Why Damon Moelter Is Being Abused
Written by: Chris Print This Article   Use of Our Content (Reposting and Quoting)
Cindy Dumas is the San Diego mother who has been flooding the media for years with claims of child sexual abuse against her son Damon Moelter. On July 15, 2010, Judge Lorna Alksne gave full custody of Damon Moelter to his father, the person Dumas continues to insist sexually abused him, with minimal contact with his mother. You might think the title of this article implies we’ll be joining in the woe-is-me chanting of her supporters. Perhaps refreshingly, we won’t waste your time with that — you’ve read enough of it already if you have followed this case. Instead, I’m going to explain to you why Damon Moelter and his entire family are victims of the corrupt San Diego courts and that Damon in particular is experiencing court-ordered parental alienation child abuse. The primary driver of the corrupt and abusive decisions in this case is a biased and incompetent Judge Lorna Alksne. The type of corruption and bias that are occurring in her court are little different from that in many other family law courts. As a result, many children are being seriously harmed. Damon Moelter is just one of these many.
Perhaps ironically, this child abuse that is truly occurring is the parental alienation emotional abuse that Damon’s mother staunchly denies exists. But the chief motives and methods involved in the abuse occurring now are not the usual malicious mischief of a parent who can’t separate her or his own needs from those of the children. Instead, they involve the collusion of Judge Lorna Alksne and her friends pursuing their own purposes by violating the law and harming a child and a family.
We may never know what really happened to Damon while with either of his parents, nor if the versions of events coming from him, his parents, or his brothers are accurate. Mom wants us to believe that dad sexually abused him, dad wants us to believe that mom made it up as is far too common for malicious parents in custody battles. Both sides have their supporters. The children are being pulled into the fray to support one parent or the other. This family finds itself back in court many times every year while a never-ending stream of divorce industry professionals parade themselves through Alksne’s court amassing more billable hours while continuing the conflict to nobody’s benefit but their own.
What has been missed in all of this is that Damon and his family are suffering more than necessary or reasonable. This is occurring precisely because Judge Lorna Alksne and her friends have decided that their varied interests concerning power, influence, and money trump Damon’s right to grow up free from abuse with two loving parents. Abusing kids can be beneficial, even profitable, for judges and their friends. What is happening to Damon Moelter is simply a demonstration of this.
Special Offers on Life Extension supplements:Enjoy free shipping on orders of $50 or more for Life Extension supplements! (through December 31, 2024)
$10 off $75 + Free Shipping: Use Code CJNEW10 (through December 31, 2024)
Dumas Viewed As Guilty, Prosecuted In Family Law Court Without a Jury
Contrary to what Cindy Dumas and her supporters appear to believe, Dumas was viewed as guilty of parental child abduction after she ran off with her three sons for more than two years with a stated intent of protecting them from abuse. Dumas mistakenly thinks this is not so because the DA’s office dropped the charges against her as part of a deal in which Judge Lorna Alksne promised there would be fair treatment in family law court.
DA Bonnie Dumanis knew that she could not successfully prosecute Cindy Dumas for parental child abduction as a jury of impartial peers would be highly unlikely to unanimously find her guilty. At least a few of the jurors would be likely to believe she abducted the children to protect them from the father, making a conviction impossible. Instead, Alksne, Dumanis, and possibly other parties in the ruling elite of San Diego decided they would “prosecute” Dumas in family law court where there is no jury to interfere with the predetermined guilty verdict. They wanted to send a strong message that parental abductors will be stripped of their children, regardless of their professed intent to protect their children, and that no jury can protect them from this.
The Saving Damon website describes the arrangements dishonestly promised by the DA Bonnie Dumanis and Judge Lorna Alksne as follows:
2007 On August 8, the boys were granted a restraining order NO0107 against Eric by Commissioner John Chemelenski. In October, District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis dismissed the abduction charges after a review of the family court file. On January 31, Judge Lorna Alksne agreed to do a fair and proper investigation of the sexual abuse and said the children would be placed with a friend of the father’s for approximately two weeks while Damon was evaluated according to FC 3118 by William Dess, Ph.D.
2008 On February 1, Cindy and the children returned, with the understanding that Damon would be listened to and protected if he reported the abuse. Although Damon described four years of abuse in detail to Dr. Dess, his attorney Gary Plavnik, and the Chadwick Center, the three boys who were now 12, 14 and 16 were not returned to their mother as promised. In August, the judge decided that there would be no hearing on the abuse and that she was simply upholding Judge Smyth’s old ruling. The new evaluation was not conducted pursuant to Family Code Section 3118. Dr. Dess reported that unless Cindy changed her position about the abuse and participated with “reunification” with the father, she would have no contact with the children.
The court adopted his recommendations and added that she must take down the Saving Damon website as well. In October, Judge Alksne found there was no credible evidence of abuse and Cindy had “influenced” Damon. Cindy was declared an abductor, an extreme flight risk, a danger to her children because she believed Damon and not allowed to have any contact with the children. Judge Alksne gave Eric partial legal custody and full custody if he moves to San Diego. Damon must undergo an evaluation for anxiety by a new psychologist Dr. Randy Robinson. All three children must participate in $200/hr. reunification therapy with their father under Breffni Barrett, Ph.D. for six months and then be reunited with their father, despite their adamant statements that they do not want to see him. Damon and his brothers have reported the abuse to Dr. Barrett as well. The boys must continue to see therapist Dr. Craig Carlson at $165/hr. All these professionals are mandated reporters, but instead are complicit in covering up the abuse.
Dumas somehow thinks this is all about whether she and Damon are being believed or not. It has nothing to do with that. Instead, it is about money, power, and exchanging favors between members of the ruling class in San Diego. Parents being able to remove the children and themselves from the extortionary family law system supporting judges, attorneys, and their friends is a very serious threat to these people. Dumas would likely have had a better chance of fair treatment if she had angrily murdered Eric Moelter as that would not have been perceived as such a serious direct threat to the powers-that-be and their financial interests. She would also have gotten the benefit of a jury trial that helps to reduce the impact of judicial misconduct and bias as well as the somewhat dampening the influence of power-brokers like Bonnie Dumanis.
Dumas is unlikely to ever get fair and impartial treatment in San Diego so long as Bonnie Dumanis is in office. If Dumas ever realizes this, perhaps she will steer her mass of supporters to work for obtaining the recall of Bonnie Dumanis. So far, it doesn’t appear they have figured this out.
Joyce Murphy “Vindicated” While DA and Courts Try to Save Face
What is happening in the Dumas case and others is similar to how other parents who abducted their children with claims of protecting them from abuse. This includes another San Diego mother, Joyce Murphy, who was prosecuted in criminal court and plead no contact to felony kidnapping after running off to Florida with her daughter. Inconveniently for the family court system and DA, Murphy’s ex-husband, Henry “Bud” Parson, was later convicted of child sexual abuse against three children in a criminal court and sentenced to six years in prison. Possibly to save face for the courts and DA, he was never charged with abusing his own daughter.
(from La Jolla Mom Says She Kidnapped Daughter To Protect Her)
The criminal complaint charges Parson with hurting three girls, two of them younger than 14 years old. The charges include oral sex with a child, molestation, possessing child porn and using a child to make porn.
A report from the District Attorney’s Office said, “The defendant’s computers and camera were seized … revealed numerous photographs of young girls.”
Using those photographs, an Oceanside police officer was able to identify and speak with one of the girls, which led to more charges against Parson.
Joyce Murphy feels vindicated, but it’s bittersweet.
“I blame the entire family court system,” she said, “because they are not held accountable.”
I-Team reporter Lauren Reynolds posed the question to the supervising judge of the San Diego County Family Court, Lorna Alksne.
“Is family court doing a good job?”
“Family court is doing an excellent job,” Alksne said.
What the courts and DA are doing protects nobody but themselves. They fail to protect parents who are falsely accused of child abuse and fail to protect children who really are being abused. In the meantime, they financially victimize families and destroy the lives of innocent children and parents, turning many of them into criminals for such “offenses” as calling their children on the phone to say hello. Then they declare themselves to be doing an “excellent job” as Alksne does with her dishonest self-serving spin.
In the absence of the parents agreeing voluntarily to some other plan, family law courts should not be able to strip any parent of such fundamental rights as joint legal and physical custody with approximately 50/50 timeshare without a criminal conviction or an impartial jury decision. There is simply too much room for bias and illegal governmental abuse by a bad judge if there is not a jury. This is exactly the kind of abuse often committed by Lorna Alksne and many other family law judges. They want control and power and to pick winners and losers, not caring that by doing so they nearly always make losers out of the children. Dumas and Murphy both threatened that control and power. If they got away with running off with the children without severe punishment, other parents might do the same and deprive the family law monster and its supporters of money they believe belongs to them. In the disturbed minds of the tyrants ruling San Diego, being a threat to the interests of the ruling class is a far worse crime than child abuse ever could be.
Picking Sides Without Understanding Family Law Bias And Corruption
The casual observer not versed in the pathological behaviors of the courts, government, and abusive parents would tend to take either the government’s side or the mother’s side. This is a serious mistake and is a primary reason for the ongoing damage being done to Damon and many other children. People should instead be taking the children’s side and realizing that kids need both their parents. The courts should work very hard to stop the zero-sum game of one parent is a winner and the other is a loser as such thinking simply ensures the children will be losers themselves.
Children of Damon’s age can be coached to lie or even worse against a parent. Dumas had plenty of time to do this during the more than two years on the run with the children having no contact with their father and his family. If you doubt this, consider the case of Dr. Rick Lohstroh whose ten year old son was trained to kill his father and shot him in the back with a handgun owned and supplied to him by his malicious mother, Deborah Geisler.
Being familiar with exactly how these courts work, how alienating and personality disordered parents think and behave, and the many far from rational witch hunts that result from somebody uttering the words “child sexual abuse”, I’ve come to the conclusion that often there is really no way to know what happened several years ago when the alleged abuse was first described.
The uncertainty is especially severe when the allegations never lead to charges and a trial. While of course it would be best to never charge an innocent person with a crime, doing so does tend to help produce more evidence that might be useful for determining innocence or guilt. Short of this, such cases lack the more rigorous “proof beyond reasonable doubt” evidentiary standards and a jury that are used in criminal court. These measures help to protect the accused more effectively from collusion between judges and their friends in law enforcement and the prosecutor’s office. Instead, it is common for the family law courts to be used to “prosecute” the accused. These courts lack a jury and feature very weak evidentiary standards, routine and extensive perjury, plentiful altered and fabricated evidence, and a “majority wins” judicial mentality which assures that almost any sociopath will be perceived as truthful simply by duping several gullible friends and family and manipulating them to repeat false statements.
With nobody but some power-crazed influence-peddling judge deciding guilt and innocence, people stuck in this system are effectively presumed guilty unless it is not in the interests of the divorce industry for them to be guilty. This is particularly alarming because the family law industry is filled with bottom of the bucket practitioners of law who went to third-rate or worse law schools and often didn’t even do well in them and seem to be motivated more by money than by any real sense of justice. Except for the few real professionals who are truly interested in family law for some higher purpose, such as helping children rather than making a quick buck, the divorce industry from judges to lawyers to psychologists is populated with opportunistic parasites who don’t care about children except as a means to profit and power.
There are usually possible and practical ways to ensure kids have substantial contact with both parents while protecting them from potential harm when there are allegations of child abuse. Often these ways are used minimally, if at all, and a judge will instead decide that children will seldom get to see a capable and loving parent simply because a malicious parent often flings about serious false allegations.
Conversely, it may also mean that when it becomes reasonably clear that a parent is a malicious false accuser, the children may be blocked from contact with that parent even though the parent may actually have something worthwhile to offer the kids. If the family were to get the support it needs to help the children get the best parts of what a mentally ill malicious parent has to offer, the kids would probably benefit from this more than not seeing the parent at all. Most of these parents actually do love their kids in some way, but they may be so damaged from their own abusive childhoods that they do not know how to behave appropriately. Some of them can be healed, some can be handled with support systems to neutralize the damage they tend to do. Either approach tends to be better than simply banning a child from contact with a parent suffering from these problems.
Many Child Sexual Abuse Allegations Are Products of Brainwashing
Even when somebody is charged with a crime and put on trial, sometimes it turns out the entire thing is an abusive sham in which either the wrong person is accused or there was never any abuse against the children. More accurately, there was no abuse up until the time which the government got involved and psychologically tormented the children in the name of “investigating” baseless accusations. This has happened in San Diego repeatedly. One of the most notable cases is that of James Wade who was falsely accused of raping his daughter when a serial child rapist already being prosecuted for crimes against children in the same neighborhood was the actual perpetrator.
Adam Lee’s documentary on the persecution of Dale Akiki
Shortly thereafter, the San Diego government helped solidify its reputation as an abuser of law and persecutor of innocents via the Dale Akiki “Sunday school satanism” witch hunt. This deeply disturbing story features a community crusade to destroy an innocent man’s life, this time with claims about how Dale Akiki, a disabled and disfigured man who volunteered at Faith Chapel Church, sexually molested the children in his care and somehow murdered an elephant and giraffe in front of Sunday school children, made them drink the blood, and then mysteriously disposed of the carcasses so nobody could find them. As public defender Kate Coyne revealed, the DA prosecutor in charge of the case hand-picked therapists who then proceeded to brainwash the children to get the answers the government wanted. The County of San Diego government and its agents of persecution, including Rady Children’s Hospital and its associated Chadwick Center crowd of biased brainwashing therapists, were eventually held responsible for their misconduct via a confidential settlement estimated at around $2 million.
Governments learned from the many satanic abuse and sexual abuse frauds they pulled on the public in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Or so they claimed. Yet even this year, there was yet another of these massive sex abuse fraud stories in the news. This time, kindergarten teacher Tonya Craft was found innocent of all 22 charges of sexually molesting three children including her own daughter. She spent two years being investigated, prosecuted, and having her own children banned from seeing her due to false allegations made by parents who didn’t like her, including her ex-husband Joel Henke who appears to have been engaging in parental alienation child abuse by teaching their daughter to falsely accuse her mother of sexual abuse.
What ensued is the sort of kangaroo court disaster we have previously seen repeatedly in San Diego. Investigators repeatedly broke the protocols on how to interview children to get accurate answers. The judge in the case, Brian House, was Craft’s ex-husband’s former divorce attorney. House let a tainted jury be seated that included Craft’s former brother-in-law. The prosecution team lead by Chris Arnt and Len McGregor arranged for improper questioning of the children and brainwashing of Craft’s own daughter to testify against her. They also hid exculpatory evidence. These are the kinds of things happening in San Diego and many other places, too, not just in Georgia where this case occurred. Obviously, despite debacles such as the Wade and Akiki cases in San Diego, the McMartin Pre-School case in Los Angeles, and the Fells Acres Day Care Center case in Massachusetts , governments have learned nothing and continue to abuse parents even when the accusers have a vested interest in seeing them ruined and their accusations should be viewed with great suspicion.
Craft was saved by one of the features of the criminal law system that is far superior to the family law system. That feature is the jury. The jury on her trial could clearly see the collusion between the judge and prosecution. They could also see the witnesses for the prosecution were lacking in credibility and some had much to gain personally by destroying Tonya Craft. By contrast, victims of the family law system often suffer severely precisely because there is no jury to counteract the collusion of corruption of the parasites comprising the majority of divorce industry practitioners.
Tonya Craft has filed a $25 million federal lawsuit against the county government, the therapists, and the parents of the children who were coached to falsely accuse her. The prosecutors wrongfully enjoy immunity for their alleged violations of the law, so they cannot be named in the lawsuit.
Dumas Behaviors Suggest Parental Alienation and Personality Disorders
Dumas’s behaviors are consistent with the sorts of distortion campaigns practiced by parents with personality disorders. Her extreme positions are dogmatic and irrational. In particular, her positions of blanket denial of parental alienation and portrayal of child abuse as being exclusively the fault of males show a total disconnect with reality. Such positions only serve to discredit her and those associated with her.
In her case, it is particularly ironic that her sons are suffering from court-imposed parental alienation against her yet she does not believe parental alienation exists. Fortunately for the kids, it appear that their father is likely not an alienator himself even though it would be quite understandable that he would have hostility and resentment towards their mother who kidnapped them and has spent years trying to convince the world that he is a monster. Judge Alksne is enough of an alienator, however, to multiply the damage to the children all by herself.
Parental alienation truly does occur and is of harm to children. Almost any child who has been through a divorce with warring parents knows this from personal experience, even if they did not believe the alienation to which they were exposed. Alienating parents can be mothers or fathers. This is well-established by reputable researchers of both genders involving both children still enmeshed in parental alienation abuse and adult children who have more distance from it.
The blanket categorization of fathers as abusers and mothers as victims is nonsense that does not sync up with the consistent findings and facts that abuse is a problem regardless of gender. The many reported abuse cases involving mothers and the experiences of both researchers and even female domestic violence advocates (read more about Erin Pizzey to see why) have revealed that violence in families is usually mutual and denying this simply causes continuation of the violence and abuse. Abused children tend to become abusers at significantly elevated rates. For example, an abused daughter is far more likely to become an abusive against her own future partner and children than a son who was never abused.
“Playing It Safe” Is Likely Child Abuse
A naive person may think courts should “play it safe” by placing a child with the accusing parent. Yet the risk of placing a child with an alienating parent is significant. Alienators tend to engage in more types of abuse than simply badmouthing the other parent and preventing the children from seeing him or her. There are elevated rates of emotional manipulation, physical abuse, and sexual abuse associated with alienators. Alienators also often have one or more personality disorders, frequently closely intertwined with their abusive personalities. Experience and research shows not only that children who are abused tend to become abusers themselves but also that children who have parents with personality disorders are more likely to develop them, too.
Today about half of marriages end in divorce. Estimates by researchers are that more than half of divorces involving children include false allegations of domestic violence and child abuse, often intentionally made to gain an advantage in a custody battle. That means a large number of children, perhaps a quarter or more (consider that some families endure multiple divorces), may be subjected to circumstances in which warring parents are making allegations of abuse or domestic violence which are not true or are significantly exaggerated.
“Playing it safe” by placing the kids with the accuser may be more likely to harm than protect them. This may even be the case if the children really did endure some small amount of abuse by the accused parent. Being struck across the face by the open hand of an angry parent may be physical child abuse, but if it is infrequent it is likely to be less damaging to the child than daily emotional abuse such as children who are forced to live primarily or solely with an alienating or emotionally abusive parent who teaches them to hate their other parent and themselves.
A truly much safer strategy that would be far more likely to work in cases with domestic violence and child abuse allegations would entail treating nobody as guilty without a confession or a finding of guilt via a proper trial featuring a jury and “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” evidentiary standards. Absent such conditions or a voluntary agreement between the parents, child custody should be approximately equal contact between the children and both parents. Therapists would be assigned for the parents and the children and would see all the accusations being made to help them understand the risks and the help the family needs. The therapists would be required to communicate in writing about concerns and progress. These memos and reports would be subject to court review to aid in understanding what help the family needs. Safety measures would be put into place to look for evidence of child abuse including professionally supervised exchanges with a “detox” period for the children to discuss any concerns and calm down when being handed off from one parent to the other.
There would be some kids who might be hurt from such a plan, but there would be far fewer hurt from this than what is currently happening. Real abuse would be detected more rapidly and with higher certainty. The children would be less prone to the extreme parental alienation outcomes that occur especially in cases when children are blocked from contact from a loving and capable parent for years while being indoctrinated with messages of hate by the alienating parent. The cost of all of this may be lower, too, as employing a few therapists and supervised exchange services is likely far lower than the cost of the four or five attorneys you see in cases like Dumas v. Moelter. Think about it — will a child be healthier from the parent spending the family fortune on destroying each other in court or if they spend a fraction of that fortune on cooperative multiple therapists to head off problems at the pass and stay out of court? The answer should be obvious to anybody who has been through the San Diego family destruction system or family law courts like it.
Damon’s Video Clips
I watched 13 year old Damon’s video clips blaming his father for sexually abusing him and threatening to kill him and found them to be distinctly lacking in credibility. The lack of appropriate emotional intensity and expressions and the rehearsed style contribute to this. That he is making claims about events that occurred more than half a decade earlier, from an age when most children cannot remember their personal experiences well if at all, also raises serious questions of credibility. He’s been rehashing the alleged abuse with attorneys, therapists, his mother, and others for several years so whatever he thinks he remembers may be based more upon discussions with other people than any real experiences. Frankly I think it looks like he has been coached or trained to present himself in this manner.
One of Damon Moelter’s Self-Made Videos
There is likely no way to know for sure what happened. It is entirely possible that Damon could be cursed with both an abusive mother and an abusive father, each executing different forms of intimidation, brainwashing, and harm against him.
The only part which seems to me to be likely to be accurate is Damon’s professed dislike of what the courts have done to him and how they block his contact with his mother. He probably truly does want to spend time with his mother. Whether that is as a result of her parental alienation brainwashing, normal feelings for a child, or some mix of the two isn’t clear, however.
Damon’s Future
Damon Moelter deserves significant time with two loving parents. He also deserves help to keep from being played as an ally by either parent or their friends and family.
Dumas and Damon both talk about Eric Moelter like he is about to murder Damon at any moment, presumably to keep him quiet about the abuse allegations. This is ludicrous. The abuse allegations are already widespread public knowlege, nothing Eric Moelter can say or do can ever put those back into the bottle. By murdering Damon, he would just be proving his guilt while everybody is watching him carefully. The argument that Eric Moelter is a lethal threat to Damon is nonsense, even if the alleged child abuse really did happen, something which we will never know beyond a reasonable doubt.
While a better argument can be made that child sexual abusers can’t control themselves, even this is specious at this point. Damon is almost 14 years old and everybody is intently watching him and his brothers. There is little likelihood that anybody could get away with sexually abusing Damon at this point, regardless of whom it was.
Even if you believe that both Eric and Cindy could be or are in fact child abusers, there is no evidence of lethal danger from either of them.
Damon’s Abusers and Their Motives
What we do know with a high degree of certainty is that Damon Moelter is being abused by the government jerking his life around and playing their own parental alienation games when there are likely better options that could be tried if a more competent and fair judge was on the case. There are likely ways to ensure there is more contact between Damon and his mother while significantly reducing the risk of further parental alienation from her. But Alksne will not consider anything other than Dumas changing her behaviors, something that is obviously not going to happen as it strongly appears this woman is seriously mentally ill based upon her actions and words to date.
Yet simply because Dumas appears severely mentally ill doesn’t mean that she can’t have a role to play in Damon’s life. Children need to learn how to identify mentally ill and emotionally abusive people (his mother appears to be a prime example), set boundaries, and understand how to detect and manage relationships in which emotional manipulation is a factor. This is not happening now because of the incompetent and biased decisions made by Judge Alksne. When Damon turns 18, it is likely that he still will not have needed psychological and relationship skills and therefore he, like most abused children, will be at much greater risk of being further emotionally abused whether it is by his mother or other women in his life. While even a competent judge may not be able to ensure he gets those skills, it appears that the present incompetent judge is intent on seeing that he does not.
Today, Damon is also being abused by his mother continuing to push him to regard his father as a lethal danger to him when there is not only no evidence of that, it defies reason as mentioned above. It appears that Damon’s father is not actively abusing the children now and there is not sufficient evidence to conclude he was ever involved in any abuse.
Who is profiting from the ongoing child abuse against Damon? Mainly Lorna Alksne and several of her many divorce industry associates. There have been many minor’s counsel attorneys on this case as well as multiple highly paid psychologists. There is also an abusive Bonnie Dumanis sitting on the sidelines influencing events who is happy to see Dumas treated as guilty without even being prosecuted in accordance with law. Every one of these people is a potential or actual campaign supporter of Alksne. She makes money or builds power for them and they will likely reward her in kind. It’s the fundamental nature of the corrupt San Diego courts.
Alksne is an attention-seeker, too, much like Dumas. She shows this by putting herself in the limelight at every opportunity, be it speaking at family law seminars or pretending she actually cares about family law and children as a members of the Elkins Task Force as she’s being flown around and wined and dined by the government and other interested parties. The Dumas case has gained a lot of attention for Alksne. Unfortunately for San Diego families, the attention should have been much more focused on Alksne’s problematic behaviors in this case.
Dumas is profiting some, too. She is an attention-seeker who thrives on holding herself out as a victim to get many other mothers, some of whom have children who have been legitimately harmed by abusive fathers, to help fuel her crowd of vocal supporters.
Alksne Should Recuse and Resign
If Damon was abused by his father, that’s a tragedy. If he was or is being abused by his mother, that’s a tragedy, too. But frankly, several years after the alleged abuse, the tragedy that Damon is living now is more the result of destructive handling by biased court and government officials with a self-interested agend and no conscience to keep them from inflicting their own form of child abuse. Judge Alksne is the foremost example of the government abuse against Damon Moelter.
On January 15, 2010, Cindy Dumas filed a request to demand Alksne recuse herself from the case due to a lack of impartiality. Alksne ruled against it based upon technicalities, effectively refusing to consider it due to its form even though its substance has merit. She doesn’t want to let go of the case even though it is obvious to fair and impartial observer that there are many reasons for her to be biased and most of these reasons would not apply to a properly selected judge.
Given what has transpired, the claim that “a person aware of the facts might reasonably entertain a doubt that the judge would be able to be impartial” seems obviously true. As previously discussed in our story Judge Lorna Alksne On The Way Out After Home Picketed, Alksne has been subjected to alleged death threats, very public adverse opinions about her family, repeated picketing of her courthouse, and reportedly a recent picketing of her home. It appears that many of these threats are related to this particular case or cases involving friends of Dumas. It is implausible that this does not create an appearance that Alksne would be unable to be impartial.
Given the apparent collusion between Alksne and other San Diego judges and government employees with interest in this case and others like it, it appears that the interests of justice would be best served by removing this entire case from the San Diego court system and placing in the jurisdiction of another court far removed from San Diego where nobody has any direct or indirect personal interest in the outcome.
That Alksne is not willing to acknowledge this shows that she is an irresponsible judge. If she has truly made the right decisions, another court would make similar decisions to those she has already made. By her own refusal to recuse, she reinforces the appearance of bias and prejudice.
Further, the claims there would be a Family Code 3118 child abuse investigation that never materialized and the hidden ties between Alksne and other judges and law enforcement officials with involvement in the case makes the inability to be impartial even more obvious. We’ve previously reported on how Alksne and her co-horts have engaged in illegal political persecution of another critic, attorney Cole Stuart, that is even more reprehensible and obviously politically motivated than what they have done in the Dumas case. That they have done this should on its face show Alksne and her cohorts are clearly unable to follow the law or remain impartial when their political interests are threatened.
Alksne should not just be recusing from the Dumas case, she should be resigning from the bench.
Instead, it appears Alksne is positioning herself to continue as a judge after moving out of the family law courts into some other courts by late 2011. Let’s hope that the court she corrupts next will feature a jury to protect the innocent from her bias and incompetence or that the citizens will vote her out of office before she can do much more damage.
Further Reading
Stopping Parental Alienation Requires Family Court Reforms
DA Bonnie Dumanis, DDA Laura Gunn Not Immune from $20 Million Federal Lawsuit
Judge Lorna Alksne On The Way Out After Home Picketed
A Judge’s View of “Best Interests of the Children”
Moms Discredit Themselves by Denying Parental Alienation
Cole Stuart Considers $10M False Arrest Suit Against SDCBA
CCFC Family Law Protest in San Diego Results in Arrest of Group Leader
Eric Moelter Speaks Against Cindy Dumas Distortion Campaign
San Diego DA Bonnie Dumanis Attempts to Pervert Justice
Parental Alienation Can Happen to Adults and In Marriages
Judge Lorna Alksne in Cindy Dumas v. Eric Moelter
Deadly Divorces: Bonnie Hoult, Bruce Pardo, and Many More
Gender Polarization Impedes Family Law Reform
Breaking Mental Illness, Violence, Divorce, and Murder Cycles
The Gregory Mantell Show: Parental Alienation Syndrome
Torture of the Wade Family by San Diego CPS
The Lohstroh Case: Articles published from August 27 to November 2004
Nassau County judge jails mother who falsely accused ex of sex abuse and alienated him from kids
Feminist Opponents of Shared Parenting Get It Right in Parental Alienation/Abuse Accusation Case
A New Wave of Prosecutorial Hysteria: The Railroading of Tonya Craft
Child Abduction, Child Abuse, Child Custody, Children, Civil Rights, Courts, Crime, Divorce, Domestic Violence, Family, Government Abuse, Legal, Parental Alienation, Politics, Prosecutor |
My ex-husband attempted to have me charged with abduction in San Diego Family Law Court. A hearing was prepared and scheduled without my notification. My ex husband a San Diego Police Officer assaulted our daughter on May 12, 2007 in front of our minor son Danny. As a result my daughter dialed 911. Unfortunately the San Diego Sheriff’s Department advised my daughter her father could hit her if he wanted, they were not going to help and she was free to go. My daughter along with my son did go. My ex husband was denied abduction charges in San Diego Family Law Court and was also advised by Commissioner Lowe the children were old enough to choose. It seems certain attorneys and ex-spouses attempt to turn the other parent into criminals in a venue that is not equipped, qualified or capable of criminal charges. Merely a haven for waste and corruption, San Diego Family Law Court is a venue for certain attorneys to churn cases and line their pockets with money obtained through misconduct, essentially using children as currency. Our family now has been held hostage in San Diego Child Support Services for 3 years and 2 mos without resolution but plenty of taxpayers’ money wasted. I am not surprised to be hearing of more and more cases that are red flagged as “high conflict”. No oversight creates a breeding ground for corruption as well as another arena for an abusive spouse to continue to abuse.
What Dumas doesn’t mention, in her typical pattern of spin and selective information used to gain the sympathy of unsuspecting listeners, is that the judge ordered a schedule of unsupervised visits with Damon and his brothers. The schedule increases over time depending on whether Dumas can behave herself, that is, have a normal, healthy relationship with them, not one based on fear and the desire to destroy the bonds they have with their father (again).
Dumas herself refused to visit with the boys the previous 4 months because she felt that supervised visits were beneath her. It’s always been Dumas not the judge keeping her from her sons. The judge just wanted to limit the abuse Dumas doled out and managed the boys’ exposure to her accordingly. Four years of abuse and alienation by Dumas took time to heal. The judge gave the boys that time.
I recommend that you attend hearings presided over by Alksne. Listen to the cases and abusive parents that she has to deal with. Considering what’s at stake and the complexity of these cases I wouldn’t want any judge rushing to a judgment especially for the sake of the children.
There may be corrupt judges but Alksne got it right in this case. Dumas appealed to the San Diego appellate court and it rejected her request to have Alksne’s ruling overturned. The Court did a good job of summarizing the entire tragedy this family has suffered at the hands of Dumas – clearly suffering from borderline personality disorder (not to mention the ongoing, enormous amounts of money wasted at taxpayer expense.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/43790226/Moelter_Dumas_Appellate_Decision_092011.pdf
One good litmus test for attorneys, therapists and judges in these types of cases is is the parent doing what’s in the best interest of the children. If not, it’s a good sign that parent is the abusive one.
Chris, you really have no idea what you are talking about with respect to this case. You are using this case to further your agenda. If you knew the full details of this case (not just what you read on Dumas’ website) you would come to the same conclusion that all 25+ professionals over 7 years have come to: that Dumas, suffering from BPD, falsely accused Damon’s father of molesting him. After incessent questioning and prodding Damon (at the time 6 1/2 years old) day after day, week after week about what his father did to him on each previous visit, Damon, like most kids will tell mom what she wants to hear. And, of course, you can only imagine what Damon was saying after 3 1/2 years in total isolation with Dumas. And of course Dumas provides none of the clear evidence of what really happened on her website (well for a while she had Chucas’ report posted which showed the pattern of her alienating the boys from their father over 6 months before she abducted them), including the original transcript of Dumas’ interview with Damon and his brother about the “incident” which has no reference to a “hard thing”, anything wet, anything to indicate that it was other than a father trying to lift his child from an upper bunk in the middle of the night to take him to the bathroom so he wouldn’t wet his bed; no video of CPS interviewing Damon as part of their thorough investigation in which he tells the interviewer that he would tell his dad if anyone were touching him inappropriately, and on and on…
Nor will Dumas tell you on her website that she has disowned her oldest son now 19, and is in the process of doing the same to her middle son.
To all the professionals involved this is an extreme case with a lot of complexity to unravel. But the family court did get it right. Sometimes children are better off with limited contact with a psychologically harmful parent, and put into the full time care of a loving, capable parent.
Carol,
It seems like you have a mistaken impression that I somehow support Cindy Dumas. Nothing could be further from the truth. I basically agree with your assessment of her. However, that doesn’t mean that what happened in this case was at all reasonable. Even you yourself admit that pointing out how it has taken more than 7 years and more than 25 professionals to get the kids away from the abusive parent.
While it is likely that nobody in government has bothered to figure out how much the case has cost, it’s realistic to think it could be millions dollars (much of it funded by taxpayers) to deal with the apparent perjury, violations of law, and child abuse that should have been put to a stop far more quickly than it was. Because these violations of law are routinely rewarded rather than punished, we can expect more of the same in many other cases across the nation and world. The courts are clogged with cases like this one, the difference is that most of them are not nearly as publicly well known.
It’s too bad that some of the victims of Cindy Dumas have taken down their website proclaiming she has BPD. By all appearances she seems to be a poster case for it. The public should be warned of the danger she is.
It appears she’s managed to recruit other malicious mentally ill moms to support her vociferously as they hurt their own children and communities similarly. There are reasons to suspect she has been supporting some of these abusive moms in return.
Nobody who has rationally looked at this case can conclude that Dumas is anything but a very sick person who has done tremendous damage to her many victims including the children, her ex, his family, the whole community, and taxpayers across the region. But she has managed to dupe some women who should know better into thinking that her case somehow represents bias against women. It couldn’t be further from the truth. If she wasn’t a woman, she would probably be in prison for her crimes. Instead, she is free to make more trouble.
What you don’t seem to understand is that the family court is directly responsible for much of the damage done to the children in this case. Dumas could not have caused all this damage except that family court judges acted negligently and improperly even before she kidnapped and brainwashed the children. There were clear signs she was an emotionally abusive liar and nutcase who was not only doing something totally unreasonable but was likely to keep doing ever more harmful things until she was somehow satisfied with the outcome. Because she is a mother and her ex was not a personal friend of somebody in the government, she figuratively got a license to kill with the court’s consent. If anything, this case shows pro-female bias. If a father had done the same things, he would be in prison.
The judge who you for some reason seem to like is lazy, negligent, incompetent, biased, and dishonest. If you talk with other people (mothers, fathers, children, and mental health and family law professionals) who have been harmed by her, it is clear she has some agenda on which the “best interests of the children” don’t even rank in the top 5, maybe not even the top 10. Money, power, ego, helping her friends, pursuing a career track at the expense of the law and the public good, and a desire to not work very hard and to let others do her job for her (not necessarily in that order) are among the top ten items on her agenda in my opinion.
You know this case, but it appears you don’t know of others in which she has made repeated irrational, biased, and illegal decisions. She has even outright lied to support her personal opinions which are not based in fact. The judge is prejudicial from the get-go apparently due to her personal connections with others in the family law community and government. If Cindy Dumas had been right about her abuse claims (and to be clear, I think she is an abusive liar), I doubt even then the judge would have ruled otherwise. The outcome was set at the start, the kangaroo court antics were all about pumping up the billing for her friends in the community at the expense of the children, families, and public. Fortunately in this case, the evidence supports the eventual outcome. But based upon this judge’s patterns of behavior in this case and others, she will pursue her agenda even to the extent of lying about evidence and violating very clear rights and laws.
Nor do you apparently know of her interactions with other similarly abusive judges in the San Diego family law system. She has set the tone for increasing abuse of children and families and violations of the law for years. It is common for mental health and family law professionals in the San Diego system to comment that the system today is the most broken they have seen it during their entire careers and that the courts are hurting a lot of people wrongly. Alksne is a significant culprit in this.
That she finally made a decision that removed abused children from their abuser (Dumas) is missing the point. Better decisions should have been made YEARS earlier and at far less expense to the children, families, and taxpayers. As to WHY she made those decisions, it appears to have more to do with her personal agenda than with the law or facts. Eric Moelter and the children are very lucky that Dumas angered Alksne’s friends (Bonnie Dumanis, etc.) and that they were eager to retaliate against Dumas. Otherwise you can reasonably bet that like with so many other cases that come in front of her, she would have made the wrong decision for the wrong reasons. In this case, she made the right decision years late for the wrong reasons yet you’re somehow duped into supporting her seemingly based upon what seems to be a “one out of three ain’t bad given the children were only severely harmed for life” opinion.
No judge is ever perfect, but some of her actions warrant her removal from the bench. Yet that will probably never happen unless people are willing to come forward and expose her crimes loudly and publicly knowing that they will be illegally retaliated against unless critical mass is reached that would insulate them from reprisals.
Even California judges who are convicted criminals are seldom punished or held accountable unless they manage to anger other government officials. Hence you see family law judges who commit felony level crimes against the taxpayers getting whitewash treatments while you have others who were not as criminal removed from office not for their offenses but because they managed to anger other government officials. Look up Peter McBrien, Lisa Schall, and Deann Salcido and read about each of them. Why is it that felony-level destruction of public property and driving drunk the wrong way down a public highway don’t warrant removal from office but the TV show antics of DeAnn Salcido do? All three of them should have been removed from office, but only Salcido is gone. It is reasonably obvious she is gone because she angered others in the government with her publicly expressed views regarding other San Diego judges. Being a judge in San Diego and much of California is about politics and nepotism and covering up for the crimes of your peers. Following the law and serving the public good has nothing to do with it for many judges.
Being a judge is supposed to be about following the law and avoiding bias. A good judge would try to ensure impartiality by recusing when one has personal connections and agendas that taint one’s ability to do the job. Ironically, the few good judges often end up recusing from cases in which they could have helped or not running for re-election and leaving office in disgust once they know what the courts are truly like. This makes way for abusive judges to become commonplace. The California judiciary is full of corrupt and lawless individuals. Nothing is being done to clean up the growing disaster because their friends keep them in office. The public is mostly ignorant of what is happening and keeps voting abusive incumbents right back onto the bench even though they have a vague awareness of how broken the system is. Reform is desperately needed. Recent reader comments about voting all of the incumbents out of office are far more right than wrong.
Don’t let yourself be duped into thinking that the kids and family in this case were done any favors by Alksne or the San Diego family law courts. You can find “right decisions” made by anybody, even a tyrant such as Hitler or Mussolini or a destructive sociopath such as David Koresh or Cindy Dumas. That doesn’t make them good people or suitable for any place in history other than the trash pile of human refuse who caused far more harm than any good they ever did.
Chris
Carol,
Do you know more about the family background of Cindy Dumas? Was she an abused child like so many personality disordered abusers (Borderlines, Narcissists, etc.) are?
Rob
Damon’s childhood has been destroyed by Cindy.
Cindy Dumas is more a child sex offender than she admits. Her crimes against Damon include covert sex abuse, also known as emotional incest. She treats Damon like he is her husband or lover.
Covert sex abuse often goes hand-in-hand with parental alienation. This is something you have missed with your analysis. Please provide more coverage of this kind of abuse against children.
@Child Advocate
“Covert incest” is another phrase used to discuss this pattern of abusive behavior by a parent against a child.
There is much overlap between abuse tactics of alienators and parentifiers. It’s worth further discussion. Perhaps one of us will have a chance to write about it further.
My (possibly incorrect) understanding is that Eric Moelter remarried but Cindy Dumas is still fixated on her obsession with Damon. If this understanding is correct, your contention that she is engaged in emotional incest against Damon seems all the more plausible and not incompatible with the other abuses she has been found to have inflicted against the kids and her ex. The thinking here is that a parent engaging in emotional incest lacks a close romantic relationship with another adult and uses the child as a substitute lover in many ways or even every way except for actual physical sex. Thus another term for this kind of abuse is “spousification” of a child.
Much of the coverage of emotional incest argues that it causes severe long-term psychological damage to the children that approaches the damage caused by actual sexual abuse. However, the damage from extended periods of emotional incest (e.g., years of living with an alienating/parentifying parent) can easily exceed that from a single sexual abuse incident (e.g., a single incident of misdemeanor sexual molestation of a minor).
You really have to look at the overall experience of the child and the child’s reactions to understand the extent of the damage from the abuse. For example, some kids who are molested once by a stranger or distant relative (groping, kissing, etc.) may suffer much less long-term damage than what a parent can do to them via parentification without any actual sexual contact. That is because the kids are not as extensively traumatized by a one-time very bad experience as they are by continuous abuse. Despite this, often the courts cooperate with continuing the parentification abuse much as they have done in the Damon Moelter case by failing to act in a timely fashion and failing to adequately protect the children and adequately constrain the abusive parent’s contact with the victims.
Rob