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California billionaire Donald Bren had two children with former girlfriend Jennifer McKay Gold. They had a 13 year long affair, but they never married and he had little involvement with the children. Gold claims that Bren promised he would be involved in the children’s lives and that his failure to do so is a violation of agreements between them. Therefore Gold and the children, David Bren, age 18, and Christie Bren, age 22, decided to sue Donald Bren for $134 million in back child support.

Donald Bren is Rich

Bren is very secretive and media-shy about his life, income, and assets. Estimates are that his assets may be worth around $12 billion, largely derived from real estate development in Southern California. Forbes Magazines has placed him 16th on its list of the 400 richest Americans.

He and his attorney claim he paid about $10 million in child support, vacations, cars, and other payments and gifts to Gold and the children during their childhood. He felt obligated to ensure they would receive advanced education through graduate school if they wished, received luxury German cars when they started to drive, and live in an upper middle class standard of living well beyond that of most of the US population. Clearly these children were not in need of more money.

Is Gold a Golddigger?

Gold disagrees on the amounts. She and the children also claim that he owes far more because he didn’t stay involved in their lives.
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Until you’ve been through a divorce in a child abusing nation like the United States or United Kingdom, you likely have no clue of the extortion and abuse families are put through by the courts and governments of such nations. But that may change as more and more fathers with ties to the entertainment and mass media industries start to open up about their experiences, particularly how their children and they are blocked from contact with each other with the full cooperation of the courts in what amounts to state-sponsored parental alienation child abuse.

Noted writer Louis de Bernieres, author of Corelli’s Mandolin which was later turned into the movie Captain Corelli’s Mandolin starring Nicolas Cage and Penelope Cruz, has recently experienced state-sponsored parental alienation himself. He seldom gets to see his children Robin and Sophie, all of five and two years old respectively, as the courts engaged in the usual sexist practice of marginalizing the father. He’s now joined UK’s shared parenting group Families Need Fathers to fight against the ongoing abuse by UK courts and government against children and families.
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In my previous article Extreme BPD / NPD Behaviors Are Internally Triggered, I discussed the puzzling ways in which normal circumstances seem to trigger abusive behaviors from Borderlines, Narcissists, and other personality disordered abusers. My advice to those who can do so is to get away and stay away from these people as they are a serious danger to your own mental health, even your freedom and your life, if you continue to have anything to do with them.

Unfortunately, not everybody can easily extricate themselves from the abuse without severe consequences. This is particularly true for parents of children whose other parent is a Borderline or Narcissist. Staying in the children’s lives means staying in the line of fire of the abuser. Leaving is likely to subject the children to even more abuse. Often the abuser has focused most of her or his rage against their former partner or spouse. But if that parent leaves, the rages, abuses, and emotional manipulations are not going to stop. They will probably be redirected at somebody else close to the abuser as loved-ones are the tops targets for these sick people. The children are a likely target for even more abuse than they have already received. This chronic abuse with no escape (as the healthy parent has disappeared) is likely to create severe psychological damage, even personality disorders, in these children as they have even less means to defend themselves against one of these sociopaths than an adult does.
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Recently a reader of our site wrote a comment about our article Talking With A Borderline citing how it didn’t show how non-Borderlines trigger the negative behaviors associated with Borderline Personality Disorder. The comment seemed to be intended to place some of the blame for Borderline behaviors on the people around them, particularly people who are essentially the targets of Borderlines who do not suffer from a personality disorder or engage in abusive behaviors themselves. This is mostly a mistake in my view. It also makes me wonder if the comment came from somebody with a Borderline son or daughter or who is personally suffering from BPD and therefore may be prone to blame-shifting as a means of coping with his or her own guilt or shame.

Most of the people around a Borderline are not abusive, yet they may trigger reactions in Borderline akin to an actual abuser even when they aren’t displaying an iota of aggression or hostility. In most of these situations, the Borderline perceives aggression or abuse in their own minds, even when a neutral disinterested person would say none is present, and then launches into a reaction that is similar to what they might do if there actually was an abuser trying to harm them. The trigger is much more internal, in the mind of the Borderline, than external. This is what makes is so difficult for others to understand why the sociopathically inclined individuals, be they Borderlines, Narcissists, or something else, behave as they do.

Extreme Reactions Product of Child Abuse

Borderlines are sometimes said to suffer from “emotional dysregulation” because they react in extreme ways to normal stimuli. This extreme reaction in many cases developed from their experience as child abuse victims, an experience most of them share, and trying to find ways to avoid being abused again. Many of them have found that extreme reactions including false blaming, projection, lying, and other behaviors associated with Borderlines and Narcissists alike are reasonably effective at either drawing fire away from them and making somebody else the target of their abuser. Other times, their extreme behaviors may somehow justify in their own minds why they are deserving of abuse, perhaps giving them some delusional feeling of control over the abuse. Over time, many of them may generalize these maladaptive behaviors by applying them to people who are not abusing them but by whom they are reminded of what it feels like to be abused.
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We’re looking for feedback on your experiences with exchanges and visitations, particularly those involving those either professionally or informally supervised. We hope to write some articles over the next couple of months on what works, what doesn’t, and to include comments on particular service providers. If you’d like to be anonymous or to include your name, either is OK with us.

Many parents end up suffering the high expenses and interference of supervised visitations because of false allegations made by a malicious ex and how abusive courts regard parents as guilty until proven innocent, even when there is no evidence to substantiate the allegations. Yet despite the hassle and expense, sometimes these court ordered services actually do end up helping to clear up the false allegations. That’s because some of the providers are competent and honest enough to write accurate reports of how the children behave around both the falsely accused parent and the accusing or alienating parent and are not afraid to give examples of why it appears there are false allegations and parental alienation at work.

We’d like to help guide our readers to use facilities that are competent, fair, and honest and that use exchange and visitation monitoring techniques that are not overly intrusive yet can head off a lot of problems. If you’ve got recommendations for or against particular providers and techniques, it would be terrific if you would take a few minutes to write them down and forward them so others can benefit from your thoughts.
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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.
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The Canadian Symposium for Parental Alienation Syndrome will be held at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City on October 2 to 3, 2010. The speakers include a wide variety of experts from across the United States and Canada.
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Parental alienation is a very serious form of widespread child abuse aided and abetted by the corrupt and abusive courts in the United States and Canada. Parental alienation is driven by the psychological problems of parents abused as kids as well as by the government and divorce industry. Courts are commonly encouraging conflict in divorcing families that leads to parental alienation and other long-running conflicts damaging children. From this, they derive income and job security.

In a very real sense, parental alienation is government-backed child abuse. When you see a judge in a black robe, if you are reminded of the grim reaper or angel of death coming to kill your family because that’s its job, you’re not far off the mark. Parental alienation will not stop unless court reforms are implemented that support shared parenting, move away from the adversarial “winner takes all” decisions common today, and put into place support systems that help parents work together for the benefit of their children without repeated conflict-inducing trips back to court.

Parental alienation is a form of emotional abuse against both children and the alienated parent, sometimes called the target parent, and often his or her entire extended family. As parental alienation expert Dr. Amy Baker has found in her research, it causes greatly elevated rates of long-term depression and substance abuse in the children who are victims. The harm does not stop when they become adults, either. A large portion of alienated children will in turn enter into emotionally abusive relationships which result in them being alienated from their own children.

(from Parental Alienation Book For Middle School Kids: “I Don’t Want to Choose!”)

Alienated children frequently are psychologically damaged in long-term ways. They often develop depression, substance abuse problems, eating disorders, and even manipulative behavior patterns similar to their alienating parents. Some compare growing up with an alienating parent as being kidnapped and brainwashed. Of her 40 research subjects covered in Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome: Breaking the Ties That Bind, some notable statistics are:

• 70% suffered from depression
• 58% were divorced
• Half of the 28 who had children are estranged from their own children
• 35% developed problems with drugs and alcohol

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Tonya Craft

False sexual abuse allegations are an appalling mainstay in child custody cases today. They cause immense damage to the falsely accused parent and to the children. The false accuser usually doesn’t care who they hurt so long as they get the kids as a result. The courts and government are quick to side with the false accuser, demanding that a careful investigation be done and in the meantime the children will live with the parent making the accusations.

These “investigations” are often nothing but a witch-hunt that takes multiple years to fizzle out. By that time, the children involved are often suffering badly from the lack of a parent who loves them. The falsely accused parent has often not only lost years with his children but has lost his job, career, home, savings, reputation, and quite possibly a new marriage, too. Usually none of this is remedied. The falsely accused parent doesn’t even receive an apology from anyone. Some “mother’s rights” groups don’t care about any of this and view false sexual abuse allegations as a sure-win strategy of choice because they are willing to do anything to get children away from their fathers, even when it results in psychological damage to the children. But the recent case of Tonya Craft may give reason for them to change their positions. That’s because it is a case in which the mother was falsely accused of sexual abuse by her ex-husband, a malicious parental alienator of the most vile sort named Joal Henke.
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Nursing infants should be able to spend quality time, including overnights, with their fathers. Yet some mothers try to use nursing as an excuse to block contact between infants and their dads. Courts should be fully aware that there are plentiful means to ensure a good supply of breast milk for use by fathers caring for infants.

Robert Franklin of Fathers & Families recently penned the posting Expert: No Conflict Between Breastfeeding and Shared Parenting about an article from a breastfeeding advocate who claims fathers are trying to assert in court that breastfeeding is inappropriate behavior:

(Breastfeeding Court Letter, by Katherine A Dettwyler, Ph.D., Anthropology)

In addition, my research has been used to counter charges of child abuse and “inappropriate parenting behaviors” in many court cases, especially involving divorce and custody disputes, where fathers may accuse the mother of “inappropriate parenting by virtue of extended breastfeeding” as a strategy to gain custody of children, or may simply claim that ‘continued breastfeeding’ is not relevant to shared custody arrangements.

At this point (2005), all of the research that has been conducted on the health and cognitive consequences of different lengths of breastfeeding shows steadily increasing benefits the longer a child is breastfed up to the age of 2 years, and no negative consequences. No research has been conducted on the physical, emotional, or psychological health of children breastfed longer than 2 years. Thus, while there is no research-based proof that breastfeeding a child for 3 years provides statistically significant health or cognitive benefits compared to breastfeeding a child for only two years, there is no research to show that breastfeeding a child for 3 years (or 4-5-6-7-8-9 years) causes any sort of physical, psychological or emotional harm to the child. This has recently been confirmed in the 2005 American Academy of Pediatrics “Recommendations for breastfeeding the healthy term infant” (see below).

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Some of the most emotionally abusive relationships and traumatic divorces involve the mentally ill. One of the most difficult of these mental illnesses is Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) because it is not easily diagnosed. Behaviors can range from extreme violence to subtle patterns of emotional blackmail and projection. On top of that, many Borderlines tend to live in denial, constantly avoiding their own feelings of emptiness, insecurity, anger, disappointment and fear that more often than not stems from an abusive childhood. It is hard to treat and help someone if they don’t want to face their own abuse — abuse that they themselves suffered or the abuse that they themselves do.

Classifying Borderlines as “Acting In” or “Acting Out”

Not all borderlines are focused on harming others. Some are so busy with their own inner demons that they are trapped in a realm of substance abuse, suicide attempts, and self-hate that for most can be traced back to child abuse or neglect. They are often known as the “acting in” type. If this is the kind of Borderline in your life, count yourself lucky. That’s because they are both more likely to recognize their own problems and work on them and less likely to focus on destroying other people in a desperate attempt to portray themselves as worthy people who are victims in need of assistance.

The other group of Borderlines, sometimes called the “acting out” group, are narcissistic sociopaths with little sense of guilt or remorse. They often have little limit to what they will do to make themselves “win” and you “lose” and don’t care who else they hurt in the process. If you have been in a relationship with a person suffering Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), be aware that much of what is written about “acting out” Borderlines applies equally to Narcissists.
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Recently, we heard from a reliable source that embattled San Diego Judge Lorna Alksne spoke at yet another family law seminar in June 2010. She speaks at many of these events to rally her friends and associates in the family law profession to keep the courts humming with the profitable business of financially victimizing and violating the rights of children and families. There was talk both of her being furious over her home being picketed by an increasingly angry public and a job change she is planning.

Alksne Planning to Bow Out Under Fire

Apparently the bad reputation Alksne has earned and the increasing public animosity towards her has finally had some effect on her career plans. She reportedly mentioned that she plans to stay in control over the San Diego family law courts for another year before she moves to another position.

There have allegedly been death threats made against her. There is public chatter about law enforcement investigations of the threats on web sites of those upset at Alksne’s abusive and biased conduct.

Picketing of her courthouse on Sixth Avenue has become routine as more and more parents understand that she aids and abets the ongoing abuse, corruption, and misconduct of family law courts and “professionals” in the county.

Hundreds of parents and concerned community members have signed a petition calling for the recall of Judge Lorna Alksne.
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Highlights of a speech by San Diego’s Honorable Lisa Drunk on June 31st

I am honored to appear before you tonight at this meeting of the San Diego County Bar Association. Thank you for inviting me to speak on my views on the best interests of children as judges see them. This is a very important matter as it is essential to our careers as jurists, attorneys, and court service providers.

As an experienced family law judge, I am tasked with upholding the law in my courtroom and serving the best interests of children. This is a difficult job, one to which I must give a great deal of consideration and attention to creating the best possible outcome to the people who really matter, judges and our friends.

When litigants enter my courtroom, they must understand that I am God and the law is what I say it is. If they question this, I will take their children, property, and other privileges away from them. They have no rights, only privileges which I allow them to have. They have no right to trial by jury, no right to due process of law, and no right to anything except to bask in the glow of my presence so long as they do not annoy me.
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Separation anxiety is a behavior normally found in infants and small children when a loved one is moving out of contact with them. They become worried and uncomfortable, anticipating the absence of the loved one. Often this loved one is a parent, other times it is a relative or a familiar care provider. This is a normal part of the development of children and tends to go away by the time they are around three or four years old. But not all behaviors that appear to be separation anxiety are in fact so. Alarmingly, sometimes such behaviors are the result of premeditated child abuse by the parent handing over a child to another person, particularly to the child’s other parent.

Personality Disordered Abusers Hurts Kids To Hurt Ex and Win Custody

When you’re a divorcing or divorced parent of a child you had a with a sociopath, psychopath, or other personality disordered abuser (PDA), there’s a chance you will come face-to-face with the reality that your ex is willing to abuse your child to make it look like he or she doesn’t like being returned to you. The ex wants to worsen the separation anxiety, or at least the apparent “symptoms” of it, often in front of witnesses whom will be asked to write declarations or testify in court or to talk with psychological evaluators, therapists, CPS, and court-appointed mediators. The PDA expects these reports that the child doesn’t like to be returned to you will help ensure your custody is reduced and the PDA’s custody is increased.
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We’ve all heard horror stories about parents who are falsely accused of crimes by a vicious ex who is bent on banning the children from seeing them. False domestic violence and false sexual abuse allegations are a sure-fire way to manipulate family law judges to participate in parental alienation child abuse. But they are not the only way malicious parents interfere with the contact between kids and the unfortunate parent who is targeted for malicious mischief.

In this article, I’ll outline a few of the less obvious but still damaging ways that malicious parents, particularly those engaging in parental alienation, use to cause trouble for the other parent. All of these tactics are simple, easily spun by a masterful manipulator to look like they are somebody else’s fault, and yet wrongly interfere with contact between kids and their other parent. They generally rely upon wasting the parent’s limited time with the kids and creating aggravation to upset both the parent and kids. They are more commonly used by “custodial” parents to abuse “noncustodial” parents, but in theory the small percentage of noncustodial parents engaging in parental alienation could use similar tactics.
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There are probably thousands or more mother’s rights groups around the world. The web is replete with their sites such as Justice4Mothers and Rights for Mothers. Generally they are irate about being deprived of contact with their kids and being financially and emotionally destroyed by family law courts. I certainly understand that as it has happened to me, too, as it has to many other parents. Unfortunately, some of these moms have gone off the deep end into sexism and gender warfare that is both counterproductive to their cause and to the interests of their children. A very obvious sign of this is the many mother’s rights web sites that issue blanket denials of the existence of parental alienation, a form of emotional child abuse that is common in divorces and troubled families.

Kids Need Both Parents

Mothers deserve to spend time with their kids, just like fathers do. In almost every case, aside from extreme abuse and neglect, kids benefit from significant time with both of their parents and their parents’ extended families. That judges in family courts across the United States and in many other nations use child custody as a means to encourage conflict and thereby increase workload, revenues, and relish in their own power as family dictators is a disgusting display of tyrannical behavior that must be stopped.

If the family law courts of which I am aware are even remotely similar to those in other parts of the United States, the many abusive family law judges in this country are a far worse threat to the safety and security of the typical American child than Al Qaeda 9/11 terror attacks and BP oil spills combined. In opposing the tyranny of the family law courts, I support these mother’s rights groups in regards to their intent to stop the abuses of the government and its war on families. I have similar opinions of the father’s rights groups in this regard.
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For anyone who hasn’t read Taken into Custody: The War Against Fatherhood, Marriage, and the Family, I just finished it and highly recommend it. Many are familiar with Professor Stephen Baskerville’s basic theories and some have read excerpts from the book. Published in 2007, this book is a comprehensive and up-to-date description of the enormity of the problems endemic to the current tyrannical status of the judicial system as a whole, not merely family court. It is an extraordinary work.

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California Assembly Representative Jim Beall is back with another attempt to shut down destructive use of child custody evaluations. This new Assembly Bill 2475 has grown out of his failure in 2009 to pass his Assembly Bill 612 that wrongly aimed to ban discussion of parental alienation in family law courts. This time around, AB 2475 is on more solid ground as it aims to strip quasi-judicial immunity from private family court appointed experts such as psychological and custody evaluators. This would provide a legal fallback for civil suits for egregious cases of misconduct by these professionals.

Failed AB 612 from 2009

Last year, Jim Beall wanted to outlaw the discussion of parental alienation in family law cases. We and many other organizations that support shared parenting and protecting children from abuse and neglect vehemently opposed the AB 612 legislation he introduced. AB 612 was nothing but whitewashing of emotional child abuse to enable abusers to get away with hurting children and in many cases rewarding them for doing so. That bill, AB 612, was gutted by legislators who understood that parental alienation is a real phenomenon. Beall later withdrew the bill.
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CCFC co-founder Cole Stuart was recently wrongfully arrested due to what appears to be manipulation of the police by his ex-wife Lynn Stuart and possibly various elements of the San Diego family law system. While malicious alienating parents using courts and police to abuse their children’s other parent is commonplace particularly in a broken family court system such as that in San Diego, she has been aided at this by a particularly dirty San Diego lawyer. Lynn Stuart hired Jeffrey Fritz. He has earned a reputation as an attorney who is a “shark” who will resort to all manners of abusive and unethical tactics to “win” cases for his clients while driving up huge billings that severely damage the finances of all but the very wealthiest. He typically attracts high-conflict clients such as Lynn Stuart.
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California Coalition for Families and Children is sponsoring a protest against the corruption, misconduct, and abuse of the San Diego family law industry on the evening of April 15, 2010, in front of the San Diego County Bar Association (SDCBA) . One of the more responsible custody/psychological evaluators in San Diego County has stated “the San Diego family law courts are the most broken they have been in decades.” Much of the blame falls most directly on the shoulders of many unqualified, biased, and even abusive judges who are harming children and families with their decisions in cases with devastating conflicts that are being encouraged by profit-seeking unethical lawyers and divorce industry service providers.
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