How an Innocent Woman May Be Accused of Molestation, Rape, or Murder and Have to Live with It

January 24, 2022July 28, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

Consider the following allegations:

“She has repeatedly exposed herself to me.”

“She told me on multiple occasions that if I wouldn’t have sex with her again she would tell the police I raped her.”

“She has stalked me since I met her. I’ve kept a dated log of all of the instances when she appeared someplace where I was. I’ve told her to leave me alone but she won’t. She says I’m her ‘destiny.’”

“She grabbed my crotch. When I pushed her hand away and ran, she laughed and called me a ‘pussy.’”

“I loaned her money. She told me if I asked for it back one more time, she and a friend of hers would hurt me. She bragged that they had killed someone before.”

“She has sent me panties covered with blood, urine, and feces. I threw them away because they were disgusting.”

“She showed me a knife and said that if I didn’t leave my girlfriend she would ‘cut her good.’”

“She said she wanted to drink my blood.”

An affidavit on a protective order application could include any or all of these statements and any number of others, including, say, alleged confessions of any act conceivable by the imagination of the accuser.

An affidavit, that is, a statement of facts alleged and sworn to be true, can usually be of any length and could include detailed descriptions of the accused’s anatomy, commentaries on his or her hygiene, and judgments of any variety, besides including an account of “what happened.”

There are no rules, and the court cannot retroactively censor what is effectively a complainant’s testimony.

Note that none of the accusations listed above could ever be ascertained as true or false, and a judge, accordingly, has no particular investment in “the truth.” His or her job, as prescribed by the law, is to decide whether the accuser is convincing.

An even cruder fact is that a judge may never read a complainant’s affidavit at all but simply ask for a verbal accounting, that’s if s/he does anything more than make sure the paperwork is filled out correctly. Once validated by a judge’s signature, unless contested and successfully quashed during a hearing that may be afforded 30 minutes on a judge’s docket, the order is a binding instrument of law and an indefinitely preserved public document that can be quoted or published.

Restraining orders are typically issued ex parte. That means based on the accuser’s say-so only. The accused may know nothing about it until a law enforcement officer or agent of the court appears at his or her door, possibly in the presence of friends, family, and/or neighbors.

The whole application and approval process may take from a few minutes to a few hours.

The latitude granted to judges in this arena of law is virtually boundless, as the politicking behind so-called “women’s law” intended it to be. A single statement from the list that heads this post, delivered persuasively enough, could suffice to make any number of allegations “stick” (whether relevant or not). Or repeated emphatic claims of terror and violation could. Or the testimony of a crony witness. Or a real or faked series of text messages or emails. Or a real or spoofed series of calls on a phone (which, if real, could have been about anything).

As Ralph Nader said, “Power has to be insecure to be responsive.” To judges, this business is just quotidian paper-shuffling, and they have no liability for their rulings, which are issued without oversight (including by judges who aren’t even judges but merely seasonal temps). Grounds for appeal, furthermore, are almost none (and “lying” is not among the few).

A reasonable person would conclude that anyone who supported laws that would allow a woman to be falsely accused of molestation, rape, or murder would have to be a monster.

The left-leaning feminist humanists and self-styled social justice advocates who do militantly support these laws emphasize their virtue: bringing relief to women in abusive relationships. This is somewhat like explaining communism’s goal is the protection of the working class citizen—while ignoring that tens of millions of working class citizens have been killed in the name of an idealistic social experiment.

Perhaps social justice crusaders who promote “women’s law” would say they’ve only ever meant for it to treat men monstrously.

*In civil lawsuits that aren’t filed for free, as restraining order applications usually are, a defendant could move the court to strike inflammatory statements that weren’t relevant and that could only serve to damage (his or) her reputation and, for example, professional standing (and health, security, interpersonal relationships, etc.). Whether this would fare any chance of success in drive-thru procedures conceived to permanently document misdeeds is less than iffy. (It would require redacting, or “blacking out,” parts of the original order, which is contrary to its purpose.)

Kim Cheezum Prays for Chick-fil-A as My Dad Starves to Death

November 27, 2019July 28, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

Kim Cheezum

This post briefly marvels at the callous indifference of people who support lies that tear lives apart.

For the benefit of the reader, the subject of this post, Kimberly Cheezum, wife of Presbyterian pastor Jeremy Cheezum, is the sister of a man, Phil Bredfelt, who, in conjunction with his wife, serially prosecuted the writer from 2006–2018 claiming abuses that ranged from harassment to sexual assault and violent danger. All were the false concoctions of a married woman desperate to hide that she had indulged what might be characterized as a pang in her pants, and all of the allegations were eventually dismissed.

In the last round of prosecutions, Kim Cheezum’s dad, Dr. Ray Bredfeldt, M.D., a Presbyterian deacon, meant to join his son and daughter-in-law in the fun, but proceedings were suspended before he had the chance.

That was in 2016, which is the year this post concerns. At the time, the writer had maintained this blog about false accusation and abused and abusive civil court procedures every day for five years, which Kim Cheezum couldn’t help but have known only too well.

Kim Cheezum, the author of the Facebook entreaty above, teaches children (“!!!!”) at Pomona Elementary in Montrose, Colorado.

Having been out of court for a year, I’ve had a chance to review the whos and whys and whens and whats of a legal matter that chewed up a quarter of my life (and in the fullness of time will probably prove to have shortened that life besides impoverished it).

Above is an image from Facebook. It’s a request from Kim Cheezum, sister of one of my accusers, Phil Bredfeldt, and sister-in-law of the other, Tiffany Bredfeldt, that the restaurant chain Chick-fil-A please come open a franchise in her hometown of Montrose, Colorado, where her husband, Jeremy Cheezum, is a Presbyterian pastor (Trinity Reformed Presbyterian Church).

Jeremy Cheezum, Pastor Jeremy Cheezum, Rev Jeremy Cheezum, Montrose High School, Kim Cheezum, Kimberly Cheezum

Jeremy Cheezum, in the glow of health, shown in place my father, who starved to death while Cheezum and his wife’s family sought my false imprisonment and whose appearance in his final days, gaunt and ravaged as it was, would horrify the viewer

Noteworthy in this context is that I had applied to Rev. Cheezum and several of his peers for help with gaining relief from Tiffany Bredfeldt’s false accusations many years before.

At the time Kim Cheezum posted her request on Facebook, then, I had been lied about for 10 years, had informed her family that I’d been lied about, had asked for her husband’s help, and had maintained a blog for five years denouncing false accusation.

In March of 2016, I was served papers (while I was in court responding to a separate prosecution by one of their stooges) informing me that after having already been forced to live in the shadow of Kim Cheezum’s family’s lies for a decade that her brother, her sister-in-law, and her father were seeking my imprisonment.

Why? For reporting those lies, lies that would be glaringly obscene to a child.

A month earlier, February 2016, while the lawsuit was being carefully typed up by one of the family’s sleazy lawyers, what was on Kim Cheezum’s mind? Her stomach.

About seven months into the 2016 prosecution, my father succumbed to cancer by starving to death after years that were diminished by Kim Cheezum’s family’s self-indulgent lies and games.

I’m a vegetarian. My dad wasn’t. If he weren’t dead, he would probably have liked to have Chick-fil-A, too.

Tim Hargis, Father of My False Accuser of over 11 Years, Retires from Banking to “Spend More Time on His Cattle Farms”

September 3, 2019August 8, 2023Moderator 4 Comments

♫ “I’m an old cowhand, from the Rio Grande, but my legs ain’t bowed, and my cheeks ain’t tanned….” ♫

Tim Hargis, Cattleman Tim Hargis, Rancher Tim Hargis, Timothy Hargis, Galyn Hargis, Tim and GaLyn Hargis, GaLyn and Tim Hargis, Gay Hargis, Hargis 4GN Ranch, Jon Hargis, Hargis Ranch, First Security Bank, FSB, Tiffany Hargis, Arkansas, First Security Bancorp, Arkansas Cattlemen’s Association, First Security Bank Springdale Emma, North American Corriente Association

Tim Hargis reportedly “runs” 200 beef cattle on his “fourth-generation family ranch” in Hindsville, Arkansas. The writer, who has been falsely accused by Hargis’s immediate and extended family of sexual aggression, stalking, and posing a violent threat; temporarily denied possession of firearms (of which he has never owned any); sued while one parent was in chemotherapy; sued again while the other starved to death; sued to be imprisoned (twice), etc., was an aspirant children’s humorist who has been a vegetarian since he was 16. Allegations against the writer by Tiffany Hargis, who testified in 2013 that she was in psychiatric care, were dismissed in 2018 in their entirety.

Timothy Hargis, father of my false accuser of over a decade, apparently retired from his post as a Springdale, Arkansas First Security Bank vice president in July. My attention was otherwise occupied, which would probably disappoint Tim to learn.

Tim Hargis has determinedly ensured that his family’s stockyard smell has tainted every breath I’ve drawn for almost 14 years.

Tim Hargis’s married daughter, Tiffany Hargis (Bredfeldt), who has been in psychiatric care, formed what for brevity’s sake I’ll call an infatuation upon our meeting about this time in 2005. She hung around outside of my residence up to and past midnight for months and engaged in antics she would not have had her absentee husband or her scolding mom been present. Tiffany told me her fundamentalist parents had constantly made her “feel like a whore” growing up, which I would contend is the motive of all that I’ll disclose below; monsters like her are the products of nurture, not nature. Suffice it to further say that Tiffany Hargis, who had been married for four years, represented herself as a single woman living alone with a dog.

Since I learned she had a husband and demanded an explanation from her, she has lied profusely to law enforcement officials and judges to whitewash her conduct and retool herself a victim. I expect she’s still lying today. She has interests to protect, like inheritance of her father’s “cattle farms in Hindsville and Huntsville,” for instance. Her husband’s family is well-to-do, too.

Based on what I’ve been told over the years, that’s how Tiffany was reared: to marry well, that is, wealthy, which is why I think she was catting around my doorstep. The husband, Philip, who has apparently dumped her, was an obsequious twerp.

I could report that the woman was cloistered as a child (that is, kept indoors with mom while her father and brother, Jon Hargis, “shot shit”), that her friends and boyfriends were screened and rejected if deemed unsuitable, that she showed me a choker she had fashioned to remind herself of what it was to be “kept on a leash,” that she told me her grandfather (Tim Hargis’s dad, I guess) had killed himself and left a gory mess she resented having to mop up, etc., but I no longer value the force of narrative. Others who may find themselves in similar situations with inveterate liars in today’s political climate are advised to take the cue: People will discredit or ignore what you say. That especially includes cops and judges. Optics will always be against you.

Instead of defending yourself with a narrative, get the liar to talk on record as much as you can and then quote her (or him, as the case may be).

That’s what I’ve done since an illegal speech injunction that was imposed on me in 2013 was lifted last year and the court put this family on notice that legal process isn’t a playground regardless of how much money you have to burn.

Here’s a synopsis of statements Tiffany Hargis (Bredfeldt) gave in evidence to the court or, in one instance, to the police only between 2006 and 2017. The story they tell isn’t the half of it, but it’s short, and its contradictions are palpable. The woman has lied impulsively and viciously and then lied to conceal the lying. Phil Bredfeldt, her “husband,” has followed his wife’s lead, nodding when expected to and signing beside the X’s.

Tim and his wife, Galyn Hargis, who have watched this happen, were informed their daughter was a liar at least as far back as 2007, and I more than suspect they already knew that. (Tiffany Hargis’s allegations were dismissed in 2018.)

Maybe the four people who didn’t miss Tim Hargis’s retirement announcement on First Security Bank’s Facebook page and offered their congratulations—Ron Harrison, Brenda S. Rascoe, DeLane Johnson McCoy, and James Bradley—would also care to congratulate him on his success as a parent.

If I were to congratulate him, it would be for what was likely an unguarded moment of honesty. Tim Hargis reportedly isn’t retiring from a 40-year career in finance to spend more time with his family but to “spend more time on his cattle farms.”

*Tim Hargis’s sister, Jamie Hargis Witmer, who presumably shares in the profits of the “fourth-generation family ranch,” is a licensed professional counselor (LPC) in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I dimly recall writing to her many, many years ago to ask for help gaining relief from abuse by her niece. A therapist, she bills herself as a “behavioral health” specialist. Jamie Witmer’s son—her own son—Daniel Witmer, Tim and GaLyn Hargis’s nephew, is a plainly troubled guy who is reported to be a convicted felon, which may lead the reader to ask, what kind of people are these? It’s a question this writer has asked himself for over a dozen years.

Jamie Hargis Witmer, Ron Witmer

There Are No “Sides” to a Story That’s BS: How Restraining Order Policy Turns Lies into Realities

April 13, 2018July 28, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

A mathematician would dismissively tell you that you can’t describe one-half of zero. The project is absurd.

Yet civil courts, as a matter of policy, demand that defendants perform this nonsensical exercise every day.

This advice about telling “your side of the story about what happened” is offered by the California Court System, and it presumes that something must have happened to inspire some accuser to petition a restraining order. No tips are included about what to do if “what happened” was that this accuser had a malicious impulse to lie or is crazy.

I’m not a mathematician; I was trained as a critic. While a mathematician would almost certainly pronounce that trying to articulate one-half of nothing is meaningless and a waste of time (and then wave you away), a critic, arching an eyebrow, would tell you that the act of trying to articulate one-half of nothing raises the expectation that nothing is something after all. The act of explaining, in other words, creates meaning; it exerts an influence. It says there is “a story.”

To describe “your side” of nothing gives substance and dimensions to zero; it turns zero (a lie or lies) into something real—and this is what the civil court forces defendants to do…then it faults them for the stories it makes them tell about what was BS to begin with.

This sorcery goes on routinely and n-n-n-duh-mbly. The presumption of civil courts that accusations are “facts” that have “sides” is a grave blindness. This prejudice can, and it regularly does, turn nothing into “something.”

A defendant could answer honestly: “Your Honor, it’s bullshit, wholly bullshit, and nothing but bullshit.” But the judge would reject that answer out of hand and would, besides, threaten the speaker with penalties for insulting the court’s “dignity.” The judge could even rule that a defendant is “guilty” of allegations that are bullshit to punish him or her for saying the allegations are bullshit.

Fun, huh? Lives are intruded upon by judges (who are paid lavishly to warm chair seats), and then these judges produce reams of records to make people blameworthy for nothing they’ve actually done.

The mindset of judges is that there must be something, which means they find something where there was nothing. They “find” something even if they have to make it up.

This is all (yet another) explanation of how civil process is (1) stupid, (2) corrupt, (3) stupid, (4) noxious, (106) absurd, and (5) reprehensible.

*People are daily deprived of their liberties, livelihoods, and even their reasons for living based on equations like this one: 0 = 22.

What Massachusetts Law Firm Dane Shulman Associates Says about Restraining Order Abuse and Divorce

March 31, 2018March 31, 2018Moderator Leave a comment

Below is Massachusetts law firm Dane Shulman Associates writing about the game of false accusation. Lawyers know this happens. They know it very well.

Various feminist advocates doggedly assert that restraining order abuse, particularly to gain leverage in family court, is insignificant—or worse, that claims of it are merely men’s rights propaganda—and such assertions are made even by professors of law. Practitioners of law (the lawyers in the trenches, not the ivory tower) report otherwise.

“Restraining Order Abuse in Divorce Cases” (emphases added):

Unfortunately, some people are abusing Massachusetts’ restraining order laws and using them as a divorce tactic. An individual involved in divorce proceedings may file a temporary restraining order against [his or her] spouse, alleging abuse of him or [her] or of the couple’s children. This would prevent the alleged abuser from having contact with his or her children during the 10-day temporary order, and if the allegations stick, the restraining order would last up to a year after the accusations were made. Often, such allegations are false, and only a way to put a wrench in the divorce proceedings and for the accusing spouse to gain custody of the children involved.

To prevent the restraining order from being extended, it is imperative that the alleged abuser present evidence [in] the second hearing that the allegations made against him or her are false. This is the first and only time an alleged abuser can present his or her case. If he or she fails to appear, chances are that the restraining order will be extended, and the accusing spouse will gain custody of the children.

A restraining order can have disastrous effects on the alleged abuser. The order is put on his or her criminal record, and any violation of the order results in criminal charges. The alleged abuser is also listed in the statewide Domestic Violence Registry, a record that never goes away. All of these actions greatly impact an alleged abuser’s ability to secure new employment, especially jobs for the government or jobs that involve working with children.

Massachusetts’ courts issue restraining orders to protect victims, not so the orders can be used as frivolous tactics to gain the upper hand in a divorce or a child custody matter. Restraining orders have serious consequences for the alleged abuser, and also for the relationship between the alleged abuser and his or her children, since the order could put strain on the parent-child relationship. A restraining order is something no one should consider obtaining without a serious, truthful cause.

*One of the most outspoken critics of restraining orders, attorney Gregory Hession, also practices in Massachusetts.

Most False Restraining Orders against Feminists Who Abuse Children Work

March 23, 2018March 23, 2018Moderator Leave a comment

If you’re not sure what the title means, that’s the point.

It’s satirical and intended to emphasize that if you falsely accuse someone of abusing a child and the accusation sticks, there’s about a 100% probability that the restraining order will work to deter future abuse of that child by the falsely accused person who never abused the child in the first place.

As a feminist might reason, however, zero probability of abuse is good, and that zero probability recommends that all feminists be restrained by order of the court from abusing children…because how could that be a bad thing?

It’s certainly likely that there are feminist child abusers. If all feminists were put on notice, then, malefactors among them would be discouraged from committing further abuses.

Okay, sure, non-child-abusing feminists might resent the implication of a court order that prohibited them from abusing children. But so what? As a feminist might observe, the net effect of forbidding all feminists from abusing children would be enhanced protection of children. Unquestionably this would be worth some ruffled fur.

Now, do I mean the above as lampoon, or am I being serious? When it comes to the subject of restraining orders, both amount to the same thing.

These remarks and my choice of words in this post’s title were inspired by a 15-year-old “family violence special report” headlined, “Most restraining orders work.” It was written by Kristen Go for The Denver Post and published Sept. 12, 1999.

The headline’s assertion is the kind that makes people who’ve been falsely accused grate their teeth.

Imagine, just for argument’s sake, that most restraining order accusations are hyped or false. If that were the case, then naturally most restraining orders would “work” (to curb behavior that the accused never exhibited in the first place).

What Ms. Go’s report saliently relates is that three Colorado women who obtained restraining orders against “abusive husbands” were subsequently shot to death by those husbands.

While these recent high-profile cases in Grand Junction, Fort Collins and Colorado Springs make it appear that restraining orders don’t work, experts say that’s not the case. Enforcing a restraining order can be difficult but not impossible. And obtaining a restraining order is just one step toward leaving an abusive relationship and staying safe, experts say.

“The reality is that a restraining order is a piece of paper,” said John Poley, an assistant city attorney in Denver’s Domestic Violence Unit. “It’s not going to stop bullets. If you get a restraining order without a safety plan in a domestic situation, I think that’s almost asking for trouble.”

Translation: Restraining orders against violent people may not actually do a damn thing but make those violent people murderously angry, and those much-promoted pieces of paper may inspire a false sense of security in their applicants that gets them killed.

No one…keeps track of how many domestic-abuse homicide victims had restraining orders against their killers.

Translation: No one really cares what the consequences are so long as perception is predominantly positive.

Recent studies—which include data collected in Denver—are inconsistent about how often orders are violated. A 1994 study by the National Center for State Courts found that two-thirds of restraining orders are never violated. Yet a 1993 study by the Urban Institute reported that 60 percent of women said their abuser violated the order.

Translation: What the courts report contradicts what women report, and what women report contradicts what Ms. Go does (“Most restraining orders work”).

What the studies do agree on, however, is that about 70 percent of people who obtain restraining orders report feeling safer.

Translation: A majority of people who obtain restraining orders report “feeling” safer, and this means most restraining orders “work.”

The foregoing may be summarized thus: (1) Restraining orders against violent people may get their applicants killed; (2) no one takes a particular interest in how often this occurs; (3) most restraining orders “work”; (4) if most restraining orders are based on BS, it only stands to reason that they should; and (5) we know that three restraining orders obtained in Colorado in the late 90s were presumably legit…and ascertainably worthless.

*Ms. Go’s report also relates the following data: “In fiscal 1998, about 18,000 temporary and 3,300 permanent domestic-violence-related restraining orders were issued in Colorado counties.” If Ms. Go is correct, there’s no evidence in her reportage that she understands this means over 80% of domestic-violence-related restraining orders issued in Colorado counties in 1998 were dismissed. Of the approximately 18,000 petitions preliminarily approved by the court, that is, less than 20% (3,300) were affirmed (made “permanent”). Over 14,500 cases, then, may have been (tacitly) deemed frivolous, flimsy, or false by Colorado courts. Appreciate, besides, that a significant proportion of the 3,300 orders that were upheld may have had false grounds. Almost 20 more years of this charade have gone by since.

A Response to Sandra Newman’s Claim That “False Rape Accusations Almost Never Have Serious Consequences”

July 20, 2017June 24, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

“Critics argue that reports of rape should be treated with more caution, since men’s lives are so often ruined by women’s malicious lies.

“But my research—including academic studies, journalistic accounts, and cases recorded in the US National Registry of Exonerations—suggests that every part of this narrative is wrong.”

—Sandra Newman, Quartz (May 11, 2017)

The quoted article is titled, “What kind of person makes false rape accusations?” Its URL slug, in contrast, is “the-truth-about-false-rape-accusations.” Plain from article’s slant is that its author wasn’t motivated to discover what kind of monster makes false rape accusations but rather to vindicate her conviction that false rape accusations, and false accusations generally, aren’t significant.

Having grudgingly waded through slurries of feminist rhetoric over the past decade, I’m led to conclude that the failings of feminists’ reasoning owe less to a shortage of intellect than to a willful failure of imagination. Ms. Newman is a novelist, from whom we might have expected better, and I’m more than cynical enough to wonder whether her chilling position wasn’t motivated to improve sales of her books among frothy feminist bluestockings.

A person possessed of an egalitarian imagination who was tasked with the same brief Ms. Newman assigned herself would be moved to satisfy questions like these: What happens to someone who has been accused of rape, and how does it feel?

Such exercise of imagination used to characterize what we call journalism—never mind creative writing.

Rape is broadly defined as any sort of intimate physical violation involving “private parts.” Is it likely that a goodly number of people who are accused of rape are forced to submit to invasive physical “examinations” that in a different context would be called assault? The question is rhetorical. Merely being taken into custody may make such examinations compulsory.

Ms. Newman’s thesis is that “it’s exceedingly rare for a false rape allegation to end in prison time” so being falsely accused of rape “almost never ha[s] serious consequences.”

By the same logic, since victims of rape are never imprisoned, being raped never has serious consequences.

The chinks in her reasoning are saliently obscene.

Ms. Newman also conveniently ignores that being accused of rape (among other felony crimes) may begin with incarceration, months of it. The accused’s being granted bail and being able to pay it is hardly a given—though it may be among members of Ms. Newman’s social caste.

Notably, Ms. Newman, a Brit, doesn’t bother to address the question of effects of false accusation to anyone who has actually felt them but instead limits her “investigation” to “academic studies, journalistic accounts, and cases recorded in the US National Registry of Exonerations.”

We’re to ignore, I guess, that she would hardly expect the effects of rape to be fully qualified by such sources. “Journalistic accounts” of false accusations of rape that this writer has digested have, besides, included such cases as these: a man falsely accused of rape, imprisoned, and then released only to learn his mother had committed suicide believing him to be a rapist; two women seducing a man and then accusing him of rape so their boyfriends didn’t learn what they’d got up to; women accusing men who spurned them or who disappointed expectations; a woman accusing a man of rape to have him murdered; men falsely accused of rape killing themselves. There is no dearth of “journalistic accounts” that contradict Ms. Newman’s assertion that being falsely accused is innocuous. See, for instance, Google.

Finally, Ms. Newman limits her contemplation to criminal cases. In this country, at least, home of the “National Registry of Exonerations,” rape accusations can also be brought in civil court, where they are adjudicated according to the very lowest standard of proof and can be credited by “default.” Faith in exonerations to provide a clear picture of the frequency of false accusation is faith in a golden calf. The conviction that only imprisonment is a “serious consequence” of being falsely accused, what’s more, is as execrable as the conviction that only rape victims who sustain permanent physical debility are worthy of sympathy.

Among a few others “types,” Ms. Newman fobs off instances of false accusation on the personality-disordered, whose prominent characterological trait is lack of empathy. Almost as defining is their resistance to self-criticism.

*This piece was originally titled: “Give Me Three Pieces of Information, and I Can Make Any Adult You Know a Rape Defendant for the Rest of His or Her Life: A Proposition Inspired by Feminist Writer Sandra Newman’s Claim that ‘False Rape Accusations Almost Never Have Serious Consequences.’” I decided, though, that articulating how I could do this might have motivated someone in earnest to apply the method—which is simple.

Midlife Madness and Restraining Order Abuse

April 26, 2016June 24, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

“Of the 760 women approached [of menopausal age], 539 (71 %) returned completed questionnaires. A total of 155 women (29%) had a score of 12 or more on the general health questionnaire and were identified as probable psychiatric cases.”

—C. Barbara Ballinger, British Medical Journal (1975)

Translation: About every fourth woman you meet “of a certain age” is at least a little off.

Men in this age group, besides—perceiving their virility to be on the wane—are commonly said to experience “midlife crises.”

In investigating and writing about abuses of restraining orders for five years, I’ve heard from plenty of teenaged and young adult victims (who are not uncommonly represented by their very distressed moms or dads).

The really hairy stories, though, come from people in midlife. I’m in midlife, and I’m fending off allegations from women who have begun (or are fast approaching) “the change.” Here are some statements one of them made to a police detective in January:

Jennifer said Todd wrote in his blog on 10-31-15 “Your lives have an expiration date and so do you.”
Jennifer said Todd also wrote, “You don’t want people like me thinking about people like you, think about that.”
Jennifer said Todd’s dog died in August 2015 and that he had said that once he didn’t have dependents he would go crazy and seek justice.
Jennifer said she believed Todd posted several blogs in which she believed he was a danger to others which included seeking retribution and “going biblical” and “seeking his own justice.”
Jennifer said she now carries a handgun due to her concern that Todd is a threat to her safety.

Note especially the last statement. This woman, who has monitored me for 10 years (and will have read this post before you), has also referred to my mother in her incoherent remarks to the police.

She works as a research specialist in the University of Arizona Department of Psychiatry.

My accuser, who is (peri)menopausal and whom I’ve met once in 10 years, was evicted from her home last summer after she accused her husband of something in 2014, which inspired him to lose his cool and flourish what police called a “killing knife” in an intoxicated rage. He was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. A former bartender, he’d previously been convicted for cocaine possession. My accuser was cited for impaired driving in 2011, though she wasn’t convicted. Her brother has been charged with DUI and imprisoned for violent crimes. The head of the University of Arizona Pharmacy College, where my accuser works or has worked, was indicted in November on three counts of sexual assault allegedly involving the use of “date rape drugs.”

The accusations against me began right at the same time. As I tried to urgently impress upon a Tucson judge this week, that’s probably more than coincidental. As I also tried to urgently impress upon him, I’m not the one whose mental state should be under suspicion.

People in midlife can be powder kegs with short fuses, and it’s hardly rare for their orientation to life to be more backwards-directed than toward the future.

Midlifers can devote an exorbitant amount of time to worrying the question, “Where did it all go wrong?” Those with accountability issues also wonder who’s to blame, and the answer they arrive at is never “me.”

A woman I’m in contact with, Betty Krachey, was threatened with eviction from her home not that long ago, because her long-term boyfriend (of decades) had designs on it and maybe nursed plans to trade Betty in for a newer model. She was issued a restraining order, which blessedly she managed to extricate herself from with the help of a lawyer (something those in her situation often don’t know is an option even if it’s an option they could afford).

Many or most respondents to this blog who report deep-seeded conflict are in their 40s or 50s. They’re served with restraining orders whose hyped or false grounds are motivated by resentments that have simmered for years or decades. Midlife is when they reach a boiling point.

It’s also a time when people’s familial infrastructures crumble. They lose friends, siblings, and parents. Safety nets tatter or disappear.

They are, accordingly, less accountable to others for their choices. They’re more socially isolated, and therefore less socially inhibited. They have fewer people to answer to for what they do, and they don’t have the fear of rejection that they might have had when they were younger. They tend to be more callused, disillusioned, and jaded or cynical (or crazier). This can mean they’re less scrupulous, too.

Appreciate that accusation is the perfect way to:

“get even” for past slights and indignities (real or imagined) and/or
“ditch” a spouse or boy- or girlfriend and keep shared possessions (including the home) and
“reset” the clock.

A quickie process that lets a person swan into a courthouse, breezily recite some accusations, and skip back out in under an hour with a renewed lease on life is therefore bound to hold some attractions for the embittered midlifer.

That’s besides anyone of any age with moral deficits and a pen.

*Update (2018): Legal actions brought pursuant to the allegations against me referenced in this post were in each instance dismissed (two to 20 months later). The matter, which goes back 12 years, is detailed here.

What Can Be Done with Public Records, Like Restraining Orders, Arrests, and Convictions: A Tutorial for Judges and Everyone Who’s Been Lied about to One

January 3, 2016June 24, 2023Moderator 7 Comments

Court records are available for public consumption, freely or for a few dollars, besides people’s home addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates and ages, work histories, list of associates and family members, etc. Men and women falsely targeted for blame in drive-thru court procedures may be fined or jailed for airing information about their accusers’ conduct that’s far less sensitive than what anyone with an Internet connection and a credit card can glean in five minutes—which may include decisions against men and women falsely targeted for blame in drive-thru court procedures….

sniffing

Decisions of the court in public proceedings are public records.

Remarkably, not even judges grasp the significance of the word public. More astonishing than that many judges today don’t know the first thing about the Internet is that no one in government seems to think it’s important that they be instructed.

The conditioned imperative is blame…and the consequences be damned.

Billions of federal tax dollars have been dedicated over the past 20 years to biasing police and judicial responses to accusations of abuse, but not one has been earmarked to show judges how the Internet works and how the public records they generate may be used.

This post will attempt to amend the lapse.

Here are a mere handful of websites that peddle so-called “private” information:

What follows is a demonstration of how they work.

In the most recent fiction-based prosecution against the author of this post, it was ruled by a superior court judge that I violated the privacy of my accuser by discussing her motives online, and I was unlawfully prohibited from publicly referencing her in future. My judge was Carmine Cornelio, and here is what is returned (at no charge) if I enter his first and last names into SwitchBoard.com:

his middle initial,
his approximate age,
his phone number (a landline provided by Coxcom),
his home address (and a map showing where his home is located),
a tab that provides directions to his house,
a tab that leads to information about his neighbors,
the names of a couple of “people [he] may know,” and
an invitation to “View [his] Background & Public Record Information.”

If I enter his name into Intelius.com (again for free), his age is confirmed to be 64, and I’m provided with the names of five of his relatives, as well as his address history, aliases, and prior jobs he’s held (he’s identified as an attorney but not a judge). All of this is right there on the surface. If I cared to know more, here’s what else I could learn for a trivial fee:

Matthew Chan of Defiantly.net has recently chronicled the case of a New Jersey man, Bruce Aristeo, who was jailed for six months for “vlogging” about a woman who accused him of abuse after he was issued something called an “indefinite temporary restraining order.” The judge didn’t even view the contents of the YouTube videos his ruling was based on. I’ve viewed some of their contents, which are mostly satire and fully protected under the First Amendment, and they’re a lot less invasive that an Intelius report. Mr. Aristeo has been arrested at least four times based on allegations he says are false, and those arrests are all public records that may be pulled from an Intelius report, by an employer, for instance, or a prospective girlfriend.

Below is a screenshot from a website called BustedMugshots.com (a product of U.S. Data Co. Ltd.).

blurred mugshot

I was told by this man’s sister that accusations against him were falsified:

It makes me wonder, how common is this? Because my own brother had his girlfriend and mother of his child accuse him of rape a few years ago. He went to prison for it even though she later recanted her lie, but the case was already in the court’s hands and they wouldn’t accept her testimony. She truly ruined his life.

This certainly isn’t something a viewer of this record (e.g., an employer, a neighbor, or a girlfriend) would conclude. Significantly, also, this record is 15 years old. Court records, besides being very public, are very permanent.

Twice on the same page featuring the above record appears this search bar:

It encourages the viewer to look up the public records of yet other people. A button under the mugshot offers the viewer the option to “Order Complete Background Report” from the same “National Database” (called “Instant Checkmate”). The viewer is also invited to enroll in a service that notifies him or her of future arrests of the same person (“Monitor For Future Crimes”).

People, possibly on arrantly false grounds, are set up as targets for constant and endless scrutiny…to which they can hardly be insensitive.

While a line of text under the mugshot suggests a person can “Request This Record to be Modified or Purged,” here’s what pops up when you click its hyperlink:

It’s a tease. The website will only remove the record if it’s been ordered sealed or vacated by the court, or if the person it identifies has died. The blurb hastily clarifies that BustedMugshots.com isn’t out to blackmail people. It doesn’t have to: It collects fees from its advertisers.

This titillating “warning” greets the visitor to InstantCheckmate.com.

Besides advertising the services of Instant Checkmate, BustedMugshots.com advertises for InternetReputation.com, with which the notice above tacitly urges someone with a mugshot published online to inquire (“Protect Your Online Privacy”).

Observe the squeeze: Damning information is published (legally) for the person it concerns to see. That person also sees that anyone can access this and other sensitive information, and is urged to exploit the services of a company that offers to protect his or her reputation…for a fee.

(Summary in media res: A person may be falsely accused in a farcical “trial” and emotionally and financially devastated. S/he may be arrested and imprisoned based on lies. The records may be used to further maim him or her in additional prosecutions. And—and—the records of all of these proceedings, based on a fraud or frauds, may be aired publicly. But the accused may not discuss them defensively without risk of court censure. No wonder, then, that some victims of procedural abuse never want to leave the house and flinch when the doorbell rings.)

This blog concerns restraining orders, which can be obtained easily on hyped or fraudulent grounds and make defendants vulnerable to arrest and conviction for “crimes” that only they can commit, for example, sending an email or placing a phone call.

Vigilant response to any claimed violation of an order has been vigorously conditioned for decades (by the Office on Violence Against Women), and it’s not uncommon for people to report that they’ve been arrested multiple times for falsified violations of restraining orders with falsified bases (see above).

On top of all of this, the records generated by this mischief can be legally published or sold, and the government, besides, has its own public databases that may be freely accessed by anyone with an Internet connection.

These are among the reasons why principle must be restored to process.

*BustedMugshots.com includes this contemptible sentence in its disclaimer: “The data may not reflect the status of current charges or convictions and all individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.” Sure they are.

Another Way False Testimony Is Concealed: The Unconstitutional “Prior Restraint”

November 13, 2015June 22, 2023Moderator 7 Comments

Courts are properly authorized to sanction acts of defamation—publicly lying about someone—but they’re not authorized to prohibit truthful speech or opinion (even if it’s negative), and they’re not authorized to prohibit speech acts before they’ve even been committed. An order of the court that prohibits future speech is called a prior restraint, and it’s unconstitutional (see the First Amendment).

With civil harassment orders, things get knotty. A prior restraint may not be expressed; it may be implicit.

When a “protective order” is in effect, it prohibits speech to someone but not speech about that person, per se, as law professors Aaron Caplan and Eugene Volokh have emphasized. A court, however, may conclude that speech about someone (any speech about that person) is “harassment,” and it may label that speech a violation of the “protective order,” and rule that a defendant be remanded to jail.

Several people have reported on this site that they were jailed or had orders of the court extended because of publications online or, in one case, for posting flyers about an accuser’s conduct. Many have reported, too, that the basis of the “protective order” against them was speech about a person (in one recently shared account, a woman complained on a county bulletin board about her neighbors’ shabby treatment of their dog).

So you have instances where people are issued restraining orders for lawfully exercising their First Amendment privilege to free speech, and you have instances where people who’ve been issued restraining orders are sanctioned for lawfully exercising their First Amendment privilege to free speech.

Trial judges aren’t First Amendment authorities and may not have graduated from college, let alone have law degrees. Furthermore, protecting the free speech of people they’ve labeled abusers is hardly an urgent concern of theirs.

Here’s what a prior restraint looks like:

Arizona prior restraint order, First Amendment law

Orders like this don’t expressly forbid criticism of the government. They forbid criticism of people who exploited a process of government. This, by extension, forbids criticism of the government.

This order was issued against me in 2013 when I was sued for libel and harassment in the Superior Court of Arizona by a married woman who had falsely accused me to the police and several judges years prior. She was someone I scarcely knew who had hung around outside of my house at night (what that might suggest to you is what it should suggest to you). Her original claims to the court (2006) were to obtain an injunction to prohibit me from communicating her conduct to anyone, and her claims to the court in 2013 were to obtain an injunction to prohibit me from communicating her conduct to anyone.

The motive for both prosecutions was the same: cover-up. (Try to imagine what it is to fight false accusations for seven years, daily, while everything around you erodes, and then have some trial judge offhandedly tell you you’re lying and should be gagged. The judge had plainly made up his mind how he would rule before ever setting foot in court. The trial nevertheless dragged out from March to October. Today I avoid using the road where I rented the private mailbox to which the judge’s arbitrary conclusions and fiats were mailed, so nauseous is the association.)

Some of my accuser’s testimony is here, and the contradictoriness of her claims, as well as the motive for them, will be evident from no words other than her own. Does it matter that her misrepresentations are self-evident? No. Does it matter that they ridicule process of law and mock the court? No.

All that matters is that those who’ve been misrepresented are silenced to preserve the image of propriety.

Litigation Privilege: Why Restraining Order Fraud Is Pandered to and Why the Falsely Accused Are Denied Recourse to the Law for Vindication, Relief, and Recovery of Damages

October 21, 2015July 9, 2023Moderator 9 Comments

“Fraud is deliberately deceiving someone else [including a judge] with the intent of causing damage.”

—Cornell Legal Information Institute

“Generally, lying during trial (or any other part of litigation) is expected to come out at the time of trial. This means an action against someone for lying during a prior proceeding would fail because even lies are protected by the litigation privilege. You have to catch them at the time; you cannot attack them collaterally (in a different proceeding).”

—Attorney Catherine Elizabeth Bennett

Here are examples of restraining order fraud and repeated abuse of process (others are here and here, and comments and posts on this site are replete with them).

Here is the obstacle to obtaining relief from fraud committed by restraining order petitioners that the falsely accused face no matter how high up the judicial chain they muster the fortitude to climb:

So-called protective orders were designed to allow battered women to apply directly to a judge for relief from household violence and intimidation. Their origin harks back to the late ’70s/early ’80s. When these orders were conceived 30 or 40 years ago, domestic violence was hush-hush, and (actual) victims faced alienation from their families for airing dirty laundry in public and rocking the boat. They faced, as well, the possibility of their claims’ being discounted by police or even ridiculed (compounding their misery and humiliation). So the middlemen (i.e., cops and prosecutors) were cut out of the process. Thus could allegations be made and ruled upon in the absence of any investigation. It seemed a reasonable stopgap at the time. Over the decades since, despite radical changes in how claims of domestic violence are received by the public and law enforcement (due in no small part to the investment of billions of federal tax dollars), the standards for substantiating an assertion of victimhood remain lenient, while what qualifies as grounds for a court injunction has steadily broadened. People now get orders against their friends, lovers, neighbors, moms, dads, kids, etc., and violence need not even be alleged; some claim of apprehension usually suffices. The process has morphed from a life-preserver for battered women with no other way out of a hellish situation to a sop to satisfy any complainant who fills out an application. Court policy pretends that anybody who walks into a courthouse with a beef (real or not) deserves a private audience with a judge to shield him or her from the terrors of public scorn or disapproval from the cops. Anyone with an ax to grind, that is, is treated like a battered woman circa 1979. So institutionalized has the process become, and so profitable to so many (both financially and politically), that no one questions whether this is ethical. So the restraining order process has become a game, a game played according to anachronistic rules. Maximum latitude is given to anyone (no fee or i.d. required) to litigate any claims s/he wants in a backroom conference with a judge, and rulings are issued ex parte, which means the person who’s accused is prejudged sight unseen. The due process rights of the accused are scotched. Grants under the Violence Against Women Act will explicitly forbid the use of lie detectors. The dictate is purely rhetorical; it’s meant to stress that what a complainant alleges shouldn’t be doubted. This expectation extends to any petitioner. Hence judicial scrutiny is minimal, and judges may actually bristle when the falsely accused allege that petitioners are lying. This is called fair and just.
The idea behind “litigation privilege,” which basically ensures that whatever a litigant or his or her attorney alleges is protected from liability (from charges of defamation, for example), is the same: Accusers need to feel secure to air “the facts” without fear of prosecution.

The protections sketched above were not put in place to defend the right of any fraudster to falsely allege anything off the top of his or her head against a target of malice in a court of law. Perjury, after all, is a statutory crime. Lying isn’t condoned by the law, but it is swallowed by cops and defended by judges.

They’ve had their priorities impressed upon them in no uncertain terms.

So emphatic is the priority to give accusers the benefit of the doubt that people who’ve been wrongly accused have little or no credibility with judges and absolutely no recourse to sue for damages caused by false allegations (to reputation, employment, enjoyment of life, and health). The court doesn’t recognize there are any damages to being falsely accused of stalking, for instance, or violent threat, sexual harassment, assault, or even rape. False accusations that are dismissed as baseless are harmful enough (the stresses they cause are beyond quantification). When false allegations stick, the guilt of the accused is presumed, and subsequent legal actions they may venture to undertake (lawsuits and appeals) may be summarily tossed for lacking merit. In contrast, the merit of rulings that are typically the products of procedures lasting mere minutes isn’t questioned. Some judges will even hold that accusations litigated in court can’t constitute perjury because of the “litigation privilege” (i.e., because they were uttered in court instead of on, say, Facebook or the radio, they can’t be lies).

Accusers (all of them identified with battered women of 1979) must be free to claim whatever they want without fear of risk or blame—that’s the overriding precept. Translated, this means the court’s position is that people must be allowed to lie and snooker the court as they choose…and anyone who’s lied about be damned.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*From “‘Out of Left Field’: The Litigation Privilege Defense to Adverse Party Suits” by attorney Keith A. Call (emphases added):

Despite some authority characterizing the litigation privilege as “absolute,” it is certainly not without limits. There are some claims for which the litigation privilege is usually not a defense. Such claims may include malicious prosecution, fraud, criminal perjury, suborning perjury, and professional discipline. See, e.g., Hagberg v. Cal. Fed. Bank FSB, 81 P.3d 244, 259 (Cal. 2004) (the litigation privilege “operates to bar civil liability for any tort claim based upon a privileged communication, with the exception of malicious prosecution”); Bushell v. Caterpillar, Inc., 683 N.E.2d 1286, 1289 (Ill. Ct. App. 1997) (litigation privilege does not provide immunity from criminal perjury); Hawkins v. Harris, 661 A.2d 284, 288 (N.J. 1995) (litigation privilege is not bar to professional discipline or criminal perjury); Dello Russo v. Nagel, 817 A.2d 426, 433 (N.J. Super. Ct. App. Div. 2003) (litigation privilege does not insulate against malicious prosecution or professional discipline); N.Y. Cooling Towers, Inc. v. Goidel, 805 N.Y.S.2d 779, 783 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 2005) (refusing to dismiss claims against adverse party’s attorney based on fraud and collusion); Clark v. Druckman, 624 S.E.2d 864, 870-72 (W. Va. Ct. App. 2005) (litigation privilege does not immunize attorney from claims of fraud or malicious conduct).

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

September 23, 2015March 18, 2018Moderator 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.

*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….).

The Harmlessness of False Accusations

September 20, 2015July 30, 2023Moderator 7 Comments

A Consideration of Attorney Gregory Hession’s “How to Fight a False Allegation Restraining Order”

August 15, 2015February 11, 2018Moderator 9 Comments

“In thousands of 10-minute hearings held all over the Commonwealth, judges are now able to do what the Marxists have only dreamed of doing before now, and could never hope to do before they were able to use the pretext of ‘domestic violence.’ However, the real violence is almost always to the rights of the defendant, and to the Constitution itself….”

—Attorney Gregory Hession

As a follow-up to the previous post, “Pointers for Contesting a Restraining Order,” this post analyzes (and recommends) attorney Gregory Hession’s tutorial “How to Fight a False Allegation Restraining Order.”

The title’s a little weird. An earlier version of the explication used the phrase “false restraining order.” Evidently Mr. Hession wanted to clarify that he means a restraining order that’s very real but based on an allegation that’s false—hence the phrase “false allegation restraining order.”

Massachusetts attorney Gregory Hession, who urges the wrongly implicated to expose their accusers’ false motives, identifies the above as “ulterior” reasons for the procurement of a restraining order.

The quotation of Mr. Hession’s that was lifted for the epigraph above highlights that violence is the pretext used to justify procedures that are constitutionally unconscionable. Often no violence is alleged. The word, however, emphatically appears everywhere in state statutes as a smokescreen. It makes any violation or abuse of the accused “okay.” The courts aren’t messing around with people’s lives for kicks; they’re protecting the vulnerable from “violence.”

Here, therefore, is what you, as the “defendant” or “respondent” (the accused), are up against:

In restraining order hearings, judges may ignore ALL traditional due process protections such as jury trials, the rules of evidence, the right to innocent until proven guilty, etc. They may also usurp several other dearly held rights, such as the right to be with one’s children, to occupy one’s own home and property, or travel where one pleases. No one has yet come up with so demonic a perversion of our legal system to match the breathtaking scope of the unconstitutional deprivations of this law.

What is the actual legal basis for getting an abuse restraining order? Many courts issue restraining orders without following the requirements of the law (which are already so flimsy as to be a mockery). If a person comes into court (called the “complainant” or “plaintiff”) and whines about feeling “fear,” a court will often issue an order, even though many times it is improper and illegal to do it.

Restraining orders—not just in Mr. Hession’s state of Massachusetts but in most if not all states—require that some intimation of “imminent physical harm” be suggested by the alleged conduct of the accused. Mr. Hession urges that this qualification be picked apart.

First the harm has to be “imminent,” [that is], immediate, right there, right now. Not a vague threat to do something someday. Not a phone call from a far location. Next, it has to be “serious.” The [Massachusetts] attorney general, on a ballot referendum to overturn some recent changes to the domestic violence laws, defined “serious bodily injury” as follows:

“Injury that results in a permanent disfigurement; long-term loss or impairment of a bodily function, arm, leg, or organ; or substantial risk of death.” [If you’re appealing an order in another state, you may investigate how your state defines “serious bodily injury.”]

Lastly, the fear has to be of “physical” harm, not emotional harm, psychic harm, hurt feelings, or any number of other non-physical issues that people commonly get orders for.

If courts went by this definition strictly, fewer frivolous orders would be issued. However, as you likely know, judges often issue an order if they feel it should be issued, regardless of the law’s requirements.

(Statutes are often mishmashes. Ridiculously, an injunction against harassment in the author’s state of Arizona reads, “The Court finds reasonable evidence of harassment of the Plaintiff by the Defendant or that great or irreparable harm would result….” There’s plainly a huge gulf between annoyance and “irreparable harm.” That’s how these statutes are designed: to apply to virtually any alleged conduct, however harmless, but to make it seem as though plaintiffs are being protected from violent assault…or murder. That’s how the laws are justified. The person who sends some angry text messages is equated with tomorrow’s serial killer.)

If you hope to appeal a restraining order, Mr. Hession stresses, you must appeal the initial order (which may issue from any of a number of courts). It is possible to contest an order through higher tiers of the court system if the first judge finds against you, but if you blow off your initial court appearance, “fuhgetaboutit.”

First, Mr. Hession says, get your “docket number” (your case number), go to the courthouse, and demand to see all of the allegations against you. (Sometimes the plaintiff’s affidavit, his or her sworn narrative statement, isn’t provided to the defendant when the order is served and must be requested.)

Second, he offers a number of strategies to attack the allegations against you, mainly by exposing falsehoods. For these, go to the source: “How to Fight a False Allegation Restraining Order.”

If you have no experience of court procedure, Mr. Hession’s tutorial is a challenging read. It’s also long, which can be off-putting. It is, however, definitely worthwhile, whatever state you may be in.

The point of this heads-up is to ensure that the substance of Mr. Hession’s advice isn’t discounted by the bewildered defendant who may think it only applies to the wrongfully accused in Massachusetts. Absorb the gist of the material, and it’s likely you’ll fare far better in an appeal than you would have otherwise.

Who Lies about Whom on Restraining Order Petitions?

August 7, 2015July 30, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

Feminists would have the public believe that complaints of procedural abuse and courthouse fraud come from a single source: ex-husbands who’ve been left high and dry after a contentious divorce. The impression they promote is that criticism of feminist-inspired procedures of law is nothing more than the misogynistic ravings of bitter men who got what they deserved.

(The Southern Poverty Law Center and some leftist dweeb collective styling itself “RationalWiki” maintain lists of what they pejoratively term “MRA” websites, which they lavish with contempt, and the blog We Hunted the Mammoth is dedicated to mocking the men’s rights movement.)

No allowance is made that the claims of husbands and fathers could be true or even understated, claims, for example, of vicious frauds by false accusers and institutionalized discrimination. Obviously, no allowance can be made by the profiteers of the that discrimination; it would discredit their “cause.” Accordingly, the array of relationships accusers and the accused have is also concealed. That array is ugly to contemplate, and it ridicules the restraining order and domestic violence processes themselves.

Here are some of the scenarios the author of this blog has heard firsthand, all of them reportedly based on false or hyped allegations to the court:

Dad and sons against daughter/sister (whom they had violently abused)
Female counselor against female patient
Mom against daughter*
Mom against son
Mom against son and daughter
Rapist against victim (who was a rival for an elderly woman’s estate)
Stalker against victim
Daughter against mother*
Daughter against father
Brother against brother
Sister against sister*
Husband/boyfriend against wife/girlfriend*****
Wife/girlfriend against husband/boyfriend*****
Wife and wife’s mother against husband/son-in-law***
Wife, sister, director of a domestic violence shelter, and lawyer/politician against one man (who was falsely imprisoned and left homeless and destitute)
Neighbor against neighbor***
Lawyer against anyone**
Friend against friend (usually both women)*
Lesbian spouse/lover against lesbian spouse/lover
Hetero woman against lesbian admirer who expressed her attraction to friends on Facebook
Gay spouse/lover against gay spouse/lover*
Ex-wife/girlfriend against current wife/girlfriend**
Wife/girlfriend against mistress*
Mistress against wife/girlfriend*
Wife/girlfriend against husband’s/boyfriend’s female friend
Ex-girlfriend against ex-boyfriend and his mother
Ex-boyfriend/girlfriend against ex-girlfriend/boyfriend long after separation**
Sister against sister’s husband
Landlord against tenant
Tenant against landlord
Coworker against coworker/lover*
Online friend against online friend in another country who rejected her

This list is by no means comprehensive. Asterisks indicate how repeatedly the scenario has been reported here.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

That They’re Made in Civil Court, Too: A Response to Megan McArdle’s “What We Don’t Know about False Claims of Rape”

June 18, 2015July 11, 2023Moderator 3 Comments

“Could the number be between 3 and 8 percent? Absolutely. But it could be substantially higher than 8 percent; it could even be that 40 percent of rape accusations or more are false, though I’d bet against that. It’s possible that less than 3 percent of rape accusations are false, though again, I would offer good odds against that. The point is that we don’t know, and the groups that claim to know are wrong together.”

—Columnist Megan McArdle (June 4, 2015)

Megan McArdle is one of a handful of professional journalists (preeminent among them Cathy Young) who objectively negotiate the chasmal discrepancy between statistics that say false claims of rape are almost none and those that say they’re abundant.

In her Bloomberg View column “What We Don’t Know about False Claims of Rape,” Ms. McArdle surveys complications that foil attempts to arrive at a hard-and-fast figure. Issues like consent, culpability, what qualifies as rape and what doesn’t, and who gets to adjudicate and how—these muddy estimations that are already suspect, because purveyors and proponents of statistics are typically biased by one ideological or political perspective or another. They promote numbers that support their views; they opine.

This writer agrees with Ms. McArdle’s conclusions quoted above, and he finds especially agreeable her honest assessment of the ambiguities and her willingness to acknowledge them in the first place, because this willingness is rare.

False claims of rape made in civil court are not registered anywhere or by anyone.

I’m not a journalist; I’m an analyst. I don’t know what the truth is. I can criticize interpretations that betray flaws, but I don’t find anything in Ms. McArdle’s “findings” to fault. I do, though, detect a blind spot, and it’s a blind spot that’s universal.

What no one appears to know about false claims of rape is that they can be made in civil court. There are no incidence rates for how often this occurs…and there can’t be. Civil rulings, e.g., in restraining order cases, are based on a “preponderance of the evidence” and not on the certainty of individual accusations. The dismissal of a restraining order petition that alleges rape is not recorded anywhere as a “false rape claim”—it’s just rejected—and a verdict in favor of a plaintiff who alleges rape signifies only that a judge was convinced that the heft of his or her claims, possibly numerous, more likely than not indicated a sound basis for the award of a restraining order—and it may not signify that. Orders are also granted if defendants simply default by not appearing to contest the accusations.

False rape claims in civil court may never be accompanied by criminal investigations nor ever conclusively adjudicated. They’re invisible. They are, however, made, and though they may be completely unsubstantiated, they exert a material influence on judicial rulings that have binding legal consequences, consequences that can be extreme.

My wife moved out of my Virginia home in June 2014, and then about a week later announced that she’d had a miscarriage. In August 2014, I got a visit from police detectives wanting to question me about a rape report she’d filed against me, but I declined to speak with them, and was never charged. Beginning in November 2014, she obtained three temporary restraining orders against me, and finally got a permanent restraining order imposed against me in Colorado in January 2015, based on a claim of domestic abuse, stalking, sexual assault, and physical assault. Not wanting to invest money and emotional energy in fighting it, and knowing it would be hard for me to successfully contest it, I didn’t show up to the hearing.

The man quoted above obtained a divorce from his wife, who he alleges had a history of mental illness, in April 2015. Two months later, he learned she had given birth to a daughter in February, who was “presumptively” his. His ex-wife had apparently lied about having a miscarriage.

The information that he was a father reached the man when he was told his ex-wife had killed herself following her commitment for “suicidal depression, and because someone had reported that she had been hearing voices telling her to hurt or kill the child.”

The man was also told there was a “dependency and neglect petition pending” against him for his abandonment of a child he hadn’t known existed.

In the petition, the county attorney notes, “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 Colorado Children’s Code says that the court shall consider a parent’s “History of violent behavior” in determining whether he’s an unfit parent.

The purported “history of domestic violence” was not established in court and was based solely on his late ex-wife’s restraining order allegations, which started five months after she had moved out, which were made in minutes in another state, which the man denies, and which he never traveled cross-country to attempt to controvert. He hadn’t known his (then) wife was pregnant with his child when her serial accusations to the court began and despaired of his chances of successfully challenging them. He had ignorantly opted to “move on.”

Now his daughter is in the custody of her maternal grandparents, and the likelihood of her father’s ever realizing a role in her life is scant.

This man’s case is highlighted because it was brought to my attention only last week and is still fresh in my mind. Instances of false claims of rape accompanying restraining order petitions, however—including claims against women—have been reported repeatedly here, in comments and in search terms that draw visitors to the blog.

Not even a tentative estimate could be formulated on how often false rape claims are asserted in civil court, but this source of false claims should at least be recognized as inclusive among the unnavigable uncertainties.

*An alternative means of falsely alleging rape in civil court is exemplified here. An extreme case of a fraudulent rape claim’s being alleged on a restraining order petition is here.

Courtroom Fraud and Smear Campaigns: The Full Machiavelli

June 11, 2015August 4, 2023Moderator 5 Comments

“False Accusations, Distortion Campaigns, and Smear Campaigns can all be used with or without a grain of truth, and have the potential to cause enormous emotional hurt to the victim or even impact [his or her] professional or personal reputation and character.”

—“False Accusations and Distortion Campaigns”

There are several fine explications on the Internet about the smear campaigns of false accusers. Some sketch method and motive generally; some catalog specific damages that ensue when lies are fed to the police and courts.

This survey of “adverse impacts” is credited to lies told by people with borderline personality disorder. Conducting “distortion campaigns” isn’t exclusive to BPDs, however, and the “adverse impacts” are the same, irrespective of campaigners’ particular cognitive kinks.

The valuable role of the police and courts in the prosecution of campaigns to slander, libel, and otherwise bully and defame can’t be overstated. They’re instrumental to a well-orchestrated character assassination.

Lies can be told to anyone, of course, and lies told to anyone can have toxic effects. The right lie told in a workplace, for example, can cost someone a job and impair or imperil a career.

Lies told to police and judges—especially judges—they’re the real wrecking balls, though. False allegations of threat or abuse are handily put over in restraining order or domestic violence procedures, and they endure indefinitely (and embolden accusers to tell further lies, which are that much more persuasive).

Among the motives of false accusation are blame-shifting (cover-up), attention, profit, and revenge (all corroborated by the FBI). Lying, however, may become its own motive, particularly when the target of lies resists. The appetite for malice, once rewarded, may persist long after an initial (possibly impulsive) goal is realized. Smear campaigns that employ legal abuse may go on for years, or indefinitely (usually depending on the stamina of the falsely accused to fight back).

Legitimation of lies by the court both encourages lying and reinforces lies told to others. Consider the implications of this pronouncement: “I had to take out a restraining order on her.” Who’s going to question whether the grounds were real or the testimony was true? Moreover, who’s going to question anything said about the accused once that claim has been made? It’s open season.

In the accuser’s circle, at least—which may be broad and influential—no one may even entertain a doubt, and the falsely accused can’t know who’s been told what and often can’t safely inquire.

Judgments enable smear and distortion campaigners to slander, libel, and otherwise bully with impunity, because their targets have been discredited and left defenseless (judges may even punish them for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights and effectively gag them). The courts, besides, may rule that specific lies are “true,” thereby making the slanders and libels impervious to legal relief. Statements that are “true” aren’t defamatory. The man or woman, for instance, who’s wrongly found guilty of domestic violence (and entered into a police database) may be called a domestic abuser completely on the up and up (to friends, family, or neighbors, for example, or to staff at a child’s school).

Lies become facts that may be shared with anybody and publicly (court rulings are public records). Smear campaigners don’t limit themselves to court-validated lies, either, but it seldom comes back to bite them once a solid foundation has been laid.

Some so-called high-conflict people, the sorts described in the epigraph, conduct their smear or distortion campaigns brazenly and confrontationally. Some poison insidiously, spreading rumors behind closed doors, in conversation and private correspondence. As Dr. Tara Palmatier has remarked, social media also present them with attractive and potent platforms (and many respondents to this blog report being tarred on Facebook or even mobbed, i.e., bullied by multiple parties, including strangers).

Even when false accusers’ claims are outlandish and over the top, like these posted on Facebook by North Carolinian Marty Tackitt-Grist, they’re rarely viewed with suspicion—and almost never if a court ruling (or rulings) in the accusers’ favor can be asserted. The man accused in this comment to ABC’s 20/20 is a retiree with three toy poodles and a passion for aviation who couldn’t “hack” firewood without pain, because his spine is deformed. He is a retired lawyer, but he wasn’t “disbarred” and hasn’t “embezzled” (or, for that matter, “mooned” anyone). He has, however, been jailed consequent to insistent and serial falsehoods from his patently disturbed neighbor…who’s a schoolteacher.

For Crazy, social media websites are an endless source of attention, self-promotion, self-aggrandizement, and a sophisticated weapon. Many narcissists, histrionics, borderlines, and other self-obsessed, abusive personality types use Facebook, Twitter, and the like to run smear campaigns, to make false allegations, to perpetrate parental alienation, and to stalk and harass their targets while simultaneously portraying themselves as the much maligned victim, superwoman, and/or mother of the year.

(A respondent to this blog who’s been relentlessly harried by lies for two years, who’s consequently homeless and penniless, and who’s taken flight to another state, recently reported that a woman who’d offered her aid suddenly and inexplicably defriended her on Facebook and shut her out without a word. Her “friend” had evidently been gotten to.)

(An advocate for legal reform who was falsely accused in court last year by her husband and succeeded in having the allegations against her dismissed reports that he afterwards circulated it around town that she tried to kill him.)

I was falsely accused in 2006 by a woman who had nightly hung around outside of my house for a season. She was married and concealed the fact. Then she lied to conceal the concealment and the behavior that motivated the concealment. She has sustained her fictions (and honed them) for nearly 10 years. People like this build tissues of lies, aptly and commonly called webs.

Their infrastructures are visible, but many strands may not be…and the spinners never stop spinning.

The personality types associated with chronic lying are often represented as serpentine, arachnoid, or vampiric. This ironically feeds into some false accusers’ delusions of potency. Instead of shaming them, it turns them on.

I know from corresponding with many others who’ve endured the same traumas I have that they’ve been induced to do the same thing I did: write to others to defend the truth and hope to gain an advocate to help them unsnarl a skein of falsehoods that propelled them face-first into a slough of despond. (Why people write, if clarification is needed, is because there is no other way to articulate what are often layered and “bizarre” frauds.)

I know with heart-wrenching certainty, also, that these others’ honest and plaintive missives have probably been received with exactly the same suspicion, contempt, and apprehension that mine were. It’s a hideous irony that attempts to dispel false accusations are typically perceived as confirmations of them, including by the court. To complain of being called a stalker, for example, is interpreted as an act of stalking. There’s a kind of awful beauty to the synergy of procedural abuse and lies. (Judges pat bullies on the head and send them home with smiles on their faces.)

Smear campaigns wrap up false accusations authorized by the court with a ribbon and a bow.

*The name Machiavelli, referenced in the title of this post, is associated with the use of any means necessary to obtain political dominion (i.e., power and control). Psychologists have adapted the name to characterize one aspect of a syzygy of virulent character traits called “The Dark Triad.”

Low and Outside: An Umpire’s Story of Restraining Order Abuse (by an Underhand Screwball)

June 6, 2015January 18, 2018Moderator 11 Comments

As the story in this post shows, the phrase “America’s Game” has taken on a new meaning.

The common assumption—one that’s been vigorously enforced by advocates of the “abuse industry”—is that restraining orders are used to protect “victims” from “abusers.” So-called abusers are represented as violent husbands or boyfriends, or as stalkers, representations that account for the ubiquity of restraining orders and the ease of their procurement.

The man whose story of restraining order abuse appears below reports that restraining orders can be obtained by drive-thru in his state (California), like milkshakes and onion rings.

The restraining order against this father and family man was petitioned by his sister-in-law on behalf of her son, his nephew. The man affronted his sister-in-law by umpiring two of her son’s games (his job), contrary to her wishes. That’s the basis of her complaint to the court.

Fighting that complaint has now cost the man and his family some $15,000 (besides money he would have earned as an umpire), and his life’s on hold while he awaits an appellate court ruling that won’t emerge for six to 24 months.

Here’s his story, as he tells it:

I am a victim of restraining order abuse.

At the age of 37, I married the love of my life. It wasn’t until after we were engaged that I found out that most of my wife’s family didn’t like me. This is the foundation of my story.

I am a little league, travel ball, and high school umpire. I umpire because I love the game and to make some additional money on the side. I have been umpiring baseball for close to 25 years without any incident whatsoever, and most reviews of my performance have been complimentary.

When my wife and I were married, we resided in Orange County, California. Our residence was far from the rest of her family, which limited our exposure to her parents and her sisters. My wife has two sisters, one older and one younger. Her elder sister is a lawyer, and her younger sister is a stay-at-home mom.

The eldest sister and her family and I have a great relationship. The problem is with the youngest sister, who is a control freak. She likes to control everything, including how many cups of coffee her husband has a day, and if she’s denied control, she will go to whatever lengths she has to to get it.

Two years or so ago, my wife was offered a job that would move us nearer to the younger sister. This was something that excited my wife, because she loves her family very much and wanted to be closer to her nieces and nephews. When she decided to take the job, she contacted her sister and told her the good news. Her sister was excited and worked with my wife to find a house that was near hers, and she found us a great one.

After moving in, we were visited quite frequently by my wife’s little sister and her family. Every time she visited, however, she pointedly let my wife know about her displeasure with the way we parented our eight-year-old little girl. As a stay-at-home mom whose entire existence revolves around her four kids, she has read every book on parenting and considers herself an expert in child-rearing. I had even caught her entering my house and administering medication to my daughter without our consent, which I firmly put a stop to.

Back to baseball.

After we moved, I enlisted with the local little league to umpire. I worked for a local umpire company that was very pleased with the service I provided to them. It considered me one of its better umpires. One day, I was assigned to umpire one of my wife’s younger sister’s kids’ games. I checked with the league to see if there was an issue and was told no and that it had people umpiring their relatives’ games all the time. Just be neutral, I was told, which I always am.

My wife’s younger sister found out that I was going to be umpiring her son’s game and called my wife to tell her to have me remove myself from the game. When asked why, she stated she just wanted to keep things separate. My wife didn’t understand why and told her to not worry, that I would not show any bias toward her kids and everything would be great. He sister repeated that she just wanted to keep things separate. My wife still didn’t understand why, because her son and I had a great relationship, with no problems at all. At this point, the woman became hysterical and said, “Keep your husband away from my son.” My wife got very upset and hung up on her. After that, we found out that the younger sister called the older sister and asked what she should do to repair things with my wife because she had upset her.

Well, because there was no good reason for my sister-in-law to be upset, and because the umpire company needed me to cover the game, I did. There was no issue with the game, and I received many compliments afterwards. I ended up working another one of my nephew’s games a couple of weeks later, again with no issues. The next week, I got a call from my umpire assignor reporting that my sister-in-law filed a complaint with the league saying her son was “uncomfortable” with my working behind the plate.

At that point, I banned her and her son from visiting my house. This really angered her and inspired her to get back at me.

Meanwhile, my assignor and I got together and agreed I should no longer work any of her kids’ games because she was clearly sick. So I was assigned to other games at the park that didn’t involve her kids.

This wasn’t acceptable to her. She didn’t want me at the fields at all. So she took pictures of me there on the days I was scheduled to work and created a story that involved my hunting and stalking her kids, and affecting their mental well-being.

She went to court and was granted an ex parte restraining order.

When I was served the restraining order, the deputy sheriff told me that he had read it and thought it was the funniest thing he had ever seen. He said he had no idea why it was issued and told me to just stay away from my sister-in-law.

When the time came for me to appear in court to fight the order, I had an attorney and she did not. The judge clearly stated that he would not give her preferential treatment, even so.

This turned out to be completely false.

My attorney laid out a solid case to have the order dismissed, presenting facts that showed there was no proof of any stalking or harassment, and that up until the time of my sister-in-law’s going crazy, her kids and I had had a great relationship.

After about a two-hour hearing, the judge ruled against me. He stated that because my wife informed me that her younger sister had told her to keep me away from her kid that I was put on notice…yet persisted in showing up at the fields to work. Never mind that I was told two months after their conversation (my wife didn’t tell me right away because she thought it was just her sister acting crazy). The judge then went on to say that a mother had the right to determine who got to be around her kids and didn’t need a good reason.

Now since the restraining order was made permanent, my sister-in-law has been using it to harass me and my family.

She went to the elementary school and instructed staff there that I was only to be allowed to pick up and drop off my daughter, and she warned them that if I dared to attend any of my child’s awards ceremonies, school performances, science fairs, or other school functions, she would call the police and have me arrested. She has also been sending letters with false claims about police reports and bullying to the little league administration that regulates all of the local little leagues, and has effectively had me removed from umpiring any games at any of the area little leagues, even ones in which her kids don’t participate.

Her family has been following me and my daughter to public parks and then approaching me to tell me I am in violation of the restraining order. Also, they have changed their walking routes to school so they walk by me and my daughter, or by me as I walk home after taking my daughter to school, to accuse me of “pushing the envelope.” They constantly photograph me when I am waiting at school, and make up stories about me doing things to harass them or their kids.

We have filed a motion for a new trial with compelling evidence. It was denied by the same judge. We have also filed a motion to modify the order to allow me to attend my daughter’s school events since I am her primary caregiver while my wife is at work (I own my own business), and this too was denied, because the judge thought it would be too hard for the school and the police to enforce.

We have filed an appeal, and briefs have been submitted. We are currently waiting for the appellate court to consider the briefs and issue a ruling. We were informed that it can take anywhere from six months to two years for this to happen. Now we are investigating whether we have proper grounds to file a motion asking for expedition to move our case closer to the front of the queue.

To show you just how crazy this restraining order is, the local police department asked, when we dropped off our guns, what clown would sign such a stupid restraining order? They said they would hold our guns for as long as needed to get this thing appealed.

This is my story, which has been my life for a year…and counting.

*From “High Conflict Family Law Matters and Personality Disorders” by attorneys Beth E. Maultsby and Kathryn Flowers Samler:

What “the Law” Means in the Restraining Order Arena and Why All Reasonable Expectations Defendants Have Are Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

May 31, 2015February 4, 2018Moderator 5 Comments

“I put a restraining order on my ex-husband. Now he’s depressed and staying in his truck.”
“Can a restraining order result in suicide?”
“Get [a] restraining order lifted for job.”
“Can a restraining order be appealed if there isn’t evidence?”
“How will it affect my child custody if I filed a false order for protection?”
“What if my abuser files [a] restraining order against me?”
“My daughter falsely accused her stepmother of civil stalking.”
“Falsely accused of breaking a protection order.”
“A crazy person filed a restraining order on me.”
“Teacher falsely accused [in] Ohio.”
“Girlfriend filed a frivolous, retaliatory protection order against me.”
“I’m falsely accused. I need help. My ex has [a] protective order on me. I’m the victim, not him.”
“Suicide [and] false accusations.”
“I was served a domestic violence restraining order, but I don’t see any evidence.”

—Some recent search terms that led visitors here (punctuation added)

Victims of restraining order fraud often voice the conviction that restraining orders require evidence, because trials, we’ve been led to believe, must have an ascertainable basis; you can’t just summon a person to court for whatever. They also express the conviction that plaintiffs “can’t” lie. After all, accusers are made to swear an oath to tell “nothing but the truth.” They should be in trouble if they lie. They should go to jail.

These expectations are all reasonable ones…but they’re wrong.

Q: To get a restraining order, you have to have proof, right?

A: No. “Proof” is not the standard by which civil restraining order allegations are judged. Also, a person can’t “prove” s/he’s afraid; all s/he can do is say so, and his or her say-so is all that’s required.

Q: But if you have proof your accuser is lying, the restraining order has to be dismissed…doesn’t it?

A: No. This is the expectation of everyone summoned before a judge, for obvious reasons: Allegations aren’t facts, and only facts can mean someone is “guilty” of something. Restraining orders, however, don’t require evidence of anything or a determination of “guilt” of anything. What “provable” facts may exist are only as relevant as a judge elects to make them.

Q: A restraining order can be finalized even if a judge knows the plaintiff is lying?

A: Yes. Oath-swearing is just a ritual; lying doesn’t invalidate a petition. Restraining order statutes don’t have a “truth” standard. A person files a petition. If the alleged grounds satisfy the law according to a judge’s personal standards—and a judge’s personal standards are the legal standard—s/he’s authorized to approve the petition. In a subsequent hearing, even if the veracity of the plaintiff is controverted, the law doesn’t require that the order be dismissed. That’s up to the judge. Often if a judge can find a reason to “believe” the plaintiff has a reason to feel harassed or afraid, based on nothing but what the plaintiff says s/he feels, that’s sufficient (even if s/he has given false testimony). Glaringly false allegations may rile a judge, but the law doesn’t require him or her to dismiss a petition on those grounds (or on any others).

Q: So a judge can do whatever s/he wants on no grounds or even on bad ones?

A: Right (a judge who may not be a lawyer or even have a college degree). The only grounds necessary are that someone submitted an application.

Q: And if a plaintiff lies to get a restraining order, s/he can also lie to have someone arrested?

A: S/he can call the police every day if s/he wants to, and allege anything. There’s also no statutory ceiling on the number of restraining orders someone can petition (for free, usually), and subsequent allegations are that much more easily put over, and subsequent orders that much more easily obtained, once one has been approved. Some people are dragged into court relentlessly.

Q: So it’s like that story by Kafka?

A: Exactly like it (with some Lewis Carroll mixed in).

*On this basis, people are removed from their homes, stripped of all possessions, denied a role in their children’s lives, incarcerated, and left broke(n) and homeless. Some kill themselves.

You Don’t Want to “Be a Part of It”: Commentary on New York’s Protection Order Biz

May 21, 2015January 20, 2018Moderator Leave a comment

I corresponded with a man last year, a man in a homosexual relationship, who was assaulted by his partner severely enough to require the ministrations of a surgeon. His boyfriend was issued a restraining order coincident to his being charged with assault. That’s how it typically works in New York: A protection order is issued following a criminal complaint.

The man who wrote reported that he contacted the violent partner while the order was in effect to impress upon him how badly he had been hurt. The boyfriend used the contact to have the assault charge reduced and to obtain a protection order of his own, which he then abused serially to drive the man he had assaulted from his job and eventually from the state. This only required that he repeatedly claim he felt threatened, which is what he did. (According to the man, “The DA did not even try to substantiate my ex’s allegations and pursued the case to the utmost of his ability.”) The law licenses “mandatory arrest” under such circumstances. Arresting officers told the man all they needed was his accuser’s statement. (It didn’t matter who the actual victim was.)

The man was badly traumatized, at least as much by the lies and legal abuse as by the violence. Though he can’t look in the mirror without being reminded of it—one of its mementos is a scar under his eye—the effects of the violence subsided; the lies and legal abuse eventuated in his public disgrace, alienation from his friends, his being arrested at his place of work, and his being asked to leave by his employer after his business dried up and he had accrued massive debts, including from legal fees and medical treatment for PTSD and depression. He says he developed “terrible agoraphobia” (“afraid I would inadvertently run into my ex and have him accuse me of anything just to have me arrested yet again”) and continues to suffer nightmares (“that cause great daily despair”) even now—in another state where he fled to the safety of his family and where he gets by on disability insurance while he plots a reemergence secure from the risk of further legal assaults.

His story, which has here been stripped of detail to preserve his confidentiality, should serve to inject some color into the black-and-white tutorial on New York protection orders that’s examined below.

I digested a page on protection orders recently that was prepped for the New York Court System by the very earnest Judge Penelope D. Clute. It obliquely highlights absurdities in the system that merit some remark.

According to the judge, there are two types of protection orders: “stay away” orders and “refrain from” orders.

The former are pretty straightforward in their prohibitions:

No physical contact of any kind.
Stay away from the home, school, business or place of employment of the person named in the Order.
No phone calls.
No letters, emails, or faxes.
No messages through other people.
No presents.
No contacting the person in any way at all, even if you are invited to talk or meet by that person.

Note the last line—and note that it is the last line.

It acknowledges that people who are nominated “victims” on protection orders may entice their “abusers” to contact them. The quotation marks around the words victims and abusers in the previous sentence are there to stress that the language used by the courts and inscribed in the law is suspect. The court itself recognizes that there are cases when “victims” invite “abusers” to chat or hang out (or move in). As the story that introduces this post shows, besides, there are instances when actual victims seek the understanding of abusers, and this may come with its own host of complications and horrors.

Attorneys like these know very well that allegations of abuse may be hyped or fraudulent.

Unstated in Judge Clute’s bullet list is that the burden of blame falls on the accused even if s/he’s invited to violate the court’s order. Unstated but implicit is that “victims” may not be victims, and “abusers” may not be abusers. Entirely unconscious is that telling people whom they are or are not “permitted” to send a message or gift to contravenes the basic principles of liberty we define ourselves by and pride ourselves on. Restraining orders obviate the chance of reconciliation between parties in conflict by criminalizing contact and making what may be strained relations wholly and possibly virulently antagonistic.

(But, I hear you counter, you sacrifice your freedom when you violate the law. The issuance of a restraining order may be in conjunction with a criminal case, as it commonly is in New York, or it may not be; doesn’t necessarily require proof conclusive of anything; isn’t itself a criminal judgment but an admonitory one; and may be grounded on cranky interpretations of perfectly lawful acts, on lies constituting fraud, or on mere finger-pointing and a few moments of the court’s attention only. The issuance of a restraining order is, however, regarded as a criminal judgment, even in the absence of a criminal charge, and a finding that the order was violated is a criminal judgment. Appreciate that a violation could be the “abuser’s” calling the “victim” and reporting, “Your dad phoned and says your mom’s been in an accident.” A restraining order makes that act criminal, and the court’s prohibitions aren’t negotiable. Restraining orders make perfectly lawful acts, even morally imperative acts, criminal ones, ones you may be arrested for, denied jobs and housing for, and/or deported for.)

These contradictions will likely be familiar to the repeat reader.

Fascinating to learn of was New York’s “refrain from” order. Its contradictions are less likely to be familiar. According to Judge Clute, if you’re issued a “refrain from” order, “you can live together and have contact, but you’re prohibited from harassing, intimidating, threatening, or otherwise interfering with the person protected by the Order.”

This means, evidently and bizarrely, that there are people dwelling under the same roof as their accusers who may be cited for criminal contempt if an accuser calls and reports them for “harassment” that occurred, for example, in the hallway or the kitchen. The implications, which are fairly stunning, bring to mind the phrase “sleeping with the enemy.” The law invests its complete faith in the virtuousness of accusers’ motives. What will be plain to anyone who’s been falsely accused is that an accuser who’s been granted a “refrain from” order and resides with his or her “abuser” holds the life of the accused in the palm of his or her hand.

A writer for the feminist house organ Jezebel might ask, “Why would anyone make a false accusation of harassment, intimidation, or threat? What could be gained by that?”

Since feminists aren’t actually obtuse, the question doesn’t require an answer. Pretending, though, that they are obtuse, here is one: A residence could be gained by making a false accusation. Property could be. Children could be. Revenge could be (see the introduction above). Attention could be. The list goes on.

Judge Clute wraps up her tutorial on protection orders with this advice on “How Defendants Can Avoid Problems,” which reinforces the earlier observations that “victims” may call their “abusers” or otherwise attempt to reconcile, and which notes, besides, how a court order may stir conflict and confrontation with “family or friends.”

Do not go to places where you know the other person goes.
Leave a building, restaurant, store, or other place if you realize that the other person is there.
Hang up the phone immediately if the person calls you. Record the call on your answering machine, if possible. Tell your lawyer about the call.
Do not send letters, emails, or faxes to the other person and do not respond if that person sends one to you. Give your lawyer any message you receive from the other person.
Do not get into arguments or confrontations with the person’s family or friends. Walk away. Try to avoid them completely.
Do not get together with the other person, even to apologize or to try to work things out unless the Judge has dropped the Order of Protection.

Everything that makes these bureaucratic intrusions and impositions ridiculous is right there on the page.

Remember: If you spot your accuser, run away and hide! If s/he calls, hang up immediately (and call your lawyer posthaste)! Also…no sending presents!

Should such a debasing and debased statutory process really be one embraced by an enlightened citizenry?

*The author of this post has listened to National Public Radio for about 20 years (and done The New York Times crossword for at least as long). If a cosmopolitan New York doyen(ne) of the art world, someone with the right background and the right associations, were saddled with a protection order based on false accusations (which are easily staged or concocted and may be heinous or a foot in the door for the commission of years of legal abuse), it might be treated on an NPR program (or in The Times) like a rare and inexplicable bird sighting, and the torments, indignities, and privations of the sensitive, cultivated victim of this “anomalous” miscarriage of justice likened to those suffered by a detainee in a Siberian gulag. It’s estimated that millions of restraining orders are issued in this country each year, and it’s posited that a majority are based on hyped or false claims. It’s further speculated by this author that only a tiny minority of the country’s privileged class are victims of such frauds.

The Question of “Angry White Men” and Complaints of Procedural Abuse

May 19, 2015March 23, 2018Moderator 7 Comments

I started to include the contents of this post in the last one, “Why More Falsely Accused Don’t Speak Out.” Then I thought the topic of angry white men might be due some room of its own.

The previous post outlined reasons why men and women who’ve been victimized by false accusations and procedural abuse are subdued from voicing their outrage publicly. This post criticizes how victims who have expressed their pain and fury have been perceived and treated.

What complaints have emerged in the past couple of decades have been derogated as the rants of “angry white men” (Google this phrase, and you’ll see what I mean; it’s even the title of a 2014 book). Complaints have been dismissed, that is, as nothing worthier of consideration than the cranky kvetches of the disenfranchised “patriarchy,” yesterday’s top dogs said to resent their loss of dominion.

What members of angry white men’s and fathers’ groups are said to object to really is not their being unjustly vilified, kicked to the curb, impoverished, and stripped of roles in their children’s lives (pfft) but their loss of power and status.

It’s an attractively tidy idea and syncs up with feminist dogma nicely, but it’s critically shallow, besides ethically and empathically vacuous.

One thing the conclusion ignores is culture. Consider the Jews you may know, or the Koreans or the Pakistanis. Do you reckon restraining orders, for example, or domestic abuse allegations are as commonly brought against Jews or East Asians as they are against whites? Would the action be as countenanced in these ethnic communities, whose members may be more accountable to the judgment of other members and whose community conscience may forbid the public airing of familial discord?

Now it could be true that entitled white men, as members of the patriarchy or former patriarchy, are meaner and feel freer to be abusive than Jews and East Asians. Certainly that’s arguable, but it’s not necessarily arguable on the basis of reports of abuse, because it could also be true that entitled white women, as the usurpers of patriarchy (and as white women), feel freer to exploit feminine advantage and cry wolf than Jews and East Asians do.

Consider that feminism—the origin of the characterization angry white men—is criticized even within its ranks as ethnocentric, i.e., Whitey McWhite. If white women are those who are preponderantly pro-litigation, thanks to white feminist indoctrination into the culture of victimhood and “empowerment,” then who would you expect to be a majority of the targets of procedural abuse?

Those who posit that complainants of courthouse dirty dealings are predominately angry white men aren’t necessarily wrong, but they may be right for reasons they haven’t considered.

Another one of these reasons is entitlement.

Has it occurred to them, I wonder, that only white people may feel entitled to complain publicly? Do they really imagine that certain minorities aren’t that much more vulnerable to legal abuse, or that they’re not invisible and mute because of their self-perceived or actual lack of entitlement? People who’ve traditionally been the system’s goats aren’t people eager to stick their necks out. They never had faith in social justice.

If you allow that a majority of entitled victims of procedural abuses are white men, then it stands to reason that a majority of complainants of procedural abuses will be white men.

It further stands to reason that these white men, who had been conditioned to the expectation of justice, should feel disappointed…and angry.

*The book Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era (2014) is by sociologist Michael Kimmel. Dr. Kimmel is a New York Jew with a Ph.D. from Berkeley. His book was reviewed in The New York Times by Hanna Rosin, a Stanford grad, a senior editor at The Atlantic, and the author of The End of Men and the Rise of Women. Ms. Rosin is also Kimmel-Rosin a New York Jew. While neither one’s conclusions can be dismissed offhand, their cultural and class remove from the subjects of Dr. Kimmel’s book makes their identification with those subjects suspect, and Ms. Rosin’s objectivity and access are plainly dubious. From Ms. Rosin’s review: “Kimmel’s balance of critical distance and empathy works best in his chapter on the fathers’ rights movement, a subset of the men’s rights movement. Members of this group are generally men coming out of bitter divorce proceedings who believe the courts cheated them out of the chance to be close to their children.” Contrast this confidently categorical interpretation of men’s and fathers’ complaints to this firsthand account by a father who was ruined by “bitter divorce proceedings”: “The ‘Nightmare’ Neil Shelton Has Lived for Three Years and Is Still Living: A Father’s Story of Restraining Order Abuse.” A comment on Amazon.com credits Ms. Rosin with being sensitive to “real women’s experience.” The story highlighted in the previous sentence chronicles a real (angry white) man’s—whose telephone number is provided in a comment beneath the post.

Why More Falsely Accused Don’t Speak Out

May 17, 2015March 23, 2018Moderator 9 Comments

If procedural abuses are epidemic (and they are), why do so few vociferously complain? Why isn’t the Internet inundated with personal horror stories (and why aren’t state representatives’ in-boxes choked with them)? We purportedly enjoy the privilege of free speech, so why isn’t it exercised more?

The absence of rampant complaints of procedural abuse is misleading. Limitation of complaints to sketchy e-petitions and forum comments, often anonymous, makes them suspect and easily discounted by those with a political interest in discrediting them.

The dearth of forthright exclamations of abuse and injustice, however, is easily understood.

Rather than consider who isn’t talking back, consider who does. What distinguishes these men and women from what may be hundreds of thousands or millions of victims of false, exaggerated, or misleading accusations to the court?

For one, most of them are childless or without young children. They don’t face being further deprived access to their kids if they buck the system. Those with minor children who do speak out have often been denied all rights to their kids, anyway; they have nothing left to lose.

Too, most of them work for themselves. It’s a fact that restraining orders influence employers. Furthermore, studies have shown that employers are influenced even by Internet disclosures by employees or potential hires that may be negatively perceived by the public. Human Resources personnel are paid to snoop around. Mere injudicious comments on Facebook may be hazardous to job opportunities and careers. Declaring that you’ve been judged to be a stalker, for example, or a domestic or child abuser has obvious and grave drawbacks, never mind if you’re also construed as a wacko because you vehemently insist online that your accuser’s psychopathic. This is an express train to sleeping in a refrigerator box.

Women aren’t immune to false accusation. They’re a minority among its victims, and that status is itself isolating (from a community peopled mainly by men who resent women and the favored political status they enjoy). Many respondents to this blog are female—maybe most. By and large, however, women may feel like interlopers in male-dominated discussions, and women’s advocates, whom they should be able to turn to, don’t want to bring scrutiny to bear on the question of procedural abuse (which is mostly by women).

People who may be foully wronged and branded with accusations that may daily tear at them are coerced into silence by the feared repercussions of ventilating their rage and anguish. Their false accusers, moreover, may be violent people or, for example, extremely vindictive ones, and the accused may fear for their safety and their children’s safety, or fear further legal abuse, which can be endlessly renewed, particularly after false accusations have once stuck, and which can result in incarceration—possibly meaning loss of a single parent’s child(ren) to the state—or financial hardship or ruin. The falsely accused are squeezed between a rock and a hard place.

As you might imagine—and it’s okay to try imagining even if it goes against your partisan loyalties—this creates a hell within a hell.

Probably most of the falsely accused, besides, are not trained writers (like the loudest voices that discredit people in their shoes are) nor among the politically privileged class, whose members are typically the most able to free themselves from false accusations in the first place. They’re not suave, and they don’t possess the kinds of credentials that make people think twice.

(Also, ironically, the people who do possess the kinds of credentials that make people think twice but who fail to deflect a false finger of blame are often sensitive to “social decorum” and may be loath to air dirty laundry.)

Public outcry, finally, is discomforting to family and friends (and their family and friends). It compounds the alienation and isolation of false accusation with alienation from those who believe in you; they sidle away.

In a nutshell, it’s not merely coincidental that those few who do elect to talk back are mainly single, independently employed, without small children, white…and male. Men don’t fear violent retaliation from their false accusers, usually, and they may have nothing left to be stripped of except the lingering expectation of justice.

*Bearing the foregoing in mind, it should be no surprise that the preponderance of publicized outrage originates from “just folks” who aren’t distinguished and who are easily dismissed (and mocked) as “rabble.” What should be a surprise is that their detractors are often those who are supposed to be looking out for them, for example, civil rights advocates like the ACL(where R)U and agents of the popular press.

If You Doubt the Grief Caused by False Accusation, Consider the Whimpers of False Accusers When THEY’RE Exposed

May 12, 2015August 4, 2023Moderator 10 Comments

Forthcoming posts on this blog will consider character assassination, and they will critique one of the many execrable ironies of the civil restraining order process. It is possible to falsely accuse a person of anything—literally anything (mooning the neighbors, groping children, chewing the ears off of puppies, rape, you name it)—and the act of false accusation, which is universally deemed a statutory crime (perjury), is not sanctioned by the court. The falsely accused, what’s more, cannot litigate the crime of perjury him- or herself nor apply to the court for relief from the falsehoods or an award for the damages they do, which may include PTSD, loss of home, and financial ruin. But…but if the falsely accused exercises his or her constitutionally protected right to free speech and exposes his or her false accuser, which is his or her only lawful defense (and a feeble one at that), this act may paradoxically be construed as “character assassination” by state prosecutors and judges. This post will ease into the topic of character assassination gently.

An alternative way of understanding the pains inflicted by false accusation, if you’re among the compassionately challenged, is to consider the complaints of those accused of falsely accusing.

They don’t like it much when the table is turned.

A woman I’m in correspondence with and have written about was accused of abuse on a petition for a protection order last year by a scheming long-term domestic partner, a man who’d seemingly been thrilled by the prospect of publicly ruining her and having her tossed to the curb with nothing but the clothes on her back. He probably woke up each morning to find his pillow saturated with drool.

The woman he accused, meanwhile, probably didn’t sleep at all during the weeks of purgatory between the accusation and her hearing. For a while, she had to worry about where she’d be able to sleep.

She successfully had the protection order dismissed and has since publicly exposed her false accuser. She’s also filed a lawsuit and endeavors to have the laws in her state amended so people like her ex face consequences for defrauding the court (which at present they never do…anywhere). After her exoneration in court, she says her ex starting circulating it around town that she tried to kill him.

Now her former boyfriend complains that the stir she’s caused by expressing her outrage in public media is affecting his business, and he reportedly wants to obtain a restraining order to shut her up…for exposing his last attempt to get a restraining order…which was based on fraud.

He feels defamed, you see.

Public exposure is not the same thing as being put on the legal rack, but, oh, how those outed for lying will snivel and pule. They expected their testimony would be neatly kept under wraps, and it’s just…not…fair!

Anyone who doubts or misconceives the torments of legal abuse need only look to the whiners who object to being revealed as its perpetrators to be disabused of illusion.

*First Amendment advocate Matthew Chan, who recently prevailed in a protection order appeal before the Georgia Supreme Court, keeps a constant vigil over what’s said about him by his own accuser, who reportedly began a social media campaign to reboot the conflict after the court ruled against her. Larry Smith, who authors BuncyBlawg.com, was ordered to show cause in 2014 why he shouldn’t be censured for writing about his false accuser, a disturbed woman who complained of grave emotional distress. A sometime commenter here, Sean Heeger, has had a restraining order against him extended, has been jailed, and has had his character and sanity impugned for talking publicly about legal abuse. Neil Shelton, who was jailed for a year, alleges his (now ex-)wife’s divorce attorney, a state congresswoman, conspired to frame him as a terrorist to shut him up after he ridiculed her on Facebook for her efforts to frame him for various violations of a restraining order obtained on false grounds (Neil represented himself in six hearings and each time won). Though Neil’s case is extreme, cases like these are exceptional only insofar as the victims of legal abuse have elected to speak out.

In Its Condemnation of the Men’s and Fathers’ Rights Movements, the Southern Poverty Law Center Has Institutionalized Bigotry and Hate (Including Racial Bigotry and Hate)—Here’s How

April 29, 2015July 4, 2023Moderator 6 Comments

There are prominent voices on the Internet, in the ivory tower, and in the press that disparage the plaints of fathers who are alienated from their children by lies and legal abuse, and denied roles in their kids’ lives. They call these fathers’ ventilations of despair and anger “misogynist,” and they look no further.

This post criticizes one such voice, possibly the loudest among them.

The Southern Poverty Law Center equates complainants of legal abuse—male ones, that is—with racists, and it’s taken seriously. It commands social prestige based on its illustrious history of combatting racial hate and violence.

I hope the outraged title of this piece reaches its attention, because the story below exemplifies a modern manifestation of racial bigotry and violence, and it’s one the Southern Poverty Law Center scoffs at and ridicules.

It’s one the Southern Poverty Law Center vociferously fortifies.

The following account, which echoes others and which includes a casual assault of a black man by police based on false allegations by his white wife, was submitted to this blog on April 27, 2015, by a father of two young children who is not a violent man; he just misses his kids and is in perdition. (What this man will be five years from now—or whether he will be five years from now—is another question all together. A man may be taunted like a dog chained to a post. Then when he snaps, there are those content to judge him mad and urge that he be put down.)

Advocacy groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center presume to blame without listening to the details. This is what the details sound like (trigger alert: real life):

Hello. Anyone out there who can help a man who is at the saddest hour of his life? For I feel life is not even worth living at this point due to the evil and malicious acts of my wife.

We had been talking about a divorce for the last year and a half as we have been married for four years and been together since we were 22—for 16 long years. We have a two-year-old and seven-month-old, both baby boys. My wife has rage issues and extreme hormone issues…and she’s clearly depressed, and I cannot help her anymore.

When our marriage became a sexless one, we agreed we were just roommates taking care of the children until we started our divorce. My wife was contacted by a jealous woman who wanted to destroy my life because I would not leave my wife to be with her. She told my wife all sorts of lies. The next day, my wife filed for divorce but also filed a fake restraining order to ensure I burn in hell, and it’s working.

My wife didn’t come home with the kids on Friday evening after picking them up from daycare. No calls, no answer, nothing. I called daycare, and I was advised that my wife picked the kids up with her mother around 4 p.m. We live in L.A., and her mother lives in Ohio, so I was like, “Her mother? I didn’t know she was in town.” It’s now about 11:30 p.m., so I call the hotel her mother usually stays at around the corner on Sunset Blvd. My wife answers and says, “My mother came in town to help us. She’s concerned about us.”

I told her to bring the kids home because she didn’t pack any Pampers or a change of clothes for them. She said, “I’ll be home in the morning.” The next day, they still were missing. I left to run errands, and my wife called about 6 p.m. saying she was back home. When I got back home, the locks to my front door were changed. I banged on the door demanding to be let into my own house and see my boys. Her mother, who was visiting, said, “Go away. She doesn’t want you here.”

I called the cops and went downstairs to wait.

When they arrived, a cop instantly started attacking me and beating me. I screamed, “I called you to help me get in my house!” He was rude, beat me and cuffed me, then put me in the back of a patrol car. I was in there for about 20 minutes.

Finally, I was let go—un-cuffed, bleeding, stepping out of the police car—and her mother is outside the police car and says you’ve been served, and hands me a packet of paperwork. I thought WTF? a divorce, cool, no problem, but it was a restraining order claiming I had done physical violence to my wife for years and years. I never ever breathed too hard on my wife, so how could she make such claims? I lost my breath for a few seconds in disbelief.

I had to leave my house as was, no money, in flip-flops and shorts, no credit cards, no suits for work, no children, no food, nothing. I was threatened with jail if I even tried to call her or stopped at my boys’ daycare. My hearing wasn’t for another 25 days.

I thought, what can I do? This is hell being homeless, but most of all I am the full-time dad and mom to our boys. I do all the cooking, cleaning, dishes, shopping, putting to bed, baths, everything. My wife has given the boys a bath maybe three times in their entire lives. She wakes up at 6 a.m. and leaves out the door while I wake up and bath the children, change Pampers, fix breakfast, dress them, dress myself in a three-piece suit , take them to daycare, and then work 11 hours at the office. My wife picks them up at 6 p.m. from daycare, then I’m home at 7 to fix dinner, put the children to bed, clean, and finally sit down about 11 when my day is complete.

I survived the 25 days of being homeless, living in hotels and racking up around $12,000 in debt, including the cost of an attorney for the hearing. The hearing was going great, my wife getting caught up in lies, backtracking, bringing up events where I might have pushed her on the bed in 2012 or dropped a cup that she stepped on in 2013…or told her I’m going to kill her every day. Yeah, right! No proof, no police reports, no police calls, no telling a friend, no nothing, just her words against my words and phone records.

I thought about all the women getting punched in the head, slapped in the mouth, and living in total fear of their husbands and how it must really suck to live like that. Then I stared at my wife on the stand lying about getting pushed on the bed years ago and saying that she was afraid for her life but still having stayed in the house every night and eaten my cooking and commanded me to be her slave.

The judge still sided with her and issued a permanent restraining order allowing me 18% visitation rights to my kids, my flesh and blood. My boys were dying to see Daddy. It’s been a month. She’s getting child support, too. I have 18% visitation, and I can’t even call my wife. I got a move-out order, but my wife and her mom made moving out hell and even called the cops because they thought I was taking some money secretly stashed in the house. I didn’t even collect my things before I was blocked in the driveway by my wife and her angry mother.

I am a black man, and my wife is white. It doesn’t go well for black men in my position.

[…]

I just had a chance to see my boys this last weekend on Saturday and Sunday from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. I cried like the world had given me the moon when my two-year-old held onto my neck for 10 minutes and said, “I miss you so much, Dada.”

I now feel so much anger and helplessness. It was heart-wrenching that a woman could be this evil to take the boys away from a man like me. All the deadbeat dads, and my kids are my only focus in life. I’m a CPA for a corporation. My wife lied, lie after lie after lie on the stand, and then even cried after lying that she was not a professionally trained actress three times until my attorney asked, “Are you a paying member of the SAG organization [Screen Actors Guild]?” Then she finally said, “Why, yes, I am, ha-ha.”

It’s killing me not to have any rights. I feel like my world has been turned upside down without my boys with me every day. I’m struggling, still living in hotels, blowing money left and right just to sleep. My car is full of clothes, and legal costs are mounting. I feel like jumping off a bridge as this woman’s evil portrayals of me are irreversible.

Now what do I do? I can’t take it. I’m going to lose my mind and snap.

I’d rather she put a gun to my head and pull the trigger than put me through lies and manipulation of the court and hurt my boys, who go insane when I have to drop them back to their mother. It’s most disconcerting to listen to a 65-year-old white judge tell me that I have 18% of my flesh and blood over he-said-she-said and not one ounce of proof at all. The judge was Judge B. Scott Silverman, Los Angeles Superior Court. Please help me, God. Please Please Please.

Thank you for reading.

The Man Who’s Dying Slowly

Contrast the impassioned story above with this antiseptic one: “Claims and activities associated with the men’s rights movement have been criticized by scholars, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and commentators. Some sectors of the movement have been described as misogynist” (Wikipedia).

The Southern Poverty Law Center doesn’t lynch people; its advocacy inspires a social and legal atmosphere of intolerance and civil rights violations that urges people to lynch themselves. The difference is instead of bedsheets’ being worn by a mob, they’re knotted into nooses by lonely, isolated individuals forlorn of hope.

The result is the same.

*As of this writing, the top tier members of the senior program staff of the Southern Poverty Law Center are eight affluent whites/Jews (most of them female) and one black woman, Lecia Brooks. Ms. Brooks is the “outreach director,” i.e., the group’s public face.

The “Nightmare” Neil Shelton Has Lived for Three Years and Is Still Living: A Father’s Story of Restraining Order Abuse

April 24, 2015August 18, 2023Moderator 45 Comments

The following account is reported by North Carolinian Neil Shelton, a father denied access to his son and daughter for “three years now and counting.”

In his account, Mr. Shelton alleges that his sister, in collusion with his ex-wife, lied to have him involuntarily committed, and that one or more partners in the law firm of his ex-wife’s attorney fabricated evidence to have him incarcerated. He alleges, in short, some very dirty divorce tactics.

Mr. Shelton’s allegations are abhorrent yet all too believable. Significantly, none of the criminal allegations introduced against him have held up in court.

Because, however, its author has no means of corroborating Mr. Shelton’s allegations of fraud, it is not the position of this blog that Mr. Shelton’s sister lied to the court or that either the attorney in question or his associates engaged in forgery. The blog author’s investigative wherewithal is limited, and he has no way of determining the allegations’ accuracy. Rebuttal responses from the accused are accordingly welcomed.

Neil’s story, then, as he tells it:

I am the victim of false allegations and restraining order abuse resulting from my divorce.

I’ve been wrongfully incarcerated for almost a year and falsely arrested numerous times for nothing I’ve done. To get a better idea, look at my page on Facebook, Growing UP Mayberry, and that will give you most of the full story. For this website, I want to share the restraining order abuse, as well as the ex parte abuse, and several things resulting from the restraining order and false allegations.

On May 29, 2012, which was shortly after I was kicked out of my house by my now ex-wife, I was arrested three times in one day.

This was the start of a campaign by my ex-wife’s divorce attorney, who is also my state representative, Sarah Stevens of Surry County and Mayberry (Mt. Airy), North Carolina. Yes, Mayberry, home of Andy Griffith and the inspiration for The Andy Griffith Show. My only reason for pointing that out is that no matter where you live, you are not immune to this unnecessary attack and, ultimately, bullying.

My ex-wife had my sister, Joan Shelton Phillips, a family nurse practitioner and my primary care physician, lie on two Involuntary Commitment forms saying I was bipolar, refused medication, and was riding around in a limousine threatening myself and others. At the top of the commitment papers, it says clearly: “wife wants husband committed.” The interviewing physicians were able to get my medical records, which showed I had never been seen or medicated for bipolar disorder. After some questioning, I was released from the first commitment attempt.

The Surry County Sheriff’s Dept. had arrested me at 10 a.m. the first time. I was released at 2:30 p.m. and rearrested by the MAPD at 3 p.m. for the second commitment attempt. When I arrived back at the hospital, the head physician asked, “What the hell are you doing back? I just released you!” Again, after a shorter session with the doctors, my ex-wife was made aware they were going to release me. On the commitment forms, the doctor even wrote that the one needing commitment was my soon-to-be ex-wife, not me.

When my now ex-wife was made aware of my impending release, she took her sister-in-law, who was the director of Surry’s Stop Child Abuse Now (SCAN), and they went to the Surry County Sheriff’s Dept. and had me charged with criminal trespassing.

I went straight from the hospital into police custody. Even though I was charged with criminal trespassing, my now ex-wife would later admit that I’d never been physically violent toward her. Using the criminal trespassing charge, of which I would later be found not guilty, my soon-to-be ex-wife was able to get a restraining order against me. Because I was never physically violent toward her, her divorce lawyer got creative. I had called my ex-wife a bitch and said, “You are not going to keep me from my kids.” This was used as the reason for the restraining order. Three years later, I’m still subject to the same restraining order.

The first day I met the divorce lawyer, Sarah Stevens, she asked to talk with me out in the hallway before the trial, saying maybe we could reach an agreement before being heard. I turned on my audio recorder and placed it in my shirt pocket, and proceeded to go speak with her. Once in the hallway, she said: “Now two things can happen today. One, you can be found guilty, which I promise you will be, and leave here with a restraining order against you from not only your ex-wife but your kids. Two, you can take a $5,000 settlement with no child support and agree to supervised visitation with your children, and the restraining order will disappear.”

I told her my children were not mentioned on the restraining order, and all I did was call my wife a bitch and tell her she wasn’t going to keep my kids from me, and that’s not domestic violence. She said yes your kids are mentioned in it, at which point I said then if you believe that, you need to go back to law school, because I haven’t been and know better than that.

“I’m dangerous broke, as y’all have shut down all my businesses, but I’m not dangerous with $5,000 and no restraining order against me?” With that, I told her I was finished. She said, “Yes, you are,” and we proceeded into the courtroom. I called her a few choice words, and her reply was, “Boy, am I gonna have fun playing with you.”

This is the nightmare I’ve lived for three years and am still living. I was arrested every time I turned down a settlement offer for an alleged restraining order violation. I began trashing Sarah Stevens on Facebook by posting what she was doing to me in court. I got warned to shut up and stop, but I didn’t and, again, everything I was doing was legal.

A total of five restraining order violations were alleged, leading up to a sixth, before they got tired of my winning in court without representation and got tired, also, of my political Facebook posts, and did something borderline genius, instead…only they executed it wrong.

They sat down with Zach Brintle, Stevens’s law partner, and penned a letter posing as me. In it, “I” threatened to kill all the lawyers, including him and his law partner/aunt, Sarah Stevens. It also threatened that all the district attorneys, the police, my entire family, and others would be killed, and ended, “Boston is nothing compared to what I’m planning.” This letter was purportedly mailed to my now ex-wife, and I was arrested for making terroristic threats.

During my almost yearlong incarceration, I was found not guilty on all counts of violating the restraining order, but I lost everything in my divorce. That’s because I was only allowed to work on my criminal trial while in jail, and my incarceration just happened to end two days after the deadline to appeal my divorce decree passed, and the decree gave my now ex-wife everything. The incarceration continued, because the district attorney claimed the FBI was doing an analysis of the letter. But after I was released, the FBI told me it had never received this letter for analysis. When I took the letter to my own handwriting expert, he concluded it was 98% likely that Brintle, not I, wrote it.

Upon my release, I showed the judge the two failed commitment attempts, the six not-guilty verdicts for allegedly violating the restraining order, the dismissal of the letter charges, the phone number of the FBI agent who told me the FBI had never been involved and had never investigated the letter—which supposed investigation the other side had used to hold me in jail—and the handwriting analysis proving the lawyer, Zach Brintle, wrote the letter. But the judge still extended the restraining order for yet another year.

I met Michael Volpe, the author of the upcoming book Bullied to Death: The Chris Mackney Story, who told me that these tactics are quite common in family court. I also met Raquel Okyay, who knows a lot and has helped raise my awareness that there are others going through this, too. She has also helped me tremendously in getting my story out.

My story is bizarre and extreme, but there are a many with stories like mine out there. I have not been allowed to see or speak with my children for three years now and counting. I’m sure I’ve left some things out, but there’s not enough room to tell my tale in this forum.

Since you’re reading this, chances are you’ve either experienced the same or are experiencing it, as most people don’t care until it happens to them. Honestly, I didn’t either, but that has changed. When reading this and all articles like it, remember you are not alone.

GOD BLESS.

TALKING BACK to restraining orders

THEY’RE NOT JUST ABUSED BUT ABUSIVE

Tag false accusations