Tag legal bullying

The Use of Restraining Orders to Bully Women: Jenny’s Story

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The painted fingernail in this image isn’t that of the person who filed the domestic violence restraining order; it’s the fingernail of the person against whom the order was issued (wrongly).

A woman named Jenny brought her blog to my attention yesterday. Jenny reports she was falsely accused of domestic violence for no better motive than to hurt her, and she prevailed in court.

I broke down during my turn to defend myself, but I couldn’t help it. My heart hurt so badly. I was in so much pain. The judge took no time at all to throw the case out. He pretty much laughed Mr. Wrong out of the courtroom for his petty allegations and…what he was trying to use as proof of domestic violence….

As Jenny puts it, she was “slapped with a restraining order.” She should have said “SLAPPed.” Her accuser, whom she calls “Mr. Wrong,” implied the worst about her that the boilerplate bureaucratic form allowed—to shut her up: She’d published a warning about her ex-boyfriend online and invited his friends to read it. That’s protected speech (besides nonviolent), and the judge was right to vacate the order.

Don’t break out the champagne yet, though.

Jenny, who has been served with two falsely petitioned restraining orders alleging “domestic violence” (this month) besides heckled on her blog as a “crazy bitch,” a “joke,” a “loser,” and “just a booty call that didn’t leave in the morning”

In her latest post, Jenny reports she was yesterday served with a second domestic violence protection order. Yeah. The motive is the same: to shut her up and hurt her. Jenny had left a note asking if she could see her accuser’s son, a boy she had parented and whom she cared about and missed.

This time around, Mr. Wrong ticked a box on the form mandating that Jenny attend a 52-week “Batterer Intervention Program” (funded by the tax-paying public).

He also ticked a box indicating Jenny owned a gun, which she says she never has. That doesn’t matter, of course, nor does it matter that the same guy petitioned the same order a few weeks before and was ultimately denied. Restraining order proceedings are conducted ex parte, which means orders are issued blindly, and the priority is to “protect” plaintiffs. There’s no cap on how many times vexatious plaintiffs can play this game. Defendants aren’t consulted or considered. They’re just handed orders that say the court has reason to suspect they’re batterers (or stalkers or child abusers or rapists, etc.).

Jenny has besides been serially ridiculed and taunted by “anonymous” commenters on her blog (who could “they” be?). She’s been called a “crazy bitch,” a “joke,” a “loser,” and “just a booty call that didn’t leave in the morning”:

According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), domestic abuse includes “coercion and threats”; “intimidation”; “emotional abuse”; “isolation”; “minimizing, denying, and blaming”; and “using children.”

The NCADV and other “women’s advocacy groups” defend restraining orders as deterrents of abuse…and thereby make the abuse of people like Jenny not just possible but easy.

Copyright © 2016 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*Contrast this story with how complainants of false accusations of domestic violence are represented by feminist advocates like UC Davis Prof. Kelly Behre.

“No Stigma Zone”: A Case for VAWA Grants’ Being Issued to Provide All Government Offices with Dictionaries so Their Employees Can Look Up Words like “Stigma”

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stigma poster

I had occasion to visit the city prosecutor’s office on Friday. The decor was sternly clinical. The only ornamentation was some small posters on a bulletin board under glass (which was probably there to protect them from cynics armed with Sharpies). One of the posters notably featured the phrase “No Stigma Zone.”

The poster was about bullying, and its message was bullying is bad and won’t be tolerated. If I didn’t have better reasons to distrust bureaucrats, I’d distrust them for being immune to irony.

To municipal lawyers, “bullying” means playground taunts and insults, like “fatso, “slut,” and “queer.” The state’s applying cruel labels to people like “stalker” and “molester” based on three minutes of finger-pointing (and permanently inscribing those labels on people’s public records)—that isn’t the same thing.

Accusations are typed up on government forms, and that makes them different from name-calling.

Duh.

I bumped into a teenage girl yesterday whom I used to swing around by the arms in another life. That was about the time I was first falsely accused—10 years ago—and she was still a twerp. (I was more carefree then. My body wasn’t run-down, and tomorrow still held infinite promise.) She told me another girl had called her a “whore” on an Internet medium called Snapchat. She explained that posts there only linger for a few seconds, so kids can snipe one another without leaving a trail of evidence.

This is what the state means by “bullying”—a zinger with a half-life of moments—and count on it that some lawmaker somewhere has designs to stop this conduct in its tracks(!)…by enacting more laws to facilitate accusation.

This is what my old journalism teacher would have called missing the forest for the trees.

Copyright © 2016 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*The girl I chanced into yesterday asked me why she always finds me at Starbucks hunched over my beater laptop. I spared her (and myself) a truthful answer but did have to tell her my dog, whom she grew up with, had died in August (while I was still hunched over my beater laptop composing commentaries like this one instead of swinging children around by the arms or playing with dogs).

Why the Restraining Order Is the Perfect White Trash Instrument of Malice

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People who exploit restraining orders are not necessarily victims, and they’re not necessarily the “good guys.”

This post will be brief. Its only ambition is to show why restraining orders present trashy people with the chance to commit malicious acts with far-reaching and permanent consequences—and to do it hands-free using our justice system as their bully agent.

  1. Restraining orders are cheap or totally free of charge (as the Office on Violence Against Women requires).
  2. They’re available to anyone and require no bona fides at all. Felons can obtain restraining orders just like anyone else. It has been reported on this site that restraining orders can even be procured under assumed names. No i.d. is necessarily required, because accusers are automatically “victims,” and the pretense is that victims never lie.
  3. Restraining orders are issued ex parte, which means “respondents” (defendants) don’t actually get to be “respondents” until after they’ve been judged and found guilty.
  4. Restraining orders can be petitioned from other counties or even other states…against total strangers.
  5. They’re often issued more or less automatically: Ask and you shall receive.
  6. Lies that aren’t successfully exposed in what may be a 10-minute follow-up hearing cannot be attacked in a collateral action. In other words, if lies work once, they work forever. Defendants cannot sue for perjury, and they cannot base an appeal to a higher court on allegations of perjury or fraud.
  7. Restraining orders, even if dismissed, remain public records, and the mere title of a restraining order is prejudicial if not damning. They blacken citizens’ names and cost them relationships, jobs, and even employability in some fields (which of course affects them psychologically and physically).
  8. Restraining orders, because they represent civil not criminal trespasses, can rarely be expunged. Their traces linger even if judges determined they were unfounded or petitioned fraudulently.
  9. People who lie to obtain restraining orders, including egregiously, are never prosecuted.

Now appreciate that on top of all of this, even if a defendant successfully has a fraudulent order that was petitioned by some lowlife dismissed, that lowlife is likely to be judgment-proof. That means even if the defendant sues him or her for malicious prosecution/abuse of process—a stressful six-month ordeal all by itself—s/he has no chance of realizing any compensation, because the lowlife has no money.

The restraining order is the ideal white trash tool of malice.

Copyright © 2016 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*The author of this post attended a criminal arraignment this week. That’s where people who have been accused of crimes plead guilty or not guilty. The city prosecutor, in every instance, referred to accusers as “victims.”