Michael Honeycutt, Hack Ph.D., Grooms Chronic Liar to Give Expert Witness Testimony as TCEQ Rep; Both Named to Trump EPA

Michael Honeycutt, Dr. Michael Honeycutt PhD, Michael Honeycutt PhD, TCEQ, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Gov Greg Abbott, TCEQ, L'Oreal Stepney, Loreal Stepney
“Almost every time there’s a public concern about pollution, [Michael Honeycutt] says there’s nothing to worry about. Almost every time industry takes a position against stronger health protections, he takes their side and contorts the science to advocate for doing nothing. He just doesn’t have any credibility anymore.”

Luke Metzger, director of Environment Texas

The subject of this post, Michael Honeycutt, Ph.D., is the toxicology director for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) and the Pruitt-appointed chairman of the EPA’s Science Advisory Boards.

I can corroborate that he has a knack for pollution, a knack, that is, for producing it.

Here is a bio possibly written by Michael Honeycutt about himself, in which either he or one of his TCEQ subordinates identifies Dr. Michael E. Honeycutt as a “dedicated, distinguished scientist.” That alone would be a sufficient commentary on the man’s ethics, besides a testament to his vanity, arrogance, and professional ridiculousness. But I have more.



Michael Honeycutt indiscriminately helped further tatter my life at a time when I might still have been able to patch the rents, and he did that by supporting a hoax, which is something that apparently comes naturally to him.

Greg Abbott, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, TCEQ, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality

Governor Greg Abbott, who says he supports “faith, family, and freedom,” but whose agency, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, has been repeatedly implicated in censorship, including censorship of the author of this post to cover up public mischief

A guy I had never met and still haven’t, Honeycutt “witnessed” against me in 2013 before the Arizona Superior Court—by phone from the comfort of his office in Texas, where I can’t help but imagine he was talking around a jelly donut and taking care not to dribble its contents on his shirt.

Some of his testimony appears below, along with that of the person on whose behalf he testified, a liar in his employ. Texas Governor Greg Abbott and TCEQ directors Toby Baker, Stephanie Bergeron Perdue, L’Oreal Stepney, and Beth West should be ashamed. Both my best friend and my father died while this mischief was ongoing. And its residue doesn’t simply evaporate as the TCEQ seems to believe chemical pollutants do. The only one who can undo lies is the liar.

Thanks in no small part, I’m certain, to Honeycutt’s flash credentials and suave delivery, which I have no doubt was coached, I would be denied my constitutionally guaranteed First Amendment freedoms for the next five years by an unlawful speech injunction that was imposed without a trial (which is, of course, also illegal). The TCEQ has been repeatedly implicated in censorship and information suppression, so in that regard there’s nothing exceptional about this instance.

During the five years I was silenced, I might have racked up a couple of Ph.D.’s of my own or published a book or two, as I had intended, had a case initiated by a protégée of Honeycutt’s at the TCEQ, senior toxicologist Tiffany Bredfeldt, been settled instead of unlawfully hushed.


Tiffany Bredfeldt, who represented the TCEQ on the news while seeking the writer’s imprisonment, was apparently dumped by her husband around the time the case concluded against her. That case stemmed from a 2013 censorship order validated by Michael Honeycutt, who might have averted manifold damages to all parties concerned had he demonstrated a molecule of discernment.


Tiffany Bredfeldt is a developmentally arrested, chronic, documented liar. She’s also a liar who has ridden her mentor’s coattails straight into the federal government—which, I grant, is where many of society’s least scrupulous succeed in turning their ethical disinhibition to profit.

I imagine Mike and Tiffany are flourishing there. I’d be surprised, really, if they weren’t already conspiring to occupy the office of EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler.

Eugene Volokh, UCLA School of Law, UCLA Law Prof. Eugene Volokh, First Amendment

Constitutional scholar Eugene Volokh, who blogs on Reason.com, among other things about faith, family, and freedom, addressing the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee

I was first in court with Bredfeldt in 2006, when I was granted a 20-minute self-defense against cooked allegations, and I was last in court with her in 2016, accused of having violated the illegal speech injunction Honeycutt had helped her illegally secure three years prior. Discounting many pretrial conferences, the entire 2016 “trial” again amounted to a single hearing, during which the proceedings were indefinitely suspended. Then they were dismissed…two years later. That’s 12 years of lying and legal abuse, including lawbreaking. What made the difference in 2016 was that I had public defenders and the support of UCLA professor of law and eminent First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh; it wasn’t just a backroom lynching as it had been in 2013 when Honeycutt glibly voiced an appearance.

At the end of the 2016 hearing, after the mics had been turned off, Honeycutt’s apprentice could be heard exclaiming, “God damn it!” She then remarked for her courtroom entourage that Honeycutt had joked that her prosecution would be “good experience” for when she gave expert witness testimony as a TCEQ rep. That was Honeycutt’s alleged commentary on a prosecution meant to have a man wrongfully imprisoned. And Honeycutt’s a guy who identifies himself as a stalwart Christian and a devotee of the Boy Scouts.

Here’s a synopsis of statements Texas state official and EPA adviser Tiffany Bredfeldt gave in evidence to the court or, in one instance, to the police only between the years 2006 and 2017. The story they tell isn’t the half of it, but it’s succinct, and its contradictions are palpable. The statements provide all the background the reader will require. Honeycutt’s contribution to this list is the third from the top. His apprentice, a stranger who had routinely hung around outside of my house at night, alone, has lied impulsively and randomly to whitewash what might be called an extramarital infatuation, and she has lied without qualm and to anyone who would listen. Like her mentor Honeycutt, she’s fond of attention.












The crackpot who made the preceding statements was, the last I knew, entrusted with a role in determining U.S. public health policy besides that of Texas.

And she’s a virtual phantom. Anyone with a grievance toward the TCEQ who’s curious to learn if a Tiffany Bredfeldt is employed there will be disappointed. Thanks to Mike Honeycutt, she hasn’t appeared on its employee roster since 2011 or 12, though she represented the TCEQ on the TV news less than three years ago (see the image above) and still draws an agency paycheck (annual salary: $73,608).

Here’s Mike’s 2013 explanation to the court:

Even the reader with no courtroom experience can appreciate how steered testimony like that could drive some coffin nails home.

I encountered Honeycutt’s protégée in 2005, a few feet from my house, which is the only place I’ve ever seen her outside of a courtroom, and I’ve never been to Texas.

A woman who was scheduled to testify in the 2016 lawsuit that was meant to have me jailed had characterized Bredfeldt’s behavior toward me this way:

Michael Honeycutt, TCEQ, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, hoax, Tiffany Bredfeldt PhD, Dr. Tiffany Bredfeldt, Governor Greg Abbott, Beth West TCEQ, TCEQ Human Resources Director Beth West, TCEQ Executive Director Toby Baker, Toby Baker TCEQ, TCEQ Deputy Executive Director Stephanie Bergeron Perdue

The email containing the woman’s remarks has been online for two years and is presumably known to Honeycutt, who, as far I can tell, has only sought to keep the matter from interfering with his moment in the limelight and his activities in church and with the Boy Scouts.

The exclusive basis for Michael Honeycutt’s involvement in the case at all was that I had contacted him in 2011 to tell him he was employing a scientist who had no compunction about lying.

It wouldn’t have occurred to me then that a willingness to lie, including under oath, might be a qualification the TCEQ prized.

Copyright © 2020 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*Michael Honeycutt told the court in 2013 that I had accused his apprentice Bredfeldt of engaging in scientific fraud, which is something I’ve never done. In fact I was careful to clarify that I knew nothing about her professional conduct. Honeycutt’s testimony, given under oath, was false. It was, however, effective, and I’m convinced that effectiveness was his priority, not accuracy. Misrepresenting a material fact in a sworn court proceeding, that is, stating a fact under oath that is likely to influence the judge but is untrue, is called perjury, and it’s a felony crime.

**Liberal detractors of Michael Honeycutt’s favor PC characterizations like this one by Honeycutt’s peer Elena Craft, Ph.D., senior health scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund in Texas: “[Honeycutt’s] positions generally are totally inconsistent with mainstream thinking.” To someone who distrusts conventional perspectives, as I do, this sounds like a compliment. Moreover, the conduct this post criticizes accords with mainstream thinking, which is something people like Ms. Craft might broaden themselves by considering. Archly feminist views, I’ve noted, are endemic in the hard sciences (and in a good many of the soft ones). A scientist is someone who confronts the truth in whatever unsettling form it comes. Otherwise, s/he’s misappropriating the title.

Sexual Solicitation, Assault Alleged by Texas Officials Michael Honeycutt and Tiffany Bredfeldt in Contradictory Testimony to the Arizona Superior Court, Implicating a Tucson Man Who’s Been Falsely Accused for 11 Years: ILLEGAL GAG ORDER GUTTED; “WOMEN’S LAW,” TCEQ DISCREDITED

This post, published on the first day of the year, was updated on July 9, 2018 (reflected in the new title), and content that had been unlawfully censored by the court has been restored. A recent respondent to this blog commented, “I think these injunctions violate the Constitution.” Despite the baggy parameters dictated by the law, it’s certain that many are impeachable as unconstitutional. The saga that follows relates the story of such an injunction. Readers merely interested in learning what unscrupulous plaintiffs can get away with (again and again for years) may skip the preamble and gain a clear picture by contrasting various sworn and unsworn statements by two such plaintiffs, who are quoted verbatim. Other quotations show how a witness, Michael Honeycutt, was induced to give misleading testimony, besides how willing attorneys may be to steer the court amiss…for the right price.


Michael Honeycutt TCEQ, Michael Honeycutt PhD, Michael Honeycutt EPA, Tiffany Bredfeldt TCEQ, Tiffany Bredfeldt PhD, Tiffany Bredfeldt EPA, Bredfeldt TG, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, TCEQ, EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, EPA Science Advisory Board, SAB, EPA Chemical Assessment Advisory Committee

Texas state toxicologists and newly appointed EPA reps Michael Honeycutt and Tiffany Bredfeldt gave testimony before an Arizona Superior Court judge in 2013 that succeeded in persuading the judge to issue an unconstitutional speech injunction against the writer. The court was told the writer had “propositioned” Bredfeldt (a married woman) in 2005, “wouldn’t take no for an answer,” and “had been harassing her ever since.” Honeycutt, who has never met the writer, recited this secondhand story with the same smug complacency that marks his expression above. Based on the fiction’s effectiveness, four additional legal actions were brought against the writer in 2016, two of which menaced him with the threat of incarceration for exercising his freedom of speech. One of the actions was aborted; two were dismissed. Despite an appeal in 2017, the 2013 gag order, which the writer was alleged in 2016 to have “continuously and contemptuously violated,” remained in effect until July 2018, when it was gutted. All charges brought against the writer in the past decade have been invalidated.

Numerous accounts related on this blog since its launch six years ago have contrasted what he said with what she said in testimony given under penalty of perjury. The account this post relates doesn’t have to. It contrasts what she said here with what she said there—and with what her statured witness said she said. Statements that should harmonize, conflict.

A lesson of what this post unfolds, valuable for anybody to learn who has been wronged by a judge and isn’t sure if s/he’s “allowed” to talk about it, is that when people get away with something in a courtroom, which is a public forum, that in no way immunizes them from being exposed for it in a different public forum (for example, Facebook, Twitter, a personal blog, or one sponsored by The Washington Post). The only legal surety against criticism in this country is square conduct. While a court can lawfully issue a restraining order that prohibits unwanted speech to someone (like phone calls or emails), it cannot lawfully prohibit unwanted speech about anyone. Critical speech directed to the world at large, however objectionable it may be to those it names, whether private individuals, public officials, or judges, is protected speech as long as it isn’t false or threatening (and opinions are sacrosanct); the Constitution doesn’t favor any citizen over another, nor does it distinguish between bloggers, pamphleteers, or picketers and the institutional press. The aegis of the First Amendment doesn’t even require that criticism be deserved. In this instance, however, blamelessness is a nonissue.

Eugene Volokh, First Amendment, freedom of speech, The Volokh ConspiracyThis post discredits a widely championed arena of law, as well as how it’s administered. Linked audio clips of one trial judge will make a seasoned courtroom veteran flinch; those of another, a presiding municipal court magistrate, acknowledge frankly that restraining orders “are abused,” no question, and that “people come in and…say things that are just blatantly false” but are “never…charge[d],” let alone prosecuted.

The post also discredits accusations made by a woman (women, in fact) against a man. To some, this will be its most compelling virtue. Men have traditionally been the butt of abused and abusive procedures, and by far continue to be their most populous feedstock. Assertions that men are “presumed guilty” and unfairly “demonized” are not exaggerations and never have been, contrary to the pajama punditry of demagogues like David Futrelle, Mari Brighe, Amanda Marcotte, and Lindy West, who would smother even the most righteous motives for male contempt beneath the blanket label “misogynist.”

Fixation on gender politics, though, has obscured from view that injustice has been legislated into the law and fortified by decades of accustomed application (albeit that politics is the reason why). Today women—straight, gay, or otherwise—enjoy no greater safety from accusation and arbitrary violations of their civil rights than men do (in drive-thru procedures promoted as “female-empowering”), and women too may be accused by women (including their own mothers, sisters, daughters, and neighbors—which is a predictable consequence when accusation is tolerated as a recreational sport). Law that mocks due process and facilitates and rewards its own abuse is iniquitous, period. What this post reveals, importantly and inescapably, is that how many people choose to understand accusation, court process, and their repercussions is deplorably simplistic. Among these many are most politicians, academics, journalists, and social justice activists.

Eugene Volokh, First Amendment, freedom of speech, The Volokh ConspiracyThe Tucson man in the title of the post is also its author, and there was a time, within his memory, when to allege sexual impropriety without urgent grounds would have stirred outrage, because such an accusation is always damaging. In the climate that has prevailed since the advent of the Violence Against Women Act, however, the female plaintiff who doesn’t allege sexual violation, or at least trespass, squanders invaluable leverage. To a potently shrill sector of the community, this represents social progress. It has made pollution de rigueur.

Inaugurating the task of restoring a site inspired by the tenacity of false accusations like those exposed below, this post breaks a year-and-a-half-long silence coerced from the site’s owner by a series of lawsuits, which included two that demanded that he be jailed for exercising his First Amendment rights. The principal complainant, Tiffany Bredfeldt, an official at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), has repeatedly alleged to the Arizona Superior Court that the writer’s criticisms of her honesty, ethics, and character are untrue. Bredfeldt told the court in 2016 that the “ongoing fear, stress, and associated physical impacts” the writer’s criticisms had caused her “have been a decision factor as to whether or not [she has] children.” She also reported she has “talked to more people at police departments, sheriffs’ departments, and federal and state agencies than [she] can count,” and urged the court to impose “significant consequences” to bring her relief from a “continual rollercoaster of fear.”

Judge Richard Gordon, Pima County Superior Court

I am not going to hold him in contempt for talking about his case,” Pima County Superior Court Judge Richard Gordon pronounced in response to a 2016 complaint that demanded the writer be jailed for doing exactly that. Also commendably, the judge granted the writer a court-appointed attorney without reservation. Disagreeing, however, that the law authorized him to revise or dissolve an illegal prior restraint entered against the writer in 2013, the judge instead delimited its vague and overbroad proscriptions. The writer continued to be (1) forbidden from publishing images of the plaintiffs on this site; (2) forbidden from using “[meta] tags” with their names to label images or contents of posts, supposedly elevating them in Google’s returns for certain search terms thereby; (3) forbidden from “repeating” three “specific statements” that, absent a jury opinion, the 2013 court deemed “defamatory”—only two of which the writer may have made, both concerning honesty; and (4) forbidden from contacting the plaintiffs, Tiffany and Phil Bredfeldt, the former’s employers at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, or “their friends, their acquaintances, or their family.” The writer’s own friends and family are among Tiffany Bredfeldt’s acquaintances, and who else may be is impossible for the writer to know, which underscores the recklessness of the 2013 order Judge Gordon construed rather than vacated. That order’s prohibitions, which were substantially narrowed in July of this year, could have been interpreted very differently by another judge at any time for the rest of the writer’s life.

Bredfeldt sued the writer in 2013, neither for the first time nor the last. Michael Honeycutt, to whom the writer had communicated his criticisms of Bredfeldt’s conduct by letter two years before, served her as a witness—telephonically, from the comfort of his desk chair in Texas. Honeycutt is Bredfeldt’s boss at the TCEQ and an old hand at testifying; his bio [deleted from the Internet since this publication] boasts that he has testified before Congress. His role in accusing the writer, who in 2013 had already grappled with crippling allegations for seven years, was to ensure that he would live with them indefinitely—and it’s unlikely that Honeycutt acted without the full approval and support of the TCEQ’s administration.

The upshot of the 2013 prosecution, in which the writer represented himself, was that Bredfeldt was granted an unconstitutional restraining order that prohibited the writer from publishing anything about her “to anybody, in any way, oral, written or web-based” by the judge whose words appear a few times in the transcript excerpts that follow. That Pima County Superior Court judge, Carmine Cornelio, is a judge no longer. In June of 2016, 84% of an Arizona Commission on Judicial Performance Review panel concluded he did not meet standards. The judge declined to face voters that fall, and his tenure on the bench terminated two months later.

(The no-confidence rating returned against Judge Cornelio in 2016 followed reprimands by the Arizona Supreme Court in 2010 and 2013 for the judge’s saying “fuck you” to an attorney during a settlement conference, causing a 19-year-old girl to cry during a different one, and gesturing accusatorily at a female court employee in public, among other alleged acts of “abusive conduct.” In a guest column in the Arizona Daily Star, Judge Cornelio wrote, “I leave with head held high….” He told the same paper in an interview that he “intends to go into private practice in alternative dispute resolution.” Judges of the Arizona Superior Court are paid $145,000 a year, and a proposal has been tabled to raise their salaries to $160,000.)

The speech injunction Judge Cornelio imposed on this writer in 2013, which the judge made permanent without bothering with a trial, was affirmed in 2016 by a second Pima County Superior Court judge, Richard Gordon, despite Judge Gordon’s having acknowledged in open court that the conduct of the 2013 proceedings was “not legal” and that the prior restraint that issued from them offended the Constitution. “There are obviously some parts that are just too broad and then don’t make a whole lot of sense,” Judge Gordon conceded in court in July. In his subsequent Sept. 2016 ruling, little trace of this acknowledgment survives. The writer’s father died a month after the ruling was returned. More than a year has transpired since (and, as the U.S. Supreme Court has held, “[t]he loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury”).

An appeal of the 2016 ruling to the Arizona Court of Appeals’ Second Division was denied in December (five months after it was filed). The court—consisting of Judge Philip Espinosa, Judge Christopher Staring, and Judge Sean Brearcliffedeclined to address the prior restraint’s unconstitutionality and sidestepped use of the phrase prior restraint entirely:

[T]he issue before us is not whether the injunction is constitutionally permissible, but whether the [2016] trial court properly refused to modify or dissolve it.

The appeals court, whose decision may have been influenced by a case narrative that this post will show is false, did acknowledge that “[a]t least one provision of the [2013] injunction would appear clearly unconstitutional, ordering that ‘[t]he defendant…immediately cease and desist all future publications on his website or otherwise.’” The word publication means any act of public speech. This provision, which was dissolved in July of this year, accordingly prohibited the writer from, for example, finishing a Ph.D., addressing the city council, marketing a book, or defending himself in a courtroom, all of which require publication. Also accordingly, courts have consistently found prior restraints facially invalid, even ones far less vague and overbroad than the one issued against the writer, and such orders have been vacated as much as 30 years later, which the writer’s attorney informed the appellate judges by brief and in oral argument. This was unremarked in their Dec. 18, 2017 ruling.

Eugene Volokh, free speech, First Amendment

UCLA Law Prof. Eugene Volokh, addressing the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on June 20

Unlike in 2013 (and previously), the writer wasn’t alone in court in 2016 or 2017. His defense was aided by two gifted lawyers representing the Pima County Legal Defender: Kristine Alger, who drafted and orally augmented a faultless appeal, and Kent F. Davis, whose zealous advocacy made an appeal possible in the first place. Their arguments were what’s more reinforced by no lesser light than Eugene Volokh, who’s distinguished as one of the country’s foremost authorities on First Amendment law and who, in conjunction with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Phoenix attorney Eric M. Fraser, graciously submitted an amicus brief to the court on the writer’s behalf. Alison Boaz of the UCLA School of Law, who assisted Prof. Volokh, is also due credit. A win in the appellate court would have been much more theirs than this writer’s, and they have the writer’s thanks for their Herculean exertions.

(It’s conceivable that a legal critique of the matter may one day appear on The Volokh Conspiracy, which is listed by the ABA Journal in its “Blawg 100 Hall of Fame.”)

Exemplifying the importance of the First Amendment, this post will illuminate how trial courts are manipulated into forming bad conclusions by lowering its beam into the crevices to rest on those who do the manipulating.

A byproduct of the writer’s representation in 2016 and 2017 was access to courtroom transcripts, so the post won’t offer much in the way of opinion. Commentary can be denied. Testimony given under oath…cannot be.


Dr. Tiffany Bredfeldt, on cross-examination by the writer in 2013

Dr. Michael Honeycutt, on cross-examination by the writer in 2013

Based on nothing more than the two statements quoted above, a precocious child would wrinkle her nose. Yet such obvious contradictions have inspired no judge to arch an eyebrow nor any Ph.D. to scruple. In over 11 years.

Calling someone a liar risks being sued, and trial judges interpret whatever they want however they want. They’re acutely aware, moreover, of which direction their criteria are supposed to skew when abuse is alleged. This remark cannot be called defamatory: Although this post isn’t about air or water pollution, as would befit one that quotes environmental scientists, it does concern filth.

Cheryl Lyn Walker PhD, Cheryl Walker PhD, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Texas A&M University Health Science Center, TAMHSC, Institute of Biosciences and Technology

Director of the Texas A&M Health Science Center Institute of Biosciences and Technology Cheryl Lyn Walker, remarks by whom were used in evidence against the writer in 2013 and 2016

It relates sworn testimony to the Arizona Superior Court by two representatives of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), reportedly the second largest agency of its kind after the EPA. Those public sector scientists are Michael Honeycutt, Ph.D., the TCEQ’s toxicology director and an adjunct professor at Texas A&M University, who was recently entrusted with a role in forming national health policy, and one of Honeycutt’s protégés, senior toxicologist Tiffany Bredfeldt, who’s also a Ph.D. and who had already been entrusted with a role in forming national health policy. On April 4, 2017, the TCEQ tweeted its congratulations to Bredfeldt for her being selected to serve on the Chemical Assessment Advisory Committee of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board, which her boss now chairs. The bio of Bredfeldt’s associated with her appointment highlights her experience as an “expert witness.” This merits note, as does Honeycutt’s superior claim to the same distinction.

A second Texas A&M professor, Dr. Cheryl Lyn Walker, Ph.D., who was Bredfeldt’s postdoc adviser at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, has been aware of the conduct of Bredfeldt’s detailed in this post for a decade. Appeals by this writer to Walker’s conscience and integrity only inspired her to tell Bredfeldt in a 2008 email: “I am very concerned about your safety.” Bredfeldt entered Walker’s email in evidence against the writer in 2013 and also quoted it to the court in 2016.

Authorial intrusions in the survey of statements to follow will be terse. Bredfeldt and her witnesses will do the preponderant storytelling.

Tiffany Bredfeldt, romancing the camera in 2005

Some orienting details are required. The writer encountered Bredfeldt, then a doctoral student in the University of Arizona College of Pharmacy, at his home in late summer 2005 and met with her there routinely over the ensuing months, mostly after dark. Bredfeldt, otherwise a stranger, declined to mention to the writer that she was married while, for example, taunting him for not inviting her in at midnight: “Where I come from, it’s considered rude not to at least invite a person onto your porch.” Then she disappeared, providing no explanation. A few months after that, when the writer sought one, Bredfeldt variously reported to the police and numerous courts—in statements that remain public in perpetuity and that are not deemed defamatory—that the writer had made unwelcome sexual advances toward her, despite being repeatedly “rebuff[ed]” and “rebuked”; that he posed a violent danger to her and to assorted others she was concerned the writer would talk to about her conduct at his home (among them her mother, who lived 1,200 miles away); that he should be prohibited from possessing firearms; and that he had stalked her, a woman the writer had only ever met hanging around his yard like a stray cat.

Here’s Bredfeldt’s account in her own words to Judge Jack Peyton on April 10, 2006:

Okay, I’ll begin by defining my relationship, um, with Mr. Greene. I met Mr. Greene in about September or October of 2005 when I was boarding a horse that I own at a boarding facility owned by his family. At that time, uh, we were acquaintances, and we spent time talking and — at his family barn. And that’s about the nature of our — our interaction. During that time, I think, um, he developed maybe romantic feelings for me that — that made me uncomfortable, and I generally would rebuff his advances, asking him to stop.

Mrs. Bredfeldt, whom the writer knew for three months and with whom he has had no contact since March 2006, has along with one of two or three girlfriends of hers who were also routinely around the writer’s residence in 2005 sued the writer some six times. Four legal actions were brought against the writer in 2016 alone, two of which sought his incarceration and all of which endeavored to suppress what this post relates. In a “Victim’s Impact Statement” Bredfeldt submitted to the court in 2016, she owned that she had accused the writer “to the Court multiple times [and] to multiple police departments, detectives, federal agencies, and other officials in several states”—including the Arizona Dept. of Public Safety and the FBI—and it’s this writer’s belief that only with the blind support of loyalists like Mike Honeycutt would Bredfeldt have been so emboldened.

attorney Beth E. Maultsby, attorney Kathryn Flowers Samler, high-conflict litigants, high-conflict people, high-conflict litigation, false testimony, lying in courtThe legal onslaught has spanned (and consumed) almost 12 years, despite the writer’s appealing to dozens of people to look between the lines, including Honeycutt, who’s notably a husband with two college-aged sons. Honeycutt is besides a distinguished scientist, cited for his rigorous investigative standards, whose testimony quoted immediately below includes the statements, “I didn’t ask for details” and “I didn’t clarify that.” As a departmental director of the TCEQ, Honeycutt is paid $137,000 per. The writer, in contrast, has for the past decade earned a subsistence wage doing manual jobs that allow him to keep an insomniac’s hours and be left alone—formerly in the company of his dog, his dearest friend, who died suddenly in 2015 while the writer was still daily distracted with trying to clear his name and recover time and opportunities that had been stolen from them. (Here is a letter the writer hired an attorney to prepare in 2009. Bredfeldt represented it to the court in 2013 as evidence of harassment, and testified she believed her “psychiatric prognosis” would improve if such speech were restrained. “One of the most difficult parts of dealing with something, since this is profoundly stressful,” she told the court, “is that the stress doesn’t go away.”) The writer had aspired to be a commercial author of humor for kids, as Bredfeldt knew, and had labored toward realizing his ambition for many years before encountering her and her cronies on his doorstep. His manuscripts have since only gathered dust.

(A further counterpoint: The first public official the writer notified of Bredfeldt’s conduct, who also took no heed, was University of Arizona Dean of Pharmacy J. Lyle Bootman, Ph.D. A decade later, Bootman was charged with raping and beating an unconscious woman in his home. For almost two years following his indictment in 2015, while free on his own recognizance, Bootman faced trial—a fundamental due process right this writer was denied in 2013. Despite having been placed on administrative leave, Bootman continued to draw a faculty salary of over $250,000 from the U of A, the writer’s alma mater and former place of employ. As a graduate teaching assistant in the English Dept. in the late ’90s, the writer cleared about $200 a week. While he awaited a ruling in Greene v. Bredfeldt, the appeal of the last of the lawsuits brought against him during the same period of time by Bredfeldt and a cohort of hers, the five felony charges against Bootman were dropped. A tort case based on the same facts continues. Bootman’s attorneys filed for a protective order in December to bar public access to records.)

In an interview that aired in 2017, Tiffany Bredfeldt, the writer’s accuser, reassured the audience of ABC News that it could place its trust in the TCEQ. Bredfeldt made a similar pitch before the National Research Council of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in 2013. Bredfeldt, who the court was told in 2013 and 2016 is not a public official, has repeatedly appeared as the face of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Her attorneys have argued that since she isn’t a public official, she isn’t obligated by law to prove her allegation that objectionable statements by this writer are false and therefore unprotected speech. Her boss, Michael Honeycutt, told the court in 2013: “Tiffany is just like the other 14 employees that I have.” If no other assertions by the TCEQ cause Texans concern, that one should.

This post’s presentation is simple: It juxtaposes contradictory statements that span seven years (2006–2013), most of them made under oath and all of them made by state scientists. (Those in small print may be enlarged in a new tab by clicking on them, or magnification of the entire post may be increased by pressing [CTRL] or [COMMAND, the cloverleaf-shaped key on Macs] + [+]. Zoom may be reversed similarly: [CTRL] or [COMMAND] + [-].) Scrutiny of the quotations below may lead the reader to conclude they’re evidence of false reporting, perjury, subornation of perjury, stalking, harassment, mobbing (including attorney-complicit abuse of process and civil conspiracy), defamation, bureaucratic negligence, professional incompetence, mental derangement, and/or general depravity.

The writer will let the facts speak for themselves.

MICHAEL HONEYCUTT, on cross-examination by the writer on May 20, 2013:

Honeycutt testifies in 2013 that Bredfeldt told him the writer “propositioned” her in 2005, which to him, he says, “would mean ask[ed] for sex.”

Bredfeldt’s attorney, Jeffrey Marks, would follow up on Honeycutt’s testimony by beginning his cross-examination of the writer with a jab instead of a question: “She says you propositioned her.” The writer replied, “What does that mean?” Marks chirped, “That you offered her sex.” Bredfeldt, while gazing around the room at her audience, nodded solemnly.

TIFFANY BREDFELDT, in an email to the writer sent Friday, March 17, 2006, that she entered into evidence three days later (Monday, March 20, 2006) along with her petition for restraining order number one:

Bredfeldt states in this self-contradictory email, which she would submit days later in evidence to the court in the 2006 procedure that began the controversy, that the writer had been “nice” to her and that she had never felt the need” to “explain” to him she was married, because her husband had come to the writer’s place of residence “a number of times,” and she thought the writer already knew and besidesviewed [her] strictly as a social friend.” Contrast Honeycutt’s 2013 testimony: “[S]he said that he propositioned her.

On April 10, 2006, not a month after Bredfeldt sent this email, she would testify before a judge (in her husband’s presence) that she had had to repeatedly “rebuff…advances” by the writer in 2005. The writer was identified to the court not as a considerate “friend” but as an “acquaintance” with whom Bredfeldt had “interact[ed].” Ten years later, the husband the writer was supposed to have known about, a geoscientist today employed by Weston Solutions as a project manager, would be asked in court on direct examination by his lawyer, “Do you know the defendant, Todd Greene?” Philip Bredfeldt’s answer: “I never met him….” Then Mr. Bredfeldt would clarify to the 2016 court that he “first came to know about the [writer] in early 2006,” that is, the same week his wife sent this email, during which the writer was alleged to have sent her a “series of disturbing emails” and “packages,” a fiction that by itself would take another entire post to unweave. Significantly, Phil Bredfeldt had no idea the writer existed until 2006 and, according to his 2016 testimony, was not informed by his wife of any sexual aggression toward her in 2005—nor was anybody else, for example, the writer’s mother, who was daily at the property where the writer lives from morning till dusk, and whom Bredfeldt knew and spoke with routinely. (The writer’s mother was then in treatment for cancer, a fact Bredfeldt exploited to flaunt her knowledge of the disease, which was a subject of her dissertation research.) Where Phil Bredfeldt was while his wife was outside of the writer’s residence at 1 a.m.—and with whom—has never been clarified.

Honeycutt, in a 2013 quotation below, will testify in further contrast to Bredfeldt’s statements in this email that he was told the writer’s behavior in 2005 was “erratic and bizarre” and that he “wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

TIFFANY BREDFELDT, in a statement to the University of Arizona Police Dept. given on March 18, 2006 (the next day):

Bredfeldt, in contrast to her emailed statements to the writer 24 hours prior (and in contrast to her subsequent testimony to the court in 2006 and both hers and Honeycutt’s in 2013), reports to the police that the writer had made “a romantic advance” toward her in 2005, inspiring her to admit to him she was married, after which he desisted. Bredfeldt then says the writer seized her cell phone, copied down her number, and contacted her. Bredfeldt’s work and home addresses and telephone numbers were publicly listed, and the writer never spoke with Bredfeldt on the phone. There was no need; she could be found outside of his residence most nights, as often as not in a red tank top.

On the single occasion the writer had handled Bredfeldt’s cell phone, borrowing it because his phone had been destroyed by a power surge, Bredfeldt had insisted on typing the numbers for him before sliding the phone into his palm and caressing his fingers (repeatedly). That was in late Nov. 2005 after she and a friend of hers had invited themselves into the writer’s house. Bredfeldt’s “chaperone,” a stranger then calling herself Jenn Oas, began conversation by telling the writer she had just returned from India where she “mostly” hadn’t worn a bra. Bredfeldt chimed in with a quip about “granny panties” (after having excused herself and returned wearing freshly applied eye makeup, complaining that she had “misplaced” her glasses). A couple of weeks later, Bredfeldt would vanish.

(Flash-forward: The policewoman who instructed Bredfeldt how to obtain a court-ordered injunction, Bethany Wilson, is today a librarian in charge of kid lit—what the writer had aspired in 2006 to make his profession.)

TIFFANY (AND PHIL) BREDFELDT, in a sworn affidavit to Judge Roger Duncan (then a pro tem) filed on March 20, 2006 (two days later):

Bredfeldt urgently petitions a protective order tailored to prohibit the writer (three days earlier called a “friend” who had been “nice” to her) from having any contact with her husband, Phil, a stranger, who is alleged to be in violent “danger.”

Later the same day, the writer would be sent an email, ostensibly by Phil Bredfeldt, that begins, “STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM MY WIFE, YOU SICK FUCK,” and ends, “THIS IS THE LAST TIME YOU WILL BE TOLD.

(The Bredfeldts simultaneously sent the email to UAPD Officer Bethany Wilson, with whom she later told the writer they had been on the phone at the time. Officer Wilson, who had met both of them, opined during a 2006 interview with the writer that Mrs. Bredfeldt “wore the pants.”)

Judge Jack Peyton, JP, Justice of the Peace, Pima County Justice Court

Judge Jack Peyton

The evidence of harassment Tiffany Bredfeldt presented to the court was five emails she and the writer had exchanged over a weekend (March 16–20): two from her, three from him in reply. The March 17 email of hers shown above was shuffled to the back of the sheaf, out of chronological order, causing the judge who presided over the writer’s April 10, 2006 hearing, Pima County Justice of the Peace Jack Peyton, to remark, “I don’t think I have a copy,” and then to ask, “Am I missing one [of the emails]?” Bredfeldt had to include the contradictory email among her evidence, which was never anyhow scrutinized, because it contained one of the only two requests she had ever made to the writer not to contact her: “I hope that you will respect my request for no further communication.” The other request was in an email she had sent him 20 hours earlier, in which Bredfeldt had represented the writer to himself as a stalker after he had gently tried to learn the motives for her behaviors at his home and her concealment from him that she was married. Judge Peyton confirmed with Bredfeldt that the minimum qualification demanded by the law, namely, two requests for no contact, had been met. The writer need not have been present.

Alleged on March 20 to be in danger of violent assault, Phil Bredfeldt had to be repeatedly reprimanded for displays of temper in open court three weeks later. Judge Peyton finally told him, after ordering his name stricken from his wife’s protective order:

I won’t think twice about asking you to leave the courtroom, because you’re not a party. You are welcome to be here. This is a public forum. But I won’t have you interrupting, and I will not have you making me uncomfortable about what your next action might be.

The judge, reputed to be the go-to JP for women alleging abuse by men, nevertheless cemented the protective order against the writer, explaining: “I do not get the impression that [Mr. Bredfeldt] was placed on that order by design.

(The following year, Judge Peyton was appointed to head a county domestic violence specialty court, which was financed by a $350,000 gubernatorial grant that included no budgetary allowance for defense attorneys. The judge, a onetime Maryland labor lawyer d/b/a J. Craig Peyton, underwent a “five-day domestic violence training session” in preparation. Reportedly operating only two days a week, his court has since processed well upwards of 25,000 cases.)

TIFFANY BREDFELDT, on cross-examination by the writer on May 20, 2013 (seven years later):

In contrast to her statements to the police in 2006, Bredfeldt testifies in 2013 that she never told the writer she was married. What Bredfeldt told the writer in 2005 was that she lived with a dog. The writer asked if it was alone at night while she was with him. Bredfeldt answered, “Yes.” The writer urged her to bring the dog with her so it wasn’t by itself and gave her a toy to take home.

TIFFANY BREDFELDT, on cross-examination by the writer on May 20, 2013 (the same afternoon):

Also contradicting her statements to the police in 2006 (besides controverting what her first witness, Honeycutt, told the court in 2013 that she had told him), Bredfeldt testifies (in the presence of her husband) that the writer made “three attempts to kiss [her]” in 2005—which made her “uncomfortable” but not so uncomfortable as to prompt her to tell the writer she was married (or to tell her husband that another man had repeatedly tried to kiss her). Then Bredfeldt denies she has “ever” accused the writer of sexual harassment.

TIFFANY BREDFELDT, in a memorandum to Superior Court Judge Charles Harrington filed July 30, 2006:

In a “Statement of Factsto the court, contradicting her statements to the police (besides to the writer himself, which emailed statements she submitted to the court in 2006, 2013, and 2016), Bredfeldt alleges the writer made “several physical, romantic advances toward [her],” despite being “rebuked,” and that she was forced to flee[w]hen such advances continued.”

There were no physical advances. Bredfeldt was invited to have Thanksgiving dinner with the writer’s family in 2005. Instead of telling the writer she had a husband to get home to, she said she was suffering from a migraine. The writer put his hand on her shoulder and said he hoped she felt better. All other physical contacts between Bredfeldt and the writer, clasps and caresses, were initiated by her, typically during conversations in which she pointedly referred to breasts, bras, or panties, her naked body, striptease, or the like. At the conclusion of an earlier meeting in November, Bredfeldt had thrust her face in the writer’s and wagged it back and forth as if to tease a kiss. The writer didn’t respond, because there was nothing romantic about it. That was on the night Bredfeldt returned after attending an out-of-state wedding—her sister-in-law’s (Sara Bredfeldt’s), a detail she omitted mentioning.

A month later, on the evening before Bredfeldt “left the horse boarding facility” (in 2005 not 2006), the writer encountered her loitering in the dark outside of his house—alone. Bredfeldt returned a coffeemaker she had borrowed from him to prepare poultices for her horse’s abscessed leg. During the transfer, Bredfeldt tried to brush the writer’s hands with hers. Bredfeldt and the writer spoke as usual—he remembers talking to her about shooting stars—and the writer’s mother briefly joined them and invited Bredfeldt to a Christmas party. Bredfeldt removed her horse the next day while the writer was at work.

TIFFANY BREDFELDT, during cross-examination by the writer on May 20, 2013:

Bredfeldt testifies on examination by the judge that she has only ever told police officers and judges that the writer “act[ed] in a way that was sexual toward [her].” She “communicated with him that that was not what [she] wanted in the most respectful way that [she] could,” she says, which did not include either informing the writer she was married or wearing her wedding ring.

JENNIFER (OAS-)TERPSTRA, Bredfeldt’s other witness in 2013, a former colleague of hers from her University of Arizona days who went by Jenn Oas when the writer was introduced to her in 2005, in an email to the writer sent April 2, 2012 (a year earlier):

Jennifer Terpstra, Jen J. Terpstra, Terpstra JJ, Jennifer Oas-Terpstra, Jenn Oas, South Texas College, STC

This and the rest of Terpstra’s some two dozen emails to the writer in 2012 have been submitted to the court in multiple cases and are public documents accessible to anyone. Whether the emails have ever been scrutinized by a judge is uncertain. No trial has been conducted since the writer was granted a 20-minute audience before a judge in 2006. The 2013 proceeding from which the focal testimony in this post is drawn was a two-hour “preliminary” hearing. Judge Carmine Cornelio, though he drew the case out for half a year and returned several scalding rulings, found a two-hour hearing to be a sufficient basis for indefinitely depriving the writer of his First Amendment privileges. (When the writer had begun to object in open court to an order that was flagrantly unlawful, the judge threatened to summon security. Among the Arizona Court of Appeals’ stated reasons for denying the writer’s 2017 appeal of the order was that the writer had not “challenged” the judge’s ruling at the time.)

In this email, Terpstra tells the writer she was “stalked [f]or over 8 years [f]rom state to state.” Both Bredfeldt and Terpstra have claimed to be victims of multiple stalkers—including this writer. Bredfeldt, who the writer would be informed four years later has held a black belt in tae kwon do since her teens, came to the writer’s door in 2005 seeking his protection from some “men in a van” who she said had been “stalking” her while she was alone in the dark outside of his residence. Narratives of the “event,” which was unwitnessed and may have had no basis in reality, were circulated by Bredfeldt among other horse boarders on the property where the writer lives. The writer bought a wireless doorbell and installed it by the gate to his yard so that Bredfeldt could summon him quickly in case of a “recurrence.” When he showed it to her, she smiled.

A few months subsequent, when Bredfeldt’s accusations against the writer began, she was reported to have told colleagues that she thought she had seen him around her residence—and at workday’s end would ask to be escorted to her car. In testimony to the court quoted in a postscript to this exposé, Honeycutt, Bredfeldt’s first witness in 2013, says the TCEQ rewarded similar expressions of fear from her by providing her with a private office (“with hard walls and with a door that has a lock on it” in Texas).

JENNIFER TERPSTRA, in an email to the writer sent April 2, 2012:

Jennifer Terpstra, Jen J. Terpstra, Terpstra JJ, Jennifer Oas-Terpstra, Jenn Oas, South Texas College, STC, Carlotta Groves PhD, Carlotta Groves DVM

In this email, sent a year before Terpstra would join Bredfeldt in testifying against the writer, Terpstra says that she “never thought [Bredfeldt] would lie so seriously to everyone” and that she knew Bredfeldt and the writer had been “close,” which remark alone contradicts everything Bredfeldt has told the court in the past decade. Terpstra also says she feels professionally “vulnerable” confiding in the writer but that he “deserve[s] to know the truth.” She suggests the writer “bring a pen and a notebook” to a meeting she proposed so that he doesn’t forget anything.

JENNIFER TERPSTRA, in an email to the writer sent June 3, 2012 (a month and a half after the two met for coffee):

Jennifer Terpstra, Jen J. Terpstra, Terpstra JJ, Jennifer Oas-Terpstra, Jenn Oas, South Texas College, STC

Terpstra told the writer over coffee in mid-April 2012 (when his father and his best friend were still alive, and a settlement could have reversed their decline) that Bredfeldt’s spouse, Phil, was known in their circle as “the phantom husband” and that Bredfeldt had urged her friends to go to the writer’s home to “check [him] out”—besides routinely talked about the writer to an audience of “25 or 30 people” at the University of Arizona College of Pharmacy.

Terpstra says in this email that Bredfeldt never talked about her husband and that she (Terpstra) wasn’t sure she had ever seen the man in person or only seen what she had described to the writer over coffee as a laminated newspaper clipping with a picture of him that was tacked to Bredfeldt’s refrigerator. Terpstra says that based on Bredfeldt’s behaviors in 2005, she judged she had been “considering an affair” with the writer, which wildly contradicts any account Bredfeldt has ever related to anybody.

In the first of the emails Terpstra sent him in 2012, she explained her six-year delay in confiding this to the writer by saying, “I don’t lie or bend the truth [but] I do avoid conflict.”

JENNIFER TERPSTRA, on direct examination by Bredfeldt’s attorney, Jeffrey Marks, on May 20, 2013 (less than a year later):

JENNIFER TERPSTRA, in an email to the writer sent April 1, 2012:

Jennifer Terpstra, Jen J. Terpstra, Terpstra JJ, Jennifer Oas-Terpstra, Jenn Oas, South Texas College, STC

In this email, Terpstra tells the writer she had asked Bredfeldt “to just have the restraining order removed” in 2006. (Terpstra would tell the writer the same thing over coffee a couple of weeks later, saying Bredfeldt had answered, “‘No.’ Just…‘no.’”) In contrast to Terpstra’s statements in this email and the others she sent him in 2012, besides in contrast to an email she sent him in 2007, Terpstra would report to Officer Nicole Britt of the Tucson Police Dept. in 2015 that “in 2005 she and her friend [Tiffany Bredfeldt] met [Todd Greene]. He then became fixated on the two of them and began stalking them.” (According to the same interview notes, Terpstra said this blog was “set up in honor” of her and “dedicated” to her.) A couple of months later (early 2016), Terpstra would report to TPD Det. Todd Schladweiler, who is assigned to the Tucson Police Mental Health Support Team, that she “now carries a handgun due to her concern that [Greene] is a threat to her safety.” Det. Schladweiler also recorded that Terpstra “said she communicated with [Greene] a few times [in 2012] and then he became very sexual in nature” and that Terpstra denied contacting the writer after they met for coffee in mid-April 2012, following which meeting she had insisted the writer give her a hug and then emailed and phoned him for a quarter of a year.

Then students in the University of Arizona College of Pharmacy, Terpstra and Bredfeldt told the writer in 2005, after inviting themselves into his house, that they took “benzos” to relieve stress. The writer asked where they got the drugs. Terpstra (who would marry a former bartender with a cocaine conviction not long afterwards and be charged with DUI in 2011) answered, “From work.” Bredfeldt echoed, “From work.”

Terpstra, who is reportedly diagnosed with bipolar disorder, told Det. Schladweiler she believed the writer was mentally ill. Although Det. Schladweiler was provided with Terpstra’s emails when he arrested the writer on Jan. 5, 2016, the subsequent synopsis of their interview gives no indication the detective spared the emails a glance.

Less than four months after her second police report, in which Terpstra alleged she feared for her safety and was carrying a gun, she would have her home address forwarded to the writer by email in the first of a spate of “copyright infringement” claims that represented her third legal action against him in 2016 and that succeeded in having this blog temporarily suspended by its host. The writer contested the claims, alleging perjury and fraud, and Terpstra declined to litigate them in court.

Terpstra, who has coauthored with Dr. Michael J. Frank, Ph.D., professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences at Brown University, is the daughter of feminist painter Joan Bemel Iron Moccasin (Oas) and was employed as a research specialist in the University of Arizona College of Medicine under psychiatrist Francisco Moreno until 2016, when, after making her sundry false allegations, she left the jurisdiction.

JENNIFER TERPSTRA, on cross-examination by the writer on May 20, 2013:

Jennifer Terpstra, Jen J. Terpstra, Terpstra JJ, Jennifer Oas-Terpstra, Jenn Oas, South Texas College, STC

Over coffee with the writer in 2012, Terpstra complained of financial problems. She also remarked, “Tiffany’s dad has a lot of money.” Tiffany and Phil Bredfeldt’s was a mutually prosperous union of two wealthy, fundamentalist Christian families. Phil Bredfeldt’s father was his best man in 2001; his sister Sara was a bridesmaid; and Tiffany Bredfeldt’s brother, Jon Hargis, was a groomsman. Four years later, Sara Bredfeldt was married to a medical student, Roberto “Bobby” Rojas, who is today an M.D. (Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center in Milwaukee).

Ray Bredfeldt MD, Raymond Bredfeldt MD, Dr. Ray Bredfeldt, Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield, ABCBSTiffany Bredfeldt’s father, Timothy “Tim” Hargis, is or was a bank vice president (First Security of Arkansas), as was his father before him. Phil Bredfeldt’s father, Raymond “Ray” Bredfeldt, is a family physician who practiced privately and besides rented his credentials to Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield for some dozen years. The starting salary for an ABCBS regional medical director is today around $180,000. Dr. Ray Bredfeldt, M.D., had volunteered to join Terpstra in giving witness testimony in 2016 that was meant to induce the court to jail the writer while the writer’s own father, who didn’t graduate from high school, lay dying—in a home in foreclosure. Ray and Ruth Bredfeldt and Tim and GaLyn Hargis have known of what this post details from the start and have temporized for over a decade rather than acknowledge any liability for their families’ ways. “It’s what people like that do,” Terpstra commented to the writer in 2012. (Testifying in 2016, while his father was nearby, Phil Bredfeldt acknowledged on the stand that he was very aware of Terpstra’s 2012 emails. He quoted a post about them. Construing his statements to the court, the only thing that disturbed him about the emails was their contents’ being public.)

The court was told on Dec. 21, 2016, that Terpstra, who was sued to have her evicted from her house the year before, had moved from Arizona to Texas, where Tiffany and Phil Bredfeldt have resided since 2006 (in a house Terpstra told the writer that Tiffany Bredfeldt’s father had bought for them)—and the writer would be surprised if Terpstra’s legal representation in 2016 and 2017 cost her a penny.

JENNIFER TERPSTRA, on cross-examination by the writer on May 20, 2013:

JENNIFER TERPSTRA, in an email to the writer sent June 7, 2012:

Jennifer Terpstra, Jen J. Terpstra, Terpstra JJ, Jennifer Oas-Terpstra, Jenn Oas, South Texas College, STC

JENNIFER TERPSTRA, on cross-examination by the writer on May 20, 2013:

Jennifer Terpstra, Jen J. Terpstra, Terpstra JJ, Jennifer Oas-Terpstra, Jenn Oas, South Texas College, STC

JENNIFER TERPSTRA, in an email to the writer sent June 3, 2012:

Jennifer Terpstra, Jen J. Terpstra, Terpstra JJ, Jennifer Oas-Terpstra, Jenn Oas, South Texas College, STC

Jennifer Oas-Terpstra, whom the writer has met three times in his life and only once in the past decade (and with whom he has had no contact since 2012), brought three legal actions against him in 2016 that each sought to suppress the emails quoted above—emails that today implicate both Bredfeldt and her (and criminal statutes of limitation, like those for false reporting and forswearing, stop running when perpetrators are outside of the state’s boundaries). Terpstra’s actions included a criminal prosecution, dismissed seven months later, in which Bredfeldt was also named a plaintiff, and a restraining order identical to the one Bredfeldt petitioned in 2006, which had inspired this blog and inspired Terpstra to tell the writer in 2012: “I can’t even begin to imagine what the past years have been like for you.” Terpstra’s restraining order was dismissed 20 months later.

Here are the allegations Terpstra made in her affidavit. These ex parte allegations remain a public record indefinitely. Here, in contrast, is how “vindication” from them appears. The writer was told that this handwritten dismissal, which required eight months of appeals to obtain, exists as a piece of paper only and won’t be reflected in the digitized record. Judge Antonio Riojas, who granted the Aug. 25, 2017 dismissal, accordingly recommended that the writer “carry [it] with [him].” His clerk provided the writer with the yellow copy of the triplicate form, the one meant for the plaintiff, who never appeared in court and will never be criminally accountable for her false allegations to the police in 2015 and 2016.

I’ve been doing this for 20 years,” Judge Riojas told the writer, “and I’ve never known a police [officer] or a prosecutor to charge someone for…false reports, no matter how blatant….” He added: “I wish they would, because I think people come in, and they say things that are just blatantly false—and lying.” A false or vexatious complainant “can keep filing as much as [s/he] wants,” Judge Riojas said (costing an attorney-represented defendant thousands of dollars a pop and his or her accuser nothing; application is free to all comers). “There is no mechanism to stop someone from filing these orders.” What may be worse, even a dismissed order, the judge explained, “can’t be expunged” (and anything may be alleged on a fill-in-the-blank civil injunction form, for example, rape, conspiracy to commit murder, or cross-dressing; whether heinous or merely humiliating, allegations that may be irrelevant to the approval of a keep-away order and/or that may never be litigated in court, let alone substantiated, will still be preserved indefinitely in the public record above a judge’s signature). Significantly, Judge Riojas, who is the presiding magistrate of the Tucson municipal court (and a member of the Arizona Judicial Council and the Task Force on Fair Justice for All), agreed that restraining orders were “abused”. Of that, he said, “[t]here’s no doubt.”

(In a given year, there are reportedly 5,000 active restraining orders in Tucson City Court, which recently added an annex dedicated to their administration exclusively—and the municipal court is just one of three courts in Tucson that issue such orders.)

Judge Wendy Million, Tucson City Court

Judge Wendy Million

The reason Judge Riojas had to dismiss the order against the writer, nine months after he requested his day in court, was that the writer had been denied his statutory right to a hearing by Judge Wendy Million, necessitating a lengthy appeal and her admonishment by Superior Court Judge Catherine Woods for abuse of discretion. (Among approximately 15 judges to have been exposed to some aspect of this matter, Judge Woods was the first to return a ruling clearly untainted by political motives, for which she has this defendant’s highest respect.) Judge Million, who twice continued the writer’s hearing until the injunction expired and then nominated the case a “dead file,” notably coordinates Tucson’s domestic violence court and is acknowledged as an editor of Arizona’s Domestic Violence and Protective Order Bench Book. Dismissal of the case was further delayed by Judge Cynthia Kuhn, who was first assigned to the writer’s superior court appeal. Judge Kuhn sua sponte (that is, without being asked) granted Terpstra’s attorney additional time to respond to the writer’s appellate memorandum—and then abruptly recused herself, citing an unspecified “conflict of interest” as the reason.

Terpstra, in the first of the 22 emails she sent him in 2012, had told the writer: “I have this deeply engrained distrust of the law and the courts and avoid them at all cost.” Besides witnessing against him in May 2013, accusing him to the police in Nov. 2015, petitioning a civil injunction and instigating a criminal prosecution a month after that, filing a second police report in Jan. 2016, and threatening to sue him in federal court for copyright infringement 14 weeks later, Terpstra was poised to witness against the writer all over again that summer in the lawsuit brought by Bredfeldt and her husband that demanded the writer be jailed for contempt of the 2013 prior restraint. In between, in 2014, Terpstra prosecuted her husband, alleging domestic violence. A relative of his, who afterwards wept, told the writer in 2016 that she believed the man was relentlessly provoked, which the writer finds more than credible. In a voicemail Terpstra left him in 2012 (in which she tacitly identifies Bredfeldt as a “crazy person” from the writer’s “life book”), Terpstra told the writer someone had “threatened to call the police on [her].” Later, by phone, she clarified that this was another man she had been corresponding with that year—who blamed her for a woman’s suicide.

Tucson attorney Chris Scileppi, attorney Christopher Scileppi

Attorney Christopher Scileppi

Bredfeldt and Terpstra, (carrion) birds of a feather, were represented by the same (criminal) attorney in 2016 and 2017, Christopher “Chris” Scileppi, whose plumage is no different from theirs. Scileppi attained minor notoriety in 2008 for having been given a hug by his “very close friend” the mayor in front of jurors at a rape trial in which Scileppi represented one of the alleged rapists of a 15-year-old girl. Scileppi remarked to the outraged judge: “Courtrooms are open to the public, and I don’t think it is inappropriate when high-profile people come in and show support for somebody who is on trial.” Scileppi’s client was cut free, but the mayor later did a stint in prison for public corruption despite Scileppi’s representation.

Showing the same unscrupulousness during hearings in the 2016 civil case, Bredfeldt v. Greene, Scileppi threatened in open court to prosecute the writer for purported felony crimes (“extortion” and “aggravated harassment,” specifically) to intimidate him into capitulating to Bredfeldt’s censorship demands, then offered to drop the lawsuit if the writer agreed to leave this site invisible to the public and accessible by request only (apparently because his clients’ fear would be eased if they didn’t know what was on the writer’s mind), and finally, as a Parthian shot, directed the judge to jail the writer for the nonpayment of a $350 sanction from 2013 (explained below): “Put him in contempt,” Scileppi said, “and somebody can post a bond and pay that and then he will be released as soon as that bond is posted….

Tucson attorney Chris Scileppi, attorney Christopher ScileppiScileppi, who was suspended for 60 days and placed on six months’ probation in 2014 for violating various ethical rules (ERs), endeavored to convince the 2016 court that the writer had “terrorize[d], demonize[d], harass[ed], and defame[d]” the Bredfeldts, in particular through the use of “[meta] tags” on this blog, that is, keywords that describe its contents. These terms, which haven’t been used by any major search engine in eight years, were alleged to have hijacked the Bredfeldts’ public images on Google and to have “contact[ed]” anyone whose name appeared among them. Because a Google Alert Phil Bredfeldt had “set up” had allegedly been triggered by tags on the blog (in publications to the world at large), that was said to represent illicit “communication [and] contactby the writer with Mr. Bredfeldt and his wife. Scileppi enlisted an information technology expert, “part-time professor” and (criminal) attorney Brian Chase, to loosely substantiate this theory on the stand. Lamely objecting to an eminent constitutional scholar’s weighing in as an amicus curiae (Latin for “friend of the court”), Scileppi also defended the 2013 prior restraint last year before the Arizona Court of Appeals. He told the court that the writer was the liar.

Jeffrey “25% OFF ALL MONTH LONG” Marks, the low-rent opportunist who represented Tiffany Bredfeldt in 2010 and 2013, and is quoted below, represented her in 2016, also, but was hastily replaced after the writer was granted a court-appointed lawyer of his own. Marks, like his replacement, Scileppi, attempted to induce the court to stifle even third-party criticism of Bredfeldt, for example, that of Georgia entrepreneur Matthew Chan, who (aided by Prof. Eugene Volokh) successfully appealed a prior restraint in 2015 in his state’s supreme court and who introduced the writer to the finer points of First Amendment law.

To explain away Terpstra’s emails to the writer in 2012 and the contradictory testimony she gave a year later, Scileppi told Judge Catherine Woods in 2017 that “[i]n the midst of Greene’s harassment of Dr. Bredfeldt, [Terpstra] reached out to Greene and met with him. Through meeting with Greene, Terpstra became privy to his harassment of Dr. Bredfeldt.” In contrast to Scileppi’s claims, which Judge Woods shrewdly disregarded, Terpstra had offered to help the writer settle the conflict with Bredfeldt in 2012 (three months after Terpstra “reached out to [the writer] and met with him”). In an email Terpstra sent the writer on July 18 of that year (the first of four she sent that day), she wrote: “Maybe I can be a go between if the pastor [Jeremy Cheezum, a brother-in-law of Phil Bredfeldt’s] will not. I told Tiffany we met for coffee.” The email ended, “Hoping for the best.” That was the last day the writer heard from Terpstra, who is notably the mother of two college-aged daughters. Desperate to raise money to secure a surgery for his dog to enable her to run and jump again—something else Terpstra had said she was eager to help him accomplish—the writer scarcely gave Terpstra another thought until she appeared as a surprise witness 10 months later and deceived the court for Bredfeldt.

The other friend of Bredfeldt’s the writer met at his home in 2005, Dr. Carlotta Groves, a reported recipient of $740,000 in scientific research grants who uses the alias “Jahchannah” and identifies herself as a “Black Hebrew Israelite” and “servant of Yah,” lives in Arizona but apparently couldn’t be persuaded to give witness testimony for Bredfeldt in either 2013 or 2016. Like Terpstra did in the first of her emails to the writer in 2012, Groves told him in a blog comment around the same time that her own brother had been falsely accused. Terpstra said her brother had been falsely accused of rape and that it had “truly ruined his life.” For 12 years, Groves has done what Terpstra did for six: spectate. Groves, a DVM and a Ph.D. (who “love[s] to read and support aspiring authors!”), works at a low-cost veterinary clinic in Tucson.


Tiffany Bredfeldt TCEQ, Tiffany Bredfeldt PhD, Tiffany Bredfeldt EPA, TCEQ, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, EPA Chemical Assessment Advisory Committee


TIFFANY BREDFELDT, on cross-examination by the writer on May 20, 2013:

TIFFANY BREDFELDT, on cross-examination by the writer on May 20, 2013:

JEFFREY MARKS, Bredfeldt’s attorney, speaking for her in a memorandum to the court filed July 10, 2013:

The difference between Bredfeldt’s attorney’s offhand estimation, “2005 or 2006,” was a year of this writer’s life (and his friends’ and his family’s). The year after the “genesis of this case” was one the writer spent every waking moment conscious he could be arrested without a warrant based on a further contrived allegation by Bredfeldt (in which case the writer’s dog, who was part Rottweiler and vigorously barked at any approaching stranger, could easily have been shot and killed).

Contrary to Marks’s claim, Bredfeldt employed others to tend to her horse’s daily hygiene in 2005. Within six or seven weeks of her installing her horse 30′ from the writer’s residence, it became lame and could not even be ridden, after which Bredfeldt increased the frequency of her nighttime visits.

Karin Huffer PhD, Legal Abuse Syndrome, legal abuse, LASMarks, who boasts of having served as a superior court judge himself, also tells the court in this memorandum, which was captioned, “Plaintiffs’ Response to Defendant’s ‘Chronology of Tiffany Bredfeldt’s 2006 Frauds,’” that “[e]ven assuming arguendo that Plaintiff Tiffany Bredfeldt is a chronic liar, her veracity is totally irrelevant to the necessity to restrain Defendant’s [speech] conduct.” Marks moved the 2013 court to strike the writer’s “scandalous” chronology from the record so that it couldn’t be accessed by the public. The judge, Carmine Cornelio, complied, rebuked the writer, and sanctioned him $350 for filing the brief, despite having invited him to: “Mr. Greene,” the judge had said in open court, “you can file anything you want.” Then the judge permanently prohibited the writer from telling anyone else what that chronology related—including by word of mouth. Bredfeldt’s handmaidens, Honeycutt and Terpstra, said exactly what they knew they should to inspire the illegal injunction. The judge permanently prohibited the writer from talking about them, also, including by reporting the testimony they gave in a public proceeding in the United States of America.

(Last year, two days before the writer’s attorney would file an appeal reminding an American court that citizens of this country enjoy freedom of speech, The New York Times published an editorial on censorship in China adapted from an essay by iconic artist and agitator Ai Weiwei. In it, Ai argues that censorship, an essential tool of oppression, does the opposite of pacify: It stimulates “behavior [that] can become wild, abnormal and violent.” Having to live with lies, as Ai told NPR in an interview in 2013, “is suffocating. It’s like bad air all the time.”)

MICHAEL HONEYCUTT, on cross-examination by the writer on May 20, 2013:

MICHAEL HONEYCUTT, on direct examination by Bredfeldt’s attorney, Jeffrey Marks, on May 20, 2013:

The testimony of “Where’s my mike?” Honeycutt exemplifies how the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality responds to “pretty significant allegations” of ethical misconduct by its scientists: It ignores the allegations…and abets the misconduct.

Under Arizona law, a “false sworn statement in regard to a material issue” is perjury, a felony crime. Honeycutt influentially testified in 2013 that the writer had called Bredfeldt a “fraudulent scientist.” Here, in contrast, is what the writer told Honeycutt in 2011, in a letter that is today a public document.

L'Oreal Stepney, TCEQ, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, censorshipIn the Texas Observer the summer before last, Naveena Sadasivam reported that “Honeycutt sent at least 100 emails to state air pollution regulators, university professors and industry representatives and lawyers asking them to send the EPA a letter supporting his nomination to the Clean Air Science Advisory Committee….” Probably none of them sought to have him silenced on pain of imprisonment for requesting support. In a further instance of incandescent hypocrisy, Honeycutt is quoted in the story as pronouncing: “Ideology is different from science and data.” The reader is invited to consider which master Honeycutt was serving when he testified against this writer four and a half years ago.

After a hearing held on July 15, 2016, during which her husband had testified he was “frighten[ed],” Tiffany Bredfeldt swore in court, “God damn it,” because instead of ordering that the writer be jailed, the judge had stayed the proceedings pending further briefings from the attorneys on the First Amendment. Then, less than a year after the writer had buried his best friend and a few months before the writer’s father would succumb to cancer by starving to death, Bredfeldt laughed. She said Honeycutt had joked that her prosecution of the writer was “good experience” for when she gave expert witness testimony. “That’s something we have to do,” Bredfeldt explained to her entourage.

Copyright © 2018 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

DR. MICHAEL HONEYCUTT, PH.D.:

DR. TIFFANY BREDFELDT, PH.D.:

How Perjury in Restraining Order Cases Is “Incentivized”

SRU

“Perjury in restraining orders is actually incentivized, not only by failing to prosecute it, but by allowing one-person hearings (ex parte) to get the orders originally, a super-low burden of proof to issue orders, no juries, a judiciary which actually gets training from feminist groups about the need for issuing orders, no rules of evidence to keep out unreliable phony stuff like hearsay, and much else. Given all this pro-perjury bias, it is a miracle when an innocent defendant wins.”

—Massachusetts attorney Greg Hession

Mr. Hession says it more authoritatively on his own blog, MassOutrage.com, but here’s what he means, elaborated point by point.

Laws concerning restraining orders, which originated in the ’70s when women complaining of domestic violence had no voice, authorize the courts to hear plaintiffs privately (ex parte) and to issue orders based on nothing more than claims that are often unsubstantiated and may be impervious to proof (or disproof). An allegation of “fear can suffice, and that’s an allegation anyone can make against anyone else (anywhere), truthfully or not, reasonably or not.

Though the justification for ex parte hearings is anachronistic (women certainly don’t lack a voice today), restraining order laws resist overdue reform. Nobody wants to rock a boat captained by politically powerful advocacy groups. (Restraining orders have besides spawned a booming cottage industry with a financial stake in maintaining the status quo.)

In the interest of economy over observation of civil rights (like due process), hearings to finalize restraining orders are both prejudiced and streamlined: no jury (albeit that consequences for allegedly violating an order are criminal), no appointment of counsel for the defendant, no guarantee of the right to cross-examine (which is fundamental to a fair adversarial system), and the extension to trial judges of broad discretionary powers (for example, to curtail a hearing to 10 minutes).

Many respondents to this blog have reported being told by a judge, “I’ve heard enough.” Some report never being afforded a chance to get a word in (and lest anyone imagine otherwise, many of these complainants are women).

Making matters worse, judges are trained by feminist advocates, who often cite tailored “social science” (that may be funded by the Justice Department), making the idea of an “independent judiciary” more than suspect. Courts, too, are issued grant monies under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and have been for 20 years. Judicial bribery is scandalous, but payouts from Uncle Sam are “in the public interest.”

Hearsay” (secondhand evidence with no reliability: “She told me he said,” for example) isn’t just admissible; it’s explicitly authorized by the law.

This is a formula for a lot of jaded, angry people. And if those jaded, angry people express their outrage by exercising their First Amendment rights, they risk being prosecuted for that, too. (If they do it anonymously, they’re mocked as cowards and discredited as cranks and misogynists.)

This villainy persists unchecked and largely unacknowledged by the “free press” or by “rights advocacy groups.” Even the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is circumspect in its criticism, because it has close ties with the feminist community and has long congratulated itself for its contributions toward realizing “equality.”

A process that is not just manifestly unjust, manifestly corrupt, and manifestly indecent is lauded as an “essential protection,” including sometimes by people who’ve been victimized by it.

That’s how strongly we’ve been conditioned.

Copyright © 2016 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*Or blinded.

Evidence of Perjury Cannot Be Used to Appeal a Fraudulently Obtained Restraining Order

Someone once told me that the only value of a lock is to keep an honest man honest.

The value of perjury statutes is exactly the same: They make an honest person extra careful about what s/he tells the court.

To a liar (the person they’re supposed to thwart), they’re just “blah-blah-blah.” Perjury (often recognized as a felony crime) isn’t prosecuted—and for that reason, judges seldom even use the word. If a plaintiff is caught lying, and the lying is significant enough to urge dismissal of the case, s/he may get a stern talking to post-trial. That’s about it.

Restraining order judges make a liberal determination about whether sufficient merit exists in a plaintiff’s claims to warrant upholding a temporary order. Lies irrelevant to that determination may be ignored even if a judge detects them.

Judicial disposition is to credit plaintiffs and suspect defendants, and that’s a high hurdle for a defendant to clear. The defendant also enters the courtroom having been prejudged “guilty.” (Some respondents to this blog report never having been allowed to address the court at all—or being silenced after a few minutes.) Besides their being prejudiced, hearings to finalize restraining orders are, putting it generously, “highly accelerated” trials. Putting it accurately, they’re superficial.

But no allowance for that is made after they’re over.

The only way to have a restraining order that’s based on fraud vacated is to expose lies during the “highly accelerated” trial. That’s why attorney Greg Hession, a strenuous critic of restraining orders (his blog is MassOutrage.com), emphasizes the importance of exposing a plaintiff’s lies and “ulterior motives” during trial: There is no “second chance.”

From Easterling v. Ameristate Bancorp., Inc. (2012):

[I]t is well settled that “[p]erjury in a prior case cannot support a cause of action in a subsequent civil case.” Elliott v. Brown, 2d Dist. Miami No. 10-CA-19, 2010-Ohio-5749, ¶12; see also Costell v. Toledo Hosp., 38 Ohio St.3d 221, 223-24, 527 N.E.2d 858 (1988) (“[A]ppellants have essentially set forth allegations constituting perjury, subornation of perjury, and conspiracy to commit perjury, all of which are punishable under the criminal statutes but which, for public policy reasons, may not be the basis of a civil lawsuit.”).

You can’t appeal a restraining order that succeeded on false evidence on the grounds that it succeeded on false evidence (unless new proof is discovered that you couldn’t have previously brought to the court’s attention). You can’t sue for perjury, either.

Similarly, unless you prevailed at trial, the odds of winning a lawsuit brought for fraud or intentional infliction of emotional distress, for instance, are very low.

You have one window of time in which to expose false accusations (and ulterior motives), and that window is very narrow.

Other countries follow the same policy ours does (in the interest of economy), for example, Canada:

[T]he claim to vacate a judgment on the grounds of perjury cannot succeed unless by new evidence and shewing that the aggrieved party could not by reasonable diligence have been able to discover and bring forward at the trial such new evidence as desired to be presented in the action….

That opinion (in MacDonald v. Pier) was entered almost 100 years ago (hence the antique spelling of showing). It’s etched in stone.

Everyone who’s been fraudulently misrepresented to a judge and railroaded in court is excited to learn the word perjury, because s/he just knew lying under oath had to be a crime.

What s/he might have expected, though, is that perjury, like telling the truth, doesn’t matter.

Copyright © 2016 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*To expose false accusations and ulterior motives at trial, it’s essential that defendants insist upon the right to cross-examine (question) their accusers. It’s one thing to say the plaintiff is lying or to try to show that s/he has lied with evidence; it’s another to actually have the plaintiff admit lies (or contradict him- or herself) on the stand in the presence of the judge.

Legal Abuse and “Learned Helplessness” (Including Commentary on the Mythical Value of “Taking the High Road”)

“Learned helplessness is behavior typical of an organism (human or animal) that has endured repeated painful or otherwise aversive stimuli which it was unable to escape or avoid. After such experience, the organism often fails to learn escape or avoidance in new situations where such behavior would be effective. In other words, the organism seems to have learned that it is helpless in aversive situations, that it has lost control, and so it gives up trying. Such an organism is said to have acquired learned helplessness. Learned helplessness theory is the view that clinical depression and related mental illnesses may result from such real or perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation.”

Wikipedia

I introduced this psychological theory to a judge in 2010 when I filed a lawsuit against a woman who falsely accused me to the police and multiple courts in 2006. The accusations began in March, and before the close of July, she had defrauded at least four judges.

To be falsely accused is bewildering; it savages the mind. To then learn that efforts to expose the truth are met by judges not with keen interest and probing questions but variably with mute indifference, scornful derision, and offhand dismissal—that’s to have it firmly impressed upon you that resistance is futile. Worse, it’s to learn that resistance compounds the frustration and pain.

The system isn’t on your side, and bucking it for many is just an invitation to be scourged afresh.

After attempting some direct appeals to people who, I reasoned, might care more about the truth than the court did (2007), then writing about the business online (2008), then employing an attorney to mediate a resolution (2009), all of which efforts were met with stony silence, I filed a lawsuit (on my own).

That was in 2010. By then, unknown to me, the statutes of limitation on the civil torts I alleged—fraud, false light, defamation, and intentional infliction of emotional distress—had flown. My accuser’s attorney, with mock ingenuousness, wondered to the court why I hadn’t filed my suit in 2006, right after having had the court twice swat down my appeals.

learned_helplessnessI offered the explanation to the judge that people who go through this become conditioned to helplessness (or hopelessness), because process militates against the proposition that a claimant of abuse has engaged in deception. The righteous indignation and outrage of the wronged defendant gradually succumb to the inevitable conclusion that facts, truth, and reason are impotent against fraud and judicial bias. (The defendant lives besides under the constant menace of unwarranted arrest.)

I didn’t know I could prosecute a lawsuit on my own until a legal assistant told me so in 2009, which I also told the judge. I might have been motivated to find out sooner if I’d had the least faith that a judge would heed my testimony.

My accuser’s attorney disdained the explanation for my tardy filing as “self-diagnosis,” and the judge eagerly echoed his assessment and dismissed the case (the court’s interest is in economy, not truth or justice). What was another six months of my life? (Letters from a physician and a therapist, along with witness affidavits, including one from a former cop, made no difference.)

I wasn’t wrong, though. People who defy a rigged system—whether restraining order defendants, domestic violence defendants, or family court defendants—can be conditioned to helplessness, and many accordingly report experiencing posttraumatic stress (which fortifies their distrust and their aversion to further rude scrutiny and contemptuous treatment from the court).

A lesson to take from this is that the “high road” (i.e., trusting in facts, truth, and reason) is a detour to hell. If I had known in 2006 what I know today, I could have extricated myself from my accuser’s false accusations in five minutes by playing the game according to her rules, which were “whatever works.”

The studies from which the term “learned helplessness” emerged were studies of drowned rats and tortured dogs. Playing fair (or aspiring to saintliness by never uttering an ill word against your accuser) is noble, but nobly drowned is still drowned. If an accuser lies about you, denounce him or her as a liar. Similarly, if a process of law is bullshit, call it what it is.

Some respondents to this blog, even after they’ve been through the courthouse ringer, retain a beleaguered faith in ethics. They believe that if injustice is laid bare to a discerning audience by rhetorical appeals to reason and decency, this will spur change. “Our objective is to fix the problem, not the blame” was quoted in a recent comment.

The abstract and impersonal may be informative, but they don’t arouse curiosity, because they don’t inflame the passions; controversy does. Advocates of the “high road” eschew naming names, for example, because it’s aggressive. Avoidance of confrontation, however, accomplishes little and exemplifies “learned helplessness.” The “high road” is safe and tame, and it leads to a dead-end.

The reason restraining order abuse endures is that the abused are paralyzed by indecisiveness. They won’t knuckle down and demand that a flawed process be repealed.

Among people who’ve been damaged by fraudulent abuse of restraining orders and related civil court procedures that are supposed to protect the defenseless, you’ve got, for instance, your liberals who’ll defend the process on principle, because they insist it must be preserved to protect the vulnerable, and they’ll fence-sit just to spite conservatives who flatly denounce the process as a governmental intrusion that undermines family.

Liberals and women who identify with legitimately victimized women feel obligated to “negotiate the gray space” and acknowledge the pros and cons of “women’s law.”

Then you have people (of whatever political allegiance or none) who believe that if you eliminated procedural inequities and ensured that defendants’ due process rights were observed, the system would work fine.

Maybe they believe a process that allows a person in Nevada to mosey into a courthouse, fill out some forms, and accuse a person in Wyoming of “stalking” or “domestic violence,” necessitating that the person in Wyoming hustle him- or herself to Nevada to present a defense within the week, can be made fair, and maybe they don’t know that the same Nevadan can prosecute the same claim over and over against the same Wyomingite (three times, six times, a dozen times, or more).

Maybe they believe that appeals to public conscience will urge the passage of laws that require free legal counsel be provided to defendants.

This would mean that if, say, a million restraining orders are petitioned a year, and legal representation for each defendant in each case could be capped at $2,000 (which might translate to a feeble defense, anyway), state governments would be required to shell out $2,000,000,000 to make everything “fair and square.” But that’s not all. If government gave free representation to “abusers,” advocates for “victims” would demand the same for them. So your $2,000,000,000 would become $4,000,000,000.

That’s per annum. (Also, the hypothetical Wyomingite would still need to travel to Nevada, and who’s paying for that?)

Others believe that if lying (perjury) were prosecuted, that would straighten things out. The costs to prosecute what may be hundreds of thousands of liars a year might be less than $4,000,000,000…or it might not be. Too, how do you prove someone is lying about an emotional state, like “fear”? How do you prove an alleged event didn’t happen?

You can’t, not conclusively, which is what a criminal prosecution requires.

More say appeal to your senator, to the president, to the press…nicely and cogently. They follow a utopian faith that basic decency will prevail if “the problem” is exposed.

As a rhetorical stance, the position has its merits. It suggests calmness and rationality, and calmness and rationality should recommend attention from others. “We’re calm and rational,” proponents of the position imply, “so when we say there’s a problem in need of fixing, it’s calmness and rationality speaking, not anger.”

The limitation is that no one who needs to be convinced has a motive to listen. No one can be made to care about abstractions like equity and due process when in the other ear they’re being cited statistics about epidemic violence.

Everything to do with the law is adversarial. If you seek to revise it without being personal or confrontational, the soonest you can expect a just reward is in the afterlife.

Protesters march on a SlutWalk in Newcastle

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*Splendid writers, particularly Cathy Young, have responsibly and lucidly exposed “the problem” for 20 years in major news outlets. The system has responded with statutes that are broader, laxer, and more punishing.

Litigation Privilege: Why Restraining Order Fraud Is Pandered to and Why the Falsely Accused Are Denied Recourse to the Law for Vindication, Relief, and Recovery of Damages

“Fraud is deliberately deceiving someone else [including a judge] with the intent of causing damage.”

Cornell Legal Information Institute

“Generally, lying during trial (or any other part of litigation) is expected to come out at the time of trial. This means an action against someone for lying during a prior proceeding would fail because even lies are protected by the litigation privilege. You have to catch them at the time; you cannot attack them collaterally (in a different proceeding).”

Attorney Catherine Elizabeth Bennett

Here are examples of restraining order fraud and repeated abuse of process (others are here and here, and comments and posts on this site are replete with them).

Here is the obstacle to obtaining relief from fraud committed by restraining order petitioners that the falsely accused face no matter how high up the judicial chain they muster the fortitude to climb:

  1. So-called protective orders were designed to allow battered women to apply directly to a judge for relief from household violence and intimidation. Their origin harks back to the late ’70s/early ’80s. When these orders were conceived 30 or 40 years ago, domestic violence was hush-hush, and (actual) victims faced alienation from their families for airing dirty laundry in public and rocking the boat. They faced, as well, the possibility of their claims’ being discounted by police or even ridiculed (compounding their misery and humiliation). So the middlemen (i.e., cops and prosecutors) were cut out of the process. Thus could allegations be made and ruled upon in the absence of any investigation. It seemed a reasonable stopgap at the time. Over the decades since, despite radical changes in how claims of domestic violence are received by the public and law enforcement (due in no small part to the investment of billions of federal tax dollars), the standards for substantiating an assertion of victimhood remain lenient, while what qualifies as grounds for a court injunction has steadily broadened. People now get orders against their friends, lovers, neighbors, moms, dads, kids, etc., and violence need not even be alleged; some claim of apprehension usually suffices. The process has morphed from a life-preserver for battered women with no other way out of a hellish situation to a sop to satisfy any complainant who fills out an application. Court policy pretends that anybody who walks into a courthouse with a beef (real or not) deserves a private audience with a judge to shield him or her from the terrors of public scorn or disapproval from the cops. Anyone with an ax to grind, that is, is treated like a battered woman circa 1979. So institutionalized has the process become, and so profitable to so many (both financially and politically), that no one questions whether this is ethical. So the restraining order process has become a game, a game played according to anachronistic rules. Maximum latitude is given to anyone (no fee or i.d. required) to litigate any claims s/he wants in a backroom conference with a judge, and rulings are issued ex parte, which means the person who’s accused is prejudged sight unseen. The due process rights of the accused are scotched. Grants under the Violence Against Women Act will explicitly forbid the use of lie detectors. The dictate is purely rhetorical; it’s meant to stress that what a complainant alleges shouldn’t be doubted. This expectation extends to any petitioner. Hence judicial scrutiny is minimal, and judges may actually bristle when the falsely accused allege that petitioners are lying. This is called fair and just.
  2. The idea behind “litigation privilege,” which basically ensures that whatever a litigant or his or her attorney alleges is protected from liability (from charges of defamation, for example), is the same: Accusers need to feel secure to air “the facts” without fear of prosecution.

The protections sketched above were not put in place to defend the right of any fraudster to falsely allege anything off the top of his or her head against a target of malice in a court of law. Perjury, after all, is a statutory crime. Lying isn’t condoned by the law, but it is swallowed by cops and defended by judges.

They’ve had their priorities impressed upon them in no uncertain terms.

So emphatic is the priority to give accusers the benefit of the doubt that people who’ve been wrongly accused have little or no credibility with judges and absolutely no recourse to sue for damages caused by false allegations (to reputation, employment, enjoyment of life, and health). The court doesn’t recognize there are any damages to being falsely accused of stalking, for instance, or violent threat, sexual harassment, assault, or even rape. False accusations that are dismissed as baseless are harmful enough (the stresses they cause are beyond quantification). When false allegations stick, the guilt of the accused is presumed, and subsequent legal actions they may venture to undertake (lawsuits and appeals) may be summarily tossed for lacking merit. In contrast, the merit of rulings that are typically the products of procedures lasting mere minutes isn’t questioned. Some judges will even hold that accusations litigated in court can’t constitute perjury because of the “litigation privilege” (i.e., because they were uttered in court instead of on, say, Facebook or the radio, they can’t be lies).

Accusers (all of them identified with battered women of 1979) must be free to claim whatever they want without fear of risk or blame—that’s the overriding precept. Translated, this means the court’s position is that people must be allowed to lie and snooker the court as they choose…and anyone who’s lied about be damned.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*From “‘Out of Left Field’: The Litigation Privilege Defense to Adverse Party Suits” by attorney Keith A. Call (emphases added):

Despite some authority characterizing the litigation privilege as “absolute,” it is certainly not without limits. There are some claims for which the litigation privilege is usually not a defense. Such claims may include malicious prosecution, fraud, criminal perjury, suborning perjury, and professional discipline. See, e.g., Hagberg v. Cal. Fed. Bank FSB, 81 P.3d 244, 259 (Cal. 2004) (the litigation privilege “operates to bar civil liability for any tort claim based upon a privileged communication, with the exception of malicious prosecution”); Bushell v. Caterpillar, Inc., 683 N.E.2d 1286, 1289 (Ill. Ct. App. 1997) (litigation privilege does not provide immunity from criminal perjury); Hawkins v. Harris, 661 A.2d 284, 288 (N.J. 1995) (litigation privilege is not bar to professional discipline or criminal perjury); Dello Russo v. Nagel, 817 A.2d 426, 433 (N.J. Super. Ct. App. Div. 2003) (litigation privilege does not insulate against malicious prosecution or professional discipline); N.Y. Cooling Towers, Inc. v. Goidel, 805 N.Y.S.2d 779, 783 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 2005) (refusing to dismiss claims against adverse party’s attorney based on fraud and collusion); Clark v. Druckman, 624 S.E.2d 864, 870-72 (W. Va. Ct. App. 2005) (litigation privilege does not immunize attorney from claims of fraud or malicious conduct).

Understanding the Significance of False Accusations in Restraining Order and Related “Trials”

Misperception of the significance of false accusations is a topic that’s been considered in past posts on this blog, particularly false accusations of sexual assault, which are the only false accusations anyone seems to believe are deserving of mention.

It’s wrong to say that the nature of false accusations doesn’t matter. But more relevant to observing corruption than a consideration of what is alleged is a consideration of how it’s alleged and decided.

Imagine if special courts were convened to judge accused people of a certain type, and imagine if the normal standards of evidence applied to allegations that may impute criminal wrongdoing to them were suspended. Imagine if instead of having to prove they had done what they were accused of, it were enough for a single judge (absent a jury) to “determine” upon a few minutes’ deliberation that the allegations were probably true and sufficiently urgent to merit the court’s intrusion.

These are among recent search terms that brought readers to this site.

If the accused people of a certain type were Jews or African-Americans, for instance, we would denounce these special courts to be an abomination. This kind of discrimination would raise our hackles.

Yet such special courts exist. Restraining order allegations are decided exactly this way, as may be allegations of domestic violence or rape, allegations that can also be made on restraining order petitions. There is nothing that can’t be alleged on a restraining order petition. Yet nothing alleged must be verified.

Now the critic of complaints about the harm of false allegations will chime in at this point and say, yeah, but it’s not like the victim of false accusations decided in a kangaroo court will be served a felony conviction.

Yes…and no. The critic should ask him- or herself what kind of person would maliciously or self-servingly lie about stalking, sexual violation, or violence and then ask him- or herself whether it’s reasonable not to expect more and worse from such a person.

Subsequent false allegations can give people criminal records (possibly, again, without a jury’s ever having vetted the evidence). They can give people criminal records because of the prior lie. A person can find him- or herself deprived of everything, including liberty, based on a tissue of frauds.

My ex-husband used to batter me and then go crawling on his hands and knees through the neighborhood until he reached the hospital or police station, and he would claim I had attacked him. I’d be hysterical, and police would arrest me. This happened repeatedly. […] I was made homeless on multiple occasions. He would involve my family, his family, all of our friends, employers, and university professors, and I was always the bad guy and still am. […] They filed restraining orders against me and claimed I was a danger to everyone; kidnapped my son, my dogs; stole my car at one point; drained bank accounts, PayPal accounts; and sawed locks of my storage unit and took off with everything…and EVERY F[—]ING TIME, police just validated the abuse and continued to terrorize me.

To complicate matters, a ruling on a false accusation can criminalize lawful behavior. So a subsequent allegation against someone can be true, but the alleged behavior that lands him or her in jail might only have been unlawful because of the original false accusation.

She filed a PFA [protection from abuse order] against me in April of 2014. Several months later, I was charged [by the district attorney on two counts of] violating the PFA. (1) My wife read my private password-protected Facebook emails. I asked a friend to contact her ex-husband #2 and tell him what was going on between her and me (he lives in Mexico and was listed on the PFA as one of the people I could not contact). The friend I emailed didn’t contact her ex-husband. In fact, nobody contacted her ex-husband. (2) I drafted a letter to my wife and gave it to my lawyer. My lawyer in turn forwarded it to her lawyer. They claimed this was also a PFA violation. We went to court, and the judge agreed on both counts and sent me to jail for 30 days. [This commenter’s wife was a Mexican national whom he met in March 2013 (Match.com) and married a month later. The PFA was filed after he “got her and her children their immigration papers” and later told her he wanted to divorce her because the marriage was unsatisfactory.]

Appreciate that one false record can be invoked until the end of time. The superficial critic thinks that once a trial is concluded and the framed victim survives his or her licks, the matter is concluded.

Not so. Ignoring the psychological residue for the moment, if the victim of a false accusation is falsely accused a second time, it can now be alleged that s/he has a “history” or “pattern” of abusive behavior, which may influence a divorce or child custody proceeding, a lawsuit, or even a criminal prosecution.

Respondent [—] and Father have a history of domestic violence that includes, but may not be limited to, the issuance of temporary restraining orders in cases […] and the issuance of a permanent restraining order in case […] which was entered by default on January 16, 2015, placing the welfare of the Child at risk. [The “Father” in this case was married to his wife for a brief period before she left and then filed a number of allegations of violence, both with the police and the court, over the ensuing six months. She then committed suicide after being institutionalized. She gave birth to a daughter a couple of months prior whom she had told the father she had miscarried. The father was never heard by a court in his defense but has nevertheless been represented as a serial abuser by the district prosecutor, who has sought to deny him any role in his child’s life.]

Lies that stick…cling, and they can be recycled. Public records don’t expire, and court rulings that impute grave misdeeds, even if those rulings were formed in mere minutes, aren’t questioned. They’re as valid as any other ruling.

Lies that stick, moreover, are entered into public (police) databases, registries that throw up red flags…indefinitely. The person falsely accused of domestic violence, for instance, may be permanently barred from certain types of employment and even, say, from attending his or her daughter’s dance recitals at school.

Defendant was refused jobs, [is] not allowed to attend [or] volunteer [at] her daughter’s school events, [and has had] numerous other rights taken away due to Plaintiff’s Abuse of Process and Fraudulent Allegations and written Affidavit to the Court. This continues today. [This is an excerpt from the draft of a commenter’s “Motion to Expunge,” which she was preparing herself with no legal know-how.]

Again, privations endure permanently, for always, ad infinitum.

The liberal critic who declaims s/he’s for immigrant rights and for restraining orders should be aware that a non-citizen who’s falsely accused in a restraining order proceeding and then accused of violating an order obtained by fraud can be summarily booted from the country: Adios, muchachito (we don’t like your kind here).

Based on lies, people are deprived of their good names, their dignity, their children, their homes, their property, their livelihoods, and their security.

Finally, being lied about and then scorned by cops and lambasted by judges—these traumas last, and they last no less indefinitely than false records do. So on top of everything else, people may be driven out of their minds.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*Public records, besides being permanent, are also public records, and a lie that a judge legitimates is a lie that everyone else will regard as true (e.g., a neighbor, a boy- or girlfriend, a student, a patient, a client, an employer, a loan officer, a landlord….).

Courtroom Fraud and Smear Campaigns: The Full Machiavelli

Cheryl Lyn Walker PhD, Dr. Cheryl Lyn Walker, Dr. Cheryl L. Walker PhD, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Michael Honeycutt PhD, Michael Honeycutt TCEQ

“False Accusations, Distortion Campaigns, and Smear Campaigns can all be used with or without a grain of truth, and have the potential to cause enormous emotional hurt to the victim or even impact [his or her] professional or personal reputation and character.”

—“False Accusations and Distortion Campaigns

There are several fine explications on the Internet about the smear campaigns of false accusers. Some sketch method and motive generally; some catalog specific damages that ensue when lies are fed to the police and courts.

This survey of “adverse impacts” is credited to lies told by people with borderline personality disorder. Conducting “distortion campaigns” isn’t exclusive to BPDs, however, and the “adverse impacts” are the same, irrespective of campaigners’ particular cognitive kinks.

The valuable role of the police and courts in the prosecution of campaigns to slander, libel, and otherwise bully and defame can’t be overstated. They’re instrumental to a well-orchestrated character assassination.

Lies can be told to anyone, of course, and lies told to anyone can have toxic effects. The right lie told in a workplace, for example, can cost someone a job and impair or imperil a career.

Lies told to police and judges—especially judges—they’re the real wrecking balls, though. False allegations of threat or abuse are handily put over in restraining order or domestic violence procedures, and they endure indefinitely (and embolden accusers to tell further lies, which are that much more persuasive).

Among the motives of false accusation are blame-shifting (cover-up), attention, profit, and revenge (all corroborated by the FBI). Lying, however, may become its own motive, particularly when the target of lies resists. The appetite for malice, once rewarded, may persist long after an initial (possibly impulsive) goal is realized. Smear campaigns that employ legal abuse may go on for years, or indefinitely (usually depending on the stamina of the falsely accused to fight back).

Legitimation of lies by the court both encourages lying and reinforces lies told to others. Consider the implications of this pronouncement: “I had to take out a restraining order on her.” Who’s going to question whether the grounds were real or the testimony was true? Moreover, who’s going to question anything said about the accused once that claim has been made? It’s open season.

In the accuser’s circle, at least—which may be broad and influential—no one may even entertain a doubt, and the falsely accused can’t know who’s been told what and often can’t safely inquire.

Judgments enable smear and distortion campaigners to slander, libel, and otherwise bully with impunity, because their targets have been discredited and left defenseless (judges may even punish them for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights and effectively gag them). The courts, besides, may rule that specific lies are “true,” target_of_blamethereby making the slanders and libels impervious to legal relief. Statements that are “true” aren’t defamatory. The man or woman, for instance, who’s wrongly found guilty of domestic violence (and entered into a police database) may be called a domestic abuser completely on the up and up (to friends, family, or neighbors, for example, or to staff at a child’s school).

Lies become facts that may be shared with anybody and publicly (court rulings are public records). Smear campaigners don’t limit themselves to court-validated lies, either, but it seldom comes back to bite them once a solid foundation has been laid.

Some so-called high-conflict people, the sorts described in the epigraph, conduct their smear or distortion campaigns brazenly and confrontationally. Some poison insidiously, spreading rumors behind closed doors, in conversation and private correspondence. As Dr. Tara Palmatier has remarked, social media also present them with attractive and potent platforms (and many respondents to this blog report being tarred on Facebook or even mobbed, i.e., bullied by multiple parties, including strangers).

Even when false accusers’ claims are outlandish and over the top, like these posted on Facebook by North Carolinian Marty Tackitt-Grist, they’re rarely viewed with suspicion—and almost never if a court ruling (or rulings) in the accusers’ favor can be asserted. The man accused in this comment to ABC’s 20/20 is a retiree with three toy poodles and a passion for aviation who couldn’t “hack” firewood without pain, because his spine is deformed. He is a retired lawyer, but he wasn’t “disbarred” and hasn’t “embezzled” (or, for that matter, “mooned” anyone). He has, however, been jailed consequent to insistent and serial falsehoods from his patently disturbed neighbor…who’s a schoolteacher.

For Crazy, social media websites are an endless source of attention, self-promotion, self-aggrandizement, and a sophisticated weapon. Many narcissists, histrionics, borderlines, and other self-obsessed, abusive personality types use Facebook, Twitter, and the like to run smear campaigns, to make false allegations, to perpetrate parental alienation, and to stalk and harass their targets while simultaneously portraying themselves as the much maligned victim, superwoman, and/or mother of the year.

(A respondent to this blog who’s been relentlessly harried by lies for two years, who’s consequently homeless and penniless, and who’s taken flight to another state, recently reported that a woman who’d offered her aid suddenly and inexplicably defriended her on Facebook and shut her out without a word. Her “friend” had evidently been gotten to.)

(An advocate for legal reform who was falsely accused in court last year by her husband and succeeded in having the allegations against her dismissed reports that he afterwards circulated it around town that she tried to kill him.)

I was falsely accused in 2006 by a woman who had nightly hung around outside of my house for a season. She was married and concealed the fact. Then she lied to conceal the concealment and the behavior that motivated the concealment. She has sustained her fictions (and honed them) for nearly 10 years. People like this build tissues of lies, aptly and commonly called webs.

Their infrastructures are visible, but many strands may not be…and the spinners never stop spinning.

The personality types associated with chronic lying are often represented as serpentine, arachnoid, or vampiric. This ironically feeds into some false accusers’ delusions of potency. Instead of shaming them, it turns them on.

I know from corresponding with many others who’ve endured the same traumas I have that they’ve been induced to do the same thing I did: write to others to defend the truth and hope to gain an advocate to help them unsnarl a skein of falsehoods that propelled them face-first into a slough of despond. (Why people write, if clarification is needed, is because there is no other way to articulate what are often layered and “bizarre” frauds.)

I know with heart-wrenching certainty, also, that these others’ honest and plaintive missives have probably been received with exactly the same suspicion, contempt, and apprehension that mine were. It’s a hideous irony that attempts to dispel false accusations are typically perceived as confirmations of them, including by the court. To complain of being called a stalker, for example, is interpreted as an act of stalking. There’s a kind of awful beauty to the synergy of procedural abuse and lies. (Judges pat bullies on the head and send them home with smiles on their faces.)

Smear campaigns wrap up false accusations authorized by the court with a ribbon and a bow.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*The name Machiavelli, referenced in the title of this post, is associated with the use of any means necessary to obtain political dominion (i.e., power and control). Psychologists have adapted the name to characterize one aspect of a syzygy of virulent character traits called “The Dark Triad.”

If You Doubt the Grief Caused by False Accusation, Consider the Whimpers of False Accusers When THEY’RE Exposed

Forthcoming posts on this blog will consider character assassination, and they will critique one of the many execrable ironies of the civil restraining order process. It is possible to falsely accuse a person of anything—literally anything (mooning the neighbors, groping children, chewing the ears off of puppies, rape, you name it)—and the act of false accusation, which is universally deemed a statutory crime (perjury), is not sanctioned by the court. The falsely accused, what’s more, cannot litigate the crime of perjury him- or herself nor apply to the court for relief from the falsehoods or an award for the damages they do, which may include PTSD, loss of home, and financial ruin. But…but if the falsely accused exercises his or her constitutionally protected right to free speech and exposes his or her false accuser, which is his or her only lawful defense (and a feeble one at that), this act may paradoxically be construed as “character assassination” by state prosecutors and judges. This post will ease into the topic of character assassination gently.

An alternative way of understanding the pains inflicted by false accusation, if you’re among the compassionately challenged, is to consider the complaints of those accused of falsely accusing.

They don’t like it much when the table is turned.

A woman I’m in correspondence with and have written about was accused of abuse on a petition for a protection order last year by a scheming long-term domestic partner, a man who’d seemingly been thrilled by the prospect of publicly ruining her and having her tossed to the curb with nothing but the clothes on her back. He probably woke up each morning to find his pillow saturated with drool.

The woman he accused, meanwhile, probably didn’t sleep at all during the weeks of purgatory between the accusation and her hearing. For a while, she had to worry about where she’d be able to sleep.

She successfully had the protection order dismissed and has since publicly exposed her false accuser. She’s also filed a lawsuit and endeavors to have the laws in her state amended so people like her ex face consequences for defrauding the court (which at present they never do…anywhere). After her exoneration in court, she says her ex starting circulating it around town that she tried to kill him.

Now her former boyfriend complains that the stir she’s caused by expressing her outrage in public media is affecting his business, and he reportedly wants to obtain a restraining order to shut her up…for exposing his last attempt to get a restraining order…which was based on fraud.

He feels defamed, you see.

Public exposure is not the same thing as being put on the legal rack, but, oh, how those outed for lying will snivel and pule. They expected their testimony would be neatly kept under wraps, and it’s just…not…fair!

Anyone who doubts or misconceives the torments of legal abuse need only look to the whiners who object to being revealed as its perpetrators to be disabused of illusion.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*First Amendment advocate Matthew Chan, who recently prevailed in a protection order appeal before the Georgia Supreme Court, keeps a constant vigil over what’s said about him by his own accuser, who reportedly began a social media campaign to reboot the conflict after the court ruled against her. Larry Smith, who authors BuncyBlawg.com, was ordered to show cause in 2014 why he shouldn’t be censured for writing about his false accuser, a disturbed woman who complained of grave emotional distress. A sometime commenter here, Sean Heeger, has had a restraining order against him extended, has been jailed, and has had his character and sanity impugned for talking publicly about legal abuse. Neil Shelton, who was jailed for a year, alleges his (now ex-)wife’s divorce attorney, a state congresswoman, conspired to frame him as a terrorist to shut him up after he ridiculed her on Facebook for her efforts to frame him for various violations of a restraining order obtained on false grounds (Neil represented himself in six hearings and each time won). Though Neil’s case is extreme, cases like these are exceptional only insofar as the victims of legal abuse have elected to speak out.

In Its Condemnation of the Men’s and Fathers’ Rights Movements, the Southern Poverty Law Center Has Institutionalized Bigotry and Hate (Including Racial Bigotry and Hate)—Here’s How

There are prominent voices on the Internet, in the ivory tower, and in the press that disparage the plaints of fathers who are alienated from their children by lies and legal abuse, and denied roles in their kids’ lives. They call these fathers’ ventilations of despair and anger “misogynist,” and they look no further.

This post criticizes one such voice, possibly the loudest among them.

The Southern Poverty Law Center equates complainants of legal abuse—male ones, that is—with racists, and it’s taken seriously. It commands social prestige based on its illustrious history of combatting racial hate and violence.

I hope the outraged title of this piece reaches its attention, because the story below exemplifies a modern manifestation of racial bigotry and violence, and it’s one the Southern Poverty Law Center scoffs at and ridicules.

It’s one the Southern Poverty Law Center vociferously fortifies.

The following account, which echoes others and which includes a casual assault of a black man by police based on false allegations by his white wife, was submitted to this blog on April 27, 2015, by a father of two young children who is not a violent man; he just misses his kids and is in perdition. (What this man will be five years from now—or whether he will be five years from now—is another question all together. A man may be taunted like a dog chained to a post. Then when he snaps, there are those content to judge him mad and urge that he be put down.)

Advocacy groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center presume to blame without listening to the details. This is what the details sound like (trigger alert: real life):

Hello. Anyone out there who can help a man who is at the saddest hour of his life? For I feel life is not even worth living at this point due to the evil and malicious acts of my wife.

We had been talking about a divorce for the last year and a half as we have been married for four years and been together since we were 22—for 16 long years. We have a two-year-old and seven-month-old, both baby boys. My wife has rage issues and extreme hormone issues…and she’s clearly depressed, and I cannot help her anymore.

When our marriage became a sexless one, we agreed we were just roommates taking care of the children until we started our divorce. My wife was contacted by a jealous woman who wanted to destroy my life because I would not leave my wife to be with her. She told my wife all sorts of lies. The next day, my wife filed for divorce but also filed a fake restraining order to ensure I burn in hell, and it’s working.

My wife didn’t come home with the kids on Friday evening after picking them up from daycare. No calls, no answer, nothing. I called daycare, and I was advised that my wife picked the kids up with her mother around 4 p.m. We live in L.A., and her mother lives in Ohio, so I was like, “Her mother? I didn’t know she was in town.” It’s now about 11:30 p.m., so I call the hotel her mother usually stays at around the corner on Sunset Blvd. My wife answers and says, “My mother came in town to help us. She’s concerned about us.”

I told her to bring the kids home because she didn’t pack any Pampers or a change of clothes for them. She said, “I’ll be home in the morning.” The next day, they still were missing. I left to run errands, and my wife called about 6 p.m. saying she was back home. When I got back home, the locks to my front door were changed. I banged on the door demanding to be let into my own house and see my boys. Her mother, who was visiting, said, “Go away. She doesn’t want you here.”

I called the cops and went downstairs to wait.

When they arrived, a cop instantly started attacking me and beating me. I screamed, “I called you to help me get in my house!” He was rude, beat me and cuffed me, then put me in the back of a patrol car. I was in there for about 20 minutes.

Finally, I was let go—un-cuffed, bleeding, stepping out of the police car—and her mother is outside the police car and says you’ve been served, and hands me a packet of paperwork. I thought WTF? a divorce, cool, no problem, but it was a restraining order claiming I had done physical violence to my wife for years and years. I never ever breathed too hard on my wife, so how could she make such claims? I lost my breath for a few seconds in disbelief.

I had to leave my house as was, no money, in flip-flops and shorts, no credit cards, no suits for work, no children, no food, nothing. I was threatened with jail if I even tried to call her or stopped at my boys’ daycare. My hearing wasn’t for another 25 days.

I thought, what can I do? This is hell being homeless, but most of all I am the full-time dad and mom to our boys. I do all the cooking, cleaning, dishes, shopping, putting to bed, baths, everything. My wife has given the boys a bath maybe three times in their entire lives. She wakes up at 6 a.m. and leaves out the door while I wake up and bath the children, change Pampers, fix breakfast, dress them, dress myself in a three-piece suit , take them to daycare, and then work 11 hours at the office. My wife picks them up at 6 p.m. from daycare, then I’m home at 7 to fix dinner, put the children to bed, clean, and finally sit down about 11 when my day is complete.

I survived the 25 days of being homeless, living in hotels and racking up around $12,000 in debt, including the cost of an attorney for the hearing. The hearing was going great, my wife getting caught up in lies, backtracking, bringing up events where I might have pushed her on the bed in 2012 or dropped a cup that she stepped on in 2013…or told her I’m going to kill her every day. Yeah, right! No proof, no police reports, no police calls, no telling a friend, no nothing, just her words against my words and phone records.

I thought about all the women getting punched in the head, slapped in the mouth, and living in total fear of their husbands and how it must really suck to live like that. Then I stared at my wife on the stand lying about getting pushed on the bed years ago and saying that she was afraid for her life but still having stayed in the house every night and eaten my cooking and commanded me to be her slave.

The judge still sided with her and issued a permanent restraining order allowing me 18% visitation rights to my kids, my flesh and blood. My boys were dying to see Daddy. It’s been a month. She’s getting child support, too. I have 18% visitation, and I can’t even call my wife. I got a move-out order, but my wife and her mom made moving out hell and even called the cops because they thought I was taking some money secretly stashed in the house. I didn’t even collect my things before I was blocked in the driveway by my wife and her angry mother.

I am a black man, and my wife is white. It doesn’t go well for black men in my position.

[…]

I just had a chance to see my boys this last weekend on Saturday and Sunday from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. I cried like the world had given me the moon when my two-year-old held onto my neck for 10 minutes and said, “I miss you so much, Dada.”

I now feel so much anger and helplessness. It was heart-wrenching that a woman could be this evil to take the boys away from a man like me. All the deadbeat dads, and my kids are my only focus in life. I’m a CPA for a corporation. My wife lied, lie after lie after lie on the stand, and then even cried after lying that she was not a professionally trained actress three times until my attorney asked, “Are you a paying member of the SAG organization [Screen Actors Guild]?” Then she finally said, “Why, yes, I am, ha-ha.”

It’s killing me not to have any rights. I feel like my world has been turned upside down without my boys with me every day. I’m struggling, still living in hotels, blowing money left and right just to sleep. My car is full of clothes, and legal costs are mounting. I feel like jumping off a bridge as this woman’s evil portrayals of me are irreversible.

Now what do I do? I can’t take it. I’m going to lose my mind and snap.

I’d rather she put a gun to my head and pull the trigger than put me through lies and manipulation of the court and hurt my boys, who go insane when I have to drop them back to their mother. It’s most disconcerting to listen to a 65-year-old white judge tell me that I have 18% of my flesh and blood over he-said-she-said and not one ounce of proof at all. The judge was Judge B. Scott Silverman, Los Angeles Superior Court. Please help me, God. Please Please Please.

Thank you for reading.

The Man Who’s Dying Slowly

Contrast the impassioned story above with this antiseptic one: “Claims and activities associated with the men’s rights movement have been criticized by scholars, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and commentators. Some sectors of the movement have been described as misogynist” (Wikipedia).

The Southern Poverty Law Center doesn’t lynch people; its advocacy inspires a social and legal atmosphere of intolerance and civil rights violations that urges people to lynch themselves. The difference is instead of bedsheets’ being worn by a mob, they’re knotted into nooses by lonely, isolated individuals forlorn of hope.

The result is the same.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*As of this writing, the top tier members of the senior program staff of the Southern Poverty Law Center are eight affluent whites/Jews (most of them female) and one black woman, Lecia Brooks. Ms. Brooks is the “outreach director,” i.e., the group’s public face.

Courthouse Violations and PTSD: What Is “Legal Abuse Syndrome”?

This is the first post on this blog to introduce Legal Abuse Syndrome (LAS), a condition proposed by marriage and family therapist Karin P. Huffer, whose books on the subject of posttraumatic stress stemming from court-mediated violations are Overcoming the Devastation of Legal Abuse Syndrome (1995) and Legal Abuse Syndrome: 8 Steps for Avoiding the Traumatic Stress Caused by the Justice System (2013), and Legal Abuse Syndrome: A Preventable Public Health Problem (2018).


“Anyone who has ever worked in a legal aid office or law library has met people whose lives have come unhinged after a bad contact with the legal system. The details vary—they may have lost a business or inheritance or the custody of a child—but the common theme of feeling violated by the legal system does not. Even 20 years after losing a lawsuit, some people who suffer from Legal Abuse Syndrome still carry a suitcase of old legal papers around, desperately hoping someone will help them find justice.”

—Ralph Warner, quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle (1997)

I’ve encountered the ghostly men and women described by Mr. Warner in the epigraph. They haunt law libraries the way some exiles haunt coffeehouses or used to haunt bookstores. They carry sheaves of papers, foxed file folders, and weathered satchels, just as Mr. Warner describes. They’re known to one another and exchange muted greetings and tinny words of encouragement.

They desultorily pore over computerized case law and weighty reference tomes—whether pursuing a lead or just out of habit, it’s impossible to tell—and they propound among themselves novel approaches to revisiting one or another of the dusty judgments that have plainly come to consume their lives.

The eager young law students who mill and toil never cast a glance in the direction of these damned souls, who palpably emanate doom.

Maybe I’m a fatalist, or maybe I was smart enough to recognize a fix when I saw one. A few self-navigated trips through the legal ringer were enough to cement in me a sense of futility. Otherwise, I suppose I might have found myself among this skeleton crew.

After my most recent pelting in that burlesque show advertised as process of law (2013), I resolved to stick with what I know: writing. I have no illusions that this makes me any more a master of my fate than if I clung to a corner and allayed my outrage by rocking back and forth and muttering imprecations, but the activity provides a sense of purpose, however lackluster, and bestows a semblance of order to my inner world (my outer world is a hopeless shambles from which the writing blessedly distracts).

I surface now and again to discover people I knew have aged, have entered puberty or college, have married or divorced, or have died.

Elucidating the trauma that forces a person to exchange living for some deranged form of solace like prating in a blog in defiance of a juggernaut is all this initial post on Legal Abuse Syndrome aspires to. For this, I defer to Dr. Huffer (though anyone who has tracked posts and comments here will find significant correspondences between their positions and hers):

LEGAL ABUSE SYNDROME (LAS) is a form of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is a psychic injury, not a mental illness. It is a personal injury that develops in individuals assaulted by ethical violations, legal abuses, betrayals, and fraud. Abuse of power and authority and a profound lack of accountability in our courts have become rampant, compounding an already stressful experience.

This stress can and does lead to physical illness. AMA statistics show that around 85% of all physical illness is directly attributable to stress. Legal Abuse Syndrome is a public health menace in this country. It leads to massive medical intervention costs, burdens insurance companies, and adds to Medicare and Social Security costs. Most painfully, it crushes the brilliance and creativity of its sufferers. Legal Abuse Syndrome is detrimental to all of society, and nobody is immune.

Whatever the court setting, whether it is regarding divorce, child custody, parental support, probate matters, personal injury, property disputes, legal or medical malpractice, criminal charges, or other deeply personal issues, the frauds put forth in our courts add greatly to the trauma. When litigants are unable to get fair resolution to their issues, when the court dysfunction further adds to the litigant’s burden, when no amount of actual case law compels an equitable outcome, litigants suffer often disabling levels of stress. When further attempts to achieve redress fail, litigants display the hallmark signs of Legal Abuse Syndrome (LAS).

I’ll conclude with a refrain that has become trite with repetition: The thesis Dr. Huffer’s statements delineate was put forward decades ago, like so many arguments from journalists, jurists, and other social critics against a heedless and unyielding status quo that has prevailed for far too long.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*The concept of Legal Abuse Syndrome was brought to the attention of this writer by investigative journalist Michael Volpe, coauthor of Bullied to Death: The Chris Mackney Story.

“She Said That I Had Been Burning Him Intentionally and That I Had Kidnapped Him”: Aaron’s Story of Restraining Order Abuse

The account below was recently submitted as a comment to BuncyBlawg.com, a site I’ve mentioned in several recent posts. Its administrator, Larry Smith, a former attorney, has been waging a one-man war on corruption excited by his relentless persecution through and by the legal system since 2011.

Aaron’s story is one of a spiteful ex-partner whose false allegations orbit popular themes: fear, emotional torment, stalking, and other (unprovable) crimes and misdemeanors that become more sensational and incriminating over time.

What makes Aaron’s story exceptional is that it has a reasonably happy ending, because the court saw through the lies.

In Aaron’s own words (lightly edited):

In my accuser’s affidavit, she repeatedly used “deathly afraid” and spoke of the medications she was on due to three years of stalking by me, vicious verbal abuse of herself and her family by me, and my stalking her where she works, shops, and lives. She claimed to have video surveillance of me following her into a grocery store. She even claimed to have a police report where I was “caught” sitting behind her home at 10 at night, etc.

She was granted an ex parte restraining order lasting two years.

Of course, none of it was true, none of her evidence existed, and the family that I had supposedly verbally abused didn’t even come to court. There was no police report, nor was there a surveillance video, because I didn’t have time to subpoena it; and had she brought the video, it would’ve shown her following me into the store she knew I was going to be at because I told her I was going to get groceries there at an exchange of our son. Had this video been brought to court, it would’ve conflicted with her affidavit.

On top of all of that, I brought in three copies of 40 pages that had every text message we had sent to each other for the previous two years in chronological conversation format. In these texts, two months prior she was inviting me into her home for “dessert” and asking to borrow money from me. Six months prior, she offered to loan or sell me her other car because I was having mechanical problems with my Jeep. These and other very common things. The texts also contained many instances of very immature ranting and attempts to create animosity and intensify disagreements into arguments, which I never fell for and always just said what needed to be said for our son’s sake. I never cursed or belittled her, though to someone like this the truth hurts.

After several hours, the judge shut the whole thing down, dismissed the order, and gave her a stern lecture. All this and no charge of perjury against her! One week later, she was granted an ex parte OFP on behalf of our then three-year-old son by a different judge in the same county! Same style of affidavit.

She said that I had been burning him intentionally and that I had kidnapped him.

He did have a burn about half the size of a pea on his finger, because he had touched a hot pot on the stove. I didn’t kidnap our son. She didn’t show up to pick him up! Since she was issued an OFP on behalf of our son, she was then afforded the services of a battered women’s and children’s center. She signed me up for psych evals and supervised visitation only with our son. Her instructions to law enforcement in her application were to arrest me for kidnapping and return her son to her.

Once again I proved the entire thing to be a lie. It was dismissed entirely. STILL NO CHARGES FILED AGAINST HER FOR PERJURY! Just stern words from a judge toward her and even a bit directed my way in that the two of us needed “to learn each other’s triggers and steer clear of conflict that needed to be sorted out by the courts”! I had to share custody with her for two more years and attempt to co-parent with her.

Our son is six now, and he lives with me and goes to her every other weekend. I had to use kindergarten as a guise to change our custody agreement. Although I am very thankful the courts named my home as our son’s primary residence, the court’s impotence to prosecute liars and the horrifying parenting that has to take place before they’ll change rights are despicable! I do think it is far worse to be a self-consumed person than to be a target of one, though. Karma is on our side.

This blog definitely gave me great insight into other people’s struggles outside of my own and opened my eyes to some of the types of people who abuse the system. I never could’ve imagined how easy and common it is until it happened.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Why Women Who Are Falsely Implicated as Abusers Have No Defenders

Women who are ravaged by false allegations of domestic violence or “violence-related” offenses—whether in civil restraining order prosecutions, or in domestic violence or family court cases—are a minority among the targets of lies.

Hunt up comments by female victims on the e-petition “Stop False Allegations of Domestic Violence,” and there’s a good chance those comments will contain an emphatic line like “This happens to women, too.”

Men who’ve been falsely accused may be unaware that the community of the damned includes members of both sexes. The women who support those men—e.g., girlfriends, wives, sisters, or mothers—may also be unaware. Alternatively, their compassion may be numbed by the consciousness that restraining order, stalking, and domestic violence laws exist for women, or their compassion may be jaded by the conviction that when women are falsely accused of abuse, the implications aren’t as severe, which may be true.

This doesn’t mean, however, that the women who are falsely impugned feel any less anguished, betrayed, mortified, or indignant. Psychic pain is subjective, and the privations than ensue from false allegations of abuse—loss of access to children, property, home, employment, etc.—may be exactly the same, whether the accused is male or female.

What we call “society” doesn’t care to acknowledge that laws enacted to curb violence against women are ever abused to inflict harm (this “society” is really the people who mold public opinion, like government reps, journalists, and various talking heads on TV; society proper only knows what it’s told). Men who’ve complained of judicial crookedness and mistreatment for years or decades are still widely discounted, dismissed, or openly derogated in accordance with established dogma.

The phrase men’s rights continues to be framed with quotation marks (often contemptuously), and that includes in the mainstream press. Those who advocate for “men’s rights” may be called “rape deniers,” “anti-feminists,” or simply “misogynists.” Men’s rights activists have achieved some sympathetic traction, particularly recently, but popular admission that “women’s law” is easily and widely exploited by fraud is still a ways off.

Admitting, then, that women are destroyed by laws that are supposed to protect them is, for a host of reasons, taboo. Acknowledgment that the laws are doing the opposite of protecting women would mean their justification is false. It would besides implicate the system itself in the abuse of women, and be politically embarrassing and compromising,

If it were admitted, finally, that processes for women can be abused to falsely incriminate them, this question would inevitably follow: How much easier must it be for those processes to be abused to falsely incriminate men?

Feminists and feminist-oriented rights advocacy groups like the ACLU can’t afford to speak on behalf of female victims of procedural abuses, because that would be to call attention to the lax standards, inherent biases, and general corruptness of policies they’ve championed (and for which they congratulate themselves). It would be to discredit “all they’ve accomplished.” Criticizing victimized women would likewise be to their discredit. So they just avert their eyes.

Men who complain of procedural abuses are broadly lumped together and demonized as a group; women who complain of the same are exiled to their own private hells.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Scapegoating: All Violence against Women, Including Rape, IS Punished—It’s Just Not the Guilty Who Necessarily Bear the Blame

Many of the posts published here in 2014 concern how we talk about violence against women.

Criticism of anti-violence rhetoric and policies is sternly denounced or dismissed, including by mainstream, populist writers. Toeing the line of political correctness, they call such criticism “denialist.” To criticize anti-rape zealotry, for instance, is said to mean a critic is a “rape denier.”

This is what the late William F. Buckley called rebuttal by epithet.

Name-calling isn’t an argument. But it’s easier than thinking—and when it identifies you with the in-crowd, it’s congenial, besides. Using epithets like “rape denier” is PC; it makes you one of the team.

The fact is the people who are said to “deny” rape are often the people who bear the blame for all of the rapists and domestic tyrants who never receive the punishment they’re due, and never will.

I had a brief but enlightening conversation years ago with a detective in my local county attorney’s office. I called to report perjury (lying to the court) by a restraining order petitioner. He sympathized but said his office was too preoccupied with prosecuting more pressing felonies, like murder, to investigate allegations of perjury.

His evasion wasn’t the enlightening part.

The enlightening part was this: He opined that the reason why judges so eagerly gibbet restraining order defendants is that they’re straw targets. They’re available scapegoats.

Realize that judges have been told for decades that physical and sexual violence against women is “epidemic,” and the alert status has never been downgraded from red. Judges, furthermore, are hardly insensitive to the expectation placed upon the justice system to arrest violence against women—or to statistics that say a majority of rapes are never reported, let alone punished.

Judges can’t act independently of allegations; they can only exercise wrath upon those who are implicated as abusers…and they do. Physical and sexual violence that’s said to go unpunished is punished—by proxy.

Proving rape in a criminal proceeding is exceedingly hard. There are seldom witnesses, and evidence can be highly uncertain, besides being ephemeral. Because rape is a serious crime punishable by a lengthy prison sentence, the evidentiary bar is high, so rulings can predictably disappoint. Rapists, even when they are reported, may escape justice.

Those accused in civil court, though, are fish in a barrel. Judges are authorized to decide restraining order cases according to personal whim. There’s no “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” criterion to satisfy, and they know they have the green light to rule however they want.

How they’re predisposed to rule shouldn’t be a mystery.

Restraining order defendants aren’t exclusively male, but most of them are of the demonized sex. Courts, what’s more, proceed by precedent, and judges act habitually. So female restraining order defendants face judicial vigilantism by association. Restraining order recipients are trussed targets, and they bear the brunt of society’s lust for vengeance, because they can be made to.

Criticism here and elsewhere of how we talk about rape and domestic violence doesn’t deny that they occur. It urges, rather, that the influence of rhetoric be recognized and that its fervor be tempered. Violent rhetoric, no less than physical violence, destroys lives.

The person who believes otherwise is the one in denial.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

You Can’t Sue for Perjury: Why Targets of Restraining Order Fraud and Other Procedural Abuses Based on Lies Get Screwed and Stay Screwed

The postscript (P.S.) to a series of comments left on the blog this week by the stepmother of a man who was falsely accused of violence asks whether he could sue his ex-girlfriend for lying.

The details, as the stepmother reports them, are these:

  1. Man and woman, who aren’t married, were together for four years and have a one-year-old daughter.
  2. During the term of their relationship, no reports of any kind of domestic conflict were made to authorities.
  3. The woman has heart disease (diagnosed as “congestive heart failure”) and can only perform minimally stressful activities, so this had typified the couple’s daily life: The man “gets up [at] 5 a.m., feeds [the] daughter, changes [her] diaper, makes his lunch, and heads to work. [He] gets home around 4­–4:30, and she is still in bed [and the] baby is still in [the] same diaper from that morning. […] He cleans, cooks, [does the] dishes [and] laundry, bathes [the] child, and heads to bed—and [the woman] bitches ‘cause he rolls over and goes to sleep.”
  4. On or about December 13, 2014, the couple “got in an argument, and she moved out, taking [their] child with her. She then texted [the child’s father] saying she was taking [the] child and moving to Oregon and he [would] never see [his] daughter again.”
  5. The woman then returned home to retrieve her belongings, “and when she went downstairs, he went out [the] door with [the] child. She freaked out. [Two] days later she filed a protection order saying all these lies about him…and he had to give [the] daughter back.”
  6. The woman, with her dad’s help, then relocated to Oregon with the child.

Among the woman’s allegedly false statements, apparently made to the police before she prepared to abscond with the child, was that the man pushed her into a fish tank, which it’s reported she actually slammed with her fist in a fit of rage while the man’s back was turned. Since the woman’s knuckles were plainly lacerated from punching glass, no arrest ensued. According to the man’s stepmother, the woman lied similarly to procure a protection order a couple of days later.

The stepmom wants to know if her stepson can sue his girlfriend for lying under oath. The answer, which is no, exposes why lying to the court is so effective, besides being easy.

Quoting “The Rule against Civil Actions for Perjury in Administrative Agency Proceedings: A Hobgoblin of Little Minds” (University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 1983):

“No action lies to recover damages caused by perjury.” If A is injured by the false or misleading testimony of B in a judicial proceeding, A cannot maintain an action for damages against B; A can obtain relief only by a direct attack on the judgment. So it was at common law, and although some observers have called for its abandonment, courts today are unanimous in following that ancient rule.

Tennessean and fraud victim Betty Krachey has launched a petition to urge her state to punish lying.

Appreciate that a corollary of that “ancient rule” is that if someone who’s lied about in a judicial proceeding lapses into suicidal despondency and kills him- or herself, his or her loved ones have no legal recourse. If you publicly mislabel someone a stalker, child molester, or batterer, for instance, outside of court, and that person kills him- or herself, you can be sued. But if the same end results from false allegations you make in court, you get away scot free.

Perjury—that is, knowingly lying to the court about influential facts—is a “serious criminal offense,” as a law student from South Africa recently remarked in a comment about a case of restraining order fraud that emerged in her country’s popular press. In many if not most jurisdictions in the U.S., perjury is a felony.

Punishment for it, however, can only follow its prosecution by the district attorney’s office, which rarely initiates perjury proceedings and only does so in slam-dunk cases of prominent interest like misconduct by public officials. Private litigants can sue for damages caused by the commission of other crimes—murder, for example—and they can sue for slanders and libels made outside of court. They can’t, though, sue for damages caused by lies told in judicial proceedings, no matter how injurious those lies might be.

The reason why, basically, is that the system likes closure. Once it rules on something, it doesn’t want to think about it again.

Consider what would happen if Person A lied about Person B, and Person B were authorized to sue Person A for lying. This would open the door for Person A to turn around and claim Person B lied in the second proceeding and sue Person B back. Person B could then pursue another action that alleged Person A lied about Person B in the third proceeding, and on and on ad infinitum.

While this would force the court to pay more than a lick of attention to the facts and also motivate it to drop the hammer on liars, it’s messy and time-consuming. So it’s rejected in the name of economy—and damn the consequences to people who are lied about.

This policy is among the reasons why restraining orders should be repealed.

Temporary orders are issued upon a few minutes’ prejudicial deliberation (really none at all). A petitioner goes to the courthouse, fills out some paperwork, and has a chitty-chat. If the accused doesn’t appeal, the court’s entire application to the case will have been those few minutes (sandwiched between stifled yawns). Even when a defendant does appear in court to contest allegations against him or her, judicial “review” of the matter may be less than 30 minutes.

On the basis of this brief “review” (which is often merely theater), a person like the man in the story above can be branded a “domestic abuser,” have his or her name entered into state and national police databases (permanently), and be denied contact with his or her child (besides potentially being denied credit, leases, and jobs, and having to indefinitely endure the agony and humiliation of being re-judged for something s/he didn’t do). S/he can also be made to pay court costs for having his or her life torn apart by lies.

A person like him, who can be male or female, can attack the false judgment in a further appeal—provided s/he has the emotional and financial resource—but s/he can’t seek redress for fraudulent testimony given in evidence against him or her.

That would inconvenience the court.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Smile, You’re on Candid Camera: Bringing a Measure of Accountability to Restraining Order Trials

Many if not most of the posts on this blog concern the absence of accountability in the restraining order process. Accusers lie, and so may judges.

State law often designates lying in court a felony offense punishable by a term in prison, and there are ethical canons that prescribe how judges should behave.

With regard to the honest representation of facts in court, however, both accusers and judges fudge (and that’s putting it mildly). Each may frame facts to produce a favored impression.

Lying in court, even if it’s discerned, is never called “lying”—which isn’t to say judges never tacitly express disdain or disgust. Frowns, scoffs, and scowls, though, aren’t picked up by microphones or preserved in trial transcripts.

Judges know the system would fall apart if they began acknowledging in the record that accusers lie, so lies are generally talked around if they’re remarked at all. No one, furthermore, reviews testimony afterwards to detect lies or material contradictions (which constitute “perjury by inconsistent statements”).

Consider how different things might be if courtroom procedures were recorded on video. Just consciousness of scrutiny puts people on notice. It triggers a primal alarm.

The knowledge or fear that we’re being watched exerts a disciplining influence on how we behave. Park an empty cop car on a street corner, and suddenly people are mindful of traffic signs. Rules are obeyed without anyone’s having to tell us to obey them.

Park a camera in a courtroom, and count on it that judges would be a lot more conscious of their performance and how their acumen stood to be perceived by others. Liars, too, would likely be a good deal warier of being caught out.

Making frauds visible, what’s more, and available for airplay would pressure district attorneys to treat lying like the serious crime it is. The concern wouldn’t be that some shaming video soundbite would appear; the concern would be what if.

Exceptions to video-recording testimony could be made in criminal trials when a witness might be inhibited or endangered by it. Since civil restraining order trials are regarded as no big deal, anyway, however, there’s much to recommend this simple, inexpensive measure to enhance accountability without having to do anything at all.

True, a possible negative consequence of cameras in court might be that the bench would only attract hams and blowhards.

Would anyone, though, notice a difference?

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Retracting False Allegations to the Court

Apologies are offered upfront to the reader expecting a tutorial on how to recant false testimony (though here is an explication about how a restraining order may be dismissed by a petitioner who has reconsidered).

The reason this post must disappoint is that to withdraw false allegations would be to confess to lying to the court and would, as well, be to require that the court acknowledge it was snookered. Hence is copping to lies a doubly taboo subject.

A thorough scouring of the Internet for a simple how-to on retracting false allegations to the court will reward an earnest inquirer with virtually nothing.

The fact is that in America, Land of the Brave Knave, the most fundamental legal precept is admit nothing. Application of that precept apparently extends to the court itself, whose officers may practice moral contortionism sooner than own on record that lies are ever detected.

Their reflex, when no amount of revision can redeem a false allegation, is to talk around it or reach for a nonjudgmental word like unfounded or baseless. Complainants never lie; at worst, they err.

The question remains, however, of how “errant” testimony may be retracted.

This writer proposes that since judges provide false accusations with the agency to work their pernicious effects on untold people’s lives, a judge should be the one to fill the informational void presently under consideration.

The judicial impulse to frame rulings according to personal conceptions of “right behavior” must surely reject the qualification of lying as conscionable conduct. Arrogating to themselves the right to prescribe rules for how others should behave, besides, presumes judges have faith in their intelligence. They must therefore know false accusations are made even if it’s against policy to say so. It’s not for nothing, after all, that statutes nominating perjury a crime exist.

Since only ignorant people could innocently deny lying occurs, and since we’ve established judges don’t regard themselves as ignorant, to them is this question humbly put: “How may false allegations to the court be simply taken back?”

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Interminable Indeterminacy: How False Allegations on Restraining Orders May Be Worse than False Allegations of Rape

 

Journalists who recognize the harm of facile or false allegations invariably focus on rape. This ignores the harm done to women by false allegations, of course, and shows ignorance, besides, of a significantly more fertile yet equally damaging source of wrongful prosecutions: the civil restraining order.

Unarguably there are few miscarriages of justice worse than when rape is falsely alleged and the victim of the false accusation is nevertheless found guilty. That’s a life brutally scarred or ruined for absolutely nothing—and ruined not by a lone malefactor but by the state itself.

Most negative commentary on rape allegations, though, focuses on cases where the evidence is less than conclusive or is found to be utterly false.

Just as there’s no quantifying the effects of being raped, there’s no quantifying the effects of being falsely accused of rape. The stigma is devastating, and public sympathy is nevertheless scant. Even online support groups for victims of false allegations of rape may be accessible to screened subscribers only, so distrustful and averse to scrutiny are the men who are maligned this way.

If, however, an allegation of rape is officially determined baseless, its victim has at least the solace of being able to say so. This hardly dispels the psychic effects, but it does mitigate external ramifications, like access to jobs.

False restraining orders, in contrast, often aren’t discerned as false (and restraining orders may be awarded in spite of false allegations’ being detected), and the consequences their recipients must live with are more than psychological. The damning records are preserved indefinitely. In some regions (like Massachusetts), to merely be accused of domestic violence in an ex parte civil court procedure is to be recorded in a state registry as a violent offender. Even if claims are later dismissed when the accused is given an opportunity to defend him- or herself, that is, even if a judge later recognizes on record that s/he’s “innocent,” s/he’s still “guilty” according to the system, and “guilty” is all a background check will reflect.

The implications of restraining orders, what’s more, are generic. There’s no specific charge associated with them. They’re catchalls that categorically imply everything sordid, violent, and creepy. They most urgently suggest stalking, violence, and sexual deviance.

Rape, it should be noted, may be among the actual allegations made by a restraining order applicant—and unlike in a criminal trial, a judgment grounded on such an allegation, amid others, may be affirmed in spite of the allegation’s merits’ never having been assessed.

Restraining orders don’t determine anything. The procedures from which they issue are too accelerated and loosey-goosey to be conclusive.

That no punishment attends the issuance of a restraining order is a tacit acknowledgment by the state that it may be based on nothing more substantive than hearsay and innuendo, and that its implications should be discounted.

They aren’t discounted, though. They’re regarded just as gravely in some respects as felony sentences. Restraining order recipients are denied jobs, leases, and loans. Some are prohibited from working with or around children—and even from attending their own children’s school events (sometimes based on accusations they’re never granted the practicable opportunity to contest in court—and always based on accusations they’re at most given a few minutes to controvert, typically without benefit of legal counsel).

Restraining order rulings are inevitably sketchy at best. They’re indeterminate but nevertheless treated as decisive—and they never go away.

“On the force of the plaintiff’s testimony, the court concludes it’s a crocodile.”

Victims of false rape allegations are socially disgraced and alienated, and psychologically tormented. Victims of false restraining orders may be, too, and besides may lose everything of value to them or have it taken from them by the state. People report spending as much as $100,000 or more to defend themselves in protracted litigations whose seed was an accuser’s filling out some paperwork and having a few-minute chinwag with a judge. They report losing their homes, becoming estranged from their children, and being permanently barred from employment in their fields of qualification and expertise.

Negative associations that attend a charge of rape are unquestionably more sensational and severe than those that accompany the issuance of a restraining order, but on balance the lived consequences of a restraining order may be comparable if not worse.

False allegations of rape should emphatically be called out by reporters to check the impulse that prevails today to credit finger-pointing as fact (particularly finger-pointing by women). Because the implications of rape are so loud and urgent, revelations of false allegations are loud and urgent, too. They arouse consciousness and conscience.

The question that they should stimulate and have yet to, however, is that if people will lie about rape, what won’t they lie about and what quieter and subtler lies and their consequences are being overlooked?

Exposure in the press would indicate that newsworthy instances of dubious or false allegations of rape are few. The problem with giving exclusive attention to them is that it hides more than it reveals.

The cancer of false allegations is far more advanced and widespread.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Larry hadn’t even seen the woman.

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

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

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

It also requests a jury.

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

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

BLACKMAIL: Using Restraining Orders to Extort and Punish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Restraining orders are perfect tools of cover-up.

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

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

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—from “Trivial Pursuit” (Noseweek magazine)

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

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

Harmless, right? Tee-hee.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harmless, right? Tee-hee.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

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

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

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

Here are the facts:

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

And:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They tarnished its appearance of uprightness and propriety.

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

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the law:

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s it.

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

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

Ever.

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

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

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

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

The plaintiff signs below.

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

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

The process is automated.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not unpredictably, the thrill is addictive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marty Tackitt-Grist, Martha Tackitt-Grist, Larry Smith, North Carolina, ABC’s 20/20, Nasty Neighbors, Neighbors from HellThat’s the horror that only the objects of high-conflict people’s fixations understand. Stalkers and “secret admirers” procure restraining orders to get attention and embed themselves in other’s lives—like shrapnel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com