If It’s Okay to Tell the Falsely Accused How They Should Feel, Then It’s Cool to Tell Victims of Rape How They Should Feel, Right?

April 22, 2015August 24, 2023Moderator 6 Comments

That’s a rhetorical question.

Plainly it’s not cool to tell victims of rape how they should feel, particularly if you’re not one yourself. I don’t say that because it’s un-PC to criticize rape victims; I say that because it’s wrong.

Yet goddamn if there’s no shortage of people who have no context to relate either to rape victims or victims of false accusations who presume to defend the former’s right to be basket cases and deny the latter any right to complain.

The previous post examined the vehement rhetoric of one of these self-appointed arbiters of anguish (whose argument seems to run: “I’ll tell you how you’re entitled to feel”).

Pause here for a point of clarification: False accusations can be of a great many acts besides sexual assault, and the phrase false accusation in this post refers to any false accusation.

There’s nothing, of course, to reproach about someone’s sympathizing with victims of sexual assault, as the writer scrutinized in the last post does; it’s compassionate. Presuming to “relate” to the pain of women who’ve been raped, however, is presuming a lot.

Presuming to deny others’ pain, furthermore, because you believe you can quantify it or “imagine” what it “should” be like—that’s stepping way over the line.

Look at enough feminist rhetoric, though, and something becomes starkly clear: The basic contention is that “our” pain is worse than yours. (One gets the distinct impression that all feminist writers consider themselves rape victims by association or genital identification.)

I don’t discount rape victims’ torment, but I do believe this pain “rating scale” is due to be dispassionately tested.

The approach of those who presume to criticize complainants of false accusation is to reduce their trials to something like this: generally speaking, (1) you’re accused, and (2) maybe you lose some friends and your job. Also, (3) if you’re exonerated, you don’t have anything to bitch about, so shut up and go away.

Now here’s what you get when you apply to rape victims the same obscenely reductive analysis: generally speaking, (1) your body is penetrated without your consent or against your express objection, and (2) you’re possibly, if not probably, left with some tissue damage.

Both of these sketchy assessments are about equivalent in their insensitivity (and according to them, the privations of the falsely accused may well be more enduring than the injuries of the victim of rape).

So why is the former assessment popularly conceived to be “fair” while the latter would be denounced as “cruel”?

Is it because false accusation inflicts a psychic trauma and that rape has a physical component? I’ve been run down in the road by a 4 x 4 while on foot. Bones were splintered and crushed. I spent five days in an intensive care ward, and my skeleton and joints will never be the same. I almost lost an eye, and the hemorrhaging came with its own host of consequences. Entire swaths of my body were without sensation. Some months later, I had a cerebral episode and was aphasic for a day (I couldn’t remember, for example, the word October or repeat “no ifs, ands, or buts”). I’d wager the physical trauma I sustained exceeds that of an overwhelming majority of rape victims. Does that make me “more worthy” of sympathy?

Apples and oranges, right? Why? Because the affront to my body was impersonal.

It makes a difference, then, when our dignity and humanity are violated, and we’re treated with intimate disregard.

I don’t know what it is to be raped. I do know, though, what complainants of rape report, and reported sources of pain are shame, outrage, fear, betrayal, a lingering and possibly insurmountable distrust, and ambivalence about reporting the violation based on the expectation of suspicion and reproach from authorities (as well as others) and having to relive the horror, possibly without hope of realizing any form of justice.

gavels-gavels I do know what it is to be falsely accused, and the sources of pain are the same, only the suspicion and reproach aren’t an “expectation.” When you’re the target of damning fingers, suspicion and reproach inevitably ensue; they’re a given.

There’s a misconception about accusation that isn’t really a misconception at all; it’s an empathic dereliction. Facile commentators say people are “accused” as if that’s all there is to it. (I’ve been falsely accused by the same person in multiple court procedures spanning seven years, and I’ve lived with the accusations daily for nine. A man I know has been summoned to court dozens of times; a woman I recently heard from, over 100 times—in both cases, by a single vexatious litigant.)

To be accused is to have the state knocking on your door. It’s to be sent menacing notices in the mail or to have them tacked to your residence (endure this long enough, and you stop looking in the mailbox or even answering the phone). It’s to be hauled into a police precinct—if not arrested and jailed—and to be subjected to invasive questioning, if not physically invasive, involuntary examinations. It’s to be treated with hostility and contempt, like a thing of disgust. It’s to become the fodder of gossip and the target of threats. Judgment is a palpable thing, and it’s far worse than a body blow (or even being steamrolled by an onrushing vehicle).

The outrage, moreover, of being blamed falsely isn’t something that can be “intuited.” Here’s how one woman I’ve corresponded with puts it, a woman who was accused by a man who had abused her both physically and otherwise (yes, sometimes the accuser simply reverses roles with his or her victim—and, yes, if you missed it in the parenthetical remark above, sometimes the falsely accused isn’t a man):

There is no “coming out the other side” of a public, on-the-legal-record character assassination. It gnaws at me on a near-daily basis like one of those worms that lives inside those Mexican jumping beans for sale to tourists on the counters of countless cheesy gift shops in Tijuana.

I have sort of moved on; I mean, what else can one do, particularly when one has young children? But the horror, outrage, shame, and, yes, fury engendered by being wrongly accused by a perpetrator, and then having that perpetrator be believed, chafes at me constantly. Some things born of irritation and pressure are ones of beauty, like a pearl, or a diamond, but not this. This is a stoma on one’s soul—it never heals, it’s always chapped and raw, and if you’re not careful, it can leak and soil everything around it.

Would a feminist sympathize with this person? Probably…grudgingly and without making a to-do about it.

Why? If the answer is because she’s a woman, then we’re getting somewhere. The blindness to the damages of legal abuse has a great deal to do with sex. Most of the vehement objectors to legal violations are men—they being the majority of the victims—and they’ve been demonized…because they’re men. This has led to the dim formulation that “falsely accused” equals “male” equals f* ’em.

Absurd, besides, is that arguments like those scrutinized in the last post on the one hand posit that men shouldn’t feel their own pain but on the other hand should show sympathy to women’s. Men are oxymoronically supposed to be stoic and insensitive, er, “empaths.”

Yeah, but not really. Really the conclusion is their pain doesn’t matter. It’s “insignificant” because (tum-tum-tum-TUMMM)…

To whom? Society? It certainly isn’t a bigger problem to its falsely accused constituents. This is a democracy, not an ant colony, and pain isn’t a competition or a zero-sum game. No one’s pain is more “valid” or “virtuous” than the next’s. What the sentiment in headlines like this really means is that the lives of the falsely accused are (politically) insignificant—and the sentiment is a sick one.

Abuse of people is abuse of people, and life-wrecking torment is life-wrecking torment.

*Though its psychic fallout may be indelible, rape ends. False accusation and legal abuse may be continually renewed. People report being in legal contests for years, even many, many years. They report running through tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. They report being left penniless and in cases homeless. They report living “like a hamster.” They report being in therapy, on meds, and sometimes being unable to work even if their careers haven’t been ruined, and often they have been. They report losing their children, and they report losing the right to work with or be around children. Accusation isn’t an “inconvenience.”

Misperception of the Damages of False Accusation Isn’t a Girls-Only Fault

April 19, 2015October 25, 2025Moderator 3 Comments

“What the fuck is wrong with these people? I keep seeing the same argument again and again and again and again—the idea that being accused of rape is not simply as bad as being raped but often worse. I honestly can’t believe how people can be so fucking dense so as to think this is true.

“Note that I am not saying that being falsely accused of rape is not bad and can utterly damage your life, but it just does not even compare to the experience of being raped. […]

“A person falsely accused of rape (and convicted, of course) may, at the worst case scenario, lose friends and family and have their career ruined, but given time they can find new friends who will believe them and repair their social circle, even while hindered by the state. Many times they even clear their names eventually (otherwise we wouldn’t have such a nice influx of False Rape Accusation news stories for the Men’s Right crowd to cheer around). But apparently for some, even the short-term damage of a false rape accusation that a male was eventually cleared from, compares to being actually raped.”

—A Division by Zer0

No, the blog A Division by Zer0 isn’t authored by Zerlina Maxwell, the attorney and social critic who gained notoriety a few months ago for voicing identical sentiments in The Washington Post (and being widely panned for it).

The post the epigraph is drawn from was authored by a man. He doesn’t identify himself…and I don’t blame him.

The quoted post is emphatically titled, “For fuck’s sake, No! Being falsely accused of rape is not not NOT as bad as being actually raped!”

People’s gender and political allegiances don’t interest me. People are people, and to each his own. Ill-reasoning, however, offends me regardless of the contours of the body that emits it, especially when it’s emitted loudly. Ill-reasoning is particularly offensive when it mocks human suffering, as this man’s perspectives do.

His sympathy for victims of sexual violation would be commendable if only it weren’t countervailed by callousness.

A recent post on the blog you’re reading highlighted the case of a young British man who was detained by authorities for two days, based on a false accusation of rape. Then the charges were thrown out, that is, they were almost immediately dismissed. He nevertheless killed himself after struggling with depression pursuant to the violation. He was 23. Another featured case concerned an adolescent who was falsely accused of rape by some hoodlums at school. He hanged himself. He was 16. A third was about a man who was falsely convicted for rape (and five other felonies) and served a year and a half of a 35-year sentence. He was exonerated when it was belatedly discovered that his “14-year-old” accuser was an adult in her 20s and that her identity wasn’t all she’d lied about. While the man was in prison, his mother committed suicide. She died believing her son was a pimp and a rapist.

Introducing cases of false accusation that have consequences of this magnitude is illustrative, but it shouldn’t be necessary. The author of A Division by Zer0, like most feminist writers, betrays he understands the aftermath of trauma very well.

Here’s the difference though, a rape victim most likely will never escape the damage of the event. Once the deed has been done, the scar will stay forever, no matter if the perpetrator is punished. You cannot undo the [violation]. You cannot restore the lost trust. You cannot wipe the memory triggers.

In a moment of dramatic irony, the writer acknowledges the root of his own indifference: “Much of it, I believe, comes from lack of empathy.”

The man behind A Division by Zer0 is a member of the “Men’s Rights crowd”—or more aptly the People’s Rights crowd. He just doesn’t know it.

False Accusations and Murder: More Headlines about the Effects of Finger-Pointing and Legal Abuse

April 18, 2015June 25, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

“[W]hy would someone lie about being sexually assaulted? What could be gained from that? Nothing, really.”

—Tracie Egan Morrissey, Jezebel (Feb. 28, 2014)

The quotation above derives from a piece titled, “Rape, Lies and the Internet: The Story of Conor Oberst and His Accuser.” It’s spotlighted because it echoes the sentiment expressed by the writer of the prior post’s epigraph, who’s also a feminist and who betrays the same blindness.

What’s disturbing to the author of the blog you’re reading is that feminists who ask questions like Ms. Morrissey’s make a strong case for rape denial, because it might just as unreasonably be asked, “Why would someone sexually assault anyone? What could be gained from that?”

What could be “gained” from raping someone is the same thing that could be “gained” from lying about being raped—or lying about any number of other offenses: the exultation of control (i.e., power, dominance).

Other reasons for lying suggested by Ms. Morrisey’s own reportage are attention-seeking, self-aggrandizement, and mythomania. There have also been a number of publicized cases about false rape accusations’ being used for concealment of sexual infidelity. Two hyperlinks in this post lead to stories exemplifying this motive. Of course (and significantly), none of these motives applies exclusively to false rape claims. Besides avarice and malice, they’re common motives among false accusers (of all types). People hurt people…to hurt people. Appetites, least of all vicious ones, don’t answer to sense.

The previous post emphasized the emotional trauma of accusation, particularly false accusation, by highlighting a number of suicides reported in the news.

Suicide is a recognized consequence of bullying; name-calling and public humiliation are recognized as among the forms that bullying takes; and falsely branding someone a stalker, rapist, child abuser, or killer, for example, certainly qualifies as publicly humiliating name-calling.

Whether someone is disparaged on the playground, on Facebook, in a courtroom, or in the headlines makes absolutely no difference; the effect is the same, and it may be unbearable.

This stuff shouldn’t need to be pointed out to grown-ups. But since the fatal consequences of false accusation don’t support any dominant political agendas—and may undermine them—they’re ignored. That people are harried and hectored by lies, sometimes to death, is an inconvenient truth.

At least it is here. Many of the news clippings featured in the last post notably originate from the U.K., as do two of the clippings below. Journalism is far more balanced there, and it’s less taboo to call a jade a jade. A Jezebel reporter might denounce this as “misogynistic,” but truth isn’t misogynistic; it’s just the truth, and it doesn’t play favorites (nor should its purveyors).

This post looks at the other lethal upshot of false accusation: murder. The stories that follow are about people who existed and now do not.

The point of introducing these stories isn’t to assert incidents like these are common; the point is to reveal the emotions that are inspired by false accusations, whether by women, by men, or by mobs. It’s also to reveal their consequences…writ large and lurid. These same emotions are aroused in cops and judges no less than they are in anyone else. False accusers know what reactions they can expect, and they know how to manipulate their audience—and bending others to do their will is thrilling.

Nothing makes the emotions provoked by accusation more manifest than when accusation inspires others to beat someone to death—or set him ablaze.

This is nevertheless typically lost on reporters and their viewers and readers. The details that are stressed and eagerly sought are who got it, and how. Why, which is always the more speculative aspect, is in its broader implications the most important one, however.

Gore is sexy. It’s what gets airplay and column space. It’s an attention-grabber and a ratings booster. Nothing draws the eye like the color red.

What sensation eclipses, though, is that for every false accusation that ends in red, thousands or hundreds of thousands end in gray, an interminable state of disquiet, disease, and dolor.

*Jezebel, if I’m remembering my Bible stories right, was a mass murderer who was condemned for promoting a false dogma. (Among her victims was a man she had judicially executed.)

False Accusations and Suicide: Some Headlines about the Effects of Finger-Pointing and Legal Abuse (Culled for the Empathically Challenged)

April 14, 2015June 24, 2023Moderator 11 Comments

Since the publication of this post, the one quoted above has been deleted.

One of the stories highlighted below concerns a young man who was falsely labeled a rapist by some bullies at school. He hanged himself. He was 16. Another concerns a man who spent a year and a half in prison based on a false accusation of sexual assault (among other false accusations). While the man was behind bars, his mother killed herself, believing her son was a pimp and a rapist.

A word to the wise: Only ask a rhetorical question if you know the answer…and it favors your position.

The question posed above by the zealous, young author of Not Sorry Feminism isn’t, of course, a question at all; it’s an indictment. She means how dare anyone think false accusations happen. What problematizes the writer’s rhetorical-question-cum-admonition is that it has a very obvious answer: The reason people think false accusations “happen” (so to speak) is that they do.

(It might alternatively be asserted that no one does believe false accusations “happen,” the same way no one believes rapes “happen.” Both are acts, and both have agents. If rape happens isn’t a construction a feminist could get behind, false accusations happen shouldn’t be, either. You’re a proponent of accountability, or you’re not.)

Worse than her question’s being problematic, because answerable, is that its answer isn’t one the writer wants to hear. Motives for false accusations, including of rape, are greed, malice, bullying, vengeance, jealousy, possessiveness, attention-seeking, mental illness, and cover-up, to name a few. They’re ugly, often petty, always destructive…and they can kill.

This post surveys examples of false allegations or deadly allegations or false and deadly allegations drawn from news stories. Here’s one such:

Unlike most of the rest, the first story glossed in this hastily cobbled digital scrapbook doesn’t include a suicide or references to suicide. It’s nevertheless a good starting point, because it’s old news.

The article’s from 15 years ago. Fifteen. Significantly, though, no half-hearted sleuth would find it a challenge today to turn up commentaries on the Internet, mostly from feminist writers like the one who introduces this post, that either (1) deny such a thing ever happens or (2) deny it’s a big deal when it does happen—and deny it’s a sign that a culture of false accusation exists and has for some time. (A story so uncannily similar as to be almost identical can be found here. It appeared in The Huffington Post less than 24 months ago.)

Consider: Where would six elementary school girls and a boy get the idea of framing their gym teacher as a molester, and where would they get the impression this conduct was okay (or “cool”) or that they’d get away with it and not face dire consequences? Should we believe the notion had no cultural influences and was purely a product of these honors students’ collective wicked imagination?

For accusing their teacher of groping them, the kids were suspended for 10 days. It’s likely the most traumatic part of their punishment was being detained by police and “fingerprinted, photographed, [and] booked.” Keep this thought in mind.

Keep this quotation in mind, too: “‘When they made the charge, that’s about 80 percent of the damage to your reputation right there,’ [attorney Paul F.] Kemp said. ‘Because even if you’re found innocent, people will assume you got off on a technicality. Or that there’s something there when there’s not.’”

Editorial intrusions end here; the remainder of this post is a series of Internet clippings (linked to the “complete stories”) from which readers may draw their own conclusions about the motives and effects of accusation, bullying, and legal abuse. The author of this post would only point out before absenting himself that an accusation that may induce someone to kill him- or herself need not be of rape and that one of the suicides chronicled below is of a woman who faced being tried for falsely alleging she was sexually assaulted (“In notes left for her family, she described her overwhelming fear of giving evidence…”).

The common denominator is accusation and public scrutiny and judgment, not being accused of a particular act, per se. Zerlina Maxwell and her ilk are categorically wrong.

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here: The Hell of Legal Abuse Syndrome

April 10, 2015February 27, 2018Moderator 18 Comments

This is the third sequential post on this blog about Legal Abuse Syndrome (LAS), a condition proposed by marriage and family therapist Karin P. Huffer “that develops in individuals assaulted by ethical violations, legal abuses, betrayals, and fraud” and that’s exacerbated by “abuse of power and authority and a profound lack of accountability in our courts.” This post surveys accounts of affliction (and its sources) drawn from various websites.

abandon all hope
Editorial intrusions and commentary in this post have been kept to a minimum, but some grammatical polishing is acknowledged.

“You May Be Suffering from Legal Abuse Syndrome if You Have Been a Victim of DCF”:

I have been doing some reading on LAS (Legal Abuse Syndrome) and PTSD since I have begun to fear my own shadow. I hate the doorbell to ring. I run to the window to try to see who it might be, and rarely answer. If someone knocks on the door with any force, I am paralyzed. I do not like to answer the phone and thank God for caller ID. When I go out of the house, heaven help me if I see a child who reminds me of what we have lost. I cannot tell you the number of times I have vomited in public toilets. A police car in the rearview mirror leads to deep breathing and panic attacks. The thought of walking into a courtroom is enough to reduce me to a shaking mess. Certain names…can cause me to feel a sense of violation like no other. Sleep rarely happens and is often interrupted by nightmares, or even worse, waking and screaming for my child. No one cares; all of those I thought would protect us have not only failed us but willingly allowed misconduct and lies. Those I held in high regard due to their positions of trust and power I have found to have let their power corrupt their values and morals. Do I think I am ill? Yes, I know I am. I have a good doctor who is trying to help, a church to support me, and my husband and children who have stood by me, but I also know I will never be the same person I was. I will never trust in the “system” and have been totally disillusioned by what I always thought were my constitutional rights as an American citizen not only being disregarded but willfully being trampled on by those sworn to protect them.

“Sufferer Legal Abuse Syndrome” (MyPTSD.com):

I was just diagnosed with PTSD from a prolonged and nasty legal battle (10 years). It was my understanding that PTSD was only for vets coming back from war. I guess there are other ways to fight wars. Mine was in the courtroom trying to fight off the onslaught of unethical attorneys and judges. I believe I fought for a good cause, but it has taken its toll on me. My nerves are shot; I have anxiety from the minute I wake up until I go to bed. Thoughts of what they did and the power they had over me and my children are with me always. I want to have a life, but I still deal with the consequences every day. I feel guilty for feeling this way as there are so many other people who have been through much worse. I think the feeling of being powerless and abused by a system I had faith in has shaken my foundation. My feelings about people and the world have changed forever, and my trust level is very low. A psychologist involved in the battle betrayed me and my family with lies, along with two other professionals in this field, all my attorneys, and the judges. You might discount my viewpoint as overboard. It took a long time to see it myself, but my investigations proved correct.

“Legal Abuse Syndrome” (Caught.net):

I became depressed, physically ill, and seriously suicidal after experiencing the insanity of litigation. I lost my home and was sent to the street with nothing but the clothes on my back. Literally everything I owned was gone for several years. I fought my fight to points of exhaustion where all I could do was stare into space. Friends had left; I was emotionally isolated, and normal living activities were no longer normal. Rage doesn’t come close to describing the feelings I lived with for years. Even this is not the full story of how bad it got.

“Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Legal Abuse Syndrome”:

I was diagnosed about two years ago with LAS [Legal Abuse Syndrome]. Protracted litigation and corrupt court decisions not only exacerbated my fibromyalgia but caused me to begin a whole new set of debilitating symptoms which have rendered me unable to sleep properly, hold a job, succeed in relationships, enjoy life, maintain goals, dreams, and hope. I suffer from what I call “spinal cord attacks,” which feel like rushes of adrenaline or cortisol permeating my spine, making me feel paralyzed, causing severe pain, lasting for 30 seconds to two minutes, and resulting in complete exhaustion and distress.

My once beautiful life as a drama and music teacher, writer and producer of children’s musicals, and fledgling writer has all but vanished. I am so debilitated from extensive legal research, useless and destructive attorneys and judges, horrendous living conditions imposed upon me by corrupt judges who denied me due process, the loss of my beautiful family home to my ex (which I had been paying for but couldn’t qualify for), the purging of all my earthly belongings, a now transient lifestyle, and increasing medical problems like high blood pressure, anxiety attacks, and hopelessness.

“Massachusetts Mother Calling for Family Court Justice in Domestic Abuse Cases”:

I have missed all of my three daughters’ birthdays, first days of school, first dances, holidays, vacations, and school volunteering since 2007. My youngest daughter, Kelly, is nine. That means I have already missed out on half her life. I am not a drug addict. I am not an alcoholic. I was and still am an upstanding citizen in the community despite Attorney Arabasz and his clients’ attempts to cause deliberate and malicious harm to me. I do my best to volunteer in the community, including hospice and domestic abuse, and have won numerous awards for my volunteerism over the years, which tends to bring me a renewed sense of healing from my own traumas. My children and I cannot get back those formative years we have missed. They are gone forever, never to return. I am speechless in my ability to describe the pain and anguish I feel over this injustice alone.

Over that time, as documented through the courts, I have endured numerous, repeated, serious abuses that I have come to the court pleading for help with to no avail. I am a human being who can take being abused only for so long. I have suffered serious, repeated, unrelenting, undue stresses, many of which are criminal in nature, that have caused health issues. When the trial arrived, I prayed and hoped for justice to finally prevail for the sake of my children.

I have been severed from my children’s lives with little to no contact since August 3, 2011, and even longer since September 2007. The verdict of August 2012 from the trial was devastating to me and I worried about the long-term negative impact it would have on my children….

As a result, I am currently being treated for ADHD, Legal Abuse Syndrome, and trauma-related stress, and my treatment since trial has increased. Symptoms of trauma-related stress include gastrointestinal issues; anxiety and fear, especially when exposed to situations reminding me of the many repeated traumatic events; trouble sleeping; trouble eating; low energy; memory problems, including difficulty remembering aspects of the trauma; a “scattered” feeling and inability to focus on work or daily activities; emotional “numbness,” which causes me to feel withdrawn, disconnected, or different from others; and protectiveness of loved ones or fear for their safety.

I did not suffer any of these symptoms until after I married an abusive partner and endured years of abuse. I was a victim that the system failed to protect, and now I suffer greatly. I was a fantastic mother, and even the father never questioned my ability to care for or mother these children until he got what he wanted and stole financially through the divorce. However, the system has stripped away all my ability to love, nurture, and parent my three daughters who need me greatly.

The foregoing first-person accounts are hardly comprehensive; they were culled because they’re evocative. Notably, they echo numerous comments submitted by visitors to this blog, who have reported everything from homelessness and hopelessness to living “like a hamster” to contemplating suicide. Many respondents to the e-petition “Stop False Allegations of Domestic Violence” have reported the same.

The third-person account below, though it leaves the victim’s torment to the reader’s imagination, is certainly no less sympathetic than those above. It speaks, particularly, to how blind or indifferent others may be to the effects of legal abuse.

“How academia betrayed and continues to betray Aaron Swartz”:

As news spread last week that digital rights activist Aaron Swartz had killed himself ahead of a federal trial on charges that he illegally downloaded a large database of scholarly articles with the intent to freely disseminate its contents, thousands of academics began posting free copies of their work online, coalescing around the Twitter hashtag #pdftribute.

This was a touching tribute: a collective effort to complete the task Swartz had tried—and many people felt died trying—to accomplish himself. But it is a tragic irony that the only reason Swartz had to break the law to fulfill his quest to liberate human knowledge was that the same academic community that rose up to support his cause after he died had routinely betrayed it while he was alive.

This survey concludes with an impersonal commentary from a woman who’s still embroiled in legal strife and fears the consequences of speaking about it too candidly in a public medium. She has removed herself to another state to escape a malicious accuser’s clutches but remains in the crosshairs, despite having been deprived of everything she once took for granted—including her sense of self.

“‘White Collar’ Domestic Violence Sanctioned by the State”:

The fraudulently obtained protective order is the new tool of abuse for abusers to obtain total power and control over their victims. The protective order is obtained using false allegations of domestic violence and abuse against the victim in an open court of law without due process or an evidentiary hearing. The protective order is then used as a state-sanctioned license to stalk, harass, intimidate, and continue to abuse the victim. The victim lives in constant fear that s/he will be arrested and incarcerated any time the abuser chooses to place him or her in jail. The accuser plays the victim of his or her own crime [cf. Dr. Tara Palmatier’s “Presto, Change-o, DARVO: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender”].

This is the new “white collar” form of domestic violence and abuse. It is a tactic used by both men and women to gain the upper hand in a divorce or custody battle, or to have a domestic partner simply removed from a lease and ejected from his or her own home. In the case of a victim’s terrible misfortune of coupling with a psychopath or sociopath suffering from a narcissistic or borderline personality disorder, the protective order is fraudulently obtained by means of false accusations of domestic abuse simply to gain total power and control over him or her while simultaneously inflicting emotional distress to hurt and humiliate him or her and publicly harm his or her reputation. This in and of itself allows the abuser to compromise the integrity of his or her victim with a permanent public record, thereby impugning the victim’s character. This not only serves to satisfy the malicious intent of the abuser; it also renders the victim helpless in any and all attempts to plead innocence and defend him- or herself to law enforcement and the courts.

Acts of malicious intent by way of falsifying police reports, manufacturing evidence, and committing perjury in a court of law—all crimes at a felony offense level—go criminally unprosecuted because restraining order courts are of a civil nature, held by low level officials with no due process. Any attempts by the victim to file complaints or police reports of his or her own are useless and futile attempts at self-protection, because probable cause cannot be proven; a victim simply cannot prove with tangible evidence the intent or motive of the abuser. All attempts by the victim to file complaints or police reports to protect him- or herself do is embolden and provoke the abuser to escalate the abusive behavior toward the victim to the point that the victim cannot attend school, go to work, or even leave his or her own home out of living in a constant state of fear that the abuser will have him or her arrested on a whim.

Without due process and without protection, the victim is ultimately under the total power and control of the abuser. Law enforcement and the legal system (the courts, the judges, the attorneys) are all simply pawns in the sociopath’s sick game of abuse of process. A carefully constructed web of lies is in itself so complex that the victim is powerless to prove s/he is the victim of abuse, not its perpetrator. Over time, after the victim is professionally and academically destroyed, publicly humiliated, and ultimately alienated and completely isolated from his or her community, from friends, and even from family, s/he begins to doubt him- or herself and eventually loses all sense of human identity. Many victims commit suicide as a result of the abuse.

*See also this post about the death of Christopher Mackney, which contains links to his suicide note: “First Amendment Rights from Beyond the Grave: Defense of a Suicide’s Publication of His Final Words by the Randazza Legal Group.” The circumstances that conduced to Mr. Mackney’s taking his life are chronicled in a forthcoming book by investigative journalist Michael Volpe, which is titled, Bullied to Death: The Chris Mackney Story.

Kangaroo Court: The Australian Government Acknowledges “Abuse of Process,” so Why Doesn’t Ours?

April 9, 2015August 4, 2023Moderator 4 Comments

The previous post introduced Legal Abuse Syndrome (LAS), a condition posited by marriage and family therapist Karin P. Huffer and defined as a form of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). “It is a personal injury that develops in individuals assaulted by ethical violations, legal abuses, betrayals, and fraud,” Dr. Huffer explains. “Abuse of power and authority and a profound lack of accountability in our courts have become rampant, compounding an already stressful experience.” This post catalogs types of legal abuse that exemplify the “ethical violations…betrayals, and fraud” to which Dr. Huffer refers.

Australians aren’t distinguished for their refinement. I like them, though.

Plenty have plainly spent too much time with the sheep—I think we have an Aussie to thank for the Creation Museum, which features dinosaurs cavorting in the Garden of Eden—but Australians tend to tell it straighter than Americans do; they’re frank.

Maybe it comes of living in an equatorial zone that forbids the Puritan dress code.

I learned last week that they have a “Law Reform Commission.” The Australian government, like governments everywhere else, may be slow to acknowledge abusive laws, but at least it acknowledges laws are abused.

In America, feminism (not the equity-for-all kind but the men-suck kind) holds sway. There’s no shortage of conscientious objectors who feel abuses of statutory processes that were conceived to curb violence against women are out of control, but their voices are effectively subdued. To express a quibble is to be immediately beset by frenzied piranha.

So I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the Australian Law Reform Commission openly acknowledges “false or misleading evidence about family violence” and “vexatious applications in protection order proceedings”—which it wouldn’t do if these violations weren’t a lot more common than Americans like to pretend they are.

(Vexatious, incidentally, means “intended to harass.” It’s a warm-and-fuzzy euphemism for intended to destroy.)

The commission predictably wimps out and concludes that “existing measures [in Australia] to sanction persons who give false evidence of family violence are sufficient,” but it does indicate that it finds “merit in allowing courts to order that a person who has brought several vexatious applications or cross applications for protection orders against the same person without reasonable grounds may not make further applications except with the leave of the court.”

This absurdly says that even if a person is repeatedly found to abuse process, the worst consequence s/he should face is having to ask special permission before doing it again. What makes the commission’s comments significant, however, is that they actually own that there are people who exploit court process to hurt others and that they may do it over and over.

In America, you’re not allowed to acknowledge this—or even to allege process is abused to any degree worthy of note. To criticize legal processes instituted to protect women means you think women are “disposable.” The indictment is a non sequitur, but it works. It shuts most politicians up. It shuts most professors and journalists up, too. Never mind that each of “several vexatious applications” for restraining orders or assertions of “false or misleading evidence about family violence” may (permanently) associate the accused with “stalking,” “violent threat,” “assault,” “child abuse,” “molestation,” or even “rape.” Remarkably, there are influential people who briskly opine in venerable media that being accused of these acts, including rape, is no big deal.

(What do you wanna bet it hasn’t happened to them?)

It’s a big enough deal that some people never recover, and some kill themselves (or others). Most survive and persist, but this isn’t the same thing as recovering; they may never be “whole” again. One false accusation that sticks can unravel a life…and the accusation doesn’t even have to stick.

Victims of legal abuse are said to be negligible by the political powers that be, however, because there are women who are battered or raped who never receive justice. Victims of legal abuse are called a “drop in the bucket” in contrast. This argument—ye olde non sequitur again—ignores (among a great many other considerations) that there are women who are battered and/or raped who are also then falsely accused by their batterers or rapists to compound the violation and conceal their crimes. In some cases, at least, feminists who deny legal abuse and its horrors abet batterers and rapists of women.

Completely lost on flatulent opinion-mongers, besides, is that falsely accusing someone of violence or one or more “violence-related” acts is an acutely personal attack that’s often committed by a trusted intimate or former intimate (a friend, for example, or a spouse, family member, or lover), and that judicial process is punishing even when no punishment is meted out. It’s dehumanizing. People’s dignity is violated, their credibility is compromised, their names are tarnished, and their trust is savaged. The scrutiny alone is traumatic—just the anticipation of it is. Regardless of the court’s judgment, an entire network of relationships may be trashed. Members become invested in one side or the other, and no one backs down. Even if the truth emerges and frauds are exposed, apologies and reconciliations may be rare and grudging.

It’s not called “adversarial process” for nothing.

Legal gamesmanship, what’s more, runs the gamut, and this, too, is significant among the Australian Law Reform Commission’s observations. It includes false or misleading accusations of violence, false petitions for state protection, false cross-petitions for protection, false claims made to have restraining orders changed or revoked, etc. (fraud here, fraud there, fraud everywhere). What no one in authority wants to concede is that if the laws make it easy and attractive to lie impulsively and hurtfully, people will lie impulsively and hurtfully.

One of my favorite phrases in the English language is shit for brains when it’s pronounced in an Australian accent. It never fails to make me smile.

What the Australian Law Reform Commission’s remarks make clear is that any shit for brains should recognize that a whole lot of fraud is committed in these volatile yet superficial court procedures that are often started and finished in minutes but whose consequences, irrespective of rulings, are nevertheless extensive, lasting, and crushing.

A Word on Restraining Order Statistics and the Rate of False Restraining Orders

March 23, 2015June 21, 2023Moderator 5 Comments

I responded to a paper published last year by law professor Kelly Behre, who took umbrage that so-called FRGs (father’s rights groups) were promulgating the statistic that 80% of restraining orders were frivolous or false. This conjectural statistic (60 to 80%) was, I believe, postulated by Save Services based on its studying available information, which is scant. I don’t know that the estimate is unimpeachable, but I don’t believe its authors ever asserted it was conclusive.

Speaking conclusively about figures like this is impossible. Even estimates of how many restraining orders are issued every year in the United States is speculative (and informed guesses I’ve read range from 900,000 to two or three million).

The posited “80%” statistic was seized upon by critics of the restraining order process and bruited broadly on the Internet. I published it myself, and this blog, accordingly, was cited in Prof. Behre’s paper as the product of an “FRG.” It’s actually the product of a single tired and uninspired man who knows that false accusations are made.

Is the statistic wrong? Who knows. Who can say, even, what such a statistic purports to refer to? Does it mean most restraining order petitions are false? Does it mean most temporary restraining orders are dismissed as insufficiently founded? Or does it mean most restraining orders that are finalized have bogus grounds?

There are three phases to the process. A petitioner files an application, which may be approved by a judge or may not be. If it’s approved (ex parte), a temporary order is issued. This order is then supposed to be subjected to review by another judge before being affirmed and made “permanent.” (The word permanent is misleading. A “permanent” order typically has a duration of one year—though, to compound the confusion, some orders may actually be permanent and never expire. What isn’t misleading is that the public record of a restraining order is permanent.)

Three phases: application, temporary order, “permanent” order—got that?

What people invested in exposing this travesty of justice must understand is that it’s possible an unknown (and significant) number of applications for restraining orders are rejected at the outset. Their petitioners are refused. Is this number recorded someplace? Maybe, maybe not. We’re a federation of states, and every one of those states has its own budget, recordkeeping practices, and priorities.

Perhaps even its individual courthouses do.

Putting aside the fact that the number of applications that are rejected may not be recorded, there’s also the question of how many orders are preliminarily approved by the court and then dismissed on review.

I recently quoted a statistic reported in The Denver Post: “In fiscal 1998, about 18,000 temporary and 3,300 permanent domestic-violence-related restraining orders were issued in Colorado counties.” This statistic itself suggests that over 80% of restraining orders are determined to be frivolous, flimsy, or false. It says that of some 18,000 initially approved (i.e., temporary) restraining orders, only a fractional 3,300 were found meritorious on review.

It says the “80%” statistic is, in one sense at least, right on the money, if not conservative.

If comprehensive statistics for all courts were available that showed how many restraining orders were petitioned, how many of those petitions were rejected outright, and how many of those petitions were rejected on review, the proper statistic for restraining orders determined to be unfounded or indefensible by the court might prove to be in the 90th-percentile range.

And that’s ignoring that a goodly number (and maybe a majority) of the restraining order petitions that “pass muster” and are affirmed by judges may themselves be based partly or wholly on BS claims.

Even what “false” may mean in respect to restraining order allegations is ambiguous. Does “false” mean misrepresentative of the truth, i.e., misleading? Does it mean inclusive of true and falsified allegations? Or does it mean fabricated wholesale, i.e., purely and maliciously untrue?

James Thurber: “It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”

More on False Accusation Culture: A Memoir That Exemplifies how False Accusations Are Motivated by “Mass Panic”

March 8, 2015July 1, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

Meredith Maran, in writing about falsely accusing her father of molesting her, has been lauded for her bravery, compassion, and honesty by no lesser literary lights than Anne Lamott, Elizabeth Loftus, and Michael Chabon. One must wonder, however, whether a memoir by her father about the torment of being falsely accused and alienated from his grandchildren, particularly if Ms. Maran had maintained her story of abuse, would have received the same sympathetic interest, never mind the same critical acclaim.

Thanks to how Google News is prioritizing its returns for the search term “false accusations,” I came across a Salon.com interview the other day (published in 2010) that speaks significantly to how false claims of abuse, even “false memories” of abuse, can be socially coerced. What it relates exemplifies why how we talk about violence is a very big deal.

More than 20 years ago, Meredith Maran falsely accused her father of molestation. That she came to believe such a thing was possible reveals what can happen when personal turmoil meets a powerful social movement. In her book My Lie: A True Story of False Memory (the introduction of which is excerpted on Salon), Maran recounts the 1980s feminist-inspired campaign to expose molestation, which hit feverish levels in 1988 with the book The Courage to Heal. As an early reporter on the story, Maran observed family therapy sessions, interviewed molesters, and steeped herself in cases where abuse clearly took place. Meanwhile, she divorced her husband and fell in love with a woman who was also an incest survivor. Maran began having nightmares about her own molestation and soon what had been a contentious relationship with her father turned into accusations of unspeakable crimes. Eventually, she came to realize the truth. She was the person who had done wrong.

Toward the end of her memoir, her father asks her, “What I really want to know is how the hell you could have thought that of me.”

Ms. Maran tells Salon reporter Michael Humphrey that she was a thrall of “mass hysteria” (of “mind control” or “brainwashing”).

I was working as a feminist journalist, writing exposés of child sexual abuse, trying to convince the world that incest was more than a one-in-a-million occurrence. In the process, I convinced myself that my father had molested me. After five years of incest nightmares and incest workshops and incest therapy, I accused my father, estranging myself and my sons from him for the next eight years.

In the early 1990s the culture flipped, and so did I. Across the country, falsely accused fathers were suing their daughters’ incest therapists. Falsely accused molesters were being freed from jail—and I realized that my accusation was false. I was one of the lucky ones. My father was still alive, and he forgave me.

The early ’90s, coincidentally, was when restraining orders entered full swing, and the Violence Against Women Act emerged—and allegations of “epidemic violence,” largely from feminist quarters, have never broken stride since.

Ms. Maran’s memoir presents a case study in the coercive effects of rhetoric, especially when it’s backed by widely embraced “social science.”

In 2007, I was out for a walk with someone I wasn’t even that close to. She asked me if I’d ever done anything I was ashamed of and had never forgiven myself for. And without hesitation I said, yeah, when I was in my 30s I accused my father of molesting me, and then I realized it wasn’t true. She stopped walking and stood still, just staring at me and she said, “The same exact thing happened to me.” When I came home from that hike I started calling people I had known back then and speaking to some of the therapists I had seen during that period. With the exception of my ex-lover, every other person I talked to who had accused her father in the ’80s and early ’90s now believed she had been wrong.

[…]

It really shocked me, I must say, to see how much influence the external had on the internal. That the most intimate emotions and relationships can be so affected by the dominant paradigm.

Today’s “dominant paradigm” (a.k.a. dogma) is that accusers who allege abuse are telling it straight, especially if the accusers are female and they’re alleging violence. Conscientious voices continue to meet with vehement hostility, even for making the mild (and very reasonable) suggestion that allegations shouldn’t be treated as facts.

[T]he statement of accusation is all it takes to put the wheels in motion. Either legally or in your family. One thing I’ve learned is the relevance of the phrase “the perfect storm.” Not only for me, but for a lot of women I know who made these false accusations, it was very much a social phenomenon. Metaphorically, everything we were saying was true. But there was a confusion between a metaphor and a fact. And it was a highly relevant difference.

Put plainly, the difference Ms. Maran remarks is between real and fictional—a “highly relevant difference” indeed. So much of the rhetoric that continues to exert a governing influence on social perspectives mirrors what we “want to think” or what we’ve been motivated or conditioned to think (what it’s “right” or politically correct to think). There’s a broad and vocal contingent of “true believers” who are deeply invested in the notion that “violence is epidemic” and that “victim’s” needs should preempt all other concerns, including justice and the false implication of the innocent.

Mr. Humphrey’s interview with Ms. Maran ends on a chilling statement that’s worthy of reflection, coming as it does from a woman who’s written a book acknowledging that people may be led to falsely accuse and that she herself was “brainwashed” into doing so.

In the middle of the book, while you are still deeply in the mind-set of being molested, there’s a notion you agree with that if one innocent man goes to prison, but it stops a hundred molesters, it’s worth it. Do you still agree with that notion?

I’m fairly close to a man still in prison, and really believe he is innocent. I know how he’s suffered. I know he’s 80 years old and in ill health. He’s spent 20 years in prison, for no reason. If every elementary school child is now taught how to protect themselves from sexual abuse—and even more to the point, some father or preschool teacher who feels the urge to molest a child will be inhibited from doing so because they think there are guys still in jail for doing that—but innocent people are in prison, do I have to make that choice? It is a Sophie’s choice kind of thing. Would I allow an innocent man to sit in prison if it meant keeping children safe?

So would you make that choice?

I think so.

In closing, appreciate these facts: (1) A false accuser isn’t pilloried but praised for “bravely” admitting the truth years later, years during which someone else—may we also say “bravely”?—lived with the isolating stigma of her accusations; and (2) the same false accuser who “saw the light” nevertheless opines that other people’s lives are arbitrarily expendable for a virtuous cause.

If these compound horrors weren’t bad enough, the view the memoirist expresses is generally shared and, for all intents and purposes, held by our own “justice system” (consequently).

The question the interviewer poses isn’t a “Sophie’s choice.” The character in William Styron’s novel is forced by a Nazi soldier to choose which of her children should be allowed to live. The choice wasn’t a moral one. Opting to punish people for crimes they haven’t committed to make “object lessons” of them against their will decidedly is.

Whether it’s “worth it” to expediently destroy some other person’s life for the betterment of society isn’t a decision anyone gets to make but the owner of that life—and how dare anyone presume otherwise.

*The definition of expedient in my dictionary (World Book) includes this model sentence: “No honest judge would make a decision that was expedient rather than fair and just.”

Talking Back to Restraining Orders Online: What the First Amendment Says Is Okay

March 1, 2015June 24, 2023Moderator 22 Comments

“If someone puts a restraining order on you, can you write about it online?”

—Google query that brought a visitor here recently

Here are some other search terms that led people to this site last week: “lying to obtain a restraining order,” “false cps reports perjury,” “fake rape restraining order,” “restraining order lie,” “falsely accused of molestation […],” “ex lied on order of protection,” “what happens when a bogus pfa is filed on a police officer[?],” “protection order fraud,” “old restraining order keeping me from coaching,” “ex-girlfriend lied about domestic violence and i lost my career.”

You see why people might be inspired to talk back.

I was introduced last year to how the constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech is qualified. In Chan v. Ellis, an appeal before the Georgia Supreme Court that was brought to my attention, First Amendment privileges are spelled out by two prominent authorities who offered opinions on the case, Profs. Eugene Volokh and Aaron Caplan (the latter a former staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union). Their amicus brief opposed the trial court’s issuance of a permanent protection order against Matthew Chan (the appellant) on the grounds that the order exerted an unconstitutional “prior restraint” on Mr. Chan’s lawfully writing about his accuser, Linda Ellis, a self-styled motivational speaker/writer whom Mr. Chan had criticized as a “copyright troll” (someone who threatens to sue people for unsanctioned use of his or her original material).

The First Amendment protects the right to speak about people, so long as the speech does not fall into an established First Amendment exception (such as those for defamation or for true threats). This includes the right to speak about private figures, especially when they do something that others see—rightly or wrongly—as unethical.

Succinctly, the First Amendment licenses a person to write about another, including critically, but not necessarily to write to him or her. In other words, you can say things about a person that s/he doesn’t necessarily want to hear; if you say those things to the person, you could be lawfully restrained by the court from continuing.

About a person is okay; to a person may not be.

Qualifiers are that what you say about someone publicly must be true (you can’t lie about someone, i.e., defame him or her), you must not infringe upon his or her privacy (e.g., by revealing his or her medical history), and you must not threaten him or her (i.e., don’t say, “I’m coming to kill you”).

Otherwise, the Constitution says you’re good.

Can a trial court judge, though, blow off the Constitution and come down on you for criticizing someone who obtained a restraining order against you (even by fraud)? Yes, s/he can. Rightly or wrongly, it happens, and lawful has nothing to do with it. Restraining order rulings and those peripheral to them are largely about spin.

(What do I mean by spin? Literally, words—actually expressed or merely alleged—can be represented to and by the court as “harassment,” which may satisfy a state’s statutory definition of “stalking,” which definition may imply sexual molestation. Alleged statements, then, may effectively implicate someone as a sex offender on public record. I wish I were kidding, but I emphatically am not. In a case I recently reviewed, the defendant was said to have committed harassment by “facial gestures.” This exemplifies spin.)

This writer’s thoughts are these:

If you’re presently under a restraining order, exercise informed caution, because anything you say publicly that can be construed as “harassing” may well be interpreted that way by a lower tier judge (these guys are answerable to no one; they do what they want). These posts are about people who were issued restraining orders or show cause orders simply because they wrote about someone: “Restraining Orders and the First Amendment: A Female Blogger’s Successful Appeal of a Restraining Order That Labeled Her a ‘Cyber-Stalker’” and “The Use of Restraining Orders to Bully Women: Jenny’s Story.” Is a judge likely to throw you in jail for merely speaking about someone? No, but there’s no surefire guarantee. What’s strictly lawful and what’s possible are two different things.
There are constitutional grounds to appeal a judgment against you for simply writing about someone. The questions to ask yourself are: How committed are you? Are you up for more court drama? The Constitution is on your side, but reversing a bad judgment requires appealing it to a higher court.
If a restraining order against you has expired, and what you write isn’t false, invasive, or threatening, then you have a strong basis for opposing any further legal action taken against you so long as what you write is about your former accuser and not to him or her (or anyone associated with him or her).

I was sued for writing about someone, and I wasn’t trying to “tell my side”; I wanted to terminate a nasty hoax that had already consumed years of my life. I speculated about my accuser’s motives, and I used a lot of names. I also reported what I knew to be misconduct and applied to a distant family member of my accuser’s (a pastor) to help me effect a resolution. Had I only written in a blog and had I confined what I wrote to facts that couldn’t be represented as invasive or libelous, the court may not have found for my accuser, particularly if I’d had a lawyer to speak for me.

The point of this post is to inform you of your legal rights, and to assert that purveyors of the truth should never have to hide or censor themselves. This is the United States of America, not North Korea. It is not the point of this post, however, to downplay the eagerness of the American court system to deny citizens their rights. If judges weren’t ready and willing to violate citizens’ constitutional entitlements, this blog wouldn’t exist in the first place.

“She Said That I Had Been Burning Him Intentionally and That I Had Kidnapped Him”: Aaron’s Story of Restraining Order Abuse

February 27, 2015February 25, 2018Moderator 2 Comments

The account below was recently submitted as a comment to BuncyBlawg.com, a site I’ve mentioned in several recent posts. Its administrator, Larry Smith, a former attorney, has been waging a one-man war on corruption excited by his relentless persecution through and by the legal system since 2011.

Aaron’s story is one of a spiteful ex-partner whose false allegations orbit popular themes: fear, emotional torment, stalking, and other (unprovable) crimes and misdemeanors that become more sensational and incriminating over time.

What makes Aaron’s story exceptional is that it has a reasonably happy ending, because the court saw through the lies.

In Aaron’s own words (lightly edited):

In my accuser’s affidavit, she repeatedly used “deathly afraid” and spoke of the medications she was on due to three years of stalking by me, vicious verbal abuse of herself and her family by me, and my stalking her where she works, shops, and lives. She claimed to have video surveillance of me following her into a grocery store. She even claimed to have a police report where I was “caught” sitting behind her home at 10 at night, etc.

She was granted an ex parte restraining order lasting two years.

Of course, none of it was true, none of her evidence existed, and the family that I had supposedly verbally abused didn’t even come to court. There was no police report, nor was there a surveillance video, because I didn’t have time to subpoena it; and had she brought the video, it would’ve shown her following me into the store she knew I was going to be at because I told her I was going to get groceries there at an exchange of our son. Had this video been brought to court, it would’ve conflicted with her affidavit.

On top of all of that, I brought in three copies of 40 pages that had every text message we had sent to each other for the previous two years in chronological conversation format. In these texts, two months prior she was inviting me into her home for “dessert” and asking to borrow money from me. Six months prior, she offered to loan or sell me her other car because I was having mechanical problems with my Jeep. These and other very common things. The texts also contained many instances of very immature ranting and attempts to create animosity and intensify disagreements into arguments, which I never fell for and always just said what needed to be said for our son’s sake. I never cursed or belittled her, though to someone like this the truth hurts.

After several hours, the judge shut the whole thing down, dismissed the order, and gave her a stern lecture. All this and no charge of perjury against her! One week later, she was granted an ex parte OFP on behalf of our then three-year-old son by a different judge in the same county! Same style of affidavit.

She said that I had been burning him intentionally and that I had kidnapped him.

He did have a burn about half the size of a pea on his finger, because he had touched a hot pot on the stove. I didn’t kidnap our son. She didn’t show up to pick him up! Since she was issued an OFP on behalf of our son, she was then afforded the services of a battered women’s and children’s center. She signed me up for psych evals and supervised visitation only with our son. Her instructions to law enforcement in her application were to arrest me for kidnapping and return her son to her.

Once again I proved the entire thing to be a lie. It was dismissed entirely. STILL NO CHARGES FILED AGAINST HER FOR PERJURY! Just stern words from a judge toward her and even a bit directed my way in that the two of us needed “to learn each other’s triggers and steer clear of conflict that needed to be sorted out by the courts”! I had to share custody with her for two more years and attempt to co-parent with her.

Our son is six now, and he lives with me and goes to her every other weekend. I had to use kindergarten as a guise to change our custody agreement. Although I am very thankful the courts named my home as our son’s primary residence, the court’s impotence to prosecute liars and the horrifying parenting that has to take place before they’ll change rights are despicable! I do think it is far worse to be a self-consumed person than to be a target of one, though. Karma is on our side.

This blog definitely gave me great insight into other people’s struggles outside of my own and opened my eyes to some of the types of people who abuse the system. I never could’ve imagined how easy and common it is until it happened.

If You’re Silent, You’re Guilty: Take a Page from the Feminist Playbook and Register Your Complaint

February 14, 2015August 25, 2023Moderator 16 Comments

It was impressed upon me by a new mentor—who possesses a much more practical mind than mine—that I don’t want to still be writing about this stuff when I’m old and gray (and that, besides, if I keep trying to “make a difference” by myself, “old and gray” will be just around the corner).

What these statistics reflect is that (1) confusion about restraining orders, if not fraudulent abuse of restraining orders, is epidemic; and (2) complainants of procedural abuses are intimidated into silence. No one wants to own humiliating or demonizing accusations against him or her, even if they’re false. This is, perhaps ironically, why fraudulent abuse of process continues unabated: Too few people talk back, so no one in a position to reform the status quo realizes there’s a problem in need of urgent remedy.

In the week leading up to Friday the 13th, 2015, WordPress reports that over 3,000 people visited this site (a few of them probably the same people on different days, but nevertheless…). Of that 3,000-plus, maybe 20 left comments or responded to petitions this site links to.

Maybe.

To one of the people who did submit a comment, a woman who was charged with assaulting her husband because she inadvertently scratched his arm while she was appealing to him to be nicer to her (during a verbal attack), I remarked that more people need to speak up about what they’ve been put through.

This woman, Izabella, has a restraining order against her, based on “all sorts of allegations,” that she reports her husband got to dominate and control her (to bully her, plain and simple). She says he’s never been an “involved dad” but uses their children now to “blackmail” her, because she had the temerity to “stand up to him.” The kids are pawns in a petty power game.

This is the kind of thing feminists deny happens (and adamantly deny happens to men). They insist restraining orders are there to protect women like Izabella.

Feminists are often wrong but never uncertain.

Their rigid advocacy is actually what makes scenarios like this possible, and for that reason, among others, I seldom find cause to sing their praises (though I’m not closed to the idea). One of their constant refrains, however, that victims will only speak up if they feel confident they’ll be believed, is right (and it’s why restraining orders exist to begin with).

Victims of procedural abuses need to speak up so that others will.

Respondents to this blog don’t need to identify themselves; they don’t even have to provide their email addresses if they don’t want to, though that information isn’t made public and allows them to be notified of others’ responses to their comments. It also lets them have dialogues among themselves.

Provided everyone plays nice, this writer is glad to take a backseat. (He’s been informed that nothing anyone else says is his responsibility, anyway.)

“Outing” yourself isn’t necessary, per se, to motivate change. But the public only understands what it sees and hears. If it sees and hears nothing, then that’s exactly what it will understand.

Inciting Violence: If Lawmakers Require a Compelling Motive for Restraining Order Reform, How about This One?

February 12, 2015June 25, 2023Moderator 48 Comments

I examined a case, recently, of a man’s committing murder hours after being accused to the police. My familiarity with the case was, admittedly, shallow; I only had what was reported to go on (and that from a single, “raw” source). I have, however, heard from scores of people who’ve been accused—or scorned for telling the truth—in drive-thru restraining order proceedings, and expressions of fury have been more than a few.

This week, I shared an email by a highly educated, professional woman and mother of three young children that expresses an “almost homicidal enmity” catalyzed by procedural abuses. Note the elevated diction she uses to describe an impulse to bash, throttle, and gouge. Does her vaulted language indicate she “doesn’t really mean it”? No, it indicates how alien rage is to her character. It indicates she’s someone who shouldn’t have cause to feel this way.

Consider: How is it the police and the courts recognize the propensity for violence that interpersonal conflicts mediated by the “justice system” may arouse, but lawmakers don’t? Are they that “in the dark”?

Yeah, pretty much.

If you get into a spat with your neighbor, and the police intervene, parties are separated into corners. In court, complainants even merely of “fear” may be shielded by law officers in anticipation of a judicial ruling. It’s understood that emotions run hot in this theater.

Why, then, is it not appreciated that when the basis for rulings is false, the risk of violence is not only higher but infinite?

We like our games, and we like our fictions about how people should be and should feel and should react even if you trash their lives maliciously. Hey, we’re disposed to remind, it’s the law.

All well and good until somebody gets an ax in the ear—an edgy remark, maybe; honesty often strikes us that way (i.e., like an ax in the ear).

The wonder is that more people who lie to the courts don’t meet premature ends—or at least sustain some anatomical remodeling. False accusations, which have inspired a great deal of sententious deliberation in recent months, don’t just “discomfort” people or make them “justifiably [and transiently] angry.” At the risk of being edgy again: People who haven’t been falsely accused in a legal procedure don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. I was collegiately trained as a literary analyst—I’ve studied and taught Victorian literature—and I’m normally more disciplined in my remarks, but this subject rebukes gentility.

Liars maim. That they do it with words in no way mitigates the brutality of the act or its consequences.

One would think that as people mature and progress through life, that they would stop behaviors of their youth. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Sadly, adults can be bullies, just as children and teenagers can be bullies. While adults are more likely to use verbal bullying as opposed to physical bullying, the fact of the matter is that adult bullying exists. The goal of an adult bully is to gain power over another person, and make himself or herself the dominant adult. They try to humiliate victims, and “show them who is boss” (BullyingStatistics.org, “Adult Bullying”).

StopBullying.gov defines bullying as including name-calling, taunting, threatening, spreading rumors about someone, and embarrassing someone in public. Falsely labeling someone a stalker, child abuser, violent danger, or sexual deviant in one or more public trials whose findings are impressed on the target’s permanent record and are accompanied by menacing threats (if not immediate punishment) plainly qualifies. Among identified effects of bullying are suicide (“bullycide”) and violence, including murder. “Extreme emotional disturbance” is a defense for murder in some states (a finding that doesn’t excuse the act but does lighten the sentence), and a related murder defense is “provocation.”

Sure, character assassination is bloodless. What of it? If I circulate lies about someone and s/he snaps, I’m a bully, and I had it coming. Few people would say otherwise.

Ah, but if I lie and use the law as my medium to insult, demean, badger, intimidate, or otherwise persecute—hey, that’s different. I’m the “good guy.”

So suck it. And keep on sucking it, because the public record says my lies are the truth. Neener-neener.

A system that represents its purpose to be the curtailment of violence shouldn’t be promoting it by pandering to bullies, even “unofficially,” and its officers shouldn’t be serving as those bullies’ lieutenants and enforcers. If the system makes it easy to lie about and humiliate people, doesn’t hold liars accountable, and furthermore punishes the falsely accused based on lies, then it’s promoting violence.

This shouldn’t require social science research to corroborate. It shouldn’t even require this analyst’s observation.

“On the Receiving End of a Sociopath’s Lies”: A Professional Mom’s Story of Restraining Order Abuse

February 10, 2015August 14, 2023Moderator 8 Comments

The following account is reproduced almost verbatim from an email of recent vintage. Its writer is a professional woman and single mother of three with whom I corresponded last year while she was embroiled in strife—legal, medical, and emotional (a synergy of torments that’s been reported here before). The capsule version of her story is that she was in an abusive relationship (including violently abusive), sought a restraining order, which was dismissed on appeal, and then was issued an order petitioned by her abuser, which she reports was based on fraud, and which was nevertheless upheld despite her appealing it. She brought criminal charges, also. Her abuser smoothly extricated himself from those, too. The victim of assault is the one with the “restraining order” on her permanent record. She asked that I not use her name because she’s “terrified of the possibility of repercussions.”

In her own words, which more poignantly express the psychic trauma of procedural abuses than any I’ve ever read:

My active involvement with my sociopath has, mercifully, ended.

[H]e refused to accept a plea deal, he took his assault case to a jury trial, and he was found not guilty by a jury of his peers. His lies were, apparently, more believable than my truth, or, best case, the jurors didn’t really believe him but couldn’t find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Either way, it doesn’t matter. I’ve seen enough of the court system to learn that the truth is completely immaterial, and that the officers of the court will consistently choose the “easy” ruling over the one that is true. If the matter before them requires some thought, some extrapolation, some reading between the lines, and/or some backbone, forget it. The truth will be jettisoned faster than a grenade with its pin pulled.

I don’t really know how to describe how profoundly my brushes with domestic abuse/restraining order abuse/generalized legal abuse have affected me. In a few short months, a year will have passed since the criminal trial against my abuser took place. Four years will have passed since the whole odyssey began on Easter of 2011, when I walked into the police station and reported my abuser’s attack after agonizing overnight about whether or not I should do so. Imagine that—agonizing overnight about whether or not to report a crime! On some level, I must have known even then how very awry it all could go.

Let me just attempt to put this into perspective: I have lived through my parents’ divorce. I have boarded an Amtrak train headed for New Orleans at 16 years old in an effort to escape a miserable childhood. I have been scarred by the shame of being a high school dropout and then gone on to receive a college education. I have experimented with more drugs than I can count on two hands. I have traveled all over Europe with little more than a backpack and a few pfennigs. I have been robbed at gunpoint while working third shift in a Shell-Mart in Anniston, Alabama. I have scuba-dived off the coast of Honduras. I have watched my stepmother fight to regain pulmonary function after she was stabbed by a purse-snatching punk in the alley behind her home in Washington, D.C., only to watch her die an agonizing death from lung cancer fifteen years later. I have held a lion cub in my arms. I have lain helplessly in a hospital bed as not one, not two, but three premature babies were whisked from my body and transferred straight into the NICU. I have survived breast cancer, and then my mother’s untimely death from a hospital-acquired infection four months after my diagnosis. I have been sliced and diced and blasted by radiation. I have been exposed to, and treated for, tuberculosis. I have lived through bacterial meningitis and undergone a blood patch procedure after a botched spinal tap. I have been resuscitated with Narcan after being given too much IV narcotic during an acute episode of kidney stones. I have skydived over the Newport, Rhode Island coastline. I have loved multiple dogs and cats and then held them in my arms when it was their time to leave this earth. I have fought for my children and for myself against a relentlessly bitter spouse during a contentious, protracted divorce.

Not one of those things has affected me as deeply as being on the receiving end of a sociopath’s lies, and the legal system’s subsequent validation of those lies. There is no “coming out the other side” of a public, on-the-legal-record character assassination. It gnaws at me on a near-daily basis like one of those worms that lives inside those Mexican jumping beans for sale to tourists on the counters of countless cheesy gift shops in Tijuana.

I have sort of moved on; I mean, what else can one do, particularly when one has young children? But the horror, outrage, shame, and, yes, fury engendered by being wrongly accused by a perpetrator, and then having that perpetrator be believed, chafes at me constantly. Some things born of irritation and pressure are ones of beauty, like a pearl, or a diamond, but not this. This is a stoma on one’s soul—it never heals, it’s always chapped and raw, and if you’re not careful, it can leak and soil everything around it.

These days, when sleep escapes me, which seems to be fairly frequently, I often relive the various court hearings associated with this shit show. One is the court hearing for the restraining order that my abuser sought against me (and which was granted) based on his completely vague, bullshit story that he felt “afraid” of me—this from the beast that had assaulted me on numerous occasions, slashed my tires, and had a documented history of abusing previous girlfriends. Another is his trial for assault and battery, during which I was forced to undergo a hostile, nasty, and innuendo-laced cross-examination by his scumbag defense attorney in front of a courtroom full of strangers. But the hearing that really gnaws at me and fills me with an almost homicidal enmity for the judge overseeing it is the one where I was requesting a restraining order against my abuser, this after a particularly heinous assault in the days following my cancer diagnosis and my partial mastectomy.

That judge apparently believed my abuser’s bald-faced, self-serving, and absurdly improbable lies over my detailed, accurate, and horrific account of his behavior immediately following my surgery. That judge believed that a well-dressed, employed, and reasonably intelligent woman would drag her ass to court a week after a life-threatening diagnosis and major surgery just to harass her blameless ex. My memory of the surreal, humiliating, and completely unexpected ruling that day, made even more galling by the judge’s proclamation that he found the defendant to be “more credible” than me, is as grievously harrowing today as it was then.

To say that I feel indignant about it would be an understatement. Take indignation, add a dollop of pain, some hefty pinches of fear, embarrassment, and hopelessness, and a heaping dose of fury, and you’ve got a toxic mix of emotions that, if I don’t actively squelch them whenever they surface, could blow the top of my skull clean off. No amount of therapy can mitigate this particular affront; I’ve learned that the best I can hope for is some measure of containment. Kind of like radioactive waste.

I will have that prick’s bogus restraining order on my record today, tomorrow, next week, and on and on into perpetuity. I am a licensed professional whose employers require a full background check prior to being hired. I honestly don’t know how that restraining order was missed by the company that my most recent employer contracted to perform my pre-employment vetting. I live with the ever-present dread that someday, someone will unearth the perverse landmine that my abusive ex planted in my legal record, and that dread hasn’t lessened one whit since the day the restraining order was granted.

I understand that the existence of a past restraining order can be a valuable red flag for the police when dealing with domestic abusers and stalkers. Most domestic abusers are repeat offenders, so prior bad acts can help to establish a pattern that law enforcement should be aware of (though, confoundingly, these same bad acts are not admissible during any trial). Even though I’m not necessarily comfortable with the existence of a permanent registry of all restraining orders—both those that are sought and those that are actually granted (which, as you know, is what currently exists)—what I’m not comfortable with is that this information is available not just to the police, not just to other governmental agencies, but to the public at large! My height and weight taken while at the doctor’s office are protected by law. A hospital cannot disclose if I was treated there for a sore throat. But an inflammatory, defamatory, embarrassing, unsubstantiated, and oftentimes false restraining order affidavit can be obtained by whoever strolls into a courthouse and requests a copy from the clerk.

I don’t believe this registry will ever be abolished, because restraining order abuse isn’t “sexy” and no one thinks it could ever happen to her, but can we at least limit who can access this information and the circumstances under which they can access it? It’s mind-boggling to me. It’s just so goddamn devastating to the people who are unfairly stigmatized, and, call me pessimistic, but I don’t think these casualties will ever have a voice.

[Today] I’m working full-time at a job that I basically enjoy, and my three children are flourishing. I no longer feel that I am defined by my intensely negative experiences with my abuser and with the legal system, or that my life is being hijacked on a daily basis. I go days at a time without any of this crossing my mind. To say that I have “gotten over it,” though, would be a lie. A piece of me was lost because of this, and an emotional fissure was left behind, that, from what I can tell, simply cannot be fixed or ignored. My only succor is my halfhearted hope that karma is, indeed, a bitch.

Not All Feminists Are Women, but All Feminists Are Responsible for Why False Accusations Are Rampant and Why They Work

January 16, 2015February 9, 2018Moderator 2 Comments

Feminist lobbying is to blame for the injustice of restraining order and related laws and policies. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

False accusations shouldn’t work, but they do—commonly, and not uncommonly to devastating effect.

That’s thanks to feminist crusaders, who may or may not represent Women, and who may or may not be women. This clarification isn’t intended for men who’ve been abused by court process; they don’t have any problem criticizing feminists, whatever form they come in.

Women, however, do—even women who’ve been abused by court process themselves. The clarification is for them.

Consider:

(1994) “Hi, Senator. This is Polly Wannacracker of COMA, the Consortium Opposing Male Aggression. I’m calling to share some startling statistics about violence, violence, and more violence. May I forward our research findings to your office?”

(1998) “Hi, Senator. This is Polly Wannacracker of COMA, the Consortium Opposing Male Aggression. I’m calling to share some more startling statistics about violence, violence, and more violence—also to tell you about the exciting progress we’ve made toward alerting the public to the horrors of domestic abuse. Of course, nothing is ever enough when the stakes are this high!”

(2005) “Hi, Senator. This is Polly Wannacracker of COMA, the Consortium Opposing Male Aggression. How are you? How’s your wife? Oh, Bob, you kidder! We’ve so appreciated the support you’ve shown our cause over the years. Ha, you know me too well! Yes, I was of course calling to share some further startling statistics about violence, which, as you know, is epidemic, epidemic, epidemic….”

The allegory may be corny, but you get the point. This is how legislation is prompted, and support for it solidified and maintained. Names change; the message doesn’t.

Money has steadily aggregated to representatives of feminist causes over the decades, and this money has been used to secure public opinion through “information campaigns.” Too, it has inspired grant allocations to agencies of the justice system amounting to billions under the feminist motivated Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). Federal grants are also issued to promote and fund social science that validates these expenditures and laws related to violence against women, including restraining order laws. Both money and this tailored research are used to influence police policy and condition judicial priorities.

Women, defensively, may deny that members of their sex instigate malicious prosecutions more often than men or to greater effect. Who lies and why doesn’t matter, though. Judges should be vigilant against false claims, which should be detected, dismissed, and punished. Judges aren’t vigilant, false claims aren’t detected, and their claimants aren’t sanctioned. Why?

Thanks to dogged and vehement feminist politicking for the past 30 years or more, standards for substantiating claims of abuse made by restraining order petitioners are none, and penalties for lying are none. That’s because (women, please note) if the law made the standards too demanding or it threatened penalties for iffy testimony—so the dated argument runs—abused women might be afraid to come forward. They would just “suffer in silence” instead.

To ensure abused women aren’t afraid to come forward—again, so the dated argument runs—allegations must be taken on faith, and judges must have complete latitude to rule as they “think best” to protect the interests of people who can’t protect themselves.

If all this wiggle room means some people (or a lot of people) get falsely implicated…so what?

Law follows politics, and the political fix has been in for a long time. It stays in, because the architecture of laws has been concrete-reinforced. Feminist advocates continue to “monitor public policy” and to maintain their painstakingly erected social webwork. They have the money to do it. Oppositional voices are neither bankrolled nor have any political cachet. They’re not just the underdogs; they’re the usual suspects.

The above makes the below possible (comment submitted to this blog a few days ago by “Rhonda Lynn”):

I’m going to court in a few hours. I haven’t slept or eaten, and I’m a wreck. My life is over. Today.

I fled a [domestic violence] situation in another state and moved back to Washington. I bounced around a bit and finally ended up renting a room. (I’m disabled, on Social Security.) Yes, Craigslist.

I felt I asked all the right questions: Are you married? Do you live on the property? Do you own the home? Who else lives there? Both [man and woman] were surprised to learn [I was disabled, because] the other tenants renting the room across from me were disabled, as well. The man of the [tenant] couple was deaf, and I know American Sign Language.

Upon moving in, I began noticing the lies being told. The disabled couple was made to turn over their food cards. They tried with me when I signed the month-to-month agreement. I, of course, declined.

I helped with the deaf man and his developmentally disabled woman, because the female “owner” (also a lie) was overwhelmed and claimed she was sick. I cooked and cleaned (28 loads of laundry, using the washer and dryer I brought from my previous residence). I paid for Thanksgiving dinner.

Then Hell came. A friend of the female claimed the “husband” had been coming on to her…long story. The next day, it was me! […] First she tells me to move out; then she’s my friend.

The exploitation of the couple continues. The sister of the deaf man calls me [and] then calls Adult Protective Services. I make a call as well. There is an active investigation.

Ready?

The police knock on my bedroom door and give me 10 minutes to get some clothes. The “husband-owner” filed a restraining order on me!

I had a couple stay overnight for a movie marathon the night before, so I had a bit of help. The female officer verified I had a lock for my room. She advised the petitioner no one was to enter my room. She had me turn over the house key. I was in shock, crying.

As we pull away, the “husband” sends me a voice recording…saying, “See…who got [who] out of whose house? I got you out of my house! Neener Neener.”

I called the police. No good. I am not the victim. I’m the perpetrator. While on the phone…two more [messages] telling me I’m not getting any more of my stuff back, can’t come back to the house…even with an officer. “You’re burnt bitch! If the police ask where’s your stuff, I’m gonna say I don’t know.”

Then, there’s the “order.” A Domestic Violence Protection Order!

The allegations, all false…and very damning: stealing his mail, opening it and not giving it to him, going in his wallet, taking his [Social Security] card and old i.d., shoving him into a wall, causing a bruise on his back, yelling at all hours of the day and night, causing such stress on the disabled couple that they can’t eat or sleep and have PTSD episodes, calling members of the house vulgar names, texting and calling everyone while they sleep, [threatening] to burn the house down, [warning] him not to sleep, because I’d kill him. [He alleges] he is in fear of his life, afraid to take a shower or come home.

Then, lastly, the night before (when I had company), [he says] I came at him with a kitchen knife as he was getting ready for work [and that] he tried to call the cops, and I took his cell phone away. Then gave it back that morning.

Oh, my lord!

They both went on my Facebook [page]. He called me a hooker, said I would sleep with any man, and called me a horrible name. I didn’t respond, of course. Then he said I do meth, [which] he knows because I lived with him and he cleaned my room and found pipes and bags. Then she responds and says…and rigs and baggies. Now we know [they say] why she cleaned, and it explains her treatment of us. He [wrote] in another post: “I just want everyone to know she does methamphetamines.” (He is in outpatient treatment.)

[…]

I call the police…to get my stuff. I left my daughter’s ashes and pictures.

They say, “How can you prove you live there? If he doesn’t say you live there, we won’t bust down the door.”

I’M GOING TO JUMP OFF A BRIDGE.
(BUT DON’T DRIVE AND NO BUS FARE)
PLEASE. HELP ME.
RHONDA

The reader may choose to indict the male accuser in Rhonda’s story instead of the apparatus he exploited because he could, or the reader may choose to indict the apparatus itself and those who inspired it, defend it, keep it well lubricated, profit from it, and convincingly deny it’s abused.

Neither position will help Rhonda, who may be broken forever (or until she finds a bridge), but one of them may eventually make it illegal for a life to be so viciously demeaned as hers has been.

“You have bullsh*t; we have research”: The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence v. Daddy Justice (Or, Why False Allegations Are a Serious Problem)

January 13, 2015June 30, 2023Moderator 10 Comments

A correspondent, friend, and fellow blogger who’s been relentlessly attacked through the courts by a disturbed neighbor (over a period now spanning years) sent a link to the YouTube vid “The Grand Poobah” last week. It’s a 2011 “interview” between men’s rights activist Ben Vonderheide (a.k.a. “Daddy Justice”) and Rita Smith, former executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), an influential Colorado-based nonprofit.

(Note: The word in the video’s title should be spelled “poohbah,” after a comic opera character whose name was probably formed from the interjections pooh + bah. Mr. Vonderheide’s spelling it “poobah” might have been an accident—or it might have been on purpose.)

The setting of the interview, which would more aptly be called an exchange of words, isn’t clear, but it seems to be a post-conference mix-and-mingle. Mr. Vonderheide takes issue with the NCADV’s feminine bias and the propagandist tenor of the factsheets it publishes, which aren’t uncommonly cited by feminist advocates.

As the quotation in this post’s title suggests, the questions he poses to Ms. Smith aren’t favorably received. Those questions regard the NCADV’s disinclination to acknowledge maternal child abuse (Ms. Smith: “It’s not our focus of work”), as well as its denial that false accusations of domestic violence are a serious problem, false accusations that Mr. Vonderheide alleges are “promoted by [the NCADV’s] budget.”

Daddy Justice’s interview style (à la Michael Moore) is obtrusive—he’s plainly crashed the party—but while Mr. Vonderheide is necessarily assertive, the worst you could say of his questions is that they’re confrontational. They’re nevertheless called “abusive” and “aggressive,” and he’s prodded to leave.

The grudging answers his questions prompt before he’s rebuffed don’t provide much informational grist for the mill, but to his allegation that more than 80% of restraining orders are based on false accusations, Ms. Smith significantly counters that her facts say it’s only “2% of the time” (and she urges Mr. Vonderheide to “stop lying”). Later she revises her estimate of the number of false accusations from 2% to “2 to 5%,” dismissively, despite the fact that if, say, 2,000,000 restraining orders are petitioned a year (and the total may be much higher), the extra 3% translates to the invasion, disruption, and possible dismantling of 60,000 innocent defendants’ lives, besides those of their children and others peripheral to the mischief.

A mere 5% false allegation rate means the victimization of 100,000 (or many more) innocent people per year (again, not including ambient casualties). Anecdotal reports, of course—including from judges and attorneys—put the false allegation rate 6 to 18 times higher than 5% (30 to 90%). It just depends who you’re asking.

Even a ridiculously conservative false allegation rate like the posited 5% plainly recommends legislative reform, because there’s absolutely no accountability in the restraining order process. False accusers aren’t punished, and damages from false allegations aren’t remediable by lawsuit. Additional false claims can what’s more be lodged almost immediately by the same accusers using the same process. There’s no statutory ceiling on the number of orders a single complainant may apply for. (Some victims of procedural abuse report spending tens of thousands of dollars to fend off one petition only to throw up their hands—and in cases forfeit their custody entitlements—when a second comes down the pike a few months later. See here for an example.)

It should be appreciated, too, that any audit-derived estimate of the number of false allegations can only be based on allegations that are recorded as false (by “somebody”). No official false allegation rate accounts for the number of times false allegations succeed or the number of times cases based on them are simply “dismissed” without comment.

In other words, false allegations may well be rampant or “epidemic” (a word favored by anti-domestic-violence advocates), and there would be no record that says so.

The nyah-nyah from the title—“We have research; you have bullshit”—deserves reflection, also. (It doesn’t come from Ms. Smith, incidentally, but from an unidentified confederate who can’t resist a Parthian shot at Mr. Vonderheide before she and the “Grand Poobah” turn their backs to him). The “research” that advocacy groups posit is survey-based, that is, it amounts to responses to questionnaires that are administered to sample groups and then extrapolated to the population as a whole. Even this survey data we must take on faith.

Appreciate that conducting “research” of this sort depends on means, which depend on money, which is only allocated to groups like the NCADV. Consider:

The NCADV’s reported income for 2011 was $643,797, down about $70,000 from the previous year. Ms. Smith’s salary was $74,586.

Among the programs toward which the NCADV’s 2011 budget was dedicated were “General Program – provides information to educate and inform the general public about domestic violence” ($240,991), “Public Policy – works in collaboration with other national organizations to affect societal response to domestic violence through public education and coalition building, monitors federal legislation, and contacts legislators regarding domestic violence issues” ($88,808), “Membership – publishes a newsletter and provides networking opportunities for individuals and organizations interested in the work to empower battered women and their children” ($67,607), “Child custody – provides resources, referrals and support to advocates working with victims of domestic violence involved in family court cases with their abusers also provides resources to victims, attorney, and family members when family court issues are present” ($97,402).

In contrast to the social largesse enjoyed by groups like the NCADV, no money is allocated for the administration of surveys to determine, for example, incident rates of depression, drug or alcohol abuse, stress-related injuries, or suicide proximal to being falsely accused; no surveys appraise the resulting lost earnings and assets; and no surveys attempt to measure the hits taken by health insurance providers as a result. Prognosis of the long-term consequences to the welfare and life prospects of injured children is, moreover, impossible. Worse, it’s not even considered, which casts rather a long shadow on the purported “mission” of groups like the NCADV to protect kids.

Clearly, that motive is context-specific.

Daddy Justice makes up for the lack of information his “interview” questions elicit with quotations interposed between snippets of footage. Here are some of them:

“Everyone knows restraining orders…are granted to virtually all who apply.” […] “In many cases, allegations of abuse are used for tactical advantage” (Elaine Epstein, former president of the Massachusetts Bar Association).
“Restraining orders are now considered part of the ‘gamesmanship of divorce’” (Illinois Bar Journal, 2005).
“In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases” (American Journal of Public Health, May 2007).
“Women were slightly more likely than men to use one or more acts of physical aggression and to use such acts more frequently” (Psychological Bulletin, 26, No. 5, pp. 651-680).
“Leading sociologists have repeatedly found that men and women commit violence at similar rates” (Law Professor Linda Kelly, 2003).
“More women than men engage in controlling behavior in their current marriages” (Violence and Victims, 22, Issue 4, 2007).
“Of all persons who suffer injuries from partner aggression, 38% are male” (Dr. John Archer, Psychological Bulletin).
“There is no doubt that this law [Ohio’s domestic violence statute] has been abused” (Judge Nadine Allen of Hamilton County, Ohio).
“Standards for proving abuse have been so relaxed that any man who stands accused is considered guilty” (Cheryl Hanna, William and Mary Law Review).
“Women are nine times more likely to report domestic violence than male victims” (National Family Violence Survey).
“85% of temporary restraining orders are filed against men” (Cathy Young, “Domestic Violence: An In-Depth Analysis,” 2005).
“Many judges view restraining orders as ‘a rubber-stamping exercise,’ and subsequently hearings are ‘usually a sham’” (Attorney Arnold Rutkin, Family Advocate, Winter 1996).
“The mere allegation of domestic violence may shift the burden of proof to the defendant” (Massachusetts Law Weekly, 1995).

Notable is that cited remarks from legal experts that categorically define the restraining order process as prejudiced, if not an outright abomination against rudimentary civil rights and principles of law, may be a decade or decades old. Rhetorical stances like the NCADV’s aren’t fooling anybody in the know, and they haven’t for a long time. But they continue to dominate political debate. They’re heeded because they’re supposed to be. Not coincidentally, women’s advocates hold the keys to the treasury.

The value of Mr. Vonderheide’s video, finally, isn’t in the information it educes or even the information it asserts but the psychological study it offers of the women behind the dogma and the sway they exercise on public perception. His questions, only impeachable as indelicate, inspire predictable reactions: antagonism, levity, or disdain.

According to tried and true method (a method both practiced and preached), the “self-reliant” feminist women who are the targets of Mr. Vonderheide’s questions register alarm. These deniers of false allegations and undue hysteria…call the police.

*Daddy Justice’s videos can be found here.

Dust It Off: This Isn’t 1979, and It’s Time Restraining Order Laws Were Reconsidered

January 8, 2015June 25, 2023Moderator 8 Comments

I remarked to a commenter the other day that when I became a vegetarian in the ’80s, I was still a kid, and my family took it as an affront, which was a common reaction then. Today, everyone’s a vegetarian or “tried vegetarianism” or has “thought about becoming a vegetarian.” Other subjects that were outré or taboo in my childhood like atheism, cross-dressing, and depression—they’re no longer stigmatized, either (in the main). Gay people, who were only whispered about then, can marry in a majority of states. When I was a kid, it was shaming for bra straps or underpants bands to be visible. Today they’re exposed on purpose.

It’s a brave new world.

While domestic violence is no more comfortable a topic of conversation now than it was then, it’s also hardly hush-hush. When restraining orders were conceived, it was unmentionable, and that was the problem. It was impossible for battered women to reliably get help. They faced alienation from their families and even ridicule from the police if they summoned the courage to ask for it. They were trapped.

Restraining orders cut through all of the red tape and made it possible for battered women to go straight to the courthouse to talk one-on-one with a judge and get immediate relief. The intention, at least, was good.

It’s probable, too, that when restraining orders were enacted way back when, their exploitation was minimal. It wouldn’t have occurred to many people to abuse them, just as it wouldn’t have occurred to lawmakers that anyone would take advantage.

This isn’t 1979. Times have changed and with them social perceptions and ethics. Reporting domestic violence isn’t an act of moral apostasy. It’s widely encouraged.

No one has gone back, however, and reconsidered the justice of a procedure of law that omits all safeguards against misuse. Restraining orders circumvent investigation by police and the vetting of accusations by district attorneys. They allow individuals to prosecute allegations all on their own, trusting that those individuals won’t lie about fear or abuse, despite the fact that there are any number of compelling motives to do so, including greed/profit, spite, victim-playing, revenge, mental illness, personality disorder, bullying, blame-shifting, cover-up, infidelity/adultery, blackmail, coercion, citizenship, stalking, and the mere desire for attention.

Restraining orders laws have steadily accreted even as the original (problematic) blueprint has remained unchanged. Claims no longer need to be of domestic violence (though its legal definition has grown so broad as to be virtually all-inclusive, anyway). They can be of harassment, “stalking,” threat, or just inspiring vague unease.

These aren’t claims that are hard to manufacture, and they don’t have to be proved (and there’s no ascertaining the truth of alleged “feelings” or “beliefs,” anyway, just as there’s no defense against them). Due to decades of feminist lobbying, moreover, judges are predisposed to issue restraining orders on little or no more basis than a petitioner’s saying s/he needs one.

What once upon a time made this a worthy compromise of defendants’ constitutionally guaranteed expectation of due process and equitable treatment under the law no longer does. The anticipation of rejection or ridicule that women who reported domestic violence in the ’70s and ’80s faced from police, and which recommended a workaround like the restraining order, is now anachronistic.

Prevailing reflex from authorities has swiveled 180 degrees. If anything, the conditioned reaction to claims of abuse is their eager investigation; it’s compulsory policy.

Laws that authorize restraining order judges, based exclusively on their discretion, to impose sanctions on defendants like registry in public databases that can permanently foul employment prospects, removal from their homes, and denial of access to their kids and property are out of date. Their license has expired.

Besides material privations, defendants against allegations made in brief trips to the courthouse are subjected to humiliation and abuse that’s lastingly traumatic. Making false claims is a simple matter, and offering damning misrepresentations that don’t even depend on lies is simpler yet.

What shouldn’t be possible happens. A lot. Almost as bad is that we make believe it doesn’t.

Just as it was wrong to avert our eyes from domestic violence 30 years ago, it’s wrong to pretend that attempts to curb it since haven’t fostered new forms of taunting, terrorism, and torment that use the state as their agent.

Feminism and False Accusation Culture

January 5, 2015June 30, 2023Moderator 29 Comments

“The idea that—as pandering anti-feminist goon Christina Hoff Sommers asserted over the weekend—university campuses have a ‘false accusation culture’ is as ludicrous as the idea that Sommers herself is a feminist. Not only do we not have a ‘false accusation culture’ anywhere on earth, we don’t have an accusation culture at all. Most victims never say a word. The price is too high. And, if their joy at the outing, harassment and supposed ‘discrediting’ of Jackie is any indication, Sommers and her cohort would like to keep it that way.”

—Lindy West, The Guardian (Dec. 9, 2014)

Alongside the headline of Lindy West’s op-ed, “Rolling Stone threw a rape victim to the misogynist horde,” is a tag that reads, “Comment is free.” It’s a fitting commentary on Ms. West’s commentary, which is cheaper than just cheap.

Not only is false accusation culture real; it extends beyond the quad.

Ms. West’s piece centers on the “Jackie story,” a Rolling Stone “exposé” that ran a couple of months ago about a purported gang rape at the University of Virginia whose details have since proved unreliable.

According to Ms. West, “The result was swift, frightening and predictable [italics added]. Jackie became an anti-feminist rallying point—incontrovertible ‘proof’ that women maliciously (or recreationally, even) lie about rape to ruin men’s lives, and that ‘rape culture’ is nothing but hysterical feminist propaganda.”

Ms. West’s diagnosis is itself hysterical feminist propaganda that’s swift and predictable…and shopworn. Writers like her incite rhetorical food fights. They tweak and pique, and this excites a flood of comments, some of them earnest, some of them dismissive or disgusted, and all of them leading to nothing.

This is a constructive formula: thesis + antithesis = synthesis. There is no synthesis, though. Provocateurs like Ms. West never relent and are only egged on by criticism, even if it’s coolly reasoned. They’re looking for conflict, not a conversation. Their arguments are purposefully outrageous to ignite attention, a motive that not coincidentally underlies many false accusations, especially ones made by women.

The quotation from Ms. West at the top of this post is stressed because it exemplifies the flatfooted feminist m.o.: nonsensical but snarky.

Ignoring the slight to Dr. Sommers, whose discernment Windy Lindy’s doesn’t hold a candle to, here’s a quickie analysis of Ms. West’s assertion that there’s no “‘false accusation culture’ anywhere on earth” (an assertion that only merits a quickie analysis):

Ms. West says there’s no “false accusation culture.”
The proof, she says, is there’s no “accusation culture.”
The evidence of this is that “most victims never say a word” (i.e., most victims never make accusations).

The only victims of a false accusation culture are the falsely accused; false accusers aren’t victims. A false accusation culture doesn’t require that actual victims of abuse ever report anything. Therefore whether actual victims “never say a word” is completely irrelevant to the existence of a false accusation culture. Feminists are encouraged to read this paragraph again and to look up words they may misunderstand, such as false.

There is a false accusation culture, and feminists like Ms. West are the reason why. They’ve made it attractive and rewarding (even ennobling) for people to style themselves “victims.” They’re also, consequently, the authors of what they label “rape denial.”

The culture of false accusation they’ve inspired is why there are so-called rape deniers. Sure, there may actually be people who deny “rape!” is ever rape, but it’s a fair deduction that most resistance to feminist social indictment that’s called “rape denial” is really a manifestation of resentment toward what feminist rhetoric has wrought. Men who’ve wrongly been treated like brutes and sex offenders over the decades since the enactment of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which ensures all men are regarded by the system prejudicially, are pained animals. (Appreciate that while prosecuting rape may be rare and difficult in criminal court, implicating someone as a violent offender in civil court, including falsely, is cake.) What do pained animals do? They snarl and claw at what hurt them (and whatever they associate with it).

Feminists provoke animosity—which rightly or wrongly may be directed toward all women—and then they denounce that animosity as misogyny…which provokes more animosity…which is denounced as misogyny (and on and on). “Rape deniers” may simply be people who’ve been conditioned to distrust accusations of violence from women and to hate feminists.

Unconscious of this, along comes someone like Megan Carpentier, who writes in the same commentary section of The Guardian as Ms. West, “I’m a victim of sexual assault and the law failed. How many of us must speak out for you to believe?” She describes a harrowing experience, to which response is mostly sympathetic, and responses that are guarded don’t challenge the accuracy of her account; they reasonably point out that “these constant calls for automatic belief of accusers signal a desire to move away from the presumption of innocence.” This challenge is what’s commonly represented as “rape denial,” and it’s the challenge of minds jaded by a culture that tolerates and rewards—and thus encourages—false accusations.

Ms. Carpentier says that “of every 100 sexual assaults in the United States, only 40 are reported to the police, only 10 result in arrests, only eight get prosecuted and only four result in a felony conviction,” not appreciating that this can only touch as it should the person (particularly the man) who has never been falsely implicated or known someone who was. Snipes like this one, besides, don’t win over any fence-sitters: “Too many women who are sexually assaulted are not considered sexual assault victims in the eyes of the law—and in the words of more than a few bloviating bystanders.”

The irony of her statement is that feminists are the original “bloviating bystanders,” and it’s their call for selective accountability instead of universal accountability that has aroused skepticism toward allegations of violence against women, including sexual violence.

Feminists blame reactions they themselves have provoked by fostering a climate of false accusation.

“Trapped”: Betty’s Story of Restraining Order Abuse

January 2, 2015July 6, 2023Moderator 9 Comments

Betty Krachey says she only wishes she had superpowers. She has, nevertheless, been flexing her muscles pretty impressively for a former drugstore clerk.

Betty launched an e-petition not long ago to bring flaws in the administration of restraining orders and the need to hold false accusers accountable to the attention of lawmakers in her home state of Tennessee (and beyond). Betty emphasizes that restraining orders can be “taken out on innocent people based on false allegations so a vindictive person can gain control with the help of authorities.” She stresses, too, that “false accusers are being allowed to walk away and pay NO consequences for swearing to lies to get these orders.”

Betty’s charges shouldn’t be revelations; opponents of restraining order laws (and related laws inspired by violence against women) have been saying what Betty is for years. What makes her denunciations eye-opening is that they’re coming from an injured woman who refuses to take her licks and silently retreat into the shadows like she’s supposed to do. Besides that, the typical rebuttals to complaints like Betty’s, rebuttals that play to our sympathies for abused women, don’t apply.

Betty is an abused woman. She was nearly deprived of her home and consigned to the curb, for no reason, like yesterday’s trash (a situation others find themselves in every day). Betty’s story, as she tells it, corresponds moreover to those of women who are considered victims of emotional abuse (which state statutes may classify as “domestic violence”).

I used to be a very private person—till all this crap—and told very few people my business, so everyone thought everything was going good with me and [him]. They had no idea I was living with someone I felt trapped with. I could NEVER talk to him or even ask him a question without him blowing up. That’s not a very happy life to live with someone. Even though I never told others how bad things were at home, I NEVER made it a secret to [him] that I wanted to leave…! I never posted lies on Facebook or emailed my friends telling them lies about [him] like he did me to try to get people to feel sorry for me and think [he] was such a bad person. Now that I think about it, he’s always played the victim….

The counterclaim feminists inevitably reach for to bat away complaints of restraining order abuse like Betty has made is that invisible, voiceless legions of battered women never receive justice, so tough luck, Charlie Brown, if you’re not treated fairly. The argument appeals to pathos, but its influence on our laws and justice system is plainly corrupt. Remarking that there are starving children in India has never made and never will make broccoli taste like cheesecake. It’s not the place of our justice system to punish people for things they haven’t done, let alone to blame them for the imagined crimes of strangers.

The posited pains and privations of unnamed others don’t justify running an innocent person through the wringer, female or male. Publicly implicating people as batterers and creeps based on superficial claims scrawled on forms and mouthed in five-minute meetings with judges shouldn’t be possible in a developed society. On these grounds, citizens are cast out of their homes by agents of the state, as Betty almost was.

Our courts take no interest in the lives they invade and often derail or devastate. The people restraining order judges summarily condemn are just names on forms; judges may never even know what the owners of those names look like—forget about who they are.

Let’s meet one.

Betty’s story begins in 1992 when she moved from Florida to Tennessee with her boyfriend, and the two built a house and life together there.

The circumstances that led to Betty’s being falsely accused by her boyfriend decades later are cliché. He slimmed down in midlife, she says, and began “cheating on me with younger girls…. So he had to figure out a way to get my half of our house from me.”

A protection order fit the bill perfectly: no muss, no fuss, and no division of assets. The boyfriend would be granted sole entitlement to the house that Jack and Jill built. Jill, with a little shove, would tumble down the hill alone, and an empty bucket to collect handouts in is all she’d end up with.

His first plan was to bully and threaten me into signing over my half of the house by signing a quitclaim deed. He had told me he would give me $50K, which…I knew I’d never see, and he promised me this would be my best deal. And if I did not sign the house over to him, he let me know I would lose everything I had worked my ass off for. “You watch and see, I promise you that,” he would tell me over and over.

Betty says she was tempted to sign. One of her dearest companions, her Doberman Dragon, had died, and Betty reckoned she could provide for her remaining dog, Lacy, by herself. “One reason I stayed was for my dogs,” she admits. “I had been wanting to leave…for years.” She and her boyfriend had effectively separated, and Betty intuited her boyfriend “knew he wasn’t going to be able to trick me into staying and paying half the bills much longer,” and she planned to call it quits. But he beat her to the punch.

His next plan, with the advice from his awesome friend, was to get the police involved and then to file the order of protection on me to get me kicked out of the house! If it weren’t for my lawyer, I would have had to leave my home from Aug. 29th to the court date Sept. 12th! [He, the ex] knew and did NOT care one teeny tiny bit that I had NOWHERE TO GO! Plus I had Lacy to worry about. [He] had moved out of our house August 6th and wasn’t even living in the home at the time he did this. [He] has another house to live in that has everything he needs. I had NOTHING else and nowhere else to go!

Betty’s situation mirrors that of many others who are falsely accused by domestic partners. Those not so lucky to have (or to be able to afford) effective legal representation may find themselves abruptly homeless (besides jobless and penniless, in cases), sleeping in their cars, sheltering with strangers, or living on the street. These are people who the day before may have been living normal, comfortable middleclass or even upper-middleclass lives.

On our court date—Sept 12th—the order of protection was dropped. My lawyer told me I was right: “This is all about the house and YOUR money you have coming from your business you sold.” I knew it!! And [he, the ex] wanted ME to pay the court costs for this!

The best laid plans of lice and men go oft astray. Betty quips, “All I can say is [he] had a lot more to be concerned about than me causing him ‘bodily harm’!”

Betty’s been in touch with a Tennessee state representative who’s indicated to her that she has “a good chance at getting [the] law changed. But he said the soonest it will go into effect is July 2015, and he let me know that means it will NOT help me with what my ex did to me, because he filed his false report on me in August!”

Besides singlehandedly pressing for reform of one of the most intransigent legal mockeries ever conceived, she’s considering a lawsuit.

Happy New Year, Betty.

The Southern Poverty Law Center v. Betty Krachey: Why the Only Honest Voices in Discussions of Restraining Order and Related Procedural Abuses Are the Little Ones

December 31, 2014August 25, 2023Moderator 4 Comments

This blog was inspired by firsthand experience with judicial iniquity.

Its author has never been accused of violence, doesn’t sanction violence except in self-defense or the defense of others, and has been a practicing vegetarian since adolescence. I have, what’s more, hazarded my life going to the aid of non-human animals. In one instance, I lost the use of my hand for a year; in another, I had various of my bones fractured or crushed, and that damage is permanent.

Although I’ve never been accused of violence (only its threat: “Will I be attacked?”), I know very well I might have been accused of violence, and I know with absolute certainty that the false accusation could have stuck—and easily—regardless of my ethical scruples and what my commitment to them has cost me.

Who people are, what they stand for, and what they have or haven’t done—these make no difference when they’re falsely fingered by a dedicated accuser who alleges abuse or fear.

This is wrong, categorically wrong, and the only arguments for maintenance of the status quo are ones that favor a particular interest group or political persuasion, which means those arguments contravene the rule of constitutional law.

Justice that isn’t equitable isn’t justice. Arguments for the perpetuation of the same ol’ same ol’, then, are nonstarters. Dogma continues to prevail, however, by distraction: “a majority of rapes go unreported,” “most battered women suffer in silence,” “domestic violence is epidemic” (men have it coming to them). Invocation of social ills that have no bearing on individual cases has determined public policy and conditioned judicial impulse.

Injustice, no surprise, arouses animosity; injustice that confounds lives, moreover, provokes rage, predictably and justly. This post looks at how that rage is severed from its roots—injustice—and held aloft like a monster’s decapitated head to be scorned and reviled.

I first learned of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) from a research paper published by Law Professor Kelly Behre this year that equates men’s rights activism with hatemongering. I later heard this position of the SPLC’s reiterated in an NPR piece about the first International Conference on Men’s Issues.

Injustice, it should be noted preliminarily, is of no lesser interest to women than to men. Both men and women are abused by laws and practices purportedly established to protect women, laws and practices that inform civil, criminal, and family court proceedings.

Groups like the SPLC, however, represent opposition to these laws and practices as originating strictly from MRAs, or men’s rights activists, whom they dismiss as senseless haters. This lumping is characteristic of the smoke-and-mirrors tactics favored by those allied to various women’s causes. They limn the divide as being between irrationally irate men and battered women’s advocates (or between “abusers” and “victims”).

They don’t necessarily deny there’s a middle ground; they just ignore it. Consequently, they situate themselves external to it. There are no women’s rights activists (“WRAs”?) who mediate between extremes. They’re one of the extremes.

I’m a free agent, and this blog isn’t associated with any group, though the above-mentioned law professor, Dr. Behre, identifies the blog in her paper as authored by an “FRG” (father’s rights group), based on my early on citing the speculative statistic that as many as 80% of restraining orders are said to be “unnecessary” or based on false claims, which may in fact be true even if Dr. Behre finds the estimate unscientific. (Survey statistics cited by women’s advocates and represented as fact are no more ascertainably conclusive; they’re only perceived as more “legitimate.”)

SAVE Services, one of the nonprofits to cite a 2008 West Virginia study from which the roughly 80% or 4-out-of-5 statistic is derived, is characterized by the SPLC and consequently Dr. Behre as being on a par with a “hate group,” like white supremacists. It isn’t, and the accusation is silly, besides nasty. This kind of facile association, though, has proven to be very effective at neutering opposing perspectives, even moderate and disciplined ones. Journalists, the propagators of information, may more readily credit a nonprofit like the SPLC, which identifies itself as a law center and has a longer and more illustrious history, than it may SAVE, which is also a nonprofit. The SPLC’s motto, “Fighting Hate • Teaching Tolerance • Seeking Justice,” could just as aptly be applied to SAVE’s basic endeavor.

On the left is a symbol for the Ku Klux Klan; on the right, the symbol for feminist solidarity. The images have common features, and their juxtaposition suggests the two groups are linked. This little gimmick exemplifies how guilt by association works.

The SPLC’s rhetorical strategy, an m.o. typical of those with the same political orientation, is as follows: (1) scour websites and forums in the “manosphere” for soundbites that include heated denunciations and misogynistic epithets, (2) assemble a catalog of websites and forums that espouse or can be said to sympathize with extremist convictions or positions, and (3) lump all websites and forums speaking to discrimination against men together and collectively label them misogynistic. Thus reports like these: “Misogyny: The Sites” and “Men’s Rights Movement Spreads False Claims about Women.”

Cherry-picked posts, positions, and quotations are highlighted; arguments are desiccated into ideological blurbs punctuated with indelicate words; and all voices are mashed up into a uniform, sinister hiss.

The SPLC’s explicit criticism may not be unwarranted, but coming as it does from a “law center” whose emblem is a set of balanced scales, that criticism is fairly reproached for its carelessness and chauvinism. There are no qualifications to suggest there’s any merit to the complaints that the SPLC criticizes.

The SPLC’s criticism, rather, invites its audience to conclude that complaints of feminist-motivated iniquities in the justice system are merely hate rhetoric, which makes the SPLC’s criticism a PC version of hate rhetoric. The bias is just reversed.

Complaints from the “[mad]manosphere” that are uncivil (or even rabid) aren’t necessarily invalid. The knee-jerk urge to denounce angry rhetoric betrays how conditioned we’ve been by the prevailing dogma. No one is outraged that people may be falsely implicated as stalkers, batterers, and child molesters in public trials. Nor is anyone outraged that the falsely accused may consequently be forbidden access to their children, jackbooted from their homes, denied employment, and left stranded and stigmatized. This isn’t considered abusive, let alone acknowledged for the social obscenity that it is. “Abusive” is when the falsely implicated who’ve been typified as brutes and sex offenders and who’ve been deprived of everything that meant anything to them complain about it.

Impolitely. (What would Mrs. Grundy say?)

There’s no question the system is corrupt, and the SPLC doesn’t say it isn’t. It reinforces the corruption by caricaturing the opposition as a horde of frothing woman-haters.

Enter Betty Krachey, a Tennessee woman who knows court corruption intimately. Betty launched a website and e-petition this year to urge her state to prosecute false accusers after being issued an injunction that labeled her a domestic abuser and that she alleges was based on fraud and motivated by spite and greed. Ask her if she’s angry about that, and she’ll probably say you’re damn right. (Her life has nothing to do with whether “most battered women suffer in silence” or “a majority of rapes go unreported,” and those facts in no way justify her being railroaded and menaced by the state.)

I made this website to make people aware of Order of Protections & restraining orders being taken out on innocent people based on false allegations so a vindictive person can gain control with the help of authorities. The false accusers are being allowed to walk away and pay NO consequences for swearing to lies to get these orders! […]

I know that, in my case, the judge didn’t know me. Even though I talked to the magistrate the day BEFORE the order of protection was taken out on me & I told him what I heard [he] had planned for me. They didn’t know that I might have superpowers where I could cause him bodily harm 4 1/2 miles away. SO they had no choice but to protect [him] from me. BUT when they found out this order of protection was based on lies that he swore to, and he used the county in a cunning and vindictive way to get me kicked out of the house – HE SHOULD HAVE HAD TO PAY SOME CONSEQUENCES INSTEAD OF BEING ALLOWED TO WALK AWAY LIKE NOTHING HAPPENED!!!!

Seems like a fair point, and it’s fair points like Betty’s that get talked around and over. There are no legal advocates with the SPLC’s clout looking out for people like Betty; they’re busy making claims like hers seem anomalous, trivial, or crackpot.

*Betty reports she’s been in conference with one of her state’s representatives and has been told she has “a good chance at getting this law changed,” albeit too belatedly to affect her own circumstances. Says Betty, “I still want the law changed to hold false accusers accountable!” Amen to that.

Why Women Who Are Falsely Implicated as Abusers Have No Defenders

December 28, 2014June 24, 2023Moderator 7 Comments

Women who are ravaged by false allegations of domestic violence or “violence-related” offenses—whether in civil restraining order prosecutions, or in domestic violence or family court cases—are a minority among the targets of lies.

Hunt up comments by female victims on the e-petition “Stop False Allegations of Domestic Violence,” and there’s a good chance those comments will contain an emphatic line like “This happens to women, too.”

Men who’ve been falsely accused may be unaware that the community of the damned includes members of both sexes. The women who support those men—e.g., girlfriends, wives, sisters, or mothers—may also be unaware. Alternatively, their compassion may be numbed by the consciousness that restraining order, stalking, and domestic violence laws exist for women, or their compassion may be jaded by the conviction that when women are falsely accused of abuse, the implications aren’t as severe, which may be true.

This doesn’t mean, however, that the women who are falsely impugned feel any less anguished, betrayed, mortified, or indignant. Psychic pain is subjective, and the privations than ensue from false allegations of abuse—loss of access to children, property, home, employment, etc.—may be exactly the same, whether the accused is male or female.

What we call “society” doesn’t care to acknowledge that laws enacted to curb violence against women are ever abused to inflict harm (this “society” is really the people who mold public opinion, like government reps, journalists, and various talking heads on TV; society proper only knows what it’s told). Men who’ve complained of judicial crookedness and mistreatment for years or decades are still widely discounted, dismissed, or openly derogated in accordance with established dogma.

The phrase men’s rights continues to be framed with quotation marks (often contemptuously), and that includes in the mainstream press. Those who advocate for “men’s rights” may be called “rape deniers,” “anti-feminists,” or simply “misogynists.” Men’s rights activists have achieved some sympathetic traction, particularly recently, but popular admission that “women’s law” is easily and widely exploited by fraud is still a ways off.

Admitting, then, that women are destroyed by laws that are supposed to protect them is, for a host of reasons, taboo. Acknowledgment that the laws are doing the opposite of protecting women would mean their justification is false. It would besides implicate the system itself in the abuse of women, and be politically embarrassing and compromising,

If it were admitted, finally, that processes for women can be abused to falsely incriminate them, this question would inevitably follow: How much easier must it be for those processes to be abused to falsely incriminate men?

Feminists and feminist-oriented rights advocacy groups like the ACLU can’t afford to speak on behalf of female victims of procedural abuses, because that would be to call attention to the lax standards, inherent biases, and general corruptness of policies they’ve championed (and for which they congratulate themselves). It would be to discredit “all they’ve accomplished.” Criticizing victimized women would likewise be to their discredit. So they just avert their eyes.

Men who complain of procedural abuses are broadly lumped together and demonized as a group; women who complain of the same are exiled to their own private hells.

You Can’t Sue for Perjury: Why Targets of Restraining Order Fraud and Other Procedural Abuses Based on Lies Get Screwed and Stay Screwed

December 21, 2014June 30, 2023Moderator 33 Comments

The postscript (P.S.) to a series of comments left on the blog this week by the stepmother of a man who was falsely accused of violence asks whether he could sue his ex-girlfriend for lying.

The details, as the stepmother reports them, are these:

Man and woman, who aren’t married, were together for four years and have a one-year-old daughter.
During the term of their relationship, no reports of any kind of domestic conflict were made to authorities.
The woman has heart disease (diagnosed as “congestive heart failure”) and can only perform minimally stressful activities, so this had typified the couple’s daily life: The man “gets up [at] 5 a.m., feeds [the] daughter, changes [her] diaper, makes his lunch, and heads to work. [He] gets home around 4–4:30, and she is still in bed [and the] baby is still in [the] same diaper from that morning. […] He cleans, cooks, [does the] dishes [and] laundry, bathes [the] child, and heads to bed—and [the woman] bitches ‘cause he rolls over and goes to sleep.”
On or about December 13, 2014, the couple “got in an argument, and she moved out, taking [their] child with her. She then texted [the child’s father] saying she was taking [the] child and moving to Oregon and he [would] never see [his] daughter again.”
The woman then returned home to retrieve her belongings, “and when she went downstairs, he went out [the] door with [the] child. She freaked out. [Two] days later she filed a protection order saying all these lies about him…and he had to give [the] daughter back.”
The woman, with her dad’s help, then relocated to Oregon with the child.

Among the woman’s allegedly false statements, apparently made to the police before she prepared to abscond with the child, was that the man pushed her into a fish tank, which it’s reported she actually slammed with her fist in a fit of rage while the man’s back was turned. Since the woman’s knuckles were plainly lacerated from punching glass, no arrest ensued. According to the man’s stepmother, the woman lied similarly to procure a protection order a couple of days later.

The stepmom wants to know if her stepson can sue his girlfriend for lying under oath. The answer, which is no, exposes why lying to the court is so effective, besides being easy.

Quoting “The Rule against Civil Actions for Perjury in Administrative Agency Proceedings: A Hobgoblin of Little Minds” (University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 1983):

“No action lies to recover damages caused by perjury.” If A is injured by the false or misleading testimony of B in a judicial proceeding, A cannot maintain an action for damages against B; A can obtain relief only by a direct attack on the judgment. So it was at common law, and although some observers have called for its abandonment, courts today are unanimous in following that ancient rule.

Tennessean and fraud victim Betty Krachey has launched a petition to urge her state to punish lying.

Appreciate that a corollary of that “ancient rule” is that if someone who’s lied about in a judicial proceeding lapses into suicidal despondency and kills him- or herself, his or her loved ones have no legal recourse. If you publicly mislabel someone a stalker, child molester, or batterer, for instance, outside of court, and that person kills him- or herself, you can be sued. But if the same end results from false allegations you make in court, you get away scot free.

Perjury—that is, knowingly lying to the court about influential facts—is a “serious criminal offense,” as a law student from South Africa recently remarked in a comment about a case of restraining order fraud that emerged in her country’s popular press. In many if not most jurisdictions in the U.S., perjury is a felony.

Punishment for it, however, can only follow its prosecution by the district attorney’s office, which rarely initiates perjury proceedings and only does so in slam-dunk cases of prominent interest like misconduct by public officials. Private litigants can sue for damages caused by the commission of other crimes—murder, for example—and they can sue for slanders and libels made outside of court. They can’t, though, sue for damages caused by lies told in judicial proceedings, no matter how injurious those lies might be.

The reason why, basically, is that the system likes closure. Once it rules on something, it doesn’t want to think about it again.

Consider what would happen if Person A lied about Person B, and Person B were authorized to sue Person A for lying. This would open the door for Person A to turn around and claim Person B lied in the second proceeding and sue Person B back. Person B could then pursue another action that alleged Person A lied about Person B in the third proceeding, and on and on ad infinitum.

While this would force the court to pay more than a lick of attention to the facts and also motivate it to drop the hammer on liars, it’s messy and time-consuming. So it’s rejected in the name of economy—and damn the consequences to people who are lied about.

This policy is among the reasons why restraining orders should be repealed.

Temporary orders are issued upon a few minutes’ prejudicial deliberation (really none at all). A petitioner goes to the courthouse, fills out some paperwork, and has a chitty-chat. If the accused doesn’t appeal, the court’s entire application to the case will have been those few minutes (sandwiched between stifled yawns). Even when a defendant does appear in court to contest allegations against him or her, judicial “review” of the matter may be less than 30 minutes.

On the basis of this brief “review” (which is often merely theater), a person like the man in the story above can be branded a “domestic abuser,” have his or her name entered into state and national police databases (permanently), and be denied contact with his or her child (besides potentially being denied credit, leases, and jobs, and having to indefinitely endure the agony and humiliation of being re-judged for something s/he didn’t do). S/he can also be made to pay court costs for having his or her life torn apart by lies.

A person like him, who can be male or female, can attack the false judgment in a further appeal—provided s/he has the emotional and financial resource—but s/he can’t seek redress for fraudulent testimony given in evidence against him or her.

That would inconvenience the court.

Yes, Virgil, There Is a Santa Claus: In a Month, Not Only Has Feminism Received Stern Scrutiny from Distinguished Members of the Press…So Has the Press

December 13, 2014July 30, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

This is what an anti-feminist looks like.

Feminism may not know it yet, but 2014 will mark the year when patrons whose sympathies it has enjoyed for decades stopped taking a knee.

There were intimations of a climate change last summer. An intrepid band of men’s rights activists staged an International Conference on Men’s Issues in June. Turnout was slim, MSNBC mocked its presenters, and its reverberations were seemingly minor. It nevertheless inaugurated a shift. People were talking back—and not just anonymously from behind cartoon avatars on blogs and in forums.

Women Against Feminism’s Tumblr page drew hundreds of submissions like the one above.

Results of a Time Magazine poll urged a ban on the the word feminist (until Time was bullied into begging feminists’ pardon and pulling the word from its list).

This week, things came to a head.

One of those lightning rod stories feminist advocates rally around, a November Rolling Stone article about a purported frat house gang rape, turned out to be sketchy at best, and besides being roundly criticized has started journalists questioning what they’ve been taking for granted.

Feminist attorney and writer Zerlina Maxwell opined in a Washington Post piece days ago that the Rolling Stone story’s failings shouldn’t deter “us” from continuing to accept allegations of sexual violence at face value. She, too, has been taken to task by her peers, many of whom are asking, “What do you mean ‘us’?”

Quite suddenly, denunciations of feminist excesses are emerging from other than fringe sources, which means they won’t be so easily discounted. Yesterday, Philip Terzian of The Weekly Standard panned the press for feeding into PC prejudices, and Bloomberg columnist Megan McArdle, bless her heart, produced an op-ed that ran Tuesday under the title, “You Can’t Just Accuse People of Rape.”

Next thing you know, writers will be saying you can’t just accuse people…period.

The Politics of Feminism and Women’s Law: A Response to Zerlina Maxwell’s Editorial “No Matter What Jackie Said, We Should Generally Believe Rape Claims”

December 9, 2014February 12, 2018Moderator Leave a comment

Implicit in the headline of this op-ed is that even “wrongly accused” men are “perps.”

The only complimentary thing this writer can find to say about attorney Zerlina Maxwell’s December 6 column in The Washington Post is—yeah, scratch that; it has no redeeming qualities.

The editorial is not only intellectually callow but morally vacuous. Even its research and computations are careless.

Ms. Maxwell’s piece concerns a story published last month in Rolling Stone Magazine about a purported gang rape at the University of Virginia. The story was swiftly lofted upon a current of hot air then failed to maintain elevation because of a number of holes.

By Ms. Maxwell’s pained logic, the story’s having nosedived is all the more reason why allegations of rape should be accepted wholesale.

Many people (not least U-Va. administrators) will be tempted to see this as a reminder that officials, reporters and the general public should hear both sides of the story and collect all the evidence before coming to a conclusion in rape cases. This is what we mean in America when we say someone is “innocent until proven guilty.” After all, look what happened to the Duke lacrosse players.

In important ways, this is wrong. We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says.

Default means negligence, which Ms. Maxwell equates with propriety. According to feminist algebra, negligence = propriety is a balanced equation.

Note that Ms. Maxwell isn’t actually making an argument for policy reform. We already do, by default, believe what an accuser says, hence outraged and anguished accounts like the ones you’ll find here: “Stop False Allegations of Domestic Violence.”

Ms. Maxwell fails to appreciate that our crediting what a rape accuser says “as a matter of default” means the slope is greased all the way to the bottom. Accepting allegations of rape on faith means accepting on faith all allegations that relate to or imply violence.

And the grease flows sideways, also, not just top-down.

According to the same policy, women too, are victimized by false allegations, false allegations made in criminal, civil, and family court (as well as to government agencies like Child Protective Services)—and the standard applied in non-criminal procedures is already much reduced from “innocent until proven guilty.” Women unjustly lose their good names, their livelihoods, their children, and their homes (and that’s just the abbreviated list). These are among the consequences of equating allegations with facts “as a matter of default.”

Ms. Maxwell concludes: “Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.”

She asserts that rape leaves a “lasting psychological wound” but that the fallout from being falsely accused of rape is minor and ephemeral. “The accused would have a rough period,” she allows. “He might be suspended from his job; friends might defriend him on Facebook.”

Haunting is not only that people like Ms. Maxwell can appeal to pathos to make their case or that they can make such an appeal despite demonstrating no faculty for empathy; haunting is that their appeals nevertheless succeed.

Ms. Maxwell says the “cost of disbelieving women…signals that women don’t matter and that they are disposable.” No, it signals that no one is any more disposable than anyone else.

Why It’s Valuable to Report Your Story of Restraining Order Abuse or Other Procedural Abuse on an E-Petition or Similar Medium

December 7, 2014August 25, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

Government statistics used to train police officers and judges are derived significantly from surveys, as discussed in the previous post.

These surveys are represented as “science” but are in fact simply acts of collecting responses, responses that may be completely anecdotal (that is, unverified and most likely unverifiable). Interviewers ask questions, and volunteers answer. Some studies according to which policy is determined (for example, on college campuses) may not even be conducted person-to-person; they may be electronic.

Policy that indelibly impacts lives on a grand scale may be based, yes, on glorified questionnaires.

“Science” that influences research trends and legislation, and that consequently conditions police and judicial impulses, is derived by “randomly” eliciting responses from a sample population—and not a particularly large one at that.

When you hear a controversial statistic, the kind that appears in international headlines and in feminist blogs from one end of the Internet to the other, like one in five college women has been a victim of sexual assault (a statistic drawn from a Web survey administered at two American universities), that figure was based on survey data.

What is a petition?

It’s a survey (of personal experience and public sentiment).

Blinded by Science: Examining the Australian Government’s Sexual Assault Statistics to Expose How Such Science Is Derived, How It’s Applied, and Why It’s Not Really as Scientific as It’s Represented to Be

December 6, 2014April 7, 2018Moderator Leave a comment

Here is the Australian government’s Institute of Family Studies’ sexual assault “Facts & Figures” page.

And here is the first thing it says: “Statistics carry significant power and persuasion.”

That’s putting it mildly. That power and that persuasion influence lives on a magnitude that no numbers could quantify. Appreciate that figures concerning sexual assault and how these figures are popularly exploited influence court rulings in all cases that touch on violence or the purported fear of it, including in civil and family court, cases based on allegations of harassment, stalking, child abuse, and/or domestic violence, among others.

You’ll encounter these statistics bruited ubiquitously on the Internet.

“Sexual assault statistics are based on two main types of data,” according to the Australian government website:

victimisation survey data—data collated from surveys conducted with individuals, asking them about their experiences of sexual assault victimisation, regardless of whether they have reported to police; and
administrative data—data extracted through the various systems that respond to sexual assault (e.g., police, courts, corrections or support services).

Important to note at the outset of this discussion is that statistics often quoted by advocates and commentators of one stripe or another (including journalists) may originate from survey responses, that is, from “intelligence” that may be unqualified by any corroborating investigation. Though this post looks at Australian statistics, figures cited as originating from the United States, for example, are derived the same way. When a statistic is phrased “[x number] of [men or women] report being the victim of [x],” that figure was derived from survey responses.

The Australian Institute of Family Studies draws its statistics from six national surveys. This number suggests scrupulous science, but no ascertainable accuracy can be ascribed to the raw data, which is anecdotal.

The 2012-13 Crime Victimisation Survey (CVS), for example, which is one of the six surveys from which the Australian government draws its statistics, is based on interview responses from one member (“selected at random”) of 30,749 “fully responding households,” that is, on the personal interpretations and alleged experiences of fewer than 31,000 people, a study sample that represents about a tenth of 1% of the Australian population. What percentage of this sample is male and what percentage female isn’t reported on the CVS webpage (though other surveys, like the Personal Safety Survey, do report gender-specific conclusions).

Survey-based statistics are among the sorts you’ll encounter broadly promulgated in feminist “fact sheets” and brochures—and consequently everywhere else.

Important to consider, furthermore, is that “administrative data” (police and court statistics), the second data set from which government figures are derived, may itself be influenced by the former sort of data. Survey responses, much touted, may exert either a direct influence on how officers of the law and courts are trained to respond to or interpret allegations, or they may exert a proximal influence by having inspired the direction of social science research that’s used for training. The former data, survey responses, may in other words determine the conclusions and actions of agents of the justice system to some degree, and possibly to a very considerable one.

“Statistics carry significant power and persuasion,” and neither police officers nor judges are any less susceptible to that power and persuasion than anyone else. In fact, they more than almost anyone else are required to absorb these statistics.

Granted, survey statistics are probably as comprehensive as it’s practical for them to be, and contrary statistics that these figures are rejoined with by advocates for disenfranchised groups like battered men may themselves be based on surveys of even smaller groups of people. All such studies are subject to sampling error, because there’s no practicable means to interview an entire population, and sampling error is hardly the only error inherent to such studies, which are based on reported facts that may be impossible to substantiate.

What must be appreciated in all of this is that what’s called “science” is far from certain and is no more verifiable or creditworthy than are responses to online petitions like this one: “Stop False Allegations of Domestic Violence.” Both types of data, that is, are anecdotal.

The significant difference is that respondents to petitions aren’t “randomly selected” or interviewed by trained questioners. There are no “controls.”

So-called controls, however, may themselves influence findings.

Government surveys are inherently biased insofar as their aim is to collect information according to specific questions. The questions determine the nature and bounds of the responses to them and are determined by designated topics of interest.

Petitions in contrast place no constraints on respondents’ comments—and indirectly garner uninhibited answers to questions like, “Have you or someone you know been the victim of fraudulent abuse of court or state process?”

They garner answers to questions, that is, that the government doesn’t care to ask.

TALKING BACK to restraining orders

THEY’RE NOT JUST ABUSED BUT ABUSIVE

Tag false accusations