Lies AREN’T a Game Leg: On Recognizing That False Allegations Only HAVE to Be Tolerated, Because They’re Not Retracted

I have a crippled leg.

It’s hardly the impediment it would have been if a surgeon hadn’t reconstructed it, but there’s only so much I can expect from it, and barring some advances in orthopedic science and my winning the lottery, its limitations are ones I’ll have to live with.

A recent comment from a very generous woman moved to express sympathy for a fellow victim of false allegations brought something to my attention. She said she was trying to get past her pain.

I understand her very well, but at the risk of pointing out the obvious, she shouldn’t have to. False allegations aren’t a withered limb, a ruptured disc, or an autoimmune disease. These latter things are real and unavoidable. Lies aren’t real, and their pain is easily relieved. The lies just have to be rectified.

That lies were made to the court doesn’t somehow convert them to truths that necessarily must be lived with. Lies don’t become authenticated or authorized because they work. The court isn’t God, and its rulings aren’t ineluctable verities etched on stone tablets. The pains of false allegations are artificially induced and nothing the wrongly accused should have to bear.

I’ve known people who were participants in compound hoaxes on the court. They, too, convinced themselves that false allegations were something that the victims of those allegations had to live with. One of the people I’m thinking of is a parent. She’s probably commanded her children to apologize for lying more than once, because she recognizes it’s wrong and wants to impress that fact upon her kids.

Lies by adults only have to be borne, because those adults aren’t equal to the expectations placed on infants. This fact isn’t changed because the lies were made to judges (who may be unequal to those expectations themselves).

The civil in civil process (from the Latin for citizen) is you and I. “The court” is a concept that society (also you and I) made up and invested with meaning. It stands for a collection of procedures that are supposed to preserve brotherly (and sisterly) harmony. The common denominator here—and the only real part—is you and I. The court’s agents are merely more infinitely fallible you’s and I’s.

It’s certainly pragmatic to accept that liars who don’t have to recant their lies probably won’t. But lies are never irreversible impositions of divine will.

They’re just the acts of liars, and there’s nothing lowlier and less divine than them. The only ones who should have to live with lies are their perpetrators.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Role Reversal: Using Restraining Orders to Conceal Misconduct and Displace Blame

“My brother was [the] victim of [domestic violence], but he was the one [who] got arrested, because he didn’t report it, and she called the police saying that she was the victim.”

“I have been accused of domestic violence. When my wife was arrested for credit fraud, I told her I wanted a divorce. She said she wasn’t letting me go. So she called the police and said I hit her so I was arrested. I’m so confused.”

—E-petition respondents

I’ve been monitoring the online petition, “Stop False Allegations of Domestic Violence,” since I came across it almost three years ago. The comments above were topmost when I looked at it Sunday evening.

The motives of the frauds they describe are essentially the same: cover-up. Plaintiffs’ blaming their victims for their own misconduct is a common motive for frauds on the police and courts, which typically stem from or involve restraining order abuse.

Dr. Tara Palmatier, on her website Shrink4Men.com, has written extensively about domestic violence committed by women, as well as about female abusers’ filing false allegations against their victims to compound the injury and garner attention. It’s neither my intention nor my interest to alienate female victims of restraining order abuse or to discount the horrors of their own ordeals with this observation, but women like attention (and, sure, men are hardly indifferent to it). This observation isn’t made gratuitously, either. Attention-seeking is a basic motive for the fraudulent abuse of restraining orders, which may derail or destroy defendants’ lives and which may be awarded based on nothing more substantial that hysterical hot air.

Playing the victim is a very potent form of passive aggression when the audience includes authorities and judges. Validation from these audience members is particularly gratifying to the egos of frauds, and both the police and judges have been trained to respond gallantly to the appeals of “damsels in distress.”

Besides attracting attention, bad faith abuses of civil process gratify abusers’ will to dominate and own their victims. Here you see the correspondence between the two scenarios in the epigraph. Potential threats in both cases have been defanged and subjugated to the control of the false accusers.

With their false allegations now in place, any threat to them that their victims may have posed has effectively been neutralized. Should the victim in the former case report that his wife is in fact the batterer, his allegation will be profoundly controverted by her beating him to the punch. She’s killed his credibility. If the victim in the latter case seeks a divorce, what should have been a clean break will have been made very messy by the domestic violence charge.

The most unacknowledged horror of the restraining order process is its convenient use to victimize men and women a second time even as they’re reeling from grievous or humiliating betrayals committed by their false accusers.

The reason this horror is unacknowledged is that the courts are very good at covering up, too.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Middle Class to Pauper in a Day: On Restraining Order Fraud, Homelessness, and Suicide

This describes what happened and continues to happen to me because of my wife’s lying to the court authorities. I am desperately seeking someone to help me, because I lost everything: job, home, money, and reputation. I already tried once to take my life because of it. [Although I have never] been in trouble with the law in the past…she was able to have me arrested for [domestic violence] and stalking with no proof, facts, or witnesses. I did not do those things, and I have surveillance video to prove my innocence. She [has] stalked and continues to stalk, intimidate, harass, threaten, and humiliate me regularly. I’m homeless in [an area where I know] no one [and have no one] to turn to, no job, no money, [and] no adequate legal representation. My life as I knew it is over. Help me, please!!!”

E-petition respondent

He’s lying, right? Like the thousands of others who’ve responded to the same petition he has? Really ask yourself. It’s appalling to me that there are intelligent human beings in the world who find it an easy matter to dismiss pleas like this out of hand.

Does this person sound crazy? Does he sound dangerous? I also find it appalling how rarely obvious questions like these present themselves even to minds trained to think critically.

I’ll answer for you: No, he doesn’t sound crazy or dangerous. Next question (this is how critical thinking works): If he’s telling it true, how is something like this possible?

It’s possible for exactly the reason he names: substantiating claims of stalking and domestic violence made through the civil court requires no evidence (nor does substantiating any other allegations), and on their basis a defendant can be summarily stripped of everything. Any adult can walk into a courtroom off the street and make allegations like these against another adult and have a restraining order issued. This can even be true when the accuser has no domestic relationship with his or her “abuser” or has never even met that “abuser” before. Allegations like these can moreover be made by people who live in different states from the accused. The restraining order process, in other words, is a golden ticket to any liar or crank with an ax to grind or even to any psycho responding to the urges of the voices in his or her head. There’s no inspection or corroboration of credentials. (One recent respondent to this blog reports that his wife’s embittered ex-boyfriend was awarded one of her children upon his falsely swearing out a restraining order against her and claiming to be the boy’s father. The boy was removed from school and handed to him. Consider how you’d feel if one of your kids were placed in the custody of a stranger…who hated you. Just based on his say-so. If you tried to recover the child and return him or her to safety, incidentally, you’d be arrested by the state and charged at the very least with contempt of court for violating the restraining order.)

It’s imagined, I think, even by those who are capable of acknowledging the stink of injustice, that the fallout of false allegations is exaggerated. There is no exaggerating it. Whatever you think you own and whoever you think you are can be taken from you and reinterpreted in an instant. By public factotums who’ve never even clapped eyes on you, couldn’t care less, and wouldn’t scruple a bit about locking you in a cage.

The nifty part is that once a person like the man quoted in the epigraph is forcibly divested of all means to fight back, s/he can’t. And no journalist is going to touch a story like his. Allegations that may lead to someone’s being stripped of home, property, and dignity may be so impossible to discriminate from the truth that there’s no way to assuredly expose the injustice. There’s no proving an allegation of fear, for instance, to be false. For that matter, there’s no proving an allegation of threat or violence to be false.

There’s no proving them to be true, either (even welts and bruises can be self-inflicted). But that doesn’t matter. This glaring bias is the only ascertainable injustice.

Aside, that is, from the fact that the man whose story prompted this discussion is sleeping in a box and thinking about offing himself.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

The Impact of Fraudulent Restraining Orders on Employment Prospects

“This law needs to change. NOW! A very good friend of mine had a false PFA filed against her by her sister, causing her to lose her career as a police officer. I have seen firsthand how this can ruin someone’s life! Please help bring the true victims in these circumstances some justice!”

E-petition respondent

One of the prevailing myths about civil restraining orders is that they’re harmless. In fact, they may exercise a graver effect on a defendant’s future prospects than a felony conviction might, because the immediate associations evoked by “restraining order” or “protection order” are those of stalking, threat, and violence. It’s presumed that a restraining order plaintiff would only petition a restraining order because s/he was afraid for his or her safety.

A restraining order defendant, including one who’s the victim of false allegations, may well be viewed with greater distaste, suspicion, and apprehension than someone with a criminal record (a burglar, for instance) whose crimes didn’t suggest s/he posed a danger to another person.

Those who’ve responded to this blog whose careers have been imperiled or derailed by false allegations made through the medium of a restraining order include an inventor and entrepreneur with a Ph.D. in science, a nurse, a lawyer, a therapist, a stock broker, a firefighter, teachers (one an aspirant composer and performer), university students, and several police officers. And any number of people who haven’t identified their professions have visited this site desperate to know if restraining orders are public records and can damage their careers.

They are and they can.

Job applications may explicitly ask whether applicants have “ever been the subject of a restraining order.” And not only has more than one visitor here reported that s/he’s lost multiple jobs because of a false restraining order; several have reported losing jobs because of a false restraining order that was dismissed. Even restraining orders recognized by the court as groundless are liabilities.

That’s how prejudicial these instruments are.

The general public has no idea how easily they’re obtained, let alone how easily they’re obtained by fraud—or that they’re obtained by fraud.

This is due as much to the system’s successfully shaming and intimidating its victims into silence as it is to propaganda that promotes restraining orders as instruments that can only do good. And that perception of restraining orders’ being harmless and of public benefit extends to government and other administrators, as well as to lawmakers. Judges and authorities may very well know that restraining orders are abused, as many lawyers certainly do, but are compelled to act otherwise.

I have a lifelong friend who works for a defense contractor and is subject to periodic background checks, as, for example, was the aforementioned stock broker. By the FBI. My friend doesn’t even have text messaging on his cell phone, because he has to be vigilant about paper trails. A restraining order would finish him: hasta la bye-bye. The aforementioned lawyer, a young woman fresh out of law school who was victimized by a false accuser, wanted to work for the FBI. Not gonna happen. And that may have been her dream since she was a little girl. She was falsely fingered as a crackpot by an older, male colleague (also an attorney) who seduced her while concealing from her that he was married. He wanted to shut her up and shut her down—and did.

It was easy.

One of the aforementioned teachers was on his way to Nashville to become a songwriter, that is, a creative artist. Any career in the public eye like this one is vulnerable to being compromised or trashed by a scandal that may be based on nothing but cunning lies or a disturbed person’s fantasies spewed impulsively in a window of five or 10 minutes. Besides the obvious impairment that something like this can exert on income prospects, its psychological effects alone can make performance of a job impossible. And nothing kills income prospects more surely than that.

Restraining orders are publicly recorded on courthouse websites, and in some regions restraining order recipients are entered in public registries, like sex offenders. Imagine being a schoolteacher and never knowing when one of your students is going to out that you were issued a restraining order that may have been filed by some short-term loser boy- or girlfriend and based on malicious lies. The juicy parts can be copied at the local courthouse for a couple of dollars (and scanned and electronically circulated on the Internet for nothing).

The abovementioned therapist has agonized over whether to publicly own what she’s been put through for fear than she’ll damage her professional standing or embarrass her children. She’s opted on the path that she’d probably counsel a patient to take: reject shame, own what’s happened to you, and defy lies sooner than let them unravel your sanity. That path is commendably courageous, but what the consequences of choosing it will be only time will tell.

Implications are what restraining orders are based on (no proof of anything is requisite), and those implications can be socially and psychologically crippling or fatal.

The prosperity of the independently wealthy—trust fund babies, for instance—doesn’t depend on public image. For these people, restraining orders likely aren’t big deals. Not coincidentally, of course, these are the folks who successfully escape from courtroom travails, anyway.

Bullshit talks, money walks.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

An American Horror Story: The Institution of Restraining Orders

I’ve just been watching American Horror Story: Asylum. It’s a cable show about a throng of victims who are wrongly labeled deviants by the state and subjected to torturous abuse. Those in authority do what they want with impunity and relish. Threat looms from all sides, and betrayal is the only constant.

If you’ve been put through the restraining order wringer, this scenario will sound familiar.

The show is set in 1964, so we can pretend that we’re looking back at a distant, degenerate period in the past when heinous violations could occur right under everyone’s nose, and no one would lift a finger to intervene. The same political games masked as “conversion therapies” are indulged today, of course, only their abuses are subtler and directed at the psyche instead of being committed with canes, electrodes, tongs, and scalpels.

And those abuses are what this blog is about.

The protagonists on the show, which is set in a mental institution, are all punished brutally for being honest, and those in authority, who are supposed to uncover the truth and restore sanity, are concealing horrible lies of their own and cultivating madness to gratify personal agendas, which they justify to themselves as furthering the common good.

Maybe I’m a little mad myself, but these themes resonate with many that have preoccupied my life since I had my first brush with the “justice system” nearly eight years ago. I rarely watched TV before that. Print was my obsession—and I still nostalgically sniff it sometimes. I’m watching the show this post is about, in fact, on DVDs borrowed from the library. For several years, I didn’t go to the library, and I can’t remember when I last borrowed a novel that I actually finished.

Like the characters in American Horror Story: Asylum, many individuals who’ve visited this blog and I have told our tales repeatedly to figures in authority who’ve discounted or disregarded them, preferring instead to administer the mandated treatment.

A line in the show goes something like, “Go ahead and scream. No one will hear you.” It’s juicily sinister and rings true. Truer yet is that even if someone does hear you, s/he’ll make believe s/he didn’t.

Screaming, though, at least gives you something to do. As a number of those who’ve visited this blog have reported of their own ambitions, what I’d rather be doing has been rankly corrupted.

I haven’t watched the show’s last episodes yet. I’m waiting for the villains in charge to cannibalize one another or get plastered by the karma bus. It could happen. It’s fiction, after all.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Covens, Cabals, and Coercion: On Peer Pressure as a Motive for Restraining Order Abuse

Last month, I emphasized that the evils wrought by the restraining order process aren’t, strictly speaking, conspiratorial in origin. That’s basically true of the macrocosm. On the local level, though, they well may be.

It’s not uncommon for victims of restraining order abuse to report that their false accusers had confederates who spurred them on, lied for or sided with them, or put them up to making false allegations. Some report, alternatively, that they were coerced either by threat or urgent prompting by authorities. They were emotionally bullied into acting: Do it, Do it, Do it.

(Or: Do it or else. Women may be intimidated into seeking restraining orders against their husbands under threat from the state of eviction from government housing or having their children taken from them and fostered out.)

There’s something in us that thrills at seeing the ax fall on someone else’s neck. (If you haven’t read Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery,” do.) We get excited, like coyotes summoned to partake in the kill. We’re glad to be among the pack.

Although men regularly abuse the restraining order process, it’s more likely that tag-team offensives will be by women against men. Women may be goaded on by their parents or siblings, by authorities, by girlfriends, or by dogmatic women’s advocates. The expression of discontentment with a partner may be regarded as grounds enough for exploiting the system to gain a dominant position. These women may feel obligated to follow through to appease peer or social expectations. Or they may feel pumped up enough by peer or social support to follow through on a spiteful impulse. Girlfriends’ responding sympathetically, whether to claims of quarreling with a spouse or boy- or girlfriend or to claims that are clearly hysterical or even preposterous, is both a natural female inclination and one that may steel a false or frivolous complainant’s resolve.

And, sure, women will lie for women, too. This is something I’ve witnessed personally. Academic types, in particular—women who’ve been cultivated in the feminist hothouse—may well nurse a great deal of animosity toward men in general and be happy for any opportunity to indulge it (manipulating the court can make a Minnie Mouse feel like Arnold Schwarzenegger). A contrasting but also correspondent dynamic is mothers-in-law’s lying about their daughters-in-law (or their sons’ girlfriends). It’s not for nothing that we have a word like catty.

I’ve never heard of men urging other men to acquire restraining orders. When men are egged on, it’s reportedly by a woman who’s jealous of a rival and wants to see her suffer, but men are just as likely to exploit false allegations successfully put over on the courts to smear their victims. My impression is that this is less about attention-seeking than rubbing salt in the wound and fortifying the credibility of their frauds—though attention, particularly female, may be a welcome dividend.

An exceptional case is the person with an attention-seeking personality disorder, whose concoctions may be so extravagantly persuasive that s/he has everyone s/he knows siding with him or her. S/he creates his or her own sensation. Perfectly innocent and well-intentioned chumps may testify on such a person’s behalf firmly convinced that they’re acting nobly (which reinforces their own resolve to self-defensively stick to their stories, even if they’re later given cause to doubt them). Domineering personality types like pathological narcissists, who come in both genders and compulsively lie with sociopathic cold-bloodedness, may even coerce or seduce others into assuming their perspectives. They generate peer pressure and alliance. Narcissists are walking Jiffy Pops in search of a little heat to rub against.

Everything to do with restraining orders is about pressure. Possibly the same could be said about all court procedures involving conflict (real or hyped), but this is particularly true of the restraining order process. Those who game the system often do so to gain attention and approbation or to appease others’ expectations.

If invoking this state procedure failed or ceased to excite drama, its applicant pool would dry up faster than a Visine tear.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Because Perjury Occurs a Lot, It’s Ignored: On the Absurdity and Toll of Domestic Violence and Restraining Order Policies’ Disregarding False Allegations

“My 87-year-old father has been arrested and jailed three times by my mentally ill mother, who is using domestic violence laws to her advantage in a divorce. This is a man who served in the military for 20 years, the federal government for 25 years, and the Department of Social Services for five years before retiring. My dad has never even had so much as a speeding ticket in his entire life, but now, at the end of his life, he has been humiliated, placed on supervised probation, and will probably lose everything due to the abuse of domestic violence laws. Nobody in law enforcement will listen to what is really going on here. Even though I had prior knowledge that my dad was being set up, I have actually been told by the District Attorney…and I quote, ‘I have convicted your father of assault on a female, and I will convict him of everything else I can.’ The justice system has gone off the rails, and the truth means nothing. My father fought in World War II and in Korea to keep this country free, and this is how he is repaid.”

—E-petition respondent

How did you spend the yuletide? With friends and family, listening to Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby, mussing kids’ hair and congratulating them on their Christmas spoils?

Read the epigraph above, and you’ll have a pretty clear idea of what Todd L. of Wilmington, North Carolina had on his mind. Not much to raise a cup of cheer to, is it?

This distinguished service veteran’s age approximates that of the cited victim of false allegations.

Two hours after Todd shared his story on the e-petition “Stop False Allegations of Domestic Violence,” a fellow North Carolinian opined, “There should be a legal penalty for false accusations!”

Lawmakers have agreed, actually, and statutes making lying to the court a felony crime are universal. What this commenter should have said is that legal penalties for false accusations should be enforced.

Perjury is never prosecuted. District attorneys will tell you that if they did prosecute perjurers, there’d be no resources left for putting “dangerous people” behind bars.

Let’s parse that logic.

First, it actually recognizes that lying occurs a lot. If it only occurred now and then, prosecutions would be few and hardly a budgetary strain.

Second, recognizing that lying occurs a lot also recognizes that the so-called dangerous people the state prefers to prosecute may simply be victims of false allegations. Preferring to prosecute alleged domestic assailants, therefore—take, for example, the 87-year-old man cited in this post’s epigraph—may mean preferring to prosecute the falsely accused (the innocent) over the genuinely criminal (the false accusers).

Ask yourself which would look better on the books: “We’ve successfully prosecuted [x number of] wife-beaters” or “We’ve successfully prosecuted [x number of] perjurers”? Everyone knows what wife-beater means. How many people even know what a perjurer is?

“If we did prosecute perjurers, there’d be no resources left for putting dangerous people behind bars…so we’ll prosecute the people perjurers falsely accuse of being dangerous”—as analysis of most of the arguments made in defense of domestic violence and restraining order policies reveals, the reasoning is circular and smells foul. It’s in fact unreasoned “reasoning” that’s really just something to say to distract attention from unflattering truths that don’t win elections, federal grants, popular esteem, or political favor. So entrenched are these policies and so megalithic (and lucrative) that rhetoric like this actually passes for satisfactory when it’s used by someone in a crisp suit with a crisper title.

Obviously it wouldn’t be necessary to prosecute all perjurers to arrest epidemic lying. Ensuring that false allegations were made less frequently would only entail putting a few frauds in cages for a year or two where they belong, making examples of them, and revising policy so that the consequences of lying were impressed upon other would-be frauds. As it is, policy (including menacing rhetoric on court documents like restraining orders) is to impress upon defendants how serious the consequences of being lied about are: “For being publicly lied about, you may be subject to arrest and incarceration for being publicly lied about some more.”

The absurdity is patent, as is the wanton cruelty. Applying the word justice to any aspect of this policy should itself be criminal.

The 87-year-old man referenced in the epigraph above may be at the end of his life, and it’s a reasonable surmise that whatever remaining time he could have hoped for will be shortened by the treatment he’s received from the country in whose service he’s dedicated over half of that life.

If a YouTube video were posted of state agents bludgeoning an 87-year-old veteran, it would shortly go viral, reporters would elbow their way onto the man’s front stoop, lawyers would scrap and scrabble to represent him, and cable commentators would decry the outrage of the abuse.

Heads would roll.

Since state agents have instead subjected this man to public denigration and dehumanizing psychic torments under the guise of propriety, the odds are strong that he’ll slip away erelong, invisibly, his final days having been poisoned by anguish, disgrace, and the unrelenting consciousness that 50 years of public service were callously invalidated: “I have convicted your father of assault on a female, and I will convict him of everything else I can.”

Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Repeat after Me: RESTRAINING ORDER and FRAUD May Mean the Same Thing

Judge: “Are you afraid of her?”

Man: “No, I….”

Judge: “Are you afraid of her?”

Man: “No, it’s not that. It’s—”

Judge: “I can’t award a restraining order unless you tell me you’re afraid of her. I’m going to ask you one more time: Are you afraid of her?”

Man: “Okay, yes, I’m very afraid of her.”

The above isn’t satire but an exchange between a plaintiff and a judge whose equivalent may be heard any weekday, particularly in Midwestern states like Illinois and Ohio. While this sort of ritual litany might have its place in church, it has no place in a courtroom.

The restraining order process has become a perfunctory routine verging on a skit, a scripted pas de deux between a judge and a complainant. Exposure of the iniquity of this procedural farce hardly requires commentary.

Upon the basis of a manifestly crooked “adjudication of facts” like this one, a defendant will be confronted at his or her home by an officer of the state and presented with a minatory order of the court alleging anything from harassment to stalking to threatening conduct or battery and warning him or her that s/he’ll be subject to arrest and incarceration for violation of that order.

This alone is excruciatingly humiliating and nerve-wracking, and brings a defendant’s life to an abrupt halt. These allegations become all s/he can think about—and this state of emotional anarchy may be one that a defendant is forced to live in for years (while everything around him or her deteriorates). Restraining orders expire but never wither and fall off the books unless vacated. All this horror may be based on allegations that are false and/or coerced.

It’s no wonder that some defendants refer to the restraining order process as “domestic terrorism.”

Once a plaintiff, by contrast, sees how eager the state is to play along, s/he may transform from a child of spite into a monster of menace, and a few impulsive lies may rapidly blossom into a protracted and layered assault.

Alleging a defendant violated an order of the court may be as farcical an exchange as the one sketched above, only this time it will be between the plaintiff and a cop: “Did she?” “Um.” “Did she?” “Er.” “DID SHE?” “YES!” A plaintiff may alternatively bait a defendant into actually violating a restraining order’s proscriptions by conveying the message that s/he had the order canceled, cold-calling him or her, or approaching him or her and provoking a scene.

A few posts ago, I stressed that the restraining order racket wasn’t the product of a conspiracy, and I keep finding myself having to qualify that. Police officers and officers of the court follow an established protocol, possibly knowing goddam well that its basis is a sham. They don’t perceive this as a collusive act, but an outsider’s perceiving it that way is certainly reasonable.

What restraining orders and their policies do is authorize these public servants to act. Though the grounds for action may be arbitrary, those grounds can be represented as sound and just. Policy is clear-cut and easily executed with no risk of repercussions to its agents.

That execution may spell the devastation of a life (or several), but it fills the day and ensures that there’ll be plenty more to do tomorrow.

Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

No False Motives: On WHY Judges Refuse to Acknowledge Restraining Order Fraud

In the last post, I stressed that the courts refuse to acknowledge false allegations made by restraining order plaintiffs as lies, perjury, or fraud. It’s unlikely courts will call them “true.” Rather they’ll just accept them as given.

This shouldn’t be too surprising considering that the legitimacy and worthiness of the restraining order process is itself unquestioned. Why? Because it’s favored by the feminist establishment, which has gained so much political sway in recent decades that society, particularly its liberal constituency, is inclined to feel that what feminists want is what women want, and what women want is what everyone should want. Even women may not question whether what feminists want is what’s in their best interests. Restraining orders are promoted as positive and empowering for women. Also, they’re there to bring bad guys to bay and advance the causes of peace, justice, and the American way. So what possible grounds could exist for criticizing them? No harm, no foul, right?

The answer to these questions is of course known to (besides men) any number of women who’ve been victimized by the restraining order process. They’re not politicians, though. Or members of the ivory-tower club that determines the course of what we call mainstream feminism. They’re just the people who actually know what they’re talking about, because they’ve been broken by the state like butterflies pinned to a board and slowly vivisected with a nickel by a sadistic child.

And the value of their lives is deemed negligible. They’re what feminist jihadists would likely refer to as casualties of war.

The perpetuation of the restraining order process and the preservation of its appearance of propriety is the product of prejudice and perception mutually reinforcing each other. Public perception is that restraining orders are “good,” because they answer a social need. Judicial perception of restraining order applicants’ motives is accordingly prejudiced by pressures both political and social. If that weren’t enough, it’s also programmed. Courts receive massive federal grants under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) in return for having their judges submit to indoctrination.

Thus judges not only ignore whether allegations made on restraining orders are false; they may well assume the position that restraining orders are never sought maliciously (or frivolously).

They do what people expect of them, what the state wants of them, and what accordingly feels righteous and noble. That it’s also in their professional interests is a bonus (as is the possible gratification they derive from making “miscreants” cavil and quail). All of these motives are wrong and are furthermore contrary to judicial ethics (due process, Constitutional privilege, social justice, etc.), but the only people who care about principle are this travesty’s sacrificial lambs.

And they’re mostly silent.

Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

No False Allegations: On Judges’ Refusing to Acknowledge Restraining Order Fraud

In case you were wondering—and since you’re here, you probably were—there is no gaining relief from false allegations on a civil restraining order. Repetition for emphasis: There is no gaining relief from false allegations on a civil restraining order. Why? Because as far as the court’s concerned, there are no such things.

Among the arts of being a judge is management of information and external perception. It’s as much about what you don’t say and what you don’t formally observe as about what you do, because everything is recorded for posterity and subject to later review (including by the general public).

And as much as the authority of the court depends on popular consciousness of the painful consequences that will ensue if that authority is flouted, it depends even more on the appearance of propriety, dignity, and rectitude.

In a recent post, I emphasized that restraining order injustice isn’t the product of conspiracy. I have to qualify that here, because there is an element of judicial practice that does smack of peer collusion. That element approximates to something like this: “We don’t recognize on record that lying happens, let alone that it happens all the time.” The reason is obvious. The justice and legitimacy of the entire apparatus would be called into question if cases were being dismissed because judges explicitly deemed them “frauds.”

Ask anyone who’s actually extricated him- or herself from false allegations made on a restraining order whether the judge who found in his or her favor acknowledged that the plaintiff lied his or her butt off. What s/he’ll tell you is that the judge found his or her case “more credible.” Or found some other reason to dismiss it, for example, that it had been “incorrectly issued.”

In a courtroom, a judge may wrinkle his or her nose or otherwise betray disgust or distaste when s/he perceives an obvious lie (facial expressions aren’t recorded). What s/he won’t do is say, “Well, that’s obviously a big, fat lie!” Which would, after all, be the honest, upright thing to do (and would nip a malicious proceeding in the bud). It would, besides, make the party who’s been lied about feel a whole lot better.

But we wouldn’t, of course, want that.

In fairness, judges may also decline to recognize false allegations made by plaintiffs as “true.” (Judicial negotiation of facts is largely about staying tight-lipped.) The difference is, because false allegations may sit there on defendants’ public records, judges’ not explicitly recognizing them as true doesn’t matter. A judge’s signing off on the restraining order that those false allegations are smeared on legitimates them, and for all practical purposes (and in the eyes of any who would scrutinize the record) makes them “true.” A judge’s signature, moreover, authorizes a plaintiff to continue to disseminate his or her false allegations as if they were true. It also authorizes another judge who hears the same allegations or who examines the record of the previous case to assume they’re true.

Here’s where the “game” aspect of restraining order adjudication becomes evident, and this is a significant part of what leads many to perceive corruption and conspiracy. Not unreasonably.

False allegations are made. This isn’t conjecture; it’s something any child who’s blamed a broken cookie jar on his or her sibling knows to be fact. People lie.

By forcing judges to give it the gloss of propriety by pretending false allegations aren’t made, the restraining order process debases the dignity and honor of the system judges are sworn to protect.

That’s not a false allegation.

Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Permanent, Public, and Persuasive: On the Enduring Effects of False Allegations

Freak collisions occur in life. So sometimes do collisions with freaks.

It’s difficult to impress upon people who’ve been spared from such collisions the damage their impact can exert on others’ lives.

Many of the respondents to this blog are the victims of collisions like this. Some anomalous moral zero latched onto them, duped them, exploited them, even assaulted them and then turned the table and misrepresented them to the police and the courts as a stalker, harasser, or brute to compound the injury. Maybe for kicks, maybe for “payback,” maybe to cover his or her tread marks, maybe to get fresh attention at his or her victim’s expense, or maybe for no motive a normal mind can hope to accurately interpret.

The restraining order process is free, nondiscriminatory, and can be abused over and over without consequence to the abuser.

Victims often preface the stories of their ordeals by insistently making it known that not only do they have no criminal record; they’ve never even had a run-in with authorities or any prior familiarity with the courts in their lives. More than one alleged perpetrator of domestic violence who’s responded to this blog is a vegetarian. And all of these vegetarian “batterers” have been women. People who “wouldn’t hurt a fly” are represented to the courts as monsters. And the label sticks.

Like hot tar.

The other day (less than a week before Christmas), someone was brought here wondering how s/he could sue a judge for approving a fraudulent restraining order. It’s unlikely s/he’ll follow through on a very understandable impulse, but if s/he were to go to the monetary and grinding psychic expense of pursuing this end, the likelihood is that s/he’d be run down mercilessly.

The point isn’t just that these things hurt; they don’t stop hurting. A victim of false allegations I corresponded with for some months in 2012, one of the aforementioned vegetarians accused of battery, wrote to me recently to report that she’s still smarting from the betrayal and humiliation over a year later. And this person prevailed against her accuser in court. Even “exoneration” isn’t a guaranteed salve.

And most victims of restraining order fraud aren’t so fortunate. They must wait in a state of constant anxiety for the term of the restraining order to run (a term that may be years), never knowing what new act of treachery to expect.

They’ll stew and fret. They may pursue a legal action of their own. They may employ an attorney (or more than one) to attempt to negotiate a resolution. They may shell out thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. They’ll stew and fret some more. And the probability is their attempts to recover their lives will be met with torturous silence from their accusers and further derogation from the courts. Some will be arrested. Some repeatedly.

A vicious impulse that takes mere moments to act on and satisfy may preoccupy or tear apart years of a victim’s life. Pointlessly. And there’s no “getting over it.” False allegations don’t evaporate or recede into the archives; they’re indelibly imprinted not just on their victims’ minds but on their public faces. Records are permanent, publicly accessible, and persuasive.

Victims of abuses whose toxic ripples are impossible to even quantify are moreover expected by judges and the public to maintain a stoical posture and reasonable tone in spite of them. A judge would evince palpable disgust, for example, at a victim’s expressing a feeling like this one:

WTF.

Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

The Word for Restraining Order Abuse is FRAUD

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

Egotists, Narcissists, and Other Self-Seeking Con Artists: On (Restraining Order) Fraud and Its Motives

I came upon a monograph recently that articulates various motives for the commission of fraud, including to bolster an offender’s ego or sense of personal agency, to dominate and/or humiliate his or her victim, to contain a threat to his or her continued goal attainment, or to otherwise exert control over a situation.

These motives will be familiar to anyone who’s been the victim of a fraudulent abuse of legal process and correspond with those of attention- and revenge-seeking restraining order plaintiffs, plaintiffs keen to avoid exposure of extramarital entanglements or otherwise compromising indiscretions or misconduct (such as stalking), and plaintiffs intent upon wresting possession of children and/or property from a partner (and, in one fell swoop, rubbing him or her out).

Excerpted from “The Psychology of Fraud” by Grace Duffield and Peter Grabosky (published by the Australian Institute of Criminology in its Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice):

“[An] aspect of motivation that may apply to some or all types of fraud is ego/power. This can relate to power over people as well as power over situations. In terms of the former, the sensation of power over another individual or individuals seems to be a strong motivating force for some fraud offenders to the point that it becomes an end in itself. As one confidence man put it:

“‘For myself, I love to make people do what I want them to, I love command. I love to rule people. That’s why I’m a con artist’ (quoted in Blum 1972, p. 46).

“In manipulating and making fools of their victims, some fraud perpetrators seem to take a contemptuous delight in the act itself rather than simply the outcome. As Stotland (1977) points out:

“‘[S]ometimes individuals’ motivation for crime may have originally been relative deprivation, greed, threat to continued goal attainment, and so forth. However, as they found themselves successful at this crime, they began to gain some secondary delight in the knowledge that they are fooling the world, that they are showing their superiority to others’ (pp. 186–7).

“Similar to the sense of superiority over others is the gratification obtained from mastery of a situation.”

Predictably the monograph also touches on narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), one of several personality disorders that lead people to commit frauds on the court, and sketches the dimensions of this cognitive aberration.

“Persons who harbour unrealistic impressions of their own capability, when reinforced by sycophants, lack a reality check and may be more likely to engage in risky behaviour than more grounded or ‘normal’ [types] (Janis 1982).

“This risk-taking would be exacerbated by the indifference to conventional rules of conduct that apply to narcissistic personalities. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, narcissistic personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, a need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others. Individuals with this disorder believe that they are superior, unique, and ‘chosen,’ and they are likely to have inflated views of their own accomplishments and abilities. They focus on how well they are doing in comparison with others, and this can take the form of an excessive need for attention and admiration. A sense of entitlement is evident, and they expect to be given whatever they want regardless of the imposition it places on others. In the workplace, these people tend to overwork others. They demand unquestioning loyalty and are incredulous or infuriated when it is not forthcoming. They are likely to respond angrily to criticism (DSM-IV Task Force 1994, pp. 658–9). Perhaps most relevant to fraud offences is the tendency of the narcissistic personality to usurp special privileges and extra resources that they feel they have an entitlement to, over and above ordinary people. This attitude is captured in the words of Leona Helmsley, a wealthy American subsequently convicted of tax evasion, when she said ‘only the little people pay taxes.’ Due to their ambition, confidence, and ruthlessness in dealing with others, the narcissistic personality may be a high achiever in their chosen field of endeavour.”

This definition bears obvious correspondences with that of the sociopath, another familiar abuser of legal process. Narcissists and sociopaths are statistically rare: 1/100 and 1/25, respectively. If you consider, however, that within a population the size of the United States’ that translates to over 3,000,000 narcissists and over 12,000,000 sociopaths, widespread complaints of fraudulent abuses by these human anomalies are easily credible. They become more credible yet if you further consider that such people, being devoid of moral inhibition, may be far more likely than others to engage in fraud for spiteful or self-serving ends.

Restraining order fraud, which often entails criminal acts like the commission of false reporting and perjury, is commonplace and commonly winked at by the courts. Possibly judges don’t appreciate how attractive and accommodating restraining orders are to frauds. Possibly they don’t appreciate how damaging the consequences of restraining order fraud are to the psyches and fortunes of defendants (among others, for example, defendants’ children). Possibly they don’t recognize how epidemic the problem is. Or possibly…they don’t care.

But should.

Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

[Referenced works in the quoted excerpts above are Deceivers and Deceived by R. H. Blum, “White Collar Criminals” by E. Stotland (published in the Journal of Social Issues), and Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascos by I. Janis.]

Cognitive Distortions and Restraining Orders: On How Judicial Method Corresponds with Automatic Thinking

My previous post concerned distortion, specifically by those with narcissistic personality disorder (one of a number of personality disorders that may lead a person to make false allegations, that is, to distort the truth). Restraining order fraud, whether committed by pathological liars or the garden variety, tends to go over smashingly, because judges’ biases (perceptual and otherwise) predispose them to credit and reward fraud.

Below is a list of cognitive distortions (categories of automatic thinking) drawn from Wikipedia interspersed with commentaries. Many if not most of these cognitive distortions are applicable to restraining order decisions and clarify how it is that slanted, hyperbolic, or false allegations made through the medium of the restraining order stick.

(Cognitive distortion or automatic thinking is pathological thinking associated with neurological disorders.)

All-or-nothing thinking: seeing things in black or white as opposed to shades of gray; thinking in terms of false dilemmas. Splitting involves using terms like “always,” “every,” or “never” when this is neither true, nor equivalent to the truth.

Restraining order rulings are categorical. They don’t acknowledge gradations of culpability, nor do they address the veracity of individual allegations. Rulings are “yea” or “nay,” with “yea” predominating. That some, most, or all of what a plaintiff alleges is unsubstantiated makes no difference, nor does it matter if some or most of his or her allegations are contradictory or patently false. Restraining order adjudications are zero-sum games.

Overgeneralization: making hasty generalizations from insufficient experiences and evidence.

Restraining order applications are approved upon five or 10 minutes of “deliberation” and in the absence of any controverting testimony from their defendants (who aren’t invited to the party). All rulings, therefore, are arguably hasty and necessarily generic. (They may in fact be mechanical: a groundless restraining order was famously approved against celebrity talk show host David Letterman because its applicant filled out the form correctly.)

Filtering: focusing entirely on negative elements of a situation, to the exclusion of the positive. Also, the brain’s tendency to filter out information which does not conform to already held beliefs.

Judicial attention is only paid to negative representations, and plaintiffs’ representations are likely to be exclusively negative. Judges seek reasons to approve restraining orders sooner than reasons to reject them, and it’s assumed that plaintiffs’ allegations are valid. In fact, it’s commonly mandated that judges presume plaintiffs are telling the truth (despite their possibly having any of several motives to lie).

Disqualifying the positive: discounting positive events.

Mitigating circumstances are typically discounted. Plaintiffs’ perceptions, which may be hysterical, pathologically influenced, or falsely represented, are usually all judges concern themselves with, even after defendants have been given the “opportunity” to contest allegations against them (which opportunity may be afforded no more than 10 to 20 minutes).

Jumping to conclusions: reaching preliminary conclusions (usually negative) from little (if any) evidence.

All conclusions in restraining order cases are jumped-to conclusions. Allegations, which are leveled during brief interviews and against defendants whom judges may never meet, need be no more substantial than “I’m afraid” (a representation that’s easily falsified).

Magnification and minimization: giving proportionally greater weight to a perceived failure, weakness or threat, or lesser weight to a perceived success, strength or opportunity, so the weight differs from that assigned to the event or thing by others.

Judicial inclination is toward approving/upholding restraining orders. In keeping with this imperative, a judge will pick and choose allegations or facts that can be emphatically represented as weighty or “preponderant.” (One recent respondent to this blog shared that a fraudulent restraining order against him was upheld because the judge perceived that he “appear[ed] to be controlling” and that the plaintiff “seem[ed] to have some apprehension toward [him].” While superficial, airy-fairy standards like “appeared” and “seemed” would carry little weight in a criminal procedure, they’re sufficient qualifications to satisfy and sustain a civil restraining order judgment, which is based on judicial discretion.)

Emotional reasoning: presuming that negative feelings expose the true nature of things, and experiencing reality as a reflection of emotionally linked thoughts. Thinking something is true, solely based on a feeling.

The grounds for most restraining orders are alleged emotional states (“I’m afraid,” for example), which judges typically presume to be both honestly represented and valid (that is, reality-based). Consequently, judges may treat defendants cruelly according with their own emotional motives.

Should statements: doing, or expecting others to do, what they morally should or ought to do irrespective of the particular case the person is faced with. This involves conforming strenuously to ethical categorical imperatives which, by definition, “always apply,” or to hypothetical imperatives which apply in that general type of case. Albert Ellis termed this “musturbation.”

All restraining order judgments are essentially generic (and all restraining order defendants are correspondingly treated generically = badly). Particulars are discounted and may well be ignored.

Labeling and mislabeling: a more severe type of overgeneralization; attributing a person’s actions to their character instead of some accidental attribute. Rather than assuming the behavior to be accidental or extrinsic, the person assigns a label to someone or something that implies the character of that person or thing. Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that has a strong connotation of a person’s evaluation of the event.

The basis of a defendant’s “guilt” may be nothing more than a plaintiff’s misperception.

Personalization: attributing personal responsibility, including the resulting praise or blame, for events over which a person has no control.

The restraining order process is entirely geared toward assigning blame to its defendant, regardless of the actual circumstances, of which a judge has only a plaintiff’s representation, a representation that may be false or fantastical. A circumstance a defendant may be blamed for that s/he has no control over, for example, is a plaintiff’s being neurotic, delusional, or deranged.

Blaming: the opposite of personalization; holding other people responsible for the harm they cause, and especially for their intentional or negligent infliction of emotional distress on us.

  • Fallacy of change: Relying on social control to obtain cooperative actions from another person.
  • Always being right: Prioritizing self-interest over the feelings of another person.

This last category of automatic thinking sums up a judge’s role and m.o. to a T. And, at least in the latter instance (“Always being right”), shouldn’t. If, to the contrary, judges always assumed their first impressions and impulses were wrong, any number of miscarriages of justice might be avoided.

Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Narcissism: A Study in Distortion

The narcissist is a study in distortion.

You’d think someone as intently preoccupied with mirrors as the narcissist is would be brutally self-critical. You’d be mistaken, though. The narcissist exalts him- or herself, very possibly in defiance of a host of reasons not to. This isn’t to say the narcissist is immune to negative judgments; it’s to say that instead of responding to reproaches as normal people do and adapting or modifying his or her behavior and perspectives accordingly, the narcissist resents and would have others adapt their perspectives to match his or hers instead.

The narcissist has a distorted sense of his or her own self-worth, distorts perceived slights or criticisms into monstrous proportions, and endeavors to distort others’ perceptions of those who dared to “criticize.”

The temptation is to say that narcissists are masters of both deception and self-deception. “Mastery,” however, implies skill. Narcissists can’t help lying. It’s a propensity to which they’re enslaved. It can therefore hardly be called a talent.

Increasing numbers of visitors to this blog are brought here because they’ve had a brush with one of these piteous people, and it’s damaged them badly.

There’s an attractiveness to detecting mental illness or personality disorders in people who’ve injured us, because it provides us with a label, a way to quantify and qualify misconduct that’s otherwise inexplicable to a normal mind. Typically visitors to this blog have been victims of false allegations leveled publicly, often through the courts, and they’ve discovered the difficulty of exposing the motives of frauds committed by the mentally aberrant: they don’t make sense.

Distortion is very effective at poisoning the minds of others, particularly authorities and judges, because they in particular have no reason to suspect and have been trained to chasten any suspicions they might naturally have of accusers. Suspicion is what they’re supposed to reserve for the accused.

If this sounds backwards, that’s because it is.

Everything to do with narcissists distills to distortion. Narcissists evince all outward signs of plausibility, and outward signs are all most people attend to. Hence narcissists readily induce others to join them in their altered perspectives.

Scrutinize a photograph of a narcissist, and what you may detect in his or her eyes is not only a consciousness of being looked at but a degree of excitement approaching sexual thrill. Those eyes are hotly relishing the attention and may almost seem prehensile, as if they’re not just trying to make an impression but trying to grab the viewer by the collar. A significant measure of what’s called a narcissist’s “magnetism” borders on coercion.

Narcissists have the power of utter faith in their convictions, and they’re no less convinced of falsehoods than normal people are of truths. Their faith in their own frauds is contagious, because most people only perceive lies that are told abashedly, and narcissists are immune to shame and self-rebuke. The mentally ill (i.e., crazy people) are correspondently convincing, because to them illusions of the mind are real. The parallel is telling.

I once read a biography of Ayn Rand that cited an instance of the philosopher’s being thrown into a fit of pique, because someone had caused her to doubt her perceptions (she called her method Objectivism, a word based on objectivity, which means perception of the world honestly and without preconceived notions). Had she ever fallen prey to a narcissist, she’d have probably throttled the mendacious wretch purple.

Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

The ABCs of Restraining Order Fraud

Fraud is knowingly misrepresenting facts with the intent to mislead, and fraud in restraining order cases—whether in the form of self-serving exaggeration or extravagantly malicious deception—is more the rule than the exception. It’s also more the rule than the exception that fraud is abetted by the courts and authorities.

It’s a misperception, though, that restraining order frauds are diabolically conceived; they may be diabolical, but they’re almost always the product of impulse. It’s also a misperception that judges and police officers have it out for people. The truth is it just feels that way to victims. Critics of restraining orders are liable to sound like conspiracy theorists, because they perceive organization and fell design where there’s really just predictable human self-interest and self-indulgence.

The outrage of restraining order abuse isn’t that it’s archly nefarious; it’s that it’s transparently evil…and readily goes over anyway. Frauds are often self-evident; it’s just that no one looks, because it’s in no one’s interest to look and in the interests of many not to.

Rank abusers of restraining orders aren’t cunning tacticians, typically, but bullies, bastards, and bitches acting on spiteful impulse. The same labels may only apply to facilitators and enablers of restraining order abuse because of the potency with which they mindlessly invest abuser’s frauds. Judges, authorities, and even attorneys are more susceptible to criticism for carelessness than conscious confederacy.

Restraining order fraud works because judges act by rote, having been both trained and conditioned to react mechanically to allegations made against restraining order defendants. The influences that prejudicially mold judicator’s reactions include social, political, and peer expectations. It’s not only safer for judges to presume restraining order applicants are telling the truth; acting as if is what they’re supposed to do. Hefty federal grants are provided to courts that in effect buy judicial cooperation. Judges aren’t paid off, per se, but it’s impressed upon them in no uncertain terms what their priorities should be.

You see how someone could reasonably perceive “conspiracy.” There’s no roundtable of plotters, however. It’s a matter of special interests dictating political policy dictating public practice. Everyone plays his or her role, because it’s in his or her personal interest. Think of a solar system of independent bodies gravitationally revolving around a principle. The principle is bad, and its subscribers may act badly because they’re influenced by it, but there’s no coordinating consciousness or central intelligence.

This isn’t to say there aren’t judges and authorities who like throwing their weight around and watching defendants suffer (or that there aren’t attorneys for whom this is their primary source of glee in life). But it is to say that they wouldn’t be so quick to do it if they didn’t think they could get away with it. The fact is this conduct is tolerated if not expected of them. They may even have been explicitly told to behave this way.

The proper criticism of restraining order policy is that it has conditioned judges to vet facts according to how they’re supposed to interpret them and to make rulings fit expectations. A conspiracy would actually be cleaner. The system, such as it is, allows judges to believe that they’re executing their jobs as they should. Conspirators know they’re up to no good.

It’s less about conspiracy than about social approbation. Fraudulent plaintiffs tend to be patronized by the courts and are sure to receive attention and encouragement from among those in their circles. Judges, too, are rewarded for toeing the line, as are administrators and other politicians.

At the center of this little cosmos is a lie: that restraining orders are administered and administered righteously to protect. From that one fraud, a cornucopia.

Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

What’s Wrong with This Nativity Scene?: Abusing Restraining Orders to Destroy Young Mothers and Take Their Babies

I hadn’t intended to write anything more before the holiday than my little stab at humor. I’ve had my outrage doubly piqued recently, though, by two corresponding sources. One of these sources is the whatever-you-call-ems who want the Christ put back in Christmas, most of which zealots are Protestants—do they want the mass put back in Christmas, too? And the other is two people’s writing to tell me about naïve, young girls who’ve been exploited, impregnated, rejected, taunted, and manipulated only to then be fingered as unstable in restraining order cases so the fathers and those fathers’ parents could gain custody of the babies. One of the dads in these cases is the son of an evangelical Protestant minister.

On NPR the other day, I listened to a woman voice how fretted she was by a nativity scene on display (in Washington D.C., I think) that was made out of beer cans. (As I understood the story to report, it wasn’t even on public display; it was viewable by admission only.) The concern—the expressed one, anyhow—was that seeing beer cans could inspire kids to want beer. According to this logic, seeing a house of cards might inspire kids to gamble, and seeing a matchstick fort might lead them to become arsonists.

Consider whether you don’t think this kind of scenario is more likely to exert a detrimental influence on a child’s development (and whether Jesus wouldn’t have thought so):

“My 23-year-old daughter’s life has been ruined by a restraining order [that] was put on her by her abusive [boyfriend] after she had their baby. My daughter is African American, and the baby’s dad is Caucasian. He decided to just stop communicating with my daughter after she had the baby [except] to taunt her into calling and emailing him out of frustration. The baby came looking close enough to Caucasian…. [H]e and his parents…put a restraining order on her and ceased any communication with her. She didn’t get how serious the restraining order was and ended up in jail three times. The irony is that he was beating my daughter up before she had the child, and she protected him rather than put a restraining order on him.”

The boyfriend and his folks used the restraining order, which was petitioned on the grounds that it was harassing of this woman’s daughter to call and email the father of her child to talk about their baby, to leverage custody of the child.

An identical situation was shared with me a month or so ago. In that case, the boyfriend/father was the son of a Southern Baptist pastor. Naïve girl was sexually exploited, led on, baited, and framed, and now must fight off maliciously false allegations and fight for custody of her child. (Merry Xmas, Reverend.)

The people who imagine that restraining orders are golden shields that protect women from abuses are the same pop dogmatists who perceive pernicious influence in a beer-can crèche. Ideas, ladies (and gentlemen), ideas need to be vetted for correspondence with reality. Let’s stop finding menace in abstractions and start recognizing it in real life.

Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

“I Forgive You”: An Original Poem by This Blog’s Author Dedicated to Abusers Both Young and Old

I FORGIVE YOU
(A BRIEF CHRISTMAS WISH)

I do not pray you die in pain,
Dismembered by a speeding train.
I neither hope you’re lacerated
And in its belly macerated
By a tasteless crocodile.
It truly wouldn’t make me smile
To learn you had succumbed to fungus,
Been squeezed to pulp in a humungous
Boa constrictor’s steely hug,
Fed a toxic dose of drug,
Or roasted on a pyre of sticks.

Before December 26.

Copyright © 2013 T. A. G.

Granting Restraining Orders to Stalkers: On How the Courts Are Abused to Abet or Conceal Stalking (or Label Conduct “Stalking” That Hardly Qualifies)

Restraining orders, which some have called blank checks to do malice, are marvelously versatile instruments. Consider, for example, that while they were conceived to deter stalkers from, say, hanging around other’s homes at night and propositioning them in the dark, they’re also easily obtained by stalkers to legitimate the same or similar conduct.

Because restraining orders place no limitations on the actions of their plaintiffs (that is, their applicants), stalkers who successfully petition for restraining orders (which are easily had by fraud) may follow their targets around; call, text, or email them; or show up at their homes or places of work with no fear of rejection or repercussion. In fact, any acts to drive them off may be represented to authorities as violations of those stalkers’ restraining orders. It’s very conceivable that a stalker could even assault his or her victim with complete impunity, representing the act of violence as self-defense (and at least one such victim of assault has been brought to this blog).

A stalker who petitions a restraining order against his or her target can toy with him or her like a cat might a mouse. Even if the target had solid grounds for some type of reciprocal or retributive legal action, the uncertainty and apprehension inspired by having received a restraining order would likely work a paralytic effect on him or her. No one who hasn’t had the state rapping on his or her door can appreciate the menace and uncertainty that linger after the echo has faded.

A reasonable person would expect there to be a readily available recourse in place to redress and remedy such a scenario. That reasonable person would find his expectation disappointed. Neither laws nor the courts officially recognize that abuses of restraining orders occur.

Granted, in most situations like this, the “stalker” is a girlfriend who impulsively procured a restraining order but still nurses amative feelings for the boyfriend she obtained it against—or a grudge. (Both defendants complaining of being stalked by those who’ve petitioned restraining orders against them and petitioners concerned to know whether they’re “in trouble” for violating their own orders are brought to this blog weekly.) This situation is less sinister than a source of constant anxiety for the target, who has no way of questioning or interpreting his or her stalker’s motives, or anticipating what further menace to expect.

A variant theme is represented by the person who becomes infatuated with or fixated on someone and later seeks to disown his or her feelings and conduct. For whatever reason—maybe the person is married—s/he professes apprehension of his or her target to the police and courts (and others) to generate a smokescreen. S/he flips the truth and alleges that the person s/he stalked stalked him or her. This is accomplished with particular ease by a woman, who can have every man she knows walking her to her car like a Secret Service entourage with a few hysterical attestations of terror.

There are in fact few more effective ways for stalkers to imprint themselves on the lives of objects of their (current or former) interest or obsession. For a stalker, a restraining order may even represent a token of love that its object is powerless to refuse.

Stalkers are driven by obsession. Realizing some consummated idyllic relationship with the objects of their fixations may not be their earnest goal at all. The source of gratification may be the stalking (the proximity, real or imagined: the connection).

Of course, a great deal of what’s called “stalking” isn’t, and the absurd over-application of this word is mocked by its use by one of a pair of acquaintances when they repeatedly bump into each other unexpectedly: “Are you stalking me?”

Restraining orders and the culture of hysteria that they nurture and reward, and which at the same time ensures their being both offhandedly approved by judges and reflexively credited as legit by everyone who’s informed of them, have invested the words stalking and stalker with talismanic foreboding: “Ooh, a stalker.” I can’t count the number of women I’ve been told have or have had a “stalker” or “stalkers” (and the veracity of the woman who most recently impressed upon me her “stalker ordeal”—and hugged me afterwards for my sympathetic responses—I’ve been given exorbitant reason to doubt). Their eagerness to share sometimes reminds me of the pride people used to derive from having full dance cards.

Just last month I caught a story about a former Baywatch babe who was issued a restraining order petitioned by a woman whom the TV actress had labeled her “stalker” and gotten a restraining order against years prior: a mom with a young son who’d brought the actress presents (gasp!). The recent restraining order case had something to do with the two encountering each other at a community swimming pool.

I can certainly appreciate the karmic turnabout (and do), but enough already.

Real harm is caused by hyped and fraudulent allegations used to set state machinery in motion, and our being conditioned to respond to hysterical trumpery as if it signified something more than its purveyor’s egotism and self-exaltation has clouded detection of genuine mischief.

When someone casually drops that s/he’s being or has been “stalked,” we should be at least as suspicious as sympathetic.

Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

“I Want My Life Back”: On the Unacknowledged Toll of Restraining Order Abuse

“I want my life back. Restraining orders have stolen everything from me, and I’d give anything to have it back.”

—From “End Restraining Order Abuses”

Here’s what no one on the outside of the restraining order process can possibly grasp: that it can strip from someone, possibly based on nothing but maliciously false allegations, everything that s/he held dear.

That everything may have been what we conventionally regard as the worthiest values in life: home, family, and children. Or that everything may have been a career, an ambition, or sanity, peace of mind, and well-being. It may have been faith in government…or God. Or it may have been good repute.

All of these values are sacred ones and ones protected by our Constitution, and all of these values are vulnerable to casual violation by a state process engineered, intentionally or not, to abet casual violations. Restraining orders not only enable but legitimate attacks that wouldn’t otherwise be possible, let alone legal.

The source of the gnawing outrage so evident in complaints about restraining order abuse isn’t simply false allegations but the eagerness with which they’re accepted as fact by the court and effectively sublimated into fact by application of a judicial signature.

Consider: If someone falsely circulates that you’re a sexual harasser, stalker, and/or violent threat—possibly endangering your employment, to say nothing of savaging you psychologically—you can report that person to the police, seek a restraining order against that person for harassment, and/or sue that person for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. If, however, that person first obtains a restraining order against you based on the same false allegations—which is simply a matter of filling out a form and lying to a judge for five or 10 minutes—s/he can then circulate those allegations, which have been officially recognized as legitimate on an order of the court, with impunity. Your credibility, both among colleagues, perhaps, as well as with authorities and the courts, is instantly shot. You may, besides, be subject to police interference based on further false allegations, or even jailed (arrest for violation of a restraining order doesn’t require that the arresting officer actually witness or have incontrovertible proof of anything). And if you are arrested, your credibility is so hopelessly compromised that a false accuser can successfully continue a campaign of harassment indefinitely. Not only that, s/he can expect to do so with the solicitous support and approval of all those who recognize him or her as a “victim” (which may be practically everyone).

Can a completely innocent person be completely destroyed like this in gratification of a sick impulse by someone with a yen for vengeance or an attention-seeking personality disorder? Totally. The allegations, files, and records (public records) gradually accrete to mock, humiliate, and destabilize that person indefinitely, denying him or her a sense of security and any reasonable expectation of receiving just treatment from his or her own government.

It works this way: police officers and judges have only brief exposure(s) to the matter and, having no investment in it, couldn’t care less either way; people who are on the fence are liable to maintain their perch, being disinclined to get involved; those who know better will express their sympathies, which are kind but powerless to work any sort of remedial or regenerative effect; and those who don’t know any better will swallow a liar’s frauds, because their reactions have been socially conditioned and they have, besides, no reason to doubt the merits of a court’s (or multiple courts’) findings.

It’s a piece of cake.

Liars typically don’t expect to have their frauds challenged, but if they are, those frauds are more likely than not to continue to succeed (the courts are averse to backpedaling, and there’s no oversight). Lies don’t even have to be consistent or particularly cunning, just sensational and dramatically delivered (bigger, more lurid lies are actually easier sells than small ones). The rewards of attention, social sympathy and encouragement, recognition by authority figures, and the sense of power that comes from prevailing over an opponent are furthermore heady and addictive, and easily eclipse any twinge of conscience or fear that a liar may feel.

Victims of abuse are left eating their hearts out while those who’ve abused them can expect to be surrounded by consoling arms. In work settings, those abusers may even end up with promotions.

Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Infidelity and Restraining Order Abuse

Restraining orders are unparalleled tools for discrediting, intimidating, and silencing those they’ve been petitioned against. It’s presumed that those people (their defendants) are menaces of one sort or another. Why else would they be accused?

One answer, not to put too fine a point on it, is sex.

A couple of years ago, a story came to my attention about two British women who accompanied a guy home for a roisterous threesome. He probably thought it was his lucky day. The women later accused him of rape, because both had boyfriends they were concerned would discover they’d cheated.

Classy, huh?

Although their victim could easily have ended up imprisoned indefinitely, he was able to produce exculpatory evidence that saw him vindicated and them jailed instead. The beauty of a criminal prosecution is that evidence is key: no proof, no blame.

Petitions for restraining orders, by contrast, are civil prosecutions. The horror of a civil prosecution is that no evidence is required. False allegations of crimes, which may never even be contemplated or commented on by a judge, may be entered on restraining order applications without fear of recrimination. Even if those allegations are proven false later on when the defendant is allowed to respond, there are no consequences for making them, and the likely consequence of making them is success. Also, and this is a beaut, those false allegations remain on public view for all time and may reasonably be presumed true and valid by any third party who scrutinizes the record.

Whether an infidelity is emotional, sexual, or somewhere in between, a restraining order is a peerless tool not only for covering it up but for revising the truth into one favorable to an unfaithful partner. The cheat has the further gratification of displacing the blame s/he is due onto the (very possibly unsuspecting and unintentional) third wheel.

Ever wondered how to have your (beef/cheese)cake and eat it, too? Get a restraining order.

Memorable stories of restraining orders’ being used to conceal (or indulge) indiscretions or infidelities that have been shared with me since I began this blog over two years ago include a woman’s being accused of domestic violence by a former boyfriend she briefly renewed a (Platonic) friendship with who had a viciously jealous wife who put him up to it; a man’s being charged with domestic violence after catching his wife texting her lover and wrestling with her for possession of the phone for an hour (he was forced to abandon his house so his rival could move in); and a young , female attorney’s being seduced by an older, married colleague who never told her he was married and subsequently petitioned an emergency restraining order against her, both to shut her up and to minimize her opportunity to prepare a defense. I’ve even been apprised of people’s (women’s) having restraining orders petitioned against them by spouses (women) who resented being informed of their mates’ sleeping around.

Restraining orders not only enable cheating spouses to redeem themselves by characterizing people they’ve come on to, developed infatuations with, or bedded as stalkers or kooks; they enable the spouses who’ve been cheated on to exact a measure of vengeance on intruders into their relationships, intruders who either may have had no designs on compromising those relationships or may not have been told about them in the first place. Restraining orders reassure the “cheatees” or cuckolds that they’re still their spouses’ numero unos.

If I haven’t remarked it before, restraining orders cater to all manner of kinks.

Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

The New Domestic Violence: Restraining Order Abuse

Daughter: “He hits me, Ma.”

Mother: “Well…I can’t say I’m surprised. What’d ya do?”

Daughter: “Whaddya mean, what’d I do?”

Mother: “What’d ya do to make him angry? He didn’t just hit ya outta the blue.”

Daughter: “I guess I didn’t do what he wanted me to.”

This exchange is extracted from a recent Hollywood movie set in the 1970s immediately preceding the advent of the restraining order and illustrates the social mindset that ’70s-era feminists sought to counteract, namely, one that tolerated spousal abuse and placed the blame for it on its victims.

Living in an environment of insecurity and intimidation is a daily torment no one should have to bear, and no one can deny that the motives that led to restraining order legislation’s being drafted were very sympathetic ones.

What this blog and others like it seek to bring to light is that restraining orders have become the arbitrarily brutal hand that they were originally conceived to check—and they’ve put brass knuckles on it.

Restraining orders’ abuses arise from the same impulse: anger, jealousy, or control, for instance; but they’re much worse in many ways than slaps and threats, because their consequences are more exacting, enduring, and inescapable.

As in the exchange above, the answer to why someone had a restraining order petitioned against him or her is too often: “I guess I didn’t do what [s/he] wanted me to.”  The motive for the abuser’s action may be identical. Only the means of abuse are different.

Because those means may, and often do, include lying and lying publicly and savagely, abuses accomplished with restraining orders don’t fade like bruises do. A man falsely accused of domestic violence, for example, is publicly recognized as a batterer for the rest of his life, and that label may follow him from job to job or relationship to relationship. Years of his life may pass in agony before his ordeal in the courts has even concluded. A lie impulsively told to a judge in a few minutes may be something its victim has to continue to counteract forever, and though counseling may help him reconcile himself to the lie and its injuries, no amount of it will ever erase that lie, because it’s branded on his public face.

And while women alleged to be batterers may not be perceived as harshly as men accused of domestic violence, women, too, may be abused by restraining orders in exactly the same way, making a process that was designed to protect women a convenient means of brutalizing them that has the sanction of both the government and the feminist establishment.

Fraudulent allegations, furthermore, don’t need to be of domestic violence to lay victims low. Falsely characterizing them as stalkers or sources of sexual harassment or threat may be just as damning and damaging, both socially and psychologically. The implications of the phrase “protection order” or “restraining order” are alone sufficient enough, because their resonance never diminishes. It and its ramifications persist indefinitely.

The horror of the woman in the domestic situation suggested in the scene recited above was that she was stuck in an untenable situation, a situation she was powerless to correct or extricate herself from. Thirty years ago, a woman might have had nowhere to turn. Even mom and dad might turn her away and remind her that she swore a vow of fidelity she was obligated to honor (which is what the mother in this scene does).

Today, a (female) victim of spousal abuse has options. Public and familial reactions to her plaints are liable to be very different. She can move out and divorce without any stigma affixing itself to her, and if she lacks the wherewithal, there are shelters that may take her in until she’s able to provide for herself.

For the victim of restraining order abuse, there are no escapes. The stigma, which may be debilitating, is permanent and may be accompanied besides by his or her being denied access to home, kids, pets, property, and money. In other words, s/he may find him- or herself robbed by the state of all resources and values on top of having to bear a psychic wound there’s no staunching.

Restraining order frauds go over easily, because three decades later authorities and the courts are still responding to what they imagine are scenarios like the one sketched in the scene above. Irrespective of the actual circumstances, it’s what sparks and fuels the indignation that meets many defendants on the faces and in the conduct of judges they’re brought before, conduct that verges on retributive vigilantism.

It’s time to dust off the misperceptions and the process itself. Restraining order laws, which originated in the 1970s, have “evolved” retrospectively, seemingly aiming to amend injustices that occurred before many or most recipients of restraining orders today even drew breath.

The sins of our fathers and forefathers, however villainous (and they assuredly were), aren’t anyone’s but theirs.

Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Objections to Restraining Orders AREN’T about Restraining Orders

Let’s get something clear: protests against restraining orders aren’t about restraining orders.

Granted, it’s a violation against decency and all things American for the government to casually curtail citizens’ freedoms without even consulting them first. But, seriously, who cares if a judge says one adult can’t talk to some other adult?

Objections to restraining orders are never about not being allowed to talk to the plaintiffs who were treacherous enough seek them. I would imagine (and I don’t strictly have to imagine) that most restraining order defendants’ feelings toward the people they’re prohibited from talking to are considerably less than friendly, anyway.

Here’s what objections to restraining orders are about:

  • On a modicum of evidence of “threat” or none at all, a spouse or boy- or girlfriend can be ejected from his or her home (even if s/he holds the deed) and forbidden access to his or her children, pets, money, and property on pain of police arrest.
  • Allegations ranging from harassment to domestic violence can be permanently stamped on defendants’ (that is, recipients’) records, again based on a modicum of evidence (very possibly misrepresented) or none at all. An allegation amounting to nothing more than “I’m afraid” is sufficient to obtain an “order of protection,” the implications of which phrase alone signify stalking, violence, or violent intent.
  • Restraining orders are public documents that may be accessible to anyone, including employers and would-be employers. Records of their issuance remain on public view even after their expiration and may be entered into public registries.
  • The truth or falsity of allegations that may be as extreme as assault with a deadly weapon, child molestation, or rape is determined according to the same civil standard of evidence as contract and insurance disputes: “preponderance of the evidence.” Regardless of the extremity of allegations on restraining orders, neither a trial by jury nor “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” is ever required for their validation. If a judge feels there’s a better than 50/50 probability that allegations are true, “preponderance of the evidence” is satisfied.
  • Allegations on restraining orders, which may be either criminal or criminal in nature and may besides be entirely false, indefinitely remain on defendants’ public records whether they’re found meritorious or not, that is, even baseless allegations that a judge ignores are never stricken from the record but remain on public view and may reasonably be interpreted as true or valid by anyone who consults those records.
  • The restraining order process is conducted ex parte, which means orders are issued based on one party’s claims alone, and these may be both damning and egregiously false.
  • Statutory penalties for lying to police officers and judges (false reporting and perjury) are never enforced, and allegations of lying are furthermore discounted by the courts.
  • Federal grant monies (average grants being in the neighborhood of $500,000) are awarded to police districts and courts in return for their consenting to have their officers “educated” about how they should respond to allegations of fear and violence. Mandated responses include accepting allegations of violence by women at face value (that is, they’re not to be questioned). This mandated response roughly translates to allegations by anyone being recognized as legitimate.
  • Irrespective of the nature of allegations entered against a defendant, which may be innocuous or false, that defendant is subjected to traumatizing menace, intimidation, and public disparagement by the state. S/he is treated generically like a fiend, the paradigmatic basis for which treatment is the domestic batterer whose conduct restraining orders were originally conceived to check, despite allegations of violence being rare today relative to the vast number of restraining orders issued (estimated at two to three million per annum).
  • Restraining orders, which circumvent due process entirely and which originate in civil court and are therefore subject to no standard of proof, may implicate defendants as criminals and may have criminal consequences if “violated.” Alleged violations, also, may be subject to no standard of proof. In other words, a defendant can find him- or herself locked up, never having been granted his or her constitutional right to a trial and very possibly on maliciously false grounds (based on a decision formed by the court prior to even knowing what that defendant looked like).
  • Opportunities to contest allegations on restraining orders, which defendants may literally have to ask for within a brief window of time, may be assigned no more than a few minutes, and defendants are never provided counsel. An innocent defendant forced to contest utterly malicious allegations may face the quandary of living with them permanently stamped on his or her public record or shelling out $2,500 to $5,000 for an attorney’s representation, which measure is no guarantee of vindication and which measure few can afford even if they’re conscious of the need (which few are).
  • Restraining orders are usually free for the asking and may be petitioned serially or multiply by a single applicant, making them marvelous instruments of harassment and torment. There’s no statutory limit on the number of restraining orders a single applicant may apply for, no penalties for having false or groundless restraining orders dismissed, and of course no penalties for lying.
  • Restraining orders impose no limitations on the actions of plaintiffs (that is, applicants), leaving them free to taunt or stalk defendants, or bait them into violating orders of the court.
  • Courts pander to and reward even those guided by spite, jealousy, malice, and/or personality disorders or mental illnessThe interchange between a judge and a plaintiff is no more than five or 10 minutes in duration and is more procedural and perfunctory than probative. A judge authorizes a restraining order, which may permanently alter many lives for the worse (including those of children), based on knowing nothing whatever about its defendant, who’s just a name on a form, and almost nothing about its petitioner, who may be disturbed or even insane.
  • Upon plaintiffs’ successfully making false allegations stick once (or baiting defendants into violating false restraining orders), they now have a foundation upon which to make further falsehoods entirely plausible. Thus can innocent defendants’ lives be scarred or fractured irreparably by chronic abuse (a single potent lie, or a series of them, can be nursed for years). And these defendants may have been the actual victims in the first place.

Most people (including authorities and officers of the court) aren’t conscious that restraining orders are abused, let alone conscious of how they’re abused, why they’re abused, or how extremely they can be abused.

It’s hoped that this synopsis makes the means and motive for restraining order abuse clearer to those in the dark, at sea, or on the ropes. Whether you’re a legislator, a judge, a police officer, an attorney, a counselor, a feminist or feminist partisan, a victim of restraining order fraud, or just someone with reasonable expectations about how the justice system operates, whatever your perceptions were about restraining orders and their administration, those perceptions were probably either naïve or wrong.

The ease and convenience with which restraining orders may be obtained make their attractiveness as instruments of passive-aggressive castigation, spite, and vengeance irresistible.

You’ve seen that game carnival-goers are invited to take a crack at that gives them three tries to drop a seated person into a pool of water? Restraining orders are sort of the same thing, only the cost of a ticket is free, a player doesn’t need to be able to hit the broadside of a barn, and the water beneath the target is scalding.

Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

READ THIS: Extremely Practical Advice and Navigational Tools for Anyone Targeted by the Restraining Order Racket

“Don’t touch the lava, or you will get burned.”

—From Breaking the Glasses

The author of the blog Breaking the Glasses, which concerns itself with the malicious abuse of restraining orders (among other injustices), is a very keen, very honest, and very brave woman. I mentioned her blog in a recent post, but I’d like to revisit it not only to double the likelihood that someone in need of information or advice will find his or her way there from here but to praise its merits at greater length.

Few writers I’ve read offer any but diffuse and reportorial criticisms of restraining order abuse, possibly because only a few have direct or proximal familiarity with it. They understand the facts but may not feel them or their implications. Consequently they may not have enough invested in them to warrant their meditating on them long enough to approach enlightenment.

The critical perspectives on how restraining order frauds and injustices are perpetrated and perpetuated presented by the author of Breaking the Glasses are those of a savvy insider who has intimate knowledge of restraining orders’ effects and their collective toll. Her writing is concentrated, direct, and practical, rather than academic.

I trained for several years to be an academic. I trained longer to be a verse writer. Both concern thinking abstractly. Years later, I’m still prone to see the endoskeleton of something sooner than its pores and follicles. Also, I’m male. It’s a biological fact that women tend to perceive the “big picture” more naturally than men.

Read this and see if you don’t agree that its author couldn’t be any more thorough, concrete, or specific: “A Temporary Restraining Order Has Been Filed Against Me. What Should I Do?” The virtues of this brief tutorial are the same ones evident in all of this blogger’s treatments: awareness, astuteness, moxie, and both passionate and compassionate regard for those affected by the injustices she confronts.

Read this.

Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Playing God: A Further Consideration of the Character and Conduct of Officers of the Court

My previous two posts have been directed at the character and conduct of officers of the court (that is, attorneys and judges), and the one immediately preceding this one looked specifically at a number of cases of extreme judicial misconduct.

I sketched some of the implications of this misconduct, which ranged from debauchery to violence, in the conclusion to that post. What I’d like to consider in this one is this: in what professional office that you can think of besides judge would it not only be possible to engage in these kinds of activities—for example, propositioning coworkers, masturbating in a roomful of people, or brandishing firearms (in buildings where they’re prohibited)—but possible for the kind of person who’s brazen enough to engage in them to occupy?

I can’t think of one in which such a person would be tolerated or one that such a perpetrator wouldn’t immediately be ousted and escorted to a cell from. Not one. Not that long ago, a President of the United States was impeached for privately dropping trou.

The obvious answer to how this is possible is that (1) courtrooms are insular spaces where judges literally reign, and (2) everyone, including members of their staff, is intimidated into (sycophantic) submissiveness. A judge can literally masturbate himself in front of a crowd of people, and no one will stand up and recognize the behavior openly, let alone challenge its seemliness (this is the phenomenon satirized in the story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”).

I’ve recently observed that several jobs in the legal and government spheres are ones people with so-called psychopathic traits are said to gravitate toward: lawyer, police officer, and civil servant (judges are both lawyers and civil servants). Other “top jobs for psychopaths” are said to be CEO and surgeon. These are all occupations whose practitioners you have assuredly heard someone remark “think they’re God.”

What does it mean to think you’re God?

What’s usually meant is that people like this have been invested with authority and expect it to be recognized; presume to dictate to others what’s best for them (that is, they presume to know best); never doubt or second-guess themselves, their judgments, or their worthiness; relish being the center of others’ attention; and are resistant to stress and immune to shame.

They’re excellent survivors, clearly, which is what the title of Oxford professor Kevin Dutton’s book, The Wisdom of Psychopaths, implies. They’re rewarded by exerting their will on others and, despite whatever consequences may ensue as a result, sleep well.

Over the course of writing dozens of editorials on restraining order abuse and the issues around which it orbits and from which it devolves, I’ve found myself over and over coming back to psychology. Both wanton abusers of the law and practitioners of the law (who may likewise be wanton abusers of it) display qualities that are directly contradictory to the conceits of civil process. Civil, along with its cognates civilization and civility, implies sensitivity to others and the value of their feelings and lives. These words are meant to embody the values espoused by our Constitution, principal among them being the recognition that all people are created equal and are thus equally entitled to earnest regard by others.

The values espoused by our Constitution are social values. What you see in conflict here are competing social systems: the authoritarian and the democratic. The law is a system that has “evolved” from ancient times to feudal times (times when the citizenry was ruled by the dictates of a single person) to modern times, and it hasn’t really kept up (just consider the word court: what does a king preside over?). What keeps government and the courts honest is social scrutiny, mediated typically by the so-called fourth estate, journalism: word gets out, and people respond.

Change and reform begin with sensitization (that is, awareness).

The counteragent to corruption, in other words, is you and I (collectively). People are dominated by the law and intimidated into submissiveness, restraining order victims doubly so, because they’ve been traumatized. What being traumatized means is having had your power taken from you (not surprisingly, more than one female victim of restraining order abuse I’ve spoken with has referred to her treatment in court and by the court as “rape”: the ultimate trauma of rape is being disregarded, dominated, and left feeling impotent.)

Take your power back. Not a single one of the judges nominated “crazy” that I mentioned in my previous post went down without a fight.

And they probably still sleep like babies.

Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com