A Story of Female Sterilization That Should Stress to Those Who’ve Been Violated by Fraudulent Abuse of Legal Process Why Reporting Judicial Tyranny and False Accusers Is by Itself Pointless (You Must Demand Change)

October 27, 2014February 4, 2018Moderator 2 Comments

The point of sharing the explication below is to emphasize how forlorn prospective recourses for redressing rights violations stemming from false restraining order and similar prosecutions are. Accountability is zero, across the board.

If you’ve ever wondered why a judge may be censured for rude conduct but not for ignoring lies or misrepresenting evidence, here’s why.

Quoted from “The Plumb Line: So What Else is New?” (Murray N. Rothbard, Libertarian Review, 1978), reprinted on LewRockwell.com as “The Tyranny of the Bench”:

The United States Supreme Court ruled, in 1872, that judges were immune from any damage suits for any “judicial acts” that they had performed—regardless of how wrong, evil, or unconstitutional those acts may have been. When clothed in judicial authority, judges can do no wrong. Period. Recently a case of an errant judge has come up again—because his action as a judge was considered generally to be monstrous and illegal. In 1971, Mrs. Ora Spitler McFarlin petitioned Judge Harold D. Stump of the DeKalb County, Indiana, Circuit Court to engage in a covert, compulsory sterilization of her 15-year-old daughter, Linda Kay Spitler. Although Linda was promoted each year with her class, Mrs. McFarlin opined that she was “somewhat retarded” and had begun to stay out overnight with older youths. And we all know what that can lead to.

Judge Stump quickly signed the order, and the judge and mamma hustled Linda into a hospital, telling her it was for an appendicitis operation. Linda was then sterilized without her knowledge. Two years later, Linda married a Leo Sparkman and discovered that she had been sterilized without her knowledge. The Sparkmans proceeded to sue mamma, mamma’s attorney, the doctors, the hospital, and Judge Stump, alleging a half-dozen constitutional violations.

All of these people, in truth, had grossly violated Linda’s rights and aggressed against her. All should have been made to pay, and pay dearly, for their monstrous offense. But the federal district court ruled otherwise. First, it ruled that mamma, her lawyer, and the various members of the “healing professions” were all immune because everything they did had received the sanction of a certified judge. And second, Judge Stump was also absolutely immune, because he had acted in his capacity as a judge, even though, the district court acknowledged, he had had “an erroneous view of the law.” So, not only is a judge immune, but he can confer his immunity in a king-like fashion even onto lowly civilians who surround him.

The U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, unaccountably didn’t understand the program, and so it reversed the district court, claiming that Judge Stump had forfeited his immunity “because of his failure to comply with elementary principles of due process,” and had therefore in a sense “not acted within his jurisdiction.” To allow Stump’s action to stand, said the appeals court, would be to sanction “tyranny from the bench.”

Now this was pretty flimsy stuff, and besides it opened an entertaining wedge toward holding judges accountable to the law and to the protection of rights like everyone else. But this would have shaken the foundations of our monopoly archist legal system. And so the U.S. Supreme Court, on March 28, set the matter straight. In a 5–3 decision in this illuminating case of Stump v. Sparkman, Justice Byron R. (“Whizzer”) White, speaking for the majority, sternly reminded the appellate court of the meaning of the 1872 ruling:

A judge will not be deprived of immunity because the action he took was in error, was done maliciously, or was in excess of his authority. Rather, he will be subject to liability only when he has acted in the “clear absence of all jurisdiction.”

Justice White conceded that no state law or court ruling anywhere could be said to have authorized Judge Stump’s action; but the important point, he went on, is that there was no statute or ruling which prohibited such an action by the judge.

Those interested in reading more are urged to click the link to Mr. Rothbard’s article at the top of the post.

What all of this should make clear is that for redress of rights violations stemming from false allegations made in restraining order and related prosecutions to be possible, the laws themselves must be rectified—and legislative reform will only be urged when more people loudly demand it.

For rights abuses to be capable of remedy by process of law, they must be illegal, which means the processes that authorize those abuses must be revamped or repealed by lawmakers (your state representatives). So long as the standard applied to restraining orders is merely a discretionary one, judges can rule however they want (that’s the statutory latitude they’ve been given), and they’re accountable for those rulings to no one.

“Predator” v. “Porn Star”: Restraining Order Fraud, False Allegations, and Suing for Defamation

October 26, 2014June 21, 2023Moderator 6 Comments

People falsely alleged to be abusers on restraining order petitions, particularly men, are treated like brutes, sex offenders, and scum by officers of the court and its staff, besides by authorities and any number of others. Some report their own relatives remain suspicious—often based merely on finger-pointing that’s validated by some judge in a few-minute procedure (and that’s when relatives aren’t the ones making the false allegations).

The social alienation and emotional distress felt by the falsely accused may be both extreme and persistent.

The urge to credit accusations of abuse has been sharpened to a reflex in recent decades by feminist propaganda and its ill begot progeny, the Violence Against Women Act. No one thinks twice about it.

Using four-letter words in court is strictly policed. Even judges can’t do it without risking censure. Falsely implicating someone, however, as a stalker, for example, or a child molester—that isn’t policed at all. Commerce in lies, whether by accusers, their representatives, or even judges themselves is unregulated. No one is answerable for sh* s/he makes up.

Accordingly, false allegations and fraud are rewarding and therefore commonplace.

It should be noted that false allegations and fraud can be distinctly different. For example, David Letterman famously had a restraining order petitioned against him by a woman who was seemingly convinced he was communicating to her through her TV, and her interpretations of his “coded messages” probably were genuinely oppressive to her. David Letterman lived in another state, had never met her, and assuredly had no idea who she was. Her allegations of misconduct weren’t true, but they weren’t intended to mislead (and the fact that they did mislead a judge into signing off on her petition only underscores the complete absence of judicial responsibility in this legal arena).

Fraud, in contrast, is manipulative and deceptive by design. It occurs when an accuser intentionally lies (or spins the facts) to give a false impression and steer a judge toward a wrong conclusion that serves the interests of the fraudster.

Regardless, though, of whether false allegations are made knowingly or unknowingly, they’re rarely discerned as false by the court, are seldom acknowledged as false even if recognized as such, and are always destructive when treated as real, urgent, and true, which they commonly are.

The falsely accused (often private citizens who’ve never had a prior brush with the law) are publicly humiliated and shamed, which by itself is predictably traumatizing. They are besides invariably (and indefinitely) entered into police databases, both local and national, and may be entered into one or more domestic violence registries, too (also indefinitely). These facts pop up on background checks, and defendants in some states may even appear in registries accessible by anyone (including friends, neighbors, family members, boy- and girlfriends, employers, colleagues, students, patients, and/or clients).

This costs the falsely accused leases, loans, and jobs (being turned down for which, of course, aggravates the gnawing indignity and outrage they already feel). Those falsely accused of domestic violence may further be prohibited from attending school functions or working with or around children (permanently). Defendants of false restraining orders may besides be barred from their homes, children, assets, and possessions. Some (including salaried, professional men and women) are left ostracized and destitute. Retirees report having to live out of their cars.

This, remember, is the result of someone’s lodging a superficial complaint against them in a procedure that only requires that the accuser fill out some paperwork and briefly talk to a judge. A successful fraud may be based on nothing more substantive, in fact, than five “magic” words: “I’m afraid for my life” (which can be directed against anyone: a friend, a neighbor, an intimate, a spouse, a relative, a coworker—even a TV celebrity their speaker has never met).

This incantation takes a little over a second to utter (and its speaker, who can be a criminal or a mental case, need not even live in the same state as the accused).

Accordingly, people’s names and lives are trashed—and no surprise if they become unhinged. (Those five “magic” words, what’s more, may be uttered by the actual abusers in relationships to conceal their own misconduct and redirect blame. That includes, for example, stalkers. Those “magic” words may also be used to cover up any nature of other misbehavior, including criminal. They instantly discredit anything the accused might say about their speakers.)

The prescribed course of action to redress slanders and libels is a defamation suit, but allegations of defamation brought by those falsely accused on restraining orders or in related prosecutions are typically discounted by the court. Perjury (lying to the court) can’t be prosecuted by a private litigant (only by the district attorney’s office, which never does), and those who allege defamation are typically told the court has already ruled on the factualness of the restraining order petitioner’s testimony and that it can’t be reviewed (the facts may not even be reviewed by appellate judges, who may only consider whether the conduct of the previous judge demonstrated “clear abuse of discretion”). The plaintiff’s testimony, they’re told, is a res judicata—an already “decided thing.” (Never mind that docket time dedicated to the formation of that “decision” may literally have been a couple of minutes.)

So…slanders and libels made by abuse of court process aren’t actionable, slanders and libels that completely sunder the lives of the wrongly accused, who can’t even get them expunged from their records to simply reset their fractured lives to zero.

Such slanders and libels may include false allegations of stalking, physical or sexual aggression, assault, child abuse, or even rape. In the eyes of the court, someone’s being falsely implicated as a monster, publicly and for life, is no biggie.

In contrast, it was reported last month that the court awarded a Kansas woman $1,000,000 in a defamation suit brought against a radio station that falsely called her a “porn star.”

When violated people speak of legal inequities, this exemplifies what they’re talking about: Falsely and publicly implicating someone as a sex offender is fine and no grounds for complaint in the eyes of the justice system, but for the act of falsely and publicly calling someone a mere sex performer, someone may be fined a million bucks.

Beating up Disabled Girls: False Allegations and Judicial Dishonor

October 20, 2014June 30, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

“There is no normal. The rational has been torn away from your ability to grasp it.”

—Cartoonist Scott Stantis (on growing up in an abusive household)

This is the sentiment shared by everyone who’s been wrongly blamed—and abused and condemned for it.

Consider that current restraining order and domestic violence legislation and policy are defended as protecting battered women and children. Consider further that honor is not only represented as the guiding principle of judicial conduct but that it’s the title that judges are expected to ceremoniously be addressed by.

Now consider this appeal posted three weeks ago (September 30, 2014) to the e-petition “Stop False Allegations of Domestic Violence” by Phoenicia W. of Springfield, Missouri:

Hi im disabled 28 year old women. And just. Because. I was sick of being. Beat by my exboyfrend I kicked him out and he put fales charges on my cost me 10.000 dollars and I lost. Alot. How can his lies be taken. Off my record. Please. IV never. Even. Could. Hurt a fly please. I cry every. Nite. Help me.im incident I swere.

I’ve edited copy since I was teenager. Here’s what Phoenicia means:

Hi, I’m a disabled 28-year-old woman, and just because I was sick of being beaten by my ex-boyfriend [and] kicked him out…he put false charges on me that cost me $10,000—and I lost. A lot. How can his lies be taken off my record? Please. I’ve never even (and couldn’t) hurt a fly. Please. I cry every night. Help me. I’m innocent, I swear.

The gist of Mr. Stantis’s cartoon essay is that when you’re punished for something you didn’t do, and there’s no way to make sense of your situation or escape it, it “mangles the soul.”

My tidied version makes Phoenicia sound very able and together. Look again at the unedited script, though, which is a poem of pain.

Does it look and sound like it was authored by someone who could capably represent herself in court? For that matter, does it look and sound like it was authored by someone dangerous? Finally, how honorable is beating up (or beating down, if you prefer) a disabled girl and leaving her crying herself to sleep each night—a disabled girl, what’s more, who says she was beaten by the man who accused her of violence?

Feminists are urged to ask themselves which they think will have a more lasting consequence on this woman’s psyche: having been hit by an ex-boyfriend or living day and night with the court’s judgment? Which obviously haunts her? Which has healed, and which can’t heal? (When the court acts on lies by abusers, it compounds the abuse many times and makes it gnawing and constant: “There is no normal.” Ever. Again.)

You can’t relate pain like Phoenicia’s with a lurid picture of a black eye. Her pain and its source are invisible—and count on it that all traces of either have been carefully concealed beneath layers of judicial impression management.

If you’re not familiar with the phrase impression management, here’s an example: “She’ll be okay. She just ran into a door.”

Larry’s Story, Part 2: Suing a False Accuser and the Judge She Rode in On

October 18, 2014July 4, 2023Moderator 8 Comments

Buncombe County, North Carolina, where Larry Smith has for three years been harried by relentless false allegations from a disturbed neighbor, is the source of the word bunkum.

Bunkum (or bunk) is more familiarly called BS, which is what Larry’s been daily forced to tolerate for three years. He’s 70, and the time he’s had stolen from him was precious.

Larry filed a lawsuit in federal district court this week (pro se) against the State of North Carolina, his neighbor-cum-accuser, the judge who encouraged her reign of terror, and a number of other public officials to be named later in an amendment to his complaint.

Larry, a grandfather living on Social Security who practiced law in his salad days, is an object lesson about why it’s ill-advised to poke a sleeping bear.

Despite suffering from agonizing scoliosis (a degenerative spinal disorder), Larry’s been summoned to court over 30 times since 2011, locked in a cell, and had a gun pointed at him consequent to crank allegations from a vengeful neighbor who’s publicly accused him of being a disbarred attorney, an embezzler, and a psychopath (including on Facebook).

She says he’s “barked like a dog” at her, recruited “mentally challenged adults” to harass her while shopping, and mooned her friends. She says he’s cyberstalked her, too, besides hacking into her phone and computer.

Larry, who’s in pain even when he’s sitting down, has been reported to the police a dozen times or more while out walking his toy poodles or just puttering around his house. His accuser has also twice filed restraining orders against him since he took exception to her cat’s killing the local songbirds that have always been a source of joy to him to watch. The first time she petitioned a restraining order, she reported that he violated it later the same day.

Larry hadn’t even seen the woman.

Larry’s accuser’s is an extreme version of the mischief that’s widely reported by targets of restraining orders. Notable (and telling) is that even the outrageous degree of flagrant procedural abuse Larry’s been subjected to is winked at by authorities and judges.

There’s liable to be more blinking than winking this time around: Mr. Smith is going to Washington—and circumventing the local old boy’s network.

Larry’s lawsuit alleges deception; fraud; judicial dereliction; frivolous and malicious prosecution; fundamental constitutional rights violations; false imprisonment; unjust stigmatization; judicial politicking; collusion, conspiracy, and tyrannical oppression by representatives of regional government; and felonious forgery of a criminal complaint.

It also requests a jury.

One man’s debunking procedures this country and many others have invested faith and a fortune in is probably a forlorn hope, but the endeavor is nothing shy of heroic (and may at least restore to a sorely hectored man his peace of mind).

Representatives of the Israeli Bar Association Report False Accusations of Domestic Violence Have “Reached Epidemic Proportions”

October 16, 2014February 28, 2018Moderator 2 Comments

Unlike the American Bar Association, the Israeli Bar Association has a Committee on False Accusations and Parental Alienation. Also unlike its American counterpart, its representatives have chutzpah.

The lawyers who chair the Committee on False Accusations and Parental Alienation in the Tel Aviv district last month told the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) that false allegations of domestic violence are “a daily occurrence” (“Female Lawyers Decry False Accusations in Divorce”).

In fact, they reported (“with complete confidence”) that “false accusations of violence filed against spouses in divorce proceedings have reached epidemic proportions.”

Feminists don’t shout “shame!” at women who lie to the court; they shout “shame!” at women who report women lie to the court.

Advocates for women’s groups predictably countered with hollered scoldings and denials.

The chairperson of the Committee for Advancement of the Status of Women (which represents the interests of women’s groups) said her figures showed “the annual total of false accusations filed by women is about 11, and the number for men is similar.”

To this, one of the attorneys on the Committee on False Accusations and Parental Alienation answered she personally knew “more than 11 people who have suffered false accusations, and promised to bring the [Committee for Advancement of the Status of Women] more detailed information.”

(She might, too, have pointed out that more than 11 false accusations can be made by a single false accuser in a single false prosecution.)

Childish is what it’s tempting to comment about the faith of women’s advocates that false accusations filed by Israeli women each year are “about 11.” It’s also tempting to say the same of their need to assert that false accusations from men are equally low but about the same in number.

Criticizing feminists, however, never seems to inspire self-reflection.

Allowing for argument’s sake that the Israeli Bar Association is right that false allegations are a daily occurrence, a question Americans might ask themselves is this: Is the reason why the American Bar Association hasn’t reported the same thing that Israelis are bigger liars than we are, or is the reason that Israel’s legal critics are braver and more principled than ours?

BLACKMAIL: Using Restraining Orders to Extort and Punish

October 14, 2014January 22, 2018Moderator 4 Comments

“A blackmailer could attempt to blackmail someone with a threat to accuse him falsely, but we should expect such cases to be rare because the victim has a good remedy: sue the blackmailer for defamation. Good but not perfect, because the blackmailer may not have the resources to pay a legal judgment. Criminalizing this form of blackmail can thus be viewed as backing up the law against defamation.”

—Judge Richard A. Posner, “Blackmail, Privacy, and Freedom of Contract”

In theory, the judge is right that victims of false allegations have a “good remedy”; in practice, however, he’s mistaken.

That’s not because the judge doesn’t comprehend his subject (to the contrary, his explication is very adept); it’s because the judge only considers the “attempt to blackmail someone with a threat to accuse him falsely” as a tool to extort money.

Among human economic transactions, money isn’t the only sought-after commodity.

A perusal of the e-petition “Stop False Allegations of Domestic Violence” will garner the social scientist any number of anecdotal accounts of blackmailers’ threatening to make false allegations in order to bend people to their will. Here’s a recent example:

My husband filed false child abuse charges against me to obtain full custody of our children. I cannot count the number of times that he threatened to keep the children away from me. He said he would tell people I abused them. I am a victim of domestic violence, and this allegation has just allowed him to continue the abuse.

In this instance, a husband used threats of filing false allegations of child abuse to blackmail his wife to stay with him and keep quiet about his abuse of her (cf. Dr. Tara Palmatier’s “Presto, Change-o, DARVO: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender”). The brief account doesn’t explain why the husband made good on the threats. Maybe his wife wasn’t as compliant as he wanted—or maybe he met someone to replace her with, and she was just an albatross around his neck.

Women, of course, do the same to men, particularly to men who’ve indicated they want to break up (sometimes kids are used as leverage, sometimes not).

Here’s a recent comment on the blog from the mother of a blackmail victim of this type:

My son’s girlfriend…filed a domestic abuse CPO [civil protection order] against my son, again telling him that he shouldn’t have left her. He hasn’t been served yet—they keep missing him. She calls my son constantly, stringing him along with the idea that she “might” let it go. He’s taking her out to eat, giving her money, staying the night with her. Hoping that she’ll let it go. All that and yet two hearing dates for him have come and gone with her showing up at both his hearings asking for a continuance because he hasn’t been served.

For the uninitiated, appreciate that restraining orders alleging abuse are obtained at no cost—and in a few hours if not minutes. Getting one is cake. It costs an accuser absolutely nothing to file serial petitions, and there are no statutory limits on the number of times s/he can file (some people do this over and over for years). The commenter has herself also been repeatedly accused by the woman in her story (her son’s “former” girlfriend) of stalking the woman and causing her to fear “for her life.”

When the court date comes up, she doesn’t show, and the case is dismissed. She then goes and files a new CPO to keep the cycle going. I tried to get a CPO protection order against her, but the magistrate denied it.

This is a reality that the court is either blind to or finds it impolitic to acknowledge—and no wonder: millions of restraining orders are issued per annum, and owning that restraining orders are abused to blackmail and terrorize defendants would implicate the court as an accessory to extortion, defamation, harassment, fraud, etc.

The “remedy” proposed by the judge quoted in the epigraph, i.e., suing for defamation, is for the same reason a nonstarter. If the court entertained defamation suits brought by the victims of false restraining orders, it would have to acknowledge its own culpability. It would have to own, that is, that restraining orders are urgent and conveniently available tools of blackmail, harassment, and terrorism. It would also have to own that it’s easily duped. The court doesn’t like to admit that it makes mistakes, let alone that it’s gullible.

This writer has filed a defamation suit and has corresponded with others who’ve done the same. The court refuses to accept the claim that “testimony” can be “defamatory.” Litigants are batted away with invocations of “res judicata” (they’re told the false allegations are already “decided things” and can’t be revisited). Never mind that consequences of false testimony include defendants’ being entered into domestic violence registries and state and federal police databases, as well as being denied employment (and, for example, the right to attend their children’s school activities, coach or teach kids, etc.).

False restraining orders, in other words, not only defame but defame with the authority of the court behind them. The reputations of those accused aren’t merely “sullied”; defamatory allegations are credited as incontrovertible truths established in a court of law.

When the motive of blackmailers is to extort money, following through with the threat by exposing the person threatened means blackmailers don’t get what they want. When, however, the motive is to dominate another person, and false allegations of abuse are the threat, following through with the threat does enable blackmailers to get what they want: control.

That includes control of the truth. Some cases of blackmail this author has been informed of were instances of the parties accused knowing something about their accusers that their accusers didn’t want to get around (usually criminal activity). When the guilty parties no longer trusted that coercion would ensure that those who had the goods on them would keep quiet, they filed restraining orders against them alleging abuse, which instantly discredited anything the people they accused might disclose about their activities.

Some such activities reported to this writer have been domestic violence, immigration fraud (selling green cards), drug use, and tax evasion. All someone who’s obtained a restraining order has to say to authorities if their actions are reported is that the allegations were brought by a crank they “had to get a restraining order against.” Case closed.

Restraining orders are perfect tools of cover-up.

Contrary, then, to what the judge quoted in the epigraph concludes, people who blackmail others with threats of filing false allegations can not only make good on their threats with the expectation of impunity; they can conceal other crimes behind the shield of the court.

For blackmailers, it’s a win-win proposition.

Class Action Lawsuits: Suing Uncle Sam for Rights Violations Arising from Restraining Order and Domestic Violence Prosecutions

October 11, 2014August 10, 2023Moderator 9 Comments

“I think action would be better than just mere words. How do you think same-sex marriages were passed? We all need to come together and file a class action lawsuit. These laws plainly violate our constitutional rights as U.S. citizens. There is no due process of law for these allegations, and the cause-and-effect deprives an individual of life, liberty, and property.”

—Michael K. from Alamogordo, New Mexico

The man makes a good point.

Cursory reading on class actions suggests, too, that a lawsuit like the one he proposes is feasible. According to Wikipedia, “Nationwide plaintiff classes are possible [if] such suits…have a commonality of issues across state lines.”

Controlling statutes and procedures concerning domestic violence and restraining order prosecutions, as well as “child welfare” interventions, vary state to state, but a “commonality of issues” vis-à-vis civil rights violations and unjust privations definitely does exist—and certainly class actions within states’ lines are at least as worthy of consideration.

Wikipedia again: “The procedure for filing a class action is to file suit with one or several named plaintiffs on behalf of a proposed class. The proposed class must consist of a group of individuals [who] have suffered a common injury or injuries.”

The most sympathetic candidates for a class action are probably those who’ve unjustly been deprived of property, employment, and/or access to children.

A recent NPR story reports that dozens of students who’ve been accused of rape are suing their universities. They allege they were denied due process and fair treatment by college investigative committees, that is, that they were “railroaded” (and publicly humiliated and reviled). The basis for a suit alleging civil rights violations, then, might also exist (that is, independent of claims of material privation). Certainly most or all restraining order defendants and many domestic violence defendants are “railroaded” and subjected to public shaming and social rejection unjustly.

“How to Start a Class Action Lawsuit,” a primer authored by Linda Jo Martin, creator of FightCPS.com, explains the basics of the procedure. (Ms. Martin advocates for the filing of class actions against Child Protective Services in all 50 states.)

Getting a class action going of the sort this post concerns requires self-starters with good networking skills and a great deal of perseverance, because inducing people who’ve been abused by state process to come forward with complaints is tough. They’re scathed, distrustful, and afraid.

Names of willing participants have to be gathered and a law firm enlisted. Attorney fees aren’t a hindrance, because they’re collected from the reward. But a law firm would have to be confident of a win.

A firm that represent class actions is Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann, and Bernstein. Its website offer further information about class actions. Alternatively or additionally, see Stanford Law Professor Janet Cooper Alexander’s “An Introduction to Class Action Procedure in the United States.”

Undertaking a venture like coordinating a class action is beyond the resources of this writer, but anyone with the gumption to try and transform words into action is welcome to post a notice here.

Placing a notice on an e-petition like “Stop False Allegations of Domestic Violence” would be of limited value, because it would recede into the archives in a couple of days. Mining the petition for names, however, could be rewarding, because some respondents include their telephone numbers and email addresses along with their stories. Using Facebook and Twitter would be the most potentially profitable tacks.

The intrepid social activist would besides do well to contact the likes of A Voice for Men, and put out the word. Any group or hub that represents the interests of people with similar complaints should be notified.

Professors who’ve written about the particular rights abuses a class action would seek to redress, particularly law professors, might also be recruited to provide amicus briefs to the court (authoritative opinions that lend support).

Abuses of the sorts this blog and related sites concern have persisted without check for decades. Even prompts for others to take action are still just words.

Someone has to step forward and attempt to translate thought into action. Is that person you?

What Journalists Need to Understand about What Restraining Orders Are: A Tutorial for Investigators, Part 2

October 9, 2014June 30, 2023Moderator 9 Comments

“Orders for protection represent a legislative attempt to incorporate distinct features from both civil law and criminal law. On the one hand, a private litigant can initiate judicial proceedings to seek redress against another private individual. On the other hand, criminal penalties, such as fines and incarceration, will attach if a protection order is violated. Unlike both civil and criminal proceedings, protection order actions involve a great deal of informality, with the end result being an order for protection that is often issued on an ex parte basis without the benefit of a full evidentiary hearing.

“Many aspects of Nevada law in this area can best be described as ‘murky,’ with virtually no critical or scholarly study available to assist Nevada’s courts. Moreover, statistical information about protection orders in Nevada is almost non-existent.”

—Staff attorney Joe Tommasino, Las Vegas Justice Court

The first thing reporters need to grasp about restraining orders is that they’re a kluge (a Frankenstein’s monster crudely stitched together from dubiously compatible parts). For plaintiffs (accusers), they merge the most favorable aspects of civil and criminal prosecutions; for defendants, the least favorable.

The scales of justice are tipped from the start.

Restraining orders allow a “private litigant [to] initiate judicial proceedings to seek redress against another private individual” just as civil lawsuits do (though restraining order applications by contrast are typically processed free of charge). They’re also adjudicated according to the lowest civil standard of proof (“preponderance of the evidence”). State standards vary rhetorically, but the criterion for rulings is basically the same: whatever judges fancy is just (and there are only two choices—thumbs up or thumbs down).

On this basis, citizens can be rousted from their homes and kicked to the curb (and some are left destitute). On this basis, also, they may be entered into domestic violence registries (indefinitely), besides state and federal law enforcement databases (indefinitely), and denied security clearances, loans, leases, and even employment in certain fields (just like convicted felons).

Notwithstanding that restraining order allegations are introduced in civil court and aren’t subject to the criminal standard of evidence (“proof beyond a reasonable doubt”), “criminal penalties, such as fines and incarceration, will attach if a protection order is violated”—or is simply alleged to have been violated: arresting officers need only have a reasonable suspicion that a violation occurred, which they need not have witnessed.

The savvy observer will note that suspicion is the motive determiner of liability at all levels. Suspicion informs judicial disposition, subsequent police response to claims of violation, and of course interpretation by third parties, including employers (judges trust accusers, and everyone else trusts judges). Emphatically worthy of remark is that billions of dollars of federal monies have been invested over the past 20 years toward conditioning judicial and police suspicion.

This may incline the savvy observer to suspect the fix is in.

He or she should appreciate further that restraining orders are most commonly issued ex parte, which means accusers simply fill out a form and very briefly interview with a judge without defendants’ being present to contest the allegations and without their even being aware that they’ve been made. (Some courts even explicitly advise plaintiffs to rehearse their allegations so they can recite them as quickly as they would an order at a drive-thru.) Although most states mandate that a follow-up hearing be slated to give the accused an opportunity to controvert the allegations against them and receive an “unbiased” second opinion, follow-up hearings are held in the same court that prejudicially ruled against them in the first place: “We found you guilty. Go ahead and tell us why we screwed up. You have 15 minutes.” Because restraining order trials are civil proceedings, defendants aren’t provided with legal counsel. They’re nevertheless afforded only a few days (or a couple of weeks at the outside) to prepare a defense.

Returning to this post’s epigraph, here’s its author’s elaboration of the points it introduces (which apply irrespective of what a restraining order is called):

The concept of a “protection order” or a “TPO” is a curious one under the law. Unlike a criminal case, where the awesome power of the State is wielded against a private citizen, an action for a protection order allows one private citizen to invoke judicial authority directly against another private citizen.

The implications are staggering when one considers that a protection order allows individuals to trigger invisible force fields affecting the conduct, movement, speech, and legal rights of others.

Even more significant is the fact that Nevada law allows a person to obtain a protection order based upon only a brief ex parte application [as do most or all states’ laws].

From these concepts, questions immediately present themselves. Are protection orders being utilized in oppressive or unexpected ways? Are the factual scenarios involved similar to what the [legislature] envisioned them to be? Are courts utilizing protection order tools correctly? Are judges issuing ex parte orders that trample upon the rights of innocent people before a hearing is held to determine the validity of specific allegations? Is this area of the law an insufficiently regulated “wild frontier”?

Loyola Law School Prof. Aaron Caplan, in a 2013 law review article that cites the 2008 paper of Mr. Tommasino’s quoted in this post, says yes.

Many structural factors of civil harassment litigation lead to higher-than-usual risk of constitutional error. As with family law, civil harassment law has a way of encouraging some judges to dispense freewheeling, Solomonic justice according to their visions of proper behavior and the best interests of the parties. Judges’ legal instincts are not helped by the accelerated and abbreviated procedures required by the statutes. The parties are rarely represented by counsel, and ex parte orders are encouraged, which means courts may not hear the necessary facts and legal arguments. Very few civil harassment cases lead to appeals, let alone appeals with published opinions. As a result, civil harassment law tends to operate with a shortage of two things we ordinarily rely upon to ensure accurate decision-making by trial courts: the adversary system and appellate review.

The process essentially operates “in a vacuum”:

Harassment orders, when granted, are very rarely appealed. In the Justice Courts of Las Vegas in 2008, only three out of 2034 non-domestic violence petitions resulted in an appeal. No appellate court opinions interpret the Nevada statute—even though it was enacted in 1989 [that’s zero appellate court opinions in 20 years]. As a result, “the limited jurisdiction courts [of Nevada] have been operating in a vacuum and creating ad hoc, reactive solutions” to recurring problems.

The stagecoach, in other words, is steered without reins. The laxity of the statutes means judges of the lowest-tier courts call the shots, and there are no big brothers looking over their shoulders. They’re licensed to do what they want. (The quotations above refer to different types of restraining order, but the two types aren’t necessarily treated any differently. Whether a petitioned injunction is a protection order or a harassment order may only depend on which box was ticked on the application form. In most jurisdictions, what distinguishes one from the other is the nature of the relationship between the accuser and the accused. The allegations may be identical.)

The legislative insensitivity to constitutional principles and protections as well as the lack of judicial housekeeping in this area of law are beneath the perceptual threshold of the public. To the uninitiated, the absence of controversy originating from “legitimate” sectors suggests that everything’s working as it should: restraining orders are issued to dangerous people who need to be tethered.

While how commonly the process is exploited for ulterior motives is a matter of heated dispute, its availability for abuse is plain. The prevailing attitude toward allegations of rampant abuse is that if statistics can’t be adduced to support them, the complaint is irrelevant and should exercise no influence on policy reform. The absurdity of this attitude is likewise plain. The process is designed to favor accusers, judges are predisposed to credit accuser’s accounts (in part according to explicit instruction), those accounts need not be substantiated, the process is initiated and completed in hearings spanning minutes only, and (as the court attorney who wrote the epigraph notes) comprehensive statistical information about restraining orders is virtually non-existent.

The restraining order process is conducted in a black hole. There’s not only no transparency; there’s no light.

What Journalists Need to Understand about Restraining Orders and Their Abuse: A Tutorial for Investigators, Part 1

October 7, 2014July 25, 2023Moderator 6 Comments

“Restraining orders give victims of domestic violence a tool to keep their abusers away or at least have them arrested if they come close. Anyone in a relationship with recent history of abuse can apply, and the order can be signed the same day.

“It gives victims the right to stay in the home and keep the kids. But the civil document relies on their abusers to respect the law.”

—“Are Restraining Orders False Security?” (USA Today)

Reporters are often keen and eager detectives when there are two sides to a story, and they want to get to the bottom of things. When there aren’t clearly defined contestants with competing narratives, however, reporters are as prone as anyone else to swallow what they’re told.

The news story the epigraph was excerpted from was prompted by a recent murder in Oregon and explores the impotence of restraining orders, in particular to “stop bullets.” Just as shooting sprees inspire reporters to investigate gun legislation, murder victims who had applied for restraining orders that proved worthless inspire reporters to investigate restraining order policies. The presumption, always, is that the law failed.

The solution suggested by the story—the same solution that’s always suggested by such stories—is to beef up protocols and give the statutes more teeth.

What’s inevitably lost in considerations like this is that for every person who’s attacked or killed in spite of a restraining order, thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people face grave indignities and privations consequent to orders’ being used exploitatively (including public revilement, chronic harassment, criminal profiling, social alienation, and loss of employment, health, and access to kids, home, and property). This is a fact it seems journalists would only be given cause to confront if more victims of procedural abuse killed themselves.

Preferable, certainly, would be if reporters could be depended on to sniff out and censure injustice without anyone’s having to die.

Toward this end, this post encourages reporters to recognize what the quoted paragraphs that introduce it actually say. This is revealed by removing the obfuscating rhetoric. Replace the phrase victims of domestic violence with accusers, and replace their abusers with the accused.

Now consider the implications of the same paragraphs, slightly revised:

“Restraining orders give accusers a tool to keep the accused away or at least have them arrested if they come close. Anyone in a relationship…can apply, and the order can be signed the same day.

“It gives accusers the right to stay in the home and keep the kids….”

The mere substitution of factually accurate, unbiased labels changes the meaning of these paragraphs significantly, and brings their implications to the fore.

Now dare to think the unthinkable (as every factual analyst should) and replace the word accusers with the word liars and the phrase the accused with the phrase those lied about, and pare away a few more words.

“Restraining orders give liars a tool to keep those lied about away or have them arrested. Anyone in a relationship can apply, and the order can be signed the same day.

“It gives liars the right to stay in the home and keep the kids.”

The same two paragraphs, reconceived, say that a restraining order can be got by lying to the court, can be used to have someone arrested without warrant based on the report of the liar, can be had in a single day (without the accused’s even being given prior notice of the proceedings), and can be used to gain immediate and sole entitlement to a place of residence and immediate and sole custody of children.

Appreciate that there are no (enforced) penalties for lying, and suddenly the motives and opportunity for fraud—particularly against a target of malice—become plain.

Appreciate further that allegations made by restraining order petitioners aren’t subject to the criminal standard (“proof beyond a reasonable doubt”). Restraining order trials are civil adjudications, not criminal ones. The “standard of proof” applied is “preponderance of the evidence,” which means no certain substantiation of allegations ranging from nuisance to sexual assault is required. Approval of a restraining order isn’t a (literal) finding of guilt, per se. No proof of anything must be established.

People, including journalists, only see what they hear.

The truth of how conveniently and urgently restraining orders avail themselves as tools of abuse is right under the noses of everyone who writes about them. It just gets obscured by loaded words (victims and abusers, for example) and the images they excite. Blindness to these words’ unexamined assumptions is further reinforced by the hysteria aroused by a (single) sensational act of violence.

Principal among these unexamined assumptions is that everyone who claims to be a victim is a victim (according to which belief everyone who claims to be a victim is treated as a victim by the court—which every false claimant dependably anticipates).

Observing this by using a story about a tragedy shouldn’t seem callous, because (1) it’s in the wake of tragedies like the one reported in the referenced story that hysteria runs highest and completely eclipses critical scrutiny, and (2) it’s tragedies like the one reported in the referenced story that show that restraining orders, besides being excellent tools to realize spiteful or avaricious intentions, aren’t any good at doing the one thing that’s said to justify them: averting violence.

On the contrary, the story reports:

“For some people it’s more dangerous [to get a restraining order],” said Kim Larson, director for Marion County District Attorney Victim Assistance Division. “Sometimes it makes people really angry, getting served with a restraining order.”

This is especially true if the order is false. (Besides inspiring violent people to commit further violence, restraining orders may drive nonviolent people to lash out or even kill in desperation, particularly if they’ve been falsely accused, publicly excoriated, and deprived of all that gave their lives meaning.)

This isn’t rocket science. People lie, and when people lie about abuse, they do egregious and often irrevocable harm to those they falsely blame—who only very rarely kill themselves. No one looks beneath the surface, because they faithfully cleave to popular conceptions and reasonably assume that there are safeguards in place (due process and such) to ensure that allegations of abuse are properly vetted and substantiated.

Investigators shouldn’t assume.

Feminist Response Invited: Mom Gives up after Spending $25,000 to Fight a False Restraining Order and Regain Custody of Her Son Only to Have Her Ex-Husband Start the Whole Thing over Again

October 4, 2014January 29, 2018Moderator 4 Comments

Feminists who identify with the “battered women’s movement” (the domestic violence lobby) insist fathers’ claims that women lie about abuse are false or overblown. This writer wonders whether they feel the same about mothers’ claims that men lie about abuse.

Here’s one mom’s account (submitted yesterday):

My ex-husband’s family just filed their second bogus restraining order against me to overturn custody of our 13-year-old. The first one, three years ago, I spent three months and $25,000 to fight, and got my son back. This one? I promised myself not to fight if they tried again, and I didn’t and lost today in court. They upheld the emergency order of protection and extended a restraining order against me for no contact with my own son for nothing I did at all—for two years. My son wants to be with them, so I’m not fighting. I just don’t want him to grow up thinking I did anything wrong and that’s why they took him from me. I don’t need to lose any more money and get fired from any more jobs trying to fight…. I’m done.

Restraining orders suck when used for ulterior motives. Unfortunately, they’re used to legally kidnap children, and I wish anyone who’s going through what I’m going through strength and health.

For those who don’t know how an “emergency order of protection” works, it’s this simple: the petitioner goes to court and files some allegations (“under oath”) that the defendant has to respond to a few days later. Typically the window to respond is far too narrow to make it possible for a defendant to retain legal counsel even if she weren’t resigned to defeat, as the mom whose story appears above was (after running up $25,000 in costs fighting a previous prosecution, losing jobs, and possibly being emotionally harried to the brink of insanity).

Feminists are encouraged to respond to this mom’s story, whether with sympathy or criticism. The court process she’s a victim of isn’t one this writer condones. Let’s hear from some people who do condone it.

This writer is tired and has no words of solace. The mother whose story this post concerns is prohibited contact with her son for two years, which may mean she’ll never have a normal, healthy relationship with him again.

Feminists out there—and I know you’re out there—are invited to remind her why this is as it should be.

Perhaps you could tell her how the courts never swallow lies, so she must be lying. Perhaps you could tell her how a process comprising two hearings mere days apart, a process that’s initiated and concluded in minutes, is fair and just. Perhaps you could reassure her that her sacrifice is ensuring the protection of abused women she’ll never meet. Don’t, however, let me put words in your mouths.

Ladies?

“Women scare the sh— out of me”: When Restraining Orders Are Petitioned by Female Stalkers against Men Who Treat Them Sensitively

October 3, 2014July 1, 2023Moderator 3 Comments

On 15 March 2009 at 11.07pm: Hi there! How are you? I am lying in my bed and thinking…I miss you and miss having you in my life and I would love to have you back in it…. I do have a lot of issues, I know, and I suppose I am a difficult woman at times…. In the same breath, I could have made the biggest tit out of myself now, because you might have met someone else…. Deep down inside I hope you miss me as much as I miss you! […] I don’t want you to feel that I am pressurising you….

On 21 April 2009: Hallo Col, you must think I am crazy…. I just read the mail I sent you on Sunday and it was a bit intense…. It feels like my life is falling apart….

On 13 July, 2009: Col, I don’t understand why you don’t answer my emails. Have you thought about what I said? I really think we’d be great together.

Later that day [Colin] replies: Hi Danielle, I feel we keep going over this. I think you keep misreading my friendship. I like you as a person but am just not interested in going out with you. Please just accept this as you are making things awkward. Colin.

On 18 July, 2009, [Danielle] writes: You are obviously very angry with me and have decided not to contact me at all. I, on the other hand, am not a person of a few words, as you very well know and have decided to mail you, because I know you won’t even pick up the phone if I try to call you. I should probably just let you be, but…I have gotten used to spending time with you…. You always say I am needy. Perhaps, but it is because I feel like the outsider in your life, the one you keep at a distance….

You’re probably thinking I’m some sort of psycho chick and that I keep contacting you in all sorts of ways, but…I do mean well…. Hope to hear from you soon, Danielle x.

—from “Trivial Pursuit” (Noseweek magazine)

One of the parties in this “correspondence” got a protection order against the other. Which do you imagine it was?

A female respondent to the blog brought my attention to the three-year-old story out of Cape Town, South Africa from which the epigraph is excerpted. It’s about a man who was served with a domestic violence restraining order (later revised to a stalking protection order) petitioned by a woman he’d threatened to “un-friend” on Facebook and with whom he’d never had a domestic relationship (he says they had fatefully “kissed once or twice” during a “brief fling”). The order was apparently the tag-team brainchild of this woman, who would be called a stalker according to even the most forgiving standards, and another woman, an attorney the man had dated for six months.

Harmless, right? Tee-hee.

The man agreed to speak with reporters about the business in 2011 because, he said, “I’ve exhausted every avenue to clear my name” (a sentiment that may sound familiar).

The seedy “girl plot” evolved on Facebook and is too long to include in its entirety. It’s impressively sick (and tragic).

The story is one this writer can relate to and synchs with any number of accounts that have been shared with him over the past three years. (Feminists who contend that opposition to restraining orders originates exclusively from fathers’ rights groups—or FRGs, as they call them—are decidedly wrong.)

The restraining order against the man in the story (Colin) was eventually dismissed. Here’s the upshot:

“At this stage, one side of me is relieved, as the stalker girl is gone, but another part of me feels aggrieved. Firstly, I had incurred unnecessary legal costs—I had stopped counting at R20,000. Secondly, I was furious that an unsubstantiated order had been brought against me by ‘a woman scorned’ who lied to the court, and thirdly, I could not understand why [my ex-girlfriend] had become involved. I could not think of a single thing I had done against her. The only thing I was guilty of was doing good things for her and her family. In return, she branded me with the stigma of a domestic violence charge which never goes away. People just think that you go around beating up women.”

Two weeks ago, [Colin] asked a woman out. “She had heard this story that I threaten women. Cape Town is a small place.”

He can’t imagine having a normal life and a normal relationship. “To be honest, women scare the shit out of me at the moment. I have no plans to date any women for the foreseeable future.”

Harmless, right? Tee-hee.

*The female judge in the matter, who was interviewed by the magazine that aired the story, is quoted as explaining, “We are all trained and experienced magistrates, but we do not know whether somebody is lying under oath.” What this means is judges just approve restraining orders on faith. Harmless, right? Tee-hee.

A Brief Look at Perjury Prosecutions: Who and What Counts and Who and What Doesn’t

October 1, 2014July 9, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

Here are two recent headlines that caught my eye: “Former Judge Charged with Perjury for Allegedly ‘Fixing’ DUI Case” and “State [Senator] Resigns over Perjury Conviction.”

Here are the facts:

A former Pennsylvania judge is facing criminal charges for allegedly improperly dropping a DUI case brought against a prosecutor’s nephew.

And:

[A California state senator] submitted his resignation Monday after he was sentenced last week to three months in jail for lying about where he lived when he ran for office.

The judge charged with perjury was a 25-year veteran. His defense against accusations of ticket-fixing were determined “not credible” by a grand jury. The prosecutor whose nephew he’s alleged to have fixed the ticket for has since become a judge herself.

The senator, called a “career politician” by the judge who determined him no longer eligible to hold office, was suspended with pay (and jailed for three months). A petition has been filed by the Judicial Conduct Board of Pennsylvania against the judge who was charged with perjury seeking his suspension from “any future judicial assignments and to bar him from being granted senior status through the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts.”

Recognize that in these rare instances when perjury statutes are enforced, the motive is political impression management (government face-saving). Everyday claimants who lie to judges are never charged at all, because the victims of their lies (moms, dads, retirees, veterans, engineers, stockbrokers, cops, therapists, teachers, etc.) don’t rate.

They’re nameless and isolated, so they don’t signify.

It’s worthy of remark that the above-referenced senator was reelected even after he was charged with defrauding the public by lying about his residency status. It didn’t affect anyone; no one cared. In contrast, lies that may trash citizen’s lives—for example, false allegations of abuse made on restraining orders or in domestic violence prosecutions—are never acknowledged by judges, let alone punished.

The justice system would seem to have a very arbitrary definition of what justice is—or a very convenient one.

It errs, besides, in believing that only the actions of judges and politicians like those cited in the stories that inspired this post “affect everyone.” The referenced judge and senator may have acted improperly, but their actions didn’t negatively impact anyone; they just made government look bad.

They tarnished its appearance of uprightness and propriety.

The court’s making the standard of justice no certain standard at all is what actually impacts everyone…and makes government look a whole lot worse in the eyes of a whole lot more people.

A Circle of Moms Reports on False Allegations to CPS (and Says the Same Things That Father’s Groups Say about the Abuse of Restraining Orders and Domestic Violence Laws)

September 16, 2014March 22, 2018Moderator 7 Comments

Here’s a group of women on a forum for mothers with school-aged kids responding to a conversational prompt that deserves the attention of those who believe false allegations made out of spite are rare and that the report of such allegations is overblown and only originates from father’s rights groups (or what one notable polemicist calls “FRGs”).

“Has someone ever called CPS on you out of spite? Have you called on someone? Why?”

Not surprising to this writer, a number of respondents commented in the affirmative. Also worthy of note in this context is that the site FightCPS.com is authored by a woman.

Here are a few of the topmost comments on the Circle of Moms thread:

Yes, twice I’ve had CPS called on me out of spite. Both times a social worker came to my house. I had nothing to hide, so I let them in and they both said, “I can’t tell you who called us, but I can tell you this is absolutely ludicrous for us to even come to your house, because we can’t find a single thing wrong. Sounds like a false allegation to me.” I was like, “I know, right. Thank you.” They couldn’t tell me who called, but I already knew who was behind it. The person who did it was just mad because I wouldn’t pay them money I didn’t even owe! This person was my babysitter, who is the most manipulative, money hungry witch. I just didn’t know it until now.

[M]y mom and sister have been calling and making false accusations about me ever since I told them they’re not my children’s mom—I am. They thought they were just going to tell me how to [rear my] kids, and I told them both, sorry about your luck, I’m their mom, and that’s final. I’ve never gotten a break from CPS since. Especially because my mom didn’t raise us—we did ourselves. And then she thought she was going to take mine and my husband’s first daughter and raise her as her [own] to try to fix mistakes that couldn’t be fixed. UH-UH, she wasn’t getting my daughter. Not till she called my sick, demented sister in to plot against me for 16 years and stole my life, my soul, my heart, my babies. Don’t trust no one.

The person [who] called them on me and my two children knew my mom was very sick and did not have much time to live. My mom died four days ago. Six days before she died, CPS came out. The person who called them on me wanted to add even more pain to my life—and fear. I went and picked up the report. It said [no] on every one of the allegations. I think CPS should let you know who called so you can file a lawsuit. I mean, if they do not do anything, then we should have a choice. We should have the right to know so we can stay away from those who called on us. It should be up to us to tell CPS to press charges or let us do it ourselves, and if we do not know who did call, then we have not got the right kind of privacy or peace throughout our lives.

According to a brochure published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau:

Approximately 29 States carry penalties in their civil child protection laws for any person who willfully or intentionally makes a report of child abuse or neglect that the reporter knows to be false. In New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the Virgin Islands, making false reports of child maltreatment is made illegal in criminal sections of State code.

Nineteen states and the Virgin Islands classify false reporting as a misdemeanor or similar charge. In Florida, Illinois, Tennessee, and Texas, false reporting is a felony, while in Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, and Virginia, second or subsequent offenses are upgraded to felonies.

In Michigan, false reporting can be either a misdemeanor or a felony, depending on the seriousness of the alleged abuse in the report. No criminal penalties are imposed in California, Maine, Montana, Minnesota, and Nebraska; however, immunity from civil or criminal action that is provided to reporters of abuse or neglect is not extended to those who make a false report.

Eleven States and the Virgin Islands specify the penalties for making a false report. Upon conviction, the reporter can face jail terms ranging from 90 days to 5 years or fines ranging from $500 to $5,000. Florida imposes the most severe penalties: In addition to a court sentence of 5 years and $5,000, the Department of Children and Family Services may fine the reporter up to $10,000. In six States, the reporter may be civilly liable for any damages caused by the report.

Based on the anecdotal reports in the referenced Circle of Moms thread, consider how likely it is any of the reported mischief was ever prosecuted. This kind of sniping, which is impossible to fend off, exactly corresponds to that perpetrated by abusers of the restraining order process, which is also exempted from the exacting standards of police and judicial scrutiny that are supposed to be applied when allegations have criminal overtones or can lead to serious privations or criminal consequences.

The women responding in this forum aren’t “anti-feminists,” and they’re certainly not motivated to report malicious exploitation of state process because they’re “for” child abuse: They’re moms.

Yet despite that under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), billions of dollars have been invested over the past 20 years toward conditioning authorities and the courts to take allegations of violence and abuse on faith, when fathers allege identical exploitation of restraining orders and domestic violence laws according to the spiteful motives alleged by the mothers cited in this post, they’re dismissed as cranks by feminists and their partisans.

Disinterested parties and feminist sympathizers are urged to recognize that if mothers and fathers are saying the same things, then the claim that allegations of procedural abuses are nothing more than the baseless rants of angry men is flatly wrong.

Facts and Fairness: Using Arizona’s Policies to Expose Restraining Order Iniquity

September 13, 2014June 24, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

I live in Arizona where I was issued a restraining order in 2006 petitioned by a woman I nightly encountered hanging around outside of my house. The restraining order said I was a danger to her husband and shouldn’t be permitted to approach or talk to him.

If you receive a restraining order in my home state, here’s the first thing that greets your eye:

On the basis of the form this warning captions—which looks like it was drafted by someone using a pizza crust as a straightedge—citizens are recorded in state and national police databases as stalkers and violent abusers.

Consider that the immediate impression this warning is meant to give is beware. It naturally excites fear—and if you’ve been falsely accused, a host of other emotions, besides, none of which conduces to calm and lucid thinking.

Something you wouldn’t guess from this “Warning to Defendant” is that if a defendant “disagrees” with an order issued in Arizona, s/he has the statutory right to apply for an appeals hearing at any time during the order’s effectiveness. For example, if the duration of the order is one calendar year, the defendant can take 11 months to assemble his or her appeal and save up, if necessary, to have an attorney represent that appeal.

Here’s the law:

At any time during the period during which the injunction is in effect, the defendant is entitled to one hearing on written request. No fee may be charged for requesting a hearing. A hearing that is requested by a defendant shall be held within ten days from the date requested unless the court finds compelling reasons to continue the hearing. The hearing shall be held at the earliest possible time. An ex parte injunction that is issued under this section shall state on its face that the defendant is entitled to a hearing on written request and shall include the name and address of the judicial office where the request may be filed. After the hearing, the court may modify, quash or continue the injunction.

The statute says the court’s order must inform the defendant that s/he’s entitled to a hearing, but it doesn’t require that the order inform the defendant that s/he has a year (or possibly years) in which to prep and apply for that hearing, that the hearing is free, or that the defendant may be represented by an attorney.

Restraining orders are rhetorical psych-outs. Their language is overtly menacing, and neither the law nor the issuing courthouse gives any consideration to apprising defendants of their rights.

The stress is on apprising defendants, who are presumed to suck (sight unseen), of what rights they’re no longer deemed worthy of.

Appreciate that the court’s basis for issuing the document capped with the “Warning” pictured above is nothing more than some allegations from the order’s plaintiff, allegations scrawled on a form and typically made orally to a judge in four or five minutes.

In the courthouse where the order issued against me was obtained, restraining order petitioners file into a room like a small bus station terminal, submit their applications, wait for an audience with a judge, chat with him or her for a few minutes, and leave.

That’s it.

Consequences of receiving an order of the court whose merits are determined on this basis include registration in state and national law enforcement databases, and may also include loss of entitlement to home, children, and possessions, and loss of employment.

In contravention of due process, orders are issued against defendants that may deny them liberties and property without the court’s hearing from them at all.

Ever.

In Arizona, unless a defendant requests a hearing before a judge, that’s an end on the process. No judge will even have learned what s/he looks like, and the truth of the plaintiff’s claims will never have been controverted—claims, to reiterate, that were made in a few minutes and could include anything from annoyance to physical or sexual violence.

Such claims often amount to nothing more certain than finger-pointing.

(Docket time afforded by the court to the testimony of defendants who go to the trouble of appealing rulings based on such claims, incidentally, is about 15 minutes. The cost of attorney representation at an appeals hearing may be $2,000 to $5,000.)

The only provision the law or the court makes for discouraging false testimony (some motives for which are here) is this one, which predictably appears at the very end of the application form:

The plaintiff signs below.

Applicants aren’t of course told what “perjury” is, and they’re certainly not told it’s a felony crime that carries a prison term (as it is and does in Arizona and many other states). Lying to the court is never sanctioned or prosecuted, anyway.

Recent posts on this blog were answers to dismissal by a doctor of laws of criticisms that the restraining order process is unfair. The process would have to be far more deliberative than it is, in fact, to be merely “unfair.”

The process is automated.

“The PPO Destroyed My Career”: Grant’s Story of Restraining Order Abuse

August 25, 2014June 17, 2023Moderator 6 Comments

Grant Dossetto has a degree in finance he can’t use.

That’s because a personal protection order (PPO) was petitioned against him in 2010 by a friend, and the law mandates that all restraining order recipients be registered in the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database—indefinitely.

The Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 requires those working in my field to be fingerprinted and to submit that to the FBI national database. This is on top of normal background checks, disclosure of any and all charitable donations as well as political donations, etc. Ironically we don’t have to pee in a cup for a drug test, but everything else goes well beyond that which my engineering friends et al. have been subjected to. I went to the Livonia police department and had my prints pressed in ink the old fashioned way on the standard card to be delivered to my employer by my first week of employment. The card then was supposed to find its way to the proper regulatory authorities before getting passed through the system.

A month after I began work at the brokerage, I was called by my boss after hours and told to mail back in my key. He fired me while out of town over the phone.

Grant is 27 years old, and he can never realize his ambition to be a stockbroker.

To this day, I have never been sponsored to get my licenses, and I am sure I never will. I can pass the CFA [to become a chartered financial analyst] but cannot take an order for a trade. The PPO destroyed my career.

Though his mother lived to see him earn his degree with honors in 2009, neither of Grant’s parents will ever know that their investment in their son’s success was betrayed or that his professional aspirations were dashed, because they’ve passed away.

When my father had a heart attack, I was just 14 years old. He passed in his sleep. Before my mom had dragged him off to bed, he had fallen asleep in my room while we were watching TV together and drooled on my pillow. When he didn’t wake the next morning, I can remember opening his mouth to try to resuscitate him and seeing how his tongue was already blackened from lack of oxygen. It was the first time I had to let in an EMT through the wide double front doors to go through the motions to tend to someone who was already gone.

Grant’s mother died in 2010 just days before Grant got word of the court order that identified him as a threat to the safety of a woman he hadn’t even seen in over a year.

I was celebrating a birthday party with my twin brother. He had just been commissioned as an artillery officer in the Marine Corps and was heading to Fort Sill in Oklahoma for training in a couple weeks, so it was a going away party as well. It ended with me carrying my mom up from the bottom of the stairs that led to the basement, blood trickling from the back of her head. She had had a stroke bringing up a food tray and collapsed. The right hemisphere of her brain immediately ceased all activity. I got to stand over another pair of EMTs, this time dabbing her eyes with a tissue. The pupils, fully dilated, failed to show any reaction. She maintained enough brain function to throw up, trying to recover from the worst concussion you could imagine, but by the next day a second opinion came back that she could not survive. My brother and I pulled the plug and held her hand until she forgot to breathe on her own. It took less than a half hour. It was a brilliantly sunny Michigan May day, those days that make suffering through the gray winter worth it. It’s hard to imagine something more at odds with how I felt.

Grant learned a protection order had been issued against him two days later. Notice of it was waiting for him upon his return from the funeral home in the form of a business card a sheriff handed his stepdad.

In Grant’s home state of Michigan, this qualifies as service. No copy of the order was ever provided to him.

I called the sheriff back, and he went through what I would later come to find out was the front page of the order. He asked me to drive to downtown Detroit, a half hour away, to be served the order. Seeing as I had seven hours of funeral activities in a day and a half, I told him that would be impossible. He said he’d mail it to me. I was never notified that I had just days to appeal or given an explanation of the consequences of the order. The order was never mailed to me. I tried twice to notify the officer that I had not received the PPO. He brushed it off once, and the second call went to voicemail and was never returned.

Grant was denied the opportunity to defend himself in court against an accuser he hadn’t even been in physical proximity to.

The last thing I had said to her was that my mom had died, and I was giving the eulogy at the funeral and would like her there even though we had our differences. The order had been issued ex parte, which requires the court to classify me as an immediate threat who will cause imminent and irreparable damage, per Michigan law. I did not meet those criteria. The hearing was held without my knowledge or participation.

No surprise, Grant has “suffered from severe depression that still surfaces at times now.” His case exemplifies the justice system’s willingness to compound the stresses of real exigencies like family crises with false exigencies like nonexistent danger.

My grandparents were going through their own personal troubles. One had emergency quadruple bypass surgery and is suffering from dementia. One was declared terminal and hung on for two and a half years as his kidneys shut down until he was also unable to tell reality from fiction. One had a hip replacement turn into a seven-surgery odyssey that involved a severe staph infection that ravaged her for most of a year. She needed over 50 blood transfusions over that period and has just recovered from fatigue in the past 12 months. I got a lifetime of bad news I couldn’t control in a couple years, and it took its toll on me.

The order of the court that turned Grant’s career path into a blind alley was petitioned by a woman whose own prospects, Grant says, declined during his senior year of college.

We enjoyed movies, card games (she cheats at euchre), parties, went to school football and hockey games. She sought me out in the parking lot of the campus church and asked me to sit with her at mass. I can’t think of an act of friendship much more intimate than that. When we were close, she was on the dean’s list.

I had been friends with her from September, sophomore year of college until midway through my senior year. In a month, I went from being someone she talked to on Facebook at one in the morning and publically said she loved to being accused of felony property damage—tire-slashing, in particular.

She had gotten involved with a bad crowd, joined a terrible varsity team at school. In April of my junior year, she asked a mutual friend of ours to do cocaine—not exactly something a happy person says. The next fall, I heard about how her parents didn’t give a damn about her, and in November she called my roommate and me over only to snap at us until she kicked us out just before 10 to take a tablespoon of Nyquil that would force her to sleep. She also talked about how she had been getting dizzy and suffering from vertigo, which got her a prescription medication. A doctor had said it was iron deficiency. I can tell you from personal experience it was stress. Her grades slipped to C’s.

This letter of encouragement represents the “misconduct” of Grant’s that his accuser and the court deemed evidence of “imminent” and potentially “irreparable” harm. The letter ends, “Do what you were meant to do. Be the person you were meant to be.”

As Grant charts his relationship, he urged his friend to make “wholesale changes” and was punished for his concern. “I was sharp,” he says, “but only after I had exhausted every other option.”

Houghton is a small town—population around 10,000—and our school has an undergrad student body of about 6,000. Wal-Mart and not much else is a big deal there as the copper and iron mines shut down decades ago driving out industry and families with it. Not surprisingly, we saw each other a lot the second half of my senior year. I saw her at the gym, had class in an adjacent room two days a week, she worked next door to my lab twice a week, and I worked in the same building as her lab.

I stopped by her house because it was a bad situation given the fact the last thing she had said to me were criminal allegations. We talked for hours, getting along enough that I sincerely believed we had patched things up. She was still miserable, though. One thing got her to brighten up like the girl I first became friends with, and that was a goal to go to med school, a reasonable one for a biomedical engineer.

I invited her out to the movies with my housemates whom she was friends with. I said she should come to the surprise birthday party I was helping to throw for a mutual friend. I tried to get her back to the group she was successful with. For that I got another round of false allegations (destroying the front quarter panel of her car).

When a protection order was issued against Grant in 2010, he hadn’t seen his accuser in over a year. The sheriff who notified him of the order “essentially told [him he] had been contacting her, and now [he] couldn’t.” Grant only got a look at the order that he was never served this month (four years later).

The first time I saw it was two weeks ago. It is a permanent file in the Macomb County Courthouse, file #10-2184-PH. I was marked a threat by my government without me present or ever having physical possession of the order. There is no way for me to have the order removed.

Grant’s former friend, the petitioner of the protection order, had gotten a job after college that apparently hadn’t worked out and returned home. In 2013, the office Grant worked in was slated to relocate near her (in a town of 10,000 residents).

I texted her, because I knew that was a problem. Given what she sent back, I replied that I was going to have to seriously consider leaving my job unless I got assurances from her this wouldn’t be an issue.

Grant received actual threats from the family of his accuser but says he has never considered applying for a protection order himself.

Grant’s texts instead inspired his accuser to dash to the nearest courthouse all over again.

In April 2013, she filed another PPO against me even though I had not seen her in over four years. I had made no attempt to try and meet up with her. It was also issued ex parte, probably because of the first one. She began texting me less than three days after it had taken effect and didn’t show up to the appeals hearing that I scheduled. I missed parts of three days of work to fight an order that she didn’t even feel like defending. In two weeks, the same court, Wayne County this time, ruled against me then for me.

What Grant means is the same court that deemed him a “threat” (sight unseen) was content to consider him benign a couple weeks later just because the protection order petitioner didn’t make a follow-up appearance. His observations underscore the cattle-call nature of restraining order adjudications that readily implicate defendants as criminal menaces but may just as readily conclude they’re harmless and send them home.

Mine was not the only PPO to be overturned—far from it—and the entire docket (about 12 cases) was decided in less than 30 minutes after we waited over an hour for the judge, who was late. Is that justice? How can I ever respect the courts again?

The same orders Grant says were summarily dismissed had just as summarily been approved days or weeks earlier. Restraining orders are typically rubber-stamped upon a few minutes’ “deliberation.”

I sued her after that. In her response to my complaint, she admitted that I had never done anything illegal. You wouldn’t know that by my public record.

Grant dropped the lawsuit, which communicated that he wouldn’t tolerate further prosecutions. The 2010 PPO remains on his record, however, and the stain not only galls him but has derailed his life.

The judge who issued the 2010 order, James Biernat, Sr., is famous for presiding over the “Comic Book Murder” case. It was big enough to make Dateline and the other true crime outlets. He overturned a guilty conviction from a jury and demanded a retrial. The action was extraordinary, held up on appeal by a split decision. The Macomb prosecutor publically rebuked him as being soft on crime. That made national news. All the cable outlets covered the second trial, which yielded the same result: guilty. He was rebuked by two dozen jurors, three appellate justices, and the prosecutor. It’s funny, if he had just given me a hearing, let alone a second, I truly believe a PPO would never have been issued.

A questionable judge who is soft on guilty murderers didn’t have a problem destroying a 23-year-old he had never met for non-threatening, legal contact. How could you not believe that the system is hopelessly broken?

Since this writing, Grant has channeled his thwarted energies into creative writing and completed a novel, The Hopping Bird, which has been praised in Kirkus Reviews: “Harold Freeman enjoyed success as a player, which included a World Series championship, until it was cut short due to injury. His managerial career has not been as smooth, but that is all behind him as he takes the reins of the Toledo Mud Hens for the 2014 season. After a last place finish in the International League’s West Division a season ago, can he turn the team around?”

Connecticut Lawmakers Conclude Getting a Restraining Order Isn’t Easy Enough Already

August 25, 2014June 19, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

Those victimized by liars who abuse restraining order and domestic violence laws often blame their judges. It’s natural. They’re the ones who deprive the wrongly accused of dignity, liberty, property, and family—and theirs are the words that echo in the memory and grate on the nerves during the empty hours.

Lawmakers it must be remembered, though, are the enablers.

Judges may be careless. They may even be cruel. But legislators are clueless.

To give an example, consider this story reported today in Hartford, Connecticut’s The Courant (August 25, 2014):

Domestic violence victims need to have a simpler process of applying for restraining orders and better communication with the agencies that handle them, a legislative subcommittee said Monday.

To that end, the subcommittee of the task force on restraining orders agreed to recommend a streamlined version of restraining order applications and an accompanying checklist to pave the way for better communication among victims, marshals and courts.

The Connecticut legislature purposes to make simpler yet a process that’s already so “streamlined” that accusers don’t have to prove anything.

CONN. GEN. STAT. ANN. § 46b-15(b): “The court, in its discretion, may make such orders as it deems appropriate for the protection of the applicant and such dependent children or other persons as the court sees fit.… If an applicant alleges an immediate and present physical danger to the applicant, the court may issue an ex parte order granting such relief as it deems appropriate.”

This literally means that if a domestic partner merely alleges s/he feels in danger, which only takes a few seconds to do, the court is authorized to order the accused to be forcibly ejected from his or her home by armed agents of the state—even if the accused owns that home and has lived in it all of his or her life. In other words (again, for example), it’s entirely possibly for someone who has no home to move in with someone else, falsely accuse him or her of abuse, and for all intents and purposes seize possession of his or her home. Other obvious motives for lying are malice or gaining custody of kids.

No evidence of anything is required by the law, which is a blank check that authorizes accusers to say whatever they feel like and judges to do whatever they feel like.

Members of the legislative subcommittee referenced in The Courant article reportedly expect to improve their understanding of the flaws inherent in the restraining order process by taking a field trip. They plan “a ‘ride along’ with the representative of the state marshals on the panel…to learn more about how restraining orders are served.”

The urgent problem with restraining orders as they see it is ensuring that more of them are successfully delivered.

The article cites concerns expressed by the executive director of the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence “about the complicated process domestic violence victims face when they apply for restraining orders.”

The “complicated process” to have someone evicted shoeless from his or her home in the Connecticut winter and prohibited access to his or kids based on an allegation is filling out a form.

The Connecticut legislators “decided to remove the instructions in small print at the top of the form, which start with the outdated suggestion that the applicant ‘use a typewriter.’ Applicants will have access to a separate sheet of paper that has step-by-step instructions.”

Authorizing the court “in its discretion” to fill out orders “as it deems appropriate” would seem more expeditious and economical to this writer.

Schizo: How Judges Think about Restraining Orders

August 23, 2014June 17, 2023Moderator 4 Comments

It’s often reported by recipients of restraining orders that the cops and constables who serve them recognize they’re stigmatizing.

Restraining order respondents receive court orders “around the corner” or in parking lots or other spots remote from prying eyes.

At the same time, restraining orders are dispensed by our courts as freely as supermarket circulars. They’re typically issued ex parte, which means judges never even meet the parties they’re issued against. Sometimes respondents never appear in court at all. They remain simply inked names on forms, despite the fact that the allegations made against them, which are matters of public record, may be grave.

Judges issue restraining orders and then wash their hands of them and expect them to just run their courses and evaporate. In accordance with the law, they don’t…ever. They’re permanent public records (in some states accessible by anyone, and in no states accessible by no one). They’re further entered into state and federal law enforcement databases (again, permanently).

Restraining orders cost people employment (and, in cases, employability in their chosen fields). They cost people leases. And they cost people their children, assets, social credibility, and health. These are serious consequences, and restraining orders are of course regarded seriously by anyone who learns of them—except, that is, officers of the court, who may regard them dismissively…after having regarded them as urgent, life-or-death matters.

“Obscure public records” is how some officers of the court think of restraining orders. In the age of the Internet, there are no such things. Many judges are in their 60s and 70s, however, and scarcely know the first thing about the Internet, let alone Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. They’re still living in the days of mimeographs and microfiche.

The sternness that judges exhibit in the courtroom upon finalizing restraining orders may border on brutal. Irrespective of the allegations against them, all restraining order defendants are treated like villains. Yet though they’re often falsely accused, they’re expected to be unfazed by this treatment. Down the road, what’s more, if defendants seek damages, other judges who revisit their cases may express wonderment at what the big deal is.

“It’s only a restraining order.”

When Girls’ Being Girls Isn’t Cute: False Allegations of Violence and Rape

August 17, 2014March 22, 2018Moderator 3 Comments

I was just contemplating what I’ve come to think of as “estrogen rage”—a peculiarly feminine mode of violence that orbits around false allegations to authority figures. Furious men do violence, which is why domestic violence and restraining order laws exist. Furious women delegate violence (by lying), which is why the abuse of domestic violence and restraining order laws is rampant.

I was distracted from this rumination by two accounts that emerged in the press recently of women accusing men of rape to conceal affairs:

“Ex-Counselor Gets up to 18 Months in Prison for False Reports of Abduction, Assault” (Bellefonte, Pennsylvania)

“Sheriff: Woman Files False Rape Report to Cover up Affair” (Athens, Alabama)

Their motive wasn’t rage; it was selfishness. That same theme is present, however: using others (cops and judges) as tools of violence.

When stories like this are bruited, it’s always to show that, hey, women lie about rape: See! That’s not what people should find disturbing about these stories, though.

whatever What people should find disturbing about these stories is how feminine false accusers think about lying, including lying about physical and sexual violence (or their threat). They think it’s no big deal—or they don’t think about it at all.

If false accusers regard lying about rape as no biggie, then what does that say not only about how they regard other types of false allegations but about how they regard rape itself? Right, they regard rape as no biggie.

This is what no one ever confronts head-on.

Even feminists who regard false allegations of physical and sexual violence as insignificant must regard acts of physical and sexual violence as insignificant. You can’t say the acts are ghastly and in the same breath say being falsely accused of them isn’t.

Either both are consequential, or neither is.

Feminists are more prone to denounce even the falsely accused (that is, to blame the victims) than they are to denounce false accusers (their “sisters”). Feminists’ denunciations, then, aren’t ultimately of (sexual) violence; their denunciations are of men. Here we come back to the topic of estrogen.

Feminine and feminist psychology are due more scrutiny than they receive. I can’t count the number of times I’ve read even sympathetic reporters of false allegations say they recognize that the more urgent problem is (sexual) violence against women—a sentiment that, intentionally or not, motivates false allegations. False accusers aren’t just aided and abetted by this pronouncement of priority; they’re encouraged by it.

Trivializing false allegations can hardly be said to deter women from making them. The message it conveys, rather, is that false accusers can and should expect sympathy and attention (because all women who make allegations can and should expect sympathy and attention).

The idea that men do evil in response to their hormonal urges is broadly promulgated, and the influence of that idea is to be seen plainly in our laws and in how our courts administer those laws.

Women have hormonal urges, too, and they’re not just toward maternity.

Consider that the women in the stories highlighted in this post falsely accused men of rape whom they’d just been rolling beneath the sheets with…and put a name to that act.

Both women’s lies, incidentally, were undone by text messages they’d exchanged with their lovers that showed the sex was consensual.

Girls will be girls.

Larry’s Story: Restraining Order Abuse and the Neighbor from Hell

July 28, 2014July 4, 2023Moderator 9 Comments

“She habitually engages in psychological projection. She has caused me to be compelled under threat of arrest and prosecution for failure to appear to attend court on her frivolous lawsuits 25 times. Yes! Twenty-five times. The frivolous prosecutions started in 2011, and they are still raging. I have been cited back to court on her application for a new restraining order on the 12th and a criminal warrant for cyberstalking on the 17th of this month. She has tried so many times to have me jailed I have lost count.”

—Larry Smith, author of BuncyBlawg.com (2014)

The quotation above is an excerpt from an email sent to the creator of “Neighbors from Hell” on ABC’s 20/20. The Feb. 8 email was a sorely persecuted man’s response to being fingered on Facebook as a candidate for the series by his neighbor, Marty Tackitt-Grist, who has forced him to appear before judges nearly 30 times in the span of a few years to answer “two restraining orders, three show-cause orders, two cyberstalking arrests, and a failure-to-appear arrest and jailing despite faxes from two doctors that I was too crippled, disabled, and suffering from herniated discs to be able to attend court.”

Here’s the reply the email elicited from ABC’s Bob Borzotta: “Hi Larry, I don’t seem to have heard further from her. Sounds like quite a situation….” Cursory validations like this one are the closest thing to solace that victims of chronic legal abuses can expect.

Concern shown by the police and courts to complaints from attention-seekers can make them feel like celebrities. Random wild accusations are all it takes for the perennial extra in life to realize his or her name in lights.

Not unpredictably, the thrill is addictive.

I think I first heard from Larry, the author of BuncyBlawg.com, in 2013—or maybe it was 2012. In the artificial limbo created by “high-conflict” people like the one he describes in the epigraph, temporal guideposts are few and far between. A target like Larry can find him- or herself living the same day over and over for years, because s/he’s unable to plan, look forward to anything, or even enjoy a moment’s tranquility.

The target of a high-conflict person is perpetually on the defensive, trying to recover his or her former life from the unrelenting grasp of a crank with an extreme (and often pathological) investment in eroding that life for self-aggrandizement and -gratification.

Among Larry’s neighbor’s published allegations are that he’s a disbarred attorney who “embezzled from his clients” and a textbook psychopath, that he has “barked like a dog for hours” to provoke another neighbor’s (imaginary) dog to howl at her, that he has called her names, that he has enlisted “mentally challenged adults” to harass her while shopping, that he has cyberstalked her, that he has “hacked into phones” and computers, that he has tried to cause her (and “many others”) to lose their jobs by “reporting false information,” that he has made false complaints about her “to every city, state, and county service,” that he sends her mail “constantly,” and that he has “mooned” her neighbors and friends.

The ease with which a restraining order is obtained encourages outrageous defamations like these (Larry’s neighbor has sworn out two). Once a high-conflict person sees how readily any fantastical allegation can be put over on the police and courts, s/he’s inspired to unleash his or her imagination. That piece of paper not only licenses lies; it motivates them.

Larry’s a quiet guy with a degenerative spinal disorder who’s been progressively going deaf for 25 years. He lives for his three toy poodles and watches birds. “I grew up,” he says, “in a little Arcadian valley here in western North Carolina with the nicest people, mostly farmers; and I guess my youth just left me naïve about some people. I always saw the good in them.” Larry began practicing law in 1973 in Asheville but voluntarily withdrew from the profession in 1986, because he was disgusted by the corruption—and the irony of having his retirement years fouled by that corruption isn’t lost on him.

You might guess his accuser’s motive to be that of a woman scorned, but Larry’s association with her has never exceeded that of the usual neighborly sort. He reports, however, that she has alleged in court that he covets her and nurses unrequited longings and desires.

Compare the details of the infamous David Letterman case, and see if you don’t note the same correspondence Larry has.

That’s the horror that only the objects of high-conflict people’s fixations understand. Stalkers and “secret admirers” procure restraining orders to get attention and embed themselves in other’s lives—like shrapnel.

This writer has been in and out of court for eight years subsequent to encountering a stranger standing outside of his residence one day…and naïvely welcoming her. One respondent to this blog reported having had a restraining order issued against her by a man she sometimes encountered by her home who always made a point of noticing her but with whom she’d never exchanged a single word.

It isn’t only intimates and exes who lie to subject targets to public humiliation and punishment. Sometimes it’s lurkers and passers-by, covert observers who peer between fence slats and entertain fantasies—or, as in Larry’s case, a neighbor who feels s/he’s been slighted or wronged according to metrics that only make sense to him or her.

Larry thinks the unilateral feud that has exploded the last several years of his life originates with his complaining about cats his neighbor housed, after they savaged the fledgling birds that have always been his springtime joy to watch.

For 25 years I have lived on this street with lovely people. We always got along, although one or two you had to watch. During most of that 25 years, there have been three different owners of the house across the street. The other two we dearly loved. The last one, the incarnation of purest evil, moved here in 2005. She was a divorcée who volunteered that her divorce was especially nasty, the first red flag which I foolishly disregarded: She constantly badmouthed her ex. For the first few years, we were friends, but as time went by she became an almost insufferable mooch and just way too friendly, expecting more attention from her neighbors, and from us, than we wanted to give. Sometime in early 2011, I left her a voicemail and told her I didn’t want to be close friends with her anymore. She was a hoverer, she manipulated, she was a narcissist. And the message meant that I did not want to be called on to mow her lawn anymore, or help her trim her trees, or lend her tools, or watch her pet while she was gone, or help her move heavy loads like furniture, or listen to her constant whining. I just wanted to cool it with her.

In the spring of 2011, she had been converting her home to a sort of boarding house and brought in tenants, and [between] them they had two cats that constantly prowled, especially the tenant’s. What became very irksome to me was the tenant’s cat creeping into our yard and killing our baby birds, which we always looked forward to in the spring. And the minute I brought it up with her, she pitched a fit, and so did the tenant. So for the first two months of baby bird season, [their] cats killed all our fledglings and the mother songbirds—wrens, cardinals, robins, mockingbirds, towhees, mourning doves, even the hummingbirds, just wiped them out. I finally got in touch with our Animal Services officers, but by that time bird season was over with, and you know something, [she] began going about telling neighbors that I was a disbarred lawyer (a particularly nasty slander). One thing led to another, and finally the tenant with the marauding cat moved away, but the irreparable damage was done, and all through the summer I had been warned by other neighbors that the neighbor from hell was plotting revenge.

I went to her one day and asked her if there was anything I could do to make it so we could at least drop all the nasty hostilities. She exploded. Next thing I knew, she had three police cruisers here with a false tale that I was “harassing” her and calling her names. This was no surprise, because early on I learned not to believe a thing she said because she just made up the most unbelievable tales about her personal crises. One of the five cops who came spoke with me in the yard, and I thought this would all blow over, but in a few days a process server was banging on the door with papers to serve me. I met him in a commercial parking lot nearby and accepted the lawsuit, an application for a restraining order, a TRO, and, well, a great big wad of lies. It was a shocker. And little did I know that the very day I received this horse-choking wad of papers, at around 10:15 a.m., [she] was back in the courthouse filing another affidavit to have me ordered to show cause why I should not be jailed for contempt. In other words, before I even had notice of the TRO, she was trying to have me jailed for violating it. That’s just how damn mean that woman is.

High-conflict people are driven by a lust to punish—any slight is a provocation to go to war—and their craving for attention can be boundless. Judicial process rewards both.

This table, prepared by attorneys Beth E. Maultsby and Kathryn Flowers Samler for the 2013 State Bar of Texas Annual Advanced Family Law Course, shows how high-conflict people and court process are an exquisitely infernal fit. Its authors’ characterization of high-conflict people’s willingness to lie (“if they feel desperate”) is generous. Many lie both on impulse or reflex and with deliberate cunning, though their chain of reasoning may be utterly bizarre.

Restraining orders are easily obtained, particularly by histrionic women. Once petitioners—especially high-conflict petitioners—realize how readily the state’s prepared to credit any evil nonsense they sputter or spew, and once they realize, too, the social hay they can make out of reporting to others that they “had to get a restraining order” (a five-minute affair), they can become accusation junkies.

Larry has responded in the most reasonable way he can to his situation. He’s voiced his outrage and continues to in a blog, and the vehemence of his criticisms might lead some who don’t know Larry to dismiss him as a crank. If you consulted his blog, you’d see it’s fairly rawboned and hardly suggests the craftsmanship of a technical wizard who can hack email accounts and remotely eavesdrop on telephone conversations. What the commentaries there suggest, rather, is the moral umbrage of an intelligent man who’s been acutely, even traumatically sensitized to injustice.

Here’s the diabolical beauty of our restraining order process. Judges accept allegations of abuse at face value and don’t scruple about incising them on the public records of those accused. They furthermore expect those who are defamed to pacifically tolerate public allegations that may have no relationship with reality whatever or may be the opposite of the truth, may be scandalous, and may destroy them socially, professionally, and psychologically. Judges, besides, make the accused vulnerable to any further allegations their accusers may hanker to concoct, which can land them in jail and give them criminal records. And finally judges react with disgust and contempt when the accused ventilate anger, which they may even be punished for doing.

Judicial reasoning apparently runs something like this: If you’re angry about false allegations, then they weren’t false; if you’re not angry about false allegations, then they weren’t false.

Larry’s been jailed, Larry’s been reported to the police a dozen times or more, an officer has rested the laser sight of her sidearm on him through the window of his residence, and the number of times he’s been summoned to court is closing on 30.

The allegations against him have been false. How angry should he be?

Confusing Women’s Rights with Feminism: Some Observations on MSNBC’s Coverage of the First Annual International Conference on Men’s Issues

July 3, 2014August 5, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

Apparently the first annual International Conference on Men’s Issues was held in Michigan recently. I read this fact on the MSNBC website in an article that disdained even to capitalize the title of the conference and which, for more reasons than just that one, reminded me of the days when I edited my high school paper.

My journalism adviser would’ve given the piece a C, among other reasons because it seems uncertain whether it wants to be a news story or an editorial—or an advertisement for its writer’s Twitter feed.

Its introduction, at least, was gripping to read: “At what was billed as the first annual international conference on men’s issues, feminists were ruining everything.” I was keen to hear about how the meeting was disrupted by a mob of angry women swinging truncheons.

I’ve come to expect disappointment, which expectation the reporter continued to cement over an ensuing two dozen paragraphs.

Not having attended the conference, I can’t say whether the reporter’s characterization of its presenters’ arguments as cranky is fair or not. Remarking that he failed to probe any of the topics he glosses in the article, however, does seem fair. A reporter’s job is to ask questions, not assemble a boa of plucked horsefeathers and hyperlinks.

I’m sympathetic to men’s plaints about legal mockeries that trash lives, including those of children, so I found the MSNBC coverage offensively yellow-tinged in more senses than one, but I’m not what feminists call an MRA or “men’s rights activist.” I don’t think men need any rights the Constitution doesn’t already promise them. What they need is for their government to recognize and honor those rights. The objection to feminism is that it has induced the state to act in wanton violation of citizens’ civil entitlements—not just men’s, but women’s, too.

On this subject, something useful the referenced MSNBC article does accomplish is reveal its writer’s unexamined presupposition that women’s rights and what feminists advocate for are the same thing. Probably many women are under the same illusion.

It’s understandable. Feminism still waves the same banner its pioneers sewed decades ago on which is blazoned that rainbow word EQUALITY. Today’s mainstream feminists, however, have redefined that word to mean “whatever’s best for us,” which doesn’t always mean what’s best for women.

To illustrate, take the 60-year-old woman who wrote last year to relate that she was expelled from the home she’d shared for 10 years with her invalid mother and terminally ill brother, whom she nursed, by her sister. The latter spitefully lied about her to the court—possibly because she was the executor of her mother’s will—and then destroyed her belongings, including her clothes and family memorabilia (photos, videos, etc.—a lifetime’s worth) when it was mandated that she vacate her residence. Her sister’s malicious testimony was rendered in a few minutes without the woman’s even being present. Though the fraudulent restraining order it succeeded in having issued was tossed on appeal, the woman’s record was sufficiently corrupted to cost her her job at a bank and the income and medical benefits it provided. When I last heard from her, she was living out of her car and trying to stay warm.

Or take the naïve girl who was lured away from her family, knocked up, and deserted by a twice-divorced pastor’s son. When the girl appealed to him to take an interest nine months later and moved to Virginia with her newborn on assurances from him that he’d found Jesus and wanted to do right by her, he and his family represented her as a hysteric to the court and, when last I got a status update, were in the process of seeking custody of her baby (cf. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”).

These aren’t merely people who “believe” they’ve been treated unfairly; these are women who’ve been used viciously and rolled into the gutter.

Women I’ve corresponded with in the three years I’ve maintained this blog have reported being stripped of their dignity and good repute, their livelihoods, their homes and possessions, and even their children according to prejudicial laws and court processes that are feminist handiworks. These laws and processes favor plaintiffs, who are typically women, so their prejudices are favored by feminists. Feminists decry inequality when it’s non-advantageous. They’re otherwise cool with it. What’s more, when victims of the cause’s interests are women, those victims are just as indifferently shrugged off—as “casualties of war,” perhaps.

I don’t know that feminists are “ruining everything,” but I do know that among the fruits of their industry has been ruining a lot of people’s lives.

The Relationship between False Allegations of Rape and Restraining Order Abuse

June 30, 2014August 21, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

It’s not without regret for how they may affect victims of sexual violence that a number of journalistic reports that expose false rape allegations have been highlighted on this blog. Although the blog’s focus is restraining order abuse, the potency of restraining orders and the laxity applied to the allegations they’re based on derive from the specter of domestic and sexual violence, the shadow of which has infected and jaundiced the perceptions of our legislators and judges.

The volume of false rape allegations that have been brought to public attention this year—mostly in the U.K., which is less squeamish about acknowledging fraud of this sort—will probably make further mention excessive, because it threatens to distract from reports and explications more directly relevant to the blog’s primary concern, which is restraining order injustice (a redundant phrase). Several news stories were noted this month, and some of these stories are each but one of a series that trace the same saga of mischief.

“Law Graduate Falsely Accused Boyfriend of Rape and Assault as Excuse, Jury Told” (Steven Morris, The Guardian, 2014)

“Oxford Union ‘Rape Victim Knew Her Claim Was False’” (Oliver Duggan, Amelia Hamer, and James Rothwell, The Telegraph, 2014)

“Woman Accused of Making Repeated False Rape Allegations” (The Inquisitr, 2014)

“Woman Sentenced after Falsely Accusing Two Men of Rape” (UPI, 2014) (see also commentary by attorney and former Houston Law Review editor Robert Franklin)

“Woman Who Cut Herself with Razor and Claimed She’d Been Raped Is Jailed” (Michael Donnelly, Belfast Telegraph, 2014)

“Victim of False Rape Accusation Seeks Compensation” (The Northern Echo, 2014)

“Man Wrongly Accused of Sexual Assault Sues Police” (Rachel Olding, Sydney Morning Herald, 2014)

The purpose of collecting these reports of false rape allegations hasn’t been to discount the claims of real victims or even to reveal that false allegations are made, which should be unsurprising in a sociopolitical climate that’s eager to credit allegations of violence against women; the purpose, rather, is to reveal the motives of false accusers and to emphasize that there’s no lie that a dedicated false accuser will balk at telling and holding fast to. It happens that when false accusers frame people for a crime society holds in the highest contempt, their motives become more noteworthy.

If accusers are willing to falsely allege even rape (and casually), there’s no estimating how many “lesser” false accusations are made routinely, particularly when no risk or serious investment is entailed. Civil restraining orders are had in hours if not minutes based on brief interviews with judges, and there are no repercussions to their plaintiffs if the allegations they’re based on are untrue. They can furthermore instantly gratify multiple motives for false allegations at the same time.

These motives are sorted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under five broad rubrics: mental illness (or aberrance), attention-seeking/sympathy, profit, alibi (blame-shifting or cover-up), and revenge (or spite).

A false restraining order litigant with a malicious yen may leave a courthouse shortly after entering it having gained sole entitlement to a residence, attendant properties, and children, possibly while displacing blame from him- or herself for misconduct, and having enjoyed the reward of an authority figure’s undivided attention won at the expense of his or her victim.

S/he may, besides, be crackerjacks.

The exposure of false allegations of rape shouldn’t be interpreted as denying the reality or brutality of sexual violence. What it should do, however, is serve as a rude awakening to those who believe (and promote the belief) that allegations of abuse should be accepted without suspicion. It should also stress that false allegations aren’t negligible, rare, or harmless.

They’re anything but.

Reporting Restraining Order Abuse to Elected Officials

June 27, 2014August 25, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

“I am suffering from the effects of a fraudulent protection order in Colorado, which was filed by my female roommate and had me and my young daughter kicked out of our home.

“There appears to be no recourse for me, but I did contact 10 state representatives and senators, and I heard back from three of them. If more people report this abuse to their elected officials, maybe something will actually be done about this awful system.”

—Respondent to this blog

Writing to district and state representatives can be a lot like trying to communicate with judges. Expecting a human response isn’t unreasonable, but it’s often disappointed.

There’s nevertheless value in bringing systemic injustices to the attention of legislators (senators and congressmen and -women), because (1) they make, reform, and repeal laws, and (2) if they hear the same complaints over and over—and especially if they know other people of influence are hearing the same complaints and looking to them for action—there’s a chance some of them might step up.

The voices of women who’ve been abused by court process, particularly, need to be heard, because the procedures that are most often and easily abused are ones it’s presumed are protecting them.

Consult this site for the names and addresses/websites of elected officials with whom to register a complaint (state legislators should be first in order of importance):

“Find Your Representatives”

Restraining Orders Based on Fraud Falsely Imprison Defendants Whether They’re Incarcerated or Not

June 25, 2014February 15, 2018Moderator Leave a comment

“Forensic psychiatrists and other mental health professionals must remember that although allegations are often genuine, there is an almost equal number of cases…in which they are not. Complete and objective assessment is always required, and especially so when accusations emerge in contexts such as the following:

Certain kinds of mental illness and character traits (particularly in allegations against clinicians). One should note poor doctor-patient relationships, whether real or perceived, patients with psychotic or delusional symptoms, certain hysterical and factitious disorders, some fragmenting or dissociative disorders, and those with substantial borderline, inadequate, and/or passive personality traits
Divorce proceedings
Child custody proceedings
Situations with the potential for substantial financial reward
Situations in which the accuser has an emotional or characterological reason to avoid discovery, prosecution, or confrontation with legal (or parental) authority (e.g., those with antisocial personality traits, some substance abusers)
A history of repeated past allegations, particularly if they have not been fully investigated
Unusual timing of the accusation or alleged event (e.g., alleged ‘date rape’ within an otherwise close and stable relationship, or accusations made only when some sort of secondary purpose or reward is evident).”

—“False Allegations: The Role of the Forensic Psychiatrist”

The previous post called attention to an excerpt from a story featured in The Times of Malta this month that concluded that incidences of false allegations weren’t “one-offs,” meaning they’re not singular occurrences but more common than the public imagines.

The lawyers quoted by reporter, what’s more, refer to criminal cases in which sexual abuse is alleged and, consequently, in which the accused are afforded attorney representation.

By contrast, civil restraining order hearings are mere minutes long, defendants aren’t afforded counsel, and fraud is typically ignored by the court even if it’s perceived. There is, therefore, no accurately determining the pervasiveness or degree of lying in such adjudications.

Many authoritative sources conclude it’s rampant, and anecdotal reports concur.

The application process for restraining orders is typically free, it’s concluded in an afternoon if not within minutes, and there are no consequences for lying. Why, then, shouldn’t the process be broadly and routinely abused?

To believe that such a process wouldn’t be abused would depend on an unshakably naïve conviction in the inherent goodness of people, and such a belief would determine the process unnecessary. Anyone who believes people are capable of beastly behavior and that restraining orders are necessary—take, for example, feminists—must believe people are capable of lying hurtfully to get them.

Exposing the flaws in the belief that anyone who points a finger must necessarily be telling the truth doesn’t take a professor of philosophy.

Consider, then, that allegations made in civil court may be identical to those introduced against defendants in criminal court—and can include rape, child molestation, or even murder. The only difference between civil and criminal rulings is legal consequence.

This is the source of the cognitive disconnect exemplified by judges and, largely, everyone else. Because civil restraining orders only threaten incarceration rather than mandate it, they’re considered “no biggie.”

The conceit is that though falsely accused restraining order defendants may be denied access to their homes, money, property, and children—besides facing other privations—they aren’t denied their freedom; it’s only curtailed somewhat (“Here are your shoes—you’re free to leave”).

Faith in the conceit that restraining orders are minor impingements on defendants’ lives depends on accepting that being falsely, publically, and permanently labeled a stalker or batterer, for example, shouldn’t interfere with a person’s comfort, equanimity, or ability to realize his or her dreams. Such faith is founded, in other words, on the fantastical belief that wrongful vilification won’t exercise a detrimental influence on a person’s mental state, won’t affect his or her familial and social relationships, won’t negatively impact his or her employment and employability, etc.

Clearly such faith is beyond unreasonable; it’s inane. Being forced to live with false allegations can be crippling—for painfully obvious reasons. Whether a person is forced to agonize in a cell or is permitted to agonize in his or her place of choice is of scant significance to the psycho-emotional well-being of the sufferer. Prison isn’t just an environment, and arresting someone doesn’t require handcuffs.

Eight Years of Hell: On the Toll of False Allegations of Abuse

June 22, 2014August 8, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

“Bitter separation battles and unrequited love are among the reasons why people falsely accuse others of sexual abuse, according to legal professionals.

“Lawyers contacted by The Sunday Times of Malta came across several examples of cases when people, often women, made false claims that they or their children had been abused.

“Lawyer Roberto Montalto gave the example of one situation where a woman claimed her children were abused by her husband’s colleague.

“The case dragged on for eight years and the man was acquitted after the court found that the woman lied….”

—“False Abuse Accusations Not One-Offs, Say Lawyers”

To read the rest of this story, published just a couple of weeks ago, you have to subscribe to The Times of Malta. I can guess the remainder’s content, as I know many men and women who’ve visited this site can.

This excerpt is highlighted, because even today most people are under the impression that instances of false allegations’ being made repeatedly in protracted legal assaults are rare and isolated occurrences.

As attorneys and others attest, they’re not. Only hearing about them is.

Among the reasons why restraining orders are criticized on this site and elsewhere is that they’re superlative and intoxicating gateway fixes for spiteful accusers bent on gratifying malicious impulses. They can be obtained in a few hours—even a few minutes—based on allegations that require no substantiation and that are subjected to a minimum of scrutiny, if any at all.

They’re easily exploited to establish claims that can then be parlayed into interminable attacks.

False criminal allegations suggestive of sexual or violent deviancy—e.g., stalking, sexual harassment or molestation, and domestic abuse—can be just as effective and for the same reasons. The hysteria promoted by the abuse industry and the political influence it has bent to its “cause” have conditioned police, municipal prosecutors, and judges to credit allegations of abuse automatically (especially ones from women).

Eight years—that’s the term in hell the man in the epigraph had to endure before it was apparently demonstrated that the whole ordeal was based on lies: eight years lost for nothing. Nothing. More horrible yet is that the only thing that makes this story exceptional is that the fraudulent accuser was eventually exposed and acknowledged as such.

Eight years is a Ph.D. Eight years is a career. Eight years is a son or daughter’s childhood.

False Restraining Orders That Allege Emotional Abuse ARE Emotional Abuse

June 5, 2014February 19, 2018Moderator 23 Comments

A theme that emerges upon consideration of restraining order abuse is lack of empathy—from impulsive or false accusers and from those who abet them. Plaintiffs who act either spitefully or viciously seldom appreciate the ramifications of their actions. They may possess what we call a normal conscience but either don’t think or, in the heat of the moment, don’t care.

The horror is that this same indifference extends not only to authorities and officers of the court but to feminist advocates for restraining orders and the public at large, who are persuaded that the gravity of violence against women trivializes all other considerations. Their indifference may in fact be unconsciousness, but when people’s livelihoods and lives are at stake, unconsciousness is no more pardonable.

It’s ironic that the focus of those who should be most sensitized to injustice is so narrow. Ironic, moreover, is that “emotional abuse” is frequently a component of state definitions of domestic violence. The state recognizes the harm of emotional violence done in the home but conveniently regards the same conduct as harmless when it uses the state as its instrument.

From “Are You a Victim of Emotional Abuse?” by Cathy Meyer:

Emotional abuse is used to control, degrade, humiliate, and punish a spouse. While emotional abuse differs from physical abuse, the end result is the same….

Note the writer’s conclusion that emotional abuse is equivalent to violence in its effects.

Her orientation, of course, is toward victims of domestic violence, but her judgment is just as applicable to false allegations, whose intent is to “control, degrade, humiliate, and punish.”

Plainly the motive of most reasonable feminist arguments and appeals, at least as that motive is understood by those making them, is to induce empathic understanding. They want people to care.

Here’s yet another irony. Too often the perspectives of those who decry injustices are partisan. Feminists themselves are liable to see only one side.

“But my side’s more important” isn’t a rebuttal but a confirmation of chauvinism.

In the explication quoted above, the writer compares the conduct of emotional abusers to that of prison guards toward prisoners of war, who use psychological torment to achieve compliance from their wards. Consider that victims of false allegations may literally be imprisoned.

Consider further some of the tactics that Ms. Meyer identifies as emotionally abusive:

Isolating a spouse from friends and family.
Discourag[ing] any independent activities such as work; taking classes or activities with friends.
If the spouse does not give into the control, they are threatened, harassed, punished, and intimidated by the abuser.
Us[ing] the children to gain control by undermining the other parent’s authority or threatening to leave and take the children.
Control[ling] all the financial decisions, refus[ing] to listen to their partner’s opinion, withhold[ing] important financial information and mak[ing] their spouse live on limited resources.
Mak[ing] all major decisions such as where to live, how to furnish the home, and what type of automobile to drive.

Now consider the motives of false allegations and their certain and potential effects: isolation, termination of employment and impediment to or negation of employability, inaccessibility to children (who are used as leverage), and being forced to live on limited means (while possibly being required under threat of punishment to provide spousal and child support) and perhaps being left with no home to furnish or automobile to drive at all.

The correspondence is obvious…if you’re looking for it. Opponents of emotional abuse need to recognize it in all of its manifestations, because the expectation of empathy is only justified if it’s reciprocated.

TALKING BACK to restraining orders

THEY’RE NOT JUST ABUSED BUT ABUSIVE

Tag false allegations