“Breaking the Glasses”: One Blog Writer’s Metaphor for Exposing Restraining Order Abuse

November 24, 2013February 23, 2018Moderator 3 Comments

A highly intelligent and sensitive woman I’ve been in correspondence with in recent months, one who’s been put through the legal crucible and left badly scalded by it, remarked to me that despite what may be their best intentions, a lot of those on the Internet who protest abuses committed through the courts and by the courts sound like nut jobs. I’m personally in awe of anyone who’s weathered court travails and emerged even reasonably sane. I’m not sure I qualify myself. But I take her point.

That’s why I’m particularly impressed when I encounter writers whose literary protests are not only controlled but very lucid and balanced. One such writer maintains a blog titled Breaking the Glasses, and anyone with a stake in the issues this blog concerns may appreciate a female writer’s perspective on them. See her posts on “Restraining Order Abuse and Vexatious Litigation.” She really gets it. Her section on “Mantrapment” (marvelous for its title alone) is dead on in its analyses, and she does a stellar job breaking down how the restraining order game works by the sedimentary accretion of lies.

Here’s an excerpt from an article of this writer’s that chronicles one man’s “Seven years in hell” (published on AVoiceforMen.com). It summarizes the horrors of restraining order injustice and may resonate with the experiences of visitors to this blog:

“After these first accusations failed to get Amy what she wanted, she changed tactics. She would go to the county courthouse first, using false claims of stalking and assault to obtain another emergency Civil Protection Order. A hearing would be set for a date within 30 days to determine whether the order was merited. This hearing would carry two possibilities: either the order would be dropped, or it would be upheld. If the order was dropped, the charge of violating it would also be dropped. If upheld, it would be in effect for 5 years, and Rodger would face limitations and penalties, including the permanent loss of his legal right to keep and bear arms. Any contact he had with Amy after that, even if it was accidental, could result in his being sent to jail.

“After requesting the order, Amy would wait until she was informed that the order had been served, and within a day or two, she would accuse Rodger of violating it. Each time, officers would arrive at Rodger’s home and take him into custody without reading him his rights. They informed him that they could do this because he was not under arrest – merely ‘going in for questioning.’

“However, despite not being under arrest, he would be transported to the station in handcuffs, riding in the back of a cruiser rather than on his own. Officers would place him in a holding cell before and after questioning him. He would be held for hours. The department would not release him without bail. Officers told Rodger’s family that they were permitted to do all of this under a combination of the Patriot Act and the Violence Against Women Act, explaining that the Patriot Act allows police to detain citizens suspected of domestic terrorism, and VAWA treats domestic abuse as a form of terrorism. However, VAWA does not treat domestic abuse as a form of ‘domestic terrorism’ as described in the Patriot Act. That assertion was an incorrect interpretation of the two laws, one which is being fed to local departments by the advocacy group from which Amy was receiving assistance, but the fact that it’s incorrect has not stopped local police departments from acting on the advocacy group’s advice when detaining area men accused of domestic violence.”

It digests much of what’s most defective and destructive about the restraining order process and underscores how easily and extremely this process can be abused.

Besides this writer’s blog, I want to direct interested parties to Restraining Order Blog, maintained by Chris Tucker, whose own treatments are reasoned and conscientious. Many detailed and revealing firsthand accounts of restraining order abuse can be found here.

It’s said that knowledge is power. This isn’t particularly true when applied to the state legal apparatus, because all the know-how in the world can fall victim to base lies. In the legal arena, the only sure power is political pull (which usually equates to money). And the only virtue in knowing this is knowing to steer clear of the legal arena. There is much to be said for speaking truth to power, however, because information is influential. And the tides of change will only be roused by that information’s spreading.

And this finally is contingent upon those in the know feeling secure enough to pronounce what they know. This is how the power of knowledge is realized. Fortune doesn’t in fact always favor the brave, but in the fullness of time it may dependably respond to their summons.

Not Evil Geniuses but Brats in Slacks: On Narcissists and Restraining Order Abuse

November 22, 2013August 2, 2023Moderator 3 Comments

Pathological narcissism is apparently a titillating topic.

A growing number of visitors to this blog are brought here by search terms that include words and phrases like narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder, and NPD. More commenters, too, have lately reported abuses by narcissists through the courts, typically restraining order abuse. This surge is less likely due to an uptick in abuses by narcissists than to a dawning awareness of the psychological motives that underlie many vicious legal assaults. More Internet support groups and websites devoted exclusively to exposing abuses by narcissists are emerging, and the same words and phrases glossed above are now appearing in headlines, such as those on The Huffington Post and Salon.com.

My own opinion, on reflection, is that narcissists are banal. Evil, as Hannah Arendt famously noted, usually is (Arendt was a teacher and writer who fled Nazi Germany). The truth is the sorts of legal mischief narcissists get up to only work because our courts are accustomed to crediting lies (however painfully transparent they might be to a disinterested party). Narcissists assuredly congratulate themselves on their courtroom triumphs (congratulating themselves is among narcissists’ principal preoccupations). Yet any precocious child would see through their counterfeit dramatics.

Narcissists aren’t, in fact, epic anything; they’re pathetic. You may perceive narcissists’ pathological lies as devious; you’d more usefully perceive them as compulsive. (A compulsion is an irresistible urge.) What gives their frauds that aura of grandeur is the astonishing ease with which they’re committed, particularly on authorities and judges, and the facility with which narcissists enlist others in those frauds or convince others that they’re true. (Narcissists’ allies and pawns are more often than not morally normal people, that is, “neurotypicals.” Sometimes they’re even seemingly intelligent and discerning ones.)

Casual charlatanism, though, is hardly an accomplishment for people without consciences to answer to. And rubes and tools are ten cents a dozen.

There probably are some narcissistic masterminds out there. None of the narcissists whose conduct I know of, however—and I’ve had dozens of stories shared with me and read scores of other accounts, besides—has ever impressed me as more than a child in big-boy pants or a big-girl skirt. Narcissists succeed by virtue of soulless inveiglement and outward plausibility, neither of which bears up under close scrutiny. (Courtroom decisions made in restraining order cases are the products of a few minutes.)

I’ve read many people differentiate between narcissism and “mental illness.” Narcissists aren’t crazy, they’ll write. I’m unconvinced. I think it’s more accurately pronounced that narcissists don’t seem crazy and that most people are taken in by narcissists not because there isn’t something about them that alerts the antennae of others that there’s something off about them than that what’s off about them doesn’t match any of the familiar paradigms of craziness.

I’m not a psychologist, but my personal opinion is that narcissists are mentally ill and, when their frauds and ploys are resisted to any significant extent, that that mental illness becomes more prominent and perceptible, particularly to those whom they’ve abused. Normal people won’t run themselves ragged defending such frauds and ploys. A narcissist will.

Narcissism is about surface. And surface, despite the warning of that adage about book covers, is what we judge by. Narcissists are good with audiences. They’re also good with stress. They don’t slide into that state of neglected personal hygiene that we associate with “madness” even when pushed to an extremity. This isn’t a reflection of their interior hygiene, however.

Scratch beneath the surface, and you will find disorder.

Contrary to what many online writers counsel, people in legal contests with narcissists shouldn’t think of their opponents as reasoning beings in possession of highly developed albeit wicked minds; they should reckon themselves to be in struggles against recalcitrant children. Much ado is made of the cunning of narcissists. That apparent cunning is really just a manifestation of obsessive-compulsive self-justification combined with infantile rage provoked by the narcissist’s not getting his or her way.

Narcissists aren’t Hannibal Lecters; they’re brats in permanent temper tantrums who recognize no moral boundaries or authority.

What HE Said: On Why Once a Restraining Order Fraud Has Been Put Over on the Courts, It Sticks like Pigeon Scat on a Car Hood

November 14, 2013February 24, 2018Moderator 17 Comments

A principle of law that everyone ensnarled in any sort of legal shenanigan should be aware of is stare decisis. This Latin phrase means “to abide by, or adhere to, decided things” (Black’s Law Dictionary). Law proceeds and “evolves” in accordance with stare decisis.

Anybody who’s read a Grisham novel or seen its screen adaptation knows that precedents are evoked to establish the merits of legal arguments. Precedents are cases whose judicial opinions imposed some novel tweak, limit, or elaboration on previous opinions. Law “advances” by means of this sort of accretion and seldom backpedals. Lawyers inform judges of precedents to persuade them that such-and-such was agreed upon by another judge, so you guys need to form your rulings correspondently.

The orientation of the courts is toward accepting that what’s previously been found to be the case must remain the case (or “the truth”).

Victims of restraining order fraud express amazement at the courts’ unwillingness to acknowledge obvious lies by designing plaintiffs (applicants). The fact is that once a restraining order has been successfully petitioned, and this is simply a matter of a plaintiff plaintively persuading a judge of his or her need in a 10-minute interview, it becomes a (presumptively) decided matter. Court rhetoric would have it believed that no final conclusion is made until the defendant can be heard in opposition, but all things judicial lean toward the notion exemplified by stare decisis, that is, what’s decided is decided.

Translation: “It’s true, because we said it was.” This is called a tautology (the assertion that a fact is its own reason) and would get a practitioner tossed out of Critical Thinking 101.

Defendants who opt to contest false allegations on restraining orders only to have judges belittle their efforts in the brief, half-hour hearings afforded them often report being horrified by judicial bias, laziness, or indifference, and leave courtrooms feeling like the outcomes were preordained.

That’s because in a very real sense they were.

Ex parte rulings may well be done deals, because judges, consciously or not, follow the precept that they should adhere to precedents and not unsettle things previously established (“stare decisis et non quieta movere”). And all restraining orders are approved ex parte, that is, without judges even knowing who defendants are, so what has previously been established has been established unilaterally (that is, prejudicially or one-sidedly) and in the absence of due process of law.

Restraining order appeals, which may climb successive rungs of the court ladder if defendants possess the financial means and moral fortitude to keep resisting, face this prejudice all the way up. So too do lawsuits seeking damages for restraining order abuse (especially if litigants are self-represented).

If you ever receive an apology from a judge, frame it.

Truth may literally be irrelevant. Procedural rules trump it and incline and authorize judges not merely to discount contradictory evidence provided by defendants but to ignore it entirely. Some disturbed person’s incriminatory fantasy, therefore, can drain the quality of years of a restraining order defendant’s life. This is the grotesque reality of the restraining order process and underscores its inherent corruption.

Government studies have concluded that a majority of restraining orders (80% by at least one reckoning) are issued unnecessarily or on false grounds.

It’s clear then that unless due process is retrofitted into the system, and defendants are granted the opportunity to be heard prior to restraining orders’ being issued so that they’re not forced to enter the process having to clear the hurdle of an unfair prejudgment (on top of feeling betrayed and menaced by the state), restraining orders will necessarily continue to do more harm than they arrest.

It would also be nice if the statutory consequence of prison time for those who lie to the courts were once and while enforced.

“restraining order is bullsh*t”: A Lesson in Lying

November 5, 2013July 9, 2023Moderator 9 Comments

The previous post concerned lying to get restraining orders, how easily frauds are put over, and the possible value to recipients of false restraining orders of lying better than their accusers.

The quoted phrase in this post’s title, slightly censored, represents an actual search term that has brought several such recipients to this blog.

Among those with no firsthand knowledge of how restraining orders are abused or why, there’s an assumption that by lying, complainants of restraining order fraud mean exaggeration, inflation of allegations that at least bear some correspondence to fact.

This assumption is mistakenly based on the belief that courts only act on proof. Proof is not the standard by which civil matters are judged or the criterion upon which civil restraining orders are approved. Restraining order interviews between applicants and judges are five- or 10-minute screen tests, nothing more; proof is unnecessary.

“But surely you can’t just make things up!” You surely can. Anything. There are no consequences to lying to the police, lying under oath to a judge, or lying on a sworn document unless the district attorney’s office opts to prosecute you, and this seldom happens in civil matters and never in those as low on its list of priorities as restraining order fraud. Statutes that threaten penalties for false reporting or committing perjury are like padlocks: they’re only meant to keep honest people honest.

Not only can people lie to the courts—and with impunity—they can lie BIG.

Not many years ago, philosopher Harry Frankfurt published a treatise that I was amused to discover called On Bullshit (which predictably mounted the bestseller list on the allure of its title alone).

In his book—which is brilliant, in fact, and well-deserving of acclaim—Dr. Frankfurt distinguishes “lies” from “bullshit.” Lies, he explains, have a basic or tangential relationship with the truth, that is, they’re not purely imaginative; they fandango the truth. Bullshit, in contrast to lies, lacks even a passing acquaintance with truth. It’s wholly improvisational. The bullshitter doesn’t “reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all.”

False allegations on restraining orders may not be lies simply; they may be bullshit, fabrications that are utterly divorced from reality. A number of respondents to this blog who have been accused of violence, for example, are vegetarian or vegan women who scruple about the welfare of insects and regard violence as unthinkable. Their accusers haven’t merely misrepresented them but reinvented them. The motive? Sheer malice. What correspondence restraining order applicants’ bullshit may have with the truth is antithetical: they allege falsehoods—ones completely estranged from the truth—that they know will most searingly damage their victims.

Success in leading anyone who hasn’t been abused in this way toward realizing that accusers can and do lie is tricky enough; getting them to perceive that allegations may be out-and-out bullshit requires forceful eye-opening.

I can’t responsibly advocate lying. I do, however, acknowledge that since opportunities afforded restraining order defendants to expose the bullshit of unscrupulous accusers may permit them all of 15 minutes to work a miracle, defendants’ following the dictum “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” has something to recommend it.

The logical extension of there being no consequences for lying is there being no consequences for lying back. Bigger and better.

It could be advantageous, speaking practically not morally, for defendants of false restraining orders to embrace this premise and—instead of trying to deflect turds flung at them—to respond in kind (and even less kindly). Fairness, one of our courts’ fundamental procedural principles, dictates that if judicators are willing to tolerate monkey-cage antics from one side (and moreover reward those antics), they can hardly be averse to bilateral flingfests.

Maybe the only way to prompt this process to evolve is to expose it to its own degeneracy: Monkey see, monkey doo-doo.

“Why Would Someone Get a False Restraining Order?”

July 9, 2013February 17, 2018Moderator 7 Comments

This question pops up a lot.

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

Satisfaction of a spiteful impulse might come to mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Overwhelmed, Outgunned, and Completely Disrespected”: One Woman’s Restraining Order Hell

July 3, 2013July 13, 2023Moderator 6 Comments

I was recently emailed by a 50-year-old woman who desperately wants to see her mother before her mother dies. This woman, whom I’ll call Natasha, has been restrained by court injunction from entering, calling, or nearing her childhood home.

The restraining order was petitioned by her father, an attorney who has “unlimited resources.” Natasha herself is jobless for the first time in her life, and doesn’t have the means to hire a lawyer of her own.

Natasha’s mother was hospitalized in September 2011 for over 70 days in intensive care. Natasha didn’t learn about her mother’s condition for three weeks, because her father and brothers, whom she alleges had psychologically and physically abused her, didn’t want her around. She says the physical abuse, doled out over two decades, was at the hands of her brothers and that this abuse was tacitly condoned by her father and sometimes explicitly sanctioned. “Far worse, though, was the psychological abuse from my father,” Natasha says, “who told me I was lying, it didn’t happen, it wasn’t that bad, I must have done something to deserve it.”

Natasha has lived separately from her family for over 15 years.

Natasha stayed with her mother throughout her hospitalization, while her father and brothers merely checked in for a few minutes at a time (always as a group). Her mother’s doctors told her “that there was a 100% chance my mother would not survive. For the next 45 days, I sat at her side and held her hand while her heart stopped and started back up. I was not going to let her die alone in a hospital if I could help it.”

Her mother lived.

Once her mother was discharged, however, Natasha says she was only able to visit her three times before her father applied for a restraining order to drive her off. Telephone calls she made to her mother prior to the court order’s being issued weren’t put through.

“But every time I talked to her, she told me without prompting that she missed me and wished she heard from me more often,” Natasha writes. She also says her mother, who is paralyzed, told her she has to invent complaints just to get her sons to come into her room to see her.

Natasha’s brothers, 33 and 49, live with their parents and have never worked.

Despite the household presence of his two adult sons, Natasha’s father, who hired an attorney to prosecute his case and who is himself a well known lawyer in the local probate court, readily convinced a judge that he was a victim of elder abuse, that he was afraid of his daughter, and that she had tried to extort money from him. Also that she “could not appreciate” the precariousness of her mother’s condition. “He lied in his request everywhere,” she says.

Natasha even reports that she “filed restraining order requests” against her father first but that the court has refused to hear them.

She hasn’t seen her mother, who has undergone another life-threatening surgery since Natasha was issued a restraining order, for nearly a year.

“I just want to spend some time with my mother,” she says. “I am afraid I will never see her again. I know I will not be allowed to attend her funeral. I am so angry, so frustrated, so hurt, and so powerless to do anything.”

She says she intends to file a complaint against her father with the state bar association. And maybe another against the judge who has disregarded her petitions.

Guess how effective that will be.

“A Nightmare That Won’t End”: Dealing with False Allegations

June 20, 2013July 13, 2023Moderator 5 Comments

A person who obtains a fraudulent restraining order or otherwise abuses the system to bring you down with false allegations does so because you didn’t bend to his or her will like you were supposed to do.

To contest the restraining order (or whatever other state process was abused) is to once more defy the will of your accuser.

No surprise then that such an accuser will up the stakes on you. Defy subsequent allegations, and your accuser will escalate them further. This is especially the case when your accuser is female. It’s not for nothing that the (mis)quotation, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” has become immortal. (And it’s not only men who have to fear this wrath; women can be at least as vehemently and doggedly brutal to other women.)

It’s rare for a false accuser to relent.

This is partly due to psychology and partly due to how easily the processes we’re talking about are abused. Restraining order issuance, for example, pretty much follows a revolving-door policy: plaintiffs are in and out in minutes.

Once a foothold is attained, and the paperwork starts mounting in the plaintiff’s favor, she’s committed and feels ten feet tall, and the snowball begins rolling downhill on its way to becoming an avalanche.

One success (that first rubber-stamped round of allegations) assures that a repeat performance will be that much easier. And it is. Both police officers and judges have been “educated” to react paternally to allegations leveled by women, and the worse those allegations are, the more hastily they’re swallowed. Initial allegations once validated by a judge’s signature, moreover, make future allegations that much more credible and future judges’ eyes that much narrower.

Each added strand strengthens and sustains the web of lies and makes it that much more lethal a snare.

Any number of men and women have written to this blog reporting that they never had a run-in with the law in their lives, and now, in the span of a few months, they’ve been transmogrified into Attila the Hun.

And no one gazing down the tunnel from the far end—whether an employer, a neighbor, or a judge—can perceive that it originates with some calculated lies scrawled on a bureaucratic form: “Hey, can I borrow your pen for a sec? I’ll give it right back.”

Lies like these, upon multiplying like cancer cells and having as they do the full force of public policy behind them, can take over lives.

And, relentlessly chewing, chewing, chewing like the parasitic agents they are, destroy them.

Processes that are supposed to defend people from abuse provide liars with the perfect media to make their wildest vengeance fantasies come true.

Ordure in the Court: On False Restraining Orders and What It Means to Get One

June 19, 2013July 13, 2023Moderator 3 Comments

I’ve recently tried to debunk some of the myths that surround the administration of restraining orders. This post is about what it’s like to actually be the recipient of one, particularly a fraudulent one.

Among the uninitiated, there’s a belief that there’s some kind of prelude to the moment a constable shows up at your door. There isn’t. Restraining orders are as foreseeable as a shovel to the back of the head.

Constables, incidentally, are nice guys. Like process servers, they’re quick to assert that they’re just the messengers—and they are, of course: they otherwise have nothing to do with anything.

The motive forces behind the issuance of a restraining order are two people: the plaintiff (the person who drops by the courthouse to allege that you’re a fiend) and the judge who interviews him or her for a few minutes before validating his or her allegations with a signature.

Application for a restraining order is a fast-food process designed so that a plaintiff legitimately in need of urgent relief from a stressful situation can obtain that relief quickly and easily. The humor of this is only appreciated by recipients of fraudulent restraining orders petitioned by plaintiffs who are willful manipulators of a system primed to take them at their word.

Restraining orders are issued ex parte: a judge never sees or knows a thing about the person s/he approves a restraining order against. What this means in practical terms is that whatever a plaintiff alleges against you, no matter how damningly untrue, is all a judge has to go on. In other words, you’re guilty until proven innocent. And there’s really no ceiling on what a plaintiff can allege: battery, sexual violations, stalking, theft—you name it. (Plaintiffs who can’t squeeze all of their allegations into the blanks on the restraining order form are allowed to use a separate piece of paper.)

The plaintiff doesn’t have to actually prove anything. The burden is entirely upon you to discredit whatever the plaintiff alleges, and what s/he alleges is only limited by his or her ethics if s/he has any. Otherwise what s/he alleges is only limited by his or her imagination and malice.

Consider what your worst enemy might relish having permanently stamped on your public record. At the moment a restraining order is applied for against you, it’s a fair bet its plaintiff is your worst enemy.

Judges, who should know better than anyone the lengths people will go to to injure one another, have been instructed to react mechanically in the presence of certain criteria like claims of threat or danger. They don’t know the plaintiff. They don’t know the defendant. They’re often just responding to cues without letting much deliberation interfere. They don’t have to worry about professional censure, because this is established practice.

So. A plaintiff waltzes into a courthouse, takes a number and fills out a form, waits to see a judge, makes his or her plea, and more than likely leaves the courthouse feeling validated by the judge’s approval of his or her restraining order, regardless of whether the allegations on that order bear any correspondence to the truth. S/he’s feeling high and righteous (and possibly wickedly gratified).

The defendant is greeted the next day by an officer—at his or her home and possibly in front of friends, family, and/or neighbors—and served with an order from the court that may accuse him or her of violence, stalking, or other perversions and that warns him or her in no uncertain terms that s/he’ll be arrested for any perceived violations of that order. (S/he may alternatively be forcibly removed from that home on the same basis with nothing but the clothes on his or her back and denied access to children, pets, property, money, and transportation—for a year, a number of years, or indefinitely.)

It’s estimated, based on statistics extrapolated from government studies, that one in five recipients of restraining orders is pretty much the person his or her accuser has represented him or her to be, has pretty much done what s/he’s been accused of doing, and that whatever that is is bad enough that s/he shouldn’t be much surprised by a knock on the door from a person in uniform.

For the other 80% of restraining order defendants—recipients of orders that were either dubiously necessary or based on false allegations—their lives may well come to an abrupt halt. Recipients of fraudulent restraining orders, especially, may be traumatized by feelings of gnawing outrage, betrayal, mortification, and impending doom. The rhetoric of restraining orders is calculated to inspire dread—maybe so most recipients simply slink away into a gloomy corner. It reflects better on the court and its statistics if restraining orders stick.

Insomnia, persistent feelings of vulnerability and distrust, anxiety, depression, retreat—the stress responses people report are predictable and are ones, obviously, that can lead to physical and psychological illness, sidetracked careers, and neglected, scarred, or broken relationships. In most cases, restraining orders that do stick—and that’s most of them—never come unstuck. The stink follows you wherever you go.

Even the rare few who manage to extricate themselves from trumped-up allegations, usually with the help of a competent attorney, are never the same. What may have been an attention-seeking stunt performed by some pathetic schemer over a lunch break leaves a permanent impression.

Like a shovel to the back of the head.

The Real Obstacle to Exposing Restraining Order Fraud: Blind, Gullible Faith

June 18, 2013July 13, 2023Moderator 4 Comments

What most people don’t get about restraining orders is how much they have in common with Mad Libs. You know, that party game where you fill in random nouns, verbs, and modifiers to concoct a zany story? What petitioners fill in the blanks on restraining order applications with is typically more deliberate but may be no less farcical.

Consult any online exposition about restraining orders or a similar legal remedy for harassment or threat like the law against telephone (or “telephonic”) harassment, and you’ll find it’s taken on faith that someone seeking such a remedy has a legitimate need.

And it’s not just taken on faith by expository writers but by cops and judges, too, who’ve been trained to react paternally, especially to allegations of threat made by women—as, in the age of feminist ascendency, we all have to some extent by dint of cultural osmosis and conformity.

I mention the law against telephone harassment, because its ease of abuse was recently brought to my attention by a respondent to this blog. What this law is meant to do is provide relief from harassing callers like cranks, heavy breathers, or hangup pranksters—or to get people off your back who are threatening you.

How, you might ask, does someone prove what was said or exchanged during certain telephone calls? S/he doesn’t. Unless the calls were recorded, there’s no way a third party can know what transpired. It’s presumed that someone who complains is telling the truth (and what’s supposed to be presumed, of course, is that the person who stands accused is innocent).

The insurmountable unh-duh factor here is that someone with an ax to grind and no scruples about lying to cops and judges can make up any story s/he wants: “He said he was going to burn my house down!”

Now, let’s say you have to defend yourself against an allegation like this and what you really said was, “Hey, Sally. I just called to say thanks. That fondue you sent over was delicious!” And maybe you called back later to get the recipe. And maybe you really thought the fondue—or whatever it was—was revolting, and you think Sally is certifiably bats, but your sister said to be nice to her. And maybe Sally asked you over to see her collection of porcelain ballerinas, and you politely declined and inadvertently hurt her feelings, and now Sally feels spurned and hates your guts.

How do you prove you didn’t threaten to burn Sally’s house down? Or to eat her cat with some fava beans and a nice Chianti?

You can’t. The burden of proof that should be your accuser’s is yours. Justice, which is supposed to be blind, is instead blindly credulous: “Yeah, yeah, and then what happened?”

Restraining orders work the same way and are just as easily abused by wanton frauds (in fact, they too can be based on telephone calls). Police officers and judges have very literally been trained to accept the stories they’re told like baby birds awaiting a regurgitated meal.

Any number of people have written in to this blog whose lives have been highjacked by vengeful liars, attention-seekers, embittered (ex-)spouses or (ex-)lovers, psychopaths, or flat out predators. Many, targeted by the particularly and devotedly malicious, have even been jailed on false allegations. Their personal and professional lives have been scarred if not derailed or demolished.

They plan to sue. They plan to seek media attention. They plan to write a book (or, um, start a blog). Being vindicated from obscene lies validated by a complacent judge or earnest cop becomes their mission in life.

Sound mad? If it does, that’s because the same thing hasn’t happened to you.

Some Myths about Restraining Orders

May 29, 2013July 13, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

FALSE: Restraining orders are mostly sought against batterers.

Redress of domestic violence was the original impetus behind the conception of restraining orders 30 years ago. Today, however, violence is seldom a factor in restraining order cases. This isn’t because violence has been stamped out—far from it—but because relative to the vast number of restraining orders petitioned from our courts each year in which violence plays no part at all, those involving violence or allegations of violence are few. As many restraining orders may now be based on Facebook annoyances as on domestic assault.

FALSE: Restraining order fraud happens only occasionally.

Fraud of a greater or lesser kind is probably more the rule than the exception. Allegations made on restraining orders are rarely without a subjective element: I feel harassed, I feel afraid, I feel in danger. Judges are responding more like advice columnists when they sign off on restraining orders than they are like criminal scientists, that is, they’re responding to alleged emotional states more than anything concrete. “I feel afraid” may in fact be the only allegation needed for an applicant to have a restraining order approved. Disregarding whether this assertion should be sufficient grounds for a restraining order’s being issued, allegations of fear can be falsified, obviously, or greatly exaggerated to mask any number of ulterior motives. Maybe someone is really just peeved and feeling spiteful. Maybe one domestic partner has designs on the other’s property or wants to gain sole custody of the kids. Maybe a dissatisfied boyfriend or girlfriend doesn’t want to make a difficult break-up call. Maybe an adulterer doesn’t want news of an affair getting back to his or her spouse. Maybe someone has a pathological need for attention (“Save me!”). Or maybe someone just wants to trash someone else’s life for the sheer wicked satisfaction of it. Neither restraining order applications nor their applicants receive any special scrutiny. An applicant is in and out of the courthouse door in less than an hour. And most of that time is spent filling out the form(s) and hanging around to rap with a judge for five or 10 minutes.

FALSE: Only residents of trailer parks receive restraining orders.

Restraining orders are issued to people in all economic brackets and fields of employ and who have achieved any level of scholastic or professional success. Those who’ve responded to this blog over the past two years are people with advanced degrees (and students seeking them), teachers, police officers, attorneys, public officials, and businessmen and -women, among others. In fact most respondents who allege they’re victims of false restraining orders are both highly sensitive and highly literate.

FALSE: Only guttersnipes defraud the courts to obtain restraining orders.

Casual lying or sensationalizing of allegations cuts across all economic and social divides. Truly committal and calculated lying, though, seems more common among the intelligent, educated, and socially successful—whose credentials, moreover, make a fraud that much more plausible in the eyes of a judge. Remember we’re talking here about a five- or 10-minute screen test. A successful performance in a restraining order interview doesn’t have to be Oscar-worthy. With intelligence, education, and social success, also, come a surer faith in one’s personal value and entitlement to special treatment. The greater someone’s sense of entitlement, the greater his or her sense of being above the law. Movers and shakers are accustomed to viewing others as competitors who either need to be wooed, subdued, or eliminated. Cut-throat comes easier and more naturally to them than it does to soccer moms. The politically oriented are more practiced at, adept at, and indifferent to lying to achieve their desired ends. They perceive life and the manipulation of others as a game.

FALSE: The issuance of restraining orders is fact/evidence-based.

Though they invariably criminalize their recipients by mere implication, restraining orders are civil not criminal instruments. Consequently no standard of proof is applied to them at all. Because they’re issued ex parte, furthermore, their sole basis is the word of their applicants and those applicants’ representations/interpretations of whatever evidence they may provide to the judge during a few-minute interview. Restraining order recipients are completely in the dark until a constable shows up on the lawn, and if they don’t immediately appeal, no contradictory testimony or evidence is so much as heard by the court, let alone considered. A judge doesn’t even know what the person looks like whom s/he’s issued a restraining order against.

FALSE: Having a restraining order on your record is no biggie.

Restraining orders routinely implicate their recipients as serial harassers, violent threats, sexual deviants, and stalkers (in sum, sickos). Allegations of this sort don’t have to be made explicitly; there are little tick boxes on the forms that allow them to be made implicitly. And just the phrase restraining order conveys these connotations, irrespective of what’s alleged. Not only are restraining orders public record and subject to discovery by employers or would-be employers, significant others, authorities, and officers of the court; there are also movements afoot to have restraining order recipients cataloged in registries like sex offenders, and some such registries already exist. These registries don’t just make the names of restraining order recipients conveniently available to the public; they make finding them out enticing. Those falsely accused on restraining orders of the behaviors identified above are psychologically traumatized and may be indefinitely tormented by fraudulent allegations that endure on public record to corrupt all aspects of their lives, in extreme cases causing social isolation tantamount to false imprisonment. Respondents to this blog have wondered if they’re allowed to relocate, to travel, to do volunteer work, to become police officers, to adopt, or even to talk to other people.

I’ll debunk other misconceptions concerning restraining orders in time, possibly by making additions to this post. One of the most common of these is manifested in the question, “Why would someone lie to get a restraining order?” Below is a brief response to this question lifted from this blog’s Q & A page (see also here):

There are many [reasons]. Here are some: to spitefully subject the defendant to public humiliation and/or to ruin him or her personally or professionally (petty revenge), to gain custody of children or possession of property from a domestic partner, to terminate an illicit relationship (or gag an extramarital friend or lover so s/he feels intimidated and can’t speak to your spouse), to lame or discredit a romantic or business rival (exes’ new spouses or love interests are popular targets), to gain power or leverage over someone (stalkers have obtained restraining orders against their victims), or simply to get attention.

In short, there are no limits on the ways people can suck when they’re handed a golden ticket to.

“Do I Need a Lawyer?”: On Combating Restraining Orders

May 28, 2013February 12, 2018Moderator 7 Comments

nutcracker
“Do I need a lawyer?” is a question that commonly brings restraining order defendants to this blog and other sites like it.

No one wants to shell out thousands for an attorney to bat away allegations made on a restraining order that may have been concocted in a fit of pique by an embittered friend, a jealous ex, or a crazy neighbor. Too, it’s often the case that allegations leveled by restraining order plaintiffs are of a kind no one wants to advertise to strangers, let alone friends and family. Just the implications of the phrase restraining order are enough to make most people recoil.

I know someone who applied to the mayor for a character reference after she was falsely accused of domestic violence—on a restraining order—by a married friend she’d briefly renewed an association with. Sounds insane, right? The judge ultimately tossed the case after observing that the allegation wasn’t even applicable, because the plaintiff and the defendant weren’t in a domestic relationship. But that didn’t cause a judge any hesitation in approving the restraining order in the first place, and imagine what it cost this woman emotionally to have to explain the matter and ask for help. Imagine further if she had been a he, and you can appreciate the horror of fighting these kinds of allegations, which are validated by judges on a modicum of evidence, if any, and which neither cost nor risk their plaintiffs anything to make. Restraining orders are cheap or free to get, and no one is ever actually jailed for lying to get them.

I did a quick scan today of top Google returns for the term “lying to the court.” Most commenters weighed in that lying = perjury, which is a crime, so beware. It’s true that lying about a material fact in court (a fact, that is, that’s likely to influence a judge’s opinion) is a statutory crime. A felony, no less. Equally true, though, and much more pertinent is that lying isn’t prosecuted. So there’s nothing really for a fraudulent plaintiff to have to be wary of except maybe a little embarrassment if actually caught in a lie (and most plaintiffs, of course, aren’t aware that lying to a judge is a crime, so it’s not even on their minds).

Someone who’s morally bankrupt enough to lie to a judge in the first place isn’t going to hesitate because of the risk of shame if s/he’s caught. Shame is an emotion to which s/he’s obviously immune, anyway.

In the administration of restraining orders, the ideal of justice isn’t given priority. Restraining orders are issued ex parte, which means they’re approved without the judge’s having the faintest idea who s/he’s issuing a restraining order against. The only person the judge hears from is the plaintiff, and hearings to obtain restraining orders are typically 10-minute affairs.

Talk show host David Letterman was famously issued a restraining order petitioned by a stranger who lived in another part of the country. The judge didn’t think twice about rubber-stamping the thing and moving on to the next applicant.

Defendants don’t need attorneys; it’s perfectly lawful for them to defend themselves in an appeals hearing. Whether defendants need attorneys to better their chances of a favorable verdict is a different question entirely. David Letterman, it should go without saying, had a team of them. And it should come as no surprise that they shredded the restraining order to confetti.

A cynical answer to the question of whether defendants need attorneys to improve their odds of beating a bum rap is that defendants who can afford attorneys are perceived as deserving greater consideration than ones who can’t (or who don’t know enough to seek counsel—or who are hoping they can just quietly make the whole thing go away on their own). This answer doesn’t jibe with the judicial canon that everyone should be treated the same, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Because restraining orders are issued ex parte, the idea that fairness obtains at any stage of the process is clearly dubious.

Truth and falsehood in judicial proceedings are, besides, very relative things. For truth to even exercise its power to dispel lies depends on how effectively a defendant can make it plain to the judge. As straightforward as a naïve defendant might believe this to be, it’s not as simple as stating facts that contradict fraudulent testimony or producing some evidence that’s expected to be conclusive. The judge might decide that that evidence is irrelevant or that the lie it exposes is immaterial to the case. Or s/he might decide s/he doesn’t like the defendant period. Can you lose a case because the judge doesn’t like you or likes the plaintiff better? Sure. Does that have anything to do with the truth of the plaintiff’s allegations against you? No.

Representation by an attorney isn’t a guarantee of success. The mere presence of one, though, will give you a degree of credibility you wouldn’t otherwise have. An attorney with courtroom experience, furthermore, has presentational skills that you lack. Restraining order appeals hearings are very brief, judges tend to be skeptical of defendants (particularly men), and even a self-styled Perry Mason may find him- or herself stammering and squirming once s/he’s in the hot seat under the glare of the judge.

There’s the possibility, too, that the plaintiff will have an attorney, and attorneys aren’t known either for playing fair or for showing mercy to their opponents. Some attorneys—gasp—are even professional liars. Several respondents to this blog, in fact, have had false restraining orders petitioned against them by attorneys who were ex-lovers or -spouses or—in one case—a parent. The restraining order process, more than any other, brings out the worst in human nature.

If you’re the defendant in a restraining order case, especially one grounded on fraud, get an attorney.

Now.

Crying Wolf: On Attention-Seeking Personality Disorders and Restraining Order Abuse

May 24, 2013June 13, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

I this week came across an online monograph with the unwieldy (and very British) title, “Drama Queens, Saviours, Rescuers, Feigners, and Attention-Seekers: Attention-Seeking Personality Disorders, Victim Syndrome, Insecurity, and Centre of Attention Behavior,” which pointedly speaks to a number of behaviors identified by victims of restraining orders who have written in to this blog or alternatively contacted its author concerning the plaintiffs in their cases.

What caught my eye, especially, is that this monograph appears on a site titled, BullyOnline.org (now defunct).

The popular perception of restraining orders is that they’re sought by plaintiffs to remedy bullying. The monograph I’ve referenced doesn’t speak to restraining orders, per se, but its revelations about attention-seeking personality disorders are very applicable to abuses of restraining orders and are interesting because they turn the popular perception of restraining order plaintiffs’ motives on its head.

Victims of false restraining orders are urged to consult this monograph for language that may be of assistance both in defining the motives of fraudulent plaintiffs and in cementing an understanding of the psychological exigencies that underlie those motives. Of particular relevance to the subject of this blog are the following personality types sketched by the monograph’s author:

The manipulator: she may exploit family relationships, manipulating others with guilt and distorting perceptions; although she may not harm people physically, she causes everyone to suffer emotional injury. Vulnerable family members are favourite targets. A common attention-seeking ploy is to claim she is being persecuted, victimised, excluded, isolated, or ignored by another family member or group, perhaps insisting she is the target of a campaign of exclusion or harassment.

The mind-poisoner: adept at poisoning people’s minds by manipulating their perceptions of others, especially against the current target.

The drama queen: every incident or opportunity, no matter how insignificant, is exploited, exaggerated, and if necessary distorted to become an event of dramatic proportions. Everything is elevated to crisis proportions. Histrionics may be present where the person feels she is not the centre of attention but should be. Inappropriate flirtatious behaviour may also be present.

The feigner: when called to account and outwitted, the person instinctively uses the denial-counterattack-feigning victimhood strategy to manipulate everyone present, especially bystanders and those in authority. The most effective method of feigning victimhood is to burst into tears, for most people’s instinct is to feel sorry for them, to put their arm round them or offer them a tissue. There’s little more plausible than real tears, although as actresses know, it’s possible to turn these on at will. Feigners are adept at using crocodile tears. From years of practice, attention-seekers often give an Oscar-winning performance in this respect. Feigning victimhood is a favourite tactic of bullies and harassers to evade accountability and sanction. When accused of bullying and harassment, the person immediately turns on the waterworks and claims they are the one being bullied and harassed—even though there’s been no prior mention of being bullied or harassed. It’s the fact that this claim appears after and in response to having been called to account that is revealing. Mature adults do not burst into tears when held accountable for their actions.

The abused: a person claims they are the victim of abuse, sexual abuse, rape, etc. as a way of gaining attention for themselves. Crimes like abuse and rape are difficult to prove at the best of times, and their incidence is so common that it is easy to make a plausible claim as a way of gaining attention.

The victim: she may intentionally create acts of harassment against herself, e.g., send herself hate mail or damage her own possessions in an attempt to incriminate a fellow employee, a family member, neighbour, etc. Scheming, cunning, devious, deceptive, and manipulative, she will identify her “harasser” and produce circumstantial evidence in support of her claim. She will revel in the attention she gains and use her glib charm to plausibly dismiss any suggestion that she herself may be responsible. However, a background check may reveal that this is not the first time she has had this happen to her.

Many respondents to this blog—victims of lovers, spouses or ex-spouses, friends, coworkers, neighbors, or family members—have reported serial behaviors of the aforementioned sorts, and some have discovered that plaintiffs who have sought restraining orders against them are not first-time applicants. One or more of these personality types (or a merger of them) is likely recognizable to most victims of restraining order abuse.

Separate profiles on the “serial bully,” the “attention-seeker,” “narcissistic personality disorder,” and “bullies in the family” appear on the referenced site, and its author estimates that 1/30 people fit its profiles.

Hold this statistic up beside the one propounded by psychologist Martha Stout in her book, The Sociopath Next Door, that an estimated 1/25 people fit the clinical definition of “sociopath”—someone, that is, who’s devoid of moral compunction/empathic identification altogether—and it’s a reasonable proposition that an abundance of allegations made to officers of our courts derive from calculated hokum and that a goodly percentage of restraining orders, far from being sought out of a need for remedial relief, are in fact exploited as instruments of abuse or employed to gratify their plaintiffs’ need to have all eyes focused on them.

“perjury and sociopaths”: On the Challenges of Contesting Restraining Orders Sought by the Mentally Aberrant, Deranged, or Ill

April 5, 2013July 13, 2023Moderator 41 Comments

A recent respondent to this blog detailed his restraining order ordeal at the hands of a woman who he persuasively alleges is a sociopath. He says this label is generally scoffed at by people he explains the matter to and wonders how he could convince a judge of its accuracy.

Since this blog was published nearly two years ago, hundreds have been led to it by search terms that include words and phrases like “sociopath,” “mental illness,” “narcissist,” and “personality disorder” or “borderline personality disorder” (“bpd”).

This should hardly be a source of surprise.

Restraining order applicants aren’t screened based on their psychiatric histories. Sociopaths and narcissists, who are seldom clinically diagnosed in the first place, are moreover cunning liars and manipulators. Obtaining restraining orders—which are issued solely on the basis of brief interviews between petitioners and judges—is not only a simple matter for them but rewards their pathological drives for dominance and revenge.

Characterized generously, the restraining order process is fast-food justice. The ability and opportunity of most defendants to qualify allegations of sociopathy or insanity against their accusers—assuming these defendants even recognize these conditions—is effectively none at all. And unless a restraining order applicant is completely off the wall, his or her allegations won’t even cause a judge to arch an eyebrow. Applicants are in and out of restraining order interviews in a matter of minutes. Sociopaths are the smoothest liars you’ll ever meet, and the insane may be more convincing yet if they wholeheartedly believe their allegations in spite of those allegations’ possibly having no relationship to reality at all.

The imperceptibility of mental disorders is what makes them so difficult to expose (on this subject, see also these related posts).

I could go on about how easily the restraining order process is abused by sociopaths or the otherwise mentally aberrant. And I could describe to you the devastating effects their false allegations have on the lives of those they abuse. Instead I’ll close with some of the relevant search terms that have brought readers here since this blog’s inception. Identical search terms have been eliminated (“beating a narcissistic sociopath,” for example, rolls in regularly).

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“Are You Serious?”: One Commenter’s Experience of Restraining Order Corruption

March 26, 2013June 21, 2023Moderator 9 Comments

A commenter on this blog’s Q&A page recently submitted an update on his own ordeal that illumines the contradictions, corruption, and chaos that mar the restraining order process. His story, which I’ve edited for clarity, is worthy of the attention of legislators and should be of interest to anyone who has a stake in these matters or is curious to know how the restraining order process has been debauched since its advent decades ago.

As I mentioned before, I made an attempt to file an order of protection against the scorned sociopathic woman who put one on me. I was told I could not, yet nobody was able to tell me what statute prohibits this or what the law says except, “You cannot put an order of protection on anyone who has one on you.” I did, however, file a motion to dismiss/vacate.

One day last week I was going to visit my mother for lunch—her house is one of the few places I will go. She lives downtown. While on the way to visit her, I decided to make another attempt to file this order of protection. The court building is very close to where my mother lives. I went to the main courthouse and was ultimately told by a clerk (as well as lawyer who had overheard me) that to file a restraining order, I had to go to another building specifically for this. This new courthouse is about three years old. I took a taxi to the new building, made it into the area to file, gave my info, signed in, and waited. Ninety percent of the people there were women, most of whom looked like trouble. There were no secretaries. Questions and answers were audible to everyone. There were some very legitimate people, though I could see a lot of these people were simply looking for trouble. Not one was turned away.

They should get a revolving door put in soon.

There were about 20 forms to fill out. I was handed examples of how to fill them out with arrows, underlines, and check marks to indicate where everything went. I had already filled mine out in advance, using an online PDF. I handed the paperwork in, and it was gone over with me before the helper entered it into the computer. A short while later, a woman called my name. She asked me if had a case with this woman. I said yes. She said she sees I’m in the computer for filing a motion to vacate. She asked, “Vacate what?” I said, “Restraining order.” She told me, “You cannot put an order of protection on a person who has one on you.” I said, “I have not been out of my house in a year. I am the one who needs this. This woman is a scorned sociopath, and she is looking to get me in trouble.” She said a judge usually won’t hear a case like this. I said, “The constitution says we have equal protection under the law.” She said, “Let me see what I can do.” A short while later another woman called me and said the judge will see you at 2. I sat around and phoned my mother to say lunch was off. Two o’clock rolled around. I headed to the courtroom and saw the youngest female judge I have ever encountered (my fourth female judge). I thought to myself, she looks like a nice woman; I think she will be unbiased.

I honestly think people become possessed by demons when they put that black robe on. Most of them, anyway.

While I waited to be called, I did witness a couple of cases that were legit. I also saw some are-you-serious? cases. One woman just wanted her ex-boyfriend to stop calling and bugging her. I thought, no way is she getting one. The judge asked her, “Are you afraid he will hurt you?” She answered, “No.” The judge said, “I cannot issue one if you have no fear of him.” She said, “I don’t think he will hurt me…I don’t want him to bug me,” and fumbled for what else to say. The judge again leaned in, stuck her head forward and said, “I am going to ask you one more time: Do you fear him?” She said, “Yes.” Bingo! You just won a restraining order. Congrats!

Now I was called.

The judge had thought my order was up in a couple weeks, though that was the motion to dismiss. She said, “I cannot give an order of protection to anyone who has one on them from the other party.” I said, “What about the U.S. Constitution and the Illinois Constitution that state citizens have equal protection under the law?” She was cocky and said, “Oh, really. Where exactly does it say that?” I went into my carrier, which has a stack of paperwork for this case, and I pulled out the full constitution and said, “Article1, Section 2: ‘nor be denied the equal protection of the laws.’” I heard gasps at the back of the courtroom. She said, “Well, it is law I cannot give you one.” (By the way, this was the fastest talker I had ever encountered in my life—Adderall added, I’m guessing.) I grabbed my pen and said, “I have looked all over for such laws and cannot find any. Can you give me that statute?” She grabbed a book and said it was in the Illinois restraining order law book (I missed the page number), statute 750:60/215. I tried to find this book or that statute and had no luck. I must have written it down wrong, or she made it up, because she found it as fast as I could put pen to paper.

The good news is she made the restraining order “pending,” and it will be heard the same day as the motion. Her final words were, “You’ve made all the proper steps so far.” Like a game, eh? If that book does exists (I’m sure it does), I’d love to buy a copy!

The statute the judge quoted to him does exist (750 ILCS 60/215):

Mutual orders of protection; correlative separate orders. Mutual orders of protection are prohibited. Correlative separate orders of protection undermine the purposes of this Act and are prohibited unless both parties have properly filed written pleadings, proved past abuse by the other party, given prior written notice to the other party unless excused under Section 217, satisfied all prerequisites for the type of order and each remedy granted, and otherwise complied with this Act. In these cases, the court shall hear relevant evidence, make findings, and issue separate orders in accordance with Sections 214 and 221. The fact that correlative separate orders are issued shall not be a sufficient basis to deny any remedy to petitioner or to prove that the parties are equally at fault or equally endangered.

This statute is over 25 years old and derives from the Illinois Domestic Violence Act of 1986. The commenter above was not a batterer, nor, it’s very likely, were most of the men (and possibly women) who were slated to be issued restraining orders as a consequence of allegations made against them on the afternoon the commenter visited the courthouse (allegations, it’s worthy to note, that may have been coerced by the presiding judge: judicial subornation of perjury). The language of the statute (“protection,” “abuse,” “endangered”) along with the title of the act that instituted it into law plainly suggest that a much narrower application of it was intended by lawmakers than obtains in the administration of restraining orders today.

I find this commenter’s account very credible, as I hope any legislators who may read it will. “Are you serious?” is right.

“a restraining order ruined my life”: A Partial Catalog of Search Engine Queries Leading to This Blog on a Single Day

March 5, 2013July 13, 2023Moderator 48 Comments

The 148 search engine terms that appear below—at least one to two dozen of which concern false allegations—are ones that brought readers to this blog between the hours of 12 a.m. and 7:21 p.m. yesterday (and don’t include an additional 49 “unknown search terms”).

Were it the case that only 12 of the thousands of restraining orders issued on a given day were based on false allegations, the number of fraudulent restraining orders generated by our courts in a single year would be 4,380 (the recipients of which may have to live, for example, with false allegations of stalking or domestic violence on their public records, and may besides have been forcibly evicted from their homes, possibly at gunpoint). This absurdly conservative casualty toll of restraining order abuse ignores lives peripherally affected by it, including those of spouses, boy- and girlfriends, and children and other family members.

It’s in fact estimated by extrapolation from government studies that a majority of the two to three million restraining orders issued each year are either “unnecessary” (that is, frivolous) or grounded on trumped-up allegations. Statistics concerning restraining orders (for example, the number of them that are thrown out on appeal, often at a cost of thousands of dollars to their defendants) either aren’t compiled or aren’t made readily available to the public by our judicial system—nor is there any way of determining the incident rates of depression, stress-related injury and disease, alcoholism and drug abuse, job and income loss, suicide or premature death, etc. linked to restraining order abuse.

The number of plaintiffs prosecuted for committing felony perjury to obtain restraining orders is zero.

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Knotty, Knotty: False Allegations and Restraining Orders

February 21, 2013June 19, 2023Moderator 20 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You Mean It Isn’t All about Me?”: On Women and Restraining Orders

December 5, 2012September 1, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

A woman writes: “I got a TRO, and he got a lawyer.” (TRO abbreviates “temporary restraining order.”)

What’s the first thing that strikes you about this search engine query? The first thing that strikes me is that this woman seems surprised. You can almost hear the exclamation point that was left off the Google search.

Her incredulity at having her restraining order challenged seems to suggest that its defendant shouldn’t regard it as a big deal, which would suggest that she doesn’t regard it as one.

Which would suggest that she’s either careless of the consequences of her action or very self-preoccupied—or both.

Over the past three decades, feminist advocates have succeeded in making restraining orders more and more punitive and more and more public. The current push is to have restraining order recipients recorded in public registries like sex offenders. Some such registries already exist.

It shouldn’t be any wonder that men are loath to be criminalized by the “civil” restraining order process.

The query that led this woman to this blog underscores a schizophrenic rift that obtains in the way women regard restraining orders. On the one hand, they expect women’s plaints to be considered grave and urgent and restraining order allegations to be taken very seriously; on the other hand, they expect defendants to take their licks and forge ahead in spite of those publicly recorded allegations’ permanently compromising their futures. Maybe women want to have their cake and eat it, too—or maybe they don’t really think about the consequences to defendants at all.

Civil equality—the insistence upon which was the original motive for the legislative enactment of restraining orders—means uniform regard for the rights, value, and well-being of all citizens, irrespective of gender. With the social ascendancy of women in recent decades has come instead an unexamined assumption that what’s important to them should be what’s important to everyone.

Restraining orders aren’t a game, a fact that’s contradicted by the ease with which they’re sought, the carelessness with which they’re issued, and the apparent expectation from plaintiffs that they should be upheld based on their word alone. All restraining order plaintiffs should have to face cross-examination in court. Social conscience should demand it.

Either restraining orders should be taken seriously, or they should be taken off the books.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mind the Gender Gap: On Coming Together against Restraining Orders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 14, 2012September 1, 2023Moderator 10 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t give ’em the satisfaction.

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

November 9, 2012September 1, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tic.

False Allegations and Restraining Orders: The Moral Snare

November 4, 2012September 1, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or maybe they should put this corrupt institution on ice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And why not? Perjury is never actually prosecuted.

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

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

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

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

Their administration is both biased and anti-feminist

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

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

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

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

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

Guilty verdicts are foregone conclusions

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

The system is broken

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

Summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rightly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TALKING BACK to restraining orders

THEY’RE NOT JUST ABUSED BUT ABUSIVE

Tag perjury