Disregarded Reality Checks to VAWA: Highlighting the Efforts of Family Law Attorney Lisa Scott

“Congressional sources have revealed some significant changes will be made to federal domestic violence laws. Bowing to pressure from men’s rights groups who for years have claimed that the Federal Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is biased against men, congressional leaders will soon announce a revamping of this legislation.

“In recognition of the fact that there may be a few men out there who get beaten up by their wives but are too ashamed to admit it, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) will be renamed the Violence Against Women and Wimps and Wussies Act (VAWAWAWA).”

—“VAWAWAWA: Federal Law Finally Catches Up with Reality

That’s Lisa Scott, a Bellevue, Washington, family attorney who knows a whole lot more than almost anyone about the reality of domestic conflict, satirically poking defenders of the Violence Against Women Act (as biased an act of legislation as has ever been conceived) squarely in the eye.

The Violence Against Women Act, or VAWA, which demonizes men, takes as granted that they’re always the villains and could never be victims themselves.

Ms. Scott is one of those rare, intrepid women of parts and integrity—see also Cathy Young, Christina Hoff Sommers, Wendy McElroy, and Phyllis Schlafly, among a few select others—who made a determined effort to temper the iniquity of “women’s law” in the years before the most recent decade or so, during which light has been smothered by heat and noise (or what might be called “Tweat”).

Victims of VAWA, who were powerless to begin with against a billion-dollar federal juggernaut flanked by thousands of media-savvy minions, have today been marginalized by the #MeToo movement to the point of invisibility.

This post, which is meant as an homage to writing Ms. Scott did between 2001 and 2011, endeavors only to highlight her perspectives, if not simply because they’re right then for those who will appreciate them.

They are no less current today than when they were first published.

Copyright © 2020 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*For more on male suicide: “First Amendment Rights from Beyond the Grave: Defense of a Suicide’s Publication of His Final Words by the Randazza Legal Group”; “False Accusations and Suicide: Some Headlines about the Effects of Finger-Pointing and Legal Abuse (Culled for the Empathically Challenged)”; Wendy McElroy (Fox News, 2002); Prof. Augustine J. Kposowa, Ph.D. (Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, 2000); Dan Bilsker, Ph.D., and Jennifer White, Ed.D. (BC Medical Journal, 2011); Christie Blatchford (National Post, 2017); Suzette Reynoso (Eyewitness News, 2017); Lindsay Holmes and Anna Almendrala (Huffington Post, 2016).

Resistance Is Feudal: Understanding the Role of the Court, Especially in Civil “Abuse” Prosecutions

The role of the court, despite popular notions and its own rhetoric, is not to mete out justice. The role of the court is to keep power where it’s “supposed to be.”

Does that mean the court privileges plaintiffs over defendants, the rich over the poor, and the titled over the commoner? Generally, yes. Little has changed in 1,000 years. Even the word court is evocative of the Middle Ages, and it’s hardly unusual for court administrators to behave like overlords.

Skilled attorney representation can upset the age-old paradigm, but typically it’s the haves and not the have-nots who can afford it, so not really.

In the restraining order arena, or in any civil procedure arising from allegations of abuse (domestic violence, child welfare, etc.), the influence of money and power in favor of plaintiffs is preexistent. Billions of federal tax dollars have been lavished on law enforcement and the courts since the 1990s to sway their judgment, or even to prescribe how they should react. Complainants of abuse today don’t need money to tilt the scales, because it has been prepaid. Plaintiffs just need stories. Female plaintiffs alleging abuse, what’s more, may be entitled to free attorney representation in accordance with the same special interest legislation that authorized the federal subsidies (see Violence Against Women Act).

This is what leads many victims of procedural abuse to conclude, “It’s a conspiracy.” They expect the court’s definition of justice to be the same as the dictionary’s.

Copyright © 2018 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*The author of this post has been in nonstop litigation for over two years, litigation stemming from accusations made 12 years ago. Judicial response in 2006 was incompetent (the judge, a pro tem, or temp, violated statutory law), and an order arising from the 2006 judgment, in 2013, was even more plainly unlawful. The Arizona Court of Appeals last year affirmed the 2013 judgment, because the writer hadn’t been able to afford to promptly appeal it. The 2017 court upheld “finality of judgment,” ignoring that the 2013 judgment offended both the state and federal constitutions. The 2017 court privileged economy and maintenance of face, in other words, over justice. The writer’s case now returns to the trial court for further litigation, which has provoked the court’s consternation, again despite the facial illegality of the 2013 order. In 2016, the attorney for the plaintiffs cited their monetary investment in the case as a reason the court should enforce the unlawful order and send the victim of that order to jail. The court can not only justify its own malfeasance but punish its victim for it. To quote a California paralegal, There is no justice system; there’s just a system. The writer is expected in court on Wednesday and again in July based on allegations made in 2016 that were based on allegations made in 2013 that were based on allegations made in 2006…that were false.

About Liberalism and Its Deterioration of Civil Rights…and Its Own Credibility

Liberals are curiously less than rapturous about a political victory only they could have accomplished: the election of Donald Trump, a living caricature straight from the pages of a satirical novel, to the country’s highest office. Liberals do count as a victory, and have for a long time, laws that authorize the wholesale removal of citizens from their homes by armed agents of the state based on what may amount to nothing more substantive than finger-pointing.

In this writer’s opinion, they’re the same victory.

Since the advent of the restraining order in the 1970s, and particularly since the enactment of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994—under the auspices of which billions of federal tax dollars have been poured into state courts and police precincts to condition how judges and law enforcement officials respond to complaints of abuse—the priority in the U.S. has been to curtail evidentiary requirements and due process rights to expediently meet political expectations, expectations inspired by liberal feminist politicking.

With typical dramatic irony, liberals today vehemently denounce immigration policies that divide family members who have entered the country illegally, that is, in plain violation of the law. Meanwhile the separation of accused citizens from their families, citizens who have not, in a majority of cases, been proven to have violated any laws, continues to quietly transpire, as it has for decades. Attorney Liz Mandarano posits that “[t]here are between 2 and 3 million temporary restraining orders issued in the United States annually,” and attorney Gregory Hession, a vocal critic of protective order laws, observes that “500,000 children are right now in the custody of the state” (“an astounding number”).

Liberals consider conservatives “dumb” yet fail to perceive that alienation of such a broad swathe of the populace could inspire contempt for their values if not a raw animal loathing for everything they represent. Liberals adduce (and Twitter-reinforce) preposterous and hackneyed theories to explain disenchantment with their positions like resistance to progress and a longing to return to the days of “patriarchy.”

The author of this post has recently examined criticisms by NYU Journalism Prof. Katie Roiphe of #MeToo feminists’ disregard for due process (for which she has been excoriated almost everywhere but in the National Review, which called her criticisms courageously commonsensical). Prof. Roiphe has similarly qualmed about the extrajudicial “rape trials” of male college students. Even she, however, seems to assume that if the merits of “abuse” complaints are decided in a courtroom, then defendants have been afforded due process of law.

The assumption is understandable but ignorant of the legal standards and the practical ones that have come to inform how civil claims of abuse are adjudicated, claims that affect the lives of millions of American citizens every year.

It’s a truism of language that the meanings of words follow usage. Applied poorly, language degrades. Rights are no different, which is something our “educated” class should already know.

On a scale our government disdains to even calculate, citizens are denied both rights and dignity, besides in many cases family, property, and liberty, in the absence of determinate evidence, which is not, in any case, heard by a jury. Liberals, who often “identify” as humanist, say they simply deplore insensitivity.

The only thing more hateful to voters than a hypocrite is a party of hypocrites who support arbitrary attacks on citizens in their own homes.

Copyright © 2018 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

A Brief Introduction to Feminist Rape Culture

“For those who don’t know, rape culture is an environment in which rape is highly prevalent, normalized and excused by the society’s media, popular culture, and political figures.”

—Ashley Jordan, The Humanist



Copyright © 2018 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*Omitted from this collage, its author realizes belatedly, is the acronym VAWA, which stands for a vector of evil. A chronicle of what this collage summarizes is here.

“Vicious Energy and Ugliness”: Candid Observations about the Feminist Movement by Prof. Katie Roiphe

“[V]icious energy and ugliness is there beneath the fervor of our new reckoning, adeptly disguised as exhilarating social change. It feels as if the feminist moment is, at times, providing cover for vindictiveness and personal vendettas and office politics and garden-variety disappointment, that what we think of as purely positive social change is also, for some, blood sport.”

—NYU Prof. Katie Roiphe

A preliminary, superfluous observation: Prof. Roiphe is right. The only valid criticism of her perspectives is that what she perceives as new and alarming isn’t new but only newly visible because of social media.

A recent post considered some measured criticisms of an essay of hers, “The Other Whisper Network: How Twitter feminism is bad for women,” which was published a couple of months ago in Harper’s. Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine quibbled, “Katie Roiphe Is Right About Twitter Feminism and Wrong About #MeToo.”

Underscoring the absurdity of the “dialogue,” a week before Mr. Chait said Prof. Roiphe was right about Twitter feminism, Sarah Jones of The New Republic, where Mr. Chait worked for 16 years, pronounced: “There’s no such thing as Twitter Feminism.”

Other responses, instancing dramatic irony that reinforces Prof. Roiphe’s points about mainstream feminism’s knee-jerk intolerance and conformity policing:

The reactions themselves are protracted tweets and creepily insular and incestuous. There’s no evidence their authors read anything but one another and those they consider influential blasphemers, like Prof. Roiphe, who is probably considered a gender-betrayer. The repeated reference to Prof. Roiphe’s essay as “anticipated” suggests a throng of rabid feminist meat merchants impatiently whetting their knives—in lockstep accord with Prof. Roiphe’s criticism of their leap to prejudge and their “vicious energy.”

To any sane reader, Prof. Roiphe’s essay isn’t even edgy. Consider a point like this, for instance:

[C]onnecting condescending men and rapists as part of the same wellspring of male contempt for women…renders the idea of proportion irrelevant.

Or:

The need to differentiate between smaller offenses and assault is not interesting to a certain breed of Twitter feminist; it makes them impatient, suspicious. The deeper attitude toward due process is: don’t bother me with trifles!

The scandal is that statement of the obvious is felt to be a daring act of defiance. Prof. Roiphe quotes members of a “new whisper network” who “fear varieties of retribution (Twitter rage, damage to their reputations, professional repercussions, and vitriol from friends) for speaking out” about “the weird energy behind [the #MeToo] movement.” Prof. Roiphe says:

Before the piece was even finished, let alone published, people were calling me “pro-rape,” “human scum,” a “harridan,” a “monster out of Stephen King’s ‘IT,’?” a “ghoul,” a “bitch,” and a “garbage person”—all because of a rumor that I was planning to name the creator of the so-called Shitty Media Men list.

Her piece centers around a list of professional media men alleged to be miscreants, a list that one of her “whisperers” describes as “Maoist.” The celebrity bellwethers of the #MeToo movement, who were collectively named Person of the Year by Time Magazine, were extolled as “silence breakers.” For doing the same thing unpopularly, Prof. Roiphe is derogated “scum.”

Noteworthy is the perception by a journalism professor that this sort of feminist list-making is novel when it has been the feminist m.o. for years, maybe decades. The push under the Violence Against Women Act, or VAWA (advent 1994), has been to have anyone who is accused, in civil court no less, entered into permanent public registries, even in cases if the allegations were later dismissed. (This is actually a contractually stipulated demand made of states in return for massive federal grants.) Lawmakers who have opposed renewal of VAWA have been publicly “outed” the same way.

Jonathan Chait, mentioned in the introduction to this post, besides in an earlier one, calls Prof. Roiphe’s essay “alternatingly brilliant and incoherent.” The essay is ranging, but there’s nothing incoherent about it.

Its sole fault is its assumption that only still waters run deep. Neither feminists’ “great, unmanageable anger” nor its unseen impacts are new.

Copyright © 2018 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*Toward the end of her essay, in a description of a conversation with a friend, Prof. Roiphe relates a reaction she had that exactly mirrors how civil court allegations of abuse are received by judges and adjudicated: “[A]s she was talking, I was completely drawn in. I found myself wanting to say something to please her. The outrage grew and expanded and exhilarated us. It was as though we weren’t talking about [an alleged abuser] anymore, we were talking about all the things we have ever been angry about…. I felt as though I were joining a club, felt a warming sense of social justice, felt that this was a weighty, important thing we were engaging in.” This response, which Prof. Roiphe says caused her to feel remorseful afterwards, is the same one that has been drilled into judges for decades thanks to feminist politicking. Why it requires a blogger to make such a connection is baffling.

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judge Richard Gordon, Pima County Superior Court

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eugene Volokh, free speech, First Amendment

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tiffany Bredfeldt, romancing the camera in 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The writer will let the facts speak for themselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judge Jack Peyton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judge Wendy Million, Tucson City Court

Judge Wendy Million

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

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

Tucson attorney Chris Scileppi, attorney Christopher Scileppi

Attorney Christopher Scileppi

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2018 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

DR. MICHAEL HONEYCUTT, PH.D.:

DR. TIFFANY BREDFELDT, PH.D.:

What Does It Mean When a Defendant Is Enjoined by the Court from Making “Indirect Contact” with the Plaintiff?

“If the writing does not request or direct a third party to contact you vicariously, and or request a third party to forward any communication to you, there is no indirect contact. Essentially, the restrained party is not prevented from communicating about you, but rather communicating with you… [emphases added].”

—California attorney Timothy Miranda

Mr. Miranda, who identifies himself as a domestic violence lawyer, puts it succinctly and correctly.

Indirect contact” is often prohibited on civil injunctions, and this prohibition is typically expressed this way: “no third-party contact.” This doesn’t mean the “restrained party” on a restraining order is prohibited from talking about the plaintiff with anyone (or the world at large); it means she can’t communicate with the plaintiff, either directly (e.g., by phone, email, text, or in person) or through another.

An example of violating a “no third-party contact” prohibition would be asking a mutual friend to convey a message from you to the “protected party” or so-called “victim.” (Worth parenthetical mention is that some courts may interpret attorney-mediated contact to be a violation, so grave care should be exercised even in that instance. A respondent to this blog reported he was jailed for merely asking his attorney to communicate a message. The attorney didn’t fulfill the request. The man was incarcerated, anyway, for his intent to indirectly contact the plaintiff, his ex-wife.)

Washington attorney Derek Michael Smith elucidates the distinction between lawful speech to a third party and unlawful “indirect contact” with a plaintiff on a restraining order.

That’s the clean-and-tidy stuff. Motives for restraining orders are often other than they appear, however. Often, preventing a defendant from talking about him or her is a plaintiff’s (ulterior) motive for petitioning a restraining order from the court, and it’s all too easy for a plaintiff to persuade a trial judge that speech about him or her to others is “harassment.”

Moreover, it’s not uncommon for plaintiffs to want a defendant jailed on any pretext. Spite and malice are not atypically (among) the reasons plaintiffs seek court injunctions in the first place.

Speech about someone that isn’t false or threatening is protected by the First Amendment, even if that person has a restraining order against you. S/he may object to that speech, but if it isn’t directed to him or her, no legal grounds exist for calling it harassment. Coercive, objectionable, and even emotionally upsetting speech about someone is protected. Opinions about and truthful criticism of others that don’t threaten and aren’t directed to them is not “harassment.” Such criticism may defame—saying someone “stinks” is hardly likely to burnish his or her reputation much—but legal liability for defamation requires that a statement be untrue, not merely unwanted, unpleasant, or unseemly.

That said, I’ve been prosecuted three times this year based exclusively on my writing about the plaintiffs (and all three actions were coordinated by the same people). Two of the procedures exposed me to immediate jail time (16 months total), and none of them was summarily dismissed for lacking meritorious grounds.

Writing about someone is easily represented today as “cyberstalking,” “harassment,” “threat,” etc. These words are nebulously defined and provoke knee-jerk reactions from prosecutors and trial judges. All a plaintiff need do is claim speech is “frightening” or “invasive.” No judge is likely to read and assess the speech, and police and judicial bias in favor of complainants who allege “fear” has been conditioned by billions of dollars over the past 20 years under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). Responses by agents of the justice system are all but automatic.

Too, it’s well-established that the law is two decades out of step with the times. To trial judges, the Internet is still newfangled and suspect.

As Judge Roger Titus clarified in U.S. v. Cassidy, the Internet is just an electronic “bulletin board” that someone may elect to look at or not. Publications on a blog, for instance, do not “contact” people, even if they’re indexed by Google. If someone you talk about on Facebook or Twitter chooses to read what you’ve said, that’s a decision s/he is responsible for not you. (An exception is “tagging” a comment in Facebook, which does cause the comment to appear in the tagged person’s Timeline. There’s a case of a New York woman’s being held in contempt of court for tagging her ex-boyfriend, who had a restraining order against her. She called him “sad” and “stupid,” so the guy tearfully ran to the courthouse and cried foul. Even such a case as this has been excepted. See, for example, David v. Textor, in which the Florida District Court of Appeals ruled that “where comments are made on an electronic medium to be read by others, they cannot be said to be directed to a particular person.” )

It’s the rare state trial judge who’s as enlightened as Judge Titus, though, and who knows to consider one-to-many speech on a website differently from one-to-one, interpersonal “contact.”

In my most recent superior court trial, for instance, it was alleged that I had “indirectly contacted” the plaintiffs by Google Alerts and by my use of keyword meta tags on this site. One of the plaintiffs requested that Google inform him of my posts. Google’s emails to him were represented as “contacts” from me. The claim is absurd, but there you go. Similarly, the keywords beneath posts here that catalog their topics were said to “contact” anyone whose name appeared among them. I wish I could say such arguments are met with derisive scoffs, but the judge in the case took notes. “Meta tags” were new to him—and sounded sinister enough.

This nonsense works. (A police detective told me in January that he believed I had “caused a contact” with one of the plaintiffs merely by using her name online or inspiring someone else to comment on her conduct.)

Probably a judge would not consider writing someone’s name on a bathroom stall a “contact,” but because the Internet is a public medium that anyone can access with a computer and a few key strokes, the distinction between speech and contact becomes muddled.

It’s further obscured by snivels and protestations of grievous violation by vindictive and attention-seeking plaintiffs, which trigger preconditioned judicial impulses.

Unless a defendant “gets in touch” with the plaintiff, it is NOT “contact.”

Copyright © 2016 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*See also the dictionary.

“PERMANENTLY PROHIBITED”: Camden County, New Jersey’s Idea of a Just Order of the Court

NOTE TO THE COURT: Facts in this post were gleaned by its author and do not originate from its subject, Bruce Aristeo, who had no influence on its composition. Commentary, likewise, is solely that of its writer.


Camden County, NJ, New Jersey, unlawful orders of the court, civil rights violations, constitutional rights violations, prior restraint, indefinite temporary restraining order

A recent post on this blog highlighted the case of Raines v. Aristeo, out of Camden County, New Jersey.

You can find the post on Google. You won’t, however, find an association between that post and the name of the plaintiff, Jody Raines, if you use that name as your search term (or the name of her business, WebMarCom). That’s because the judge returned a verdict on April 26, 2016, against defendant Bruce Aristeo requiring that any such association be severed.

I got a chance to look at the judge’s order this week. To call it an offense against free speech (and some other constitutional guarantees) would be like calling public defecation impolite.

Bear in mind that Mr. Aristeo was prosecuted for posting satirical videos ABOUT Ms. Raines on YouTube. That’s the basis for his being nominated a “criminal stalker”—also that he’d previously been issued something called an “indefinite temporary restraining order” (unique to Camden County, New Jersey). Mr. Aristeo’s videos purportedly violated this “indefinite temporary” whatchamacallit and were represented as “harassing” and therefore evidence of “stalking” and “domestic violence.” (Don’t strain to find logical connections. You’ll give yourself a nosebleed.)

This is actually how the order, issued by Judge Frederick J. Schuck, reads:

  1. The Defendant shall be PERMANENTLY PROHIBITED from entering the residence or place of employment of Jody Raines and shall be further prohibited from being present upon the grounds or property surrounding said locations whether in the State of New Jersey or another jurisdiction as specified below.
  2. The Defendant shall be PERMANENTLY PROHIBITED from any future acts of domestic violence against Jody Raines enumerated in J.S. 2C:25-19a and specifically from following, monitoring, surveilling, stalking, harassing and/or threatening Jody Raines.
  3. The Defendant shall be PERMANENTLY PROHIBITED from any and all personal contact with Jody Raines.
  4. The Defendant shall be PERMANENTLY PROHIBITED from any and all communication to or about Jody Raines and her business (see paragraph 8).
  5. The Defendant shall be PERMANENTLY PROHIBITED from causing any communication to or about Jody Raines and her business and any contact to be made with Jody Raines directly or indirectly, or through any third parties, mediums or agents.
  6. The Defendant shall be PERMANENTLY PROHIBITED from any and all communication or personal contact with any family members, friends, employers and co-workers of Jody Raines or other persons with whom communication would be likely to cause annoyance or alarm to Jody Raines.
  7. The Defendant shall be PERMANENTLY PROHIBITED from utilizing any internet and/or social media postings, directly or indirectly, or through any third parties, mediums, or agents regarding, referring to, or simulating, characterizing or alluding to Jody Raines, her family, her friends, her business, or her pets in any form, including but not limited to YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
  8. Prohibited contact or communication in Paragraphs 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 above shall include any form of communication made by any means, including but not limited to, any verbal or written communication, communications conveyed by any electronic communication device or medium, including but not limited to, a telephone, including a cordless, cellular or digital telephone, computer, or any other means of transmitting voice or data, including but not limited to text message, email, social media, social networking sites, internet or other communication via computer or electronic device, including but not limited to the posting or publication of images or audio recordings of Jody Raines, and communication made by sign or gesture and the physical presence of the Defendant in proximity to Jody Raines or at the specified prohibited locations.
  9. The Defendant shall further be PERMANENTLY PROHIBITED from communicating, sharing, disclosing, or disseminating to any third party, medium or agent any information referencing Jody Raines, her business, her family, or her pets via any method described [above].
  10. The Defendant shall cause to take down and remove from the Internet any and all publications or postings over which he has control that mention the name of Jody Raines or any business owned or operated by her, exhibit her image, or contain audio recordings of her voice.
  11. A violation of this Order shall be governed by J.S. 29-9a; however, nothing in this paragraph shall preclude the filing of additional criminal complaints based upon the act(s) constituting a violation of this Order.

Remember that Mr. Aristeo, a former schoolteacher, was found guilty of “stalking” (in contempt of a “temporary indefinite” restraining order) for publishing some one-to-many satirical videos.

(Ironic of that is how the judge’s order reads like satire: “including but not limited to, any verbal or written communication, communications conveyed by any electronic communication device or medium, including but not limited to, a telephone, including a cordless, cellular or digital telephone, computer, or any other means of transmitting voice or data, including but not limited to text message, email, social media, social networking sites, internet or other communication via computer or electronic device, including but not limited to….” How can you not hear that in the voice of John Cleese?)

Mr. Aristeo is now PERMANENTLY PROHIBITED from publicly referencing (“including but not limited to”) a goldfish Ms. Raines might own—and congratulations to county prosecutor Tracy Cogan for that snot blob on the Constitution.

Mr. Aristeo, whom Ms. Raines has had jailed before, was sentenced to 364 days behind bars (less 190 previously served). There’s more, too:

  • Four (4) years’ probation, subject to standard conditions.
  • Defendant shall undergo a psychological evaluation and treatment if necessary.
  • Defendant shall abide by all of the terms of the Permanent Restraining Order entered separately this date.
  • Defendant shall provide a DNA sample.
  • The Court separately shall enter a permanent stalking restraining order pursuant to N.J.S.A. 2C:12-10.01.
  • The State’s request for forfeiture of the Defendant’s Mac Pro Laptop Computer, and Apple Desktop Computer is denied. The State shall return to the Defendant any property seized from him immediately upon his release from incarceration, unless the State otherwise has initiated an appropriate civil action pursuant to N.J.S.A. 2C 64-3.

He was also fined: VCCA Assessment, $50; Law Enforcement Officers Training and Equipment Fund Penalty, $30; Safe Neighborhood Services Fund, $75; Probation Supervision Fee, $5; Domestic Violence Offender Surcharge, $100.

VAWA_order

Fittingly, the judge’s name, Schuck, is just one letter shy of an earthy Yiddish slang word that means dick.

Copyright © 2016 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*The arrests and prosecutions of Bruce Aristeo have cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars, for which they stand to be refunded $260 (if the judge corrects his math) by a man the state has left indigent (with a corrupted public record). If Mr. Aristeo now has grounds to sue the state for obscene abuses of power and false imprisonment, that may mean tens of thousands of dollars more drained from the public till, from which the costs of Mr. Aristeo’s housing, as well as the filing fees for his appeal, will also be drawn—all because he published some satirical material online representing his accuser as a toy monkey.

Jody Raines, Bruce Aristeo, WebMarCom

How Perjury in Restraining Order Cases Is “Incentivized”

SRU

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

—Massachusetts attorney Greg Hession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s how strongly we’ve been conditioned.

Copyright © 2016 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*Or blinded.

No One Is a VICTIM Just because S/he Says S/he Is: A Reminder for Reporters…and Other People Who Shouldn’t Need Reminding

I looked at a form I was handed a couple of weeks ago at a criminal arraignment I was ordered to attend. The form gives the impression I was supposed to sign it, which no one asked me to do. This would be disturbing if I were still capable of registering disturbance. I noticed with dim approval, though, that it said this:

alleged_victim

When accusations are made on “protective orders” or are of the type “protective orders” typically purport to concern (e.g., harassment, stalking, or domestic violence), journalists routinely call accusers “victims” automatically. They reason, apparently, that a person can’t be awarded a restraining order unless s/he has demonstrably been victimized. (More accurately, “reporters” don’t scruple overmuch about the facts or how the process works, because they know where their loyalties are supposed to lie.) Probably a majority of injunctions are awarded based on their petitioners’ say-so alone. To understand what that means, a “reporter” would have to investigate (instead of, say, quoting a pamphlet authored by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence).

Prosecutors? They seem to call all accusers “victims” on reflex. Their job, after all, is to “prevail” in court. If they think they can win, they try to; it’s not about justice. That’s rosy rhetoric for the rubes…like journalists.

Whether intentionally or not, both journalists and prosecutors get it wrong. Legislators do, too. The statutes they enact may explicitly call accusers “victims” (due process be damned).

The (criminal) court at least got this much right: Allegations aren’t facts, and until some semblance of due process has been staged, an accuser is an “alleged victim,” not a “victim.”

Judges don’t always get this right, either, however.

I couldn’t say with complete assurance whether lapses in objectivity, ethics, and procedural propriety like this have always existed or whether they’re testaments to systemic bigotry conditioned since the mid-’90s by the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA)—whose megabuck grant contracts stipulate that alleged victims should be treated as victims in every instance.

I feel pretty confident, though, in my suspicions of corruption.

The lines can’t help but have become blurry since the advent of the restraining order, which authorizes the court to draw conclusions prior to a trial, based on a few minutes of testimony and what may be no ascertainable facts at all.

If “verdicts” can be formed without proof and possibly without any adversarial contest in which controverting evidence could be adduced, that would seem to make the distinction between “victim” and “alleged victim” merely academic.

Restraining order judgments aren’t uncommonly “default” judgments, because defendants either don’t show up in court or can’t. An “emergency” injunction can require a defendant to appear in court mere days after service, possibly after having been booted to the curb (and left without resource or a vehicle), and even a non-emergency injunction may require a defendant to appear in court within a week. There’s no time to secure legal representation, even if the means are available and even if the respondent appreciates the significance of the paperwork that’s been thrust in his or her hand, and injunctions can be issued against defendants in other counties or states. (Some defendants, moreover, may not be first-timers, and they may simply conclude: “F— it. What’s the point?”)

(What defendants are told: “Here’s your restraining order. Don’t violate it, or we’ll arrest you.” What they’re not told: “You have six days to learn enough law to extricate yourself from allegations of which you’ve already been found guilty.” At the time they’re told anything, chances are they won’t know what the word defendant means.)

When procedure is engineered to find anyone who has alleged victimhood to be a “victim,” maybe calling every accuser a victim to begin with is just economical. Maybe it’s also the closest thing to honest a person can expect from a manifestly crooked business.

Copyright © 2016 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*And make no mistake: It is a business.

“No Stigma Zone”: A Case for VAWA Grants’ Being Issued to Provide All Government Offices with Dictionaries so Their Employees Can Look Up Words like “Stigma”

stigma poster

I had occasion to visit the city prosecutor’s office on Friday. The decor was sternly clinical. The only ornamentation was some small posters on a bulletin board under glass (which was probably there to protect them from cynics armed with Sharpies). One of the posters notably featured the phrase “No Stigma Zone.”

The poster was about bullying, and its message was bullying is bad and won’t be tolerated. If I didn’t have better reasons to distrust bureaucrats, I’d distrust them for being immune to irony.

To municipal lawyers, “bullying” means playground taunts and insults, like “fatso, “slut,” and “queer.” The state’s applying cruel labels to people like “stalker” and “molester” based on three minutes of finger-pointing (and permanently inscribing those labels on people’s public records)—that isn’t the same thing.

Accusations are typed up on government forms, and that makes them different from name-calling.

Duh.

I bumped into a teenage girl yesterday whom I used to swing around by the arms in another life. That was about the time I was first falsely accused—10 years ago—and she was still a twerp. (I was more carefree then. My body wasn’t run-down, and tomorrow still held infinite promise.) She told me another girl had called her a “whore” on an Internet medium called Snapchat. She explained that posts there only linger for a few seconds, so kids can snipe one another without leaving a trail of evidence.

This is what the state means by “bullying”—a zinger with a half-life of moments—and count on it that some lawmaker somewhere has designs to stop this conduct in its tracks(!)…by enacting more laws to facilitate accusation.

This is what my old journalism teacher would have called missing the forest for the trees.

Copyright © 2016 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*The girl I chanced into yesterday asked me why she always finds me at Starbucks hunched over my beater laptop. I spared her (and myself) a truthful answer but did have to tell her my dog, whom she grew up with, had died in August (while I was still hunched over my beater laptop composing commentaries like this one instead of swinging children around by the arms or playing with dogs).

Restraining Orders Make Casual Interpretation of Superficial Facts Easy, Privative, and Enduringly Crippling

Most restraining orders are issued ex parte, that is, based exclusively on the testimony of the accuser. Making hyped, skewed, or false allegations against someone who’s not there to contradict them, and making those allegations persuasive, isn’t hard. Hearings to finalize orders based on ex parte rulings, furthermore, may begin and end in 10 minutes.

At no stage of the process do allegations meet with eagle-eyed scrutiny.

This shouldn’t be news to anyone, nor should it be news that the effects of picknose adjudications are far-reaching. Based on them, citizens are publicly humiliated and may be deprived of access to their children and property besides denied jobs. Proximal effects of these consequences are stress, emotional turmoil, depression, and disease. (Restraining orders are also a foot in the door from which vexatious litigants can persecute the accused relentlessly, aggravating these effects manifold.)

The accused expect these results to be obvious to judges, and they expect consciousness of them to influence judges’ decisions. They expect judges to care about the truth and to care equally about the lives of those who stand before them. Judges, however, aren’t boy scouts, philosophers, or social workers. They’re just people performing a job. They clock their eight and hit the gate like sanitation workers do—and they may not perceive their job very differently.

There is a difference, though. How judges are to perform their job is prescribed by the law. The indifference of the law is the problem.

Laws concerning restraining orders were hastily slapped together decades ago, and their evolution has been informed by very narrow priorities (mostly prescribed by feminist advocates and VAWA). None of these priorities considers the rights or welfare of the accused. Restraining order law is “women’s law,” and the only historical imperative has been to process, prohibit, punish, and permanently brand purported abusers in the name of protecting those who are “politically disadvantaged.”

As recent posts have stressed, restraining orders are public records that staunchly resist revision or expungement. While convicted felons may be able to have their criminal records erased, citizens accused on restraining order petitions, even ones that have been dismissed (“thrown out”), must wear their labels forever.

To be accused is to stay accused.

This injustice won a fresh objector recently whose story is telling. I won’t identify him, because he intends to tell the story himself sometime soon, and he hopes to report a happy conclusion. This man made headlines last year when he successfully appealed a restraining order against him in his state’s supreme court. The order was vacated, and that should have been an end on it.

Not long ago, he says, he and his girlfriend were detained by a customs and border official when they attempted to reenter the country after going on a cruise. The dismissed restraining order raised some kind of red flag (in the mind of the official, anyhow). The man wasn’t seriously inconvenienced, and as an American citizen, he faced no risk of being barred from the country.

What was forcibly brought to his attention, though, is that a very dead order of the court still hounded him months after it should have been laid to rest.

The man is an entrepreneur who works for himself, but he’s now cognizant of the potential harm a record like this could have on anyone who’s employed in the public or private sector who’s subject to a thorough background check. The record that got him detained didn’t say “vacated” or “void” or any such thing. It showed, in fact, as current.

That’s because tidy-up isn’t mandated by law; only this is: “Process, prohibit, punish, and permanently brand purported abusers.” Nobody in the system cares what happens afterwards, because no one in the system has to. It’s on to the next “abuser.”

This highlights a broader fact about restraining orders. They’re prejudicial, and because they’re pumped into statewide and national databases, they’re subject to free interpretation by anyone in the system—or anyone with access to the public record…which is anyone.

Summary:

  1. A judge interprets some superficial claims made by a complainant and enters a “preliminary” (ex parte) order. This is then permanently entered into the public record, including into state and federal registries.
  2. The order may be finalized, or it may be “tossed.” Either way, the initial judge’s (five-minute) impression is preserved.
  3. Any other cog in the system, whether a clerk of the court, police officer, or other public official, can see this record and freely interpret its significance.
  4. Any private party, what’s more (e.g., an employer, a loan officer, a landlord, a student, a client, a girl- or boyfriend, a child’s school administrator, etc.), is also invited to freely interpret the significance of an order that may bear a title as fatal to the accused’s popularity and prospects as “emergency protective order for stalking and sexual assault.” (Even if such an order is tossed after the defendant is afforded the chance to defend him- or herself—or because the plaintiff voluntarily had the order dismissed—the permanent record still says, “emergency protective order for stalking and sexual assault,” and it says it right next to the defendant’s name.)

What might be called cruel and unusual punishment isn’t acknowledged by our government as unjust or even unfair.

Copyright © 2016 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*When the writer of this post was first accused in 2006, he inquired with two clerks at the Pima County Superior Courthouse about where to file a brief to a judge. The male of the pair, upon hearing what the matter was about, fixed him with a knowing look and gratuitously remarked, “She wants you to stay away from her, right?” My accuser, a married woman who deceived multiple judges, was someone I had only ever encountered outside of my own house (where she nightly hung around in the dark). Pococurante orders of the court license any arrogant twit to form whatever conclusion s/he wants…and to pronounce that conclusion with righteous contempt.

An Aggressive Approach to Restraining Order Policy Reform: Threaten to Sue the State Courts Administrator in Federal Court

Restraining orders are public records, and recent posts have concerned or commented on their publicity and the unavailability of having their traces expunged even if orders are dismissed by their petitioners or otherwise vacated. This post highlights the pioneering efforts of one Missouri civil rights lawyer to upset the imbalance by threatening to file a federal lawsuit.


“Unless expunged, criminal case records remain online, even if prosecutors drop the charges. Civil lawsuits [which include restraining orders] stay on Case.net even if a judge dismisses the claims, [Kansas City media attorney Jean Maneke] noted.

“‘Openness is generally a better way to clean up concerns about inaccuracy than attempting to put everything back in a box,’ Maneke said.”

—“Pending Protection Orders Yanked from Public View

Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. “Bullshit” is this writer’s opinion of the one quoted above. If you’ve been wrongly implicated in an abuse of process (or several), you probably disagree with views like Ms. Maneke’s, too, and believe that lies should never have been taken out of the box in the first place let alone engraved in databases and preserved indefinitely for public scrutiny.

Here are among what views like Ms. Maneke’s ignore:

  1. Restraining orders aren’t criminal cases, so they can never be expunged. Even if a judge dismisses (“tosses”) the allegations, only Tennessee has legislation that affords a wronged defendant the opportunity to have the case against him or her erased from the public record. Many orders, moreover, are finalized despite being grounded on fraud.
  2. Restraining orders aren’t criminal cases, but they’re not strictly civil cases, either. Acts imputed to defendants are often, if not typically, criminal (e.g., harassment, sexual harassment, stalking, terroristic threats, assault, battery, child abuse, sexual violence, or domestic violence).
  3. Unlike in other kinds of civil cases, a restraining order judgment may be wordless and formed in mere minutes, and the defendant may never be heard from at all. (An order can be obtained in a county or state other than the one a defendant resides in, so s/he may have no practicable opportunity to defend.) Also, an order may be awarded even though some of what may be many allegations are never considered by the court or are determined to be baseless. An approved order is an approved order. There aren’t necessarily any qualifications from the court on the recorded instrument to indicate which claims it regarded to be real and urgent, which suspect, or which baseless. To a third-party reader of the order, then, the accusations that appear on it are taken at face value.
  4. The mere title of an order may be prejudicial all by itself, regardless of the facts litigated in court.

The story the epigraph was excerpted from begins like this:

The client couldn’t stand it.

He typed his name into Case.net and up popped an ugly classification: “Protection Order: Adult Abuse Stalking.”

Who needs any more than those five words to form a conclusion about the person they were applied to? The case was dropped by the woman who made the accusation, but those five words nevertheless remained on the Internet.

The man was naturally concerned about the affect those words could have on his business and asked his lawyer to intervene.

[Bevis] Schock, a St. Louis attorney, [drafted] a federal equal protection lawsuit against the Office of State Courts Administrator. He never filed it, because four months later a Missouri Supreme Court committee decided privacy concerns trumped the public nature of this type of electronic court records.

Now pending orders of protection don’t appear on Case.net until judges grant full orders of protection.

The policy shift isn’t unopposed, but today “if the judge denies a petition or the filing party drops her request, it won’t ever appear online [and the] rule change is retroactive; OSCA scrubbed any previous ex parte orders from Case.net, including those involving Schock’s client.”

Schock said he spent 40 to 50 unpaid hours drafting an 18-page federal lawsuit against Greg Linhares, state courts administrator. Among other arguments, the lawsuit claimed the prior public records rule treats respondents differently than petitioners, because respondents are named online but petitioners are not.

The federal 2005 Violence Against Women Act prohibits states from publishing online any identifying information about people seeking protection.

Remarkable is that it takes the threat of a federal lawsuit to alert the courts to an obvious inequity. (Note, too, that finalized orders remain online, even though they may have been based on false allegations, and that even dismissed orders are preserved and can be accessed at the courthouse.)

The story is recommended reading. It notes in passing several facts about the process that are rarely observed, for example, that plaintiffs may file “seven or eight orders of protection” only to have them dismissed.

Under Missouri’s former policy, all of these dismissed petitions would have been visible online.

Unsurprisingly, a staff attorney with the Domestic Violence Unit at Legal Services of Southern Missouri is quoted as expressing the conviction that a “history” like this is indicative of true victimhood.

It can also be indicative of persecution by a venal and vindictive ex, vexatious neighbor, or fixated nutcase.

Copyright © 2016 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

How Restraining Order Fraud is Motivated and Concealed by VAWA and Its Advocates

The previous post, which highlights how fraudulent abuse of process is promoted and disguised, contains a link to a PDF prepared by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) called “Comparison of VAWA 1994, VAWA 2000 and VAWA 2005 Reauthorization Bill.”

The acronym VAWA stands for the federal Violence Against Women Act, which was ratified over 20 years ago (and has been repeatedly renewed). State police and judicial bias toward allegations of abuse has accordingly been conditioned with billions of dollars over decades and is today well-cemented.

Even a non-cynical critic would call the “justice system” owned.

Parsing the entirety of the NCADV’s PDF would be overkill. This post will examine a few quotations that illustrate how police, judicial, and prosecutorial conduct have been bought with inducements that are called “grants.

Grants from the Office on Violence Against Women for “Court Training and Improvements” (i.e., “training” or “educating” judges and court staff) have been discontinued under current legislation, possibly because it occurred to someone that “instructing” the court how it should rule sounds very like coercing verdicts. Procedural bias, however, has already been firmly rooted, and money to influence court process has merely been relabeled Grants to Support Families in the Justice System.

High school civics teachers tell us our government was set up so that its administrative, legislative, and judicial branches act independently to ensure that “checks and balances” prevent any one branch from acting tyrannically, and that state governments enjoy autonomy from the central government. What the quotations below show is how checks and balances can be worked around with cash.

 (VAWA 2000): “Amends Pro-arrest grants to expressly include enforcement of protection orders, and is designed to help state and tribal courts improve interstate enforcement of protection orders.”

This quotation means that money from the federal government is issued to state police departments to urge them to arrest people, including anyone who has purportedly violated a restraining order. If the petitioner of a restraining order reports a violation (real or not)—including a violation s/he has “arranged” (“Susie, I’ve reconsidered. Please come over so we can talk about this!”)—officers have been “incentivized” to haul the defendant in (according to their “judgment,” which has been influenced and can hardly be called fair and objective).

 (VAWA 2000): “Clarifies that as a condition of funding, recipients of STOP and Pro-Arrest grants must ensure filing and service of protection orders at no extra cost to the victim.”

This quotation “clarifies” that unless states allow restraining order petitioners to accuse people for free, they won’t get any money.

(VAWA 2005): “Requires law enforcement agencies and courts to enforce these orders.”

(VAWA 2005): “Prevents courts from publishing survivor information on the internet.”

These quotations explicitly say that state police and court policy has been dictated (i.e., cops and courts have been told how they’re “required” to act). Either they comply, or the money tap gets shut off. This may reasonably be called extortion or coercion.

(VAWA 2005): “Encourages protocols and training to avoid dual arrest.”

This quotation means if there are two complainants in a domestic spat, for example, only one should be arrested (and since this stipulation is eagerly reported by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, guess which member of a hetero couple the police are supposed to arrest).

(VAWA 2005): “Criminalizes stalking by surveillance.”

(VAWA 2005): “Expands the accountable harm to include substantial emotional harm to the victim.”

(VAWA 2005): “Expands minimum penalties of stalking if it occurs in violation of a protection order.”

These quotations mean that pretty much any alleged misconduct is punishable and dictates how it should be punished (at a minimum) if it reportedly occurs while a restraining order is in effect.

(VAWA 2005): “Permits LAV-funded attorneys to support victims’ dealings with the criminal justice system; but, does not permit funding to pay for prosecutorial or defense functions.”

This quotation says accusers (“victims”) may be provided with free legal services but that the accused must not be.

The themes in these few quotations indicate the pattern of the web:

  • Punishable conduct has been broadened to include almost anything that can be described as offensive by a plaintiff and/or a judge. In practice, this means any alleged conduct that allegedly causes a complainant to feel afraid.
  • Police and judges have been urged to act and to act without deliberation and bigotedly.
  • Accusers’ accountability has been minimized (and accusers are nominated “victims” or even “survivors” on no more ascertainable grounds than that they accused someone of violating them), while the accused’s accountability has been maximized to include permanent registration in public/police databases, ones that may specifically label them “stalkers” or “violent abusers.”
  • Free attorney services are granted to accusers but must be denied to the accused.

This web has been constructed methodically with billions of taxpayer dollars, and this money has gone not only to the police and the courts but to law schools and nonprofits (like the NCADV), and the latter may reciprocate by producing research papers; websites; and pamphlets, brochures, and posters that further bias the system as well as the public and their representatives, for example, journalists. (Grants from the National Institute of Justice may also be awarded to generate feminist “social science that’s used to “train” judges.) The federal government’s investment in favored nonprofits furthermore legitimates and empowers those nonprofits and thereby increases the donations they receive from the public. The Kayden Jayce Foundation (KJF), a nonprofit that acknowledged false accusation and focused on providing legal aid to low-income (non-white) families, applied for grant monies, was denied, and has since had to shutter its windows. So, too, have nonprofits that defend men’s rights—i.e., equal rights—been spurned. They’re on their own. Consequently, they can’t pay for teams of professional writers and web designers, etc., and receive little or no public assistance. They don’t have the cachet that only money can buy.

If all of this weren’t enough, rulings that nominate people “stalkers,” “batterers,” “child abusers,” or even “rapists” can legally be formed in 10 minutes or even by “default” (i.e., without ever having heard from a defendant at all). In some states (Arizona and Indiana are examples), three-minute ex parte rulings are final unless defendants apply to the court for the opportunity to be heard. Men and women may be accused from another state and never afforded a practicable chance to defend themselves against allegations that may be arrant lies and exercise dire effects on their lives (including loss of employment).

When complainants of procedural abuses speak of “conspiracy,” this is what they’re talking about…and they’re not wrong.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*For further insight, see “‘You have bullsh*t; we have research’: The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence v. Daddy Justice (Or, Why False Allegations Are a Serious Problem).”

Restraining Order Rulings Aren’t about Justice but about Justification, and Lies to the Court Only Work because Judges Also Lie

What this post predicts in its postscript occurred exactly a year after its publication.—Editor, 2018


Here’s a formula for fraud:

  1. You lavish police departments with hefty federal grants to urge their officers to steer complainants of abuse to the courthouse to apply for restraining orders.
  2. You have legislation in place that rewards impulsive or malicious accusation with quickie ex parte rulings from judges.
  3. You instruct judges how they should form those and subsequent rulings and threaten to withdraw funding from states whose courts don’t play ball and comply with federal dictates (see VAWA).
  4. You give this farce a gloss of credibility by requiring that the accused be granted the opportunity to be heard in their defense.
  5. You ensure that the appellate process is also cursory and that the accused have no further recourse to the law to expose what may be false allegations.
  6. With rhetoric and obfuscation, you further ensure that journalistic investigation and criticism are minimal and that the public is kept in the dark.

Accusers are encouraged to beef up their claims to justify themselves to the court and appear duly afraid (and that’s the ones who aren’t outright lying). Judges, whose motives have been coerced, are encouraged to skew their findings (in hearings that may span all of 10 minutes) to meet social and political expectations and justify their intrusions into the lives of the accused (intrusions that deprive the accused of rights and property), as well as to justify themselves to other judges and the public should their performance come under scrutiny.

Other judges who weigh in on accusations that may spawn multiple prosecutions or appeals are encouraged to skew their findings for the same motives and to preserve the veneer of judicial propriety. They are justified in this course by the original ruling or rulings in a case, which may have been formed in moments.

Frauds may start with hyped or false claims from plaintiffs, but that isn’t where they stop.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*The writer of this post was sued for harassment and libel in 2013 (based on his writing about false accusations against him that began seven years prior). To justify the court’s ruling against me, the judge asserted on record that statements of mine on this site were “false.” The judge didn’t say what statements were false, because he didn’t have to. No statements were false. The judge took liberties with the truth. Based on his characterization, I could be sued again. (The next judge would just cite the former judge’s statement as fact.) This conduct isn’t extraordinary; it’s how things are done (and how the court guarantees things stay done).

“Somebody Do Something to End This Madness!”: One Commenter’s Appeal for Restraining Order Reform

A comment Wednesday resonated with the author’s experiences of legal abuse and many others’. It said its writer’s life was trashed because he showed compassion for another. He exhausted his savings to help his ex-wife out of a fix, flying out to California from Colorado on a day’s notice. Five years later, having lived with the aftereffects of legal madness every day of the interim—which included appeals in another state, postponements, and a five-year restraining order extension—he says he feels his life is “over.” Of particular note is that the apparent instigator of the fraudulent restraining order petitioned against him was his ex-wife’s son; the son allegedly threatened to turn his back on his mother and evict her from his home if she didn’t comply with his wishes.

The commenter’s account:

[In] 2010, she calls me in Denver [Colorado], where I had a two-bedroom apartment, crying the blues that she had a big fight with her boyfriend, and requested to stay with me for a little while. I gave in as we were married for 23 years and had remained friends.

I fly out to San Jose [California] the next day, and we drive directly from the airport to U-Haul, pick up a truck, and are on the road in a couple of hours. Five days later, I move her into her own bedroom and put her furniture in storage.

Things went fine until she wanted this dog up in Wyoming that had some issues.

We drive up to get the dog and then after getting it home, I find out the issues—the dog would just pee on the carpet at random. I told her the dog had to go. She’s not happy, but we surrendered it to the local shelter.

Next thing I know, there is a knock on the door with her son ready to drive her back to San Jose.

Not a problem until two weeks later when the sheriff delivered the TRO [temporary restraining order] that stated I had to give up my guns and appear in San Jose at a hearing in seven days. “Why?” I asked. “Don’t we have laws in Colorado? Shouldn’t the case be tried in Denver?” Apparently not. I lost that argument.

I went to San Jose, had a 10-minute hearing in front of—what else?—a woman judge. My ex had a lawyer [thanks to] the good old folks at VAWA providing the funding. I [checked with] over 30 attorneys, and no one would touch the case pro bono (she took any spare money I had moving her).

Then we found out that she can talk to me; I just can’t talk to her (great system).

We found a way to communicate…through the Internet on one of those game shows. We would pass notes back and forth. She did not have a problem with that. The son found out and over his IPhone requested an extension on the court order.

Turns out, truth be told, that the son was the one who wanted her to get the RO. She never had any intention of doing such a thing. The son apparently was angry because he asked me what happened between his mother and me. I responded by asking him if he was sure that he really wanted to know the truth about his mom. Well, I told him the truth. I told him that his mother was screwing around on me every chance that she had.

That did not sit well with him. So here we are…RO. Every lie in that first and second complaint was written by him. He forced his mother to go along with it by threatening that he would not want her to be around him anymore and that she would have to move out of his house.

With all the postponements, when we finally got a ruling on the attempt to continue the first RO, which only had two weeks left on it, the judge, a new woman judge, ruled against me. She would not even let me speak.

So, long story short, after all the delays in between the appearances, I now received an additional five-year RO causing my total RO to be about 7 years.

I don’t give a shit whether I ever see her again, but I thought that this was a country of laws. There was never any violence between us. Yet this judge violated my Second Amendment rights once again.

So…lesson learned: Never even raise your voice to your significant (???) other. When she finds out how much money she can get out of all the federal funding, inclusive of cars, a place to stay, educational programs, etc., etc., she will come after you without a second thought.

The entire law is wrong. It violates [the First, Second, and Sixth Amendments, and probably others]. And the worse part of it is that any woman you want to date is going to plug your name into the Internet before she considers going out with you. Or her son or daughter or girlfriend will…just because they want to make sure she’s not going out with a “bum.”

My life is over. I have no social life [and] no place to turn. Not one lawyer will help. Not one congressman or senator will go against all the women who started all of this in 1994. And why? The only reason that I can come up with is that they don’t want to get “cut off.” They have no balls and couldn’t care less about what is right or wrong.

This is a bad law. I think if I remember the VAWA statute correctly, the phrase man or men is mentioned one time. I am for anyone who has any ideas on how to overturn this law and at least give us our “rights” back. I can understand it if you are a wife-beater or something like that, but the word harassment is so ambiguous. How can any judge make an honest decision?

Please, everyone, chime in. This could happen to you! If your wife gets an RO on you, you are in “the system.” You no longer will have a job, friends will shy away from you, and even your own family will distance themselves from you.

SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING TO END THIS MADNESS!

Please.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*The anonymous commenter’s remarks began: “I will be more than happy to pay any attorney to get my Santa Clara County, California RO taken off of the Internet!”

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

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

Cornell Legal Information Institute

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

Attorney Catherine Elizabeth Bennett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

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

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

Feminism and False Accusation Culture

“The idea that—as pandering anti-feminist goon Christina Hoff Sommers asserted over the weekend—university campuses have a ‘false accusation culture’ is as ludicrous as the idea that Sommers herself is a feminist. Not only do we not have a ‘false accusation culture’ anywhere on earth, we don’t have an accusation culture at all. Most victims never say a word. The price is too high. And, if their joy at the outing, harassment and supposed ‘discrediting’ of Jackie is any indication, Sommers and her cohort would like to keep it that way.”

Lindy West, The Guardian (Dec. 9, 2014)

Alongside the headline of Lindy West’s op-ed, “Rolling Stone threw a rape victim to the misogynist horde,” is a tag that reads, “Comment is free.” It’s a fitting commentary on Ms. West’s commentary, which is cheaper than just cheap.

Not only is false accusation culture real; it extends beyond the quad.

Ms. West’s piece centers on the “Jackie story,” a Rolling Stone “exposé” that ran a couple of months ago about a purported gang rape at the University of Virginia whose details have since proved unreliable.

According to Ms. West, “The result was swift, frightening and predictable [italics added]. Jackie became an anti-feminist rallying point—incontrovertible ‘proof’ that women maliciously (or recreationally, even) lie about rape to ruin men’s lives, and that ‘rape culture’ is nothing but hysterical feminist propaganda.”

Ms. West’s diagnosis is itself hysterical feminist propaganda that’s swift and predictable…and shopworn. Writers like her incite rhetorical food fights. They tweak and pique, and this excites a flood of comments, some of them earnest, some of them dismissive or disgusted, and all of them leading to nothing.

This is a constructive formula: thesis + antithesis = synthesis. There is no synthesis, though. Provocateurs like Ms. West never relent and are only egged on by criticism, even if it’s coolly reasoned. They’re looking for conflict, not a conversation. Their arguments are purposefully outrageous to ignite attention, a motive that not coincidentally underlies many false accusations, especially ones made by women.

The quotation from Ms. West at the top of this post is stressed because it exemplifies the flatfooted feminist m.o.: nonsensical but snarky.

Ignoring the slight to Dr. Sommers, whose discernment Windy Lindy’s doesn’t hold a candle to, here’s a quickie analysis of Ms. West’s assertion that there’s no “‘false accusation culture’ anywhere on earth” (an assertion that only merits a quickie analysis):

  1. Ms. West says there’s no “false accusation culture.”
  2. The proof, she says, is there’s no “accusation culture.”
  3. The evidence of this is that “most victims never say a word” (i.e., most victims never make accusations).

The only victims of a false accusation culture are the falsely accused; false accusers aren’t victims. A false accusation culture doesn’t require that actual victims of abuse ever report anything. Therefore whether actual victims “never say a word” is completely irrelevant to the existence of a false accusation culture. Feminists are encouraged to read this paragraph again and to look up words they may misunderstand, such as false.

There is a false accusation culture, and feminists like Ms. West are the reason why. They’ve made it attractive and rewarding (even ennobling) for people to style themselves “victims.” They’re also, consequently, the authors of what they label “rape denial.”

The culture of false accusation they’ve inspired is why there are so-called rape deniers. Sure, there may actually be people who deny “rape!” is ever rape, but it’s a fair deduction that most resistance to feminist social indictment that’s called “rape denial” is really a manifestation of resentment toward what feminist rhetoric has wrought. Men who’ve wrongly been treated like brutes and sex offenders over the decades since the enactment of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which ensures all men are regarded by the system prejudicially, are pained animals. (Appreciate that while prosecuting rape may be rare and difficult in criminal court, implicating someone as a violent offender in civil court, including falsely, is cake.) What do pained animals do? They snarl and claw at what hurt them (and whatever they associate with it).

Feminists provoke animosity—which rightly or wrongly may be directed toward all women—and then they denounce that animosity as misogyny…which provokes more animosity…which is denounced as misogyny (and on and on). “Rape deniers” may simply be people who’ve been conditioned to distrust accusations of violence from women and to hate feminists.

Unconscious of this, along comes someone like Megan Carpentier, who writes in the same commentary section of The Guardian as Ms. West, “I’m a victim of sexual assault and the law failed. How many of us must speak out for you to believe?” She describes a harrowing experience, to which response is mostly sympathetic, and responses that are guarded don’t challenge the accuracy of her account; they reasonably point out that “these constant calls for automatic belief of accusers signal a desire to move away from the presumption of innocence.” This challenge is what’s commonly represented as “rape denial,” and it’s the challenge of minds jaded by a culture that tolerates and rewards—and thus encourages—false accusations.

Ms. Carpentier says that “of every 100 sexual assaults in the United States, only 40 are reported to the police, only 10 result in arrests, only eight get prosecuted and only four result in a felony conviction,” not appreciating that this can only touch as it should the person (particularly the man) who has never been falsely implicated or known someone who was. Snipes like this one, besides, don’t win over any fence-sitters: “Too many women who are sexually assaulted are not considered sexual assault victims in the eyes of the law—and in the words of more than a few bloviating bystanders.”

The irony of her statement is that feminists are the original “bloviating bystanders,” and it’s their call for selective accountability instead of universal accountability that has aroused skepticism toward allegations of violence against women, including sexual violence.

Feminists blame reactions they themselves have provoked by fostering a climate of false accusation.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Judicial Impression Management: What Makes False Allegations “True” and True Allegations “False” (and Drives Victims of Procedural Abuses to Despair)

“Politics, corporate bullshit—it’s all the same game of impression management.”

House of Lies

What do political spin-doctoring, corporate PR, government-sponsored science, and judicial rulings have in common?

Each is about impression management, the selective representation of facts to create a composite “truth” that suits a particular set of social, political, and/or economic imperatives.

Pols and corporations engage in flimflam to win votes and increase profit shares. Science, too, seeks acclaim and profit, and judicial motives aren’t so different. Judges know what’s expected of them, and they know how to interpret information to satisfy expectations.

The general context of discussions on this blog is the issuance of restraining orders, an arena of law that receives little scrutiny either from within the system or from the public; there is no oversight. Judges are moreover licensed to rule according to their discretion, so their latitude for impression management is broad. Any set of facts or plausible fictions can be rendered damning with a little rhetorical footwork, which needn’t be subtle—skewed rulings more often suggest clog dancing than ballet.

Nobody’s paying attention anyhow, except to make sure judges are fulfilling their mandate to make government look good and keep special interest groups mollified.

Since judges can rule however they want, and since they know that very well, they don’t even have to lie, per se, just massage the facts a little. It’s all about which facts are emphasized and which facts are suppressed, how select facts are interpreted, and whether “fear” can be reasonably inferred from those interpretations. A restraining order ruling can only be construed as “wrong” if it can be demonstrated that it violated statutory law (or the source that that law must answer to: the Constitution). There are no “mistakes,” only the very exceptional “over-reach.”

The restraining order process is the product of lobbying by special interest groups (collectively called “feminism”), which have secured government favor in recent decades, and this favor has conditioned how judges manage impressions. Favoring special interest groups has translated into the investment of billions, which has directed trends in social science research (including monetarily), swayed public opinion, and besides conditioned police and judicial impulses and priorities, thereby determining how allegations ranging from harassment to violent and/or sexual assault are credited and acted upon by officers of the justice system.

A crude evolutionary précis (not necessarily chronological) might look something like this:

  • Feminism gets the nod;
  • legislation is passed enacting restraining orders;
  • further legislation is passed making them more stringent and punitive;
  • additional legislation is passed: domestic violence acts and statutes, stalking statutes, etc.;
  • the definition of “domestic violence” is broadened to be inclusive of almost anything that can be construed as “abusive” according to judicial discretion;
  • the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is passed;
  • a special office of the Justice Department is established;
  • billions of dollars of federal monies are doled out in the form of grants to police departments and the courts to beef up arrest policies and “train” judges and police officers how to interpret allegations of violence or merely “fear”;
  • and the popular press is enlisted, knowingly or not, to flak the whole business.

Impression management marks the standard operating procedure from top to bottom.

Feminism’s foot soldiers in the blogosphere and on social media, finally, spread the “good word,” and John and Jane Doe believe what they’re told—unless or until they’re torturously disabused of their illusions. Stories like those you’ll find here are often the stories of average people who’ve been publicly maligned and have maddeningly discovered that “the truth” is whatever the system chooses to enter into the record.

To conclude this abstract litany with a concrete illustration, consider these stories, published six months apart (“Son of Whitestown judge charged with animal cruelty” and “Judge’s son pleads guilty to taping kitten ‘inhumanely’”):

The difference you’ll detect between the two versions of the facts and how they’re interpreted exemplifies impression management.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

How Dogma Is Preserved: A Feminist Law Professor Is Awarded a $500,000 Grant from Uncle Sam to Prove Claims of False Allegations in Family Court Are “Junk Science”

“Ten years ago, about one in 10 domestic violence arrests involved women as defendants. Now, it’s one in five in Michigan and Connecticut, one in four in Vermont and Colorado, and more than one in three in New Hampshire. Public officials are trying to figure out what’s going on. They are especially mystified because, according to [The New York Times], the trend ‘so diverges from the widely accepted estimate that 95 percent of batterers are men.’

“Interesting logic: first, a dogma contradicted by virtually all social science research [namely, 95% of batterers are men] becomes ‘widely accepted.’ Then, when it’s disproved by the facts, the response is to ask what’s wrong with the facts.”

—Cathy Young, “Female Aggression—Domestic Violence’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’” (1999)

What the quoted writer means is that when dogma becomes “widely accepted,” it stays “widely accepted.” Time has proven her right. Fifteen years later, that dogma—men are abusers; women are victims—still predominates.

It gets by with a little help from its friends.

Some months ago, a post on this blog responded to research conclusions published this year by Prof. Kelly Behre, director of the UC Davis Law School’s Family Protection and Legal Assistance Clinic.

Among those conclusions was that anecdotal reports of procedural abuses, false allegations, and judicial bias by what she calls FRGs (fathers’ rights groups) have no “legitimate” research studies to back them up and should therefore exert no influence on public policy. They should, according to the professor’s own research, be disregarded.

Last month, it was reported that a George Washington University law professor was awarded a $500,000 grant from the National Institute of Justice (i.e., taxpayers) to “conduct a study in which she hopes to show that family courts across the country have fallen into a pattern of awarding custody” of children to fathers who are “known abusers.”

The professor, Joan Meier, directs the university’s Domestic Violence Project. She’s also the “founder and legal director of the Domestic Violence Legal Empowerment and Appeals Project, a nonprofit that [helps] domestic violence survivors receive pro-bono [legal aid].” Her credentials, you’ll notice, are conspicuously similar to those of Prof. Behre, referenced above.

Consider why Prof. Meier was awarded the grant:

She said researchers can say anecdotally that courts have awarded custody to known abusers or fathers whose [partners or ex-partners] have warned could be abusive to children, but researchers and advocates’ sharing their experiences alone hasn’t yet led to change.

Now consider that fathers’ rights researchers and advocates’ sharing their experiences has also yet to lead to change, and appreciate that those researchers and advocates aren’t being cut half-million-dollar checks to compile research data. What they have to say doesn’t accord with the “widely accepted” dogma; it isn’t popular.

Because their anecdotal reports of false allegations, procedural abuses, and judicial bias don’t have any official research to validate them, they’re to be ignored.

Ignoring those reports, in fact, is essential for a hypothesis like Prof. Meier’s to be tenable. It depends on absolutely denying that those whom the professor calls “known abusers” could be men who’ve been falsely implicated.

Prof. Meier says she expects to use the $500,000 federal grant to conclusively expose gender bias in family court against women—and to do it using a study sample of “over 1,000 court cases from the past 15 years” (a study sample, in other words, of fewer than 2,000 cases).

For the professor’s hypothesis to be proven “true,” it just has to be shown that in a significant number of the “over 1,000 cases” reviewed, a father awarded custody of children had previously been accused of abuse.

The researchers hope to debunk “junk science” that mothers make false accusations of abuse to alienate fathers from their sons or daughters, a misconception that Meier said has put many children in danger.

Prof. Meier seems to fail to grasp that the complaint is that mothers successfully “make false accusations of abuse to alienate fathers from their sons and daughters.” Even if her study were to show that child custody is awarded to fathers who’ve been successfully accused of abuse, it wouldn’t necessarily prove that the complaint that false accusations are routine  is based on “junk science” (unless by that phrase she means science that hasn’t been government-funded and -audited).

Prof. Meier’s assertion that claims of false allegations are a “misconception,” what’s more, ignores that any number of attorneys who practice family law publicly corroborate that so-called misconception. Some indeed say false allegations to gain the advantage in custody battles are commonplace. These are the attorneys who actually practice in the trenches. Their reports, however, are once again only anecdotal.

Fathers and their advocates who claim false accusations are made don’t, of course, misconceive anything. They know what they know; they’ve lived it. The professor’s use of the word misconception is directed at the “people who count,” that is, the policy-makers. What she means is any credibility they might be disposed to show complainants of procedural abuse is based on a misconception. That misconception, apparently, is that men without law degrees could possibly be telling the truth.

The professor’s assertion that reports of false accusations are “junk science,” furthermore, would seem to advocate for good science, and there’s certainly nothing scientific about prejudicially dismissing those reports offhand. Studies like those proposed by Prof. Meier need to be counterbalanced by studies with opposing hypotheses—and they aren’t.

Meier and her team of legal and statistical experts will create a database of court opinions that she hopes will show a pattern that supports her hypothesis, and will then present it to activists, local courts, and organizations that train judges.

Preservation of dogma is a game of ring-around-a-rosy. Advocacy for what’s widely accepted to be true is lavishly funded, and the resultant “science” may then be used to “train” judges how to rule, further reinforcing the dogma.

(If the context of this policy were Russia instead of the United States, would training still be the word we used to mean influencing judges?)

This is how underhand gets the upper hand, and it’s remarkable how openly this kind of business is transacted. No one bats an eye, because it’s “official.”

Prof. Meier may have the best of intentions. The author of this post has never known anyone whom he would characterize as a domestic violence “survivor.” He has no doubt, however, that there are people who are daily subject to violent cruelty, and if he did know someone like that, he’d be grateful that there were people like Prof. Meier looking out for their interests.

Victims need advocates and defenders.

The reality is, though, that victims of domestic violence have quite an abundance of public and private sympathizers, while victims of abuse of civil and criminal processes legislated to protect battered women and children (including restraining orders) receive little public recognition at all. An agency that calls itself the “National Institute of Justice” shouldn’t play (or pay) favorites. Justice would, in fact, advocate that an equal payout be provided to researchers to study the frequency of fraudulent accusations, which can’t be determined from court rulings, because those rulings are influenced if not dictated by the prevailing dogma.

Hypotheses, it’s been amply observed, tend to incline researchers to find evidence of whatever it was they were looking for in the first place (this is called “confirmation bias” or “myside bias”).

Leora Rosen, a former senior social science analyst at the National Institute of Justice, said [Prof. Meier’s] study is unique because it is transparent about its lack of objectivity and looks at family court rather than criminal court cases. She has partnered with Meier for the study.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Hocus-Pocus: More on False Restraining Orders and the Five Magic Words

Some recent posts on this blog have touched on what might be called the five magic words, because their utterance may be all that’s required of a petitioner to obtain a restraining order. The five magic words are these: “I’m afraid for my life.”

Cops, it’s even reported, tell women whom they goad to get restraining orders that they should recite this magical phrase to the judge (wink, wink)—and some of these women complain later that they felt forced onto a course that they regretted pursuing but weren’t permitted to correct.

(Notably, billions in federal tax dollars have been invested under the Violence Against Women Act in so-called STOP grants—“Services and Training for Officers and Prosecutors”—as well as in grants to encourage arrests, according to which VAWA grants police officers have essentially been instructed to promote restraining orders.)

The I’m-afraid-for-my-life enchantment has variant forms. This writer’s accuser, who had for months nightly hung around outside of his residence alone in the dark, used this one: “Will I be attacked?”

The abbreviated version, “I’m afraid,” can even suffice. What’s more, judges in some jurisdictions may cue a restraining order applicant to say it, because they’re not authorized to issue the requested injunction unless s/he does (e.g., “I can only issue a restraining order if you tell me you’re afraid of [him or her]. I’m going to ask you one more time: Are you afraid?”).

Gamesmanship in this arena is both bottom-up and top-down. Liars hustle judges…and judges hustle liars along.

Claims of fear are seldom unaccompanied by specific for-instances (sometimes real, sometimes not), but typically if it weren’t for the magic words’ coloring the for-instances, they would signify little by themselves.

(A California man employed as a little league umpire, for example, had a restraining order petitioned against him this year by his sister-in-law. She alleged that looks the man had cast in his nephew’s direction—while the boy was playing baseball, and the man was in the park to perform his job—caused his nephew grave emotional upset. She also cited an incident when she said her brother-in-law had aggressively honked and waved at her and her son from his car. The so-called relevant facts were only made sinister by their reporter’s alleged apprehension.)

Words aren’t magical, and allegations of fear aren’t facts. In procedures as brief and superficial as those mandated by restraining order laws, even facts aren’t facts. They’re often just innuendo upon which foundation a judge is urged and authorized to erect an outhouse.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

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

destroyPeople 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.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

How It Serves Political Interests to Issue Restraining Orders Falsely

Under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), some $10 billion has been invested over the past 20 years in procedures meant to redress violence against women, and restraining orders are the centerpiece of a host of related legislative measures.

The truth is restraining orders can’t prevent violence; they’re just pieces of paper. Their only value is rhetorical (they influence). They put defendants on notice, and they make it look like the government is protecting people.

When defendants are falsely blamed, their (isolated) protests are seldom registered or credited by others. Because their complaints are discounted or disregarded, they don’t tarnish the court’s image or inspire the press to investigate.

At the same time, it serves the court’s interests when defendants are falsely blamed. The greatest likelihood that an order of the court will appear to have averted violence is realized when that order is issued to someone who was never a threat at all.

Put another way, if the court only issued restraining orders to volatile people, it’s a fair bet that a discomforting percentage of orders would be violated, and the negative statistics would urgently disclose their ineffectiveness as deterrents.

Issuing a majority of restraining orders to people who pose little or no violent threat, contrariwise, ensures violations will be fewer and less consequential by and large. Negative figures, like murders, are thereby minimized, and the process appears to live up to its promise of insulation.

All of this is to say that if you issue 60 restraining orders against nonviolent people to every one issued against a violent aggressor, violations of restraining orders resulting in injuries or death will be comparatively few respective to the total number of people “restrained.” It skews the odds in favor of positive perception.

It’s good PR.

More restraining orders, besides, guarantees greater job security for those who administer them. It means there’s more “work” to get (handsomely) paid for doing.

More restraining orders also means greater substantiation of claims of “epidemic” this and that, which keeps dominant political interests happy and thriving (cha-ching!)…and justifies ramping up the process even further.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Restraining Order Registries: Using Indiana’s Policies to Expose Government’s Abuse of Its Citizens

One of the thrusts of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) has been to establish public restraining order registries like those that identify sex offenders.

To underscore the inappropriateness of equating restraining order recipients with sex offenders, appreciate that the latter (sex offenders) have been tried and convicted in criminal court, and the former (restraining order defendants) have typically been labeled “offenders” according to civil criteria.

You’ve heard the phrases “innocent until proven guilty” and “proof beyond a reasonable doubt”? These don’t apply.

The usual “standard” applied to restraining order adjudications is “preponderance of the evidence,” according to which if a judge feels, on the force of a plaintiff’s testimony, that there’s a 51% probability that s/he’s mostly telling the truth, a restraining order should be awarded.

Often no ascertainable evidence is required at all to substantiate allegations ranging from pestering to physical or sexual assault. A mere claim of abuse or apprehension may be sufficient.

Restraining orders are largely approved according to judicial discretion. Judges are authorized to reckon the truth based on brief interviews with accusers (the accused are just names on forms). Judicial predisposition, furthermore, has been conditioned by federal cash inducements under VAWA to favor those pointing fingers. (These inducements are in the form of grants issued to courts in return for having their judges and staff “educated” about how to regard restraining order plaintiffs’ accusations.)

Note: restraining order proceedings are concluded in minutes, and there are no juries (or even anyone looking over judges’ shoulders). The game is played by house rules.

Despite the dubiousness of restraining order rulings vis-à-vis criminal rulings, however, it’s deemed just not only to enter the names of restraining order recipients in state and national police databases (indefinitely) but to enter them in conveniently accessible public registries (also indefinitely) the way sex offenders’ names are.

This isn’t a universal policy, but unquestionably were certain political interests to be given their way (and they increasingly have been in recent decades), it would be universal policy.

Recent reading I’ve done almost prompted me to take back past statements on this blog that public registries make finding out who’s received a restraining order “enticing” or “alluring.” Several state registries I’ve learned of limit registry access to specific government agencies, staff and officers of the court, and the like.

Some, however, don’t. Their registries are public in the most literal sense.

Here, for example, is what Indiana’s registry website looks like:

Every Indianan who’s been issued a “protective order” or “no contact order” since July 1, 2009 is recorded in this registry, including the ones whose cases were dismissed, that is, even those found “innocent” of the allegations against them are “outed” as having been accused of stalking, perhaps, or domestic violence or sexual assault. Browsers’ imaginations are free to take wing.

This search engine is simple to use. A restraining order recipient’s employer, landlord, student, client, patient, neighbor, girl- or boyfriend, etc. can perform a search in seconds—and as the headnote helpfully explains, “more information about cases” can be obtained by contacting the county clerk’s office.

Consider for a moment what the justification for a database like this could be. It doesn’t do anything to “protect” the plaintiffs of restraining orders. Therefore the justification must be to “protect” the public. Implicit then in the existence of such a database is that restraining order defendants are “dangerous.” Recall the basis upon which the determination of “dangerousness” was formed in the first place: a five-minute interview. Appreciate, too, that a restraining order recipient registered in a database like this may have been condemned for text messaging someone who resented the contact. And, as should go without saying, s/he may have been condemned on completely false allegations.

A process that’s highly prejudiced and answerable to no oversight is also highly punitive. Restraining order defendants are implicated according to kangaroo procedures whose rulings their noses are then rubbed in everlastingly.

Defendants often have mere days to respond to restraining orders, which can make procuring an attorney’s aid impossible even if defendants grasp the need for representation and can afford to shell out a few thousand at the drop of a hat. Appeals hearings, moreover, may be 30 minutes or less in duration (and only half that time is afforded to defendants’ testimony).

The process is a lock, but rulings are represented as the products of diligence and deliberation—and the public takes those rulings seriously, rulings that Indiana legitimates and publishes in a conveniently accessible database.

Here’s what returns look like if you simply enter the last name Jones into Indiana’s registry search engine:

Only half of the orders on the first page this search pulled up were actually finalized. The other half were tossed—after previously having been approved. The judicial error rate reflected in this random sampling is 50%. This statistic’s economic ($) implications are disgraceful by themselves. If you further allow that some of the restraining orders that were upheld were cases of false allegations’ succeeding, then judicial error is the norm.

A few months ago, a friend joked to me that her daughter (a smart cookie) had researched her teachers’ criminal records to use as leverage in the event of a grade crisis.

Arizona, blessedly, doesn’t yet have a nifty resource like Indiana’s for teenaged blackmailers to mine.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Big Money v. No Money: VAWA and the Men’s Rights Movement

The previous post was a response to research conclusions published this year by Dr. Kelly Behre, director of the UC Davis Law School’s Family Protection and Legal Assistance Clinic.

In a paper titled, “Digging beneath the Equality Language: The Influence of the Fathers’ Rights Movement on Intimate Partner Violence Public Policy Debates and Family Law Reform,” Dr. Behre asserts there’s an absence of empirical evidence to support various arguments and statistical estimates published by men’s rights advocates respecting false restraining orders, false allegations of domestic violence, and judicial bias against men in family courts.

Ironic is that Dr. Behre’s denial of men’s groups’ position that men aren’t treated fairly is itself unfair.

When Dr. Behre says there’s no “empirical support” for estimates like 60 to 80% of restraining orders are unnecessary or based on falsehood, she means there are no formal audits of the process to back them up. She further examines studies that have been pointed to and finds those studies “problematic.”

Dr. Behre may well be right that empirical support for the claims of men’s groups is scant, shaky, or at best anecdotal. It’s disturbing, though, that Dr. Behre doesn’t find the dearth of studies that could be cited as empirical support a source of concern.

Clearly she has interests in both justice and human welfare.

A truism in law is that those with no money have no voice. Men’s rights groups are not lavishly funded teams of crack Ph.D.’s (they may in fact represent ragtag groups of man-on-the-street volunteers), and many if not most of those represented by such groups are themselves on the outside of the system looking in.

In contrast, consider these facts from the chart “Comparison of VAWA 1994, VAWA 2000, and VAWA 2005 Reauthorization Bill” compiled by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) eight years ago.

  • Grand total of [federal] money allocated [under the Violence Against Women Act] from 1994 to 2011: $9.43 billion, including:
  • STOP (Services and Training for Officers and Prosecutors) Grants: $2.85 billion
  • Grants to Encourage Arrest Policies: $886 million
  • Rural Domestic Violence and Child Abuse Enforcement Grants: $555 million
  • Civil Legal Assistance for Victims of Violence: $588 million
  • Sexual Assault Services: $250 million
  • Education and Training for Judges and Court Personnel: $35 million

If battered women’s advocates like Dr. Behre find little empirical support for the plaints of men’s groups, they might at least find ample motive in these figures for systemic prejudice against men—and by extension all defendants who find themselves the targets of allegations of abuse (male and female).

While it’s noteworthy that comparatively little federal money has been approved for allocation to research studies, the magnitude of investment toward countering domestic violence is a clear pronouncement of priority, and this investment alone should suggest to a mind as trained and astute as Dr. Behre’s that allegations like “family courts discriminate against men and…mothers frequently and successfully make false allegations against men to obtain custody of children” entirely plausible.

Dr. Behre would call this observation a “commonsense argument” (“implying that the truth…is intuitively evident”).

Fair enough.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com