angiEmedia

On March 20, 2009, Ellie Cunningham viciously attacked her husband Adam with a broken wine glass, repeatedly slashing him and leaving him with multiple severe cuts on his arms and legs and a broken ankle. When police arrived and found him on the steps outside of their home in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada, it was clear Ellie had badly assaulted him.

Ellie was arrested by police and a domestic violence (DV) investigation ensued. A restraining order was issued on the wife, and Adam moved in with his mother to recover from the assault. He had extensive stitches to hold together his slashed skin and surgery to repair his broken ankle. Unfortunately, he was found dead on his mother’s sofa three weeks later. An autopsy indicated the cause of death to be complications from the surgery to fix the damage from the DV assault.

During the time between the assault and his death, Adam was interviewed by police and wrote about his experiences during the nearly four years of marriage to Ellie. He recounted how Ellie would have outbursts and become verbally abusive.

Video news coverage of Adam’s death, including photos of his injuries and an interview with his sister Nikki, can be found at:

Global BC TV News Coverage of Death of Adam Cunningham

Oddly, his wife published this obituary claiming that she’ll miss him:
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Until you have personal experience of divorce and child custody litigation, it would be difficult to understand or appreciate what Alec Baldwin (with Mark Tabb) writes about in his book A Promise to Ourselves: A Journey Through Fatherhood and Divorce.

Many, I think, would consider his book as being some far-fetched Hollywood gossip and a way to gain more celebrity status, or even a way to defend his case and blame it on the ex. I suppose it’s hard not to be influenced by the roles actors play in movies and what you read in trashy magazines and newspapers. To me, Alec Baldwin certainly doesn’t have the “nice guy” reputation — if anything, it’s more like the “womanizer”. Then again, Kim Basinger is no angel, either.
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Bay City, Michigan is the home of website author Douglas Richardson. He’s chosen to focus his website on the incompetence, negligence, corruption, and fraud endemic to the child support system in Bay County, Michigan, in the 18th Judicial Circuit Courts. This system forces child support payments by men who are not the fathers of the children and denies them rights of visitation to their biological children as well.

Friends of the Family — Children Need Both Parents

Richardson’s website it particularly interesting in part because he posts a lot of scanned court and child support system documents to prove his points. From looking through the information he’s posted, it appears he makes a good case that the system in Michigan has abused him and his family.
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(Click here for more coverage on parental alienation.)

Psychologist Dr. Robert M. Gordon has testified in many court cases about the form of child abuse known as parental alienation. One of the things that frustrates him is that advocacy groups such as NOW (National Organization of Women) dispute the existence of parental alienation and Parental Alienation Syndrome to the extent that it becomes difficult to talk in court about a very real phenomenon backed by research. Yet most of these articles disputing that PAS even exists don’t mention research. Many are full of anti-father diatribes, others of individual cases in which PAS was claimed by an abusive father and the alienation wasn’t really PAS but the children’s legitimate reaction to child abuse.
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RationShed is a Christian group in New Zealand promoting the concept of “equal parenting” involving the whole biological family, including both parents and all four grandparents. Its website at http://rationshed.wordpress.com hosts a mix of original content and repostings from other news and opinion sources, including angiemedia .

RationShed is also sponsoring an “equal parenting petition” to show support for shared 50/50 parenting as presumed default. Click here to view and sign it.
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Guess what group is among top of those showing contempt of court?

Family Law Judges!

Family law courts in the United States are a disgusting and abusive mess. While we can’t blame it all on the judges as many problems are caused by lying litigants, the judges are ultimately responsible for most of the problems. They should be upholding the law, ensuring that people’s rights are not violated, and requiring reasonable proof of allegations before they are acted upon. But in the United States today, that’s not the function of family law judges.
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Another of my favorite “real feminist” authors is Erin Pizzey. She was a pioneer in domestic violence activism, in 1971 setting up the Chiswick Refuge in London, UK as one of the first shelters for battered women in the world.

Early on in her work at Chiswick, she noticed that many of the women coming to her shelters were “violence prone”. They sought out abusive relationships and committed a significant amount of violence themselves. Often their violent ways triggered their partner’s abuses against them. Worse, these families raised their children to be a new generation of abusers addicted to violent behaviors.

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The choice of a marriage therapist is a very serious matter.  Some of them are pro-marriage, capable of maintaining civility during sessions, and push both parties to try to work out their problems but in a neutral, unbiased fashion and without ordering the patients to take drastic actions.  Such therapists can be a great asset.  They will listen to both sides objectively, tease out inconsistencies, get people to open up about their real problems and issues, and enable progress towards resolving the problems.  The best of them even gradually teach their clients how to do these things themselves.

However, if you pick a poor therapist, you may rapidly find that not only will your marriage be destroyed, you may also end up with losing contact with your children and/or false criminal allegations against you.  This is particularly a problem for men, but can happen to women, too.

A poor marriage therapist can destroy your marriage and create a “death spiral” out of your life.

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