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.

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