So complacent toward lying have judges become that restraining order fraud goes over without raising an eyebrow. I’ve known one judge to scoff at the use of the word perjury on reflex, despite being ignorant of the facts he’d been called upon to adjudicate. And, though careless, he wasn’t a dim man.
Perjury, a felony crime, is the false (i.e., fraudulent) representation of a material fact to a judge (including on a sworn document like a restraining order application). A material fact is one that’s likely to influence a judicial decision. To falsely allege you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted, for instance, is to commit perjury. Perjury is a word all defendants who’ve been falsely accused should know. Chances are they’re victims of more than one materially factual misrepresentation to the court.
The phrase restraining order fraud, too, needs to gain more popular currency, and I encourage anyone who’s been victimized by false allegations to employ it. Fraud in its most general sense is willful misrepresentation intended to mislead for the purpose of realizing some source of gratification. As fraud is generally understood in law, that gratification is monetary. It may, however, derive from any number of alternative sources, including attention and revenge, two common motives for restraining order abuse. The goal of fraud on the courts is success (toward gaining, for example, attention or revenge).
People who are victimized by the restraining order process are rarely students of law and often have had no prior exposure to legal procedure whatever. Words like perjury and fraud, while possibly familiar from having been heard in TV courtroom dramas or read in novels, are mostly alien concepts to the uninitiated. Restraining order recipients have mere days to prepare a defense—if they know they can contest an order of the court at all—and it’s unlikely that they’ll have concepts like these at their command. (I’m a student of words, and it took a lawyer’s familiarizing me with the significance of these two, among others, for me to gain a reasonably firm grasp of their meaning—and this was years after my own day in court. I was a practicing kids’ poet, and words like these weren’t ones I’d ever had call to use. And I’d prefer I were still ignorant of them today.)
Fraud isn’t commonly applied to restraining order abuse (itself an uncommonly used phrase), and it certainly should be, because the restraining order process is assuredly the most common motivator of frauds on the court. This process is usually employed impulsively, is free, and is completed in a matter of moments. Those motivated to use it maliciously—and they’re legion—typically do so in the throes of spiteful passion. They say whatever they believe they need to to achieve their desired ends.
However lacking their stories may be of scrupulous premeditation, though, they’re nevertheless frauds. And they nevertheless work.
The reason for the court’s failure to perceive restraining order fraud derives from its failure to perceive how damaging false allegations are to defendants. Judges aren’t likely to associate fraud with restraining order allegations, believing the term more aptly applied to cases that inflict “real” harm. Restraining order fraud, even when it doesn’t cost a defendant access to his or her home, property, and children, does real harm: anxiety, gnawing outrage, despondency, and depression, which may predictably lead to insomnia, deterioration of health, loss of productivity, and behavioral changes, and may conceivably induce drug or alcohol abuse and homicidal or suicidal ideation. Defendants may lose jobs or job opportunities. They may end up homeless. And these consequences ignore those inflicted on peripheral parties like children, who may also be lastingly traumatized.
The judicial disconnect between restraining order and harm is one defendants against false restraining orders must endeavor to bridge, because even a judge who’s nobody’s fool isn’t likely to get there on his or her own. The restraining order process is virtually automated. Judges know they don’t have to apply a great deal of diligent attention to particulars and consequently rarely do.
Use of the words perjury and fraud aren’t likely to avail restraining order defendants. Of probable value, though, is understanding them. And of definite value to arousing awareness of restraining order abuse and promoting reform of the restraining order process is leading others to understand them.
Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com
TALKING BACK to restraining orders 
Reblogged this on Falsely Accused.
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YES, it is FRAUD as you have stated in this post and MANY others. FRAUD that is completely ignored by the courts even once proven as such in court. Think about that, one is able to prove that the accuser is lying and not just some white lies, but blatant lies yet the orders are granted as if the respondent(accused) is of no worth, value, importance, WITHOUT their own RIGHTS, freedom that should be protected?!
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You’ve anticipated my next post. As far as the courts are concerned, there are no false allegations. When restraining orders are dismissed following an appeals hearing, it’s because the defendant was “more credible” than the plaintiff (or the orders were “improperly issued”). The only judge I’ve ever known to acknowledge perjury (i.e., fraud on the court) was one who wasn’t involved in the case: no paper trail or public record.
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I tried unsuccessfully to sue for defamation for perjury in the filing of the CPO as well as lies to a police officer. My civil suit was over ruled as perjury in a civil case is considered absolute privelege. Many court cases in Ohio documenting anything in a judicial proceeding is protected. If the petitioner could be subjected to qualified privelege and it is indeed false then you may have a case but only in the situation involving initial police report. Ohio Supreme Court has not been ruled on decisions have only been made at a district level for qualified privlege. I am debating appealing my case to the 12th district. It just takes so much energy to pursue, energy that sociopath does not deserve. My case took 18 months to decide.
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I’m sorry to hear this, Cindy. And I know what every single day of those 18 months drained from you. This is the kind of thing that just makes you want to beat your head against the wall. Does the restraining order you were issued and that the plaintiff signed include some warning above the signature like “Under penalty of perjury I, the undersigned, swear that the foregoing is true [blah, blah, blah]”? If so, and if the allegations on the sworn statement were false, they can’t be both statutory violations and privileged, right? What you were told is patently absurd (and may nevertheless be defensible). There truly is no concluding otherwise than that this is a game played by house rules: wrong is right and left is purple. The person on the bench may as well be the Mad Hatter.
According to what you’ve been told, you’d be perfectly authorized by the law to make false claims in civil court about the judge: he ogles me, he screams vulgarities at me every day, he calls me and makes dirty suggestions, he’s threatened my life, he groped me, etc. If any of these claims inclined a judge to find against that judge and issue him a restraining order, then you could have him arrested based on some other false claims later on. And your claims of threat or sexual harassment would be public record and could be printed on page 1 of the local newspaper (or a national one), because a judge is a public figure. (AND those false claims would be protected, AND you’d be exempted from sanction for making them?) Truly I’m not sure whether judges don’t care that this is possible or whether they’re clueless (or whether they make it up as they go because they can).
Did you represent yourself, and were you opposed by an attorney?
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Thanks for the support…I did represent myself, arduous process and probably to my disadvantage as it is clearly a good old boys legal club. My CPO was denied originally and then withdrawn. Fortunately a case in Ohio in schussheim v. Schussheim was just ruled on by the Ohio Supreme Court and it allowed a civil action to be expunged and sealed. I did file a motion and it was granted so I am at least grateful for that.
But you are right it is just bad law to allow perjury in a judicial proceeding it mocks our entire legal system if no one is expected to tell the truth at least in a civil matter, what is the point in any of it.
They give such latitude when someone says I don’t know or I didn’t realize or I am just an idiot so you can’t expect me to understand These people are expert manipulators and liars.
More than likely going to try and close this chapter of my life.
I do appreciate your blog and being a resource to people going through something horrific which no one can possibly understand unless it has happened to you, humiliating.
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I did the same thing in 2010, not knowing thing one about prosecuting a lawsuit. I’d consulted with an attorney beforehand, though, and he at least reflected on how he’d go about it. By that point, I’d paid him a few thousand dollars to compose a letter for me, so he had a good superficial grasp of the matter. The torts he thought applied were these: fraud, intentional infliction of emotional distress, abuse of process/malicious prosecution, and defamation of character. I added perjury. I was 36 months into this ordeal before I started this and didn’t know there were statutes of limitation on torts. My case was dismissed because its torts (with the exception of felony perjury) were “time-barred,” but it would otherwise have been heard. All allegations would have been, that is, except perjury. The judge said he found no precedent that allowed anyone to litigate allegations of perjury except the state itself, i.e., the district attorney’s office. I’d of course already talked to a detective there, who said his office was too preoccupied with prosecuting murderers to mess with character assassins. The reason I called the county prosecutor in the first place is because a sitting judge who scrutinized the case (and who wasn’t ruling on it or otherwise directly involved in it) noted obvious contradictions and directed me to, using the phrase “felony perjury” (the first time I’d ever heard the word perjury in a real-life encounter).
I’ve been walking a circular rut in the ground for the better part of eight years.
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