Tag discrimination

Understanding the Significance of False Accusations in Restraining Order and Related “Trials”

Moderator 4 Comments

Misperception of the significance of false accusations is a topic that’s been considered in past posts on this blog, particularly false accusations of sexual assault, which are the only false accusations anyone seems to believe are deserving of mention.

It’s wrong to say that the nature of false accusations doesn’t matter. But more relevant to observing corruption than a consideration of what is alleged is a consideration of how it’s alleged and decided.

Imagine if special courts were convened to judge accused people of a certain type, and imagine if the normal standards of evidence applied to allegations that may impute criminal wrongdoing to them were suspended. Imagine if instead of having to prove they had done what they were accused of, it were enough for a single judge (absent a jury) to “determine” upon a few minutes’ deliberation that the allegations were probably true and sufficiently urgent to merit the court’s intrusion.

These are among recent search terms that brought readers to this site.

If the accused people of a certain type were Jews or African-Americans, for instance, we would denounce these special courts to be an abomination. This kind of discrimination would raise our hackles.

Yet such special courts exist. Restraining order allegations are decided exactly this way, as may be allegations of domestic violence or rape, allegations that can also be made on restraining order petitions. There is nothing that can’t be alleged on a restraining order petition. Yet nothing alleged must be verified.

Now the critic of complaints about the harm of false allegations will chime in at this point and say, yeah, but it’s not like the victim of false accusations decided in a kangaroo court will be served a felony conviction.

Yes…and no. The critic should ask him- or herself what kind of person would maliciously or self-servingly lie about stalking, sexual violation, or violence and then ask him- or herself whether it’s reasonable not to expect more and worse from such a person.

Subsequent false allegations can give people criminal records (possibly, again, without a jury’s ever having vetted the evidence). They can give people criminal records because of the prior lie. A person can find him- or herself deprived of everything, including liberty, based on a tissue of frauds.

My ex-husband used to batter me and then go crawling on his hands and knees through the neighborhood until he reached the hospital or police station, and he would claim I had attacked him. I’d be hysterical, and police would arrest me. This happened repeatedly. […] I was made homeless on multiple occasions. He would involve my family, his family, all of our friends, employers, and university professors, and I was always the bad guy and still am. […] They filed restraining orders against me and claimed I was a danger to everyone; kidnapped my son, my dogs; stole my car at one point; drained bank accounts, PayPal accounts; and sawed locks of my storage unit and took off with everything…and EVERY F[—]ING TIME, police just validated the abuse and continued to terrorize me.

To complicate matters, a ruling on a false accusation can criminalize lawful behavior. So a subsequent allegation against someone can be true, but the alleged behavior that lands him or her in jail might only have been unlawful because of the original false accusation.

She filed a PFA [protection from abuse order] against me in April of 2014. Several months later, I was charged [by the district attorney on two counts of] violating the PFA. (1) My wife read my private password-protected Facebook emails. I asked a friend to contact her ex-husband #2 and tell him what was going on between her and me (he lives in Mexico and was listed on the PFA as one of the people I could not contact). The friend I emailed didn’t contact her ex-husband. In fact, nobody contacted her ex-husband. (2) I drafted a letter to my wife and gave it to my lawyer. My lawyer in turn forwarded it to her lawyer. They claimed this was also a PFA violation. We went to court, and the judge agreed on both counts and sent me to jail for 30 days. [This commenter’s wife was a Mexican national whom he met in March 2013 (Match.com) and married a month later. The PFA was filed after he “got her and her children their immigration papers” and later told her he wanted to divorce her because the marriage was unsatisfactory.]

Appreciate that one false record can be invoked until the end of time. The superficial critic thinks that once a trial is concluded and the framed victim survives his or her licks, the matter is concluded.

Not so. Ignoring the psychological residue for the moment, if the victim of a false accusation is falsely accused a second time, it can now be alleged that s/he has a “history” or “pattern” of abusive behavior, which may influence a divorce or child custody proceeding, a lawsuit, or even a criminal prosecution.

Respondent [—] and Father have a history of domestic violence that includes, but may not be limited to, the issuance of temporary restraining orders in cases […] and the issuance of a permanent restraining order in case […] which was entered by default on January 16, 2015, placing the welfare of the Child at risk. [The “Father” in this case was married to his wife for a brief period before she left and then filed a number of allegations of violence, both with the police and the court, over the ensuing six months. She then committed suicide after being institutionalized. She gave birth to a daughter a couple of months prior whom she had told the father she had miscarried. The father was never heard by a court in his defense but has nevertheless been represented as a serial abuser by the district prosecutor, who has sought to deny him any role in his child’s life.]

Lies that stick…cling, and they can be recycled. Public records don’t expire, and court rulings that impute grave misdeeds, even if those rulings were formed in mere minutes, aren’t questioned. They’re as valid as any other ruling.

Lies that stick, moreover, are entered into public (police) databases, registries that throw up red flags…indefinitely. The person falsely accused of domestic violence, for instance, may be permanently barred from certain types of employment and even, say, from attending his or her daughter’s dance recitals at school.

Defendant was refused jobs, [is] not allowed to attend [or] volunteer [at] her daughter’s school events, [and has had] numerous other rights taken away due to Plaintiff’s Abuse of Process and Fraudulent Allegations and written Affidavit to the Court. This continues today. [This is an excerpt from the draft of a commenter’s “Motion to Expunge,” which she was preparing herself with no legal know-how.]

Again, privations endure permanently, for always, ad infinitum.

The liberal critic who declaims s/he’s for immigrant rights and for restraining orders should be aware that a non-citizen who’s falsely accused in a restraining order proceeding and then accused of violating an order obtained by fraud can be summarily booted from the country: Adios, muchachito (we don’t like your kind here).

Based on lies, people are deprived of their good names, their dignity, their children, their homes, their property, their livelihoods, and their security.

Finally, being lied about and then scorned by cops and lambasted by judges—these traumas last, and they last no less indefinitely than false records do. So on top of everything else, people may be driven out of their minds.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*Public records, besides being permanent, are also public records, and a lie that a judge legitimates is a lie that everyone else will regard as true (e.g., a neighbor, a boy- or girlfriend, a student, a patient, a client, an employer, a loan officer, a landlord….).

What Makes Someone an “MRA”? Why Are Those Guys So ANGRY?

Moderator 17 Comments

Both questions in the title have a common answer, which I’ll illustrate by allegory.

When I was about 20, I worked next to the residence of an aged woman who kept a Rottweiler on a chain in her yard. The dog lived on the tie-out all hours of the day and probably had all of his life.

After I’d observed his situation for months and saw it never changed, I determined to offer to fence in the woman’s property for her. Our business had some unused rolls of chain link that wouldn’t be missed.

I knocked on the woman’s door and explained my interest. She said she’d come out and talk to me. While I waited, the dog approached. I knelt down to greet him. He lunged at my face, tore my nose, and then clamped down on the arm I raised protectively, crushing my radial nerve. I kicked him off and drove myself to the emergency room. If he hadn’t been on a chain, it would have been an ambulance transporting me there. It would still be eight or 10 months before I recovered the use of my left hand, brief as the attack was.

The dog had been mistreated, and he was insane. When I returned to Tucson after leaving for a time to rehabilitate, I learned he’d mauled two little girls and was destroyed. (I passed the woman on the road not long after. She smiled and waggled her fingers at me, and then scowled when I stared at her coldly.)

Question: Who was to blame?

People are no different from dogs. If you force them to live with undeserved privations, whether cruelly or just irrationally, they lose it. This is the answer to the questions in the title.

Calling male victims of abuse, abuse that has its roots in gender dogma, “crazy”—as the man does whose writings I panned in the last post—isn’t necessarily wrong. But driving people crazy and then blaming them for it does kind of make you a monster.

If I then call you a monster, does that mean I’m insensitive? The conclusion is ridiculous.

Consider this story of female violence that was submitted to the blog yesterday:

Hi, I just wanted to share my story for all the other guys who have been victims of vengeful women. I have had two restraining orders placed on me now. The second one is pending…. The first one was dismissed because it was a lie. The girl used it to kick me out of our apartment and to punish me. That was in 2004.

It has caught up with me since then.

In 2010, a guy who was jealous and wanted my girl used his private investigator credentials to pull my records. He found the [dismissed] restraining order and told my girl, who promptly left me.

I am currently married to a woman who has been hitting me, shoving me, knocking me over, and physically keeping me trapped in my own apartment. After having enough, I told her that I wanted a divorce and to go live her life (but really I love her and don’t want to leave her).

She left the next day and then called me a few days later and said she was going to come home. We argued and I yelled that if she attacked me again, I’d call the police immediately. That night when I came home, there were three police cruisers there (mind you, this is three days after the incident). The police escorted her along with my parents to help her get her stuff from the apartment. […]

My mother is a drama queen and always has been. She gets in fights with people in public and was kicked out of her family for spreading lies about them. When my wife asked to be taken home (she was staying with my parents whom she promised never to talk to), my mother told her about the restraining order I had over 10 years ago. I’m sure my mother embellished as she always does. She frightened Diana, and my mother called the cops.

That Monday, my mother brought her to the courthouse to file the restraining order. Diana did not stop her, and Diana even called me, and I heard this new tone in her voice, a tone of righteousness, like she was talking to a child she was about to punish. […] The next day, the police were beating down my door and served me the notice (that’s today).

I have no doubt that I will win this case, but just as the last case caught up with me…how do I explain two cases? This may ruin my reputation for life. I mean surely if you’ve had two cases brought against you, you did something wrong. You must be guilty, right? But I’m not. The first case actually brought on the second case, and in both cases it was the women who were hitting me, not me hitting them or even threatening them. […]

This man says he was battered by two women who petitioned restraining orders against him as a further form of assault (a power play). “They do it because they’re emotional disasters and want to punish,” he offers. He’s right. The system panders to impulse (and often rewards it).

Now consider that the blogger, Tom Boggioni a.k.a.“TBOGG,” criticized in the last post for a 2014 commentary on “MRAs” published on RawStory.com, popped out a piece two days ago telling men they should never strike a woman—as if anyone who would strike a woman will have some sort of moral awakening because Tom pronounced he shouldn’t. Please. (If pieces like his do more than make their male authors look good to their female audience members, it’s lost on me. They pander, and feminists eat it up.)

A man like the one in the account above, who has tolerated violence from women without raising his hand even in self-defense, has been punished for his tolerance by having cops pound on his door and being dragged into court to stand accused. He’s been represented as an abuser—to compound the indignities of being battered—and the implications of the representation are alone enough to damage him…indefinitely. (The first order against the man, which cost him a relationship, was thrown out of court. Note: Even when the court acknowledges allegations are groundless…it doesn’t matter, because the damning implications are preserved. Only one state in the nation, Tennessee, has a law on the books that enables a dismissed restraining order to be expunged.)

Will the guy in the story become the “embittered, divorced white man with anger issues” that TBOGG and his fellows mock? Who knows?

But would you blame him if he did? More significantly, if you did blame him, who would the real monster be?

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*What writers who contemn MRA rhetoric seem to miss is that it’s not violent. It may be unsavory—it may be downright nasty—but its aggressiveness is passive. If the authors of MRA rhetoric (or what’s held up as exemplifying MRA rhetoric) were actually the violent bullies that many of them have probably been represented to be in courtrooms, is this the form their anger would assume…words? Put another way, what form would their anger take if they weren’t the violent bullies that many of them have probably been represented to be? That’s right…words.