PERJURY: BS-ing the Court, the Frequency of False Allegations, and the Fraudulent Abuse of the Civil Restraining Order

March 15, 2014July 12, 2023Moderator 10 Comments

In the last post, I discussed how lying is generally gotten away with beneath the radar. What people who’ve blessedly had no personal experience with fraudulent abuse of legal process fail to grasp is (1) there’s no incentive to expose untruths except (perhaps) when they’re used to frame people for crimes for which they stand to be convicted, (2) lies are much more commonly used to re-frame the truth into one favorable to the image or malicious intentions of fraudsters than they are to send people to prison, (3) lies don’t have to succeed in false criminal convictions to be damning or ruinous, and (4) lies may be of sorts that are impossible to discredit yet may permanently corrupt the public records and lives of the falsely accused.

Writers, for instance, who confront false allegations of domestic violence don’t actually invite their imaginations to conceive what such false allegations might be. Perhaps they vaguely suppose they’re of this nature: “He beats me with a belt buckle” or “She locks me in the pantry.” False allegations like these may certainly be made, but lies may be much more subtle or vaporous: “I live in a constant state of fear” or “She said she was going to kill me while I sleep.” Is the truth or falsity of these latter claims possible to ascertain? No. Police reports and restraining orders may be based on allegations like these, however, and anyone who imagines maliciously motivated people are incapable of making false statements to this effect have lived enviably sheltered lives.

False claims of stalking are as easily manufactured: “He creeps around my neighborhood late at night” or “She cut me off in traffic, almost running me off the road.” Allegations like these may not only be the substance of false police reports (which may—and do—gnaw at the sanity of their victims) but may be grounds for false restraining orders (which are far more nightmarish). In fact, the latter allegation was the basis of an emergency restraining order reported to this blog, which was petitioned against a college girl, in or just out of her teens, by her female counselor. The girl and her mom had a weekend to prepare her defense, and she wasn’t fully exonerated of her accuser’s litany of “terror-inspiring misconduct” (which included the girl’s greeting her accuser a few times in chance public encounters in a town of 2,000 residents and seeing her at church).

False allegations of sexual harassment? “He‘s repeatedly told me he wants me to [X] him” or “She keeps propositioning me”—try disproving allegations like these, which may be much more explicit and include claims of physical molestation. The consequences, if it’s necessary to enumerate them, could include termination of employment, marital dissolution, peer or social isolation, and the emotional and thus physical decay that accompany each or all. False claims like these, which take mere seconds to articulate, may never be recovered from.

For making such false allegations to the authorities and courts, there are no consequences, except to their victims. There are statutory penalties on the books for making false claims (committing perjury), but they’re rarely if ever enforced and couldn’t be enforced consistently within governmental budgetary constraints, so commonplace is lying. Are such false claims going to end up in some statistical database? Of course not. Ask an honest district attorney, though, why lying isn’t prosecuted, and s/he’ll tell you it’s because lying is an everyday occurrence.

This is the invisible irony that escapes everyone who tackles consideration of rates of false allegations: the fact that lying isn’t prosecuted is the indicator of its rampancy (prosecution of frauds on the police and courts would overwhelm the system). And because lying isn’t prosecuted, it’s in the interest of maintaining the dignity of the legal system and the semblance of just and orderly process that judges not acknowledge even flagrant lies as such. To acknowledge them in all their plenitude, yet not punish them, would be to call into question the legitimacy of the system itself. Restraining order frauds, moreover, may be rewarded with favorable verdicts in spite of lies, making the concealment of those lies by judges that much more urgent.

Society has been conditioned, in the decades since the advent of the restraining order, to be hyper-vigilant and -reactive toward allegations of domestic violence, stalking, and sexual harassment—behaviors associated with male abuse of women, which the restraining order was conceived to curb, if not remedy. These offenses are ones to which the population has been vigorously, even coercively, sensitized. The justice system is consequently poised to descend upon those accused of such behaviors (including women), as is the public poised to believe allegations of such behaviors to be true, especially when validated by the courts.

False accusers are certainly aware of these prejudices and may easily exploit them—and should hardly be expected not to. Agents of the system may, in fact, goad them on, even while salting the wounds of those who report that they’re victims of false allegations by telling them they have no legal recourse (which, practically speaking, they don’t). Judges, furthermore, may scourge such victims in the courtroom based on allegations that their accusers leveled in one-sided, five- or 10-minute auditions.

To recap: Liars aren’t prosecuted, so lies aren’t acknowledged as lies, but the civil procedure that’s most eagerly and impulsively abused by liars, the restraining order process, is supremely lax, instantly gratifying, and universally promoted. This procedure, what’s more, indelibly fouls a falsely accused defendant’s public record; may deny him or her entitlement to home, children, and property; and may cost him or her, besides, employment and employability in his or her chosen field of endeavor.

If this weren’t infernal enough, the outrage and misery expressed by victims who’ve found themselves in the eye of this perfect storm of unreason, some of whom are left impoverished of everything that gave their lives meaning, are credibly denounced or even mocked as crackpot.

The Truth about the Frequency of False Allegations ISN’T to Be Found in Statistics: On How Fraudulent Abuse of Civil Restraining Orders Escapes Recognition

March 12, 2014June 19, 2023Moderator 4 Comments

I’ve earnestly and objectively examined posited rates of false allegations in recent months, because statistics and analytics are what we soonest regard as estimates of the truth. It’s typical of writers hostile to the notion that false allegations are rampant, as well as of legal analysts and social scientists, to cite such rates, particularly official approximations of the incidence of false claims of rape and domestic violence.

What even very balanced and cogent analyses of these rates fail to observe, however, is that not all false allegations are of crimes and not all false allegations of crimes are criminally alleged, that is, false allegations of crimes may very conveniently be made through the civil court on restraining/protection order applications (as may be false allegations of every other kind). The number of criminal claims rejected or discredited by the police, then, is not an accurate measure or reflection of the prevalence, nature, or magnitude of false allegations.

It doesn’t, in fact, scratch the surface.

Allegations made pursuant to the procurement of a civil restraining order are never dismissed by the police (and plaintiffs may bypass the police entirely). Unless a complainant seeks to have someone criminally charged, the police have nothing to do with it. Their role is simply that of usher. They steer the complainant toward the courthouse. And if a restraining/protection order is obtained (or possibly just alleged to have been obtained) by a complainant, police inclination is to credit his or her allegations on reflex, because they’ve been conditioned to accept restraining order applicants’ claims at face value, that is, as legitimate.

Because the truth or falsity of allegations is irrelevant in civil proceedings, there are no comprehensive statistics relating to false allegations made on restraining orders. The awarding of restraining orders is grounded on the forcefulness of plaintiffs’ allegations and judicial discretion. It might be possible to determine how many restraining order applications nationwide were rejected in a given period; it’s impossible, however, to determine how many were rejected because judges determined their allegations to be false (rather than just insufficient), or how many were approved in spite of false allegations.

There is no accurate assessment of the volume or degree of lying in civil court. Significantly, too, false allegations made in civil court may easily evolve into criminal allegations that stick, despite those criminal allegations’ original premises’ having been trumped-up.

Journalists who address the subject of false allegations, typically focusing on rape, are prone to dismiss the charge that false allegations are commonplace based on how few plaintiffs are prosecuted for bringing fraudulent allegations. The false assumption of these investigators is that fraudulent allegations are necessarily prosecuted when detected. The fact is that even false allegations of rape may only rarely be prosecuted (see, for example, this case, in which allegations were determined to be unfounded and cost their plaintiff $55,000 but weren’t deemed grounds for the plaintiff’s being prosecuted for perjury). False allegations of sorts other than rape may never be acknowledged as false by judges, let alone deemed grounds for prosecution by district attorneys’ offices (which couldn’t care less). So the equation prosecutions for false allegations are rare = false allegations are rare is flatly wrong.

Isolated, regional studies have been performed by governmental agencies, including one in West Virginia that famously concluded that four out of five (domestic violence) restraining orders were either “unnecessary” or fraudulently based. Since an estimated two to three million restraining orders are issued each year in the United States alone, however, even national scrutiny of every restraining order issued in a given week for false allegations would be impracticable.

Restraining order rulings—disregarding how they’re perceived by the accused and how others perceive the accused because of them—aren’t determinations of guilt or innocence, as criminal rulings are. Restraining order rulings are at best kinda-sorta judgments based on plaintiffs’ persuasiveness.

Even that’s overly dignifying a process that’s initiated on the basis of a brief, one-sided interview of five or 10 minutes that results in the issuance of an order of the court that its defendant may be granted only a half-hour hearing to challenge (and only half of that 30 minutes is afforded to the defendant’s presentation). The idea that restraining order rulings are the products of scrupulous deliberation is beyond absurd.

To repeat, there is no accurate assessment of the volume or degree of lying in civil court. And it’s worthy of repeated observation, moreover, that when false allegations succeed in restraining order adjudications, defendant susceptibility to false criminal allegations increases exorbitantly, so prejudicially is the procurement of a restraining order regarded. How handily restraining orders are obtained and how carelessly their merits are ruled upon are conveniently disregarded after the fact. The next judge down the line is authorized to assume that the original allegations validated by the previous judge were in effect “true.”

The system is rigged both to guillotine the falsely accused and to ensure that false allegations are never discerned or acknowledged as such. The conception is marvelously diabolical, and its effectiveness is witnessed by the fact that the restraining order process has hummed along without a hitch for decades in spite of its being outrageously slack and tendentious (even while levying monstrous sanctions).

Where honest parties with an interest in social justice should seek an estimate of the volume, degree, and consequence of lying is in the testimonies of defendants and the lawyers who (sometimes) represent them—who, in the latter case, if they’re honest (and many are), will readily own that exploitive and malicious use of restraining orders is unexceptional, particularly in family court.

That statistics themselves lie shouldn’t be a novel proposition to anyone. The truly desolating fact to everyone who’s been lied about is that purveyors of statistics of false allegations may not have the least idea that their denial of the rampancy of lying invalidates the trials and torments of multitudes of victims.

Claiming Fear and Harassment to Terrorize and Harass: How to Deal with Serial Restraining Order Abuse

March 1, 2014August 10, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

“Can anything be done when someone constantly gets TROs [temporary restraining orders] falsely…?”

—Search term leading to this blog

This conduct is properly labeled harassment and stalking, and (absurdly) deterrence of this conduct is properly achieved by applying to the court for a restraining order.

The court may be resistant to acknowledging that this sort of thing happens, but it’s in fact a wonder that it doesn’t happen on a larger scale. Restraining orders are free and easily got by claims of apprehension or by outright and calculated fraud, including false allegations of dismaying specificity or even manufactured evidence. (You can’t make this stuff up: I remember reading several years ago of a false accuser’s situating a chainsaw in her driveway and then summoning police to photograph the tableau, which she represented as a “warning” from an ex—vivid, indeed.)

Victims of serial restraining order petitioners must be assertive and present their cases reasonably. Harassment is, by definition, behavior that’s intended to disturb, disrupt, and wear down, and that’s repeated over time. As easy as it is for a crank or a sociopath to continuously obtain restraining orders, it nevertheless represents a very deliberate and sustained course of action that’s furthermore clearly evident of fixation (i.e., stalking).

Provided that a separate case is opened by the victim who alleges chronic harassment by restraining orders, the fact that his or her abuser applied for restraining orders against him or her first isn’t an obstacle.

Essential is showing a pattern of deviant and repetitively malicious misconduct.

Short of applying for a restraining order to arrest this misconduct, the value of which is to discredit false allegations a malicious accuser may make in the future, a victim’s only “easy” remedy is to relocate beyond a false accuser’s reach. Restraining orders may still be issued but cannot be served.

(Yes, dealing with these obscenities forces people to completely uproot their lives.)

Filing a lawsuit is always an option, but it’s never one easily realized, and a successful prosecution is very demanding and stressful, and is only reliably accomplished with the aid of an attorney, making it very expensive besides.

I live in the formerly Wild West. One brush with a nut who exploits the system this way makes you yearn for the lawless days when you could call someone into the street and settle a dispute with an expeditious showdown…and then grab a slice of pie at the diner while the undertaker tidied up.

Why Women Are Abused by the Restraining Order Process So Easily

February 15, 2014August 10, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

People—brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, friends, lovers, spouses, exes, and strangers—abuse women with false restraining orders for the same reason rapists abuse women: because they can. And the reason why women are so easily abused by malicious prosecutors is that the restraining order process is the bowling alley of jurisprudence.

Set ‘em up, knock ‘em down.

Women are abused by restraining orders, because restraining order policy is lax and prejudiced in favor of applicants. Why? Because women are abused.

Sound circular? It is. The social push to address violations against women, agitated by galvanic denunciations of “rape culture” and domestic violence, has unwittingly contributed to violations against women.

Rape and domestic violence happen. There’s no question about it. There’s likewise no question that their effects may be damaging beyond either qualification or quantification.

The overwhelming majority of rapes represent sexual violence against women by men. Social perception to the contrary notwithstanding, however, victims of domestic violence may be of either gender, and the ratio is nearly 50-50.

Perception is the operative word here, and perception is the preeminent concern of this blog, because it’s what informs the bias for plaintiffs and against defendants (of both genders) that’s customary to the restraining order process.

The precedent for this bias reaches back three decades to the institution of the process as a deterrent to domestic violence against women, and the influence exerted by second-wave feminists since has only reinforced the bias to the extent that anyone who’s accused on a restraining order, male or female, is considered guilty, ipso facto.

To assert guilt, in a majority of cases, is to “prove” guilt.

Beyond satisfying social expectations, the court must satisfy its ethical obligation, so guilt is presumed not just of male defendants on restraining orders but of all defendants on restraining orders (to make the process “fair”).

A significant number, if not the majority, of respondents to this blog who report being the victims of false allegations on restraining orders—particularly the ones who detail their stories at length—are women. This doesn’t mean that women, who represent less than 20% of restraining order defendants, are more commonly the victims of false allegations. It’s indicative, rather, of women’s disposition to socially connect and express their pain, indignity, and outrage. (Women, furthermore, aren’t perceived as dangerous and deviant, so they feel less insecure about publicly declaiming their innocence; they have the greater expectation of being believed and receiving sympathy.)

The irony is that it’s this same disposition, the disposition to engage with others and ventilate suffering, that has given feminist propaganda such emotive force, force that has spawned the prejudices endemic to the restraining order process that have trashed these women’s lives.

The metaphor that inevitably presents itself to the writer who contemplates restraining order injustice is the knot, and I’ve used it more than once.

Abuse of restraining orders, which originate with gender loyalty, is sustained by gender loyalty. Who do women who’ve been abused by male restraining order plaintiffs resent? Men. Who do the feminist advocates for restraining orders resent? Men. Who makes it so easy for restraining order plaintiffs to total the lives of female victims of false allegations (including mothers and grandmothers), possibly leaving them destitute besides psychologically shattered? Women.

This is the vicious circle of misattributed blame that has preserved an unjust process from scrutiny and reform.

And this discussion circles back on itself by reintroducing perception as the ultimate culprit.

Victims of restraining order abuse only recognize the immediate causes of their torment: the scabby liars who falsely accused them and the cruel, careless, or clueless judges who validated their false accusers’ lies.

The invisible, germinal cause of that torment is the demonization of men as rapists and batterers. The restraining order process is both fueled and funded by this perception, and until this perception is more actively challenged by women, particularly by women who’ve been victimized by its effects on public policy, the self-perpetuating cycle of grief will grind on.

J’accuse: On Wikipedia and Restraining Order Abuse

January 26, 2014July 6, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

“Testilying is a portmanteau of testify and lying. Defendants who embellish their own testimony, particularly when no evidence contradicts them, can…be said to be testilying.”

—Wikipedia

I’ve highlighted this coinage because it’s a clever and colorful one. What it’s drawn my attention to is that while Wikipedia, the universal go-to source for information or corroboration, has entries on “Perjury,” “Abuse of process,” “Malicious prosecution,” “False accusation,” “False allegation of child sexual abuse,” “False accusation of rape,” “False evidence,” “Scapegoating,” “Miscarriage of justice,” “Legal abuse,” and “Restraining order,” an entry on restraining order abuse or false allegations on restraining orders is conspicuously absent.

And bump-bump-bum there used to be one.

I’ve resisted joining the conspiracy crowd, because I haven’t frankly detected any intelligence in the administration of restraining orders that would suggest the existence of some sinister, overarching plot. Glad-handing, cronyism, money motives, power mania, and rote automation, yes. Evil ingenuity, no (except in the trenches).

When you perceive a conspicuous absence like this, though, you have to wonder just how nonpartisan and free-ranging Wikipedia really is.

The page that used to be up was discounted as lacking a meritorious basis and not representing a topic of broad social interest (“No indication that this article…covers a notable and/or neutral topic”). It was brief, to be sure, but certainly could have been developed, and my understanding of how Wikipedia works is that pages are fleshed out and refined by the cooperative efforts of various contributors. Since e-How recognizes that restraining order allegations are falsified and offers tutorials on how to combat false restraining orders, move for their vacation and expungement, etc., Wikipedia’s recusancy is curious.

Certainly there are any number of Wikipedia pages devoted to topics of interest to a highly select few. I’m sure I could learn all about the author of some obscure cookbook if I wished. Or a B-movie actress, manga villain, or obsolete gadget.

No topic defies neutral qualification, and since Wikipedia’s own “Restraining order” page recognizes that restraining orders are widely claimed to be misused, and since restraining orders are furthermore issued against millions of people every year across the globe, restraining order abuse can hardly be dismissed as a trivial topic or one unworthy of attention and elucidation. That’s its being disregarded owes to avoidance of a sensitive subject is a more credible explanation.

If Wikipedia has a page on cannibalism—and I’m sure it does—a page devoted to restraining order abuse is palpably overdue.

Diving into the Shallow End: What It Takes to Disprove and Recover Damages for a Restraining Order Based on Fraud

January 19, 2014July 9, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

Many restraining order recipients are brought to this site wondering how to recover damages for false allegations and the torments and losses that result from them. Not only is perjury (lying to the court) never prosecuted; it’s never explicitly acknowledged. The question arises whether false accusers ever get their just deserts.

It turns out it does happen sometimes. Or has at least once. Kinda.

A news story I came across the other day exemplifies how extreme false allegations must be, how vigorously they must be confuted, and how prominently their victim must stand out from the crowd for a judge to sit up and take notice.

The story concerned a woman’s being ordered to pay her former boyfriend over $55,000 after she “falsely accused him of raping and brutalizing her…during a child-custody dispute.” She had applied for a permanent restraining order against him alleging that he “perpetrated a horrific physical attack.” Her specific allegations to the police and court were that he “knocked her unconscious,” “dragged her in the house,” “sexually assaulted her,” and “burned her with matches and committed other violence.”

The boyfriend was arrested and held without bail for three months before a judge dismissed the charges. To regain his liberty, the man had to hire (besides an attorney, of course) a private investigator, who turned up “10 witnesses who were ready to testify that they saw [him] in other locations at the time of the alleged attack.”

According to his lawyer, he would otherwise have “faced the possibility of five life sentences in prison as a result of [his girlfriend’s] criminal complaint.” The money he was awarded was for legal and travel expenses. Although the lawyer informed the district attorney’s office that she had evidence the girlfriend had committed perjury, the woman wasn’t prosecuted. She had accused her boyfriend of breaking her shoulder during his alleged assault, but, the lawyer said, “her medical records reveal that she broke her shoulder diving into the shallow end of a swimming pool.”

The news story goes on to report that the boyfriend was pursuing a malicious prosecution lawsuit against his accuser, with whom he shares a son, alleging false imprisonment, abuse of process, and infliction of emotional distress.

While the recognition this man received for his suffering may surprise readers who’ve also been victimized by false allegations only to be subjected to further ridicule and disparagement from the court for resisting a bum rap, the fact that this rare recipient of quasi-justice is the senior vice president of a bank won’t be surprising at all.

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.

Presumed Guilty: On How Restraining Order Laws Enable and Promote Abuse

November 11, 2013February 23, 2018Moderator 6 Comments

I’ve had occasion in the last few months to scrutinize my own state’s (Arizona’s) restraining order statutes, which are a study in prejudice, civil rights compromises, and politically coerced naïvety. Their outdated perspective fails even to acknowledge the possibility of misuse let alone recognize the need for remedial actions to undo it.

Restraining orders are issued upon presumptive conclusions (conclusions made without judges ever even knowing who recipients are—to the judges, recipients are just names inked on boilerplate forms), and the laws that authorize these presumptive conclusions likewise presume that restraining order applicants’ motives and allegations are legitimate, that is, that they’re not lying or otherwise acting with malicious intent.

That, you might note, is a lot of presuming.

In criminal law, the state must presume that defendants are innocent; in civil law (restraining orders are civil instruments), defendants may be presumed guilty. What’s outrageous about this with respect to restraining orders is that public allegations made on them may be criminal or criminal in nature, and violations of restraining orders—real or falsely alleged—have criminal consequences. Due process and the presumption of innocence are circumvented entirely; and with these safeguards out of the way, a defendant may be jailed on no valid evidence or for doing something that’s only illegal because a judge issued a restraining order on false grounds that made it so. (A parent who’s under a court-ordered injunction may be jailed, for example, for sending his child a birthday present.)

One of my motives for consulting my state’s restraining order statutes is having absorbed a broad array of stories of restraining order abuse over the past two years. Common themes among these stories are judicial bias; lying and fraud by plaintiffs (applicants); restraining order plaintiffs’ calling, emailing, or texting the people they’ve petitioned restraining orders against (or showing up at their homes or places of work—or following them); and restraining orders’ being serially applied for by plaintiffs whose past orders have been repeatedly dismissed (that is, restraining orders’ being used to harass and torment with impunity).

Those who’ve shared their stories want to know how these abuses are possible and what, if anything, they can do to gain relief from them. The answer to the question of how lies within the laws themselves, which are flawed; the answer to the question of what to do about it may well lie outside of legal bounds entirely, which fact loudly declaims just how terribly flawed those laws are.

Arizona restraining orders are of two sorts, called respectively “injunctions against harassment” and “orders of protection.” They’re defined differently, but the same allegations may be used to obtain either. Most of the excerpted clauses below are drawn directly from Arizona’s protection order statute. Overlap with its sister statute is significant, however, and which order is entered simply depends on whether the plaintiff and defendant are relatives or cohabitants or not.

“[If a court issues an order of protection, the court may do any of the following:] Grant one party the use and exclusive possession of the parties’ residence on a showing that there is reasonable cause to believe that physical harm may otherwise result.”

This means that if your wife/husband or girlfriend/boyfriend alleges you’re dangerous, you may be forcibly evicted from your home (even if you’re the owner of that home). The latitude for satisfying the “reasonable cause” provision is broad and purely discretionary. “Reasonable cause” may be found on nothing more real than the plaintiff’s being persuasive (or having filled out the application right).

“If the other party is accompanied by a law enforcement officer, the other party may return to the residence on one occasion to retrieve belongings.”

This means you can slink back to your house once, with a police officer hovering over your shoulder, to collect a change of socks. Even this opportunity to recover some basic essentials may be denied defendants in other jurisdictions.

“[If a court issues an order of protection, the court may do any of the following:] Restrain the defendant from contacting the plaintiff or other specifically designated persons and from coming near the residence, place of employment or school of the plaintiff or other specifically designated locations or persons on a showing that there is reasonable cause to believe that physical harm may otherwise result.”

This means defendants can be denied access to their children (so-called “specifically designated persons”) based on allegations of danger that may be false.

“[If a court issues an order of protection, the court may do any of the following:] Grant the petitioner the exclusive care, custody or control of any animal that is owned, possessed, leased, kept or held by the petitioner, the respondent or a minor child residing in the residence or household of the petitioner or the respondent, and order the respondent to stay away from the animal and forbid the respondent from taking, transferring, encumbering, concealing, committing an act of cruelty or neglect in violation of section 13-2910 or otherwise disposing of the animal.”

This means defendants can be denied access to the family pet(s), besides.

Note that the linguistic presumption in all of these clauses is that recipients of restraining orders are wife-batterers, child-beaters, and torturers of puppies, and recall that restraining orders are issued without judges’ even knowing what defendants look like. This is because restraining orders were originally conceived as a deterrent to domestic violence (which, relative to the vast numbers of restraining orders issued each year, is only rarely alleged on them today at all). It’s no wonder then that judicial presumption of defendants’ guilt may be correspondently harsh. Nor is it any wonder that in any number of jurisdictions, an order of protection can be had by a plaintiff’s alleging nothing more substantive than “I’m afraid” (on which basis a judge is authorized to conclude that a defendant is a “credible threat”).

“A peace officer, with or without a warrant, may arrest a person if the peace officer has probable cause to believe that the person has violated section 13-2810 by disobeying or resisting an order that is issued in any jurisdiction in this state pursuant to this section, whether or not such violation occurred in the presence of the officer.”

This means you can be arrested and jailed based on nothing more certain than the plaintiff’s word that a violation of a court order was committed. More than one respondent to this blog has reported being arrested and jailed for a lengthy period on fraudulent allegations. Some, unsurprisingly, have lost their jobs as a consequence (on top of being denied home, money, and property).

“There is no statutory limit on the number of petitions for protective orders that a plaintiff may file.”

This observation, drawn from Arizona’s Domestic Violence Civil Benchbook, means there’s no restriction on the number of restraining orders a single plaintiff may petition, which means a single plaintiff may continuously reapply for restraining orders even upon previous applications’ having been denied.

Renewing already granted orders (which may have been false to begin with) requires no new evidence at all. Reapplying after prior applications have been denied just requires that the grounds for the latest application be different, which is of course no impediment if those grounds are made up. As search terms like this one reveal, the same sort of harassment can be accomplished by false allegations to the police: “boyfriends ex keeps calling police with false allegations.” Unscrupulous plaintiffs can perpetually harass targets of their wrath this way—and do.

No restrictions whatever are placed upon plaintiffs’ actions, which means that they’re free to bait, taunt, entrap, or stalk defendants on restraining orders they’ve successfully petitioned with impunity. And neither false allegations to the police nor false allegations to the courts (felony perjury) are ever prosecuted.

“A fee shall not be charged for filing a petition under this section or for service of process.”

This means the process is entirely free of charge.

“Why Would a Narcissist Put a Restraining Order on You?”

October 13, 2013August 2, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

Questions about the motives of the narcissistic brain like the one that titles this post bring visitors to this blog almost daily (related search terms that have drawn readers here can be found cataloged at the end of this post). Among the blog’s most clicked-on links are those to short essays on the subjects of narcissistic malice and vengeance by Dr. Linda Martinez-Lewi like those I’ve provided in the comments to this page. Dr. Martinez-Lewi is an expert on pathological narcissism (also called narcissistic personality disorder or NPD) who hosts the blog The Narcissist in Your Life. (Investigators into this subject may also find enlightening the writings of Stanton E. Samenow, Ph.D.; Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.; Paul J. Hannig, Ph.D.; and the late and very astute Joanna M. Ashmun.)

Below are some excerpted paragraphs from Dr. Martinez-Lewi’s essays that, contemplated as a series, will lead a person a long way toward an understanding of why malicious abuse of restraining orders to defame, discredit, and demolish targets of their wrath is so attractive to narcissists. (Italics are added.)

Narcissists expect everyone, through their words, gestures, and behaviors to mirror them perfectly. If you fail to do this in their eyes (and they are always looking for imperfection in others not themselves), it causes an unconscious bruise in their brittle egos. Even the smallest mistake or what the narcissist perceives as your mistake will result in the spewing of dark rage. If you do not go along to get along with them perfectly and buck them, you are bumping up against an inflexible, grandiose ego, and there will be hell to pay.

No one says “No” to the narcissist—unless they want to be the recipient of retribution. That is the narcissist’s mindset. These individuals have very rigid personality structures that do not change. They have unbending wills that insist they are always right, that their way is the only one, and…all of those who buck them will be discarded and punished severely. The narcissist plays dirty; [s/he] is a street fighter, a ninja. The narcissist picks the weak spots, the vulnerabilities in his [or her] opponent and knows exactly where and how to turn the screws. We become an opponent of the narcissist when we defy him [or her] and think for ourselves and let him or her know that they can no longer rule our lives. Most people are intimidated by the power and force of the narcissistic personality, especially if this is a person of high professional achievement, financial status, and powerful connections.

There are sociopathic narcissists who will not be satisfied until their “enemy” is completely vanquished—emotionally, psychologically, financially. They seek revenge, not for what has been done to them but what they perceive in a highly deluded way…has been done to them. Narcissists are never wrong—they are incapable of mistakes, because they truly believe that they are perfect. They are capable of persuading even intelligent people that they are the good guy, and their victim is the culprit. With the use of a fake charm, dynamism, [and] sexual wiles, they fool most individuals. A sociopathic narcissist will tear you to shreds….

[N]arcissists or their doubles contact your relatives, in-laws, friends, and anyone who will listen to broadcast blatant lies about your character. This doesn’t happen in all instances, but it is remarkable the lengths these malicious individuals exceed to trash you, putting you at fault and even leading others to believe that you are “crazy.” Even people whom you have trusted…can be flipped to the narcissist’s side, especially if [s/he] has influence where you have lived and deep pockets.

Narcissists never play fair. Narcissists are extreme competitors. Narcissists are very sore losers. When you cross a narcissist in business or your personal life, be prepared for some form of revenge. Although the narcissist has a full-blown, grandiose ego, beneath the surface [s/he] is subject to narcissistic wounds. His [or her] ego bruises easily. If you beat him [or her] out of a business deal, it is likely that [s/he] will go after you in some way. If you choose to divorce a narcissist, it can go several ways. [S/he] may want to get rid of you and any children you have…and send you out of his [or her] life. In some cases, the narcissist is holding a deep grudge and is determined to collect on what [s/he] knows is his [or hers]. In divorce matters, [s/he] makes outlandish claims and tells outright lies about his [or her] spouse in order to win the battle.

The urge to take revenge runs deeply through the narcissist’s blood. Revenge is as prehistoric as life in the caves. Revenge is an act of retaliation for a perceived wrong or injury—payback time. I have been in contact with many spouses and ex-spouses of narcissists who were shocked by the unrelenting force of their former partner’s revenge tactics. During a divorce from a narcissistic partner, plans for revenge are hatched and played out. One classic ploy is the narcissist’s bullying tactics as [s/he] convincingly threatens to take you down financially and psychologically. Even after the divorce is final, the narcissist continues the Hundred Year War. Many narcissists cannot let go, not because they have ever loved their previous spouse, but for purposes of psychologically destroying the previous partner. Rumor campaigns are ignited to ruin the reputation and social standing of the previous spouse. Threats are made to change custodial agreements, not because the narcissist feels compelled to have more involvement in his [or her] children’s lives but to shake the cage of the ex-spouse. One of the most potent ploys of the narcissist is playing the victim role. When he or she has torn his [or her] ex-spouse’s life to bits for decades, [s/he] makes a quick switch, becoming the recipient of psychological and emotional pain not the narcissistic perpetrator.

Narcissists know how to manipulate their way out of trouble—even if there are serious ethical violations or illegal activities involved. Some narcissists finally tumble, and we watch them finally get their due and pay the consequences. This doesn’t happen often. If you are waiting for your ex-narcissistic husband or wife to be brought down due to his cruel, manipulative, and devastating behaviors toward his family, don’t hold your breath. We cannot put our faith even in the courts to obtain justice. Narcissists find clever ways around legal issues. If they have large sums of money at their disposal, there are situations in which they manipulate the outcome of legal proceedings. I know of cases in which a narcissistic spouse ended up wresting custody control from the other partner.

Dr. Martinez-Lewi’s therapeutic orientation is toward narcissists’ spouses and family members, but her revelations of basic narcissistic motives and tactics are applicable to the situation of anyone who runs afoul of a narcissist, irrespective of how intimate their relationship.

Though this advice of Dr. Martinez-Lewi’s is directed toward soon-to-be ex-spouses, its gist should be taken to heart by anyone in a legal contest with a narcissist: “[B]e sure you hire an attorney who is not only an expert in family law but who is exceedingly savvy about the ruses, tricks, and ploys of the narcissistic personality disorder. Your attorney needs to be highly professional but fearless in facing this relentless, cruel, and destructive individual. An excellent attorney in these situations must be like ultra-marathon runners. Regardless of any obstacle placed in front of them by the narcissist, they are undaunted. Their perseverance is golden.”

There are no depths to which a narcissist won’t stoop to injure the target of his or her wrath. A narcissist will lie to your face about things you did together, so expect him or her to have no compunction at all about lying to anyone else about you, including friends, associates, authorities, and officers of the court.

Because judges of restraining order applications are inclined to presume a plaintiff is telling the truth, they’re readily duped by narcissists, who not only lie glibly and persuasively but with a cold-bloodedness nothing shy of fiendish.

“Why Would Someone Get a False Restraining Order?”

July 9, 2013February 17, 2018Moderator 7 Comments

This question pops up a lot.

Simply rephrasing it can dispel some of the wonderment: “What would someone have to gain by falsely accusing someone else of conduct society condemns?”

Satisfaction of a spiteful impulse might come to mind.

I remember looking at a book once by a guy named Hayduke. It was chock full of ingenious vengeance schemes—pretty much all of them criminal or bordering on it. Lying on a restraining order to sate a hurtful yen, while technically criminal, is never treated as such and may well succeed in criminalizing the target of that yen.

Common allegations on restraining orders are harassment, stalking, danger, and violence. Any of these—and especially the last—can doom a person’s employment or professional aspirations, tear relationships apart, and gnaw at and vex the innocently accused indefinitely (to his or her physical and psychological erosion). Allegations like this from a domestic partner can deprive the same victim of assets and access to loved ones. The use of fraudulent restraining orders to gain the upper hand in child custody battles is pretty much cliché.

And restraining orders don’t just vanish from public record when the expire. In some regions, there are even restraining order registries to make finding out who’s had a restraining order sworn out against him or her conveniently (and alluringly) accessible by the public. The political push is toward making such registries universal.

It’s possible that the question, “Why would someone get a false restraining order?” is prompted by a disbelief that a person could be so unethical. Such a disbelief betrays the questioner’s naivety.

People frame people for crimes or commit crimes to hurt others every day. Abusing restraining orders is just more fail-safe. Perjury (lying in court or on a sworn statement) is never prosecuted, and restraining orders are generally free for the asking. You get the state to exercise your malice for you, it costs you nothing, and everyone extends you their sympathies.

The worst that happens when someone lies to obtain a restraining order is that it’s overturned on appeal. And even if it’s quashed, the recipient of the fraudulent restraining order will have been put through hell (and possibly cost several thousands of dollars in attorney fees). In fact succeeding in having a restraining order vacated (canceled) doesn’t necessarily mean it disappears from public record. Even if a fraud loses, s/he wins.

Clearly then the answer to the question, “Why would someone get a false restraining order?” is “Why not?”

“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.

due process in restraining order
can a police officer work in a town if someone has a restraining order against them
dated a manipulator whose threatening me with a restraining order
how much does it cost to heat a restraining order
state puts restraining order
fighting exparte maryland
does my husband have the right to slander my name to my doctor
wisconsin consequences of false accuse get t restraining order harrassing non-violent
can u beat pfa in ohio if you have prior mental issues
can you get a protective order cause of a threatening phone call
can i include my girlfriend in a restraining order
court order protected party lets restrained party contact
my friend called the police and gave a false statement. this person owes me money and now i cant call or talk to him. how do i get my money?
ex abusive restraining order broken uk
can he make a restraining order against me
court order to stop me being approached
if someone files a police report on me for saying i would slap them but i didn’t and they threw a book at the door i was exiting out of who would get charged
how long do you have to wait to file a restraining order from the time you filed a police report?
is posting pictures of someone on facebook who has a pfa illegal?
can you put a restraining order on your mom
a restraining order ruined my life
wife filed restraining order against me
odds of getting a restraining order
can a restraining order be filed against an officer
what happens if i violate my restraing order in the us
if i dont want to press charges will they drop the restraining order
i was violent ny girlfriend wont take me back
restraining order aginst crazy ex boyfriend houston texas law
peace order in new york for a church’s
how does a lawyer handle a defendant for restraining order in pennsylvania
what happens if someone avoids being served a restraining order
order of protection for stalking-does it go on your record
can my adult son take legal action if i try to call him?
what happens if you run from the cops while they’re trying to serve you a restraining order
is there a protective order against me without being served
what type of attorney do i hire to prosecute malicious prosecution
can i email to offer a settlmeent to someone who has a tro on me
pressing charges againstfraudulent restraining order
how to get a restraining order against someone who has one against me
can you charge someone with fraud without concrete evidence ny
expunging ex parte orders missouri
how to stop someone from filing false lawsuit
restraining order in washington can i my attorney represent me?
how to protect yourself against false accusations protective order hearing
how long before a ppo expires if u never get served with it
can i send a email to someone who issued me a tro offering a settlement
defemding yourself against a civill harrassemnt order ca
can i get in trouble for responding to my ex if there is a no contact order
counter restraining order
my wife is the plaintiff and broke her own protection order in kansas is it still in effect?
if u never physically harmed someone can they put a restraining order on you
can you appeal a protective order entered against you
do you have to notify your job you have a ppo against someone
is it put defendant in better position if plaintiff dies?
what to do if served with an order of protection arizona
what happens when a restraining order is dropped
restraining orders cause women to get hurt
can a restraining order be issued if charges are dropped
narcissistic friends and family
court ordered protective order for minor expires
should i notify my job about peace order
is it legal for a lawyer to call me and say i have a court date but not serve me by paper?
can i file a pfa against an exlovers new girlfriend
is it easy to ask for more distance in a restraining order
can you report protection order based on suspicion only
how to get a court order lifted off my child, i dunno if social had it on all my girlfriend
do they put date i went on restraining orders
husband under protection order rules
can i file protective order on someone who has filed one on me
my wife wanted temporary support and my lswyer was able to fight it and let the status quo remain
can an order of protection be placed without pressing charges in nys
my husbands girlfriend filed a restraining order against me so they can try to take my baby away what can i do
tro was dropped but i want to prove she lied
if i call someone a name can they get a restraining order against me
how to sue my daughters mother for filing a false claim
what to do if someone files a false restraining order against you
can i speak to the judge for a restraining order before my court date?
can court provide lawyer for defendant with restraining order
what to do if ex girlfriend files ppo an
does continued unwanted third party contact violate a protection order
is requesting the pettiontioner on face valate restrainign order
how do you get a restraining order in arkansas against my daughters boyfriend
can employers find out about restraining order
can i sue someone for a false order of protection
can i lay charges against someone who says im having aids?
what if i’m threatened with libel and slander
how can i pick up my belongings from ex wife that hit me with restraining order
how to defeat a pfa
restraining order served me
fighting false restraining order in illinois
can i report someone breaking restraining order even if its not against me
if someone files a says they police report against you saying you hit someone
can a person get a false restraining order
is telling someone’s boyfriend that he can do better than his present girlfriend a defamation of character
what to write on removing a restraining order
slander in restraining order violation
how to vacate a protection order in massachusetts
bogus criminal protection orders
maryland protection order petitioner does not show
washington state legal action against texting harassment
how to cancel injunction for self but keep kids on?
canmy ex husband get a restraining order to stop me sending letters to my kids
are az injunction against harassment ever thrown out on appeal
can my husband file a restraining order without cause in california
can you file a restraining order against someone who has posted a video of you
can you sue someone for put a restraining order on you
how to cancel a protective order in ok
how to stop a restraining order against me
how to take off a restraining order in missouri
my fiance dad keeps attacking my fiance by sending him to court
what if a person files a false tro in california
“civil restraining order” alberta
the police called me on phone restraining order
vacating restraining order when alleged victin is incarcerated
how much trouble for braking protection order
what would happen if you don’t follow protective order
what possibility could happen if the judge findss out allegations of harrassing are false accusation
if someone keeps taking communictain threats warrants out on me and dropping them is that slander
drop restraining order before
person using dishonest restraining order to intimidate
is my husband post new pictures online and then put the disclaimer that i can’t copy them will it be illegal for me to copy them
can they file a restraining order for making phone call
which is the hr theory where one is defending oneself just because he is telling other do the same and no action it taken against him
what to say on a restraining order to get it dropped
can a email someone with a settlement offer if i have a tro
what happens to the plaintiff if she is caught with the defendant in a restraining order
beating a narcissistic sociopath
what happens if i have a restraining order and at same party
what happens if a family court order of protection is broken through phone calls
nm law on appealing an order of protection
npd father won’t accept no contact keeps calling to my house
can i call my spouse’s girlfriend without getting into trouble
how much will an attorney cost me to represent me in a restraining order hearing
courts won’t honor my request to drop restraining order
sue wife for defromation of charchter after restraing order
can a police officer work in a town if someone has a restraining order
expungement arrest for restraining order alabama
im charging someone with abuse
will police pursue criminal charges based on a restraining order
if i have a hearing in court for a temporary restraining order can i go in and see the judge early
knotty
what if i don’t go to court to enforce restraining order
when the mother of a child file a restraining order and is lying
defamation of character and wrongful dismissal because of spousal dispute
penalty for lying on a restraining order
when temporary restraining order expires does come back
defending a restaining order from your own home
ex-girlfriend served restraining order falsely

Knotty, Knotty: False Allegations and Restraining Orders

February 21, 2013June 19, 2023Moderator 20 Comments

Whoever came up with restraining orders must have been a marvel at Twister.

Though they’re billed as civil instruments, restraining orders threaten their recipients with criminal consequences and may be based on allegations of a criminal nature, for example, stalking, sexual harassment, the threat of violence, or assault.

The standard of substantiation applied to criminal allegations is “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Since restraining orders are “civil” instruments, however, their issuance doesn’t require proof beyond a reasonable doubt of anything at all. Approval of restraining orders is based instead on a “preponderance of evidence.” Because restraining orders are issued ex parte, the only evidence the court vets is that provided by the applicant. This evidence may be scant or none, and the applicant may be a sociopath. The “vetting process” his or her evidence is subjected to by a judge, moreover, may very literally comprise all of five minutes.

Based on allegations leveled in this hiccup of time by a person with an obvious interest in seeing you suffer, you are now officially recognized as a stalker, batterer, and/or violent crank and will be served at your home with a restraining order (and possibly evicted from that home) by an agent of the nanny state: “Sign here, please” (“and don’t let the door hit you on your way out”).

The application of a standard of proof to restraining order allegations is circumvented entirely: what a plaintiff claims you are becomes the truth of you. The loophole is neatly conceived (and it’s exploited thousands of times a day). Your record may be corrupted by criminal allegations like those enumerated above based on crocodile tears and arrant lies spilled on a boilerplate bureaucratic form. And these allegations may tear your life apart.

Abuse of restraining orders for malicious ends is a court-catered cakewalk.

How easily it’s exploited for foul purposes, in fact, is the restraining order process’s claim to distinction from other judicial procedures. Even by veteran officers of the court, false allegations made in restraining order petitions are routinely accepted at face value. The reasons for this are manifold:

Judges are trained to regard women’s plaints as legitimate and may never question this prejudice, because it’s shared by the society at large. And to appear to be fair, a judge may apply the same prejudice to allegations brought by men against women.
No judge wants to be the one who refused a restraining order to someone who later comes to harm, because (a) he will have failed a constituent in need and be perceived as having had a hand in her (or his) injury; and (b) because he will be publicly vilified, likely fired or forced to resign, and possibly sued.
Innocent defendants never succeed in making a stink that would put a judge’s career in jeopardy: erring on the side of a plaintiff poses no threat to a judge’s job security, while erring on the side of a defendant may cost him not only his job but considerably more.
It’s in the financial interests of local jurisdictions and their judges to appear to be “cracking down” on society’s bad eggs.

Lying to obtain a restraining order, therefore, is a cinch. Any lowlife can do it.

Disinterest (a.k.a. objectivity, fairness, impartiality, yadda-yadda-yadda) is the essential canon of judicial ethics. Since it’s one that clearly doesn’t obtain in the restraining order process, this judicial procedure is also distinguished from others by its inherent corruptness.

This corruptness is obscured from public awareness by yet another knot. Innocent defendants, in endeavoring to extricate themselves from false allegations—for example, as this author has by clamoring in a blog—cannot help but appear to be the fixated “deviants” that those false allegations represent them to be. The more they resist the allegations, the more they seem to corroborate them.

Appearances are not only the predominant grounds for restraining orders; appearances are what motivated their sketchy conception in the first place (“We’ve got to show we care”), and appearances are what preserve the corrupt process from which they issue from being recognized for the disgrace that it is.

“Take That!”: On Restraining Orders’ Catering to Hurtful Impulses

November 30, 2012September 1, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

Someone asks: “Can I be charged for talking to someone I put a protective order against?”

Someone else asks: “What to do when [the] petitioner contacts you under a restraining order to tell you she loves you?”

Search engine queries like these regularly lead readers to this blog. Along similar lines, one reader reports his girlfriend moved back in with him after filing a restraining order to forbid him from coming near her. Another reports his girlfriend’s subsequently moving in up the street from him after doing the same. Yet another reports his girlfriend’s stalking him after successfully petitioning for a restraining order against him. Such questions and reports prompt an unavoidable conclusion: restraining orders are obtained impulsively.

Which leads to a further obvious conclusion, namely, that they’re urged too readily by authorities and gotten too easily.

This is the scenario as I’ve seen it play out in the restraining order cases I’ve personally been privy to: party goes to the police to register a complaint, police solicitously “suggest” a restraining order, party—feeling righteously supported by the system and possibly obligated to it—immediately goes to the courthouse and obtains one (which in my state is free and takes less than an hour to acquire).

I’m sure that restraining orders are sometimes taken out by people with very real concerns for their safety and that some of these probably accomplish what they’re meant to (which is to provide their plaintiffs with a sense of security).

I’m unconvinced, however, that this recommendation validates the restraining order process’s annual $4-billion-dollar-plus price tag (and that’s just its cost to the United States). Or the untold costs to defendants of frivolous and fraudulent restraining orders.

After a year of monitoring queries to this blog by restraining order plaintiffs and defendants, this is what I am convinced of: that restraining orders are commonly petitioned in hot blood by plaintiffs who are ushered (or goaded) through the procedure and who neither weigh the consequences of their actions on defendants or ever have the gravity or expense of this action impressed upon them. I’m further convinced that danger is only rarely a legitimate factor in restraining order cases and that motives for petitioning restraining orders are commonly ulterior to those stated—typically boiling down to “Take that!”

Worse, I’m convinced that officers of the court—lawyers and judges—know this very well and are by and large content to play along and profit on the discord and misery they abet.

Oh, and to the man who writes, “Does she still love me if she got a restraining order on me?” the answer, disturbingly, may be yes.

Mind the Gender Gap: On Coming Together against Restraining Orders

November 25, 2012September 1, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

This blog was “liked” this week by a blogger whose collegiate disciplines are criminology and sociology. In her own blogs, she tracks news of interest to students of these fields that relates especially to social justice and gender-based violence and oppression (phrases that are often mistaken as exclusively concerning the same thing).

Contrasting her blogs’ contents with those of sites that monitor and editorialize on issues of concern to this blog highlights a divide that must be spanned if progress is to be made toward achieving genuine social justice (the word social being inclusive of both sexes). Informed and objectively critical minds like hers—sensitive both to the needs for civil equality and recognition and redress of violence toward women—are out there, and cultivating their advocacy is vital to reforming the defective restraining order process.

I’m a day laborer and would-be children’s humorist who doesn’t even have Internet service at home. The time I’m able and willing to devote to keeping tabs on movements in the blogosphere is scant. But I have perforce become familiar with many of the sites that focus on restraining order injustice, and the preponderance of respondents to most if not all of them are men whose views on this injustice and the issues that orbit it typically derive from one ideological bias or another: post-70’s misandry, the political favoritism shown to women in the West, the courts’ attack on the family, etc.

I don’t challenge the merits of their beefs, which far from lacking legitimacy are very defensible; but these forums leave little room for unification of awareness and purpose among activists and socially conscientious members of the community at large.

The advocacy rift is often crudely genital: boys siding with boys and girls either seeing the boys as villainous, uncompromising, or exclusionary. Men, reared as and genetically engineered to be rule-oriented beings, equate unfair with wrong (plain and simple). Women, pragmatic and historically the holders of the short end of the stick, aren’t immune to the difference between fair and unfair but know the impetus behind the advent of restraining orders to be an urgent and well-grounded one: men are violent.

Men aren’t going to quit being violent if the restraining order process is dissolved, and the process isn’t going to trend toward fairness if it isn’t. Herein lies the rub.

Both sides of this divide are naturally reactionary, and the mediated space—that occupied by those sensitive to both truth-born positions—is narrow and sparsely populated.

It’s a manifest and uncontestable fact that the restraining order process is biased, unconstitutional, and injurious to both men and women who find themselves on its receiving end. It caters to and rewards fraud, and liars come in both sexes. The process’s flaws will only become clear to the mainstream when proponents of one team or the other stop being opponents.

The split in perspective is as much Cartesian as sexual: body vs. mind. Violence can in fact be of either sort, physical or psycho-emotional. Even rape isn’t strictly a physical act. Many violations, equally traumatic and enduringly oppressive, are perpetrated by men and women who never touch their victims. A false allegation of rape, for example, is a rape. The notion that physical violence is necessarily worse is facile and unexamined. Physical violence is loud and dramatic; psychological violence is invisible and insidiously corrosive. Both can be catastrophic. Calumnious lies are just as likely to drive victims to despair or even conceivably suicide, and the pain of these violations is magnified manyfold in the case of false allegations made in restraining order cases, because victims (men, especially) can’t expect social sympathy, as victims of violence may, but quite the opposite: condemnation. (This was the horror that kept a lid on abuses by Catholic priests for so long. Adults molested as boys were constrained from coming forward by fear of further shame, humiliation, and social indictment. Damages finally awarded to these victims weren’t for their being manhandled so much as their being scarred to the extent that they failed to thrive.)

Mob mentality is what sustains the crooked restraining order process; it won’t be what leads to its revision. A problem is that those who speak against it have never been a direct party to it (except in the case of activist attorneys), and those who have been victimized aren’t talking at all, because they’ve been intimidated into silence. Advocates tend to subscribe to one dogma or the other: good/bad, pro/con. Good or bad, useful or not—these are natural but misleading inquiries. The restraining order process is flawed and destructively pernicious, being both subject to and permissive of wanton abuse. To bring this fact and its poignancy across to a political consensus, the partisan gap must be closed. Finger-pointing is fruitless and even erroneous, because the real culprit is a faceless bureaucratic machine that has no oversight.

And it’s going to take a plurality of arms to pull the lever that stills its gears.

Don’t Let a False Restraining Order Crush Your Spirit: Reach Out and Talk Back

November 14, 2012September 1, 2023Moderator 10 Comments

Someone writes (in reply to an earlier commenter): “I too am a victim of a false order of protection and have the same judge. My story is an unbelievable loss of rights with no possible outcome of justice. As I am fearful that publicly telling my story would result in retribution from the judge, I must stay quiet until after I can get out of the court system.”

In the year or so that I’ve maintained this blog, it has received thousands of queries from people abused by restraining orders but considerably fewer actual comments from victims. Most of these comments are anonymous, and many victims seeking answers or consolation have instead emailed me to avoid subjecting themselves to further public scrutiny—understandably. They’re wounded, humiliated, and intimidated and have had it impressed upon them by the state that they if they don’t shut up they’ll be locked up (or suffer more permanent privations).

The restraining order process is sustained on shame and fear and perpetuated because of its political value not its social value, which is dubious at best. The agents of its perpetuation, the courts, are very effective at subduing resistance. Defendants are publicly condemned and threatened with police interference and further forfeitures of rights, and are saddled with allegations that make them afraid besides of social recrimination and rejection—even if those allegations are fraudulent. Avenues of relief are narrow and by and large only available to defendants of means, who, if they prevail, are glad to put the ordeal behind them and move on. The rest are put to flight. And so it goes…on.

First Amendment. Amendment to U.S. Constitution guaranteeing basic freedoms of speech, religion, press, and assembly and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. The various freedoms and rights protected by the First Amendment have been held applicable to the states through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (Black’s Law Dictionary, sixth ed.).

Due process clause. Two such clauses are found in the U.S. Constitution, one in the [Fifth] Amendment pertaining to the federal government, the other in the [Fourteenth] Amendment which protects persons from state actions. There are two aspects: procedural, in which a person is guaranteed fair procedures and substantive which protects a person’s property from unfair governmental interference or taking. Similar clauses are in most state constitutions. See Due process of law (Black’s Law Dictionary, sixth ed.).

Glaring to anyone who peruses these entries in Black’s Law Dictionary and who’s been put through the restraining order wringer is that the process flouts the very principles on which our legal system was established (when I recall one of the judges in my own case referring to his courtroom as “the last bastion of civilization,” I don’t know whether to laugh or cry). It mocks the guarantee of fair procedures and the protection of a person’s property from unfair governmental interference or seizure—and it does a pretty decent job of convincing defendants that if they complain about it they’ll go from the frying pan into the fire. (For those who don’t have an intimate familiarity with the process, a restraining order case may receive no more than 10 minutes of deliberation from a judge—without ever meeting or hearing from the defendant—and even if appealed, no more than 20 or 30 minutes. That’s minutes. On allegations that often include stalking, battery, or violent threat; that may result in a defendant’s being denied access to home, property, family, and assets, and/or forfeiting his or her job and/or freedom; and that are publicly accessible and may be indefinitely stamped on a defendant’s record. It takes a judge many times longer to digest a meal than a restraining order case.)

If you’re a restraining order defendant, recognize these facts: (1) no matter what truth there is to allegations made against you in a restraining order, your civil rights have been violated by the state (all restraining order defendants are blindsided if not railroaded); (2) the restraining order process’s being constitutionally unsupportable makes it unworthy of respect; and (3) impressions by menacing rhetoric notwithstanding, you have every right to challenge the legitimacy of an unfair procedure (in fact, doing so makes you the last bastion of civilization).

Reject the impulse the process inspires to withdraw and hide. Seek counsel (consult with an attorney—or three—even if you can’t afford to employ one). Get information. Harry court clerks until your questions are answered. Ask others for help in the form of character and witness testimony and affidavits, advice, legwork, or just moral support. Get familiar with a local law library (university librarians, in particular, are very helpful). Request a postponement from the court if you need more time to prepare a defense. File a motion to see a judge if your appeal is normally conducted in writing only. Be assertive. Make the plaintiff work for it.

The restraining order process is a specter that feeds on fear. Switch on the light. Remember that as horrible as the accusations against you may seem or feel to you, they’re not likely to be credited by those who know you—especially if those accusations are completely unfounded. And chances are lawyers you explain them to will yawn rather than wag their fingers at you. They’ve heard it all before and know to take allegations made in restraining orders with a shaker of salt. So don’t hesitate to reach out, particularly if the case against you is trumped up. The last thing you want to do is give it credibility by behaving as though it’s legitimate. Don’t violate a restraining order but do resist its tearing your life apart.

And if one has compromised your life and you’re “out of the court system” as the commenter in the epigraph awaits becoming, recognize that your freedom of speech is sacrosanct. This nation was founded on the blood of men who died to guarantee your right to express yourself.

This travesty, the restraining order process, is a breach of the contract between the state and its citizens, and it endures because defendants feel impotent, helpless, and vulnerable (even after their cases are long concluded). This is how you’re meant to feel, and the effectiveness of this emotional coercion is what ensures that the cogs of the meat grinder stay greased.

Don’t give ’em the satisfaction.

Tic-Tac-Toe: The Vulgar Game of Restraining Orders

November 9, 2012September 1, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

I corresponded this year with a woman who was accused of domestic violence by a man against whom the most aggressive act she had made was giving him a friendly hug at a class reunion. This woman was a former city official who walked dogs to raise money for animal shelters and had once volunteered to donate a kidney to a boy in need she had no relation to. She’d dedicated much of her adult life to the service and welfare of others. She was a vegetarian who kept a garden and was rearing a young daughter by herself. They donated $100 to a fundraiser for a surgery needed by my dog to run again (she’s now mending).

How was the accusation against this woman registered with the courts and stamped on her public record? By marking a box on a restraining order application: tic.

You know, a box like you’ll find on any number of bureaucratic forms. Only this box didn’t identify her as white or single or female; it identified her as a batterer. A judge—who’d never met her—reviewed this form and signed off on it (tac), and she was served with it by a constable (toe) and informed she’d be jailed if she so much as came within waving distance of the plaintiff or sent him an email. The resulting distress cost her and her daughter a season of their lives—and to gain relief from it, several thousands of dollars in legal fees.

After requesting that it be postponed, her accuser eventually confessed at her appeals hearing (under cross-examination by her two attorneys) that his allegations were a fraud urged by his wife, who was jealous of his renewed relationship with a former flame. The innocent victim in this story was one of several they had brought restraining orders against. The false allegations cost them nothing: tic, tic, tic.

The lines below from the restraining order application used in my home jurisdiction illustrate how easily serious allegations may be brought against a person the judge approving that application has never met and knows absolutely nothing about. Allegations that may be utterly fraudulent and that take mere seconds to make may cause an innocent defendant years of torment—or even dismantle his or her life.

In a country that prides itself on its system of law, maybe leveling allegations of violence and threat shouldn’t be a kindergarten game of tic-tac-toe. If you agree, get ticked off and say so.

Tic.

False Allegations and Restraining Orders: The Moral Snare

November 4, 2012September 1, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

Someone writes: “I made false allegations to obtain a PPO [an order of protection]. What do I do?”

Disappointingly, this is the first such query this blog has received. Hearteningly, it’s something. And this person should congratulate him- or herself on having a belated pang of conscience.

The ethical, if facile, answer to his or her (most likely her) question is have the order vacated and apologize to the defendant and offer to make amends. The conundrum is that this would-be remedial conclusion may prompt the defendant to seek payback in the form of legal action against the plaintiff for unjust humiliation and suffering. (Plaintiffs with a conscience may even balk from recanting false testimony out of fear of repercussions from the court. They may not feel entitled to do the right thing, because the restraining order process, by its nature, makes communication illegal.)

The lion’s share of the blame for fraud and its damages, of course, clearly falls on the shoulders of plaintiffs—the knots are theirs to untie—but the court should also recognize culpability.

The restraining order process is a honeypot to people nursing a grudge: it’s cheap, convenient, and accommodating. Its making the means to lash out readily available to anyone with a malicious impulse might even be called entrapment. And the court neither acknowledges this process’s consequences to wrongly accused defendants nor impresses upon plaintiffs the consequences to them of making false allegations.

(One defendant I corresponded with this year—who happily succeeded in having the order against her quashed months and thousands of dollars later—was clawing her hair out and dosing herself to sleep. Her young daughter was traumatized by the episode, too. She was accused of domestic violence by a man she’d briefly renewed a friendship with. He was put up to baselessly attacking her through the courts by his wife, who felt jealous—which he admitted in court after dragging the defendant through hell.)

By definition, a civil process shouldn’t foster discord and distress. Maybe lawmakers should mandate a cooling-off period before judges are authorized to approve restraining orders, as they do with handgun purchases.

Or maybe they should put this corrupt institution on ice.

Lying and Restraining Orders: How the Justice System Doesn’t NOT Encourage Perjury

October 31, 2012July 25, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

A woman writes: “What was the legislative intent of having the petitioner sign under oath in a civil TRO [temporary restraining order]…?”

The question seems ingenuous enough. The answer, obvious to anyone who’s run afoul of the restraining order racket, is that people lie.

Less ingenuous is the state’s faith that a warning against perjury in fine print on the last page of a restraining order application (that its petitioner has just spent 20 minutes filling out) is going to discourage a liar from signing his or her name to the thing. (In my county this “warning” reads, “Under penalty of perjury, I swear or affirm the above statements are true to the best of my knowledge….” No explanation of perjury or its penalties is provided.)

If the courts really sought to discourage frauds and liars, the consequences of committing perjury (a felony crime whose statute threatens a punishment of two years in prison—in my state, anyhow) would be detailed in bold print at the top of page 1. What’s there instead? A warning to defendants that they’ll be subject to arrest if the terms of the injunction that’s been sprung on them are violated.

Led by the dated dictum that it should in no way discourage would-be restraining order petitioners, the state relegates its token warning against giving false testimony to the tail end of the application where it will most likely be disregarded.

And why not? Perjury is never actually prosecuted.

What this woman’s question reveals is (1) that the average petitioner doesn’t equate statements made on restraining order applications and in affidavits with sworn testimony given in a courtroom, and (2) that neither the consequences to plaintiffs of making inaccurate, misleading, or intentionally false statements to the court nor the consequences to defendants of being emotionally saddled with a restraining order are seriously weighed.

After a more complete digestion of this woman’s question, the unavoidable answer to it is that the legislative intent of having the petitioner sign under oath is plausible deniability of the process’s inviting and rewarding fraudulent abuse.

The Problems with Restraining Orders: Flaws, Flimflam, and Other F-words

October 29, 2012September 1, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

Their administration is both biased and anti-feminist

The justice system takes it as axiomatic that plaintiffs who say they are victims are victims, especially when these plaintiffs are female. This policy ignores the obvious, namely, that people lie. Moreover, the court’s showing partiality toward female plaintiffs to redress a perceived inequity between the sexes only fosters reverse discrimination and exhibits contempt for the essential feminist conviction that women merit equal treatment under the law—no less and no more. This disdained expectation, the right to equal treatment, is the same one that restraining orders were originally conceived to acknowledge and validate. Women are still patronized. They’re just patronized in a more favorable way (“There, there, dear”).

They play into the fabulistic and sympathy-seeking tendencies of women

When women are in love, the objects of their affections can do no wrong. They exhale perfume. A spurned woman or one who otherwise nurses a grudge, however, will vilify a man to his toenails. A slight is an attack, a slammed phone is an act of violence, a hand balled in frustration is a death threat. Women, long habituated to the practice by conversations with other women, anatomize the smallest details of masculine conversation and conduct, and apply to them the interpretations that suit the color of their feelings. Exaggeration, embellishment, and caricature in conversation with judges, which is essentially what the brief interviews between judges and restraining order plaintiffs amount to, are to be expected. Judges, subjected to the equivalent of sensitivity training on steroids, accept statements made in these conversations as the equivalent of testimony, which, if made on a witness stand before a jury, would in fact be held to much higher standards of objectivity, accuracy, and accountability.

They’re more effective as instruments of abuse than as instruments of protection

The reliability of restraining orders as shields against violent abuse is iffy at best. Anyone dedicated to doing another harm is unlikely to be deterred by a piece of paper, which may just fan the flames. As vindictive weapons against those who never intended their plaintiffs any harm, however, restraining orders can’t be beat. They demolish lives.

Guilty verdicts are foregone conclusions

The nature of restraining orders being to silence, fetter, humiliate, and intimidate, efforts by defendants to dissuade judges from their institutionally schooled biases are enfeebled and easily disregarded. Defendants who resist are already presumed guilty, and their ability to defend themselves is compromised both by this prejudgment and their consciousness of it. Defendants (men, especially) are likely to file into appeals hearings feeling the presence of a noose around their necks: heads bowed, postures shrunken, voices pinched. Defendants, before they’ve even had a chance to hear the allegations made against them, let alone respond to them, have been confronted by a police officer at their homes and served a judgment by the state: harasser, stalker, deviant, aggressor, villain. When you feel judged, you look and sound guilty.

The system is broken

The failure of judicial oversight committees and state lawmakers and administrators to impose the expectation of fairness on the restraining order process provides judges of a certain bent the opportunity to let loose on defendants with both barrels, indiscriminately and with impunity (judges of this disposition, what is more, seem to be in the majority—maybe because they like adjudicating in this arena). This misconduct is not only sanctioned but oftentimes encouraged and applauded (“Throw the bums to the curb! Atta boy!”). No statutory consequences for plaintiffs’ giving false testimony are enforced, nor are judges held to their canons of office. The victims of abuses by plaintiffs and judges have no advocates or recourses: there’s no impartial ear within the system to turn to. Even those on the outside, journalists and civil rights advocates, shy away from the political razor wire that protects this airtight system.

Summary

The restraining order process is f*ed, and so is everyone it snares. Even the wrongly accused who manage to escape it—like bugs sucked into a vacuum cleaner and dumped from the bag—are lastingly damaged.

“I Felt Like a Sex Offender”: More Stories of Restraining Order Abuse

October 13, 2012September 1, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

“I’ve never been treated like that in my life! I felt like a sex offender.”

That was the reaction of a Georgia man, a former English teacher and aspiring songwriter who speaks with a gentle drawl, after his appeals hearing for a restraining order spitefully filed by his on-again, off-again girlfriend (whose mental stability was also on-again, off-again: he had turned to find her pointing a gun at him not long before). “We were like a married couple,” he told me. He was reeling from being publicly berated by the judge, a complete stranger, whose condemnation was based on an evidentiary review as lengthy and thoughtful as a trip to the men’s room.

“It was all over in about 10 minutes,” he said. He was rattled and still riding a wave of adrenaline. Barely out of the courthouse, he was concerned that the restraining order would pop up every time he was stopped for a routine traffic violation and that it would cling to his record forever and foul his ambitions.

Rightly.

All of those who’ve contacted me in the past year about their own cases have been identically tormented. They’re chafed and gnawed at not only by the injustice of this karaoke process—scripted score, add voice—but by the implications of having a restraining order on their permanent records, which implications are exactly as this man characterizes them: aggression, violence, sexual deviancy, etc.

In recent weeks and months, I’ve been contacted by an entrepreneur and Ph.D. whose entire life has been dismantled by assaults made through the courts both on him and his business—along with maliciously anonymous peripheral attacks like phony Craigslist ads and a webpage pornographically parodying a site crafted by his children. He says there have even been attempts on his life, compelling his wife and him to separate from their kids and relocate them to another part of the country for their safety. These assaults—including falsified restraining orders and bogus legal motions by a corrupt attorney (a phrase that may be redundant)—dominate his every waking moment. “I fight for my life every day,” he writes.

Another man, the victim of his ex-wife, a serial restraining order abuser intent to deny him access to his children, writes that he’s tempted to forfeit his visitation rights just to protect them from the fallout. “Recently she called me and asked if she could change some things on our parenting plan. I didn’t agree with the changes,” he writes, “and she told me I would regret it if I didn’t. Two weeks later I was being served with a restraining order. I didn’t show up to court, because this was the third time she had done this, and I was just tired of fighting.”

One woman, a young attorney barely out of law school who was seduced by an older, married peer (also an attorney), was issued an emergency restraining order petitioned on fraudulent grounds, the motive for which was no doubt to discard her and hastily shut her up. She aspires to work in federal law enforcement, a career ambition that stands to be permanently derailed by this man’s viciously selfish manipulations. “Please help,” she closes.

Yet another man, whose ex-wife is an attorney whose new husband is also attorney, has been hit with two restraining orders (the first dismissed as groundless; the second in effect pending appeal) since his ex-wife heard four months ago that he planned to remarry. “They are trying to ruin my wedding and my relationship with my fiancée,” he writes. “They thrive on using the kids as pawns. How do I protect myself from this?” He and his ex-wife have been divorced for 10 years.

Most recently a woman reports she’s been cattily threatened with a restraining order by her neighbor, a disturbed woman who monitors her every move and had physically assaulted her years before. She’s waiting apprehensively for the other shoe to drop.

The themes that run through these accounts are common ones: abuses by attorneys who know how to bend the system to their own self-serving ends, abuses by vindictive lovers and ex-lovers, abuses by the deranged, abuses by the parasitic.

The victims in these stories are the casualties who get whisked under the rug, purportedly in the interest of serving the greater public good.

Many more stories of restraining order abuses can found among the comments on various posts in this blog, and hundreds if not thousands more on this e-petition (the number of respondents to which has nearly trebled since the summer of 2011 when this blog was conceived and published).

Not surprisingly, most of the fraction of fraudulent restraining order victims who do summon the courage to share their stories withhold their names.

The restraining order process remains a crude, unprincipled, and stigmatizing one. Abuse is rampant and largely abetted by the courts, and the tide shows few signs of turning—though one recent visitor indicates that judges in his or her district have imposed a moratorium on issuing protection orders (no reason was given).

If the momentum of this runaway steamroller is finally arrested, it won’t be the result of studies, statistics, or reasoned appeals to social conscience. This debauched institution is all but immune to facts, as any of its victims can well attest. Change will only occur, because victims who refuse to quietly tolerate unjust punishments and public excoriation defiantly talk back.

TALKING BACK to restraining orders

THEY’RE NOT JUST ABUSED BUT ABUSIVE

Tag malicious prosecution