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The first step in helping somebody with BPD is figuring out that they suffer from it. In the article Could it be Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)?, author Tami Green lists 43 questions to examine your personality or that of somebody close to you to see if you may have Borderline Personality Disorder. The more questions answered “yes”, the more likely a person is to suffer from BPD or a similar mental health problem.
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Earlier this month a court in Toronto, Cananda, transfered full custody of three daughters ages 9 to 14 to their father after a long-term parental alienation campaign by their mother. She had worked for years to brainwash them to hate their father. Judge McWatt of the Superior Court of Justice found that this constituted emotional child abuse and banned the mother from all further contact with the children except for counselling programs, including a program to help the children recover from parental alienation syndrome.

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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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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

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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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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What is the one thing a sociopath does not want other people to know? The truth. More specifically, sociopaths do not want the truth about them to be known as they are insecure, malicious, and devious people. Beyond being embarrassed by the truth of their behaviors and thoughts, they have a deathly fear of being exposed and rejected. That’s in large part because they use lies, manipulations, and distortions to control other people and get what they want. If others were to know about their true nature, they realize that most would want nothing to do with them. They would lose the support networks of malicious minions they control and incite to abuse other people. Therefore sociopaths have a strong motivation to attack, discredit, harass, and ruin anybody who presents arguments and facts that might tend to raise questions and doubts about their behaviors and their false statements.

Many sociopaths are so insecure and malicious that they feel similarly motivated to go on the offensive, perhaps with lesser severity, in reaction to people who might embarrass them with obviously nasty (to them) comments like “Is that lettuce stuck between your teeth?” or “Your car is filthy! There’s a $3 carwash special across the street.” If that gets them unhinged, just imagine what being exposed as a child abuser, false accuser, liar, or thief will do.

Sociopaths Experts At Blaming Others, Greatly Fear Being Blamed

Nobody likes to be blamed, but a responsible person will accept blame for something appropriate. Sociopaths don’t like to accept blame for anything, even if it is well-earned. While part of this is likely from their typically narcissistic “I’m better than you” and “rules don’t apply to me” attitudes, there’s more to it than that. They may realize that blaming is how they control others to harm the targets they viciously attack, often family members or former love interests. They understand both the destructive and defensive powers of blaming and make regular use of both.

Sociopaths may be especially cognizant of the risk that people whom they have used to abuse others might even turn against them, especially those who might be greatly angered by how they were manipulated into participating in destructive and harmful activities against others. People like to blame others. While sociopaths do it with extraordinary intensity and dishonesty, the people they manipulate are likely to do it, too. After all, a sociopath was able to manipulate them into unjustly attacking a former partner, a child’s other parent, teacher, doctor, counselor, therapist, or some other party the sociopath doesn’t like and that clearly demonstrates they are the sort of people who are into blaming others. Who is to say they won’t turn and attack the sociopath when they realize how they were used?
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Cindy Dumas is the San Diego mother who has been flooding the media for years with claims of child sexual abuse against her son Damon Moelter. On July 15, 2010, Judge Lorna Alksne gave full custody of Damon Moelter to his father, the person Dumas continues to insist sexually abused him, with minimal contact with his mother. You might think the title of this article implies we’ll be joining in the woe-is-me chanting of her supporters. Perhaps refreshingly, we won’t waste your time with that — you’ve read enough of it already if you have followed this case. Instead, I’m going to explain to you why Damon Moelter and his entire family are victims of the corrupt San Diego courts and that Damon in particular is experiencing court-ordered parental alienation child abuse. The primary driver of the corrupt and abusive decisions in this case is a biased and incompetent Judge Lorna Alksne. The type of corruption and bias that are occurring in her court are little different from that in many other family law courts. As a result, many children are being seriously harmed. Damon Moelter is just one of these many.

Perhaps ironically, this child abuse that is truly occurring is the parental alienation emotional abuse that Damon’s mother staunchly denies exists. But the chief motives and methods involved in the abuse occurring now are not the usual malicious mischief of a parent who can’t separate her or his own needs from those of the children. Instead, they involve the collusion of Judge Lorna Alksne and her friends pursuing their own purposes by violating the law and harming a child and a family.
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Some emotional abusers are particularly adept at using a technique called “gaslighting” (from a movie starring Ingrid Berman and Charles Boyer) to drive their victims to question their own grip on reality and even to make them feel like they are going insane. The essence of gaslighting is to make somebody believe a falsehood and to wonder why they didn’t remember or recall it previously. It is a mind game often used to distract from their own problematic behaviors and to create self-doubt in their target of abuse. Many Borderlines and some with related personality disorders from the DSM-IV Axis II Cluster B group (including Borderline, Narcissistic, Antisocial, and Histrionic) personality disorders are particularly skilled and prone to using gaslighting on their partners and people close to them.

In The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life, Dr. Robin Stern sums up the behavior like this:

Gaslighting is when someone wants you to do what you know you shouldn’t and to believe the unbelieveable. It can happen to you and it probably already has.

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Separation anxiety is a behavior normally found in infants and small children when a loved one is moving out of contact with them. They become worried and uncomfortable, anticipating the absence of the loved one. Often this loved one is a parent, other times it is a relative or a familiar care provider. This is a normal part of the development of children and tends to go away by the time they are around three or four years old. But not all behaviors that appear to be separation anxiety are in fact so. Alarmingly, sometimes such behaviors are the result of premeditated child abuse by the parent handing over a child to another person, particularly to the child’s other parent.

Personality Disordered Abusers Hurts Kids To Hurt Ex and Win Custody

When you’re a divorcing or divorced parent of a child you had a with a sociopath, psychopath, or other personality disordered abuser (PDA), there’s a chance you will come face-to-face with the reality that your ex is willing to abuse your child to make it look like he or she doesn’t like being returned to you. The ex wants to worsen the separation anxiety, or at least the apparent “symptoms” of it, often in front of witnesses whom will be asked to write declarations or testify in court or to talk with psychological evaluators, therapists, CPS, and court-appointed mediators. The PDA expects these reports that the child doesn’t like to be returned to you will help ensure your custody is reduced and the PDA’s custody is increased.
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