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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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Cole Stuart Arrested During Family Law Protest

In the wake of what appears to be a wrongful arrest of California Coalition for Families and Children co-founder and president Cole Stuart, the evidence is building that one of the primary culprits in this matter is the San Diego County Bar Association (SDCBA).

We’ve obtained copy of computer file containing a letter directed to Patrick L. Hosey, President of the San Diego County Bar Association. In the letter, Cole Stuart describes the events of the April 15, 2010, family law seminar sponsored by the SDCBA at which their staff and private security guards allegedly handcuffed and removed him from the event. This is despite the facts that he is a licensed attorney who paid for admission to the event, the arrest warrant for him was obtained in an irregular fashion that suggests judicial misconduct was involved, and the San Diego Police Department (SDPD) and San Diego Sheriff Department officers on the scene wanted to wait until after the event to make an arrest.

SDPD officers pointed out that it was highly unusual for an arrest warrant to be issued over a misdemeanor alleged violation of a temporary restraining order. Possibly even more unusual is that the TRO was not served on Cole Stuart until April 16, two days after the issue of the arrest warrant tied to the TRO and one day after he had already been arrested.
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Protecting citizens from crime is a good goal. Technology has contributed many new tools to the effort such as burglar alarms, car security systems, and cell phones. But some technological tools have vast potential for abuse. GPS monitoring devices being used for family law and civil restraining orders are one such application fraught with serious abuse potential.

GPS Monitoring Raises Risks of Convincing But False Accusations

The potential for false accusations and harassment is aggravated dangerously if GPS tracking devices are used in family law and civil restraining order cases in which there has not been any conviction in a criminal court. That’s exactly the common case for many people falsely accused of domestic violence who have temporary retraining orders (TROs) slapped on them with no evidence, no chance to contest the false allegations, and no due process. This is business as usual for abusive judges like Lorna Alksne and Lisa Schall of the San Diego Superior Court as well as other similarly abusive judges across the United States. They issue such orders routinely without even a shred of evidence and no chance for a defense until much later.
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On April 15, CCFC co-founder and attorney Cole Stuart was arrested in what appears to be a stunt staged by San Diego family law system employees, possibly including Judge Lorna Alksne and Judge Lisa Schall. It appears incontrovertible that the impending CCFC protest at the San Diego County Bar Association family law seminar on April 15 was well-known to court employees starting on April 14, the day on which an arrest warrant was issued for Cole Stuart.

We have observed there was a spike in activity on our web site by employees of the San Diego Superior Court on that, less than two days after we posted our article discussing the impending CCFC protest at the SDCBA family law seminar. While this doesn’t prove judicial bias on its own, it shows these judges were likely aware of the impending protest. It is also consistent with the opinion that San Diego judges viewed having Cole Stuart arrested as an opportunity to quash vociferous political opponents by abusing their authority.
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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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Eric Moelter has started to speak up a bit about what has happened in the false sexual abuse and child custody abduction case of Cindy Dumas v. Eric Moelter now that all three boys are living with him once again. He believes their mother Cindy Dumas suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder and has been waging a distortion campaign against him for years.
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(Note: This article was published together with Personality Disordered Abusers in Psychological Evaluations. That article focuses on problems encountered when psychological evaluations are used in an attempt to deal with a personality disordered abuser in a family law dispute.)

William Eddy is an attorney and licensed clinical social worker who has written many excellent books on personality disorders and how they manifest in family law battles. In his recent books, he has taken to calling people with personality disorders who engage in extensive and unreasonable litigation as High Conflict Personalities (HCP). He’s stated that a large part, possibly as much as 40%, of the litigation in family courts involves HCPs.

Yet despite the prevalence of these psychological problems in family law courts, judges often fail to understand the problems and are prone to reward the abusers for their conduct. This is likely to intensify the abuses because they have been positively reinforced with rewards such as sole physical and/or legal custody, financial awards, or simply emotional satisfaction of seeing the hated target being berated by a judge the abuser manipulated.
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In February 2010, the United States federal government cranked up the pressure on Japan to start cooperating with resolving international parental child abduction cases involving Japanese parents taking kids back to Japan and preventing them from seeing their non-Japanese parents. Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell issued a warning to Japan to revise its family law system to permit non-Japanese parents to have contact with their children.
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Parental alienation is a form of emotional abuse in which a normal positive parent/child relationship is damaged or destroyed by another party using emotional manipulation, threats, false accusations, and other means. It involves at least two basic elements. The first is an alienator engaging in access blocking to keep a child from seeing a parent. The second is a pattern of denigration and destruction of reputation to make the child dislike the parent. When parental alienation becomes severe and/or extended in duration, the child may start to avoid seeing the target parent, repeat the statements of the alienator as if they were the child’s own, and even make up new “reasons” to dislike having contact with the target parent. Often these “reasons” are complete nonsense and have little to no accuracy.

If you’re suffering as a target parent and are aware of parental alienation, probably none of this is news to you. However, what may be news to you is that parental alienation isn’t limited to the most commonly discussed situation of parents involved in divorce or child custody battles. For starters, you may be alienated from your children by your spouse while married.
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As I previously reported in DCF Poaching on the Tiger Woods, Elin Nordegren Kids?, Florida’s Department of Children and Families visited the home of Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren to investigate a child abuse complaint.

Now State Senator Ronda Storms of Florida is calling for an investigation of the complaint that led to this visit. She believes that the complaint was filed falsely and maliciously and if evidence exists to prove this, she wants the Orange County State Attorney to prosecute those responsible for the complaint. She’s concerned that false child abuse reports waste state funds needlessly and take away resources from children who really do need help.
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