Restraining Order Fraud and the Disintegration of Morals

July 20, 2014July 9, 2023Moderator 10 Comments

It’s estimated that two to three million restraining orders are issued each year. It’s also estimated that a significant number of them, if not a majority, are based on fraud (i.e., lies intended to mislead). It’s further the case that lying in court is ignored. To quote Texas attorneys Beth E. Maultsby and Kathryn Flowers Samler, for instance: “Lying (perjury) is rarely acknowledged or punished.”

Judges are authorized to approve restraining orders in spite of evident lies by petitioners, because the honesty of plaintiffs isn’t the standard according to which rulings are to be formed.

Consider that if millions of people (counting both false accusers and the falsely accused) are every year having it impressed upon them by judges that lying is not only okay but profitable, then social ethics is taking a pretty significant hit—and at a pretty significant rate.

Our courts are actively eroding it, no matter whether by design or not.

(Model Penal Code § 250, introductory note (1980): “Offenses in this category affect a large number of defendants, involve a great proportion of public activity, and powerfully influence the view of public justice held by millions of people.”)

Judges, who don’t let those who stand before them forget that what they say is very important, every minute contradict and devalue the moral principles that they’re supposed to represent and uphold by not only tolerating lying but rewarding it (and thereby encouraging it).

When truth and honesty are discounted, all moral principles are cheapened.

Putting a positive face on this by defending a corrupt process as a social good, finally, is a fraud on everyone.

Sex, Restraining Order Abuse, and the “Dark Triad”: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy

May 31, 2014June 29, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

“Socially aversive personality traits such as Psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and Narcissism have been studied intensively in clinical and social psychology. […] Although each of these three constructs may have some unique features not shared by the other two, they do appear to share some common elements such as exploitation, manipulativeness, and a grandiose sense of self-importance. Accordingly, Paulhus and Williams (2002) have called these three constructs the ‘Dark Triad’ of personality….”

—Kibeom Lee and Michael C. Ashton

“Members of the Dark Triad tend to be especially untrustworthy in the mating context.”

—Daniel N. Jones and Delroy L. Paulhus

Restraining orders are commonly used to sever relationships. The assumption is that the applicant of a restraining order has been the victim of mistreatment. Many who’ve been implicated as abusers, however, report mistreatment by manipulative personalities who then exploited court process to dominate them, garner attention, and/or deflect blame for their own conduct—typically by lying through their teeth.

It turns out there’s a sexy phrase for the collective personality traits exhibited by manipulators of this sort: the “Dark Triad.”

Several of the posts on this blog have discussed personality-disordered and high-conflict people (who may be personality-disordered), and such people are a central focus of the work of attorney, mediator, and therapist Bill Eddy and psychologist Tara Palmatier, whom I’ve frequently quoted and who’ve written volubly about abuses of legal process by predatory personalities. Narcissism and psychopathy, two of the constituents of the Dark Triad, also qualify as “Cluster B” personality disorders.

As should be evident to anyone who’s read up on these matters, there’s a high degree of overlap among attempts to define, differentiate, and distinguish the mentally kinked.

The context in which the phrase Dark Triad is applied is interpersonal relationships that are familiarly called “romantic.” This should be of interest to victims of court process, because their abusers are more often than not current or former spouses, boy- or girlfriends, or intimates.

The concept of the Dark Triad should also be of interest to them because clinical labels may only roughly match their abusers’ conduct, conduct like deception, inexplicable betrayals, irreconcilable (mixed) messages, etc. (behaviors that “don’t make sense”). People who fall within this (subclinical) delta of personality quirks represent their interest and intentions to be sincere, and reveal them, often abruptly, to have been shallow or even sinister.

From “How the Dark Triad Traits Predict Relationship Choices” (Jonason, Luevano, & Adams):

The Dark Triad traits should be associated with preferring casual relationships of one kind or another. Narcissism in particular should be associated with desiring a variety of relationships. Narcissism is the most social of the three, having an approach orientation towards friends (Foster & Trimm, 2008) and an externally validated ‘ego’ (Buffardi & Campbell, 2008). By preferring a range of relationships, narcissists are better suited to reinforce their sense of self. Therefore, although collectively the Dark Triad traits will be correlated with preferring different casual sex relationships, after controlling for the shared variability among the three traits, we expect that narcissism will correlate with preferences for one-night stands and friend[s]-with-benefits.

In contrast, psychopathy may be characterized by an opportunistic, exploitive mating strategy (Figueredo et al., 2006; Jonason et al., 2009b; Mealey, 1995). Booty-call relationships by their very name denote a degree of exploitation. That is, individuals use others—their booty-call partner[s]—for sex by a late night phone call with the expressed or implied purpose of sex (Jonason et al., 2009). Therefore, we expect that after controlling for the shared variability among the three traits, psychopathy will be correlated with preferences for booty-call relationships. Such a relationship may be consistent with their exploitive mating strategy. Last, although prior work has linked Machiavellianism with a short-term mating style (McHoskey, 2001), more sophisticated analyses controlling for the shared correlation with psychopathy has revealed that Machiavellianism might not be central to predicting short-term mating (Jonason et al., 2011). Therefore, we expect Machiavellianism to not be correlated with preferences for any relationships.

What we’re talking about, basically, are people who exploit others for sexual attention and/or satisfaction (that is, players). The common denominator is a disinclination toward or disinterest in what’s called a “meaningful” or “serious” relationship. The motive is noncommittal, urge-driven self-pleasure (assisted masturbation, as it were). Psychologists sometimes remark in writing about narcissists in other contexts that they entertain “romantic fantasies” but conclude that these fantasies are exclusively about personal feelings and not interpersonal anything.

What we’re talking about in the context of abuse of restraining orders are people who exploit others and then exploit legal process as a convenient means to discard them when they’re through (while whitewashing their own behaviors, procuring additional narcissistic supply in the forms of attention and special treatment, and possibly exacting a measure of revenge if they feel they’ve been criticized or contemned).

Since it’s only natural that people with normally constructed minds will struggle to comprehend the motives of those with Dark Triad traits, they conveniently set themselves up for allegations of harassment or stalking, which are easily established with nothing more than some emails or text messages (that may, for example, be pleas for an explanation—or demands for one). People abused by manipulators who then abuse legal process to compound their injuries typically report that they were “confused,” “angry,” and/or “wanted to understand.”

This is the Jonason & Webster “Dirty Dozen” scale for assessing Dark Triad candidacy:

I tend to manipulate others to get my way.
I tend to lack remorse.
I tend to want others to admire me.
I tend to be unconcerned with the morality of my actions.
I have used deceit or lied to get my way.
I tend to be callous or insensitive.
I have used flattery to get my way.
I tend to seek prestige or status.
I tend to be cynical.
I tend to exploit others toward my own end.
I tend to expect special favors from others.
I want others to pay attention to me.

Victims of restraining order abuse by manipulative lovers or “romantic” stalkers will note a number of correspondences with their accusers’ personalities, as well as discern motives for their lying to the police and courts, which elicits special treatment and attention from authority figures…and subsequently every other sucker with whom they share their “ordeal.”

*Some specialist monographs on this subject are here.

How Men Lie on Restraining Orders: A Tutorial for Feminists

May 18, 2014June 29, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

The topic of this discussion is vicious men—not real men but the kind who’d make false allegations against a woman and ruin her for self-gratification or -gain.

Below is an excerpt from a standard restraining order form. Apply your imagination and consider how a man might exploit the opportunity it affords to trash a woman’s life. I’ll guide you. See the tick boxes and blanks? What he’d do is flick the cap off his Bic and write lies in the spaces provided. It only takes a few minutes.

A false complainant might allege, for example, that his girlfriend stalked him, coerced him into having sex, threatened to kill him, beat his daughter or made her smoke crack, etc. His motive might be revenge, or his motive might be to deflect blame from himself for actually engaging in the same or worse activities. Restraining order petitioners may be the real offenders, and the courts graciously provide them with the chance to compound their victims’ torment and walk away scot free. The first one up the courthouse steps is the “good guy.”

Besides a pen and a few minutes to kill, the only requisite for upending a woman’s life this way is a malicious will. For men to apply for false restraining orders against women is usually free (that is, the cost is covered by the taxpayer), as the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) mandates it be.

All there is to making allegations on restraining orders is tick boxes and blanks, and there are no bounds imposed upon what allegations can be made. A false applicant merely writes whatever he wants in the spaces provided—and he can use additional pages if he’s feeling inspired. The basis for a woman’s being alleged to be a domestic abuser or even “armed and dangerous” is the unsubstantiated say-so of the petitioner. Can the defendant be a vegetarian single mom or an arthritic, 80-year-old great-grandmother? Sure. The judge who rules on the application won’t have met her and may never even learn what she looks like. She’s just a name.

The worst that happens is a fraudulently accused woman appears for a hearing after a week or two of sleepless nights (possibly spent living out of her car) and manages to persuade a judge that she’s not a stalker, child-beater, or whatever. Although even this won’t ensure the judge finds in her favor and dismisses the order, let’s say the judge does dismiss the order.

The false accuser is subject to no sanctions from the court and is at no risk of prosecution from the state, and it isn’t guaranteed that the dismissed restraining order will be expunged from the woman’s public record, which may be the public record of a kindergarten teacher, a therapist, or a police officer (even dismissed orders are stigmatizing and cost people jobs).

The man’s just out a little time and may still have cause to smirk.

And, anyway, he can always file for another restraining order later on. There’s no statutory ceiling on how many times he’s authorized by the state to do this. The sky’s the limit. He could even reapply for multiple restraining orders from different jurisdictions to up the fun.

High-conflict litigants can consume years of their targets’ lives like this. Between rounds of false allegations, their targets may languish in a personal hell, unable to reconcile themselves to betrayals and lies, unable to work in chosen professions because unable to rinse those lies from their public faces, and never knowing what to expect next or when. Whatever familial and social infrastructures depend on them may obviously crumble, besides.

How men lie on restraining orders and make wrecks of women’s lives—and how easily—should be clearer now.

How women lie on restraining orders and make wrecks of men’s and other women’s lives is exactly the same way.

A Legislated License to Lie: Nothing CAN’T Be Falsely Alleged on a Restraining Order

May 12, 2014June 29, 2023Moderator 7 Comments

Battery, rape, child molestation—any heinous allegation imaginable can be made in a petition for a restraining order, and it can be made falsely without consequence to the accuser.

Victims of false allegations often ask incredulously, “Can somebody say that?”

There’s nothing that can’t be alleged to the courts (or, for that matter, to the police). There’s no such thing as “can’t allege.” A judge might view allegations of genocide or conspiracy with aliens to achieve global domination as suspect—or s/he might not. Certainly there’s nothing to stop a restraining order applicant from making these allegations, and there’s nothing to stop a judge from crediting them. Neither accusers nor judges are answerable to a literal burden of proof.

As the infamous David Letterman case shows, even the most outlandish allegations easily duck judicial radar. For anyone unfamiliar with the case, here’s Massachusetts attorney Gregory Hession’s synopsis and commentary (quoted from “Restraining Orders Out of Control”):

One day in December of 2005, Colleen Nestler came to Santa Fe County District Court in New Mexico with a bizarre seven-page typed statement and requested a domestic-abuse restraining order against late-night TV host David Letterman.

She stated, under oath, that Letterman seriously abused her by causing her bankruptcy, mental cruelty, and sleep deprivation since 1994. Nestler also alleged that he sent her secret signals “in code words” through his television program for many years and that he “responded to my thoughts of love” by expressing that he wanted to marry her.

Judge Daniel Sanchez issued a restraining order against Letterman based on those allegations. By doing so, it put Letterman on a national list of domestic abusers, gave him a criminal record, took away several of his constitutionally protected rights, and subjected him to criminal prosecution if he contacted Nestler directly or indirectly, or possessed a firearm.

Letterman had never met Colleen Nestler, and this all happened without his knowledge. Nonetheless, she requested that the order include an injunction requiring him not to “think of me, and release me from his mental harassment and hammering.” Asked to explain why he had issued a restraining order on the basis of such an unusual complaint, Judge Sanchez answered that Nestler had filled out the restraining-order request form correctly. After much national ridicule, the judge finally dismissed the order against Letterman. Those who don’t have a TV program and deep pockets are rarely so fortunate.

If allegations like these don’t trip any alarms, consider how much easier putting across plausible allegations is, plausible allegations that may be egregiously false and may include battery, rape, child molestation, or the commission of any other felony crimes.

What recent posts to this blog have endeavored to expose is that false allegations on restraining orders are very effective, because the “standard of evidence” applied to restraining order allegations both tolerates and rewards lying. The only thing that keeps false allegations reasonably in check is the fear that malicious litigants may have of their lies’ being detected. Normal people at least understand that lying is “bad” and that you don’t want to get caught doing it.

To some degree at least, this understanding restricts all but the mentally ill, who may be delusional, and high-conflict litigants, who may have personality disorders and have no conscience, or whose thinking, like that of personality-disordered people’s, is overruled by intense emotions, self-identification as victims, and an urgent will to blame. Normal people may lie cunningly or viciously; high-conflict people may lie cunningly, viciously, compulsively, outrageously, and constantly.

The fear of getting caught in a lie is in fact baseless, because perjury (lying to the court) is prosecuted so rarely as to qualify as never. Most false litigants, however, don’t know that, so their lies are seldom as extravagant as they could be.

Often, though, their lies are extravagant enough to unhinge or trash the lives of those they’ve accused.

Appreciate that false allegations on restraining orders of battery, rape, child molestation, or their like don’t have to be proved. Restraining orders aren’t criminal prosecutions. Allegations just have to persuade a judge that the defendant is a sick puppy who should be kenneled. An allegation of battery, rape, or child molestation is just a contributing influence—except to the people who have to bear its stigma.

More typical than utterly heinous lies are devious misrepresentations. Accusations of stalking and untoward contact or conduct, which may simply be implied, are a common variety. The alleged use merely of cruel language may be very effective by itself. Consider how prejudicial a female plaintiff’s accusing someone (male or female) of forever calling her a “worthless bitch” could be. Substantiation isn’t necessary. Restraining order judges are already vigilantly poised to whiff danger and foul misconduct everywhere. In processes that are concluded in minutes, false or malicious accusers just have to toss judges a few red herrings.

Irrespective of the severity of allegations, the consequences to the fraudulently accused are the same: impediment to or loss of employment and employability, humiliation, distrust, gnawing outrage, depression, and despondency, along with possibly being menacingly barred access to home, children, property, and financial resource. This is all besides being forced to live under the ever-looming threat of further state interference, including arrest and incarceration, should additional false allegations be brought forth.

Even if no further allegations are made, restraining orders, which are public records accessible by anyone, are recorded in the databases of state and federal police…indefinitely.

This “advice,” which urges restraining order applicants to rehearse, comes from the California court system and is offered on a page titled, “Ask for a Restraining Order.” The page’s title is not only invitational but can be read as an order itself: Do it. Note, also, that finalization of a restraining order may be based on less than “3 minutes” of testimony and that the court prefers it to be.

Recourses available to the falsely accused are few, and even lawsuits that allege abuse of process may face hurdles like claim preclusion (res judicata), which prohibits previously adjudicated facts from being reexamined. Never mind that the prior rulings may have been formulated in mere minutes based on fantasy and/or cooked allegations. Victims of defamation, fraud on the police and courts, and intentional infliction of emotional distress may moreover face stony indifference from judges, even if their lives have been entirely dismantled. And it should be stressed that attempting to rectify and purge their records of fraudulent allegations, which are established in minutes, can consume years of falsely accused defendants’ lives.

Recognizing that there are no bounds placed upon what false accusers may claim and that there are no consequences to false accusers for lying, the wonder is that more victims of lies aren’t alleged to be “batterers,” “rapists,” and “child molesters.”

How “Preponderance of the Evidence” Rewards Restraining Order Fraud and Why Bigger Lies Work Better than Smaller Ones

May 9, 2014June 29, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

Recent posts to this blog have discussed American evidentiary standards and stressed that the standard applied to civil restraining orders, “preponderance of the evidence,” has nothing to do with proof. According to this standard, a judge should find in favor of a restraining order plaintiff if s/he figures there’s a greater probability that the plaintiff’s claims are true than that they’re totally false.

The word to bear in mind here is probability.

I’ll give you a for-instance. Let’s say Person A applies for a protection order and claims Person B threatened to rape her and then kill her with a butcher knife.

Along with the allegation of the rape/death threat, Person A tells Judge A that she and Person B dated for six months, that she dumped Person B, that he refuses to leave her alone and insists that she’s the love of his life and that if he can’t have her no one will, and that she’s terrified of him. Person A shows Judge A a text message from Person B that says, “I want what’s mine.” She also tells Judge A that Person B insisted that she engage in sexual role-playing during their relationship and that he liked to spank her. “Sometimes he was very rough and scared me,” Person A says. Too, she says she thinks Person B jealously monitored her email correspondence and adds that he frequently accused her of seeing other men behind his back (“He would just suddenly go off sometimes for no reason”).

Judge A doesn’t know Person A, and all he knows of Person B is what Person A has just told him. How does Judge A determine that there’s a greater probability Person A is telling the truth than that she’s lying? With no certain facts other than a text message, he can’t. He issues a protection order anyway, because Person A might be telling the truth, and he doesn’t want to be answerable to his conscience or the public if she were to come to harm.

Person B, who didn’t actually threaten to rape or kill Person A, is more than unsettled by the allegations against him and appears in court to deny them. He tells Judge B that he and Person A dated for six months after she hit on him at a party, and that they had discussed moving in together but that he discovered Person A had been cheating on him and angrily demanded that she return expensive gifts she had asked him to buy for her during their relationship. He tells the judge that Person A laughed at him and called him “a fool,” and that he’s never been abused this way before. “She was horrible to me,” he says, “and I was only ever nice to her.” Person B also tells the judge that Person A was sexually withholding, and would often, he realizes now, use the promise of sex to manipulate him, and that he had never hit her, even in fun. “There was no role-playing,” he says indignantly. “That’s a complete lie!” Person B admits that he may have heatedly called Person A “a sick bitch” when he last saw her and slammed her apartment door behind him. Person B also admits to sending the text message, but testifies that he’s never struck or even threatened another person in his life.

Judge B has no more ascertainable grounds for determining whether Person B threatened to rape and kill Person A than Judge A did previously. On the basis of Person B’s admitted rage and reason for feeling vengeful, however, he rules in favor of Person A and affirms the protection order. The alleged rape/death threat, which may have been influential but was otherwise irrelevant, is preserved on public record along with allegations of “constant temper tantrums,” “violent sex games,” and stalking. The protection order is also recorded in the databases of state and federal police.

Person A circulates the details she shared with the court, which are embellished and further honed with repetition, among her friends and colleagues over the ensuing days, months, and years.

Person B, a widowed engineer, is fired from the position he’d occupied for over a decade with a national defense contractor. Consequent to his being terminated, Person B’s daughter, whose tuition at an Ivy League university he’d been paying, is forced to drop out of school 12 months shy of graduation with honors.

This scenario, though purely allegorical, is mirrored to a greater or lesser extent by thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of restraining order cases adjudicated in this country every year (false allegations, including false criminal allegations, may moreover be made to the police, besides the courts). Its gender reversal (Person A = male; Person B = female), while less probable, is also entirely possible. Women, too, are falsely accused of threats, violence, stalking, and other crimes on restraining orders, including felonies. Feminist advocates of restraining orders, consciously or not, defend the daily dismemberment of women’s lives across the map.

(Besides facing loss of employment and employability, victims of false allegations and distortions of the truth may be forcibly removed from their homes and prohibited access to their children, money, and property. Legal derelictions, besides, make such victims vulnerable to further state interference, including arrest and incarceration, upon additional false reports’ being filed by malicious accusers.)

The point of the above hypothetical is neither to deny that real rape or death threats are made nor to characterize complainants of such abuse as liars. Unquestionably many complainants, particularly of extreme abuse, honestly and reasonably fear for their safety. Its point, rather, is to illustrate that the truth of any allegation made pursuant to the procurement of a restraining order is literally irrelevant (except to the accused). It’s not the brief of judges of restraining order cases to determine whether individual facts are truthfully reported, nor is ascertainment of the truth or falsity of individual allegations required by the standard of “preponderance of the evidence.”

This standard is satisfied by probability, which is gauged according to a judge’s personal lights. It doesn’t depend on certainty of anything.

Emphatically noteworthy of a standard that’s satisfied by probability is that it acknowledges from the start that truth doesn’t matter. A standard that relied on proof wouldn’t contain the word probability or its derivatives at all.

Consider further that lying is rarely if ever prosecuted or even acknowledged by the courts.

Consider finally this question: If the object of a restraining order applicant is to win—and it always is—what tactics will most assuredly be effective in persuading a judge that his or her allegations (on balance) are probably true? The answer is lying, lying luridly and sensationally, and lying copiously, particularly about facts that are impossible to verify (facts that in a criminal case would be discounted or dismissed).

Because “preponderance of the evidence” is based on the overall forcefulness of allegations rather than the truth or falsity of one, two, or a few of them, the most effective way to win a restraining order case is to lie hugely.

As should be obvious, “preponderance of the evidence” is seldom if ever actually satisfied in cases where restraining orders are awarded, because specific claims on restraining order applications are often impossible to accurately assess as even 51% likely to be true. “Satisfaction” of this standard is based, instead, on the acceptance that the sum total of allegations (their tenor or essence), which collectively support an overarching allegation of “fear” or “distress,” can together be called “preponderant” (which means more potent, convincing, or influential).

In other words, there’s no point in malicious litigants’ lying small.

Blame, No Shame: Restraining Order Abuse by High-Conflict, Personality-Disordered Plaintiffs

April 3, 2014June 17, 2023Moderator 16 Comments

“Court is perfectly suited to the fantasies of someone with a personality disorder: There is an all-powerful person (the judge) who will punish or control the other [person]. The focus of the court process is perceived as fixing blame—and many with personality disorders are experts at blame. There is a professional ally who will champion their cause (their attorney—or if no attorney, the judge) […]. Generally, those with personality disorders are highly skilled at—and invested in—the adversarial process.

“Those with personality disorders often have an intensity that convinces inexperienced professionals—counselors and attorneys—that what they say is true. Their charm, desperation, and drive can reach a high level in this very emotional bonding process with the professional. Yet this intensity is a characteristic of a personality disorder, and is completely independent from the accuracy of their claims.”

—William (Bill) Eddy (1999)

Contemplating these statements by therapist, attorney, and mediator Bill Eddy should make it clear how perfectly the disordered personality and the restraining order click. Realization of the high-conflict person’s fantasies of punishment and control is accomplished as easily as making some false or histrionically hyped allegations in a few-minute interview with a judge.

Contemplating these statements should also make clear the all-but-impossible task that counteracting the fraudulent allegations of high-conflict people can pose, both because disordered personalities lie without compunction and because they’re intensely invested in domination, blaming, and punishment.

Lying may be justified in their eyes—possibly to bring a reconciliation. (This can be quite convoluted, like the former wife who alleged child sexual abuse so that her ex-husband’s new wife would divorce him and he would return to her—or so she seemed to believe.) Or lying may be justified as a punishment in their eyes.

As Mr. Eddy explains in a related article (2008):

Courts rely heavily on “he said, she said” declarations, signed “under penalty of perjury.” However, a computer search of family law cases published by the appellate courts shows only one appellate case in California involving a penalty for perjury: People v. Berry (1991) 230 Cal. App. 3d 1449. The penalty? Probation.

Perjury is a criminal offense, punishable by fine or jail time, but it must be prosecuted by the District Attorney, who does not have the time. [J]udges have the ability to sanction (fine) parties but no time to truly determine that one party is lying. Instead, they may assume both parties are lying or just weigh their credibility. With no specific consequence, the risks of lying are low.

High-conflict fraudsters, in other words, get away with murder—or at least character assassination (victims of which eat themselves alive). Lying is a compulsion of personality disorders and is typical of high-conflict disordered personalities: borderlines, antisocials, narcissists, and histrionics.

When my own life was derailed eight years ago, I’d never heard the phrase personality disorder. Five years later, when I started this blog, I still hadn’t. My interest wasn’t in comprehension; it was to recover my sanity and cheer so I could return to doing what was dear to me. I’m sure most victims are led to do the same and never begin to comprehend the motives of high-conflict abusers.

I’ve read Freud, Lacan, and some other abstruse psychology texts, because I was trained as a literary analyst, and psychological theories are sometimes used by textual critics as interpretive prisms. None of these equipped me, though, to understand the kind of person who would wantonly lie to police officers and judges, enlist others in smear campaigns, and/or otherwise engage in dedicatedly vicious misconduct.

What my collegiate training did provide me with, though, is a faculty for discerning patterns and themes, and it has detected patterns and themes that have been the topics of much of the grudging writing I’ve done in this blog.

Absorbing the explications of psychologists and dispute mediators after having absorbed the stories of many victims of abuse of court process, I’ve repeatedly noticed that the two sources mutually corroborate each other.

Not long ago, I approached the topic of what I called “group-bullying,” because it’s something I’ve been subject to and because many others had reported to me (and continue to report) being subject to the same: sniping by multiple parties, conspiratorial harassment, derision on social media, false reports to employers and rumor-milling, fantastical protestations of fear and apprehension, etc.

The other day, I encountered the word mobbing applied by a psychologist to the same behavior, a word that says the same thing much more crisply.

Quoting Dr. Tara Palmatier (see also the embedded hyperlinks, which I’ve left in):

If you’re reading this, perhaps you’ve been or currently are the Target of Blame of a high-conflict spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend, ex, colleague, boss, or stranger(s). Perhaps you’ve been on the receiving end of mobbing (bullying by a group instigated by one or two ringleaders) and/or a smear campaign or distortion campaign of a high-conflict person who has decided you’re to blame for her or his unhappiness. It’s a horrible position to be in, particularly because high-conflict individuals don’t seem to ever stop their blaming and malicious behaviors.

A perfect correspondence. And what more aptly describes the victim of restraining order abuse than “Target of Blame”?

This phrase in turn is found foremost on the website of the High Conflict Institute, founded by Bill Eddy, whom I opened this post by quoting:

Restraining orders are seldom singled out or fully appreciated for the torture devices they are by those who haven’t been intensively made aware of their unique potential to upturn or trash lives, but the victims who comment on this and other blogs, petitions, and online forums are saying the same things the psychologists and mediators are, and they’re talking about the same perpetrators.

Judges understand blaming. That’s their bailiwick and raison d’être. They may even understand false blaming much better than they let on. What they don’t understand, however, is false blaming as a pathological motive.

Quoting “Strategies and Methods in Mediation and Communication with High Conflict People” by Duncan McLean, which I highlighted in the last post:

Emotionally healthy people base their feelings on facts, whereas people with high conflict personalities tend to bend the facts to fit what they are feeling. This is known as “emotional reasoning.” The facts are not actually true, but they feel true to the individual. The consequence of this is that they exhibit an enduring pattern of blaming others and a need to control and/or manipulate.

There are no more convenient expedients for realizing the compulsions of disordered personalities’ emotional reasoning and will to divert blame from themselves and exert it on others than restraining orders, which assign blame before the targets of that blame even know what hit them.

Returning to the concept of “mobbing” (and citing Dr. Palmatier), consider:

The group victimization of a single target has several goals, including demeaning, discrediting, alienating, excluding, humiliating, scapegoating, isolating and, ultimately, eliminating the targeted individual.

Group victimization can be the product of a frenzied horde. But it can also be accomplished by one pathologically manipulative individual…and a judge.

Disdain for a Feminist Institution of Law Isn’t the Same as Disdain for Women

March 29, 2014August 10, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

“I am the victim of false accusations [by] a female with sociopathic tendencies. She stabbed my husband [and] threatened to kill me, but for whatever reason filed for a domestic violence protective order on me. I value respect from people, so I do and act morally to maintain my relationships, but because any given person, whether sane or not, can go file a petition with its being granted depending on how it’s worded, I was treated like a criminal and not one time given the opportunity to inform even the judge that the petitioner had committed perjury. Only in [West Virginia] a felony can be committed and go unpunished. This is [an overlooked] flaw that needs immediate attention!!!! This not only jeopardizes my future, but my kids’ future, because if the petitioner wouldn’t have dropped it, it would [have been] filed in a national database, popping up whenever a background check is done on me, including [by] my college for my admission into Nuclear Medicine Technology…and this is all based on a drug-addicted, manipulating, vindictive person’s false accusations.”

—Female e-petition respondent

“Dangerous law easily used as a sword instead of shield. A Butte man died over this. His girlfriend, after making the false allegations, cleaned out his bank account. He committed suicide. His mother, Ruth, had no money to bury him. The girlfriend depleted his assets partying.”

—Female e-petition respondent

“I can relate to this topic, because I once made false allegations against my lover because I was a woman scorned and wanted to get even with him and make him feel the same level of pain that he made me feel. Luckily for him and me, I was convicted in my spirit and confessed to the court that I’d lied, and the matter was dropped. If I’d not been led to do that, my lie could have ruined this man’s life….”

—Female e-petition respondent

“It makes me sick that there are so many families affected by false allegations. The children [who] are affected break my heart. We have been living this nightmare for over a year now—over $40 thousand dollars spent, and this woman still keeps us in court with her false allegations…. At what point will the courts make these people accountable???”

—Female e-petition respondent

A recent comment to this blog from a female victim of restraining order abuse (by her husband) expressed the perception that criticism of feminist motives and the restraining order process, a feminist institution of law, seemed vitriolic toward women.

Her reaction is understandable.

What isn’t perceived generally, including by female victims of fraudulent abuse of process, is that the restraining order was prompted by feminist lobbying just a few decades ago and that its manifest injustices are sustained by feminist lobbying. It’s not as though reform has never been proposed; it’s that reform is rejected by those with a political interest in preserving the status quo.

Political motives, remember, aren’t humanitarian motives; they’re power motives.

So enculturated has the belief that women are helpless victims become that no one recognizes that feminist political might is unrivaled—unrivaled—and it’s in the interest of preserving that political might and enhancing it that the belief that women are helpless victims is vigorously promulgated by the feminist establishment that should be promoting the idea that women aren’t helpless.

It’s this belief and this political might that make restraining order abuses, including abuses that trash the lives of women, possible. Not only does the restraining order process victimize women; it denies that women have personal agency.

Nurturance of the belief that women are helpless victims puts a lot of money in a lot of hands, and very few of those hands belong to victims.

The original feminist agenda, one that’s been all but eclipsed, was inspiring women with a sense of personal empowerment and dispelling the notion that they’re helpless. The restraining order process is anti-feminist as is today’s mainstream feminist agenda, which equity feminists have been saying for decades.

Restraining orders continue to be doled out (in the millions per annum) on the basis of meeting a civil standard of evidence (which means no proof is necessary), pursuant to five- or 10-minute interviews between plaintiffs and judges, from which defendants are excluded.

So certainly has the vulnerability and helplessness of women been universally accepted that the state credits claims of danger or threat made in civil restraining order applications on reflex, including by men, because our courts must be perceived as “fair.” Consequently, fraudulent claims are both rampant and easily put over.

Restraining orders aren’t pro-equality and don’t contribute to the advancement of social justice. They do, though, put a lot of people’s kids through college, like lawyers’ and judges’.

Victim-Blaming: The “Patriarchal Paradigm,” Discrimination against Male Victims of Domestic Violence, the Frequency of False Allegations, and Abuses of Men and Women by Restraining Order Fraud

March 28, 2014August 17, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

“Accounting for the discrepancy between the empirical data and current public policy has been the gender paradigm (Dutton and Nicholls 2005), also known as the patriarchal paradigm (Hamel 2007b), a set of assumptions and beliefs about domestic violence that has shaped domestic violence policy on arrest, treatment, and victim services at all levels for the past several decades. A product of feminist sociopolitical theory, the paradigm posits that the causes of domestic violence can be found in patriarchy and male dominance…. Despite data that are inconsistent with the feminist perspective…it remains a dominant influence….”

—Journal of Family Violence (2009)

In a recent post, I wrote about false allegations of domestic violence and quoted a male victim who was arrested when he reported to police that he was being assaulted. The ensuing ordeal cost him his “career, [his] name, and three years of income” before the police department copped to wrongdoing and settled with him out of court.

Deplorably, this is what comes of asking for help from a system that’s been conditioned to perceive men as stalkers, batterers, and rapists (despite the fact that best population-based studies reveal as many as half of victims of partner violence are men).

According to findings by Dr. Denise Hines, more than a quarter of male victims of domestic violence who call the police are themselves arrested as a result (26%). Half of the time, responding police officers do nothing, and in less than one in five cases (17%) is a reported female abuser arrested.

Imagine the outrage of the National Organization of Women if half the women who reported being battered were blown off by authorities, or if one in every four women who reported being battered was herself arrested and prosecuted for assault.

This isn’t to say, of course, that the “patriarchal paradigm” promoted by feminist advocates and the Violence against Women Act (VAWA) doesn’t also brutally injure women.

Alternative to filing criminal complaints is the filing of civil protection orders—and this knife cuts both ways. Diminished standards of verification applied to allegations made in connection with restraining orders ensure that women, too, are abused by the state according to false allegations leveled against them by conniving men. The frequency of female victimization by men is lesser; the damages of that victimization are not.

Returning to the journal article quoted in the epigraph (Muller, Desmarais, and Hamel), consider:

Every state in the United States now authorizes its courts to issue civil orders of protection against domestic violence. Typically, a temporary domestic violence restraining order (TRO) is issued ex parte at the request of any plaintiff who expresses an “objectively reasonable subjective fear of being injured” (Miller 2005, p. 74), without the respondent (i.e., the alleged perpetrator) having to be present in court. TROs are granted for two- to four-week periods, at which point a hearing is held to determine if a permanent order is warranted, valid in most states for a period of one to four years. In California, as of June 6, 2003, there were 227,941 active restraining orders (including temporary and permanent) issued against adults, almost all of them for domestic violence. Of the domestic violence orders, approximately 72% restrained a man from a protected woman, 19% restrained a same-sex partner, and 9% restrained a woman from a protected man (Sorenson and Shen 2005). Of particular significance to family court cases, the protected parent almost automatically obtains custody of the children, without a custody hearing or a custody decision being made (Kanuha and Ross 2004; Sorenson and Shen 2005).

Various motives for lying to the court are both obvious and confirmed.

“Many TROs and POs [protection orders],” concludes a Hawaiian task force on restraining orders, “are obtained by one party to a dispute to try to gain advantage over another party in future or ongoing divorce proceedings or a custody dispute” (Murdoch 2005, p. 17). In California, the Family Law section of the state bar expressed concern that domestic violence restraining orders “are increasingly being used in family law cases to help one side jockey for an advantage in child custody and/or property litigation and in cases involving the right to receive spousal support” (Robe and Ross 2005, p. 26). A retired Massachusetts judge revealed to the press that, in his experience, one-third of restraining orders are strategic ploys used for leverage in divorce cases (“Retiring Judge” 2001). Attorneys Sheara Friend and Dorothy Wright, the latter also a former board member of a battered women’s shelter, estimate that 40 to 50% of restraining orders are used to manipulate the system (Young 1999). In some cases, mothers secure custody despite a history of abuse against the father or the children (Cook 1997; Pearson 1997).

As I prefaced these quotations by remarking, they shouldn’t be interpreted to mean that men don’t also lie to inculpate women (who may be the actual victims of domestic violence), because they do, as the study these quotations are drawn from suggests. The rate of false allegations between the sexes may in fact be equivalent (and as high as 50%).

The difference is that women far more often make allegations (and thus false allegations) against men than vice-versa.

Absent from all analytic studies and contemplations is the toll of false allegations and victim-blaming on those devastated by them, which can’t be quantified.

Who BS-es the Police and Court? Who Doesn’t.

March 22, 2014August 10, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

“Everyone lies to me.”

—University of Arizona police officer

The willingness of false accusers to lie to authorities and the courts—and of some authorities and officers of the court to lie—is a tough pill to swallow, especially for those who learn about it the hard way, as have many of those who visit or have responded to this blog.

Scholars, members of the clergy, and practitioners of disciplines like medicine, science, and the law, among others from whom we expect scrupulous truthfulness and a contempt for deception, are furthermore no more above lying (or actively or passively abetting fraud) than anyone else.

The false accusers from whom I’ve seen and been informed the most devious and unmitigated frauds originate, in fact, are the self-entitled, those who imagine they’re distinguished from the crowd and therefore exempt from its rules. They lie smoothly, righteously, and with an air of affronted dignity. That such people typically enjoy the security and reassuring presence of an attorney by their sides no doubt factors largely into their confidence.

M.D., Ph.D., Th.D., LL.D.—no one is above lying, and the fact is the better a liar’s credentials are, the more ably s/he expects to and can pull the wool over the eyes of judges, because in the political arena judges occupy, titles carry weight: might makes right.

Like most of us are prone to, judges presume a superior standard of integrity from people with advanced degrees or other tokens of accomplishment who practice in areas of influence. The court takes the ethics of such people on faith. It’s a prejudice as old as human hierarchies. Those who have power or its semblance aren’t to be held accountable for abuses of power.

The court shouldn’t presume integrity from these people; it should demand it and hold such people accountable to the high standards to which it presently and wrongly presumes such people hold themselves.

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

March 15, 2014July 12, 2023Moderator 10 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 12, 2014June 19, 2023Moderator 4 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Restraining Order Fraud Needs to Be Recognized for What It Is: CRIME

March 10, 2014August 10, 2023Moderator 4 Comments

“Emotional distress as the result of crime is a recurring theme for all victims of crime. The most common problem[s], affecting three quarters of victims, [include] fear, anxiety, nervousness, self-blame, anger, shame, and difficulty sleeping. These problems often result in the development of chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).”

—Wikipedia, “Victimology”

Restraining orders are governmentally advertised and popularly perceived as deterrents to crime, particularly stalking/harassment and domestic violence. In other words, they’re supposed to do good.

It’s no wonder, then, that the idea that restraining orders may be used to commit crime and do grievous harm is regarded with indifference if not hostility.

The very real if inconvenient truth remains that victims of false allegations made to authorities and the courts present with the same symptoms highlighted in the epigraph: “fear, anxiety, nervousness, self-blame, anger, shame, and difficulty sleeping”—among a host of others. And that’s just the ones who aren’t robbed of everything that made their lives meaningful, including home, property, and family. In the latter case, post-traumatic stress disorder may be the least of their torments. They may be left homeless, penniless, childless, and emotionally scarred.

It’s time for a much overdue reality check: victims are victims, and it doesn’t matter one iota whether a victim is injured by a recognized crime or one that society prefers to pretend doesn’t occur because it’s complicit in its commission. Treating victims like fiends, in fact, compounds victimization manifold, as any zealous bandier of the phrase victim-blaming should eagerly corroborate.

The quoted Wikipedia entry observes that we (among other countries) have a National Crime Victimization Survey (“a tool to measure the existence of actual, rather than reported, crimes”) to determine our country’s victimization rate. “This survey enables the government to estimate the likelihood of victimization by rape, sexual assault, robbery, assault, theft, household burglary, and motor vehicle theft for the population as a whole as well as for segments of the population such as women….”

False allegations, predictably, aren’t recognized as criminal, which of course both false reporting to the police (a statutory misdemeanor) and perjury (a statutory felony) most certainly are. Moreover, and significantly, all of the crimes enumerated in the quotation immediately above may be abetted or excused by the state’s endorsement of restraining order fraud—and at the same time. Victims of restraining order abuse may not only be victims of assault (or even conceivably rape) by their false accusers; by virtue of the state’s validating false accusers’ allegations, the accused may literally be stripped (robbed) of their belongings (i.e., property, vehicles, and money), and ousted from their homes, besides, and forced to forfeit entitlement to them (along with access to their own children): grand theft everything.

E-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. We’re talking not only about trivializing suffering or “blaming the victim” but of punishing the victim to a cruel and unusual extreme—and congratulating ourselves for doing it. (Feminist) rights advocates make much ado about society’s discounting or trivializing the suffering of victims, ignoring that the state may, for example, yank victims of domestic violence from their homes and kick them sobbing to the curb if their abusers finger them on restraining orders first.

Blaming victims of false allegations made on restraining orders IS “blaming victims of terror for not wearing bulletproof armour,” and why false allegations on restraining orders are so effective (and devastating) is because of the basic message of posters like this: When victimhood is asserted, it’s not to be questioned.

The perceptual blind that preserves these crimes from being exposed and redressed is the “unspoken, politically correct rule that the role of the victim…is NOT to be explored” acknowledged by Dr. Ofer Zur in “Rethinking ‘Don’t Blame the Victim’: The Psychology of Victimhood.” The presiding prejudice that procurers of restraining orders are victims not only enables false accusers to commit theft and abuse on a grand scale (in cases effacing the lives of their male and female victims entirely); it enables them to do so with authorization and impunity, and on top of it all to be rewarded with sympathy. This is victim-blaming with a megaphone.

Victims—victims—may be incarcerated (locked in cages) and serially persecuted (in cases, for years) after having been tossed in the street and having had everything they owned and cared about taken from them. A survey of the accounts on the e-petition “Stop False Allegations of Domestic Violence” will make the horror plain to any reader with a soul (or even just an ounce of honesty).

Denial of this horror by agents of the abuse industry underscores that rights advocacy has become corrupted by dogma, politics, and cash. If it was ever truly about justice, any claim that its mainstream manifestations still are is beyond disingenuous. It’s criminal.

DARVO and the Diva: A Hypothetical Case in Point of Restraining Order Abuse to Reverse the Roles of Victim and Offender

February 5, 2014August 10, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

“False allegations and bogus calls to the police are an extremely sick form of abuse.”

—Tara J. Palmatier, Psy.D.

I introduced a useful term in my previous post coined by psychologist Jennifer Freyd and adapted by psychologist Tara Palmatier to her own practice and professional writing: DARVO, an acronym of Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.

In sum, the abuser in a relationship denies a behavior s/he’s called on, attacks his or her confronter (the victim of the behavior), and by social manipulation (including false allegations, hysterical protestations, smear tactics, etc.) reverses roles with him or her: the batterer becomes the beaten, the stalker becomes the stalked, the sexual harasser becomes the sexually harassed, etc.

The restraining order process and DARVO are a jigsaw-puzzle fit, because the first party up the courthouse steps is recognized as the victim, that party’s representations are accepted as “the truth,” a restraining order is easily got with a little dramatic legerdemain, and procurement of a restraining order instantly qualifies its plaintiff as the victim and its defendant as the villain in the eyes of nearly everybody. In one fell swoop, the exploiter dodges accountability for his or her misconduct and punishes his or her victim for being intolerant of that misconduct.

To illustrate, a conjectural case in point:

Imagine that a solitary, bookish man, a starving but striving artist working on a project for children, haplessly attracts a group of overeducated and neglected women keen for recognition and attention. Their leader, a brassy, charismatic, married woman, works her wiles on the man to indulge an infatuation, contriving reasons to hang around his house up to and past midnight. He lives remotely, and the secluding darkness and intimacy are delicious and allow the woman to step out of the strictures of her daytime life as easily as she slips off her wedding ring and mutes her cellphone.

Her coterie of girlfriends is transposed straight from the halls of high school. They’re less physically favored than the leader of their pack and content to warm themselves in her aura. The adolescent intrigue injects some color into their treadmill lives, and they savor the vicarious thrill of the hunt. The man is a topic of their daily conversation. The women feel young again for a few months, like conspirators in an unconsummated teen crush.

Eventually, however, the creeping finger of consequence insinuates itself between the pages of the women’s Harlequin-novel holiday, and the game is a lark no more. Realizing the ruse can’t be maintained indefinitely, the married woman abruptly vanishes, and her cronies return where they came from like shadows retreating from the noonday sun.

What no one knows can’t hurt them.

The man, though, nevertheless learns of the deception and confronts the woman in a letter, asking her to meet with him so he can understand her motives and gain some closure. The woman denies understanding the source of his perplexity and represents him (to himself) as a stalker. She then proceeds to represent him as such to her peers at his former place of work and then to her husband, the police, and the court over a period of days and weeks. She publicly alleges the man sexually harassed her, is dangerous, and poses a threat to her and her spouse, and to her friends and family.

Her co-conspirators passively play along. It’s easy: out of sight, out of mind.

The life of the man who’d hospitably welcomed the strangers, shaking hands in good faith and doling out mugs of cheer, is trashed: multiple trips to the police precinct to answer false charges and appeals to the court that only invite censure and further abuse. His record, formerly that of an invisible man, becomes hopelessly corrupted. His artistic endeavor, a labor of love that he’d plied himself at for years and on which he’d banked his future joy and financial comfort, is predictably derailed.

The women blithely return to realizing their ambitions while the man’s life frays and tatters.

Sleepless years go by, the economy tanks, and the man flails to simply keep afloat. The paint flakes on his house and his hopes. His health deteriorates to the extent that he’s daily in physical pain. He finally employs an attorney to craft a letter, pointlessly, undertakes a lawsuit on his own, too late, and maunders on like this, alternately despairing and taking one stab or another at recovering his life and resuscitating his dreams.

The married woman monitors him meanwhile, continuing to represent him as a stalker, both strategically and randomly to titillate and arouse attention, while accruing evidence for a further prosecution, and bides her time until the statute of limitation for her frauds on the court lapses to ensure that she’s immune from the risk of punishment. A little over seven years to the day of her making her original allegations, she takes the man to court all over again, enlisting the ready cooperation of one of her former confederates, to nail the coffin shut.

This is DARVO at its most dedicated and devotional, and it’s pure deviltry and exemplifies the dire effects and havoc potentially wrought by a court process that’s easily and freely exploited and indifferently administered.

In her explication of DARVO, Dr. Palmatier introduces this quotation from attorney and mediator William (Bill) Eddy: “It’s only the Persuasive Blamers of Cluster B [see footnote] who keep high-conflict disputes going. They are persuasive, and to keep the focus off their own behavior (the major source of the problem), they get others to join in the blaming.” As a scenario like the one I’ve posited above illustrates, persuasive blame-shifters may keep high-conflict clashes going for years, clashes that in their enlistment of others verge on lynch-mobbing that includes viral and virulent name-calling and public denigration.

Consider the origins of consequences that cripple lives and can potentially lead to physical violence, including suicide or even homicide, and then consider whether our courts should be the convenient tools of such ends. Absent our courts’ availability as media of malice, the appetite of the practitioner of DARVO would starvo.

Dr. Tara Palmatier: “Cluster B disorders include histrionic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and antisocial personality disorder. At their core, I believe all Cluster B disorders stem from sociopathy (i.e., lack of empathy for others, refusal to hold themselves accountable for their behaviors, and exploitation of others). Bleiberg (2001) refers to these characterological disorders as ‘severe,’ because they chronically engage in extreme conflict [and] drama, and cause the most problems in society.”

J’accuse: On Wikipedia and Restraining Order Abuse

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

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

—Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Impact of Fraudulent Restraining Orders on Employment Prospects

January 4, 2014August 22, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

“This law needs to change. NOW! A very good friend of mine had a false PFA filed against her by her sister, causing her to lose her career as a police officer. I have seen firsthand how this can ruin someone’s life! Please help bring the true victims in these circumstances some justice!”

—E-petition respondent

One of the prevailing myths about civil restraining orders is that they’re harmless. In fact, they may exercise a graver effect on a defendant’s future prospects than a felony conviction might, because the immediate associations evoked by “restraining order” or “protection order” are those of stalking, threat, and violence. It’s presumed that a restraining order plaintiff would only petition a restraining order because s/he was afraid for his or her safety.

A restraining order defendant, including one who’s the victim of false allegations, may well be viewed with greater distaste, suspicion, and apprehension than someone with a criminal record (a burglar, for instance) whose crimes didn’t suggest s/he posed a danger to another person.

Those who’ve responded to this blog whose careers have been imperiled or derailed by false allegations made through the medium of a restraining order include an inventor and entrepreneur with a Ph.D. in science, a nurse, a lawyer, a therapist, a stock broker, a firefighter, teachers (one an aspirant composer and performer), university students, and several police officers. And any number of people who haven’t identified their professions have visited this site desperate to know if restraining orders are public records and can damage their careers.

They are and they can.

Job applications may explicitly ask whether applicants have “ever been the subject of a restraining order.” And not only has more than one visitor here reported that s/he’s lost multiple jobs because of a false restraining order; several have reported losing jobs because of a false restraining order that was dismissed. Even restraining orders recognized by the court as groundless are liabilities.

That’s how prejudicial these instruments are.

The general public has no idea how easily they’re obtained, let alone how easily they’re obtained by fraud—or that they’re obtained by fraud.

This is due as much to the system’s successfully shaming and intimidating its victims into silence as it is to propaganda that promotes restraining orders as instruments that can only do good. And that perception of restraining orders’ being harmless and of public benefit extends to government and other administrators, as well as to lawmakers. Judges and authorities may very well know that restraining orders are abused, as many lawyers certainly do, but are compelled to act otherwise.

I have a lifelong friend who works for a defense contractor and is subject to periodic background checks, as, for example, was the aforementioned stock broker. By the FBI. My friend doesn’t even have text messaging on his cell phone, because he has to be vigilant about paper trails. A restraining order would finish him: hasta la bye-bye. The aforementioned lawyer, a young woman fresh out of law school who was victimized by a false accuser, wanted to work for the FBI. Not gonna happen. And that may have been her dream since she was a little girl. She was falsely fingered as a crackpot by an older, male colleague (also an attorney) who seduced her while concealing from her that he was married. He wanted to shut her up and shut her down—and did.

It was easy.

One of the aforementioned teachers was on his way to Nashville to become a songwriter, that is, a creative artist. Any career in the public eye like this one is vulnerable to being compromised or trashed by a scandal that may be based on nothing but cunning lies or a disturbed person’s fantasies spewed impulsively in a window of five or 10 minutes. Besides the obvious impairment that something like this can exert on income prospects, its psychological effects alone can make performance of a job impossible. And nothing kills income prospects more surely than that.

Restraining orders are publicly recorded on courthouse websites, and in some regions restraining order recipients are entered in public registries, like sex offenders. Imagine being a schoolteacher and never knowing when one of your students is going to out that you were issued a restraining order that may have been filed by some short-term loser boy- or girlfriend and based on malicious lies. The juicy parts can be copied at the local courthouse for a couple of dollars (and scanned and electronically circulated on the Internet for nothing).

The abovementioned therapist has agonized over whether to publicly own what she’s been put through for fear than she’ll damage her professional standing or embarrass her children. She’s opted on the path that she’d probably counsel a patient to take: reject shame, own what’s happened to you, and defy lies sooner than let them unravel your sanity. That path is commendably courageous, but what the consequences of choosing it will be only time will tell.

Implications are what restraining orders are based on (no proof of anything is requisite), and those implications can be socially and psychologically crippling or fatal.

The prosperity of the independently wealthy—trust fund babies, for instance—doesn’t depend on public image. For these people, restraining orders likely aren’t big deals. Not coincidentally, of course, these are the folks who successfully escape from courtroom travails, anyway.

Bullshit talks, money walks.

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

December 31, 2013August 23, 2023Moderator 5 Comments

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

—E-petition respondent

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s parse that logic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heads would roll.

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

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

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

Judge: “Are you afraid of her?”

Man: “No, I….”

Judge: “Are you afraid of her?”

Man: “No, it’s not that. It’s—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they’re mostly silent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s not a false allegation.

The Word for Restraining Order Abuse is FRAUD

December 23, 2013August 23, 2023Moderator 8 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ABCs of Restraining Order Fraud

December 15, 2013August 23, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 8, 2013August 23, 2023Moderator 10 Comments

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

—From “End Restraining Order Abuses”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a piece of cake.

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

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

The New Domestic Violence: Restraining Order Abuse

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

Daughter: “He hits me, Ma.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Objections to Restraining Orders AREN’T about Restraining Orders

December 1, 2013February 15, 2018Moderator 32 Comments

Let’s get something clear: protests against restraining orders aren’t about restraining orders.

Granted, it’s a violation against decency and all things American for the government to casually curtail citizens’ freedoms without even consulting them first. But, seriously, who cares if a judge says one adult can’t talk to some other adult?

Objections to restraining orders are never about not being allowed to talk to the plaintiffs who were treacherous enough seek them. I would imagine (and I don’t strictly have to imagine) that most restraining order defendants’ feelings toward the people they’re prohibited from talking to are considerably less than friendly, anyway.

Here’s what objections to restraining orders are about:

On a modicum of evidence of “threat” or none at all, a spouse or boy- or girlfriend can be ejected from his or her home (even if s/he holds the deed) and forbidden access to his or her children, pets, money, and property on pain of police arrest.
Allegations ranging from harassment to domestic violence can be permanently stamped on defendants’ (that is, recipients’) records, again based on a modicum of evidence (very possibly misrepresented) or none at all. An allegation amounting to nothing more than “I’m afraid” is sufficient to obtain an “order of protection,” the implications of which phrase alone signify stalking, violence, or violent intent.
Restraining orders are public documents that may be accessible to anyone, including employers and would-be employers. Records of their issuance remain on public view even after their expiration and may be entered into public registries.
The truth or falsity of allegations that may be as extreme as assault with a deadly weapon, child molestation, or rape is determined according to the same civil standard of evidence as contract and insurance disputes: “preponderance of the evidence.” Regardless of the extremity of allegations on restraining orders, neither a trial by jury nor “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” is ever required for their validation. If a judge feels there’s a better than 50/50 probability that allegations are true, “preponderance of the evidence” is satisfied.
Allegations on restraining orders, which may be either criminal or criminal in nature and may besides be entirely false, indefinitely remain on defendants’ public records whether they’re found meritorious or not, that is, even baseless allegations that a judge ignores are never stricken from the record but remain on public view and may reasonably be interpreted as true or valid by anyone who consults those records.
The restraining order process is conducted ex parte, which means orders are issued based on one party’s claims alone, and these may be both damning and egregiously false.
Statutory penalties for lying to police officers and judges (false reporting and perjury) are never enforced, and allegations of lying are furthermore discounted by the courts.
Federal grant monies (average grants being in the neighborhood of $500,000) are awarded to police districts and courts in return for their consenting to have their officers “educated” about how they should respond to allegations of fear and violence. Mandated responses include accepting allegations of violence by women at face value (that is, they’re not to be questioned). This mandated response roughly translates to allegations by anyone being recognized as legitimate.
Irrespective of the nature of allegations entered against a defendant, which may be innocuous or false, that defendant is subjected to traumatizing menace, intimidation, and public disparagement by the state. S/he is treated generically like a fiend, the paradigmatic basis for which treatment is the domestic batterer whose conduct restraining orders were originally conceived to check, despite allegations of violence being rare today relative to the vast number of restraining orders issued (estimated at two to three million per annum).
Restraining orders, which circumvent due process entirely and which originate in civil court and are therefore subject to no standard of proof, may implicate defendants as criminals and may have criminal consequences if “violated.” Alleged violations, also, may be subject to no standard of proof. In other words, a defendant can find him- or herself locked up, never having been granted his or her constitutional right to a trial and very possibly on maliciously false grounds (based on a decision formed by the court prior to even knowing what that defendant looked like).
Opportunities to contest allegations on restraining orders, which defendants may literally have to ask for within a brief window of time, may be assigned no more than a few minutes, and defendants are never provided counsel. An innocent defendant forced to contest utterly malicious allegations may face the quandary of living with them permanently stamped on his or her public record or shelling out $2,500 to $5,000 for an attorney’s representation, which measure is no guarantee of vindication and which measure few can afford even if they’re conscious of the need (which few are).
Restraining orders are usually free for the asking and may be petitioned serially or multiply by a single applicant, making them marvelous instruments of harassment and torment. There’s no statutory limit on the number of restraining orders a single applicant may apply for, no penalties for having false or groundless restraining orders dismissed, and of course no penalties for lying.
Restraining orders impose no limitations on the actions of plaintiffs (that is, applicants), leaving them free to taunt or stalk defendants, or bait them into violating orders of the court.
Courts pander to and reward even those guided by spite, jealousy, malice, and/or personality disorders or mental illness. The interchange between a judge and a plaintiff is no more than five or 10 minutes in duration and is more procedural and perfunctory than probative. A judge authorizes a restraining order, which may permanently alter many lives for the worse (including those of children), based on knowing nothing whatever about its defendant, who’s just a name on a form, and almost nothing about its petitioner, who may be disturbed or even insane.
Upon plaintiffs’ successfully making false allegations stick once (or baiting defendants into violating false restraining orders), they now have a foundation upon which to make further falsehoods entirely plausible. Thus can innocent defendants’ lives be scarred or fractured irreparably by chronic abuse (a single potent lie, or a series of them, can be nursed for years). And these defendants may have been the actual victims in the first place.

Most people (including authorities and officers of the court) aren’t conscious that restraining orders are abused, let alone conscious of how they’re abused, why they’re abused, or how extremely they can be abused.

It’s hoped that this synopsis makes the means and motive for restraining order abuse clearer to those in the dark, at sea, or on the ropes. Whether you’re a legislator, a judge, a police officer, an attorney, a counselor, a feminist or feminist partisan, a victim of restraining order fraud, or just someone with reasonable expectations about how the justice system operates, whatever your perceptions were about restraining orders and their administration, those perceptions were probably either naïve or wrong.

The ease and convenience with which restraining orders may be obtained make their attractiveness as instruments of passive-aggressive castigation, spite, and vengeance irresistible.

You’ve seen that game carnival-goers are invited to take a crack at that gives them three tries to drop a seated person into a pool of water? Restraining orders are sort of the same thing, only the cost of a ticket is free, a player doesn’t need to be able to hit the broadside of a barn, and the water beneath the target is scalding.

TALKING BACK to restraining orders

THEY’RE NOT JUST ABUSED BUT ABUSIVE

Tag perjury

Sex, Restraining Order Abuse, and the “Dark Triad”: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy

How Men Lie on Restraining Orders: A Tutorial for Feminists

A Legislated License to Lie: Nothing CAN’T Be Falsely Alleged on a Restraining Order

How “Preponderance of the Evidence” Rewards Restraining Order Fraud and Why Bigger Lies Work Better than Smaller Ones

Victim-Blaming: The “Patriarchal Paradigm,” Discrimination against Male Victims of Domestic Violence, the Frequency of False Allegations, and Abuses of Men and Women by Restraining Order Fraud

Who BS-es the Police and Court? Who Doesn’t.

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

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

Restraining Order Fraud Needs to Be Recognized for What It Is: CRIME

DARVO and the Diva: A Hypothetical Case in Point of Restraining Order Abuse to Reverse the Roles of Victim and Offender

J’accuse: On Wikipedia and Restraining Order Abuse

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

The Impact of Fraudulent Restraining Orders on Employment Prospects

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

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

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

The Word for Restraining Order Abuse is FRAUD

The ABCs of Restraining Order Fraud

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

The New Domestic Violence: Restraining Order Abuse

Objections to Restraining Orders AREN’T about Restraining Orders