The Southern Poverty Law Center v. Betty Krachey: Why the Only Honest Voices in Discussions of Restraining Order and Related Procedural Abuses Are the Little Ones

December 31, 2014August 25, 2023Moderator 4 Comments

This blog was inspired by firsthand experience with judicial iniquity.

Its author has never been accused of violence, doesn’t sanction violence except in self-defense or the defense of others, and has been a practicing vegetarian since adolescence. I have, what’s more, hazarded my life going to the aid of non-human animals. In one instance, I lost the use of my hand for a year; in another, I had various of my bones fractured or crushed, and that damage is permanent.

Although I’ve never been accused of violence (only its threat: “Will I be attacked?”), I know very well I might have been accused of violence, and I know with absolute certainty that the false accusation could have stuck—and easily—regardless of my ethical scruples and what my commitment to them has cost me.

Who people are, what they stand for, and what they have or haven’t done—these make no difference when they’re falsely fingered by a dedicated accuser who alleges abuse or fear.

This is wrong, categorically wrong, and the only arguments for maintenance of the status quo are ones that favor a particular interest group or political persuasion, which means those arguments contravene the rule of constitutional law.

Justice that isn’t equitable isn’t justice. Arguments for the perpetuation of the same ol’ same ol’, then, are nonstarters. Dogma continues to prevail, however, by distraction: “a majority of rapes go unreported,” “most battered women suffer in silence,” “domestic violence is epidemic” (men have it coming to them). Invocation of social ills that have no bearing on individual cases has determined public policy and conditioned judicial impulse.

Injustice, no surprise, arouses animosity; injustice that confounds lives, moreover, provokes rage, predictably and justly. This post looks at how that rage is severed from its roots—injustice—and held aloft like a monster’s decapitated head to be scorned and reviled.

I first learned of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) from a research paper published by Law Professor Kelly Behre this year that equates men’s rights activism with hatemongering. I later heard this position of the SPLC’s reiterated in an NPR piece about the first International Conference on Men’s Issues.

Injustice, it should be noted preliminarily, is of no lesser interest to women than to men. Both men and women are abused by laws and practices purportedly established to protect women, laws and practices that inform civil, criminal, and family court proceedings.

Groups like the SPLC, however, represent opposition to these laws and practices as originating strictly from MRAs, or men’s rights activists, whom they dismiss as senseless haters. This lumping is characteristic of the smoke-and-mirrors tactics favored by those allied to various women’s causes. They limn the divide as being between irrationally irate men and battered women’s advocates (or between “abusers” and “victims”).

They don’t necessarily deny there’s a middle ground; they just ignore it. Consequently, they situate themselves external to it. There are no women’s rights activists (“WRAs”?) who mediate between extremes. They’re one of the extremes.

I’m a free agent, and this blog isn’t associated with any group, though the above-mentioned law professor, Dr. Behre, identifies the blog in her paper as authored by an “FRG” (father’s rights group), based on my early on citing the speculative statistic that as many as 80% of restraining orders are said to be “unnecessary” or based on false claims, which may in fact be true even if Dr. Behre finds the estimate unscientific. (Survey statistics cited by women’s advocates and represented as fact are no more ascertainably conclusive; they’re only perceived as more “legitimate.”)

SAVE Services, one of the nonprofits to cite a 2008 West Virginia study from which the roughly 80% or 4-out-of-5 statistic is derived, is characterized by the SPLC and consequently Dr. Behre as being on a par with a “hate group,” like white supremacists. It isn’t, and the accusation is silly, besides nasty. This kind of facile association, though, has proven to be very effective at neutering opposing perspectives, even moderate and disciplined ones. Journalists, the propagators of information, may more readily credit a nonprofit like the SPLC, which identifies itself as a law center and has a longer and more illustrious history, than it may SAVE, which is also a nonprofit. The SPLC’s motto, “Fighting Hate • Teaching Tolerance • Seeking Justice,” could just as aptly be applied to SAVE’s basic endeavor.

On the left is a symbol for the Ku Klux Klan; on the right, the symbol for feminist solidarity. The images have common features, and their juxtaposition suggests the two groups are linked. This little gimmick exemplifies how guilt by association works.

The SPLC’s rhetorical strategy, an m.o. typical of those with the same political orientation, is as follows: (1) scour websites and forums in the “manosphere” for soundbites that include heated denunciations and misogynistic epithets, (2) assemble a catalog of websites and forums that espouse or can be said to sympathize with extremist convictions or positions, and (3) lump all websites and forums speaking to discrimination against men together and collectively label them misogynistic. Thus reports like these: “Misogyny: The Sites” and “Men’s Rights Movement Spreads False Claims about Women.”

Cherry-picked posts, positions, and quotations are highlighted; arguments are desiccated into ideological blurbs punctuated with indelicate words; and all voices are mashed up into a uniform, sinister hiss.

The SPLC’s explicit criticism may not be unwarranted, but coming as it does from a “law center” whose emblem is a set of balanced scales, that criticism is fairly reproached for its carelessness and chauvinism. There are no qualifications to suggest there’s any merit to the complaints that the SPLC criticizes.

The SPLC’s criticism, rather, invites its audience to conclude that complaints of feminist-motivated iniquities in the justice system are merely hate rhetoric, which makes the SPLC’s criticism a PC version of hate rhetoric. The bias is just reversed.

Complaints from the “[mad]manosphere” that are uncivil (or even rabid) aren’t necessarily invalid. The knee-jerk urge to denounce angry rhetoric betrays how conditioned we’ve been by the prevailing dogma. No one is outraged that people may be falsely implicated as stalkers, batterers, and child molesters in public trials. Nor is anyone outraged that the falsely accused may consequently be forbidden access to their children, jackbooted from their homes, denied employment, and left stranded and stigmatized. This isn’t considered abusive, let alone acknowledged for the social obscenity that it is. “Abusive” is when the falsely implicated who’ve been typified as brutes and sex offenders and who’ve been deprived of everything that meant anything to them complain about it.

Impolitely. (What would Mrs. Grundy say?)

There’s no question the system is corrupt, and the SPLC doesn’t say it isn’t. It reinforces the corruption by caricaturing the opposition as a horde of frothing woman-haters.

Enter Betty Krachey, a Tennessee woman who knows court corruption intimately. Betty launched a website and e-petition this year to urge her state to prosecute false accusers after being issued an injunction that labeled her a domestic abuser and that she alleges was based on fraud and motivated by spite and greed. Ask her if she’s angry about that, and she’ll probably say you’re damn right. (Her life has nothing to do with whether “most battered women suffer in silence” or “a majority of rapes go unreported,” and those facts in no way justify her being railroaded and menaced by the state.)

I made this website to make people aware of Order of Protections & restraining orders being taken out on innocent people based on false allegations so a vindictive person can gain control with the help of authorities. The false accusers are being allowed to walk away and pay NO consequences for swearing to lies to get these orders! […]

I know that, in my case, the judge didn’t know me. Even though I talked to the magistrate the day BEFORE the order of protection was taken out on me & I told him what I heard [he] had planned for me. They didn’t know that I might have superpowers where I could cause him bodily harm 4 1/2 miles away. SO they had no choice but to protect [him] from me. BUT when they found out this order of protection was based on lies that he swore to, and he used the county in a cunning and vindictive way to get me kicked out of the house – HE SHOULD HAVE HAD TO PAY SOME CONSEQUENCES INSTEAD OF BEING ALLOWED TO WALK AWAY LIKE NOTHING HAPPENED!!!!

Seems like a fair point, and it’s fair points like Betty’s that get talked around and over. There are no legal advocates with the SPLC’s clout looking out for people like Betty; they’re busy making claims like hers seem anomalous, trivial, or crackpot.

*Betty reports she’s been in conference with one of her state’s representatives and has been told she has “a good chance at getting this law changed,” albeit too belatedly to affect her own circumstances. Says Betty, “I still want the law changed to hold false accusers accountable!” Amen to that.

Why Women Who Are Falsely Implicated as Abusers Have No Defenders

December 28, 2014June 24, 2023Moderator 7 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 21, 2014June 30, 2023Moderator 33 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That would inconvenience the court.

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

October 27, 2014February 4, 2018Moderator 2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Predator” v. “Porn Star”: Restraining Order Fraud, False Allegations, and Suing for Defamation

October 26, 2014June 21, 2023Moderator 6 Comments

People falsely alleged to be abusers on restraining order petitions, particularly men, are treated like brutes, sex offenders, and scum by officers of the court and its staff, besides by authorities and any number of others. Some report their own relatives remain suspicious—often based merely on finger-pointing that’s validated by some judge in a few-minute procedure (and that’s when relatives aren’t the ones making the false allegations).

The social alienation and emotional distress felt by the falsely accused may be both extreme and persistent.

The urge to credit accusations of abuse has been sharpened to a reflex in recent decades by feminist propaganda and its ill begot progeny, the Violence Against Women Act. No one thinks twice about it.

Using four-letter words in court is strictly policed. Even judges can’t do it without risking censure. Falsely implicating someone, however, as a stalker, for example, or a child molester—that isn’t policed at all. Commerce in lies, whether by accusers, their representatives, or even judges themselves is unregulated. No one is answerable for sh* s/he makes up.

Accordingly, false allegations and fraud are rewarding and therefore commonplace.

It should be noted that false allegations and fraud can be distinctly different. For example, David Letterman famously had a restraining order petitioned against him by a woman who was seemingly convinced he was communicating to her through her TV, and her interpretations of his “coded messages” probably were genuinely oppressive to her. David Letterman lived in another state, had never met her, and assuredly had no idea who she was. Her allegations of misconduct weren’t true, but they weren’t intended to mislead (and the fact that they did mislead a judge into signing off on her petition only underscores the complete absence of judicial responsibility in this legal arena).

Fraud, in contrast, is manipulative and deceptive by design. It occurs when an accuser intentionally lies (or spins the facts) to give a false impression and steer a judge toward a wrong conclusion that serves the interests of the fraudster.

Regardless, though, of whether false allegations are made knowingly or unknowingly, they’re rarely discerned as false by the court, are seldom acknowledged as false even if recognized as such, and are always destructive when treated as real, urgent, and true, which they commonly are.

The falsely accused (often private citizens who’ve never had a prior brush with the law) are publicly humiliated and shamed, which by itself is predictably traumatizing. They are besides invariably (and indefinitely) entered into police databases, both local and national, and may be entered into one or more domestic violence registries, too (also indefinitely). These facts pop up on background checks, and defendants in some states may even appear in registries accessible by anyone (including friends, neighbors, family members, boy- and girlfriends, employers, colleagues, students, patients, and/or clients).

This costs the falsely accused leases, loans, and jobs (being turned down for which, of course, aggravates the gnawing indignity and outrage they already feel). Those falsely accused of domestic violence may further be prohibited from attending school functions or working with or around children (permanently). Defendants of false restraining orders may besides be barred from their homes, children, assets, and possessions. Some (including salaried, professional men and women) are left ostracized and destitute. Retirees report having to live out of their cars.

This, remember, is the result of someone’s lodging a superficial complaint against them in a procedure that only requires that the accuser fill out some paperwork and briefly talk to a judge. A successful fraud may be based on nothing more substantive, in fact, than five “magic” words: “I’m afraid for my life” (which can be directed against anyone: a friend, a neighbor, an intimate, a spouse, a relative, a coworker—even a TV celebrity their speaker has never met).

This incantation takes a little over a second to utter (and its speaker, who can be a criminal or a mental case, need not even live in the same state as the accused).

Accordingly, people’s names and lives are trashed—and no surprise if they become unhinged. (Those five “magic” words, what’s more, may be uttered by the actual abusers in relationships to conceal their own misconduct and redirect blame. That includes, for example, stalkers. Those “magic” words may also be used to cover up any nature of other misbehavior, including criminal. They instantly discredit anything the accused might say about their speakers.)

The prescribed course of action to redress slanders and libels is a defamation suit, but allegations of defamation brought by those falsely accused on restraining orders or in related prosecutions are typically discounted by the court. Perjury (lying to the court) can’t be prosecuted by a private litigant (only by the district attorney’s office, which never does), and those who allege defamation are typically told the court has already ruled on the factualness of the restraining order petitioner’s testimony and that it can’t be reviewed (the facts may not even be reviewed by appellate judges, who may only consider whether the conduct of the previous judge demonstrated “clear abuse of discretion”). The plaintiff’s testimony, they’re told, is a res judicata—an already “decided thing.” (Never mind that docket time dedicated to the formation of that “decision” may literally have been a couple of minutes.)

So…slanders and libels made by abuse of court process aren’t actionable, slanders and libels that completely sunder the lives of the wrongly accused, who can’t even get them expunged from their records to simply reset their fractured lives to zero.

Such slanders and libels may include false allegations of stalking, physical or sexual aggression, assault, child abuse, or even rape. In the eyes of the court, someone’s being falsely implicated as a monster, publicly and for life, is no biggie.

In contrast, it was reported last month that the court awarded a Kansas woman $1,000,000 in a defamation suit brought against a radio station that falsely called her a “porn star.”

When violated people speak of legal inequities, this exemplifies what they’re talking about: Falsely and publicly implicating someone as a sex offender is fine and no grounds for complaint in the eyes of the justice system, but for the act of falsely and publicly calling someone a mere sex performer, someone may be fined a million bucks.

BLACKMAIL: Using Restraining Orders to Extort and Punish

October 14, 2014January 22, 2018Moderator 4 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Restraining orders are perfect tools of cover-up.

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

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

Class Action Lawsuits: Suing Uncle Sam for Rights Violations Arising from Restraining Order and Domestic Violence Prosecutions

October 11, 2014August 10, 2023Moderator 9 Comments

“I think action would be better than just mere words. How do you think same-sex marriages were passed? We all need to come together and file a class action lawsuit. These laws plainly violate our constitutional rights as U.S. citizens. There is no due process of law for these allegations, and the cause-and-effect deprives an individual of life, liberty, and property.”

—Michael K. from Alamogordo, New Mexico

The man makes a good point.

Cursory reading on class actions suggests, too, that a lawsuit like the one he proposes is feasible. According to Wikipedia, “Nationwide plaintiff classes are possible [if] such suits…have a commonality of issues across state lines.”

Controlling statutes and procedures concerning domestic violence and restraining order prosecutions, as well as “child welfare” interventions, vary state to state, but a “commonality of issues” vis-à-vis civil rights violations and unjust privations definitely does exist—and certainly class actions within states’ lines are at least as worthy of consideration.

Wikipedia again: “The procedure for filing a class action is to file suit with one or several named plaintiffs on behalf of a proposed class. The proposed class must consist of a group of individuals [who] have suffered a common injury or injuries.”

The most sympathetic candidates for a class action are probably those who’ve unjustly been deprived of property, employment, and/or access to children.

A recent NPR story reports that dozens of students who’ve been accused of rape are suing their universities. They allege they were denied due process and fair treatment by college investigative committees, that is, that they were “railroaded” (and publicly humiliated and reviled). The basis for a suit alleging civil rights violations, then, might also exist (that is, independent of claims of material privation). Certainly most or all restraining order defendants and many domestic violence defendants are “railroaded” and subjected to public shaming and social rejection unjustly.

“How to Start a Class Action Lawsuit,” a primer authored by Linda Jo Martin, creator of FightCPS.com, explains the basics of the procedure. (Ms. Martin advocates for the filing of class actions against Child Protective Services in all 50 states.)

Getting a class action going of the sort this post concerns requires self-starters with good networking skills and a great deal of perseverance, because inducing people who’ve been abused by state process to come forward with complaints is tough. They’re scathed, distrustful, and afraid.

Names of willing participants have to be gathered and a law firm enlisted. Attorney fees aren’t a hindrance, because they’re collected from the reward. But a law firm would have to be confident of a win.

A firm that represent class actions is Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann, and Bernstein. Its website offer further information about class actions. Alternatively or additionally, see Stanford Law Professor Janet Cooper Alexander’s “An Introduction to Class Action Procedure in the United States.”

Undertaking a venture like coordinating a class action is beyond the resources of this writer, but anyone with the gumption to try and transform words into action is welcome to post a notice here.

Placing a notice on an e-petition like “Stop False Allegations of Domestic Violence” would be of limited value, because it would recede into the archives in a couple of days. Mining the petition for names, however, could be rewarding, because some respondents include their telephone numbers and email addresses along with their stories. Using Facebook and Twitter would be the most potentially profitable tacks.

The intrepid social activist would besides do well to contact the likes of A Voice for Men, and put out the word. Any group or hub that represents the interests of people with similar complaints should be notified.

Professors who’ve written about the particular rights abuses a class action would seek to redress, particularly law professors, might also be recruited to provide amicus briefs to the court (authoritative opinions that lend support).

Abuses of the sorts this blog and related sites concern have persisted without check for decades. Even prompts for others to take action are still just words.

Someone has to step forward and attempt to translate thought into action. Is that person you?

What Journalists Need to Understand about What Restraining Orders Are: A Tutorial for Investigators, Part 2

October 9, 2014June 30, 2023Moderator 9 Comments

“Orders for protection represent a legislative attempt to incorporate distinct features from both civil law and criminal law. On the one hand, a private litigant can initiate judicial proceedings to seek redress against another private individual. On the other hand, criminal penalties, such as fines and incarceration, will attach if a protection order is violated. Unlike both civil and criminal proceedings, protection order actions involve a great deal of informality, with the end result being an order for protection that is often issued on an ex parte basis without the benefit of a full evidentiary hearing.

“Many aspects of Nevada law in this area can best be described as ‘murky,’ with virtually no critical or scholarly study available to assist Nevada’s courts. Moreover, statistical information about protection orders in Nevada is almost non-existent.”

—Staff attorney Joe Tommasino, Las Vegas Justice Court

The first thing reporters need to grasp about restraining orders is that they’re a kluge (a Frankenstein’s monster crudely stitched together from dubiously compatible parts). For plaintiffs (accusers), they merge the most favorable aspects of civil and criminal prosecutions; for defendants, the least favorable.

The scales of justice are tipped from the start.

Restraining orders allow a “private litigant [to] initiate judicial proceedings to seek redress against another private individual” just as civil lawsuits do (though restraining order applications by contrast are typically processed free of charge). They’re also adjudicated according to the lowest civil standard of proof (“preponderance of the evidence”). State standards vary rhetorically, but the criterion for rulings is basically the same: whatever judges fancy is just (and there are only two choices—thumbs up or thumbs down).

On this basis, citizens can be rousted from their homes and kicked to the curb (and some are left destitute). On this basis, also, they may be entered into domestic violence registries (indefinitely), besides state and federal law enforcement databases (indefinitely), and denied security clearances, loans, leases, and even employment in certain fields (just like convicted felons).

Notwithstanding that restraining order allegations are introduced in civil court and aren’t subject to the criminal standard of evidence (“proof beyond a reasonable doubt”), “criminal penalties, such as fines and incarceration, will attach if a protection order is violated”—or is simply alleged to have been violated: arresting officers need only have a reasonable suspicion that a violation occurred, which they need not have witnessed.

The savvy observer will note that suspicion is the motive determiner of liability at all levels. Suspicion informs judicial disposition, subsequent police response to claims of violation, and of course interpretation by third parties, including employers (judges trust accusers, and everyone else trusts judges). Emphatically worthy of remark is that billions of dollars of federal monies have been invested over the past 20 years toward conditioning judicial and police suspicion.

This may incline the savvy observer to suspect the fix is in.

He or she should appreciate further that restraining orders are most commonly issued ex parte, which means accusers simply fill out a form and very briefly interview with a judge without defendants’ being present to contest the allegations and without their even being aware that they’ve been made. (Some courts even explicitly advise plaintiffs to rehearse their allegations so they can recite them as quickly as they would an order at a drive-thru.) Although most states mandate that a follow-up hearing be slated to give the accused an opportunity to controvert the allegations against them and receive an “unbiased” second opinion, follow-up hearings are held in the same court that prejudicially ruled against them in the first place: “We found you guilty. Go ahead and tell us why we screwed up. You have 15 minutes.” Because restraining order trials are civil proceedings, defendants aren’t provided with legal counsel. They’re nevertheless afforded only a few days (or a couple of weeks at the outside) to prepare a defense.

Returning to this post’s epigraph, here’s its author’s elaboration of the points it introduces (which apply irrespective of what a restraining order is called):

The concept of a “protection order” or a “TPO” is a curious one under the law. Unlike a criminal case, where the awesome power of the State is wielded against a private citizen, an action for a protection order allows one private citizen to invoke judicial authority directly against another private citizen.

The implications are staggering when one considers that a protection order allows individuals to trigger invisible force fields affecting the conduct, movement, speech, and legal rights of others.

Even more significant is the fact that Nevada law allows a person to obtain a protection order based upon only a brief ex parte application [as do most or all states’ laws].

From these concepts, questions immediately present themselves. Are protection orders being utilized in oppressive or unexpected ways? Are the factual scenarios involved similar to what the [legislature] envisioned them to be? Are courts utilizing protection order tools correctly? Are judges issuing ex parte orders that trample upon the rights of innocent people before a hearing is held to determine the validity of specific allegations? Is this area of the law an insufficiently regulated “wild frontier”?

Loyola Law School Prof. Aaron Caplan, in a 2013 law review article that cites the 2008 paper of Mr. Tommasino’s quoted in this post, says yes.

Many structural factors of civil harassment litigation lead to higher-than-usual risk of constitutional error. As with family law, civil harassment law has a way of encouraging some judges to dispense freewheeling, Solomonic justice according to their visions of proper behavior and the best interests of the parties. Judges’ legal instincts are not helped by the accelerated and abbreviated procedures required by the statutes. The parties are rarely represented by counsel, and ex parte orders are encouraged, which means courts may not hear the necessary facts and legal arguments. Very few civil harassment cases lead to appeals, let alone appeals with published opinions. As a result, civil harassment law tends to operate with a shortage of two things we ordinarily rely upon to ensure accurate decision-making by trial courts: the adversary system and appellate review.

The process essentially operates “in a vacuum”:

Harassment orders, when granted, are very rarely appealed. In the Justice Courts of Las Vegas in 2008, only three out of 2034 non-domestic violence petitions resulted in an appeal. No appellate court opinions interpret the Nevada statute—even though it was enacted in 1989 [that’s zero appellate court opinions in 20 years]. As a result, “the limited jurisdiction courts [of Nevada] have been operating in a vacuum and creating ad hoc, reactive solutions” to recurring problems.

The stagecoach, in other words, is steered without reins. The laxity of the statutes means judges of the lowest-tier courts call the shots, and there are no big brothers looking over their shoulders. They’re licensed to do what they want. (The quotations above refer to different types of restraining order, but the two types aren’t necessarily treated any differently. Whether a petitioned injunction is a protection order or a harassment order may only depend on which box was ticked on the application form. In most jurisdictions, what distinguishes one from the other is the nature of the relationship between the accuser and the accused. The allegations may be identical.)

The legislative insensitivity to constitutional principles and protections as well as the lack of judicial housekeeping in this area of law are beneath the perceptual threshold of the public. To the uninitiated, the absence of controversy originating from “legitimate” sectors suggests that everything’s working as it should: restraining orders are issued to dangerous people who need to be tethered.

While how commonly the process is exploited for ulterior motives is a matter of heated dispute, its availability for abuse is plain. The prevailing attitude toward allegations of rampant abuse is that if statistics can’t be adduced to support them, the complaint is irrelevant and should exercise no influence on policy reform. The absurdity of this attitude is likewise plain. The process is designed to favor accusers, judges are predisposed to credit accuser’s accounts (in part according to explicit instruction), those accounts need not be substantiated, the process is initiated and completed in hearings spanning minutes only, and (as the court attorney who wrote the epigraph notes) comprehensive statistical information about restraining orders is virtually non-existent.

The restraining order process is conducted in a black hole. There’s not only no transparency; there’s no light.

What Journalists Need to Understand about Restraining Orders and Their Abuse: A Tutorial for Investigators, Part 1

October 7, 2014July 25, 2023Moderator 6 Comments

“Restraining orders give victims of domestic violence a tool to keep their abusers away or at least have them arrested if they come close. Anyone in a relationship with recent history of abuse can apply, and the order can be signed the same day.

“It gives victims the right to stay in the home and keep the kids. But the civil document relies on their abusers to respect the law.”

—“Are Restraining Orders False Security?” (USA Today)

Reporters are often keen and eager detectives when there are two sides to a story, and they want to get to the bottom of things. When there aren’t clearly defined contestants with competing narratives, however, reporters are as prone as anyone else to swallow what they’re told.

The news story the epigraph was excerpted from was prompted by a recent murder in Oregon and explores the impotence of restraining orders, in particular to “stop bullets.” Just as shooting sprees inspire reporters to investigate gun legislation, murder victims who had applied for restraining orders that proved worthless inspire reporters to investigate restraining order policies. The presumption, always, is that the law failed.

The solution suggested by the story—the same solution that’s always suggested by such stories—is to beef up protocols and give the statutes more teeth.

What’s inevitably lost in considerations like this is that for every person who’s attacked or killed in spite of a restraining order, thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people face grave indignities and privations consequent to orders’ being used exploitatively (including public revilement, chronic harassment, criminal profiling, social alienation, and loss of employment, health, and access to kids, home, and property). This is a fact it seems journalists would only be given cause to confront if more victims of procedural abuse killed themselves.

Preferable, certainly, would be if reporters could be depended on to sniff out and censure injustice without anyone’s having to die.

Toward this end, this post encourages reporters to recognize what the quoted paragraphs that introduce it actually say. This is revealed by removing the obfuscating rhetoric. Replace the phrase victims of domestic violence with accusers, and replace their abusers with the accused.

Now consider the implications of the same paragraphs, slightly revised:

“Restraining orders give accusers a tool to keep the accused away or at least have them arrested if they come close. Anyone in a relationship…can apply, and the order can be signed the same day.

“It gives accusers the right to stay in the home and keep the kids….”

The mere substitution of factually accurate, unbiased labels changes the meaning of these paragraphs significantly, and brings their implications to the fore.

Now dare to think the unthinkable (as every factual analyst should) and replace the word accusers with the word liars and the phrase the accused with the phrase those lied about, and pare away a few more words.

“Restraining orders give liars a tool to keep those lied about away or have them arrested. Anyone in a relationship can apply, and the order can be signed the same day.

“It gives liars the right to stay in the home and keep the kids.”

The same two paragraphs, reconceived, say that a restraining order can be got by lying to the court, can be used to have someone arrested without warrant based on the report of the liar, can be had in a single day (without the accused’s even being given prior notice of the proceedings), and can be used to gain immediate and sole entitlement to a place of residence and immediate and sole custody of children.

Appreciate that there are no (enforced) penalties for lying, and suddenly the motives and opportunity for fraud—particularly against a target of malice—become plain.

Appreciate further that allegations made by restraining order petitioners aren’t subject to the criminal standard (“proof beyond a reasonable doubt”). Restraining order trials are civil adjudications, not criminal ones. The “standard of proof” applied is “preponderance of the evidence,” which means no certain substantiation of allegations ranging from nuisance to sexual assault is required. Approval of a restraining order isn’t a (literal) finding of guilt, per se. No proof of anything must be established.

People, including journalists, only see what they hear.

The truth of how conveniently and urgently restraining orders avail themselves as tools of abuse is right under the noses of everyone who writes about them. It just gets obscured by loaded words (victims and abusers, for example) and the images they excite. Blindness to these words’ unexamined assumptions is further reinforced by the hysteria aroused by a (single) sensational act of violence.

Principal among these unexamined assumptions is that everyone who claims to be a victim is a victim (according to which belief everyone who claims to be a victim is treated as a victim by the court—which every false claimant dependably anticipates).

Observing this by using a story about a tragedy shouldn’t seem callous, because (1) it’s in the wake of tragedies like the one reported in the referenced story that hysteria runs highest and completely eclipses critical scrutiny, and (2) it’s tragedies like the one reported in the referenced story that show that restraining orders, besides being excellent tools to realize spiteful or avaricious intentions, aren’t any good at doing the one thing that’s said to justify them: averting violence.

On the contrary, the story reports:

“For some people it’s more dangerous [to get a restraining order],” said Kim Larson, director for Marion County District Attorney Victim Assistance Division. “Sometimes it makes people really angry, getting served with a restraining order.”

This is especially true if the order is false. (Besides inspiring violent people to commit further violence, restraining orders may drive nonviolent people to lash out or even kill in desperation, particularly if they’ve been falsely accused, publicly excoriated, and deprived of all that gave their lives meaning.)

This isn’t rocket science. People lie, and when people lie about abuse, they do egregious and often irrevocable harm to those they falsely blame—who only very rarely kill themselves. No one looks beneath the surface, because they faithfully cleave to popular conceptions and reasonably assume that there are safeguards in place (due process and such) to ensure that allegations of abuse are properly vetted and substantiated.

Investigators shouldn’t assume.

Battering Women to Protect Battered Women: Using Massachusetts’s Policies to Examine Restraining Order Publicity and Its Damages

September 10, 2014June 20, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

“In the event a Restraining Order is issued for any period of time (initial 10 days or subsequent extension/dismissal), you will be listed in the statewide Domestic Violence Registry system. This could impact your ability to obtain or maintain employment in government, law enforcement, certain medical fields, or social services, or to work with/coach children. Impoundment of the restraining order does not expunge your listing on the statewide domestic violence registry, as certain government agencies and private companies with significant government contracts still have access to the registry system.”

—“Massachusetts Restraining Orders Procedure and Ramifications”

I’ve just been corresponding with a Florida woman named Ally who had a domestic violence (209A) protection order petitioned against her in Massachusetts alleging she was a danger to a former boyfriend (these kinds of instruments can be obtained by plaintiffs who don’t even live in the same state or country as their defendants).

Ally contends the allegations against her are false and has been living in hell for over a year.

She’s surviving day to day and can’t afford to procure the services of an attorney. Ally’s trying to defend herself and clear her name with no money and from another time zone. She’s preparing a motion on her own (very possibly ill-fated) to request that the order against her be expunged, because it has ruined her employability.

Note: As the epigraph explains, even were Ally to succeed in having the order simply dismissed (which is itself unlikely), she would still remain registered as a domestic abuser.

From a draft of Ally’s “Motion to Expunge”:

Defendant was refused jobs, [is] not allowed to attend [or] volunteer [at] her daughter’s school events, [and has had] numerous other rights taken away due to Plaintiff’s Abuse of Process and Fraudulent Allegations and written Affidavit to the Court. This continues today.

Note: To successfully combat prosecutions like this requires money…which prosecutions like this prevent their defendants from earning.

A recent post on this blog observed the court’s schizophrenic regard toward restraining orders. On the one hand, they’re viewed by judges as urgent, potentially life-or-death matters; on the other hand, they’re viewed as inconsequential as long as defendants mind their prohibitions for the prescribed period of time.

Ignored is that adjudications both initiated and finalized in minutes yield rulings that are entered into state and national law enforcement databases indefinitely. Orders become “inactive” once they expire, but they don’t disappear. A woman like Ally remains for the rest of her life marked as a perpetrator of domestic violence.

In contrast—and the contrast is a telling one—consider this excerpt from a “Memoradum” issued by the Massachusetts Supreme Court last year on “Internet Dissemination of Personal Protection Order Information.”

As transparency and improved access remain court goals, it is important that we not unknowingly or unintentionally release victims’ personally identifiable information through the Internet, recognizing that this information is easily accessed and that access to such information could be dangerous to victims. Additionally, it has been brought to our attention that current federal law prohibits providing information over the Internet about personal protection orders (PPOs) that would be likely to reveal the identity or location of the petitioner (“PPO Information”).

18 USC 2265(d)(3) states:

A State, Indian tribe, or territory shall not make available publicly on the Internet any information regarding the registration, filing of a petition for, or issuance of a protection order, restraining order, or injunction in either the issuing or enforcing State, tribal or territorial jurisdiction, if such publication would be likely to publicly reveal the identity or location of the party protected under such order. A State, Indian tribe, or territory may share court-generated and law enforcement-generated information contained in secure, governmental registries for protection order enforcement purposes.

The privacy of restraining order plaintiffs (who are nominated “victims”) is to be tightly guarded.

Note: Based on “determinations” formed in minutes and possibly based on nothing more substantial than accusation, a plaintiff is deemed a “victim” whose identity and privacy must be protected, and the defendant is deemed a “violent threat” whose privacy is accordingly due no consideration. After the term of the restraining order has flown, the “danger” to the accuser is assumed to have been resolved, but the accuser continues to enjoy anonymity while the accused must go on bearing the implications of the restraining order for the rest of his or her life, exactly as if those implications were a criminal sentence.

Only in the recent past, in fact, did it even become possible to remove a Massachusetts restraining order defendant’s name from the domestic violence registry if it were found that allegations against him or her were substantially or totally false. (Remember that such allegations are made ex parte in the time it takes to place an order at McDonald’s.)

Until recently, it was almost impossible to expunge a person’s record with the domestic violence registry once the initial entry was made. In the 2006 case of Commissioner of Probation v. Adams, it was recognized that a judge has the inherent authority to expunge a record of an abuse [from the] violence registry system in the rare and limited circumstance that the judge finds the order was obtained through fraud on the court.

Note: The phrase rare…circumstance (of fraud) is emphasized in the original document quoted above (“Massachusetts Restraining Orders Procedure and Ramifications”), which was authored by an all-female law firm (Mavrides Law of Boston). Allegations of rampant restraining order misuse in Massachusetts have actually been the subject of press coverage and at least one law review monograph, and one of the most outspoken critics of restraining orders, attorney Gregory Hession, practices in Massachusetts and has for many years reported that restraining orders are “out of control.”

The previous two posts on this blog were responses to allegations that those who criticize restraining orders and domestic violence laws are “opposed to the battered women’s movement.” Defenders of these laws are urged to ask themselves how Ally’s wanting to be able to provide for her daughter and one day attend her daughter’s graduation has anything to do with battered women at all.

They’re also urged to ask themselves how denying Ally these opportunities isn’t itself an act of brutality.

Restraining Order Fraud and the Disintegration of Morals

July 20, 2014July 9, 2023Moderator 10 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Relationship between False Allegations of Rape and Restraining Order Abuse

June 30, 2014August 21, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

It’s not without regret for how they may affect victims of sexual violence that a number of journalistic reports that expose false rape allegations have been highlighted on this blog. Although the blog’s focus is restraining order abuse, the potency of restraining orders and the laxity applied to the allegations they’re based on derive from the specter of domestic and sexual violence, the shadow of which has infected and jaundiced the perceptions of our legislators and judges.

The volume of false rape allegations that have been brought to public attention this year—mostly in the U.K., which is less squeamish about acknowledging fraud of this sort—will probably make further mention excessive, because it threatens to distract from reports and explications more directly relevant to the blog’s primary concern, which is restraining order injustice (a redundant phrase). Several news stories were noted this month, and some of these stories are each but one of a series that trace the same saga of mischief.

“Law Graduate Falsely Accused Boyfriend of Rape and Assault as Excuse, Jury Told” (Steven Morris, The Guardian, 2014)

“Oxford Union ‘Rape Victim Knew Her Claim Was False’” (Oliver Duggan, Amelia Hamer, and James Rothwell, The Telegraph, 2014)

“Woman Accused of Making Repeated False Rape Allegations” (The Inquisitr, 2014)

“Woman Sentenced after Falsely Accusing Two Men of Rape” (UPI, 2014) (see also commentary by attorney and former Houston Law Review editor Robert Franklin)

“Woman Who Cut Herself with Razor and Claimed She’d Been Raped Is Jailed” (Michael Donnelly, Belfast Telegraph, 2014)

“Victim of False Rape Accusation Seeks Compensation” (The Northern Echo, 2014)

“Man Wrongly Accused of Sexual Assault Sues Police” (Rachel Olding, Sydney Morning Herald, 2014)

The purpose of collecting these reports of false rape allegations hasn’t been to discount the claims of real victims or even to reveal that false allegations are made, which should be unsurprising in a sociopolitical climate that’s eager to credit allegations of violence against women; the purpose, rather, is to reveal the motives of false accusers and to emphasize that there’s no lie that a dedicated false accuser will balk at telling and holding fast to. It happens that when false accusers frame people for a crime society holds in the highest contempt, their motives become more noteworthy.

If accusers are willing to falsely allege even rape (and casually), there’s no estimating how many “lesser” false accusations are made routinely, particularly when no risk or serious investment is entailed. Civil restraining orders are had in hours if not minutes based on brief interviews with judges, and there are no repercussions to their plaintiffs if the allegations they’re based on are untrue. They can furthermore instantly gratify multiple motives for false allegations at the same time.

These motives are sorted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under five broad rubrics: mental illness (or aberrance), attention-seeking/sympathy, profit, alibi (blame-shifting or cover-up), and revenge (or spite).

A false restraining order litigant with a malicious yen may leave a courthouse shortly after entering it having gained sole entitlement to a residence, attendant properties, and children, possibly while displacing blame from him- or herself for misconduct, and having enjoyed the reward of an authority figure’s undivided attention won at the expense of his or her victim.

S/he may, besides, be crackerjacks.

The exposure of false allegations of rape shouldn’t be interpreted as denying the reality or brutality of sexual violence. What it should do, however, is serve as a rude awakening to those who believe (and promote the belief) that allegations of abuse should be accepted without suspicion. It should also stress that false allegations aren’t negligible, rare, or harmless.

They’re anything but.

Reporting Restraining Order Abuse to Elected Officials

June 27, 2014August 25, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

“I am suffering from the effects of a fraudulent protection order in Colorado, which was filed by my female roommate and had me and my young daughter kicked out of our home.

“There appears to be no recourse for me, but I did contact 10 state representatives and senators, and I heard back from three of them. If more people report this abuse to their elected officials, maybe something will actually be done about this awful system.”

—Respondent to this blog

Writing to district and state representatives can be a lot like trying to communicate with judges. Expecting a human response isn’t unreasonable, but it’s often disappointed.

There’s nevertheless value in bringing systemic injustices to the attention of legislators (senators and congressmen and -women), because (1) they make, reform, and repeal laws, and (2) if they hear the same complaints over and over—and especially if they know other people of influence are hearing the same complaints and looking to them for action—there’s a chance some of them might step up.

The voices of women who’ve been abused by court process, particularly, need to be heard, because the procedures that are most often and easily abused are ones it’s presumed are protecting them.

Consult this site for the names and addresses/websites of elected officials with whom to register a complaint (state legislators should be first in order of importance):

“Find Your Representatives”

Restraining Orders Based on Fraud Falsely Imprison Defendants Whether They’re Incarcerated or Not

June 25, 2014February 15, 2018Moderator Leave a comment

“Forensic psychiatrists and other mental health professionals must remember that although allegations are often genuine, there is an almost equal number of cases…in which they are not. Complete and objective assessment is always required, and especially so when accusations emerge in contexts such as the following:

Certain kinds of mental illness and character traits (particularly in allegations against clinicians). One should note poor doctor-patient relationships, whether real or perceived, patients with psychotic or delusional symptoms, certain hysterical and factitious disorders, some fragmenting or dissociative disorders, and those with substantial borderline, inadequate, and/or passive personality traits
Divorce proceedings
Child custody proceedings
Situations with the potential for substantial financial reward
Situations in which the accuser has an emotional or characterological reason to avoid discovery, prosecution, or confrontation with legal (or parental) authority (e.g., those with antisocial personality traits, some substance abusers)
A history of repeated past allegations, particularly if they have not been fully investigated
Unusual timing of the accusation or alleged event (e.g., alleged ‘date rape’ within an otherwise close and stable relationship, or accusations made only when some sort of secondary purpose or reward is evident).”

—“False Allegations: The Role of the Forensic Psychiatrist”

The previous post called attention to an excerpt from a story featured in The Times of Malta this month that concluded that incidences of false allegations weren’t “one-offs,” meaning they’re not singular occurrences but more common than the public imagines.

The lawyers quoted by reporter, what’s more, refer to criminal cases in which sexual abuse is alleged and, consequently, in which the accused are afforded attorney representation.

By contrast, civil restraining order hearings are mere minutes long, defendants aren’t afforded counsel, and fraud is typically ignored by the court even if it’s perceived. There is, therefore, no accurately determining the pervasiveness or degree of lying in such adjudications.

Many authoritative sources conclude it’s rampant, and anecdotal reports concur.

The application process for restraining orders is typically free, it’s concluded in an afternoon if not within minutes, and there are no consequences for lying. Why, then, shouldn’t the process be broadly and routinely abused?

To believe that such a process wouldn’t be abused would depend on an unshakably naïve conviction in the inherent goodness of people, and such a belief would determine the process unnecessary. Anyone who believes people are capable of beastly behavior and that restraining orders are necessary—take, for example, feminists—must believe people are capable of lying hurtfully to get them.

Exposing the flaws in the belief that anyone who points a finger must necessarily be telling the truth doesn’t take a professor of philosophy.

Consider, then, that allegations made in civil court may be identical to those introduced against defendants in criminal court—and can include rape, child molestation, or even murder. The only difference between civil and criminal rulings is legal consequence.

This is the source of the cognitive disconnect exemplified by judges and, largely, everyone else. Because civil restraining orders only threaten incarceration rather than mandate it, they’re considered “no biggie.”

The conceit is that though falsely accused restraining order defendants may be denied access to their homes, money, property, and children—besides facing other privations—they aren’t denied their freedom; it’s only curtailed somewhat (“Here are your shoes—you’re free to leave”).

Faith in the conceit that restraining orders are minor impingements on defendants’ lives depends on accepting that being falsely, publically, and permanently labeled a stalker or batterer, for example, shouldn’t interfere with a person’s comfort, equanimity, or ability to realize his or her dreams. Such faith is founded, in other words, on the fantastical belief that wrongful vilification won’t exercise a detrimental influence on a person’s mental state, won’t affect his or her familial and social relationships, won’t negatively impact his or her employment and employability, etc.

Clearly such faith is beyond unreasonable; it’s inane. Being forced to live with false allegations can be crippling—for painfully obvious reasons. Whether a person is forced to agonize in a cell or is permitted to agonize in his or her place of choice is of scant significance to the psycho-emotional well-being of the sufferer. Prison isn’t just an environment, and arresting someone doesn’t require handcuffs.

Victims Are Important, but They’re Not More Important than Anyone Else: Amending Priorities and Reconceiving Restraining Order Policy According to the Principle of Equality

June 20, 2014August 8, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

“While some municipal court judges acknowledge that the domestic violence law can create injustices—one calls it ‘probably the most abused piece of legislation that comes to my mind’—there are counterpoints. Melanie Griffin, executive director of the Commission to Study Sex Discrimination in the Statutes, a legislative commission that drafted much of the 1991 law, says that for every individual who files a false report, ‘there are 100 women who don’t come in at all and stay there and get beaten.’”

—“N.J. Judges Told to Ignore Rights in Abuse TROs”

This quotation comes from a nearly 20-year-old journalistic exposé, yet you’ll find the same starkly meretricious apology for restraining order abuse routinely voiced today.

This quotation from the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) means that all people should be treated equally under the law, not that women should be privileged. Anyone who’s for women’s being afforded special treatment by the authorities and the courts opposes the message of the ERA, as do proponents of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).

The argument, basically, is that it doesn’t matter if restraining order defendants’ rights are ignored, and it doesn’t matter if defendants are falsely accused, because there are many more victims of abuse who suffer in silence than there are false accusers.

The argument equates apples with orangutans. Its reasoning is partisan and purely emotion-based—and betrays ignorance of the fact that women, too, are falsely accused of domestic violence. Its thesis is that since there may be multitudes of unacknowledged victims of domestic violence, the state’s creating victims by abetting false prosecutions is of no statistical significance.

While everyone should feel for women who are “beaten” at home, no one should be forced by the state to endure “sympathy pains.” The falsely accused man or woman whose life is upturned or undone by hyped allegations or gross lies credited by careless judges is absolutely blameless for the suffering of strangers.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights guaranteed to all citizens under the Constitution, and equality and fair treatment under the law are among its mandates that brook no compromise. Denying the latter to anyone, ever—even if the motive is a sympathetic one—is categorically wrong.

The statement in the epigraph says: It’s okay if you, Mr. or Ms. Doe, are falsely accused and battered by the system, and it’s okay if it deprives you of your kids and home and livelihood and dignity and sanity, because some people you don’t know and never will know are reportedly “beaten” by some other people you don’t know and never will know.

It says there are women who suffer unjustly, so never mind if we make you suffer unjustly, too.

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

May 31, 2014June 29, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

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

—Kibeom Lee and Michael C. Ashton

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

—Daniel N. Jones and Delroy L. Paulhus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Some specialist monographs on this subject are here.

How Men Lie on Restraining Orders: A Tutorial for Feminists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SPITE: Feminism and Restraining Order Rampancy

May 15, 2014June 29, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

“I wasn’t thinking when I wrote my domestic abuse statement in Virginia against my boyfriend.”

“Can I get a permanent protection order against my spouse’s lover?”

“How [do you] bait someone into violating a restraining order?”

—A few recent search terms leading to this blog

I stumbled upon a video presentation the other day by a self-styled anti-feminist activist Karen Straughan, who’s blogged for a couple years under the moniker “girlwriteswhat.” I thought her talk, “Feminism: Socialism in Panties,” was evenhandedly confrontational, nervy, and smart.

Responses from feminist quarters that I hastily gleaned yesterday suggest that this activist’s denunciations have raised some hackles. I noted, though, that more than one woman respectfully remarked that she’s “articulate,” if “biased.” She’s in fact very articulate. And something I don’t think her female critics are able to appreciate is that her “bias” is a counter-bias and that she isn’t employing rhetorical strategies that are any more tendentious or inflammatory than those used by the people she draws a bead on.

For feminists to argue that turnabout is foul play is silly, and it’s interesting to observe that when dogma’s challenged using its own tactics, it pitches a fit.

The same impulsive emotional reasoning exemplified by this foot-stamping is what’s suggested by the search terms that introduce this post (to which I could have appended thousands more of a similar nature).

The large-scale injustices perpetrated by the restraining order process (on both men and women) are the product of impulsive emotional reasoning, as is the process itself. What may have started out as a sober guard dog 30 years ago has transformed into a manic dragon that arbitrarily spits fire when fingers are snapped, particularly nail-polished fingers. It doesn’t warn its targets to back down; it torches them.

There’s an ancient philosophic principle called the golden mean that advocates avoidance of extremes (“moderation in all things”). According to this principle, if something gets too far off-kilter in one direction, you have to counteract the imbalance by excessively striving in the contrary direction. If the above-referenced activist strikes some as overstating her case, they might consider that she’s endeavoring to knock things back toward equilibrium.

Reading through online comments about her, I was familiarized with the acronyms MRM and MRA, which apparently stand for “men’s rights movement” and “men’s rights activist,” respectfully. One thread about her I found was titled, “What do Feminists think about YouTube blogger ‘Girl Writes What,’ a Female MRA?”

You see from this question how far abroad feminism has strayed and why equity feminists are appalled by what they call the “feminist establishment” (a.k.a. “The Sorority”). The motive of the feminist movement that was underway when I was a kid was to dissolve distinctions and dichotomies between the sexes. Yet as conversational prompts like this one show, today’s so-called feminism promotes division: Us versus Them. Its compulsion is to split everyone into camps. The original idea was to have everybody recognized as the same, irrespective of whether they had an innie or an outie between their legs.

The thrust of today’s mainstream ideological feminism is to blame, subjugate, and punish, not unify. Feminism has betrayed itself.

It has also betrayed women. Something that’s long been a source of curiosity to me is that while the feminist establishment is often criticized as misandronist (man-hating), it’s rarely criticized as misogynist (woman-hating).

Yet inducing women to self-identify as victims can hardly be called “empowering.” If the source of power isn’t you, the power isn’t yours. What inducing women to self-identify as victims is, rather, is denigrating to feminine self-respect. The feminist establishment doesn’t encourage women to cultivate or rely on personal agency; it infantilizes them and urges them to apply for paternal protection (and the abuse and domestic dispute industries have been glad to profit by the ensuing strife).

Contemporary feminism has conditioned women to identify themselves respective to men, namely, as their victims. It’s thoroughly preoccupied with men—to the point of fixation. (The online conversational threads I’ve just looked at either concerned bitching about men or bitching about women who don’t bitch about men.)

The original feminist platform argued that women should identify themselves as independent people. Feminism, however, has become entirely male-centric. There is no feminist identification independent of men.

Prejudicial laws and court processes criticized in this blog and elsewhere are a societal response to women’s conceding that they lack personal agency. Consider that the reason why infants cry for help is because they’re incapable of meeting their own needs (incapable, literally, of standing on their own two feet). Women are much more capable than they’ve been led to believe.

Restraining orders are by and large sought impulsively—in the millions every year. Both motives and the engine that generates them are virtually automatic.

Interesting to me, finally, is that men have adapted to the new status quo (“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”). Most of the complainants of court abuses who’ve responded to this blog are women, some of whose lives have been shattered by lies and fraud. Men have hopped onto the abuse industry bandwagon, too, and the time may come that the equality that feminism is supposed to be advocating for is realized in the form of both sexes’ exploiting state protections to bash each other into a uniform goo.

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

May 12, 2014June 29, 2023Moderator 7 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 9, 2014June 29, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

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

The word to bear in mind here is probability.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They Don’t Have to Be True, Just “Truthy”: Civil Restraining Order Allegations and the “Burden of Proof”

May 6, 2014June 29, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

“Preponderance of the evidence, also known as balance of probabilities, is the standard required in most civil cases. […]

“The standard is met if the proposition is more likely to be true than not true. Effectively, the standard is satisfied if there is greater than 50 percent chance that the proposition is true.”

—Wikipedia, “Legal burden of proof”

As the previous two posts have discussed, “preponderance of the evidence” is the standard according to which restraining order allegations are “tried.”

Note that the odds of its being accurate, assuming all conditions are equal, may be only slightly better than a coin flip’s.

Accusations on restraining orders that are adjudicated by this standard may include any of the following (along with any other allegation conceivable): simple or aggravated assault, simple or aggravated battery, stalking, cyberstalking, sexual abuse, false/unlawful/forced imprisonment, peeping, criminal coercion, reckless endangerment, child abuse/molestation, “menacing,” “terroristic threatening,” theft, arson, criminal mischief, extortion, burglary, criminal trespass, sexual harassment, incest, offensive touching/“lewd fondling,” kidnapping/abduction, malicious property damage, injury or killing of animals/pets, larceny, rape or statutory rape, or other felonies, including (in New Jersey and Alaska) homicide.

See for yourself: “Standards of Proof for Domestic Violence Civil Protection Orders (CPOs) by State.” And appreciate that accusations like these need not be made against domestic partners or other members of a shared household. They can be made against friends, lovers, work associates, neighbors, exes, exes’ new spouses or boy- or girlfriends, rivals of any other sort, nondomestic family members, former family members, strangers—you name it.

Accusations on restraining orders may alternatively amount to no more than “annoyance.” The same standard is applied to the allegation of rape as is applied to allegations of nuisance, and irrespective of a plaintiff’s actual claims, the implications of a restraining order, which is a publicly accessible record and one preserved in the databases of state and federal police, are threat, stalking, and/or violence.

Restraining orders are understood to be issued to “sickos.” Nobody hears “restraining order” and thinks “Little Rascal.”

Consider that the initial determination of the truth or falsity of a restraining order plaintiff’s allegations is grounded on a brief interview between the plaintiff and a judge. Consider further that the judge will likely have never met the plaintiff before; that the judge may therefore have no basis whatever for forming an opinion of the plaintiff’s honesty, soberness, or sanity; and that the defendant upon whom judgment is rendered is just a name on a form.

If the “legal burden of proof” defined in the epigraph didn’t already sound sketchy enough, observe that unless a defendant has a prior record of misconduct, no empirical grounds exist even for a judge to decide that there’s a 51% probability that the plaintiff’s telling the truth—other than, perhaps, whatever physical corroboration the plaintiff may provide, which may be none, may be forged, or may be misrepresented.

Restraining order allegations are essentially established (and essential establishment is all that’s required) on the forcefulness of a plaintiff’s claims. The truth or falsity of individual allegations is literally irrelevant (except, of course, to the defendant who has to live with them for the rest or his or her life). A judge isn’t a fact-finder in these cases; s/he’s a bookmaker.

It’s all about the probability that a plaintiff’s claims are more true than false, and the fixer of the odds is a single judge—or at most two.

In other words, the standard “preponderance of the evidence” is hokum. It’s basically an authorization for a judge to act according to his or her discretion, which is a lofty way of saying that it authorizes a judge to decide however s/he wants. Allegations, including of felony crimes, don’t have to be true, just “truthy.”

If, prior to forming a decision on a restraining order petition, a judge were required to at least meet the defendant; and if it weren’t the case that the judge had likely had it impressed upon him or her that s/he should prejudicially regard the plaintiff’s allegations as true; and if it weren’t the case that societally conditioned expectations urged the same prejudice…then there might be a reasonable hope that a judge could perform the computation required by “preponderance of the evidence” with some degree of accuracy, allowing that a “degree of accuracy” should be acceptably conclusive.

As the procedure exists today, there can be no such reasonable hope.

“American Law is Irresponsible”: The American Civil Standard of Evidence and Abuse of Restraining Orders

April 26, 2014June 29, 2023Moderator 10 Comments

“On the European continent, for the court to hold against the defendant, the judge must be convinced that the facts brought forward by the plaintiff in support of the claim are indeed true. In principle, continental law does not make a difference between civil law and criminal law […]. By contrast, U.S. law has three different standards of proof […]. In criminal law, the charge must be established ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’ In civil law, normally the plaintiff wins if only ‘the preponderance of the evidence’ is in [his or] her favour. Only in a limited number of civil law matters, of particular gravity for the defendant, the intermediate standard of ‘clear and convincing evidence’ must be met.”

—Dr. Cristoph Engel

The monograph from which this quotation is excerpted, which is by a professor of experimental law and economics, begins by candidly remarking that “American law is irresponsible.”

No argument here.

At the root of restraining order injustice is the lax evidentiary standard applied to plaintiffs’ allegations. Not only may allegations on restraining orders be false; a judge doesn’t have to be convinced that they’re not false to find in favor of their plaintiff.

Excepting in Maryland, which adjudicates the merits of civil restraining order allegations based on the intermediate standard of “clear and convincing evidence,” the standard applied to restraining orders is “preponderance of the evidence.”

If claims seem more likely true than false, “preponderance of the evidence” is satisfied.

In other words, the law is contented if a single judge (not a jury of independent thinkers) reckons the allegations against a defendant are “probably true” (or “maybe true” or “true enough”). To be effective, all allegations have to be is compelling.

Making allegations compelling isn’t a tall task for people in the throes of bitter animosity, as restraining order plaintiffs typically are, and it’s a cakewalk for unscrupulous liars, who are hardly rare among restraining order plaintiffs.

Officers of our courts have furthermore had it impressed upon them that they shouldn’t question allegations made pursuant to the procurement of restraining orders, which are presumed to be sought by those in need of protection.

The legal standard familiar from TV and the movies, “proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” is reserved for criminal prosecutions. For a judge to find in favor of a civil restraining order plaintiff, no proof of his or her allegations is necessary.

Why this is a big deal is that being publically accused is agonizing. Cops and constables serve restraining orders on people at their homes, and just the documents themselves terrorize and shame (as they’re meant to). Allegations on restraining orders, what’s more, are never harmless. Even alleged minor offenses like harassment are inevitably tinged with overtones of danger and/or sexual deviancy. Plaintiffs are inclined to make their allegations as sensational as possible to justify their applications to the courts, and the courts are inclined to find threat or perversion even where none may exist to justify their intrusions into defendants’ lives.

Defendants are met with damning fingers from all directions—and enduringly, because restraining orders (and the allegations on them) are public records, accessible by anyone, that never disappear.

What makes this an even bigger deal, especially when evidence is fraudulently represented or allegations are false, is that restraining order defendants further face loss of employment and employability, as well as loss of access to kids, home, and property in a majority of cases.

Revisiting a phrase used by the author of the epigraph, such losses easily qualify as “particularly grave” and should therefore require the application of a more conclusive standard of evidence by our courts than “close enough.”

Exacerbating the injustice of this tenuous standard is that restraining orders are issued based solely on the word of their plaintiffs (ex parte). Decisions that may result in the losses enumerated above proceed from testimony given in interviews rarely lasting longer than 10 minutes.

Such hearings are far more perfunctory than probative. Basically a judge is just looking for a few cue words to run with and may literally be satisfied by a plaintiff’s saying, “I’m afraid.” (Talk show host David Letterman was notoriously issued a restraining order based on the petition of a woman who accused him of mentally oppressing her through her TV.)

What you have, then, on top of the presupposition of guilt, is a wishy-washy protocol yoked to a wishy-washy evidentiary standard.

It’s true that defendants are afforded the opportunity to challenge allegations leveled against them and actually address the court, but these follow-up hearings, also mere minutes long, are necessarily biased by the court’s prior findings.

The issuance of a restraining order (based on a few-minute chitchat) already represents a ruling, and the court’s disposition isn’t to contradict itself. This bias, authorized by a low evidentiary bar, too often translates to follow-up hearings’ being little more than theater—and an opportunity to subject defendants to additional humiliation and scorn.

Judges coyly criticize their partiality as “paternal.” Considering, however, the steep toll that that partiality may exact from innocent defendants, this self-excuse is nothing shy of obscene (and underscores the cognitive disconnect to which judges are prone between their performances in the courtroom and the effects of those performances on people’s lives).

Clearly the motive for applying a diminished standard of evidence to any courtroom procedure is not to decrease the likelihood of error. The lower the standard of evidence is, that much greater is the probability that miscarriages of justice will occur. When such miscarriages equate to innocent defendants’ being subjected to public humiliation and defamation, loss of employment, and effacement from their former lives, besides their having to tolerate the ever-looming possibility of incarceration following further false allegations’ being made against them, nothing less than the highest standard of evidence is conscionable.

The criticism of the writer of this post’s epigraph that “American law is irresponsible” doesn’t even begin to say it.

(Female) Stalkers, False Allegations, and Restraining Order Abuse

April 16, 2014July 1, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

Restraining orders are maliciously abused—not sometimes, but often. Typically this is done in heat to hurt or hurt back, to shift blame for abusive misconduct, or to gain the upper hand in a conflict that may have far-reaching consequences.

There’s a cooler, more methodical style of abuse practiced by people who aren’t in intimate daily proximity to their victims, however, that’s alternatively called stalking, bullying, or mobbing. These words have distinct meanings but are nevertheless porous, because motives for the behaviors they represent are the same: coercion, punishment, domination, and control.

There’s a lot of crossover between them—as is there crossover between the various high-conflict personality types who engage in these behaviors, who contrary to popular perception may be women.

Journalists’, psychologists’, and bloggers’ representations of those with personality disorders that stem from sociopathy tend to use gendered language that implies most abusers (or the worst abusers) are male. Possibly this is because many who write about sociopaths and narcissists are female, and their experiences are of abuse by men. Or possibly this is because making women out to be villains is ungallant. Or possibly it’s assumed that men can’t be victims of women, even sociopaths, because men have nerves of steel or because their general physical advantage carries over into all contexts. Neither of the latter beliefs is true, and when the context is abuse of legal process, it’s usually the case that the bigger you are, the harder you fall.

Consider these illustrated WikiHow tutorials on “How to Spot a Sociopath” and “How to Identify a Psychopath,” which are pretty good, except that the reader is likely to get the impression from the cartoons that all sociopaths are men.

They aren’t.

These “tips” from “How to Spot a Sociopath” are at least as applicable to women as men, and suggest why abuse of legal process, including restraining order abuse, is so attractive to the sociopathic mind—and why it comes easily to sociopaths or to those who manifest sociopathic traits.

“Most sociopaths can commit vile actions and not feel the least bit of remorse. Such actions may include physical abuse or public humiliation of others. If the person is a true sociopath, then he or she will feel no remorse about hurting others, lying, manipulating people, or just generally acting in an unacceptable way.”

Sociopaths often know how to make others believe they are the victim while actually being the aggressor.
Sociopaths tend to blame the victim for their shortcomings. They can never admit to fault and instead attack the victim. Key factor in any DSM diagnosis.
This type of person will tell you things to get you to forgive them and then say they never told you. This is a tactic to play mind games.
If a person is “too good to be true,” they probably are. This is the case for any DSM diagnosis, including sociopathy, borderline [personality], and narcissism.
Most are aware of their need to hide cold traits, and are good actors (have adapted to being different)….
Some scientists believe that sociopaths suffer from damage to the prefrontal cortex which regulates emotions and morality, etc.
Sociopathic behavior is strongly inherited, so look at problems in the family as a clue to a person’s real personality.
Some experts say that a great number of sociopaths were also child abuse sufferers.

The same tutorial, despite its gendered cartoons, references a book published last year titled, Confessions of a Sociopath, which is by a female sociopath who uses the penname M. E. Thomas—and who’s an attorney and law professor, which shouldn’t be particularly surprising to anyone who’s been exposed to legal practitioners.

It may be that not all sociopaths are fairly typified as stalkers and bullies, but if you read this review of Confessions of a Sociopath, you’ll appreciate that motives for abusive conduct come readily enough to the sociopathic psyche.

Thinking of women as stalkers or bullies is just something we’re unaccustomed to or something we treat lightly.

In a series of hers titled, “Female Stalkers,” psychologist Tara Palmatier notes that “female stalking behaviors are portrayed as ‘funny’ or ‘cute.’” We’ve been conditioned—and “we” includes the police and judges—to think of women as both harmless and helpless. Women don’t hurt people.

They do, though.

Popular perceptions of “stalking,” domestic violence, and other abuses tend inordinately to inculpate men. The object of observing that women also act hurtfully isn’t to suggest that women more often act hurtfully than men but to controvert the popular notion that they don’t or can’t, which is both false and largely to blame for the absurd ease with which legal process is maliciously abused.

Accounts submitted to this blog by both men and women indicate that individuals of either gender may and do abuse legal process to torment others, horribly and sometimes for years on end. Either sex may engage in cyclic mind games, as well: manipulating another into trust and then punishing that trust (“It’s okay, I’m sorry, come here”…WHACK!). Repeatedly. One woman’s (mother’s) account of this, shared a few months ago, is numbing: affairs by her (probably borderline personality-disordered) boyfriend followed by apologies followed by recriminations (rinse, repeat) followed by false allegations to the police, to the court, to child protective services, to the military, and on and on.

Most group-stalking or -bullying (mobbing) acts reported to this blog, though, are orchestrated by women. These include combinations of behaviors like making false allegations, spreading false and ruinous rumors with the help of negative advocates (accomplices), using social media to taunt and intimidate from multiple directions, etc. These passive-aggressive forms of abuse to punish, frighten, and dominate—which, depending on the context, may alternatively be called bullying, harassment, or stalking—are usually viewed as less harmful than physical assault. This perception is facile, however, and wrong.

A recent male respondent to this blog, for example, reports encountering an ex while out with his kids and being lured over, complimented, etc. (“Here, boy! Come!”), following which the woman reported to the police that she was terribly alarmed by the encounter and, while brandishing a restraining order application she’d filled out, had the man charged with stalking. Though the meeting was recorded on store surveillance video and was unremarkable, the woman had no difficulty persuading a male officer that she responded to the man in a friendly manner because she was afraid of him (a single father out with his two little kids). The man also reports (desperately and apologetic for being a “bother”) that he and his children have been baited and threatened on Facebook, including by a female friend of his ex’s and by strangers.

Harassment by these means, which tends to be unrelenting but is just as bad when sporadic, creates anxiety and insecurity in its victims, and may well undo them not only psychologically but professionally, financially, and in every other possible way. False allegations (which alone gnaw and corrode) may lead to criminal charges, which may lead to incarceration, from which ensues traumatization of children and possibly loss of employment (from which ensues further traumatization of children…). Same thing with restraining orders, which may easily be obtained in an afternoon by spiteful fraud and which don’t go away—and may also lead not only to loss of employment but loss of employability in a given field.

When a restraining order is issued, it’s entered into state law enforcement databases as well as the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database. The pretense is that restraining orders are civil misdemeanors of no particular significance. Repeat: National Crime Information Center.

Records of restraining orders are public, besides, and accessible by anyone, and may moreover be recorded in public registries for easy access. Allegations on those records, no matter how scandalous and even if found to be exaggerated or maliciously false, aren’t censored.

Our perceptions of the consequences of public allegations, as well as the justice system’s perceptions of them, are completely schizoid. They’re neither actually “no big deal” nor actually treated as though they’re “no big deal.” And they’re certainly not “no big deal” to those falsely accused and everyone who depends on them. False allegations may range from stalking to sexual harassment to battery or worse.

The actuality is that allegations made on restraining orders, which may be utterly malicious fabrications, are presumed to be legitimate by everyone. Just the phrase restraining order instantly establishes the credibility of an accuser who may be a bully or stalker.

Applicants for restraining orders, it’s again presumed, are afraid of the people they’ve accused and want nothing to do with them. Accordingly, there are no limitations placed on the conduct of petitioners and no repercussions to them for their harassing the people they’ve alleged they’re afraid of. Restraining orders license abusers—bullies, stalkers, and their confederates—to act with impunity. Even when abuses are reported, the tendency of cops and court staff is to shrug.

Restraining orders, because they establish credibility with judges and police officers (based on no standard of evidence and on mere minutes-long “trials” that never approach conclusiveness), make further claims that bullies or stalkers allege, whether proximally or later on (even years later on), entirely plausible. Conflict can be rekindled and stoked endlessly and whimsically.

Lives are derailed this way: sanity compromised, careers sabotaged or sundered, savings exhausted, and on and on. Trials may lead to further trials without end.

And all of this may originate with sick games whose motives are dismissed as “harmless”—or even “cute.”

Rethinking “Stalking”: When Sociopathic Stalkers Apply for Restraining Orders

April 7, 2014June 29, 2023Moderator 7 Comments

“Stalking acts are engaged in by a perpetrator for different reasons: to initiate a relationship (i.e., Some call it stalking; [he or] she calls it courtship); to persuade/coerce a former partner to reconcile; to punish, frighten, or control the victim; to feel a sense of personal power; to feel a ‘connection’ to the victim; or some combination of all of the above. Stalking is a form of abuse, and most abusers ultimately want control over their victims. Therefore, stalking is about controlling a love object, a hate object, or a love/hate object. Both love and hate can inspire obsession.

“Abusive personalities and stalkers often lack or have selective empathy for their victims. In fact, a characteristic of stalking is that the stalker objectifies [his or] her victim. If you don’t see your victim as another human being with feelings, needs, and rights, it becomes very easy to perpetrate any number of cruel, crazy, malicious, spiteful, and sick behaviors upon him or her. What about stalkers who believe they’re in love with their victims? Again, this is about possession and control; not love. They want to possess and control you regardless of what you want.”

—Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, Psy.D.

Laws tend to define stalking as the exhibition of unwanted behaviors that alarm people.

What a broader yet nuanced definition of stalking like Dr. Palmatier’s reveals is that what makes someone a stalker isn’t how his or her target perceives him or her; it’s how s/he perceives his or her target: as an object (what stalking literally means is the stealthy pursuit of prey—that is, food).

Who perceives others as objects? The sociopath. Mention sociopath and restraining order in the same context, and the assumption will be that the victim of a coldblooded abuser will have sought the court’s protection from him or her.

The opposite, however, may as easily be the case.

Appreciate that stalking is about coercion, punishment, domination, and control of a target who’s viewed as an object, and it’s easy to see why the stalker in a relationship might be the petitioner of a restraining order, an instrument of coercion, punishment, domination, and control.

(“[T]o feel a sense of personal power,” furthermore, is a recognized reward motive for the commission of fraud. Pulling one over on other people, particularly those in authority, feels gooood.)

Appreciate, also, that a stalker’s motives for “courtship” (i.e., what s/he stands to gain from a relationship) may not be recognized by his or her target as abnormal at all. Nor, of course, will they be understood as abnormal by the stalker. What this means is, stalking isn’t always recognized as stalking (predator behavior), and correspondingly isn’t always repelled.

The Psychology of Stalking: Clinical and Forensic Perspectives notes that the majority of stalkers manifest Cluster B personality disorders, which I’ve talked about in the previous two posts, citing various authorities. People like this—borderlines, antisocials, narcissists, and histrionics—often pass as normal (“neurotypical”). They’re around us all the time…and invisible. Dr. Palmatier, a psychologist from whose writings the epigraph is drawn, has posited that Cluster B personality disorders “form a continuum” and “stem from sociopathy,” a trait of which is viewing others as objects, not subjects. Not only may others be unconscious of personality-disordered people’s motives; such people may be unconscious of their motives themselves.

(Out of respect for the author of the epigraph, I should note that my application of the word stalker in the context of this post departs from hers. The position of this post is that the person who pursues an objectified target and then displaces blame for aberrant behavior onto that target to “punish, frighten, or control” him or her is no less a stalker than the person who relentlessly seeks to possess his or her target. The topic of Dr. Palmatier’s exposition is attachment pathology of the latter sort.)

Contrary to the popular conception that stalkers are wallflower weirdos who obsessively trail dream lovers from a distance with the aid of telescopic lenses, stalkers may be socially aggressive and alluring—or at least sympathetic—and may exhibit no saliently weird qualities whatever.

Returning to Dr. Palmatier’s definition of stalking, what makes someone a stalker isn’t how s/he acts, per se, it’s why she acts the way s/he does. What makes an act an act of stalking is the motive of that act (the impulse behind it), which isn’t necessarily evident to a stalker’s quarry.

Placed in proper perspective, then, not all acts of stalkers are rejected or alarming, because their targets don’t perceive their motives as deviant or predatory. The overtures of stalkers, interpreted as normal courtship behaviors, may be invited or even welcomed by the unsuspecting.

The author of the blog Dating a Sociopath astutely limns the course of a relationship with a stalker (someone who views the other as a means, not an end with “feelings, needs, and rights”).

The sociopath wears a mask. But [s/he] will only wear that mask for as long as it is getting him [or her] what [s/he] wants. The sociopath is not emotionally connected, to you or anybody else. Whilst the sociopath might show connection, this would only be a disguise, to serve his [or her] own needs.

When the sociopath realises that [s/he] can have better supply elsewhere, or if [s/he] feels that supply with you is coming to an end, [s/he] will leave you without warning. The sociopath would have sourced a new victim for supply, but this would have been done behind your back and without your knowledge.

To do so, it is likely that the sociopath needed to play victim to the new source. Often [s/he] would have made complaints about you to gain sympathy and win support. Again, this will be something that you have absolutely no knowledge of, until later.

Consider her conclusion that a sociopath may “play victim” to acquire new narcissistic supply, and you’ll perceive how perfectly lies to the police and/or the courts (donning a new mask) may assist him or her in realizing his or her pathological wishes.

The blog post from which this quoted material is drawn concerns being abruptly discarded by a sociopath, which the writer notes may leave the sociopath’s quarry feeling:

Confused
Bewildered
Lost
Desperate for answers
A longing and neediness to understand
Wanting back the honeymoon stage
Unsure if the relationship is actually over or not?
Self-blame
Manipulated, conned, and deceived

Expressions of these feelings, whose motives are not those of stalkers but of normal people prompted by a need to understand the inexplicable, may take the form of telephone calls, emails, or attempts at direct confrontation—all of which lend themselves exquisitely to misrepresentation by stalkers as the behaviors of stalkers.

The personality-disordered answer primal urges, and among those urges is the will to blame others when their bizarre expectations aren’t satisfied—and they inevitably aren’t—or when others express natural expectations of their own that defy disordered personalities’ fantasized versions of how things are supposed to go.

The author of this blog, a formerly private man who had a restraining order petitioned against him characterizing him as a stalker (and who has been back to court three times since to respond to the same allegation, the least of several), has been monitored for eight years by a stranger he naïvely responded to whom he found standing outside of his house one day as he went to climb into his car.

I was a practicing writer for kids.

The first correspondent I had when I began this blog three years ago was a woman who’d been pursued and discarded by a pathological narcissist, who subsequently obtained a restraining order against her (by fraud), representing her as a stalker (cf. Dr. Palmatier’s “Presto, Change-o, DARVO: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender”).

She taught music to kids.

Last fall, I exchanged numerous emails with a woman who’d fallen for a man with borderline personality disorder, who abused her, including violently, then did the same thing after she sought a restraining order against him, which was denied.

She was a nurse who had three kids.

You’ll note that those labeled “stalkers” by the state in these cases—and they’re hardly exceptions—confound the popular stalker profile that’s promoted by restraining order advocates.

An irony of this already twisted business is that injuries done to people by their being misrepresented to the authorities and the courts by disordered personalities as stalkers ignite in them the need to clear their names, on which their livelihoods may depend (never mind their sanity); and their determination, which for obvious reasons may be obsessive, seemingly corroborates stalkers’ false allegations of stalking.

This in turn further feeds into the imperative of personality-disordered stalkers to divert blame from themselves and exert it on their targets. People like this fatten on drama and conflict, and legal abuses gratify their appetites like no other source, both because the residue of legal abuses never evaporates and because those abuses can be refreshed or repeated, setting off further chain reactions ad infinitum.

The agents of processes that were conceived to arrest social parasitism and check the conduct of stalkers are no less susceptible to believing the false faces and frauds of predatory people than their victims are.

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

April 3, 2014June 17, 2023Moderator 16 Comments

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

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

—William (Bill) Eddy (1999)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TALKING BACK to restraining orders

THEY’RE NOT JUST ABUSED BUT ABUSIVE

Tag restraining order fraud