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(Please see the comments to this article that indicate the California state legislative website contains misleading information that may have resulted in my wrongly concluding the Judiciary Committee voted on the pro-child-abuse version of this bill on April 28 rather than the significantly cleaned up version that is being listed with a revision date of May 5, 2009.)

This is an update to our previous article California Democrat Jim Beall Supports Child Abuse. When we started writing that article, AB 612 pro-child-abuse legislation. Despite minor changes, it was still pro-child-abuse when the Judiciary Committee voted to approve it on April 28. However, somebody in the California Assembly significantly watered it down on May 5 to a version that is no longer pro-child-abuse. These changes weren’t made until after the Judiciary Committee vote approving the bill.

You can find the the revision history of AB 612 complete with text and changes and votes at AB 612 Revision and Voting History.
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(Click here for an update to this post.)

A California representative, Democrat Jim Beall, has reintroduced legislation as Assembly Bill 612 (AB 612) to ban the discussion of parental alienation in child custody evaluations. California judges, psychologists, and family law attorneys all oppose this legislation because they know that parental alienation is a real problem that is harming children in many families, especially in high-conflict divorces. So do the many California parents who have been alienated from their children. And so do the grown children who are victims of parental alienation and recognize it for the damage their alienating parent caused in their own lives.

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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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Amine Baba-Ali was falsely convicted of child sexual abuse against his four year old daughter based upon false accusations from his ex-wife, lies from a doctor, and prosecution fraud by the New York City Queens District Attorney’s Office. Although his conviction was overturned in 1992 and he was released from prison, he continues to be persecuted due to the false conviction. The persecution has continued for two decades, despite the conviction being overturned. It has even extended to Mr. Baba-Ali being turned down for a job with the Census Bureau on account of the false conviction. The $2 million awarded to Mr. Babi-Ali in March 2009 by the New York State Court of Claims just barely begins to make up for what the government wrongfully did to ruin this man’s life and deprive his daughter of a father.

Vindicated, but Still Not Freed From Court’s Injustice
(excerpted from New York Times)
Amine Baba-Ali, a father wrongly convicted of raping and molesting his 4-year-old daughter, is the first person ever held by a state court to have satisfied every facet of the unjust-conviction law that he sued New York State under, according to the court’s decision. His lawyers proved that the Queens district attorney’s office fraudulently prosecuted him for a crime he did not commit. The court awarded him $2,093,428.

But Mr. Baba-Ali, 52, cannot shake the sense that this case will haunt him for a lifetime, not least because his daughter, now 26, was forever removed from him once he was convicted. He has not seen her for two decades, and has no idea where she is living.

“Though I am thankful, the fact of the matter is that I’ve lost my daughter,” Mr. Baba-Ali said in an telephone interview from his Manhattan apartment on Tuesday. “I’ve lost the most important part of my life.”

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Stephen Baskerville is an advocate for family law reform. In his book Taken into Custody: The War Against Fatherhood, Marriage, and the Family, he documents how the era of the no fault divorce as it spread across the United States in the 1970’s lead to the demise of the marriage contract both in social and legal terms. Divorce was no longer voluntary and agreed upon, it became something that could be forced by one party to the detriment of the other and their children. It enabled the government to throw people out of their homes, deprive children of a father or mother, take their property and income, and even deprive them of fundamental civil rights and throw them into jail without due process or trials in violation of the US Constitution.
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(Click here for more coverage on parental alienation.)

Dr. Jayne Major, former police officer Catherine MacWillie, and film director Shelli Ryan discuss parental alienation syndrome on The Gregory Mantell Show. Some topics mentioned in the discussion include Shelli Ryan’s movie on parental alienation called Jake’s Closet and the murder of Dr. Rick Lohstroh by his ten year old son after his mother, Deborah Geisler, had brainwashed him into hating his father and allowed him to take a gun to his father’s house.

(Click here for more coverage on parental alienation.)

The article to which this post links was written by Shari Schrieber, a child of parental alienation who is now a therapist. She loved her father very much, and felt intense pain as her mother cut him out of her life starting at age five. Her mother falsely accused her father of molestation and succeeded at mostly driving her father out of her life.

In retrospect, she wishes the courts had assigned custody of her to her father rather than to her mentally ill mother. She believes that her mother’s inability to emotionally provide for her as a child caused many problems in her life that took years for her to overcome. These problems could have been avoided if the courts would have had her live with her mentally healthier father. He wanted to be involved in her life, but the courts and her mother refused to permit it. Instead, they insisted she should live with her mother even though her mother was mentally ill and caused enormous damage because of it.

In the article, Schreiber mentions how personality disordered parents are often unable to emotionally provide for their children. Such parents may be able to meet basic physical needs of the children such as shelter and food. But their children develop low self-esteem, inability to trust, inability to have healthy relationships, and a variety of mental health problems themselves as a direct result of their primary parental relationship being with an emotionally chaotic or unavailable mentally ill person.

Click below to read the article:

THROWAWAY DADS; Children’s struggle for wholeness in the wake of divorce.

(Click here for more coverage on parental alienation.)

New York Firefighter Richard Smulczewski has two teenage daughters. His ex, Susan Smulczewski, committed parental alienation against their two daughters, brainwashing them into hating their father, and blocking access to the kids. She was found to be committing parental alienation by the courts and deemed an unfit mother. The court remanded custody of the daughters to their father. Yet the mother has refused to comply with court orders, continued to alienate their daughters against him, and continues to have custody.
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(Click here for more coverage on parental alienation.)

Here’s an interview with Jayne Major, Ph.D., a Los Angeles psychologist and educator advocating means to stop parental alienation behaviors and heal the damage they cause. In the interview, she answers common questions about parental alienation. She describes the range from mild bad-mouthing to sociopathic intent to brainwash children to hate the other parent. She notes that in severe alienation cases, the target parents (those who are alienated against) must learn to stand up for the truth if they are to have hope of not losing their children permanently to the brainwashing of the alienating parent. She notes that the most dangerous alienating parents often have one or more personality disorders:

Few lawyers, judges, nor laypersons are able to recognize seriously disturbed people who look and often act “normal.” Yet, their numbers are large and the damage they do to other parents, their children, and society is staggering. Sociopaths are cruel—without moral conscience, empathy, sympathy, or compassion. Their purpose is to win by domination. Harvard psychologist Martha Stout, in her book The Sociopath Next Door, states that one in twenty-five people is a sociopath. Furthermore, there is an estimated 20% of the general population with personality disorders. Those individuals who are the most dangerous are described in the DSM IV, Axis II Cluster B. The descriptive labels of these disorders are borderline, narcissistic, histrionic, and anti-social.

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(Click here for more coverage on parental alienation.)

Actor (“30 Rock”) and author (“A Promise to Ourselves: A Journey Through Fatherhood and Divorce“) Alec Baldwin speaks September 22, 2008, to The Commonwealth Club of California about parents turning their children against a former spouse.

Our Review of Baldwin’s Book

Book Review: A Promise To Ourselves, by Alec Baldwin

Sheena Berg’s Review of Baldwin’s Book

Blended-Families.com‘s Sheena Berg briefly reviews Alec Baldwin’s book A Promise to Ourselves: A Journey Through Fatherhood and Divorce.

Other Reviews of A Promise to Ourselves

Book Review: Alec Baldwin’s “A Promise to Ourselves“

Alec Baldwin: A Promise to Ourselves

Alec Baldwin’s A Promise to Ourselves Captures the Brutality of Divorce Wars

Divorce American Style (review by New York Times)

Recommended Books on Parental Alienation