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Kids benefit from having two healthy parents who can focus on the children’s developmental needs and a healthy family life. Too often, the courts and government set up situations in which parents are encouraged to pursue sole custody and cut the other parent out of the children’s life. That parent is then forced into traumatic battles over just being able to see the children.

Sometimes one or both parents in such a battle degenerate into horrible monsters because of how their child custody disputes are being mishandled. Courts and government agencies fan the flames and encourage bad behaviors which often lead to years of continuing or even escalating conflict.

Often parents who refuse to share their kids with the other parent abduct or even kill the children when they do not get their way. Sometimes, they enrage the other parent with abuse causing him or her to eventually crack and to start using the kids as weapons of revenge just like the originally selfish parent.

Father Murdered Child To Get Revenge On Mother For Child Access Blocking

As an example of parental custody disputes leading to child murders, here’s a story about Ramazon Acar of Australia.

Acar was often prevented from seeing his daughter by her mother. After some time, he was fortunate enough to occasionally get to see his 2 year old daughter Yazmina Acar. Reportedly this was an unusual occurrence. He said he was going to take the child to what has been variously described as a nearby “candy shop” or “milk bar”.

Instead, he kept the child with him as he proceeded to taunt her mother, Rachelle D’Argent, over Facebook about how he was going to kill the girl. This wasn’t just an unfortunate choice of words or even an evil joke. He stabbed the child to death and then continued to write on Facebook about what he had just done.

Why would he do this? He says it was to get revenge on D’Argent, with the intention of making her feel like she had made him feel when she blocked him from seeing their child.

Like so many parents who murder their kids, he says he also wanted to kill himself but could not do it.

This man didn’t just kill a baby and break a mother’s heart. He hurt a lot of other people in the process.

He stabbed in the back the many fathers who merely want to have reasonable time with their kids and would never do anything remotely like his crime.

He slashed at the hopes of the many children who are suffering from being deprived of time with one parent or who are forced to endure an abusive childhood because of an irate parent who has sole or primary custody and refuses to treat the kids and the ex reasonably.

Acar also has encouraged the paranoid fears of many mentally ill mothers who are already acting horribly in regards to their children and ex, encouraging them to act even worse than they already do. You see these people often spouting off about how “all fathers” are bad evil people who should never see their children again. What Acar did pushes even more people into supporting these abusive nutcases.
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Family law courts habitually fail to recognize that women can be sociopaths that are dangerous to the children. Even when they show strong signs of a sociopathic personality disorders such as Borderline Personality Disorder, the courts and government agencies like CPS often ignore warning signs and fail to act to protect the children when there is clear reason to believe they are in danger from their disturbed mothers. They make orders that indicate a belief the children are somehow better off living with a female sociopath who breaks the law and court orders than with a safe and sane father who is repeatedly falsely accused of things he did not do and is following the law and court orders.

This pattern is exactly what we are seeing play out in the case of Gordon Smith and Tiffany Smith of Delaware. Tiffany Smith has executed a distortion and harassment campaign against Gordon for more than three years. He has been repeatedly arrested based upon false accusations. Reports from late August 2012 were 8 arrests for 14 false allegations.

The exact numbers of the moment, which have changed rapidly in the past few months as many more false allegations were made by Tiffany Smith, is not particularly important. What matters is that the cost to Gordon has been the loss of his time with the children, severe harm to his career, major financial damages, and repeated suffering from false arrests and incarcerations. All this happened despite him having not been convicted of a crime and the police being in possession of solid evidence that many of the accusations were outright lies.

The Smith children suffer from lack of their father and living with a mother for whom two of her foremost goals in life is to prevent them from seeing their father and to put their father in prison using malicious false allegations. Tiffany Smith clearly isn’t thinking of the best interests of the children, but the courts continue to leave the children in the custody of a monster.

Tiffany Smith Finally Arrested

Until recently, Tiffany Marie Smith got away with her abuse of Gordon Smith with zero consequences to herself. On August 31 or September 1, 2012, Dover Police Department finally arrested Tiffany Smith for recent false allegations and reports to police because they had clear cut evidence that she lied to them which had caused them to falsely arrest Gordon Smith. The official police department statement is:
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A school district in San Antonio, Texas, is implementing mandatory RFID tracking of students in two of schools, John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School, at a cost of over $500,000. Andrea Hernandez, a student at one of these high schools, is refusing to wear the RFID badge. The Hernandez family and their supporters are protesting against the system over concerns of it being used to violate privacy rights.

RFID tracking devices such as these students are to be forced to wear can be detected up to about 70 feet away. Some say the ranges may already be longer than this with recent RFID systems.

Although the basic underlying technology is very similar to proximity cards that been used widely in businesses for decades, most of those ID cards have to be in close physical proximity to a scanner (within a foot) for their RFID information to be captured. The badges being used in San Antonio reportedly contain batteries and higher power transmitters that can be tracked at much greater distances.

Some have been attacking this family as Christian wackos who believe the RFID badges are the “mark of the beast” mentioned in Revelations in the Bible. But there is plenty that can be said about the potential problems of abuse of this technology that has nothing to do with religion.
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Over the past couple of years, Gordon Smith has been accused of domestic violence more than a dozen times and arrested at least eight times by Delaware law enforcement. The exact number of allegations and arrests is difficult to track because it keeps growing in many recent months. The man must report to a probation officer and wear a GPS tracking device at all times. From this, you might surmise that he was convicted of one or more crimes. But in fact, Gordon Smith has not been convicted of a crime.

Tiffany Marie Smith, Serial False Accuser

Tiffany Marie Smith

Evidence points to repeated lying by his ex-wife Tiffany Marie Smith to block Gordon’s contact with their children and to harm him. When she filed a report that he made “terroristic threats” over the phone to her, he was in fact in a courthouse where cell phones are not allowed and court video surveillance did not show him using a phone. When she filed a report that he left a note threatening to kill her and the kids, witnesses and other evidence placed him several hundred miles away in Georgia. When she claimed he was violating a restraining order by being at her home, video surveillance at a Taco Bell shows he was eating there at the time. When she made another allegation of a threatening note, GPS tracking showed he was nowhere near where she claims a new threatening note was left on her car.

The GPS tracking of Gordon Smith is being done by the government that has forced him to report to a probation officer and submit to restrictions on his freedoms deemed suitable for convicted domestic violence offenders when in fact he has not been convicted of any such crime.

The evidence suggests that he is the victim of crime. But instead of helping Gordon escape harassment by a malicious lying ex-wife, the government is helping encourage and reward what appears to be ongoing criminal filing of false police reports and perjury by Tiffany Smith.

While it is not possible to prove that Tiffany lied about every allegation, none of her allegations to date have been substantiated. For at least four of her allegations, there is solid evidence that she lied including filing false police reports. There is also a consistent pattern of what appear to be false and unsubstantiated reports going back more than two years that have been repeatedly used as basis to falsely arrest Gordon Smith and to engage in systematic violation of his civil and Constitutional rights.

The police seem to be suggesting that Tiffany Smith might have just been “wrong” without malice in some of her allegations and that nobody can prove who actually left the notes. However, the sheer quantity of the allegations and the number of times it is clear she was lying makes it evident she is a serial false accuser, liar, and perjurer who has the unlawful aid of the police and courts in her reign of terror over her ex-husband.

Gordon Smith’s Civil Rights Suit Against Police

Smith has filed a civil rights lawsuit against the police. It has merit in part because the police have acted against him completely without any legal authority to do so whatsoever. They arrested him for trying to call his kids, who were 3 and 4 years old, by calling his ex-wife’s cell phone. There was no basis for them to arrest him for this, and in fact it is fairly ordinary for child custody orders to require that parents are to permit the children to talk with the other parent.

In Delaware, a complaint such as “I told him not to call” or a false accusation “he threatened to kill me on the phone” by the ex is all that is needed for you to be arrested, forced into a probation program, and even to have a GPS tracking device attached to your body by the government.

Quoted from Injustice in Delaware:

There are a few things already quite clear. This is a nightmare turned real for Mr. Smith, who, among other things, was arrested by the Delaware State Police for calling his ex-wife’s cell phone to make contact with his children, who were not old enough at the time to initiate contact with him (3 and 4 years old respectively), when there was no restraining order preventing him from doing so. He was arrested simply on the word of his former wife, who told police that she had asked him not to call.

Gordon Smith is being harassed, persecuted, and harmed in violation of the US Constitution to reward his ex-wife’s baseless complaints and continued lying. The Delaware State Police are co-conspirators in these crimes as they arrested him without checking readily available evidence and then, when evidence show Tiffany lied, they failed to file charges and arrest her for filing false police reports.
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Why is it that government seems so resistant to punishing sociopaths in family law disputes? These people frequently use false allegations, lies, distortion and vilification campaigns, perjury, false reports to law enforcement and child protection agencies, and other tactics to badly harm an ex-spouse and his or her family and friends. Many of their abusive and illegal actions are crimes that trigger significant unwarranted expenses on the part of government including law enforcement, child protection, and courts. Given the adverse financial impact on taxpayers that is tantamount to committing fraud, society should have a strong incentive to punish these people and to make them pay restitution for their crimes. Yet this virtually never happens, even when there is clear proof of criminal conduct by these people.

There must be a reason for why these people are not being held accountable for their crimes. Often judges and lawyers say perjury is not punished because it is “too expensive” to prosecute perjury and false reports to law enforcement agencies. The few cases of perjury you do see prosecuted are usually pursued for political reasons even when there is little to no identifiable harm done by the particular lies made under oath.

When you consider other examples of crimes the government does prosecute people for doing, that “too expensive” argument rings false. The government routinely prosecutes people for minor drug crimes that have created nowhere near the damage caused by sociopathic attacks in family law disputes, and they often spend many tens of thousands of dollars pursuing these minor offenders even when there are no identifiable victims besides the drug abuser himself or herself.

Who does more damage to society, the casual drug addict or the sociopath in a family law dispute? The drug addict who gets high in his or her home a few times per week for years but doesn’t drive under the influence and doesn’t sell drugs might do some damage to others, but often it is hard to even identify what that damage is.

On the other hand, the sociopathic liar who files false child abuse reports, lies about domestic violence or rape, and triggers many years of law enforcement investigations, court hearings, CPS actions, and causes the victims of the lies (the children and the falsely accused parent) to be deprived of their rights and financial security. Sometimes people are even incarcerated on the basis of the lies.

The damage often continues for many years, sometimes even decades. Not infrequently, it leads to severe damage to the children and even death by stress or suicide of the falsely accused. Such a sociopath also causes financial damage to taxpayers running into the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars over the years.

But judging by the almost zero prosecutions for perjury and malicious false reports to law enforcement agencies in obvious cases of malicious lying in family law disputes, it is evidently public policy to not prosecute such a sociopath’s crimes, even when there are multiple identifiable victims and the damages are often extreme.

Why is it that the government may be willing to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to prosecute and imprison a drug user who has hurt possibly nobody but himself or herself but is not willing to prosecute and imprison a perjurer or false reporter who has hurt many others?

One commonly cited reason is that it is against the government’s financial interests to stop extorting the life savings from people stuck in family court. They would much rather keep these conflicts going for years and even decades, lining the pockets of many involved in the courts.

However, there is certainly job security and money to be made that could be found prosecuting sociopathic liars as there are so many of them to be found in family law disputes. Thus there must be another reason for why perjurers and false reporters are not being prosecuted.

A second and possibly more important reason why government does not prosecute perjurers and false reporters is that prosecuting these people would also call unwanted attention to the tactics they use. The government does not want these tactics to be seen for what they are because the abusive and illegal tactics used by a sociopath in a family law dispute are similar to tactics frequently used by government employees including politicians, law enforcement officers, child protection social workers, and court employees such as judges. Character assassination using lies, making false allegations, and harassment including vilification campaigns are the common tools of sociopaths in family law disputes and sociopaths in government.

The government does not want to punish sociopaths in family law disputes because government itself is filled with sociopaths who use the same abusive and illegal strategies to get their way. If they prosecute sociopaths in family law disputes, they increase their own risk for prosecution, too. Much better for them to protect the sociopaths and protect themselves, too.

As a result, I strongly believe that anybody who is seriously interested in advocating for family law reform must also join up with and support groups fighting against other forms of abuse and corruption in the government. Government will consistently oppose necessary reform of family law not just because of greed, but also because such reforms might pave the way to action against the liars, cheats, crooks, and fraudsters that fill the ranks of the political class. Without cleaning up the government and replacing the sociopaths in it with people who will follow the law, there is no real hope of family law reform ever succeeding.

Further Reading

Abusive Conduct and Failure To Follow Law by Judge William Watkins Requires His Removal From Bench

Los Angeles DA Must Prosecute Wanetta Gibson for False Rape Allegation Against Brian Banks

Former Gov. Jesse Ventura Rightly Labels United States the “Fascist States of America”

San Diego Custody Evaluators Generate Cash Flow by Victimizing Families Using Restraining Orders

How Sociopathic Parents Use Police Reports for Defamation

Prosecuting Civil Perjury Is Unusual, but It Can Mean Prison

Leila Marie Tarantino (DOB 10/24/1976) of Citrus Springs, Florida, claims that on July 17, 2011, she was pulled over by Citrus County Sheriff Department officers on South Columbia Street in Beverly Hills, Florida, for rolling through a stop sign, an offense she denies committing. She claims she fully stopped at the stop sign, then a police car did a U-turn to stop her vehicle. She says her two kids ages 4 and 1 were in the car with her and got a full view of the malevolent antics of the police as they pointed a gun in her face, removed her from her car, and put her in a squad car for two hours. She claims that when backup arrived, the cops then proceeded to strip search her along the side of the road, and forcibly pulled a tampon out of her in a search for contraband. She was then released with a traffic citation for violating restrictions on her driver’s license.

Here’s a copy of the lawsuit filed against the Sheriff Jeffrey Dawsy (who is alleged to have personally approved of the strip search in this incident), the department, the Citrus County government, and six other unnamed officers including five men and one woman. The female police officer is the one alleged to have pulled the tampon out from Tarantino.

Tarantino Tampon Lawsuit

According to Florida Statute 901.211, strip searches are unlawful for such a traffic stop:

2011 Florida Statutes: 901.211 Strip searches of persons arrested; body cavity search

(1) As used in this section, the term “strip search” means having an arrested person remove or arrange some or all of his or her clothing so as to permit a visual or manual inspection of the genitals; buttocks; anus; breasts, in the case of a female; or undergarments of such person.
(2) No person arrested for a traffic, regulatory, or misdemeanor offense, except in a case which is violent in nature, which involves a weapon, or which involves a controlled substance, shall be strip searched unless:
(a) There is probable cause to believe that the individual is concealing a weapon, a controlled substance, or stolen property; or
(b) A judge at first appearance has found that the person arrested cannot be released either on recognizance or bond and therefore shall be incarcerated in the county jail.
(3) Each strip search shall be performed by a person of the same gender as the arrested person and on premises where the search cannot be observed by persons not physically conducting or observing the search pursuant to this section. Any observer shall be of the same gender as the arrested person.
(4) Any body cavity search must be performed under sanitary conditions.
(5) No law enforcement officer shall order a strip search within the agency or facility without obtaining the written authorization of the supervising officer on duty.
(6) Nothing in this section shall be construed as limiting any statutory or common-law right of any person for purposes of any civil action or injunctive relief.

Is Tarantino Truthful?

But did this incident happen as Tarantino describes? The Citrus County Sheriff Department says Tarantino is lying and making false accusations. They point to Tarantino’s extensive court history including criminal history including a history of alleged domestic violence in 2011 and numerous traffic violations including hit and run driving, repeated DUIs, and repeatedly driving with a suspended license.
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On April 3, 2012, Los Angeles Superior Court Commissioner Alan Friendthal was publicly admonished by a 9 to 1 vote of the California Commission on Judicial Performance for abusive conduct in violation of judicial canons of the California Code of Judicial Ethics in five family law cases in June 2007 to January 2009. CJP found that he engaged in improper conduct including verbal abuse of litigants, engaging in ex-parte communications, conducting independent investigations which is clearly not part of his job duties, complaining to litigants about formal legal complaints they had filed against him, and demonstrating that he was personally embroiled in the cases before him.

Laura Lynn is a California mother who has been abused by the family courts of Los Angeles. Commissioner Alan Friendenthal presided over many hearings in her family law case and her case is one of those cited as evidence of Friedenthal’s misconduct in the form of creating apparent bias and clearly showing his personal embroilment in the case before him. In her case and others, Friedenthal improperly acted as an investigator, contacted third parties involved on his own behalf, and outside of hearings reviewed web postings written by litigants and then complained about those postings during hearings. CJP found that he was improperly conducted investigations and engaging in ex-parte communications.

In a stunning example of how the courts value money over children and the law, Friedenthal threatened to remove custody from a father who was to have the child with him because of alleged abuse by the child’s stepfather. When the father pointed out he could not afford to pay for a custody evaluation all at once and asked for a payment plan, Friedenthal threatened to place the child with other relatives:

At a hearing on July 3,2007, arrangements were made for the minor child to return by airplane to his father’s residence from his mother’s residence in another state pending a custody hearing set for August 3,2007. A supplementary custody evaluation had been ordered. Commissioner Friedenthal ordered the father to pay over $4,000 in fees for minor’s counsel and the supplemental custody evaluation. When the father raised his hand to address the issue of payment, Commissioner Friedenthal responded by threatening to place the child with grandparents, as follows:

[FATHER]: I’m not refusing to pay. I owe a lot of people money –

THE COURT: Okay. This needs to be grandparentplacement because he can’t afford to pay the rates for the child. f^J Where do the [grand]parents live?

[FATHER’S COUNSEL]: Mexico.

THE COURT: [Mother]?

[10-fl]

[MOTHER]: My parents are in Mexico.

THE COURT: You have brothers?

[MOTHER]: I have a brother in Moorpark.

111… [11

THE COURT: I want [minor’s counsel] to talk to the brother in Moorpark. [f] Will you provide that information?

[FATHER’S COUNSEL]: My client is simply saying he’d like to have a payment arrangement. On that basis, you are going to order –

THE COURT: Marsha Wiley is going to do this evaluation. If I have to stand on my head and walk on my hands all the way down McKay –

[FATHER]: I’m asking for three payments, sir.

[FATHER’S COUNSEL]: Rather than-

[MOTHER’S COUNSEL]: Miss Wiley does not accept that. Most evaluators request –

THE COURT: She wanted 2,500?

[MINOR’S COUNSEL]: No; 3,500 which is very modest.

THE COURT: Follow my order. That’s it. No more discussion. [Tf] What is your brother’s name in Moorpark?

[10 [Mother’s counsel] is to provide his name and number to [minor’s counsel] for appropriateness of some shared custody.

(R.T. 15:5-16:10.)

Commissioner Friedenthal’s threat to award custody of the child to other family members in response to the father’s statements that he was not refusing to pay fees but wanted a payment plan constituted a threatened abuse of authority and violated canons 1, 2A and 3B(4). At his appearance before the commission, the commissioner maintained that his statement concerning a grandparent placement was based on his concerns about the father’s parenting abilities. This assertion is refuted by the fact that the commissioner had already ordered a supplemental custody evaluation report and scheduled a custody hearing for the following month, as well as by the commissioner’s own words: “This needs to be a grandparent placement because he can’t afford to pay the rates for the child” (Italicsadded.)

Commissioner Friedenthal’s conduct in the matters described above was, at a minimum, improper action.

Other cases cited as evidence of misconduct by Friedenthal include those of Tonja Jarrett and Maria Chiarello.

Many other allegations of violations of judicial ethics codes and laws have been leveled against Friedenthal that appear to go beyond the scope of the CJP investigation. See a Topix discussion thread on Alan Friedenthal for more examples such as allegations he was practicing as an attorney while servicing as a court commissioner and alleged failure to file Statement of Economic Interests (Form 700) as required for court judicial officers.

Laura Lynn contends that the misconduct of Friedenthal extends far beyond the contents of the CJP report:

Quoted from Who complained about Commissioner Alan Friedenthal?:

The story is much bigger than the simple little order written. It is my contention that Commissioner Friedenthal was a conspirator to commit fraud and aided and abetted convicted child abductor Crystel Lynn Strellioff to conceal the children she abducted. He and his wife Commissioner Steff Padilla also adopted two children whose mother’s parental rights were completely severed with no apparent reason. The biological mother has a tidy home, does not seem to be using illegal drugs and is a practicing Mormon, married to a substitute school teacher.

Friendenthal was removed from hearing family law cases, but is still a judicial officer in Los Angeles County. LA Times reports that he was reassigned to small claims, civil, and unlawful detainer cases in February 2009.

Friedenthal should be removed from the bench entirely. But as is typical of CJP’s usual glacial paced disciplinary actions that take years to result in a report, the “severe public admonishment” doesn’t go far enough to repair the damage Friedenthal has done to the public and his victims and to prevent his abuses of law from recurring.

CJP’s severe public admonishment means so little that he was elected to be secretary-treasurer of the executive board of the California Judges Association two months after his severe public admonishment. California judges want abusers and criminals among them and regard such people as important leaders of their corrupt racketeering influenced organization.

The full text of the severe public admonishment of Alan Friedenthal is available on the CJP website.

Judge Elizabeth Feffer reportedly replaced Friedenthal on a number of contentious family law cases. But there are many concerns being expressed about problems with Feffer’s judicial conduct and integrity, also. One anonymous litigant reports that Feffer cited as reason to change custody of children the fact that the litigant had filed complaints against Friedenthal:

Judge Feffer crossed the line – in her statment of decision to transfer custody to the abusive father, she cited, for 14 pages in her statement of decision, our “harassing complaints of the prior Commissioner”.

Too bad that her Statement of Decision, done in December, 2011, was just a few months ahead of the Public Admonishment of that poor Commissioner.

If that is true, then Feffer should be subjected to the even more severe punishment than Friedenthal has received for his comments about complaints against him. Punishing a litigant for filing a complaint against the court that when investigated turns out to be valid is a ridiculous abuse of justice.

Further Reading

California judicial panel admonishes L.A. County commissioner

CJP Admonishes Commissioner Alan Friedenthal

Musings about the late admonishment of Commissioner Alan H. Friedenthal

CJP Investigation of Judge Lisa Schall Heats Up, Citizen Input Sought

San Diego Judge DeAnn Salcido Resigns Under Fire, Yet Shows CJP Is Corrupt

San Diego Judge DeAnn Salcido Demeans Litigants and Justice to Create Demo Videos for Her Proposed TV Show

Sacramento Judge Peter James McBrien Dismembers Park Trees and Families In Contempt for Law

If you’ve read books or other publications on parental alienation, you may have the impression that divorced parents who are alienators are unlikely to stop this form of abuse for any reason. There are a couple of common misconceptions here. First of all, even though parental alienation is usually discussed in the context of divorce, the fact is that parental alienation often starts long before a divorce or separation as the psychological factors that drive the most severe alienators include life-long personality disorders that were present long before the children were born. Secondly, it turns out that not all alienating parents are incurable. This is particularly true of mildly alienating parents who are angry but are not personality disordered. Often these mild alienators are prone to nasty verbal remarks about the target parent but do not engage in false abuse allegations and extreme interference in contact with the kids. If this is the pattern you see in your situation, there is some reason for hope. With appropriate teaching and enforcement of rules and boundaries, you can help your kids resist alienation. In mild cases of alienation, you may even be able to help your ex stop his or her behaviors. Even if you cannot get the ex to stop, taking appropriate steps early with your kids can often inoculate them sufficiently to prevent their alienation from becoming severe even in the face of a very nasty ex who is constantly badmouthing you.

Douglas Darnall, Ph.D., is a psychologist who works with many children suffering from parental alienation and is the author of Divorce Casualties: Understanding Parental Alienation. His analysis is that there are three types of alienating parents:

1. Naive alienators
2. Active alienators
3. Obsessed alienators

Darnall contends that all parents occasionally are naive alienators who carelessly drop a remark here or there that puts down the other parent. Some may inadvertently slip into using alienating language as they struggle to counteract the badmouthing the children are hearing about them and behaviors the children have engaged in to support the alienating parent. These alienators generally do not cause extensive damage to kids because their alienation behaviors are sporadic and the kids continue to have enough contact with both parents that they can see for themselves what each parent is really like. Some of them, particularly those who are target parents trying to cope with difficult problems who just don’t have the skills and practice needed to stay completely away from judgmental language, they don’t really qualify as alienators in my view. However, Darnall tends to categorize this group more by words than by intent or context.

Active alienators know what they are doing and may know what they are doing is wrong, but do it anyway because of how angry they are. Darnall claims some of them may even feel guilty about it later. The children suffering from an active alienator generally show signs of harm, but it may not be obvious what that harm is at a casual glance. Often these kids miss some of their time with the target parent because of interference by the alienating parent. This makes them more susceptible to the distorting influence of what is an active alienation campaign.

Obsessed alienators are another matter entirely. These parents are focused on destroying the other parent and giving the children no choice but to hate that parent. They don’t care if what they are doing is wrong, and frankly they generally mistakenly believe it is right. Often these obsessed alienators are suffering from a personality disorder that results in them showing behaviors across the board that indicate they believe they are above the rules and the law. The children of obsessed alienators often show marked harm with behavioral problems, insecurities, eating disorders, substance abuse problems, poor performance in school, and other obvious signs. Frequently they echo the alienating parent’s complaints about the target parent and may actually believe what they are saying, in part because they are often denied much of their time with the target parent and therefore are highly influenced by the streams of badmouthing and distortions coming from the alienator.

Mild Alienators May Be Helped By Appealing To Their Self-Interest

I would clump most of the naive and and some of the active alienators into the category of “mild alienators” who are sometimes upset enough to trash the other parent but in general are not engaging in extreme forms of alienation including false child sexual abuse allegations, extensive community-wide distortion campaigns, frequent malicious violations of court orders, and other severe behaviors that you see nearly all of the obsessed alientors use in their alienation campaigns.

Some of these mild alienators can be helped to realize that their behaviors are harmful not only to their children, but to themselves, as well. Children who are subjected to parental alienation often become adults who avoid or turn against the alienating parent. When a angry but mildly alienating parent is confronted with information like this and shown there are better alternatives, many of them are capable of change. The book The Co-Parenting Survival Guide: Letting Go of Conflict After a Difficult Divorce by psychologists Elizabeth Thayer and Jeffrey Zimmerman has practical advice on how to restructure the relationship between the parents to be business-like contact that is about simple logistics (schedules, school events, medical and therapy appointments, etc.) and what is best for the kids. If you read this book or another title like it and can get your mildly alienating ex to read it, too, there’s a chance that she or he will turn around and start to behave more reasonably.

If your divorce has resulted in nasty words and a mild lack of cooperation that is affecting the kids but has not involved false criminal and abuse allegations, extensive perjury, and systematic harassment against you and your family, this strategy of using a good book to help bridge the communications gap and reduce the conflict may be useful to you.
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Parental alienation is a form of emotional child abuse that occurs when one parent teaches the children to fear, disrespect, and/or avoid the other parent. It’s a common problem in divorces, but unknown to many alienation often gets started in marriages well before a divorce.

Studies of parental alienation show that alienators are almost exclusively parents with sole custody of the children. Statistics on child custody arrangements show that around 80% to 85% of children of divorce in the US end up in the sole custody of their mothers and that this has been the case for multiple decades despite changes in family law and society. These two observations combined mean that parental alienators are predominantly mothers and the parents they are teaching the children to hate are primarily fathers.

Alienators are emotional child abusers, often in more ways than just by teaching the kids to hate the other parent. Many alienators suffer personality disorders and also engage in emotional parentification (also known as emotional incest) by inappropriately using their children as emotional crutches for themselves.

To deny the culpability of these mothers who are child abusers, feminists belonging to groups such as the National Organization of Women (NOW) deny the very existence of parental alienation. They usually offer statements that there is “no scientific evidence that parental alienation is real” and “parental alienation is an excuse for why children do not like child abusing fathers.” Richard Gardner, a psychiatrist who was among those early in describing and defining Parental Alienation Syndrome (commonly abbreviated as PAS, it is a severe form of parental alienation in which the child aligns completely with the alienating parent), made it clear that alienation was not at work if the child disliked a parent who was truly being abusive to the child. But the feminists, in their zeal to treat all women as victims and trash all men as abusers, completely overlook that fact.

There are a growing number of alienated moms in which the child abuser in the family is the father. Typically this occurs in families in which the father has a narcissistic personality and has some advantages such as:

• He is more wealthy.
• He has more education.
• He has professional certification such as a doctor, lawyer, judge, or law enforcement officer.
• He is more politically connected.
• He is a native operating in his own culture and the mother is an immigrant.

These advantages for a narcissistic man often aid him in reversing the usual anti-father bias in family courts, generally producing an anti-mother bias in these cases. Although anti-father bias is clearly wrong, it is disgustingly ironic that often when the bias becomes anti-mother it is happening in cases in which the fathers actually are behaving abusively.
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Two of the most basic premises in Western jurisprudence are impartiality of the judge and that the judge must follow the law and rulings of higher courts. Family Law Judge William Watkins of Putnam County, West Virginia, has repeatedly demonstrated that he is unable to perform either of these basic job duties. West Virginia has a legal obligation to remove this abusive man from the family law bench and to document his abusive conduct publicly to help ensure that no litigant in any court will ever be treated as unjustly and irresponsibly by him again.

Watkins first came to my attention based upon the video below that features him yelling, screaming, and threatening a quiet elderly man named Revered Arthur Hage in a family law hearing over sale of the family home in a divorce. From the very start of the tirade, Watkins makes it clear that he will not allow Hage to speak on threat of imprisonment. He then launches in a verbal tirade making accusations against Hage. The screaming is so loud that it causes the microphone and recording system to distort and clip the audio.

Whether the accusations are true or not, I don’t claim to know. More importantly, the truth or falseness of the accusations is actually besides the point because the judge’s accusations are not about the case being heard but rather about a newspaper article featuring a photograph of Hage’s home and his wife and alleged vandalism of the home that he claims is somehow Hage’s fault. Can there be any kind of conflict of interest more obvious than this?

Watkins has attacked many people in the community over their questioning his impartiality, his lateness on HOA (homeowner’s association) payments, and other problems involving him. His verbal rage at Hage exposes how he thinks he can use his position as a judge to retaliate against people in his courtroom simply because he believes they have something to do with his personal problems.

Watkins had a duty to immediately recuse himself from this case because of his personal feelings and strong conflict of interest. He should have done so by a proper written judicial recusal communicated to both parties, and this would have precluded his ridiculously abusive outburst in court. But Watkins failed to do so, instead holding a hearing to berate a litigant over personal matters and then proceeding to hear the matter thereby showing a complete inability to behave appropriately for a judge.

Even if Hage had personally spray painted, smashed windows, and littered trash at Watkins’ home and there was absolute proof of this such as by a video recording (to be clear, nobody claims there is such proof), Watkins still would have had no business behaving this way. The correct course of action would be to recuse from the case and let the police and prosecutor deal with Hage.
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