What Restraining Order Defendants Need to Know That No One Ever Tells Them: The Truth Doesn’t Matter

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The ambition of this post, an intermission between considerations of graver subjects, is to dispel restraining order defendants’ faith in the value of “truth.” Defendants are led to believe that if they’re truthful in the defiance of lies or hyped allegations, all will turn out as it should. But truth is a false idol that answers no prayers.

If you haven’t yet had to swear this oath, you’ve heard it before on TV: “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” (Sometimes God and the word solemnly are thrown in for emphasis…maybe to suggest you’ll be struck by lightning if you distort the facts or omit any.)

The significance of this courtroom ritual is none, and taking it literally is for chumps.

Civil trials, especially the kind this blog concerns, do not weigh “truth”; they weigh testimony, along with evidence as it’s represented (in procedures that may span minutes only). The savvy defendant will think in terms of economics and marketing. “Truth” has no inherent value to a defense. Unless it conclusively proves something you want to prove, it’s totally worthless. Worse, it may distract and dilute the potency of what you’re trying to sell. Facts, besides, may not tell the truth. The word truth is a trap for the naïve.

What wins cases are successful representations, ones that work the desired effect (i.e., what wins is salesmanship not scrupulous reporting).

While the court asks for honesty, it doesn’t reward it. It’s what you say and how you say it that counts, not “the truth.” God isn’t the judge; a man or woman is, and his or her favor goes to the person who gives the most compelling presentation (i.e., sales pitch).

Why do lying plaintiffs win? They win because their representations were persuasive. Did they tell “the whole truth and nothing but”? They may have told none at all. (Restraining orders have reportedly been obtained by people using assumed names; they didn’t even tell the truth of who they were.)

What do cunning attorneys who represent lying clients (or any clients) do? They tell only those truths that support their stories…and no others. (They may lie, also—and vigorously.)

The fastidious defendant who finicks over every detail, who backpedals and carefully qualifies his statements (in the interest of complete and accurate disclosure), and who otherwise invests his or her trust in “the truth” grossly misperceives the nature of process.

Representations win court contests, not “the truth.” The truth doesn’t matter.

~ EPILOG ~

A few months ago, the writer spoke for an hour or so with a 30-something man who said he was an obsessive-compulsive. He had written that he was “starting to go downhill really fast” and needed help. “I will try to eventually explain,” he began, “but there’s such a long history of what happened.”

What he explained was that he’d been bullied by a woman many years prior, while they were in high school, and had been haunted and galled by the abuse ever since. He said she had tried to coerce him to have sex with a friend of hers, that he had refused, and that she had spitefully urged some guys to rough him up (one of them would later be convicted of murder, so this wasn’t bush league bullying). She had also greeted him with a sneer whenever they met after that, and flipped him the bird and yelled “Fuck you!” at him as he passed by. He had tried to reach an accord but had only been mocked. He said he never used to stand up for himself and was sick of turning the other cheek.

He impulsively ventilated rage that he had bottled for 20 years by calling the cell of the woman’s husband and leaving her a voicemail that called her a “rude, mean bitch” and that ended with a string of “Fuck you!”s. That was pretty much the extent of it, but he was handily represented as a stalker.

He wanted to know what pointers I could offer that might aid him in his defense against a restraining order petitioned by a woman who claimed to have no memory of the events he described and whose stepmother, he said, was a former lawyer who had prosecuted cases before the state supreme court and was, besides, the director of a “domestic abuse and physical violence organization.”

Yeah.

I repeatedly impressed upon him that reciting a history that spanned decades wasn’t likely to move a judge to anything but a yawn (or a rebuke) and that he should consider how to frame his story to put himself in the most favorable light, for example, by updating the context (and abandoning a rigidly chronological narrative).

Each time I interrupted, he said he understood and then recommenced his story, which stretched back to his anguished childhood. He was very earnest and conscientious, and continually paused and qualified his remarks with “Granted, I….” It was important to him, he said, to tell his “heart’s truth” (i.e., the “whole truth”). He wanted someone to sympathize, and I did. But I knew a judge would not.

I never heard from him again.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

8 thoughts on “What Restraining Order Defendants Need to Know That No One Ever Tells Them: The Truth Doesn’t Matter”

  1. Funny. Twice I have had attorneys do the work and twice they both leave out fundamental issues, rights guaranteed by the Constitution. I came to the conclusion that as lawyers they only work within the code, the codes of the state, nothing more. So I was doomed. Even after nothing for 2 years a lawyer could not win the case for me. Was she really trying? Or was it the hope of more money on an appeal? I suspect the later, now.

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  2. Any falsely accused person who’s dealing with restraining order proceedings needs to recognize that in a way, they were defeated before the paperwork was ever filed. They were defeated in that they failed to avoid associating with (or attracting the notice of) someone who is a vindictive, paranoid, scheming, or delusional enough individual to want to file such a petition, and thereby use the legal system to inflict pain on them or to gain an unfair advantage. The first line of defense is, when possible, to recognize what kind of person would do that, and learn how to identify and avoid them before it’s too late.

    As we discover once restraining order proceedings have started, there aren’t very many other lines of defense. Judges don’t want to spend on a lot of time on these cases, and they figure that you probably wouldn’t be facing an accusation if there weren’t at least some basis for it. After all, what rational person wants to go to the trouble of getting a court to prohibit contact, unless the contact is so abusive that ignoring the alleged abuser wouldn’t be a viable option? Well, actually, some rational people (when they perceive it could give them an advantage in divorce proceedings, for instance), and probably a much larger number of irrational people, would do that.

    The majority of people are honest, kind, reasonable, and fair enough that they wouldn’t stoop to making a false accusation, despite there being typically no punishment for it. But everyone will eventually encounter someone psychotic enough not to know the difference between truth and lies, or unscrupulous enough not to care. If you were already in the middle of some kind of conflict with them, they know they can gain the initiative by forcing you to defend against an accusation. If you were trying to avoid them and move on with your life, they know that having officers show up at your door with a summons to court is a way to get your attention and make you think of them. Or if they’re paranoid enough to consider you a threat, they may not think there’s any other option.

    I also think that in all kinds of cases, criminal or civil, judges tend to be more skeptical of pro se defendants. I’ve seen a dramatic difference between when I went to court pro se and when I was represented by an attorney. An attorney could tell the judge, “I have here a document that shows he completed all of his community service” and the judge would accept it as the truth without even asking to look at the evidence. However, if I went pro se and told the judge, “I have here a document that establishes my alibi” the judge would then question the officer, get a contrary account from him, and presume that the officer was telling the truth and that I had fabricated the evidence (despite the fact that I could’ve called about 30 witnesses; I assumed that the document would suffice, but that’s another story).

    In the long run, the solution to the restraining order problem will need to be a political solution, since the current laws put defendants at such a disadvantage. We’ll need to organize and get restraining order laws repealed, or at least reformed. We’ll need dedicated volunteers and/or money to do this, and we’ll need to go up against well-funded and well-organized opponents — most notably, the feminist movement, whose leaders don’t seem to agree with Blackstone’s formulation that “it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer” except when it comes to protecting false accusers from legal consequences for their perjury.

    There are a lot of questions to answer about how to organize a movement. For example, would we organize a single-issue movement, or operate within some larger organization (and if so, which one)? A starting point could be to create a restraining order reform site with 50 different forums, one for each state. Activists in each state could then find each other and discuss plans for changing the laws in their jurisdiction.

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      1. The FightCPS forums look kinda similar to what you created, except with a lot more sub-forums. http://forum.fightcps.com/ (They’re closed to the public so that people can discuss their cases without worrying so much about their adversaries’ using them as evidence against them, although theoretically the board could be infiltrated.) I think it’ll be important to use a system that allows users to be emailed when there are new responses to threads that interest them.

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        2. The author of FightCPS.com is inaccessible. All you can do to get her attention is leave a comment to her.

          I’m wondering, though, could forums be piggybacked?

          I’m curious, too, are the FightCPS threads you’ve looked at tame? Are people pissed? Do the boards have to be monitored and censored?

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          1. I don’t think there are a lot of trolls, since you can’t read the threads till you get access, and getting access requires going through an approval process first. There seem to be two active moderators who personally respond to most threads. People don’t seem to get very ideological on there (other than agreeing that the system is messed up). They mostly are telling their stories and exchanging their ideas and advice on how to navigate the system successfully and get their kids back from the foster care system. So in that sense, it reads like a technical forum.

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