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You’ve probably heard the term “Psycho Ex Wife” if you’ve talked with a man who has suffered from the atrocities of the family law courts manipulated by a truly malevolent ex. It was popularized in part by the illegally banned website The Psycho Ex Wife. Malicious moms are deservingly labeled as psychos quite often, hence the widespread recognition of the phrase. The reality is that both men and women can behave horribly and abusively using the children as pawns in a struggle with the other parent. Often this abusiveness starts even before the filing for a divorce.

It’s hard to find a widely accepted term for referring to the kind of maliciously manipulative parents that interfere with their children’s time with the other parent. Some call them “high conflict personalities” (HCPs), others “parental alienators”, still others “sociopaths” or “psychopaths.” Many refer to Borderlines, Narcissists, Histrionics, Antisocials, Paranoids, or other personality disorder diagnoses to explain the behaviors and label the abusers. The problem is huge and really encompasses multiple groups of people with severely messed up behaviors as parents. For this article, I’ll simply be referring to them as “psycho parents” and not try to more precisely label them.

In this article, I’ll be describing some of the tactics that psycho parents use to manipulate kids to participate in resisting child custody exchanges. This is part of the overall problem of parental alienation. The psycho parent is often successful at causing children to resist custody exchanges even in cases in which the children do not actually hate the parent being attacked and still enjoy spending time with that parent.

Anybody faced with a psycho parent is likely to benefit from reading about Borderlines and Narcissists and their interactions with children. However, don’t let this mislead you into trying to diagnose one of these people and use such as a diagnosis in court. Even if you are absolutely correct in your assessment, judges almost uniformly lack the understanding of what it means and will attack you for putting a reasonable label on the bizarre and destructive behaviors because you’re not a licensed psychologist. Unfortunately, many if not most licensed psychologists are not capable of diagnosing these kinds of disorders accurately because they lack the time with the person and also, in some cases, have their own agendas and biases that make them easy targets for a psycho parent to manipulate.

Motivations of the Psycho Parent

If there’s anything truly common to all psycho parents, it’s hard to find. Although many of them were abused by one or both parents as kids, not all were. And not all abused kids grow up to be psycho parents. Many psycho parents are Borderlines or Narcissists, but not all are. Even if they do meet the criteria for BPD, NPD, or some other personality disorder, few are formally diagnosed and fewer still ever voluntarily seek treatment or honestly work on fixing their problems. So the formal name for whatever ails them is somewhat besides the point, although it is sometimes handy as an abbreviation for describing their overall behavior patterns.

What I find to be reasonably frequent features of psycho parents are the following:

• A history of insecurity during childhood. This often stems from child abuse or neglect in the home, but can also arise from other situations such as severe poverty or living in a unsafe environment such as a neighborhood with frequent violence from crime or war.
• Pervading sense of insecurity about one’s self as an adult. This flows from the childhood insecurities that were never resolved. Some might say that Narcissists don’t act like this, often touting their own superiority. But when you think about it, they really do have intense insecurities and their Narcissitic behaviors are the means to make themselves feel better or to hide their self-doubts.
• Extreme focus on self. Inside their adult bodies they are still hurt little insecure children. Consequently, they are usually unable to focus on anybody but themselves because they are so badly damaged they never learned how to do so. This shows up via narcissistic traits such as selfishness, even if the person does not meet the criteria for NPD.
• Little or no empathy for others. These people are usually unable to put themselves in another’s shoes, or to consider how their words and actions harm others. They probably don’t care. Sometimes you may see them pretend to care, but usually this is a means to manipulate others. Other times, it is simply they are following behavior patterns they have seen other more healthy people follow often without actually having any genuine empathy themselves.
• Frequent manipulations of others as a means to meet their emotional needs. Often such manipulations involve lying and distorting about the actions of others, particular the ex or the kids, in an attempt to win allies or sympathy or battles in court. But these people also play at being victims in many other venues. In a workplace, for instance, you may see them pretend to be loaded up with unfair amounts of work, that other people are taking credit for their work, or that they are being sexually harassed.

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There has been much mainstream media coverage of the controversy over the illegal banning of the The Psyco Ex Wife website. Many of the mainstream media writers pump up sympathy-evoking statements, particularly those coming from Allison Morelli who is the woman reputed to be the PEW (Psycho Ex Wife) character discussed on the site. As an example, I’ve seen variations of this statement reported by UPI and other publications:

Quoted from Man’s divorce blog starts free speech dispute:

Allison Morelli said she just wants the legal battle to end.

A person who has not had experience interacting with sociopaths is easily led into feeling sympathy by statements like this.

But anybody who is familiar with the workings of the mind of the devious sociopathic liars who pervade family law courts must ask, what does such a statement really mean? In my experience, statements such as “I just want the litigation to end” are warning flags. You should stop to think long and hard about what they really mean.

Healthy people certainly would have a reason for making such a statement. When they say something like this, they mean they want to stay out of court, or that they want some fair resolution to the dispute and then to be done with it and put it behind them.

But sociopaths mean something completely different. They often make such comments not for honest reasons but to manipulate you and to gain allies.
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In June 2011, Judge Diane E. Gibbons of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, illegally ordered an excellent web site called The Psycho Ex Wife to be taken down in violation of the US Constitution’s First Amendment. The site is reportedly owned by a Pennsylvania woman named Misty Weaver-Ostinato whose partner for the last several years has been a man named Anthony Morelli. On the site, they identified themselves as DW and “Mister M” never using their real names or identifying information, nor the real name or identifying information of Morelli’s ex who allegedly inspired the site with her behaviors.

First Amendment rights expert Eugene Volokh writes that he believes this order is blatantly unconstitutional, especially because of its expansiveness:

from “Father Shall Take Down That Web Site and Shall Never on Any Public Media Make Any Reference to Mother At All,”

If the father says anything about the mother in public, he could be sent to jail for contempt of court. The order isn’t limited to banning libelous statements (though I think even such a much narrower ban would itself pose constitutional problems, especially under Pennsylvania law), nor is it even limited to statements about minor children (though even that sort of order strikes me as constitutionally impermissible). Rather, the court order categorically orders the removal of a Web site, and prohibits all public statements — factually accurate or not — by one person about another person.

Allison Morelli apparently claims that PEW (the abbreviation for “Psycho Ex Wife”, one of the main characters discussed on the site) is her, even though nobody is ever identified or named on the site. According to reports in other publications, PEW served as the source for around a quarter of the articles describing bizarre and abusive behaviors on the banned website.

Allison, for reasons that don’t make any sense to me at all, wants us all to believe that PEW is her and therefore the whole site is an attack on her. She claims the site is about her without naming or identifying her or anybody else. She simultaneously implies or maintains that she didn’t behave as the PEW character behaved but somehow she knows they were writing the site about her to attack her. This makes no sense to me, nor does it to much of anybody else except apparently Allison Morelli, her supporters, and Judge Gibbons.

The PEW character may not be meant to be literally interpreted. The words and actions appear to be what you could see as a synthesis of behaviors and conduct of more than one troubled ex-spouse. Certainly describing a person as looking like “Jabba the Hut” (a description used for PEW) is obviously figurative speech that no rational person is going to believe is a literal statement. Yet Allison Morelli claims the site is about her and is an attack on her, all the while trying to imply or claim she didn’t write the emails or do the actions described. But somehow she “knows” it is all about her.

However much literary license may have been taken with PEW’s words and actions and no matter what victimhood badge Allison is trying to win with her weird assertions, it is clear that “PEW” as used on the site often does not even refer to Allison Morelli even if you believe it sometimes does.

PEW is used to refer not just to the PEW character but also as a generic abbreviation throughout the site’s content. It means different things in different places. This abbreviation is often used to refer to any generic “psycho ex wife” or at times even more broadly any “psycho ex” regardless of gender or marital status.

Even the readers of the site used such terms to describe their own conflicts. “PEW” is frequently used to generically refer to a “psycho ex wife” or to some other unnamed specific ex-wife that could not be Allison Morelli, unless of course she wants to claim she has been married to dozens or hundreds of the readers and they are all writing about her, too.

The site and its readers also use “PEH” to refer to “psycho ex husband” which can’t be about her. Or can it? If she were to claim she was a man named Alfred in some past life and therefore any references to “PEH” are about her, too, from her actions to date it looks like Judge Gibbons would be convinced by that argument.

The generic “psycho ex” content and discussion included all the kinds of things you’d expect to see discussed about malicious Borderlines, Narcissists, Antisocials, and other personality disorders that are typically seen in sociopaths. These include drug abuse, alcohol abuse, verbal abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse, manipulation, projection, gaslighting, pathological lying, distortion campaigns, and more. They even discussed at times how these people get to be their malicious selves, often from a history of abuse as children. All of that is very generic and helpful information that doesn’t specifically pertain to Allison Morelli. Some of it may not have been written to have anything to do with her. Yet Judge Gibbons, in her infinite stupidity, sought to silence all of that content, too, because she apparently is unable or unwilling to differentiate between content that is widely and generally applicable and not specific to any one person and content (be it information or misinformation) that has to do with the Morelli dispute in particular.

Unfortunately for the operators of the site and its readers, Judge Gibbons does not seem able to ask basic questions about how an anonymous site naming and identifying nobody but quoting bizarre and abusive emails and describing similar behaviors could be about a person unless that person is also in effect admitting she is behind those words and actions.

Gibbons must also have failed her Constitutional Law classes on the First Amendment, nor does she understand that even if there was some defamatory or harassing statement on the site that this does not justify banning all the content. She evidently can’t comprehend or doesn’t care that roughly 2/3 or more of the material on the site wasn’t even about the PEW character and therefore could not have been about the Morelli dispute, even if Allison wants people to believe she is the PEW character.

Did Gibbons even review the site? By the appearance of the alleged transcripts I’ve seen so far, it looks like she just took Allison’s word for it when she moved to ban the site.

Take Down the Site Or Go To Prison

The judge stated among other things that if the site was not taken down, she would imprison Anthony and take away his kids. Here’s a direct quote from the alleged June 6, 2011 transcript:

THE COURT:
Father shall take down that website and shall never on any public media make any reference to the mother at all, nor any reference to the the relationship between mother and children, nor shall he make any reference to his children other than “happy birthday” or other significant school events. The father’s girlfriend shall not be referred to as mother and father shall not in any way interfere with mother’s relationship with her children.

Mother will not consume any alcohol at all and will continue in alcohol treatment.

This matter is continued for a period of four months.

By her words in the alleged transcript, Judge Gibbons indicates that Allison Morelli is an alcoholic. Later you see:

NAME REDACTED: You know, in the course of having custody evaluation, it was discovered that I had developed a drinking problem as a result of gastric bypass surgery that I had in March of ’09. And that after that point, you know, I suffered from addiction transference and, you know, it — I am certainly not going to minimize that today, that of course it impacted the children. But the children saw me intoxicated four times in the course of two years. And I am in treatment. I attend AA meetings.

To date I have not seen anybody disputing the legitimacy of this transcript. There’s also a second alleged transcript of a June 14, 2011 hearing available. I’d like to have some reasonably easy way to quickly authenticate such documents with court records, but apparently the Pennsylvania courts don’t publish such court records online.

The website had a lot to say about the “PEW” character over the years. “PEW” was alleged to be an emotional child abuser, harasser, abusive litigator, perjurer, frequent violator of court orders, and was suspected by Anthony and Misty of suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder.

If Allison Morelli didn’t do such things, then why on earth would she be arguing that the site is about her? And if she did so such things, why on earth would she want the public to hear about it by publicly claiming the site is about her?

If Anthony and Misty believe that PEW behaved so abusively, regardless of who PEW is, those familiar with such destructive situations should be able to understand why they would have been motivated to write anonymously about such conflicts.

Later in the transcript, Gibbons talks about incarcerating the father if he does not follow her orders, apparently including the ones regarding the illegal restrictions on his free speech rights and the illegal orders made regarding his partner’s website:
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I’ve been meaning to publish a review of Welcome Back Pluto: Understanding, Preventing, and Overcoming Parental Alienation for some time now. Having watched it myself and with some children who are targets of parental alienation, I think it is a very helpful video for most kids who are at risk for alienation but who have not yet been totally turned against parent they are being encouraged to hate.

There are a lot of positive reviews of this video on Amazon, I’d encourage you to read them. Instead of simply rehashing the universally positive general comments about the video, I’m going to outline chapter by chapter what you’ll see when you watch it so you can better understand what Dr. Warshak is trying to accomplish with this video.

Chapter 1 – What is Alienation?

This first chapter explains what parental alienation is and what it isn’t. It makes it clear that even though it sounds like it has something to do with space aliens, it has nothing to do with this. It explains alienation in the general sense, that people can hate a person, their government, or their family. It breaks down the level of alienation in levels via the terms disillusioned, alienated, and estranged. It also explains that alienation can be realistic, such as when somebody has been very cruel for a long time, or unrealistic when the rejected person was once loved but now is not despite not having done anything to justify this.

I often use the term “target parent” to refer to what the video calls the “rejected parent”, in part because I’ve observed that such parents are often not only targeted for alienation but also for defamation, false accusations, harassment, intimidation, and more by the parties who are out to harm them and the children’s relationships with them.
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Jesse Ventura is not just a former wrestling star. He’s also the former governor of Minnesota from 1999 to 2003, a former Navy SEAL, and a man disgusted by the fascist United States of America. Almost a year ago, he filed suit against the US government’s TSA (Transportation Security Administration) over its practice of patting him down that is an evident violation of the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure.

US Constitution Fourth Amendment

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Ventura been a frequent target for pat-downs and other searches because he has a titanium hip implant. But he’s obviously no security threat given his personal history.

What particularly angers Ventura is that his suit was tossed out of Federal court on the grounds that the Federal courts have no jurisdiction over the TSA. Yes, you read that right — the TSA cannot be sued in Federal court unless perhaps you have the money and connections to somehow get a case into the Federal Appeals courts. That essentially means the TSA can essentially do anything it wants because access to those courts is extremely difficult to obtain. The US government’s abusive policies have led him to label the nation as the “Fascist States of America” and vow to seek dual citizenship in Mexico.
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If you’ve been going through a nasty divorce or child custody battle that has lasted years, it’s likely you have experienced a great deal of chronic stress. Years of such stress can create devastating health problems that are often misunderstood and inadequately treated. The stress of dealing with a high-conflict co-parent is particularly likely to badly damage a person’s health as the troubles often continue until well after the children grow into adulthood. But often medical professionals treat these problems as merely mental health issues when in fact there has been significant physiological to the body. This article points out some of the common symptoms of the physiological damage and refers you to additional reading on medical tests that can help you determine appropriate treatment for such conditions.

Personality Disorders and “High Conflict Personalities” Can Cause Severe Mental and Medical Damage

Parents who are dealing with a person who appears to suffer from a personality disorder such as Borderline, Narcissistic, Histrionic, Antisocial, or Paranoid personality disorders are particularly prone to devastating health effects. Often these people engage in parental alienation child abuse such as by blocking the children from contact with a capable or loving parent and trying to force the children to hate that parent. The children are clearly being abused along with the target parent. It’s entirely possible that the young ones will develop mental and physiological injuries from this abuse, too.

Some are literally driven to their deaths by years of abuse. A few even commit suicide to escape it. Others end up on work disability and require expensive medical care for many years. Yet for them, the symptoms still linger for even decades because often medical professionals treat these people as if they are simply suffering from “major depression” or “generalized anxiety disorder” when in fact they are physiologically very ill and in need of medical care, not just counseling and psychotherapy.

Common Symptoms of Physiological Damage from Chronic Stress

The following symptoms are often signs of long-term damage to the stress management systems in the body. Every one of them can result from damage to the adrenal glands after they have been forced to pump out vast quantities of cortisol for years trying to help you cope with the ex’s harassment and attacks.
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We’ve recently received a FL-325 document for a San Diego family law case involving ill-reputed custody evaluator Stephen Doyne. The source, Dr. Emad Tadros of the California Coalition for Families and Children, states that he has verified the authenticity of this document. Apparently the party who provided him this document does not want the names of the family members disclosed at this time.

According to the family law rules for custody evaluation as expressed on this form, Doyne was to have signed and filed the FL-325 form no more than 10 days after appointment and before beginning work on the case. He was appointed to this case on August 27, 2008, but the information on the form indicates he did not sign it until more than a year later on September 30, 2009. If this document is legitimate as is claimed, it appears to be further evidence of misconduct by Doyne and the San Diego family law court system.
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After hearing yet another friend discuss how it is impossible to live happily or even function due the many years of continuing chaos being caused by his children’s mother and the parental alienation she inflicts upon them, I was alarmed but not surprised to hear him say that he’s about to give up on all his kids. I can’t say on blame him, he has been trying for years to simply be a part of his children’s lives and is attacked and persecuted relentlessly for simply wanting to be an involved parent. The damage caused by the combination of a parental alienator and the government bullies who support and reward this and other abusive conduct by bad parents, be they abusive mothers or abusive fathers, is immense. It eats away at your peace of mind, burns holes in your soul, and drains your finances to near bankruptcy over the years. You are left but a battered shell of a person with an empty wallet unable to enjoy anything in life, unable to even have a moment of peace and contentment.

Then I remembered something I just read from our friends at CopBlock, a great web site that discusses police brutality and misconduct across the United States. CopBlock suggested that we all spend some time on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to remember the travails and tactics of the African-American leader who put the nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience tactics of India’s Gandhi into action in the United States. Civil disobedience is a just and fair suggestion for a means of action for parents being afflicted by the American courts and law enforcement and their near universal support for parental alienation, family terrorism, false accusations, and many other crimes against children and families.

Parents who are being pushed to the limit like my friend should engage in civil disobedience and rally their families and friends to do the same. Simply stop cooperating with the government. Stop paying your taxes and stop funding a system that abuses and terrorizes millions of innocent children and their loving parents. Start protesting all you can against bully judges and corrupt politicians who do nothing to protect children and good parents who are being victimized by psychologically brutal attackers in the form of alienating parents, CPS social workers, family law attorneys, and the many other criminals who scheme to use and abuse children to make a profit. Or maybe just vote with your feet by leaving the United States as it increasingly appears to be an irredeemably sick nation that persecutes good parents and innocent children in the name of profit and power of the government and its friends.
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Each year a new set of 19 San Diego citizens is seated as the San Diego Grand Jury. Applications for the 2011 / 2012 Grand Jury are now being accepted through January 14, 2011. The Grand Jury could be hugely helpful to cleaning up the mess in San Diego’s courts, but despite the evidence of widespread misconduct particularly in the family law courts, the current and past Grand Juries have been stymied from going after judicial criminals. In this article I aim to point out how this could change if the right people get into the next Grand Jury and are willing to take some personal risks to protect the public from the out-of-control abusive judicial system in the county. If you and your family have been harmed by the government and courts of San Diego, I strongly suggest that you consider taking a year out of your life to get a seat on the Grand Jury and use it to pursue the government criminals who are harming and destroying so many families in the county.

Grand Juries Stymied from Investigating Courts

California’s county Grand Juries are tasked with investigating and reporting on problems in county and local governments. However, the San Diego County Grand Jury has been effectively prohibited from investigating the San Diego Superior Court itself for a variety of reasons. Aside from whatever legal technicalities there may be for this, it is clear there is a strong motivation for the government officials who control the county to prevent investigation of the court system itself. The government wants naive citizens to believe that the courts in the county are fair and obey the law when neither is true.

The San Diego Superior Court is filled with abuse, corruption, illegal conduct, and disreputable judges such as drunk driver Lisa Schall, cover-up scam artist Lorna Alksne, abusive Christine Goldsmith with her nepotistic control over the San Diego City Attorney, and TV-star-wannabe DeAnn Salcido (who recently resigned over her misconduct) that the Grand Jury would literally have to investigate most judges for misconduct and eventually verbally eviscerate the judiciary and file criminal indictments against many of them to even get a start on cleaning up the corrupt mess that these judges wish to remain hidden.

Many of these judges and court officials have ties to other “civil servants” such as San Diego City Attorney Jan Goldsmith, District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, Sheriff William Gore, and others who use the courts and government offices as their personal playthings to harm their opponents and critics alike. Consequently, there is every intent by the government to hide the widespread judicial corruption and lawlessness. Aside from keeping secret their illicit plans and connections, they also endeavor to maintain their tyrannical grip on power by attacking and marginalizing their victims. They do this because if the public were to understand how many people have been badly harmed by the lawless tyrants seated in government positions throughout San Diego, there might be a public uprising against them.
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Constitutional law attorney Leon Koziol has filed a parental civil rights lawsuit alleging willful and harmful violations of the US and New York Constitutions and civil rights laws by New York courts and government agencies involving their mistreatment of parents and children. After reading the very long list of complaints regarding alleged corrupt and illegal actions by judges, government employees, and police officers and a pattern of retaliation against Koziol for exercising his First Amendment free speech rights to criticize government officials and the people they employ for their pattern of abuse and misconduct, it appears the pattern of retaliation for legitimate complaints is remarkably similar to what is done to many other parents who go up against criminals employed by the government.

Koziol has lost his children, his legal career, and much of his income and property apparently due to the systematic abuse alleged to have been executed by several of the defendants as they attempted to terrorize, harass, threaten, and coerce Koziol to stop his complaints against them.

The defendants include a long list of primarily New York state and county government officials but also includes US federal government Secretary DHHS Kathleen Sebelius:
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