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

December 31, 2013August 23, 2023Moderator 5 Comments

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

—E-petition respondent

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s parse that logic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heads would roll.

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

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

December 28, 2013August 23, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

Judge: “Are you afraid of her?”

Man: “No, I….”

Judge: “Are you afraid of her?”

Man: “No, it’s not that. It’s—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 27, 2013August 23, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they’re mostly silent.

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

December 26, 2013August 23, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s not a false allegation.

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

December 24, 2013August 23, 2023Moderator 6 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

Like hot tar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

WTF.

The Word for Restraining Order Abuse is FRAUD

December 23, 2013August 23, 2023Moderator 8 Comments

So complacent toward lying have judges become that restraining order fraud goes over without raising an eyebrow. I’ve known one judge to scoff at the use of the word perjury on reflex, despite being ignorant of the facts he’d been called upon to adjudicate. And, though careless, he wasn’t a dim man.

Perjury, a felony crime, is the false (i.e., fraudulent) representation of a material fact to a judge (including on a sworn document like a restraining order application). A material fact is one that’s likely to influence a judicial decision. To falsely allege you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted, for instance, is to commit perjury. Perjury is a word all defendants who’ve been falsely accused should know. Chances are they’re victims of more than one materially factual misrepresentation to the court.

The phrase restraining order fraud, too, needs to gain more popular currency, and I encourage anyone who’s been victimized by false allegations to employ it. Fraud in its most general sense is willful misrepresentation intended to mislead for the purpose of realizing some source of gratification. As fraud is generally understood in law, that gratification is monetary. It may, however, derive from any number of alternative sources, including attention and revenge, two common motives for restraining order abuse. The goal of fraud on the courts is success (toward gaining, for example, attention or revenge).

People who are victimized by the restraining order process are rarely students of law and often have had no prior exposure to legal procedure whatever. Words like perjury and fraud, while possibly familiar from having been heard in TV courtroom dramas or read in novels, are mostly alien concepts to the uninitiated. Restraining order recipients have mere days to prepare a defense—if they know they can contest an order of the court at all—and it’s unlikely that they’ll have concepts like these at their command. (I’m a student of words, and it took a lawyer’s familiarizing me with the significance of these two, among others, for me to gain a reasonably firm grasp of their meaning—and this was years after my own day in court. I was a practicing kids’ poet, and words like these weren’t ones I’d ever had call to use. And I’d prefer I were still ignorant of them today.)

Fraud isn’t commonly applied to restraining order abuse (itself an uncommonly used phrase), and it certainly should be, because the restraining order process is assuredly the most common motivator of frauds on the court. This process is usually employed impulsively, is free, and is completed in a matter of moments. Those motivated to use it maliciously—and they’re legion—typically do so in the throes of spiteful passion. They say whatever they believe they need to to achieve their desired ends.

However lacking their stories may be of scrupulous premeditation, though, they’re nevertheless frauds. And they nevertheless work.

The reason for the court’s failure to perceive restraining order fraud derives from its failure to perceive how damaging false allegations are to defendants. Judges aren’t likely to associate fraud with restraining order allegations, believing the term more aptly applied to cases that inflict “real” harm. Restraining order fraud, even when it doesn’t cost a defendant access to his or her home, property, and children, does real harm: anxiety, gnawing outrage, despondency, and depression, which may predictably lead to insomnia, deterioration of health, loss of productivity, and behavioral changes, and may conceivably induce drug or alcohol abuse and homicidal or suicidal ideation. Defendants may lose jobs or job opportunities. They may end up homeless. And these consequences ignore those inflicted on peripheral parties like children, who may also be lastingly traumatized.

The judicial disconnect between restraining order and harm is one defendants against false restraining orders must endeavor to bridge, because even a judge who’s nobody’s fool isn’t likely to get there on his or her own. The restraining order process is virtually automated. Judges know they don’t have to apply a great deal of diligent attention to particulars and consequently rarely do.

Use of the words perjury and fraud aren’t likely to avail restraining order defendants. Of probable value, though, is understanding them. And of definite value to arousing awareness of restraining order abuse and promoting reform of the restraining order process is leading others to understand them.

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

December 22, 2013August 22, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But should.

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

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

December 20, 2013August 23, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

Overgeneralization: making hasty generalizations from insufficient experiences and evidence.

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

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

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

Disqualifying the positive: discounting positive events.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fallacy of change: Relying on social control to obtain cooperative actions from another person.

Always being right: Prioritizing self-interest over the feelings of another person.

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

Narcissism: A Study in Distortion

December 19, 2013August 23, 2023Moderator 5 Comments

The narcissist is a study in distortion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ABCs of Restraining Order Fraud

December 15, 2013August 23, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 13, 2013August 23, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 10, 2013July 1, 2023Moderator 4 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 8, 2013August 23, 2023Moderator 10 Comments

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

—From “End Restraining Order Abuses”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a piece of cake.

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

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

Infidelity and Restraining Order Abuse

December 8, 2013January 22, 2018Moderator 3 Comments

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

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

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

Classy, huh?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Domestic Violence: Restraining Order Abuse

December 7, 2013January 16, 2018Moderator Leave a comment

Daughter: “He hits me, Ma.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Breaking the Glasses”: One Blog Writer’s Metaphor for Exposing Restraining Order Abuse

November 24, 2013February 23, 2018Moderator 3 Comments

A highly intelligent and sensitive woman I’ve been in correspondence with in recent months, one who’s been put through the legal crucible and left badly scalded by it, remarked to me that despite what may be their best intentions, a lot of those on the Internet who protest abuses committed through the courts and by the courts sound like nut jobs. I’m personally in awe of anyone who’s weathered court travails and emerged even reasonably sane. I’m not sure I qualify myself. But I take her point.

That’s why I’m particularly impressed when I encounter writers whose literary protests are not only controlled but very lucid and balanced. One such writer maintains a blog titled Breaking the Glasses, and anyone with a stake in the issues this blog concerns may appreciate a female writer’s perspective on them. See her posts on “Restraining Order Abuse and Vexatious Litigation.” She really gets it. Her section on “Mantrapment” (marvelous for its title alone) is dead on in its analyses, and she does a stellar job breaking down how the restraining order game works by the sedimentary accretion of lies.

Here’s an excerpt from an article of this writer’s that chronicles one man’s “Seven years in hell” (published on AVoiceforMen.com). It summarizes the horrors of restraining order injustice and may resonate with the experiences of visitors to this blog:

“After these first accusations failed to get Amy what she wanted, she changed tactics. She would go to the county courthouse first, using false claims of stalking and assault to obtain another emergency Civil Protection Order. A hearing would be set for a date within 30 days to determine whether the order was merited. This hearing would carry two possibilities: either the order would be dropped, or it would be upheld. If the order was dropped, the charge of violating it would also be dropped. If upheld, it would be in effect for 5 years, and Rodger would face limitations and penalties, including the permanent loss of his legal right to keep and bear arms. Any contact he had with Amy after that, even if it was accidental, could result in his being sent to jail.

“After requesting the order, Amy would wait until she was informed that the order had been served, and within a day or two, she would accuse Rodger of violating it. Each time, officers would arrive at Rodger’s home and take him into custody without reading him his rights. They informed him that they could do this because he was not under arrest – merely ‘going in for questioning.’

“However, despite not being under arrest, he would be transported to the station in handcuffs, riding in the back of a cruiser rather than on his own. Officers would place him in a holding cell before and after questioning him. He would be held for hours. The department would not release him without bail. Officers told Rodger’s family that they were permitted to do all of this under a combination of the Patriot Act and the Violence Against Women Act, explaining that the Patriot Act allows police to detain citizens suspected of domestic terrorism, and VAWA treats domestic abuse as a form of terrorism. However, VAWA does not treat domestic abuse as a form of ‘domestic terrorism’ as described in the Patriot Act. That assertion was an incorrect interpretation of the two laws, one which is being fed to local departments by the advocacy group from which Amy was receiving assistance, but the fact that it’s incorrect has not stopped local police departments from acting on the advocacy group’s advice when detaining area men accused of domestic violence.”

It digests much of what’s most defective and destructive about the restraining order process and underscores how easily and extremely this process can be abused.

Besides this writer’s blog, I want to direct interested parties to Restraining Order Blog, maintained by Chris Tucker, whose own treatments are reasoned and conscientious. Many detailed and revealing firsthand accounts of restraining order abuse can be found here.

It’s said that knowledge is power. This isn’t particularly true when applied to the state legal apparatus, because all the know-how in the world can fall victim to base lies. In the legal arena, the only sure power is political pull (which usually equates to money). And the only virtue in knowing this is knowing to steer clear of the legal arena. There is much to be said for speaking truth to power, however, because information is influential. And the tides of change will only be roused by that information’s spreading.

And this finally is contingent upon those in the know feeling secure enough to pronounce what they know. This is how the power of knowledge is realized. Fortune doesn’t in fact always favor the brave, but in the fullness of time it may dependably respond to their summons.

Not Evil Geniuses but Brats in Slacks: On Narcissists and Restraining Order Abuse

November 22, 2013August 2, 2023Moderator 3 Comments

Pathological narcissism is apparently a titillating topic.

A growing number of visitors to this blog are brought here by search terms that include words and phrases like narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder, and NPD. More commenters, too, have lately reported abuses by narcissists through the courts, typically restraining order abuse. This surge is less likely due to an uptick in abuses by narcissists than to a dawning awareness of the psychological motives that underlie many vicious legal assaults. More Internet support groups and websites devoted exclusively to exposing abuses by narcissists are emerging, and the same words and phrases glossed above are now appearing in headlines, such as those on The Huffington Post and Salon.com.

My own opinion, on reflection, is that narcissists are banal. Evil, as Hannah Arendt famously noted, usually is (Arendt was a teacher and writer who fled Nazi Germany). The truth is the sorts of legal mischief narcissists get up to only work because our courts are accustomed to crediting lies (however painfully transparent they might be to a disinterested party). Narcissists assuredly congratulate themselves on their courtroom triumphs (congratulating themselves is among narcissists’ principal preoccupations). Yet any precocious child would see through their counterfeit dramatics.

Narcissists aren’t, in fact, epic anything; they’re pathetic. You may perceive narcissists’ pathological lies as devious; you’d more usefully perceive them as compulsive. (A compulsion is an irresistible urge.) What gives their frauds that aura of grandeur is the astonishing ease with which they’re committed, particularly on authorities and judges, and the facility with which narcissists enlist others in those frauds or convince others that they’re true. (Narcissists’ allies and pawns are more often than not morally normal people, that is, “neurotypicals.” Sometimes they’re even seemingly intelligent and discerning ones.)

Casual charlatanism, though, is hardly an accomplishment for people without consciences to answer to. And rubes and tools are ten cents a dozen.

There probably are some narcissistic masterminds out there. None of the narcissists whose conduct I know of, however—and I’ve had dozens of stories shared with me and read scores of other accounts, besides—has ever impressed me as more than a child in big-boy pants or a big-girl skirt. Narcissists succeed by virtue of soulless inveiglement and outward plausibility, neither of which bears up under close scrutiny. (Courtroom decisions made in restraining order cases are the products of a few minutes.)

I’ve read many people differentiate between narcissism and “mental illness.” Narcissists aren’t crazy, they’ll write. I’m unconvinced. I think it’s more accurately pronounced that narcissists don’t seem crazy and that most people are taken in by narcissists not because there isn’t something about them that alerts the antennae of others that there’s something off about them than that what’s off about them doesn’t match any of the familiar paradigms of craziness.

I’m not a psychologist, but my personal opinion is that narcissists are mentally ill and, when their frauds and ploys are resisted to any significant extent, that that mental illness becomes more prominent and perceptible, particularly to those whom they’ve abused. Normal people won’t run themselves ragged defending such frauds and ploys. A narcissist will.

Narcissism is about surface. And surface, despite the warning of that adage about book covers, is what we judge by. Narcissists are good with audiences. They’re also good with stress. They don’t slide into that state of neglected personal hygiene that we associate with “madness” even when pushed to an extremity. This isn’t a reflection of their interior hygiene, however.

Scratch beneath the surface, and you will find disorder.

Contrary to what many online writers counsel, people in legal contests with narcissists shouldn’t think of their opponents as reasoning beings in possession of highly developed albeit wicked minds; they should reckon themselves to be in struggles against recalcitrant children. Much ado is made of the cunning of narcissists. That apparent cunning is really just a manifestation of obsessive-compulsive self-justification combined with infantile rage provoked by the narcissist’s not getting his or her way.

Narcissists aren’t Hannibal Lecters; they’re brats in permanent temper tantrums who recognize no moral boundaries or authority.

What HE Said: On Why Once a Restraining Order Fraud Has Been Put Over on the Courts, It Sticks like Pigeon Scat on a Car Hood

November 14, 2013February 24, 2018Moderator 17 Comments

A principle of law that everyone ensnarled in any sort of legal shenanigan should be aware of is stare decisis. This Latin phrase means “to abide by, or adhere to, decided things” (Black’s Law Dictionary). Law proceeds and “evolves” in accordance with stare decisis.

Anybody who’s read a Grisham novel or seen its screen adaptation knows that precedents are evoked to establish the merits of legal arguments. Precedents are cases whose judicial opinions imposed some novel tweak, limit, or elaboration on previous opinions. Law “advances” by means of this sort of accretion and seldom backpedals. Lawyers inform judges of precedents to persuade them that such-and-such was agreed upon by another judge, so you guys need to form your rulings correspondently.

The orientation of the courts is toward accepting that what’s previously been found to be the case must remain the case (or “the truth”).

Victims of restraining order fraud express amazement at the courts’ unwillingness to acknowledge obvious lies by designing plaintiffs (applicants). The fact is that once a restraining order has been successfully petitioned, and this is simply a matter of a plaintiff plaintively persuading a judge of his or her need in a 10-minute interview, it becomes a (presumptively) decided matter. Court rhetoric would have it believed that no final conclusion is made until the defendant can be heard in opposition, but all things judicial lean toward the notion exemplified by stare decisis, that is, what’s decided is decided.

Translation: “It’s true, because we said it was.” This is called a tautology (the assertion that a fact is its own reason) and would get a practitioner tossed out of Critical Thinking 101.

Defendants who opt to contest false allegations on restraining orders only to have judges belittle their efforts in the brief, half-hour hearings afforded them often report being horrified by judicial bias, laziness, or indifference, and leave courtrooms feeling like the outcomes were preordained.

That’s because in a very real sense they were.

Ex parte rulings may well be done deals, because judges, consciously or not, follow the precept that they should adhere to precedents and not unsettle things previously established (“stare decisis et non quieta movere”). And all restraining orders are approved ex parte, that is, without judges even knowing who defendants are, so what has previously been established has been established unilaterally (that is, prejudicially or one-sidedly) and in the absence of due process of law.

Restraining order appeals, which may climb successive rungs of the court ladder if defendants possess the financial means and moral fortitude to keep resisting, face this prejudice all the way up. So too do lawsuits seeking damages for restraining order abuse (especially if litigants are self-represented).

If you ever receive an apology from a judge, frame it.

Truth may literally be irrelevant. Procedural rules trump it and incline and authorize judges not merely to discount contradictory evidence provided by defendants but to ignore it entirely. Some disturbed person’s incriminatory fantasy, therefore, can drain the quality of years of a restraining order defendant’s life. This is the grotesque reality of the restraining order process and underscores its inherent corruption.

Government studies have concluded that a majority of restraining orders (80% by at least one reckoning) are issued unnecessarily or on false grounds.

It’s clear then that unless due process is retrofitted into the system, and defendants are granted the opportunity to be heard prior to restraining orders’ being issued so that they’re not forced to enter the process having to clear the hurdle of an unfair prejudgment (on top of feeling betrayed and menaced by the state), restraining orders will necessarily continue to do more harm than they arrest.

It would also be nice if the statutory consequence of prison time for those who lie to the courts were once and while enforced.

Rape and Restraining Order Fraud: On How Men Betray Women, How Women Betray Men, and How the Courts and the Feminist Establishment Betray Them Both

November 7, 2013February 22, 2018Moderator 2 Comments

I had an exceptional encounter with an exceptional woman this week who was raped as a child (by a child) and later violently raped as a young adult, and whose assailants were never held accountable for their actions. It’s her firm conviction—and one supported by her own experiences and those of women she’s counseled—that allegations of rape and violence in criminal court can too easily be dismissed when, for example, a woman has voluntarily entered a man’s living quarters and an expectation of consent to intercourse has been aroused.

Her perception of judicial bias against criminal plaintiffs is one shared by many and not without cause.

By contrast, I’ve heard from hundreds of people (of both genders) who’ve been violated by false accusers in civil court and who know that frauds are readily and indifferently accepted by judges. (Correspondingly, more than one female victim of civil restraining order abuse has characterized her treatment in court and by the courts as “rape.”)

Their perception of judicial bias against civil defendants is equally validated.

Lapses by the courts have piqued the outrage of victims of both genders against the opposite gender, because most victims of rape are female, and most victims of false allegations are male.

The failures of the court in the prosecution of crimes against women, which arouse feminist ire like nothing else, are largely responsible for the potency of restraining order laws, which are the product of dogged feminist politicking, and which are easily abused to do malice (or psychological “rape”).

In ruminating on sexual politics and the justice system, I’m inexorably reminded of the title of a book by psychologist R. D. Laing that I read years ago: Knots.

In the first title I conceived for this piece, I used the phrase “can’t see eye to eye.” The fact is these issues are so incendiary and prejudicial that no one can see clearly period. Everyone just sees red.

Under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), federal funds are doled out to police precincts and courts in the form of grants purportedly intended to educate police officers and judges and sensitize them to violations against women, which may have the positive effect of ensuring that more female victims of violent crimes see justice but simultaneously ensures that standards applied to the issuance of civil restraining orders slacken still further, allowing casual abuse of a free process to run rampant and destroy lives. The victim toll of false restraining orders negates strides made toward achieving justice for female victims in criminal prosecutions. What is more, though restraining orders are four times more often applied for by women than men, making women their predominant abusers, the laxity of restraining order administration allows women to be violated by men, too.

Not only was a woman I’ve recently been in correspondence with repeatedly assaulted by her short-term boyfriend, a charming and very cunning guy; he also succeeded in petitioning a false restraining order against her, alleging, among other things, violence. She had even applied for a restraining order against him first, which was dismissed:

There are no words for how I felt as I walked to my car that afternoon. To experience someone I had cared deeply about lying viciously in open court, to have a lawyer infer that I’m a liar, and to be told by a judge that, basically, he didn’t believe me (i.e., again, that I’m a liar), filled me with a despair so intense that I could hardly live with it. You know how, in trauma medicine, doctors will sometimes put grossly brain-injured patients into medically-induced comas so as to facilitate healing? That afternoon, I needed and longed for a medically-induced emotional coma to keep my skull from popping off the top of my head. I don’t know how else to describe it. It was that day that I learned that the justice system is rotten, that the truth doesn’t mean shit, and that to the most depraved liar go the spoils.

As many people who’ve responded to this blog have been, this woman was used and abused then publicly condemned and humiliated to compound the torment. She’s shelled out thousands in legal fees, lost a job, is in therapy to try to maintain her sanity, and is due back in court next week. And she has three kids who depend on her.

The perception that consequences of civil frauds are no big deal is wrong and makes possible the kind of scenario illustrated by this woman’s case: the agony and injury of physical assault being exacerbated by the agony and injury of public shame and humiliation, a psychological assault abetted and intensified by the justice system itself.

The consequences of the haywire circumstance under discussion are that victims multiply, and bureaucrats and those who feed at the bureaucratic trough (or on what spills over the side) thrive. The more victims there are and the more people there are who can be represented as victims, the busier and more prosperous grow courts, the police, attorneys, advocacy groups, therapists, etc.

What’s glaringly absent in all of this is oversight and accountability. Expecting diligence and rigor from any government apparatus is a pipedream. So is expecting people to be honest when they have everything to gain from lying and nothing to lose from getting caught at it, because false allegations to civil courts are never prosecuted.

Expecting that judges will be diligent, rigorous, and fair if failing to do so hazards their job security, and expecting civil plaintiffs to be honest if being caught in a lie means doing a stint in prison for felony perjury—that, at least, is reasonable.

The obstacle is that those who hold political sway object to this change. The feminist establishment, whose concern for women’s welfare is far more dogmatic than conscientious, has a strong handhold and no intention of loosening its grip.

Typically both criminal allegations of assault or rape and civil allegations in restraining order cases (which may be of the same or a similar nature) boil down to he-said-she-said. In criminal cases, the standard of guilt is proof beyond a reasonable doubt, a criterion that may be impossible to establish when one person is saying one thing and the other person another, evidence is uncertain, and there are no witnesses. In civil cases, no proof is necessary. So though feminist outrage is never going to be fully satisfied, for example, with the criminal prosecution of rapists, because some rapists will always get off, feminists can always boast success in the restraining order arena, because the issuance of restraining orders is based on judicial discretion and requires no proof at all; and the courts have been socially, politically, and monetarily influenced to favor female plaintiffs. However thwarted female and feminist interests may be on the criminal front, feminists own the civil front.

And baby hasn’t come a long way only to start checking her rearview mirror for smears on the tarmac now.

“restraining order is bullsh*t”: A Lesson in Lying

November 5, 2013July 9, 2023Moderator 9 Comments

The previous post concerned lying to get restraining orders, how easily frauds are put over, and the possible value to recipients of false restraining orders of lying better than their accusers.

The quoted phrase in this post’s title, slightly censored, represents an actual search term that has brought several such recipients to this blog.

Among those with no firsthand knowledge of how restraining orders are abused or why, there’s an assumption that by lying, complainants of restraining order fraud mean exaggeration, inflation of allegations that at least bear some correspondence to fact.

This assumption is mistakenly based on the belief that courts only act on proof. Proof is not the standard by which civil matters are judged or the criterion upon which civil restraining orders are approved. Restraining order interviews between applicants and judges are five- or 10-minute screen tests, nothing more; proof is unnecessary.

“But surely you can’t just make things up!” You surely can. Anything. There are no consequences to lying to the police, lying under oath to a judge, or lying on a sworn document unless the district attorney’s office opts to prosecute you, and this seldom happens in civil matters and never in those as low on its list of priorities as restraining order fraud. Statutes that threaten penalties for false reporting or committing perjury are like padlocks: they’re only meant to keep honest people honest.

Not only can people lie to the courts—and with impunity—they can lie BIG.

Not many years ago, philosopher Harry Frankfurt published a treatise that I was amused to discover called On Bullshit (which predictably mounted the bestseller list on the allure of its title alone).

In his book—which is brilliant, in fact, and well-deserving of acclaim—Dr. Frankfurt distinguishes “lies” from “bullshit.” Lies, he explains, have a basic or tangential relationship with the truth, that is, they’re not purely imaginative; they fandango the truth. Bullshit, in contrast to lies, lacks even a passing acquaintance with truth. It’s wholly improvisational. The bullshitter doesn’t “reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all.”

False allegations on restraining orders may not be lies simply; they may be bullshit, fabrications that are utterly divorced from reality. A number of respondents to this blog who have been accused of violence, for example, are vegetarian or vegan women who scruple about the welfare of insects and regard violence as unthinkable. Their accusers haven’t merely misrepresented them but reinvented them. The motive? Sheer malice. What correspondence restraining order applicants’ bullshit may have with the truth is antithetical: they allege falsehoods—ones completely estranged from the truth—that they know will most searingly damage their victims.

Success in leading anyone who hasn’t been abused in this way toward realizing that accusers can and do lie is tricky enough; getting them to perceive that allegations may be out-and-out bullshit requires forceful eye-opening.

I can’t responsibly advocate lying. I do, however, acknowledge that since opportunities afforded restraining order defendants to expose the bullshit of unscrupulous accusers may permit them all of 15 minutes to work a miracle, defendants’ following the dictum “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” has something to recommend it.

The logical extension of there being no consequences for lying is there being no consequences for lying back. Bigger and better.

It could be advantageous, speaking practically not morally, for defendants of false restraining orders to embrace this premise and—instead of trying to deflect turds flung at them—to respond in kind (and even less kindly). Fairness, one of our courts’ fundamental procedural principles, dictates that if judicators are willing to tolerate monkey-cage antics from one side (and moreover reward those antics), they can hardly be averse to bilateral flingfests.

Maybe the only way to prompt this process to evolve is to expose it to its own degeneracy: Monkey see, monkey doo-doo.

Lying Back: On Taking the Low Road against Restraining Order Abusers

October 30, 2013February 26, 2018Moderator 2 Comments

One of the most common questions that brings recipients of false restraining orders to this blog is how to prevail in an appeals hearing against an unscrupulous liar.

Because restraining orders are easily applied for and typically cost applicants nothing but a lunch break, they’re unparalleled as instruments of malice. With a few strokes of a pen and some calculated fictions conveyed to a judge with the right touch of hysteria, a liar can undo a target of his or her wrath in short order, permanently sullying his or her reputation, subjecting him or her to public disparagement and disgrace, and possibly denying him or her access to home, children, pets, and property. If word gets out, that target may lose his or her job and moreover have a highly prejudicial blot on his or her record that impedes him or her from getting a new one. More than one respondent to this blog has reported being jailed on fraudulent charges or left homeless and destitute.

Multiple restraining orders against a number of people marked for vendetta can even be applied for back to back by a single plaintiff.

False allegations are routinely accepted by the courts at face value—the attention paid to such allegations is scant at best—and if those whom false allegations are leveled against are heard from by the courts at all, it’s only after the allegations against them have been presumed true. An appellant may furthermore be granted no more than 15 or 20 minutes to try to convince the court that it erred in its initial decision. The expectation of a fair and just hearing, therefore, is next to nil.

I’ve spilled a good deal of digital ink over the past 26 months articulating the manifold and manifest problems inherent in the restraining order process, and I’ve offered what limited information and modest advice I could to those who’ve been abused by it.

In doing so, I’ve tried to toe the ethical line: “speak to the allegations and show that they’re false,” “explain to the judge any ulterior motives the plaintiff would have for lying about you,” etc. I’ve counseled, in other words, fighting fire with water.

The more familiar phrase, of course, is “fight fire with fire.” I can’t endorse lying and won’t. But admitting that lying more effectively than your accuser may be the best defense against a false restraining order isn’t a lie.

The sad and disgusting fact is that success in the courts, particularly in the drive-thru arena of restraining order prosecution, is largely about impressions. Ask yourself who’s likelier to make the more impressive showing: the liar who’s free to let his or her imagination run wickedly rampant or the honest person who’s constrained by ethics to be faithful to the facts?

A fraud enters an appeals hearing with the advantage of already having had his or her lies recognized by a judge as true. An honest defendant not only faces the obstacle of disproving what should never have been taken for fact to begin with but must also fend off whatever new lies his or her accuser may have concocted in the meantime or may invent on the spur of the moment.

And that defendant may have all of 15 minutes in which to accomplish this, since restraining order appeals hearings may be allotted no more than half an hour on the court’s docket. A fraud knows exactly what facts to anticipate from an honest person (and can prefabricate false defenses); an honest person flies blind (and in this process, injured), never knowing what’s coming or from what direction.

Unscrupulous restraining order plaintiffs, who may be sociopaths or have borderline personality disorders, may falsely allege violence, bizarre sex acts, stalking, death threats, or worse. And they do so with complete indifference to the effects these allegations (and their being made publicly) have on their victims. Some liars are horrifyingly imaginative and color their frauds with lurid details that would inspire the envy of a professional screenwriter. Some liars—pathological narcissists, for example—are magnetic personalities, besides, who may have devoted followers willing to abet them in a fraud or who may readily persuade those who don’t know any better to take their side.

Should defendants lie?

This question has two possible interpretations: 1. Is it ethically conscionable? Or 2. Is it the only way to defuse an improvised explosive device that could shatter their lives? Depending on which of these interpretations is meant by the question, the answer could be negative or affirmative.

Should citizens in the civilized world ever be placed in the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t position of having to lie to the courts to counteract lies to the courts? The answer to that question is easy: Hell no.

Restraining Order Laws Hold Nothing Sacred

August 20, 2013September 1, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

I’ve been in correspondence with a woman who was recently forced to abandon her home to make herself unavailable to further allegations of abuse from her neighbor, allegations that she reports aren’t just false but nuts (and that have continued to escalate and compound over weeks and months).

This woman, a solitary 65-year-old with no nearby family to turn to for support, has had to relinquish her independence and move in with a friend at great sacrifice to both her comfort and pride.

She has also, of course, had to retain the services of an attorney.

And chances are that no matter how the controversy resolves in court, she’ll never again feel safe and easy in her own house and will have to uproot.

Her situation emphasizes a number of the horrors that attend restraining orders and the policies that inform their administration:

Confounding the constitutional guarantees to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, restraining orders may deny defendants all rights to property, children, and home—or, as in this woman’s case, the right to feel secure in that home—based on unverified (and possibly unverifiable) accusations leveled by plaintiffs in a span of a few minutes. Aptly applying a quotation from Woody Allen to how easily restraining orders are obtained: “Eighty percent of success is showing up.”
The standard of proof is so meager that a lone defendant has little hope of defusing allegations by an aggressive and insistent plaintiff. (And it’s almost always the case that had the defendant been the first party in a dispute to seek a restraining order, the court would as likely have found the defendant’s representation to be the more urgent “truth of the matter.” Especially when, as in this case, both the plaintiff and defendant are women. Certainly the first party before a judge has the competitive edge—not least of all because the opposing party is never interviewed.)
Once an unscrupulous plaintiff gets a taste of what s/he can get away with, s/he may repeatedly up the ante. Harsher allegations, counterintuitively, are no more likely to be closely scrutinized by the court and all the more likely to be accepted. I say “accepted,” because their accuracy is irrelevant. Restraining orders aren’t approved based on the truth of a plaintiff’s individual allegations so much as on the forcefulness of their totality (even if some or all are bogus). Basically, the harder allegations are for a judge to ignore, the more likely they are to work. A person succeeds in getting a restraining order; s/he doesn’t get one because everything s/he alleges is true (though all allegations remain on public record, true or false—which of course means false ones become “true” by virtue of a judge’s signature).

The woman whose story prompts this post has been left with seeking solace from her faith, because there are no other sources. That a citizen of the United States of America must sooner trust in prayer than in the justice of her own government tells you everything you need to know about the iniquities of this process.

“perjury and sociopaths”: On the Challenges of Contesting Restraining Orders Sought by the Mentally Aberrant, Deranged, or Ill

April 5, 2013July 13, 2023Moderator 41 Comments

A recent respondent to this blog detailed his restraining order ordeal at the hands of a woman who he persuasively alleges is a sociopath. He says this label is generally scoffed at by people he explains the matter to and wonders how he could convince a judge of its accuracy.

Since this blog was published nearly two years ago, hundreds have been led to it by search terms that include words and phrases like “sociopath,” “mental illness,” “narcissist,” and “personality disorder” or “borderline personality disorder” (“bpd”).

This should hardly be a source of surprise.

Restraining order applicants aren’t screened based on their psychiatric histories. Sociopaths and narcissists, who are seldom clinically diagnosed in the first place, are moreover cunning liars and manipulators. Obtaining restraining orders—which are issued solely on the basis of brief interviews between petitioners and judges—is not only a simple matter for them but rewards their pathological drives for dominance and revenge.

Characterized generously, the restraining order process is fast-food justice. The ability and opportunity of most defendants to qualify allegations of sociopathy or insanity against their accusers—assuming these defendants even recognize these conditions—is effectively none at all. And unless a restraining order applicant is completely off the wall, his or her allegations won’t even cause a judge to arch an eyebrow. Applicants are in and out of restraining order interviews in a matter of minutes. Sociopaths are the smoothest liars you’ll ever meet, and the insane may be more convincing yet if they wholeheartedly believe their allegations in spite of those allegations’ possibly having no relationship to reality at all.

The imperceptibility of mental disorders is what makes them so difficult to expose (on this subject, see also these related posts).

I could go on about how easily the restraining order process is abused by sociopaths or the otherwise mentally aberrant. And I could describe to you the devastating effects their false allegations have on the lives of those they abuse. Instead I’ll close with some of the relevant search terms that have brought readers here since this blog’s inception. Identical search terms have been eliminated (“beating a narcissistic sociopath,” for example, rolls in regularly).

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“Are You Serious?”: One Commenter’s Experience of Restraining Order Corruption

March 26, 2013June 21, 2023Moderator 9 Comments

A commenter on this blog’s Q&A page recently submitted an update on his own ordeal that illumines the contradictions, corruption, and chaos that mar the restraining order process. His story, which I’ve edited for clarity, is worthy of the attention of legislators and should be of interest to anyone who has a stake in these matters or is curious to know how the restraining order process has been debauched since its advent decades ago.

As I mentioned before, I made an attempt to file an order of protection against the scorned sociopathic woman who put one on me. I was told I could not, yet nobody was able to tell me what statute prohibits this or what the law says except, “You cannot put an order of protection on anyone who has one on you.” I did, however, file a motion to dismiss/vacate.

One day last week I was going to visit my mother for lunch—her house is one of the few places I will go. She lives downtown. While on the way to visit her, I decided to make another attempt to file this order of protection. The court building is very close to where my mother lives. I went to the main courthouse and was ultimately told by a clerk (as well as lawyer who had overheard me) that to file a restraining order, I had to go to another building specifically for this. This new courthouse is about three years old. I took a taxi to the new building, made it into the area to file, gave my info, signed in, and waited. Ninety percent of the people there were women, most of whom looked like trouble. There were no secretaries. Questions and answers were audible to everyone. There were some very legitimate people, though I could see a lot of these people were simply looking for trouble. Not one was turned away.

They should get a revolving door put in soon.

There were about 20 forms to fill out. I was handed examples of how to fill them out with arrows, underlines, and check marks to indicate where everything went. I had already filled mine out in advance, using an online PDF. I handed the paperwork in, and it was gone over with me before the helper entered it into the computer. A short while later, a woman called my name. She asked me if had a case with this woman. I said yes. She said she sees I’m in the computer for filing a motion to vacate. She asked, “Vacate what?” I said, “Restraining order.” She told me, “You cannot put an order of protection on a person who has one on you.” I said, “I have not been out of my house in a year. I am the one who needs this. This woman is a scorned sociopath, and she is looking to get me in trouble.” She said a judge usually won’t hear a case like this. I said, “The constitution says we have equal protection under the law.” She said, “Let me see what I can do.” A short while later another woman called me and said the judge will see you at 2. I sat around and phoned my mother to say lunch was off. Two o’clock rolled around. I headed to the courtroom and saw the youngest female judge I have ever encountered (my fourth female judge). I thought to myself, she looks like a nice woman; I think she will be unbiased.

I honestly think people become possessed by demons when they put that black robe on. Most of them, anyway.

While I waited to be called, I did witness a couple of cases that were legit. I also saw some are-you-serious? cases. One woman just wanted her ex-boyfriend to stop calling and bugging her. I thought, no way is she getting one. The judge asked her, “Are you afraid he will hurt you?” She answered, “No.” The judge said, “I cannot issue one if you have no fear of him.” She said, “I don’t think he will hurt me…I don’t want him to bug me,” and fumbled for what else to say. The judge again leaned in, stuck her head forward and said, “I am going to ask you one more time: Do you fear him?” She said, “Yes.” Bingo! You just won a restraining order. Congrats!

Now I was called.

The judge had thought my order was up in a couple weeks, though that was the motion to dismiss. She said, “I cannot give an order of protection to anyone who has one on them from the other party.” I said, “What about the U.S. Constitution and the Illinois Constitution that state citizens have equal protection under the law?” She was cocky and said, “Oh, really. Where exactly does it say that?” I went into my carrier, which has a stack of paperwork for this case, and I pulled out the full constitution and said, “Article1, Section 2: ‘nor be denied the equal protection of the laws.’” I heard gasps at the back of the courtroom. She said, “Well, it is law I cannot give you one.” (By the way, this was the fastest talker I had ever encountered in my life—Adderall added, I’m guessing.) I grabbed my pen and said, “I have looked all over for such laws and cannot find any. Can you give me that statute?” She grabbed a book and said it was in the Illinois restraining order law book (I missed the page number), statute 750:60/215. I tried to find this book or that statute and had no luck. I must have written it down wrong, or she made it up, because she found it as fast as I could put pen to paper.

The good news is she made the restraining order “pending,” and it will be heard the same day as the motion. Her final words were, “You’ve made all the proper steps so far.” Like a game, eh? If that book does exists (I’m sure it does), I’d love to buy a copy!

The statute the judge quoted to him does exist (750 ILCS 60/215):

Mutual orders of protection; correlative separate orders. Mutual orders of protection are prohibited. Correlative separate orders of protection undermine the purposes of this Act and are prohibited unless both parties have properly filed written pleadings, proved past abuse by the other party, given prior written notice to the other party unless excused under Section 217, satisfied all prerequisites for the type of order and each remedy granted, and otherwise complied with this Act. In these cases, the court shall hear relevant evidence, make findings, and issue separate orders in accordance with Sections 214 and 221. The fact that correlative separate orders are issued shall not be a sufficient basis to deny any remedy to petitioner or to prove that the parties are equally at fault or equally endangered.

This statute is over 25 years old and derives from the Illinois Domestic Violence Act of 1986. The commenter above was not a batterer, nor, it’s very likely, were most of the men (and possibly women) who were slated to be issued restraining orders as a consequence of allegations made against them on the afternoon the commenter visited the courthouse (allegations, it’s worthy to note, that may have been coerced by the presiding judge: judicial subornation of perjury). The language of the statute (“protection,” “abuse,” “endangered”) along with the title of the act that instituted it into law plainly suggest that a much narrower application of it was intended by lawmakers than obtains in the administration of restraining orders today.

I find this commenter’s account very credible, as I hope any legislators who may read it will. “Are you serious?” is right.

“a restraining order ruined my life”: A Partial Catalog of Search Engine Queries Leading to This Blog on a Single Day

March 5, 2013July 13, 2023Moderator 48 Comments

The 148 search engine terms that appear below—at least one to two dozen of which concern false allegations—are ones that brought readers to this blog between the hours of 12 a.m. and 7:21 p.m. yesterday (and don’t include an additional 49 “unknown search terms”).

Were it the case that only 12 of the thousands of restraining orders issued on a given day were based on false allegations, the number of fraudulent restraining orders generated by our courts in a single year would be 4,380 (the recipients of which may have to live, for example, with false allegations of stalking or domestic violence on their public records, and may besides have been forcibly evicted from their homes, possibly at gunpoint). This absurdly conservative casualty toll of restraining order abuse ignores lives peripherally affected by it, including those of spouses, boy- and girlfriends, and children and other family members.

It’s in fact estimated by extrapolation from government studies that a majority of the two to three million restraining orders issued each year are either “unnecessary” (that is, frivolous) or grounded on trumped-up allegations. Statistics concerning restraining orders (for example, the number of them that are thrown out on appeal, often at a cost of thousands of dollars to their defendants) either aren’t compiled or aren’t made readily available to the public by our judicial system—nor is there any way of determining the incident rates of depression, stress-related injury and disease, alcoholism and drug abuse, job and income loss, suicide or premature death, etc. linked to restraining order abuse.

The number of plaintiffs prosecuted for committing felony perjury to obtain restraining orders is zero.

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TALKING BACK to restraining orders

THEY’RE NOT JUST ABUSED BUT ABUSIVE

Tag false allegations