about her case in violation of their rights to free speech.

I will not say more about an active lawsuit in progress. However, what I have learned about Family Courts more generally through my investigations I must write about as a scholar of violence. Family Courts are committing the greatest human rights violations on U.S. soil and getting away with it, through abuses of vastly-expanded judicial authority.

I noted before that enclaves of medieval barbarity exist even in civilized society, such as behind the concrete walls of jails and prisons. Gladiator fights, gang rapes, and serial murders happen regularly in prisons, because it is known that there will be no consequences; prisoners, who have no real voice, are fair game for unspeakable brutalities, usually far worse than anything they committed. What has been most shocking for me to discover — in my lifetime of studying violence — is that even worse than what is occurring in prisons is happening to another group without a voice: children. An even more depraved world of savagery exists behind the self-imposed “court seals” and secrecy of the so-called “Family Courts.” And these innocent children committed no crime.

This is how it usually works: an overwhelming majority of women and children presenting to Family Court are victims of domestic abuse. They do not suspect that the abuse will escalate a thousandfold upon entry into Family Court, as they do not realize that Family Courts are a predatory enterprise. In any criminal court, an abuser’s lack of remorse would be punished, and his delusion (common in criminal psychology) that his accusers have mental problems or are trying to “alienate” the children from him would be nipped in the bud. In Family Court, however, this abuser pathology is precisely what is coddled, for it creates children who are “fair game.” Child theft, a crime warranting the death penalty in some states, is routine practice in Family Court, since stealing children from the loving parent and then “selling” them to the abuser is a lucrative, 50+ billion-dollar business of human trafficking and a modern-day slave trade. Whenever objections are raised, Family Courts can hide behind the narrative that it was merely a “contentious divorce” and those who complain are merely “unhappy litigants.” With one in four children subject to severe physical abuse, and one in five to sexual abuse — and over one million of them being processed through the Family Courts every year, pedophilic sex trafficking gangs operate along the lengths of the East and West Coasts (and I recently heard in the Midwest, also), waiting for Family Court-generated fodder.

I clarify that I have not verified the pedophilic sex rings myself, but insiders almost universally know about them: “a trafficking ring known as ‘the barber shops,’ a group that populates the corridor of I-95 across the country.” All that I know is that Family Courts have sent 100 percent of abused children to their abuser in the forty or so cases I have engaged in as an expert witness for the courts. About half of them, in my experience, are trafficked to others for sexual abuse, photographed, and videotaped, and there is no age limit: four-year-olds, three-year-olds, and even infants. It happens in broad knowledge of the Family Courts, since the loving parents continue to bring evidence — enough to convict in less than an hour in a criminal court — petitions, and pleas to the Courts, for which only they, and never the perpetrators, are punished. The abuser may rape, batter, and even murder the children they are granted custody of, but even after children die, there are no consequences in Family Court (instead, supervision, fines, and imprisonment are only applied to the loving parent). Indeed, studies now show how commonly Family Courts facilitate the murders of former partners or of children.

My sister’s own distorted divorce apprised me of the warped situation of the Family Courts. At first, she seemed to be undergoing a normal divorce, with her philandering husband deciding to leave to live with his girlfriend, because she was no longer “praising me enough.” Then, all of a sudden, he wanted custody of the children he never cared enough to spend five minutes with before (this is common, as the predatory Family Courts spot abusive personalities instantly and promise them that the children will be their “ticket” to financial windfalls through “child support,” all marital assets, the house, and legal fees — and indeed my brother-in-law has demanded six-figure “child support,” no alimony for his wife, the house, and all his legal fees). Sadistic personalities discover that, through Family Court, they can torture, imprison, and maybe even murder their ex-spouse with impunity — and indeed my brother-in-law attempted to “medically murder” my sister six times, three times in collusion with the Family Court. He also nearly killed his son by head injury, the way he did his daughter when she was an infant, and was on a temporary restraining order just before the court gave him sole custody. He has been duly diagnosed of psychopathy, which is a contraindication to parenting, but in Family Court this is all the more “qualification” to have the children!

A domestic violence victim who enters Family Court ceases having any Constitutional rights, any freedom, any right over her children, or any right over her past, current, and future earnings. Evelyn Nissirios, the “children’s guardian ad litem” is in place to ensure that the transfer of children occurs “smoothly” for herself (for the children, it is the most abrupt and brutally traumatic transfer imaginable, by police raid). The “judge”, Jane Gallina-Mecca, is there to force “appointed officers” on litigants and then to order their payment, liquidating assets at the rate of hundreds of thousands, if not millions. And to intimidate witnesses, they recruit school “principals” such as Michael Piacenza, who entrapped and then falsely arrested two physicians trying to report child abuse (the abusive father was caught on camera orchestrating the entire arrest behind the scenes at the school, during a mandatory conference from which the Family Court excused him but not the mother), and on another occasion falsely arrested the mother for doing routine volunteer work, as she had done the previous five years, without telling her that she was not allowed when he greeted her in the hallway or when he complimented her for her service (he was caught on camera lying to the police that there was a “court order,” when there was not, when the officer was unwilling to arrest her without one). There is also collusion with the Division of Child Protection and Permanency and the Child Abuse Hotline, which is why Family Courts are often referred to as organized crime, or a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) scheme. Below are my latest correspondences with the court:

July 1, 2024

Judge Gallina-Mecca:

This is an eighth [communication] you are receiving, as a result of your refusal to hold Alan T. Chan accountable in his intent to commit a financial heist by fraud upon the court. I request again: please do your job, and enforce accountability. Your task as judge is not to co-conspire in child abduction and abuse, not to co-conspire in financial theft and fraud, and not to assist in a violent spouse’s attempted murder as his hired hand, but to administer the Law….

Sincerely yours,

Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div.

In response, I received the repetitive and mechanical answer that I am “not a party to this matter.” What is curious is that the response came from the judge’s administrative assistant, and my last several messages bounced back from her clerk, indicating that the clerk has been missing for over two months, running into the end of her term. An automatic message states simply that she is “out of the office” and does not state why she would be out for this long, running into the end of her clerkship. This clerk came across earlier as exceptionally conscientious and intelligent, and I strongly suspect that she may have joined the many compassionate lawyers and judges who enter Family Court and then are ousted or quit their professions altogether, so horrified are they by what they have seen. I have written one last note to the administrative assistant, as below (what will seem very obviously wrong to the average reasonable person, is what is “right” in the upside-down “Family Court):

Ms. Castro:

I am indeed not a litigant, as Ms. Gallina-Mecca seems mistakenly to believe. I am a fact witness whom she has:

- illegally blocked, intimidated, harassed, and arrested by secret order;

- violated the professional rights and privileges of, so that I could not fulfill my medical duties;

- intervened with every agency in every way possible, so that I could not report child abuse;

- violated the First Amendment rights of, by abridging my freedom of speech, interfering with the press, and prohibiting my right peaceably to assemble with my own sister.

[Ms. Gallina-Mecca is the one who] forced me to become a party of her case, in order to control me. Does she really believe there will be no consequences?

It has been seven weeks since the trial. We are waiting for her final order with bated breath.

Thank you very much,

Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div.

*Of note, victims of Jane Gallina-Mecca are mobilizing with a petition calling for her impeachment — and have collected 400 signatures in less than two weeks! If you care about saving the lives of children and adult victims in a Family Court, please feel free to sign here as well . Thank you!

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