(logo sound)
(music plays) 50% of US marriages end in a divorce.
Divorce is more than a 50 billion dollar a year industry.
(music plays) This is why
People get married, they get divorced.
Since I started in 1949, when I passed a wedding,
I'd think to myself, "That's inventory."
The statistics are that more money passes
through family law court than all the other courts combined.
The more you charge, the more people are willing to pay,
because they feel that money equals skill.
You know, we aren't much different from any other
segment of society, in terms of money calling the shots.
I've had cases where they've spent $20 million in fees.
The real standard is how much money can we make
off these people. (laughs) That's the standard.
There's an expression that people can get as much justice
as they can afford and that most people cannot
afford any justice at all.
What's wrong with that? It's a business.
This is a business. This is not social services.
(music plays)
DIVORCE CORP.
People thought we were crazy,
getting married after just three months of dating,
but she had children from another marriage
and I had my son from a previous marriage
and we just thought, you know, this would be a great way
that we could combine our families
and raise all these children together
and we were like the Brady Bunch.
People called us the Byron Bunch. (laughs)
I just couldn't have been happier.
I've got this wonderful new wife and a new family
that we're starting together.
For whatever reason, it just didn't work out.
The biggest single reason for divorce in this country
is marriage.
Each year, about 4 million people get married in the US.
Although some people plan for months,
a basic marriage ceremony can be completed in ten minutes.
All that's really required is proof of age
and a $50 fee for a marriage license,
but getting divorced is far from easy.
Litigation lasted for over a year.
17 months for a 23 month marriage.
We were only married for a year.
We've been going through our divorce for a year and a half now.
I was married only four months
and my divorce has lasted now over six and a half years.
I'll be close to eight years.
Eight years.
Why is divorce so difficult?
(rock n' roll music plays)
Marriage in the US was once considered
a lifetime commitment.
A divorce was something that regular folks just didn't do.
Back then, divorce was considered dirty,
both for the people getting a divorce
and for the lawyers handling it.
There could not be a divorce unless there was fault.
Fault usually was either adultery or cruelty,
which was the word for abuse.
But the feminist movement of the 1960s began
to change the way Americans viewed women in the home
and in the workplace.
Activists considered marriage a low-paying job,
a trap that you couldn't escape.
Because proving fault created such a barrier to divorce,
in 1969 then governor of California, Ronald Reagan,
responded to increasing political pressure
by signing the first no-fault divorce act.
The concept quickly spread to most of the other 49 states.
The divorce revolution, the great increase in divorce
that happened in the 70s, happened in part
because of no-fault.
Although no-fault laws made it easier to file for divorce,
they didn't make it easier to complete a divorce.
Even if your spouse is in total agreement
and wants to end things on a happy note,
you need the approval of a family court,
presided over by a family court judge.
But family courts can be like the wild west,
because certain rights provided by the US Constitution
do not apply in family court.
The Constitution states that you're entitled to a trial
by jury and an attorney if you can't afford one.
All kinds of basic mechanisms that exist
in the criminal and civil courts in this country
don't exist in the family courts.
The family courts call themselves courts of equity,
not courts of law.
Although it's not written anywhere
in our federal or state constitutions,
family courts have given themselves a pass on juries.
Juries keep you keep you honest,
because they're 12 people who are going to make a decision,
based on how they look at things.
The judge is a jury of one.
In a family courtroom, the judge dominates the preceding.
In my world, where there's no jury,
you're the decision maker.
I'm more comfortable with that.
In family court, you don't have the right
to an attorney if you can't afford one.
Litigants have no right to counsel.
The right to an attorney did not apply.
and The Constitution of the United States did not apply.
One would think in a court where there is no jury
and where you're not given the right to an attorney,
our government would simplify the rules
and make it easy to represent yourself.
At a moment's notice, the judge will recite a civil code,
a procedure code, or a family local rule code or whatever.
You'll ask for a clarification and the judge won't give you
the clarification.
It always comes back as, "Well, you should know".
We use terms like "order to show cause",
"notice of motion".
They're not really user-friendly,
except for attorneys, who are familiar with them.
The court is not a friendly environment.
People are there without an attorney, for a judge,
they're an irritant, because they don't know the system,
they don't know the procedure,
they don't know how to do this, they don't know how to do that.
If you are a litigant who is acting
as his or her own attorney in a family court,
you can often turn the judge against you,
just by means of the way you behave,
your lack of familiarity with etiquette of the courtroom,
speaking out of turn.
They don't know what's going on
and there's nobody there to guide them.
When you ask for help within the courthouse,
Oh, I'm sorry,you have to go see the court facilitator over there
take a number and if your number doesn't come up in eight hours,
well, come back again and try over again.
So I called around the law library in Sacramento,
"Well, we can't give you that information."
Wow! What is this? This is like top secret, priest-class stuff.
The rules of the family courts are documented
in the family codes of each state,
but the size and complexity of these codes
is often overwhelming.
This is a civil code from when I entered law school in '46
The family law section in this whole book is right there.
That's it and this is thick paper.
This is the family code 2011.
Thin paper, small print. Look at this.
So why would our government make the family court
so complicated for the average citizen?
People often say a law is so complicated,
lawyers make law so complicated,
and Congress makes law or legislators make law
so complicated and there is some truth to that.
You know, there's the old saying from Charles Dickens
that "The business of the law is to make business for itself".
The more complicated and specialized family law is,
the more you need an attorney.
The lawyers are the legislators. They make the laws.
The more laws and the more complex they are,
the more we have to pay them.
With all this complexity, it seems like you have no choice
but to hire a lawyer, but this isn't some huge legal battle
between two massive corporations, this is divorce.
These lawyers can't cost that much money.
The rate was $600 an hour.
In the Gold Coast, Fairfield County, it's $650 an hour.
I'm not saying I'm worth $700 an hour,
but that's what I charge.
My rate is $950 an hour.
That's for one lawyer.
They had assistants, people filing.
I was being charged for multiple people working at the firm.
They said, "Tell me your hourly rate".
I add it all together and I said to the litigants,
"I want you to know the cost is $27,000 an hour."
I said, "After two hours, we will have spent more
than most people in this courthouse make in a year".
I have to work 25 hours to pay for one hour
of an arrogant attorney's time. 25 to 1.
It comes down to, always, money.
With so much money on the line,
why don't couples force their lawyers
to finish divorces quickly?
It actually has to do with the financial setup of a marriage.
When you file for divorce, money from both parties is looked on
as a shared pool of cash that's available
for either side's attorney to spend.
The first thing that lawyers do is find out exactly
how much money you and your spouse have.
You fill out an income expense declaration, basically,
just to find out how much you're worth.
What your assets are, what you've encumbered.
How much you have in the bank,
how many cars you have.
They want an entire picture of all your financial assets,
because they want to size you up.
Once the lawyers find out how much each side is worth,
they tempt their clients with the prospect
of getting more money through fighting.
It has become about winning and that's both
from the economic perspective and from
this, sort of, emotional perspective.
What you have is a tinderbox and virtually anything
can ignite that tinderbox and the lawyers, frankly,
often are throwing gasoline on that fire.
We're going to fight you, and even if you win,
you will think you lost.
What you wind up with is people feeling antagonized
by the tactics of the lawyers on the other side.
If you and your spouse hate each other like poison
and want to get out of the hellhole you call a marriage,
you've come to the right place.
You've got questions, we have answers.
I'm Reno Brackman and this is Brutal Divorce Tactics.
The system is an adversarial, polarized system.
It turns out the court system is designed to create conflict.
Many lawyers encourage their clients
to be as aggressive as possible,
tempting them with winning more money.
And once someone starts making accusations towards you
in court, you have no choice but to fight back,
because if you don't, you could lose it all.
Your house, your money, your possessions, your children,
everything.
If one side is being reasonable and the other side
is being totally unreasonable and greedy and miserable,
in thus lies the problem.
Basically what the court does is it creates a battleground,
in which each side hurls the harshest accusations
they can come up with, because they're desperate to win.
There's nothing secret, everybody's sexual habits
and propensities and dirty little lack of hygiene,
every detail, their journal and their photographs of them
with weird toys strapped to them come into court.
If you want to enter the circus and you put on the outfit
and you want to be a great clown and entertain,
the system will certainly accommodate you.
You're getting billed by the hour and it gets expensive
and people need to realize that.
The more acrimonious it is, the smaller the things
that the parties are willing to fight for,
the more they get to bill.
Attorneys get paid by the hour.
The more accusations they make towards the other side,
the more things they ask you to send them,
the more papers they file with the courthouse,
the more they earn and the more it costs you.
One party files something, you have to respond.
If you don't respond, you either lose by default
or if it's a contempt petition, you land yourself in jail.
You're a lawyer, you write a nasty letter,
her lawyer has to write a nasty letter.
It's just a great system.
Essentially paper the other side
until they can't take it anymore.
It's just paperwork after paperwork after paperwork
after paperwork.
And there are no limits.
When attorneys get started, they have no incentive to stop
until you run out of money.
You have lawyers who are in it for the money,
who are greedy, who will milk a case.
If your case is taking years and years,
then that means some attorney is just putting in a lot
of frivolous motions to delay the case.
In the 60s, it'd take a few months, a year.
Now, cases drag on five, six, seven, eight years.
Which is extremely expensive, as you can imagine.
The attorneys definitely don't want to settle the cases,
because once they do, their income stream has been cut off.
And the lawyers have been granted complete immunity
in family court.
A lawyer can say or do anything, no matter how false or cruel
and waste tens of thousands of dollars intentionally
and maliciously and they cannot be sued
for malicious prosecution or excessive litigation.
I'm not aware of any case where a lawyer was sued
for being overly zealous.
Did you ever hold an attorney in contempt?
No.
I really didn't have the heart to do that.
I would see them privately maybe when we had lunch afterwards.
No, because he's doing his job and however pitiful his case was
I'm reluctant to embarrass attorneys.
With such high rates and no consequences
for over-litigating, the money in the marriage is often spent
before the divorce is even finished.
So how do people pay for all this?
When the liquid cash went out, at that point there,
he said, "Well, I understand you have $100,000 line of credit,"
which I had to go ahead and use that in order to pay
for my legal defense.
A lot of people go into debt as a result of their divorces.
Some attorneys automatically put a lien on your house,
just to make sure that, eventually, they get paid.
We took out a equity line of credit on my parents' house
and that's been maxed out now.
I think it's $250,000.
What they do is bleed you until all the money is gone.
And if that isn't enough, the court can even order you
to sell everything you own.
A judge looks through here and he says to me,
"You really messed this up.
The next time I see you in my court,
I'm going to order your land sold, so you can get attorneys."
Your home, your valuables are all going to be sold
to pay the lawyers and people like me.
The court does regularly liquidate an asset,
sell the house, to pay that person to do their job.
So the court system has become the marketeer
and under threat of a court order of contempt
have ordered you to comply with it and then has ordered you
to pay it and will then collect it for them,
as their collection agency.
The legal system, like many of the other systems
in our country, turns around money
and money makes a big difference on everything.
It's not what we think of in America,
but it's the reality of America.
You didn't have family law firms in the old days,
because the people who ran the big firms weren't interested
in doing family law.
There was no money in it.
Once houses started to go up in value
and more money came into the family law system,
some of those big firms did get interested in family law.
The cases became much bigger,
so divorce became a business-type trial.
It's not surprising that the average contested divorce
in the US costs $50,000.
In the last 40 years, the number of divorce
lawyers has exploded,
increasing over 2,000% in California alone
and this is a nationwide issue.
No matter what state you live in you're going to get pulled in.
We're all part of this machine
that makes divorce a business.
It is a business and I'm not ashamed to say that.
This is how I feed my family, this is how I keep a roof
over my head, this is how I put gas in my Rolls Royce.
And when children get involved,
things get even more complicated.
The real heart of family court,
the real thing that is the most painful
and that is the most damaging is custody fights
and I really think that courts need to, for the most part,
get out of that business.
I do believe that, in many cases,
the system does fail children.
The family courts are supposed
to acknowledge several Supreme Court decisions
that both parents have an equal right to see their children.
It's a fundamental
constitutional right to parenthood
and the Supreme Court has said it repeatedly.
Go back over 100 years.
Parents have a constitutional right to raise their children.
We have to defer to their judgment, unless we find
that their judgment is detrimental.
But it turns out the family courts have trumped
the Supreme Court, with a doctrine called
"The Best Interest of the Child."
This doctrine is a broad set of guidelines
that allows the court to scrutinize nearly every aspect
of parenting.
What does this mean, the best interest of the child?
And you ask, you say, "Can I have some criteria?
Is it better to study a lot or have friends?
Is it better to play baseball or chess?
Is it better to watch old movies on TV or watch the new movies?"
If there was a legislative definition
of what the best interest is, then of course,
we could follow that.
It ends up meaning pretty much whatever first,
the trial judge and then a court of appeal court wants it
to mean.
The judge gets to decide whether the parent's ethics,
morals, and behavior fits his or her profile
for the perfect parent and ultimately,
they have the undisputed power to choose one parent
over the other or neither parent at all.
What I would consider a good parent,
another judge might not consider a good parent.
They have to decide who is best for the child,
and who's a better parent.
Suppose you're in the 88th percentile as a parent
and then the other parent is in the 93rd percentile,
then you can, as a judge, say, "I think the child
should spend more time, because that's better."
Whereas if you have two parents and one is
in the third percentile and the other is
in the eighth percentile, the 8th would get it,
between those two parents.
But look at that.
The one who's in the 88th now doesn't get his child
and one who's in the 8th does get his child
because of the purely fortuitous circumstances of the marriage
or the union.
The whole thing is just insane.
As long as you treat your family well
and there's not anything going on criminally
and there's not some abuse, the state doesn't get involved,
but for some reason, when you file for divorce,
a whole bunch of strangers are starting
to look up your dress.
Neglect and abuse, sure.
The government has a right to be there, has a duty to be there.
We're talking about the situation in family court,
two fit parents who, outside of this system,
would never be challenged, in terms of their right
to be with their child.
You need evaluators, you need psychologists,
you need all these people to tell you what you did wrong.
I will never understand that.
Because the concept of the best interest of the child
is so nebulous, the court system created a position
called a custody evaluator.
These evaluators advise the judges to help them determine
who should get custody of the children.
As a parenting evaluator, you conduct all sorts of tests,
personality tests, and then make a recommendation
who should get primary custody of the kids.
Give me a list of all your friends,
all the people who know you, and they go
and interview each and every one of them and
then every time someone says something good or bad,
they look into that.
Many people are very defensive
when they're being evaluated by a stranger
to see if they're a worthwhile parent.
And who wouldn't be?
The MMPI, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory,
has test/retest reliability that 50% of the people change
in less than two weeks.
It's the most widely used test in the country,
but it is not a reliable test.
In showing you a bunch of inkblots,
"What's this look like? What do you see in here?"
and then scoring you for narcissism or defensiveness
or paranoia because you see bats and butterflies
and birds is not based on science.
It's unethical. It is unconscionably unethical.
The custody evaluators, for the most part,
are a bunch of morons making money off the backs
of people who don't even quite understand the system.
Do you know what the qualifications
of being a custody evaluator are?
Can I name them? Probably not.
I can tell you it took my attending a two day seminar
that one could basically sleep through.
As a parenting evaluator, you don't have to be good
at understanding the human condition
or knowing who would be a better parent.
What you have to be good at is writing reports and testifying
and being able to convince a judge that you know
what you're talking about.
In the old days, you could get those evaluations
for anywhere from $2,500 to $5,000,
more typically $5,000 to $7,500.
Now, I'm seeing them $35,000, $60,000.
They're very expensive.
You end up getting a bill for $50,000 to $100,000
for the evaluation that, until you filed for divorce,
none of this was an issue.
Evaluators are frequently hired by one parent
or the other, so the evaluator's purpose is
to achieve the parent's goal, the goal of the parent
who hired him or her.
Whatever expert you get to say about how bad mom is
at parenting her child, the other side can
get another expert to say mom is a great parent.
And that's where the rub comes, because the fact
that it has no merit.
It's known within the industry that certain firms
have certain custody evaluators in their back pocket
and I can confirm that that's what happens.
So, it really shows you so often what matters
is not the relationship between the children and both parents,
but money.
Deborah Singer had an experience with one
of those evaluators.
My case was very, very simple.
I had been taking care of my daughter since she was born,
alone since she was nine months old, financially,
providing in every, every way.
In Ms. Singer's case, there was a particular bank account
that had liquid funds.
Once the court sees the financial picture, it says,
"Now I know I've got money to work with."
She said that in court.
On the transcript, sure. On the record.
Commissioner Gretchen Taylor said,
"There is going to be a custody evaluation
and you're either going to pick Dr. Susie Dupay
or Dr. Joseph Kenan.
No other custody evaluator was acceptable for the judge,
so they chose Dr. Joseph Kenan.
He pulled up in an Aston Martin,
he was dressed very, very well.
He didn't even know my name.
He didn't know my ex-husband's name,
he didn't know anything about the case,
which was very shocking.
I sat down with him and he put a microphone in front of me
and said, "Tell me about birth until you were 10 years old."
So I start talking. He was sweating, he was anxious.
I felt very uncomfortable.
I could tell that there was something
that just wasn't settling right.
My instinct was that there was something terribly wrong.
When it was over, she gave Dr. Kenan a check
for his agreed upon fee, $7,500.
He rushed directly to her bank to cash the check.
I got a call from the manager at the bank, who I know,
and said, "There is a man downstairs
trying to cash a check
for $7,500", and I thought, "Why would this doctor
not just deposit my check into his account?"
Within a couple of days type of thing,
I received a phone call from him.
He was asserting to me that for another 25 or 35
he'd be able to give us what we wanted.
I said, "25?" and he said, "Yeah, $25,000".
And, of course, then I realized I'm dealing with a major problem.
Right this moment, as the wheels turn, you think about,
"Am I going to accuse the judge's appointed
licensed psychiatrist of attempting to commit extortion?"
We spin out of control, it bodes poorly against my client,
and all hell breaks loose.
I didn't know what to do.
I get a call out of the blue from somebody
who wanted to have lunch with me.
Coming back from lunch, we bump into Dr. Kenan
on the street.
My friend looks over and sees him and I looked at him
and I said, "Do you know him?" and he said, literally,
"Do I know him? Hold on a second.
I'll show you his Facebook."
Instead of Joe Kenan, he calls himself Joe Kegan.
There was one after another of shocking photos
of sex, porn stars, cocaine.
It took them ten years for me.
It goes to the degree of how well I hid things.
One specific photograph, it was a picture
of Dr. Kenan and his two other friends.
It was a flier for a party and it said,
"The Dysfunctional Family," and at the bottom of it,
it said, "Bareback anal sex with strangers following the event."
And I'm thinking, "This is the guy that's going to tell me
"whether or not I'm a good mother?"
If I had one photo, one photo like that on my Facebook,
Dr. Kenan would have taken my child away from me.
She would have been gone.
Probably any evaluator, actually.
Do whatever you want in your private life,
but you do not get to determine what's best for my child.
When the story hit the press,
Dennis Braun received phone calls from other parents
that had been evaluated by Dr. Kenan.
Out of the hundred or so phone calls that I received,
women were literally crying on the phone to me
about the injustice they felt had been perpetrated upon them
by Dr. Kenan and I kind of found it somewhat disingenuous
that the court would say that they had not heard
that Dr. Kenan was one of the questionable evaluators.
Turns out the court system is well aware of issues like this.
In 2010, California's auditor was ordered to examine
the family courts.
The audit discovered that the courts were forcing parents
to pay thousands of dollars to unlicensed
and unqualified evaluators.
I'm an ex-cop, all right?
I know what it is to drive a police car,
I know what it is to sit in the back of one.
I'm not easily hustled and when I see these custody evaluators,
they sicken me.
There has been no outreach whatsoever about this
from the court system and Dr. Kenan is free to continue
to do custody evaluations if lawyers contact him,
which I fully believe they are.
It seems the courts are trying to protect themselves
from getting exposed, no matter what the cost.
(music plays)
Dan Brewington and his wife had two daughters,
When Dan's wife filed for divorce, they decided
to split their time with the children 50/50,
but their divorce dragged on for over two years.
After going through two lawyers
and nearly running out of money,
Dan decided to represent himself
with a little informal advice from Bob Kelly.
Close to three years ago, he would stop in
and ask me general questions or if I could provide him
with information.
In Dan's case, he had equal parenting time with his wife.
There was no problem, no allegations of abuse,
no allegations of harm to the children
in any way, shape, or form.
This is where they were born.
They did diapers, bottles, potty training, everything
and nothing went wrong.
There was no drugs, no alcohol, anything like that.
And so for two and a half years, there were no complaints,
no child custody investigations, no anybody trying
to change the visitation arrangements.
But Dan went through a custody evaluation.
The custody evaluation report was 29 pages.
One of the tests that Dan had taken, he had nine categories.
In eight categories, he scored average or above.
And when Dan asked why none of the good stuff was ever mentioned,
he said that he was only paid to find the bad stuff.
They accused of him of being possibly paranoid
and paranoid people sometimes strike out.
Dan felt that he was being railroaded by the evaluator,
so he started a blog site to express
what he felt was an injustice.
Dan soon found examples where the evaluator may have acted
in biased or inconsistent ways.
For example, Dan's evaluator recommended
that a mother who had had sex with a 15 year old boy
and who served alcohol to minors in her home
be granted more custody than was recommended for Dan.
Dan Brewington was the individual who got in,
started digging, made a determination
that this psychologist who was being appointed
by judges in Indiana was not licensed to practice psychology
in Indiana, so once Dan Brewington got that ball rolling
he was a marked man.
The judge takes a look at the situation,
what's the first recourse?
He wants to avoid the publicity, "Take down your blog".
There was a preliminary hearing,
in which the judged warned that Dan needed to take down
his blog site if he wanted to see his little girls.
Just saying that is threatening.
You know, I can't make you take it down,
because it's your First Amendment right,
and, so he's saying you either can have First Amendment rights
or you have your children, but unlike most people,
you can't have both.
For that judge to say, "You won't get to see your children
if you don't take that blog down," is absolutely
in violation of the First Amendment.
Dan felt that his First Amendment right
to the freedom of speech enabled him
to continue publishing his blog, so he didn't remove it.
As a consequence, two and a half months later,
the judge completely rescinded Dan's right to see his girls.
No visitation whatsoever.
Even convicted felons are granted visitation
of their children.
I believe that he did that to be malicious and vindictive,
to take the girls away.
I've had clients who have either had alcohol,
drug problems, or whatever.
They've all received visitation, even if it's supervised.
They went out the front door and I said,
"Goodbye my darlings. I'll see you tomorrow
and we'll plan the birthday cake",
and I've never seen them since.
And evaluators are just one of the many types of experts
that a judge can assign to your case.
In fact, if evaluators aren't enough,
the court can even appoint lawyers to represent children.
(music plays)
This is our leopard gecko, Star.
I got custody of him. (laughs)
I actually got this sign right after I got divorced.
I laugh a lot.
The sign in the kitchen makes me think
of my oldest daughter.
The divorce process in 2004, we sat down together,
we came up with our own agreement that was fairly simple
and we wrote our own custody schedule,
which was a 50/50 custody split.
In November of 2008, my ex-husband
started violating court orders and withheld one of our children
from being with me.
Wendy pleaded with her ex-husband
to maintain the custody schedule, but he refused,
so she took the matter to family court to ask for help.
My ex-husband's attorney asked for a guardian ad litem,
or what's called an amicus attorney to be appointed
to our case.
Her job was supposed to be to determine
what's in the best interest of the children.
Sometimes the courts will appoint an attorney
to represent the child, but that is not necessarily
a positive step, either.
She told me in our first meeting
that she would be giving custody to my ex-husband.
It was very shocking to me.
I have seen some attorneys who, because they want
to curry favor with a judge,
so that that judge will appoint them again,
they tend to provide a report that leans toward
what they think the judge wants anyway.
It's not a positive system.
The amicus attorney sent me a bill for $11,000
and they knew I didn't have $11,000.
I took my bank statements to the court
and they knew that I was to the point where I had nothing left.
Some of these children can't say, "goo goo, ga ga",
and yet these lawyers are sending you these outrageous bills
for all these sessions they had.
We kept getting the same figure,
where she was billing the same number of hours
to all these different cases and she's got dozens and dozens
of cases, couldn't possibly have performed
this number of hours.
A few of these lawyers have gotten away
with hundreds of thousands of dollars
taking kids to movies and going to have lunch.
Now in the audits of Marin and Sacramento County,
this was found to be a highly abusive area,
where the minors' counsel's bills weren't being looked at
and they would just submit them, they'd pencil whip them,
and write them a check and the parents ended up
being responsible for a bill that they couldn't get in
and audit.
I can't dispute any of the guardian ad litem fees.
I asked to get a statement at one point of her fees,
so I could understand how she was billing
and she told me that the guardian ad litem bills,
she can give to the children only,
because she's their attorney.
Now, my children are under the age of ten years old.
They would not understand any of the fees,
but she refused to give them to me,
so whatever she wrote down is what I had to pay.
It was actually very clever on the other attorneys' parts.
I got an ultimatum, a motion for enforcement,
that said, "Pay this $11,000 or go to jail."
So, it really got to the end of the line for me.
With her back against the wall,
Wendy decided to do some digging.
We had gone in and we had obtained some public records
from the Ethics Commission.
I came to find out and it is reflected in public documents
that the amicus attorney in our case has relationships
with the judge in our case and she has worked very closely
with my ex-husband's attorneys in previous cases
and in fact, my ex-husband's attorneys represented
the amicus attorney in a case.
Wendy kept digging.
We found that the amicus attorney in our case
was a large campaign contributor to the judge in our case
and the attorneys representing my ex-husband
were also large campaign contributors to the judge
in our case.
It seems kind of unbelievable to me
that the judge who's hearing the case or one of the parties,
their attorneys is a very large campaign contributor.
Sounds like a conflict of interest, doesn't it? (laughs)
And that wasn't all she found.
If you pull the records from the Texas Ethics Commission,
you'll find oftentimes that the attorneys
who make the largest contributions to the judges
tend to win most of their cases.
Because of all this, Wendy requested a new judge,
in an effort to get a fair trial.
The courts responded by asking another judge
to rule on whether there was a conflict of interest,
regarding the campaign contributions.
The other judge heard the case and denied Wendy's request,
but made a very interesting speech
And the judge said, "This thing about contributions
"is as uncomfortable for a judge as any topic you can get on.
"That's because you folks that are non lawyers don't contribute
"to judicial campaigns and the only way that a judge can run
"for reelection is to raise money for all those things
"that cost to get your name before the public
"and you know who has the most interest in seeing that done?
"The lawyers".
If we read on, he says the lawyers only contribute
"to good judges."
So what does it mean to be a good judge in the eyes of a lawyer?
Perhaps it means seeing things their way.
Some lawyers even boast that they can control the outcome
of a case.
They have it now where $300,000 to $400,000
will guarantee the outcome.
Amazingly, these same judges are also the ones
who approve the bills of all the court professionals
who work on your case.
If we talk about who are the most ferocious,
more feared collectors, often you hear things like the IRS, right?
On that list, near the top of the list of the most fearsome
would be the courts.
And the reason is they have a lot of extralegal tools.
There's very few businesses in America
where you can sit back and a judge sends you the business
and a judge collects your money for you
and that money gets to you for sure.
And the beauty of this is all they've got to do is get in good
with the judges.
And campaign contributions are just one of many incentives
that are used to influence judges.
They have a family law section of the
Los Angeles County Bar
that's very active, that puts on programs.
Some judges will sit on that executive committee
from time to time, judges will be in all the programs
that they present. You work together with them on panels
on presentations, so there's a lot of contact
and communication and you see these same lawyers
all the time.
The law firms have created conferences,
all expense paid trips, and even awards that they give
to the judges.
And these activities are often sponsored by the same lawyers
who present cases to these judges.
I love my lawyers and I'm very, very happy to say
that I was awarded by both the plaintiff's bar,
when they had their annual convention with expenses paid
and I was awarded by the defense bar.
Boy, their trip was to Spain and we had two judges along there.
I just was very close with the vast majority of my lawyers
and it was no conflict whatsoever.
But these are small potatoes,
compared to the largest incentives for judges.
When a judge goes into retirement,
they not only get a generous pension,
but they also have the option to continue practicing privately
as a judge or as a lawyer.
Law firms often hire the retired judges to rule on cases
outside the court.
And the law firms pay is exponentially higher
than what they were paid by the government.
So guess which judges get hired most often to work
for these law firms.
And, of course, some of the judges, it's interesting,
is that a lot of them are millionaires, too.
I mean, how about that for a thought?
You guys ever thought about that?
Many civil judges nowadays go into arbitrations
and mediations afterwards.
I'm seeing the same lawyers that I saw
when I was sitting on the bench.
What we try to do is go to retired judges,
pay them their hourly rate and have them hear our cases.
I charge $500 an hour.
There's some people who charge $400,
some people who charge $600.
My fee is $500.
And unlike other public officials,
judges do not have a waiting period between public
and private practice.
A judge can retire one day,
practice as an attorney the next day,
and then go back to being a pro tem judge a day later.
Amazingly, your opposing attorney could literally
have been serving as a judge the day before,
having had lunch with the same judge you're sitting
in front of today.
With all this happening behind the scenes,
it begs the question: Is anyone actually getting a fair trial
in family court?
I haven't seen my boys, except through Skype,
for over four years now.
I found out that my judge used to work in the same law firm
as my ex's attorney.
They were friends and associates and my ex's attorney
had been giving campaign contributions to my judge.
The judge didn't let me speak in court,
wouldn't let me tell my story.
He was hostile in court, so I went to the press.
I-Team reporter Ernie Freeman reports
on how a mother's desperate cries for help
are not being heard.
Shortly thereafter, both boys were taken away from me.
No contact with them whatsoever.
My judge was retaliating against me for me being vocal.
It's not like I abused my kids.
There was nothing like that that would substantiate
such a harsh ruling as to completely cut me
out of my kids' lives.
I kept filing new papers to try and get some kind
of contact with my boys.
Eventually the judge put a court order on me
that said that I was not allowed to file anything,
not only in his court, but in the entire court system.
At that point, I felt desperate and hopeless.
I want to see my boys.
Time was going by and I still didn't have
any contact with them.
So, that's when I decided to file a paper.
That filing landed me in jail.
They didn't give me a lawyer, no jury, just the one biased judge.
I've gone to jail now three times,
not because I committed a crime not because I stole anything,
but because I want to see my children.
I think it's quite fair to question the amount of money
that's changing hands in the family court system
and how that affects the decisions that officials
in the system make.
As I always tell my grandchildren, follow the money
and you'll figure out why people are hurt and who is helped.
Who exactly is watching the courts?
Custody mediator Emily Gallup tried to answer that question.
I went to Stanford right out of high school
and my first class was Psych 1 and I knew immediately
I wanted to know absolutely everything I could
about psychology.
The mediator can make a recommendation to the judge
to what the custody plan should be.
It's easy to just rubber stamp
whatever the mediator tells you to do.
And for the most part, that is exactly what happens.
Something like 90 or 95% of the cases get the rubber stamp,
but there was this one hour guideline.
Within one hour, I was supposed to review the file,
meet with parents, write a recommendation to the court.
They call it the ER model.
They say,
"Well, you know, people come in, they get service
for their most immediate problem,
they're sent on their way,
and if they need to come back, they can come back later".
The only way you can do that
is if you cut some very important corners
and you play quick and dirty.
I called the AOC, thinking that the AOC was the police
for all the courts in California,
that they monitor compliance.
So I called them from this cramped,
little victim witness waiting room across the hall.
I literally was in the dark with the door locked,
calling them for help, saying,
"I have tried everything I can think of here
"and domestic violence victims are being forced
"into mediation with their perpetrators,
"files are not being reviewed."
You know, I went through my list of all my concerns and they said,
"Wow, that sounds terrible, but there's nothing we can do.
"I'm sorry. We don't like to get
involved in these interdepartmental disputes".
Okay, so who is watching the court?
I've come to the unfortunate conclusion that no one
is holding them accountable for their actions.
They've done a lot of damage to this community.
Andm at the time, I thought, "Well, yeah.
"Half the people who've been through here don't like us,
"because they didn't get what they wanted."
And I realize now that's not the problem.
The problem is you were disrespecting people
and they knew it.
(music plays)
While the ER model has not been effective
at lowering court dockets, it has been very effective
at creating a revolving door that brings litigants back
over and over and over again.
The great structure is take the litigants,
who are in trouble and desperate enough to pay money
and get them to pay money to the lawyers,
who are the friends of the judges and the judges
are ex-lawyers, so it's all this interlocking situation.
You get money based on numbers
and if there's more people and more
and more people coming in, then you can ask
for more funding.
If you, kind of, handle the situation,
there's less people that have to come back.
It's a great repeat business.
Yes. The revolving door of services.
The courts are state-sponsored.
The more divorce disputes they have,
the more funding they get from the state.
Professionals who benefit from the system
continually lobby for more and more money.
We can only hope that the priorities
of the legislative and executive branches will be
to pour money into our courts.
More funding for more judges and commissioners
for the courts.
Funding should be substantially increased
over the good years that we have.
But, hopefully we will get the money we need.
And they often get their way.
The Judicial Council is the policy-making body
of California state courts.
Chief Financial Officer Steven Nash outlined
what funding the branch can expect.
This budget is such a relief, not that it's great,
but it is such a relief.
The more funding the courts get from the state,
the larger they get and the more business they can handle
from the law firms.
(music plays)
Ulf Carlson has experienced first-hand
just how much damage the collusion
between lawyers and judges can cause.
At the beginning of the divorce,
I had talked to some of the biggest law firms
here in Sacramento and their first question was
who is the judge and who is the opposing attorney.
And I was told by numerous firms
that they had a very serious concern about that relationship.
The attorney representing Ulf's wife
had a close relationship with the judge
and now even serves as both an attorney and a judge
in the same courthouse.
Not surprisingly, Ulf's judge seemed biased against him
during his trial.
Right during cross examination,
the judge just got up and left and he never returned
to the courtroom.
My attorney, I think it was a couple days later,
she gets called in by his clerk and basically,
is informed that the trial's over with.
And the interesting thing is he actually ruled against me
on every single issue, not 99%, but 100%.
I mean, he nailed me on everything.
He ordered both properties sold, that I were
to pay my ex's all of her attorney fees.
So, I was left with no other choice than to file an appeal.
Filing an appeal is what someone does
if they're trying to reverse a judge's decision.
Unfortunately, the appeals court can only change a decision
or order a retrial if the family court judge didn't apply
the family code correctly.
Aside from that, appeals courts don't have the power
to change a judge's ruling, even if the judge's decisions
were biased, one-sided, or cruel.
Two days after I had filed my appeal,
McBrian found out about it and has admitted
that he picked up the phone and called his buddy,
who just happened to be Chief of Legal
at the Department of General Services,
where I worked for 18 years and I had an impeccable work history
and I was just escorted out of the building and fired.
It became clear to Ulf that the judge was retaliating
against him for filing an appeal,
so Ulf submitted a complaint to the Judicial Council.
This is where people can report unethical
or incompetent judges, but the judicial council
is made up of judges and lawyers
and they rarely remove a judge from office.
In fact, that year, there were over 1,000 complaints
filed against judges in the state of California alone.
Of those 1,000 complaints, none of the judges were fined,
one of the judges were put in jail,
and none of the judges were removed from office.
Even thought the judicial council found
that Ulf's judge engaged in willful misconduct
and contacted Ulf's employer they didn't fire him.
And even the appeals court and the judicial council acknowledged
that the judge was in the wrong, Ulf's divorce
still caused him to go completely broke.
This mistake has cost me hundreds of
thousands of dollars.
I've not been reimbursed any of that money.
It's not fun, at the age of 51, to start over.
All my other friends are talking about, you know, getting ready
for retirement at 55 or so and here I have to begin again, so...
Unfortunately, Ulf had no choice but to move back in
with his parents, who live in Scandinavia.
It's another part of the world,
where divorce is done much differently.
(music plays)
Scandinavia is home to Ikea, the Nobel Prize,
and the world's largest shipping company.
Like the US, Scandinavian countries are advanced,
democratic, and free.
Its citizens are amongst the wealthiest and happiest.
Their children score as well or better than US children
on standardized tests and their unemployment rates
are relatively low.
Interestingly, Scandinavia has a similar divorce rate
to the United States, but they do not use family courts
or lawyers to get divorced.
I went to see a priest, I went to see a psychiatrist,
I talked to my husband with a psychiatrist, with a priest,
I talked to friends, I never, ever thought that I need
to see an attorney.
I've never heard of anyone went for a legal debate
about the divorce, never heard of it.
You just get a paper in your mailbox and you fill it in
and you send it back and then you have six months
to think about it, you have time to change your mind
in six months and then it's done.
How much did your divorce cost?
Nothing. Not a single krona.
Maybe five kronur for the stamp on the envelope.
(laughing)
So, why is divorce so much easier in Scandinavia
than in the US?
It's because Scandinavians view husbands and wives
as complete equals.
The rules in Iceland are based on the equality
of men and women, but the one who has lower income,
you know, he has the same possibilities as others
and he needs to get used to, you know, changes in his life.
Women in Iceland are very much economically
very independent.
They don't look at the marriage or the divorce
as a way to get support.
Of course, the assets are divided into two parts.
So, the couple has equal rights to the assets,
but when we are talking about the future
and the future income, they go their separate ways.
By contrast, family courts in the US
do not treat marriage partners equally.
While the US has attempted to make its laws gender neutral,
family courts still promote the 1950s view
that marriage is a lifetime partnership
between a provider spouse and a dependent spouse
and that a dependent spouse will need monthly support payments
to survive after the marriage.
All of that was based on a model
of a woman stays home and takes care of the children
and the man is the primary and sole breadwinner.
But over the past 60 years,
more women have attained financial independence
and there are more women working than men today.
In 80% of American marriages, both spouses are employed
and the income gap has become much smaller.
It is going to be less and less relevant,
as time goes on, because women are less and less likely
to be solely housewives.
You would think that the amount of dependent support
being ordered by the courts each year would be diminishing,
but the size of these support payments has gone up 30%
in the past 20 years,
swelling to well over 44 billion dollars per year.
All this is happening, despite a 20% drop in the divorce rate.
So, what's going on here?
For some reason, the family courts have strayed
from the original intent of the support laws.
They have invented a new math.
The printed tables that originally helped courts
and family law attorneys deal with support guidelines
were very limited.
So, in 1985, family law attorney Steven Adams
and I made it actually compute on IBM PCs.
It would take me weeks or months to do this
if I tried it with a pencil and paper.
So, here's an example of what makes it so complex.
You have to take certain guideline deductions,
like health insurance, required union dues.
The bonus reports and overtime reports, legal fees,
and charitable contribution, reassigning
the dependent exemption, the hardship deduction, mortgages
(crosstalk)
Total support is $4,836.
I've just taken a simple example.
That's the end of my script.
Let's take a look behind the curtain.
There are two types of support payments.
The first kind is alimony.
Alimony is supposed to balance the income
between spouses after marriage, even if there were no children,
but many states have laws that make alimony last longer
than the marriage, sometimes even for life.
Massachusetts was one of those states.
Steve Hitner was a victim of a particularly onerous
alimony arrangement and started the group Mass Alimony Reform
to try to change things.
We have people who are married for short term marriages
of four or five years, who are paying 25 years worth of alimony.
And then women came to me who actually pay alimony to men
who didn't want to work.
So now you have a situation where you divorce someone
because they refuse to work or weren't very responsible
with your finances and you end up having to take care
of them for the rest of their lives at the lifestyle
of the marriage.
Would you have married me if you knew this was going
to happen?
No. I wouldn't have married him.
I mean, I really love him, but the judge told me I have
to work two jobs in order to keep him out of jail.
Your responsibility, based on the law,
is to maintain your ex-spouse to the lifestyle
of the marriage.
So, you're essentially working two jobs
and your spouse is working two jobs
to support someone who is going to Italy twice a year.
More divorced women are paying alimony
to their ex-husbands.
He basically came to me in a session and said,
"I'm asking for money and you need to keep me
"in the life that I'm accustomed to."
So when he said the life he's accustomed to,
what did he mean?
He went to trips in Europe, paid for his veneers,
paid for personal trainers, et cetera,
and he wanted to be kept in that lifestyle still.
The modern day family courts not only focus
on what's needed for survival, but also what's needed
for pleasure and excess.
Steve was ultimately successful at lobbying the state
of Massachusetts to change their alimony laws,
but the changes do not occur automatically.
If you want to change your actual ruling,
you still have to go back to family court
to get your alimony arrangement renegotiated.
And that means having to open up your divorce case again,
creating even more business for the family court system.
In Scandinavia, things are handled much differently.
The question of alimony is only
to fulfill this legal obligation of supporting the spouse
until the marriage has come to an end.
And it's only for the period until the divorce is fully through
for this period of six months or twelve months.
By limiting alimony until the divorce is finished
and to no more than $1,000 per month,
the Scandinavian laws have removed any incentive
for pursuing a lengthy battle in court.
And if a Scandinavian couple wishes to adopt a traditional,
provider/dependent relationship, they can always agree
prior to the marriage, to extend support payments
for a longer time.
(music plays)
Another type of dependent support is child support.
But calculating child support is even more confrontational,
because it's based not only on the difference in income,
but also on who gets the most time with the kids.
Are you going to have your kids 86% of the time,
like in a sole custody situation, or only
50% of the time,
as in a shared custody situation.
There's a lot of money at stake for both the higher earner
and the lesser earner.
Now, at this point, we have 0% with dad and 100% with mom.
So now, watch what happens overall as I increase time share.
It turns out the more time you spend with your children,
the more child support you get.
The family court system has actually created
a financial incentive for people to fight court battles
over their own children.
It probably quadrupled the amount
of contested custody matters that we have.
The kids are the pawns.
I use the term "little bags of money"
when there is a contested case over physical custody
of the children.
People go and do battle
because they have these remarkable incentives.
Interestingly, child support is not based
on what you spend or need for your children,
but on how much you make.
About a third of your gross income, up to $250,000,
that's got to go over here for child support.
But that's calculated before taxes, so it actually ends up
being more like 50% to 60% of your take home pay.
I absolutely have payor spouses,
whether they be the husband or the wife,
come in all the time and say, "This is completely unfair.
"I'm dividing everything I have and giving half of it
to my spouse and I'm still going to keep working just as hard
"as I've been working to continue to support my spouse
"and my children.
"How am I supposed to go on and have a new life?"
And the recipient parent doesn't have to spend the money
on the children.
They can spend it on whatever they want.
In fact, they can spend child support money on legal fees
to see the payor parent for even more child support.
You don't get to get receipts
for what the child support was spent for.
The parent gets the money, not the child
and the parent decides how much the kid gets.
All else being equal, if you had your choice
between receiving $1,000 of child support or $1,000
of spousal support, then you'd prefer to get the child support,
because you're not going to pay taxes on it.
You know, that child support can quickly become
more like alimony, it can become Monopoly money,
play money, mad money.
Mr. Kolodony, let me start with you.
$320,000 a month in child support,
they need $144,000 for travel,
$14,000 for parties and playdates,
$436 a month for care of Kira's bunny.
This seems to be as much or more
about Lisa Corrigan's lifestyle than Kira's.
Family courts justify granting child support
at levels higher than what is needed for basic necessities
and education by claiming that children
in America are entitled.
Child is entitled to the lifestyle
of the non-custodial parent.
Now, is there research that supports that it would be bad
for a child to go from a high standard of living
to a lower standard of living?
There might be.
I'm not aware of it, but it just makes sense.
There's absolutely no research that indicates
that a child who spends part of the time
in a more affluent environment and part of the time
in a less affluent environment is going to end up any different
than one who spends time in equally...
It doesn't make any sense.
Most of the time, it's not an issue of money.
I don't think the business of equalizing
the standard of living
is a requirement for children to be happy after divorce.
And child support, since it's based on the amount of custody,
can be re-litigated at any time.
Custody will always be something
that could be modified, so you could resolve the entire case
and then two years later, somebody could come back
and say, "Custodial schedule is not working.
"There needs to be a change."
And the child support formula is so complicated
that it could even be used to make a low-income parent
pay money to a wealthy parent.
This happened in Wendy's case.
When she went to court to get help with visitation,
the judge ordered her to start paying child support
to her ex-husband, even though her ex-husband's income
was much higher.
My ex-husband was living in a $1 million house.
He had several very expensive cars and his income
was about $400,000 a year.
I produced my pay stubs, my bank statements,
my tax returns.
I begged the court to not order me to pay child support,
because of my financial situation.
My monthly expenses alone, out of my income
of $2,400 per month, were $3,000 a month,
so I was already negative $600 a month.
I was ordered to pay my ex-husband $775 per month.
These people end up racking up a big child support debt.
A lot of states have interest on the debt,
sometimes that interest is high as 10% or 12%
and the person ends up saddled with a debt
that they can no longer pay.
I ended up losing all of my cash, lost all of my credit,
and when I had nothing left,
then my mom spent her retirement money to help me.
Wendy didn't see her daughter for two years
and ultimately, ended up losing custody altogether.
I felt very victimized by the family court
and I think that my children were the biggest victims
of the family court.
It's very frustrating and it's very depressing to have gone
for help and then to come out with your family destroyed.
People are being put in jail for not having the ability
to pay their child support.
Debtor's prisons were abolished in this country
about 150 years ago, but we do have debtor's prisons
in the United States right now.
We have people who are in jail, not because they didn't want
to pay their child support,
but because they cannot pay their child support.
This doesn't happen in Scandinavia.
Custody time and money are two different things
that we never mix together.
The laws are much more simple here
and therefore there is less things going to court,
less fighting over custody of the children
and also less fighting over each other's money.
Support of one child, how much does it cost?
How much does the child need or the parent need
for the child?
The amount today is a little less than $150
or something like that.
By limiting child support to a fixed monthly amount
for basic necessities, an amount that doesn't change,
no matter who spends more or less time with the children,
Scandinavians have eliminated any incentive to use children
as financial pawns.
Most of the time, it's like half and half.
You have them one week and you have them the other.
I have had many, many cases,
but very few of them are custody cases.
Very few.
How many?
Well, I would say two a year, but I've been a judge
over 30 years, so...
Of all the cases where you need to decide on custody,
just about two percent of them go to court.
Which is a very, very small percentage.
You don't get rich taking care of your own child.
In Sweden, it doesn't work that way.
Is that the way it is in America? I'm not sure.
In America, even if you are not married,
just having children subjects you to the family courts.
If you and your partner can't resolve a custody issue,
it might mean paying for custody evaluators,
experts, and lawyers, just like someone who goes
through a divorce.
The dependent/provider spouse relationship
also extends to legal fees.
The provider is often forced to pay the dependent's lawyer.
This actually incentivizes the dependent spouse
to prolong legal battles.
In fact, it's not uncommon for the legal fees
to be higher than the marital money being fought over.
$320,000. Michael Newdow was livid, furious
that he had to write a huge check to pay
for the other side's legal fees in his child custody case,
all because he wanted 50/50 custody of his daughter.
I think these are outrageous fees.
If we wouldn't pay these, these people wouldn't make
this ridiculous money.
And he's only been granted 30% custody.
I mean, this is nonsense.
Then, on top of this, I say, "This can't be constitutional."
The judge says, "Even if you win, you have to pay."
But, in Scandinavia, in the two percent of custody battles
that actually go to court, each side pays their own legal fees.
Usually in these kind of cases, either party answer
by paying the legal fees of his lawyer.
So, people in Scandinavia think twice
before taking someone to court,
especially since they can't win much, but in America,
all the financial incentives actually motivate people to lie.
One of the biggest problems in family court
is there are so many false accusations
and so few consequences for those accusations.
False accusations are used to gain custody,
to gain control of property, gain control of the house,
to gain control of the financial assets,
to gain more alimony, more child support.
This stuff goes on all the time, yet there's very little
in the way of punishment for false accusations
or accountability.
How could you be married for 20 years,
you were a great husband, she was a great wife.
Now, we're going through a divorce, he's a pervert,
he's a drug dealer, he's doing all these horrible things,
she's an alcoholic, she's a drug dealer,
and she's sleeping with everybody.
Did this just happen in the last week or two?
I got a lot of those that happened right at the top
of divorce action, when both people were in the house
and one person wanted to get the other person
out of the house.
It may be that, in fact, there is no violence,
but they make it up because they talked with their friends,
or they've gone to a lawyer who said, "Make it up
"and if you really do a good job,
"then you can get him kicked out.
"Now you're in the house, you have a big leg up
in keeping the kids and maybe keeping possession
of the house."
I've counseled women and a few men at how
to get the other side thrown out of the house.
How hard is that to do?
If you follow my instructions, easy.
Domestic violence, first of all, is defined so broadly,
there's so many things that can count as domestic violence,
that it's not hard, it's not hard to be accused of domestic violence.
It's really a travesty, the way a system, the system
that was designed to protect women from domestic abuse,
to protect children from abuse, to protect children
from sexual abuse, a system that was set up
with every good intention, that was set up to protect
those who needed it, has been allowed to be subverted
so that false accusers, really, are able to gain so much
by making the false accusation.
Physical violence and sexual assault are crimes
and our justice system is set up
to handle criminal accusations like this,
but family courts also listen to and act upon such accusations
and because false accusations are so common
during a divorce, these cases are typically not turned over
to criminal court.
Family court judges have to distinguish
between true abuse victims and those crying wolf
for financial gain.
Unfortunately, when you call the police
and you tell them about bruising or whatever,
their first reaction is not "Are there any weapons in the house?"
or "Do you have medical records?"
or "Can I see the bruises?"
Their first reaction is "Are you involved in a custody case?"
When you use the system as a leg up,
you're damaging all the women out there
who are truly getting abused,
because it taints the whole system.
You look at it with a tainted eye when people are crying wolf
and there is none there and judges get it wrong.
It happens.
We're beginning tonight with new details
about a local mother's efforts to keep her kids away
from her husband, because she believed he was dangerous.
A judge denied her request.
Six weeks later, her husband shot and killed them all.
When she filed for divorce on May 29,
she asked the court for sole custody of their two children,
Bailey and Jackson.
Asked to explain the immediate danger,
she wrote, "My husband threatened to steal them
"and not return them.
"He has threatened to hurt them.
"He yells at them and makes them feel nervous and upset."
On the same page, you can see the judge's response.
"Denied. Danger not established."
Tragedies like this, perhaps, would be handled differently
if judges did not hear so many fictitious cries for protection
and because of these tragedies, some judges elect
to issue restraining orders whenever an allegation
of abuse is made, no matter how credible.
You hate to be wrong on a domestic violence charge.
You err on the side of caution.
But, this can also have horrible consequences,
as Mark Byron found out.
My competence as a father has never been questioned
by my first wife.
I have a nine year old son.
His name's Zach and we have a shared parenting agreement.
We split the time with him 50/50, so...
and she's never made any allegations of abuse
or negligence or anything of that sort.
Eventually, Mark remarried and had another son
with his new wife.
One thing led to another and we had a horrible argument
and she ends up calling the police on me.
You know, the police, they made a call right there on the spot.
They said, "Look, we're not going to arrest your husband.
"Normally, we arrest somebody,
"but you don't have a mark on you.
"Everything seems fine here."
Even though the police didn't arrest anyone,
Mark's wife got a restraining order from family court
and also filed a criminal complaint.
Mark was kicked out of his home and not allowed
to see his newborn son.
You're talking about a parent being thrown out
of his or her home, cut off from his or her children,
losing God knows how much in financial assets, right,
and it's like, it's slightly more likely that one side's
"telling the truth than the other."
Boom, restraining order. Done.
A lot of times, it's the attorneys driving this.
The attorney wants to win and the attorney knows
that if their client can claim to be abused
or make an accusation of abuse, that puts their client
in the driver's seat and they're much more likely to win.
It took a long time to get through the court system.
Everything just takes forever, but finally I had my day
in court, in criminal court.
I was found not guilty and it was such a relief.
This was like the weight of the world was
lifted off my shoulders,
but that was a different judge than the one that was deciding
on the custody and visitation in family court.
Even though the magistrate overseeing my divorce
was fully aware of the fact that I was acquitted
of domestic violence, he still made a decision
to take my son away from me.
It's been really hard not getting to see him
and miss every, you know,
His birthday was last week and I didn't get to see him.
I felt like it was time for me to tell my side of the story,
because I've been quiet for so long.
People are probably wondering why I don't get to see my son.
Mark decided to express himself privately
to his friends on Facebook,
believing that his First Amendment right
of free speech would protect him.
And I simply said, "If you're an evil, vindictive woman
"and you want to ruin your husband's life
"and take your son's father away from him completely,
"all you have to do is say that you're scared
"and they'll take him away".
And I really just meant that in general, because I've come
to realize someone can just simply say,
whether it's true or not, just making a claim about somebody
is enough to destroy a family, tear everyone apart.
Within a few days, I got a letter in the mail
from the court system.
I'd had a contempt of court charge filed against me
and I explained to the magistrate that
this is my private Facebook wall.
One of Mark's friends gave his ex-wife access
to the Facebook post.
Mark was found in contempt of court,
even though he hadn't made his comments public.
He sentenced me to 60 days in jail,
or to publish a prewritten apology on Facebook
and it read something to the effect that,
you know, I apologize
to my wife, Elizabeth Byron, for shedding her
in an unfavorable light and it also went on
to make me apologize for making claims that the courts
were keeping me from seeing my child.
I didn't make it to the full 30 days of apologizing.
You know what?
Enough is enough. I'm not going to do this anymore.
And when I went before the judge, Jon Sieve,
I was fully prepared to tell him that,
"No. I'm not going to apologize anymore."
Mr Byron, in the course of history,
there have been many champions of the First Amendment.
You, sir, are not one of them.
The finding of contempt will be purged
as substantial compliance is hereby recognized.
I would have liked to see him incarcerated
for at least a weekend.
Now, what I think people need to know that it doesn't take much
for a family to get split up.
Just some simple allegations that can be really frivolous.
Many people reached out to me with like heartfelt condolences
about, you know, similar experiences that they had,
where the court system had gotten in the middle
of their family and torn it apart.
It definitely opened my eyes and it made me feel humbled
to have a chance to at least let my story get out.
Maybe in some way, it could make a difference.
(music plays)
In Dearborn County, Indiana,
Dan Brewington encountered similar hardships.
After a year of being separated from his daughters,
Dan decided to criticize the judge on his blog.
Dan said that the judge had punished
the three and five year old girls,
because their dad had questioned the ethics
of the courts and the illegal actions of their expert,
Dr. Edward J. Connor and because the judge
had denied his daughters visitation,
Dan believed the judge was mentally
and emotionally abusive towards his daughters.
The kids have been deprived of their father.
In terms of the psychological harm on the children,
these children want to see their father.
So, Dan went on to write, "One of the biggest child abusers
"is wearing a black robe and holding the gavel."
He appealed to friends and family to send
letters of support
to the Indiana Ethics and Professionalism Committee.
This one is really almost laughable,
because they put the judge's wife
on the professionalism committee, who is supposed
to supervise the judges in Indiana.
Thenm once she receives a complaint, instead of
acting on the complaint,
she has the individual indicted.
Dan was arrested and put in jail
and bail was set at $600,000,
an amount he couldn't possibly afford.
He was forced to stand trial in criminal court
and Bob Kelly was not allowed to represent Dan,
because he wasn't licensed in Indiana.
And, unfortunately, no other reputable attorney was willing
to take a case against the judge.
And so, the prosecutor, who'd worked alongside the judge for years,
convinced a jury to convict Dan for intimidation of a judge,
a judge's wife, and a custody evaluator,
all because of what he wrote on the internet.
And so, Dan was sentenced to five years in prison.
All judges have the same middle name: God.
We asked if we could interview Dan in prison,
but we were repeatedly turned down by the warden,
the judicial council, and the governor.
Okay, right now, no cameras. Shut off the cameras, guys.
The statistics out there for fatherless homes are atrocious,
I mean, like 200% more likely to commit suicide.
It's crazy.
Among other things, go to jail, teen pregnancy,
lower grades, depression, drug and alcohol abuse.
All of them are like 100 plus percent more probable.
Are you trying, when you take these cases and present them
to the judge, are you trying to spin a narrative?
Always.
What's truer than the truth? The answer?
The story, because in the story, we distill data
and give it meaning.
And what's the story that we family law attorneys
and mediators hear every day?
It's the story of a victim, the victimizer
and it's very important in stories to have a rescuer.
There's always got to be that third person
and who is going to be that rescuer?
Well, it might be the lawyer, it might be the judge.
You have to create a theme and try and keep it going
through the case, so that it sticks in the judge's mind
when they're making a final decision.
I can tell you when I represent women,
I can make a man look like a piece of shit in two seconds.
Get up there, "What's the name of your daughter's teacher?"
"What grade is she in?" "What's the doctor's name?"
They know none of those.
Are they good dads? Excellent.
I can make them look like they don't care about their kid
in three seconds, because that is not a man's strength.
There have been a number of studies that show
that it is a public health hazard, not just general stress,
but the number of deaths by suicide, one-car accident,
murder, that come out of the raw turmoil
of a family law dispute.
I've seen men walk out crying,
I've seen women walk out crying and what do you do?
What do you do?
I mean, it's, it's, it's...
You can't sit there and not feel bad for some of these people.
How much can the body take?
I'm getting screwed here and I'm supposed
to sit here and take it?
Sir, I'm going to ask you not to make any comments
in the middle of my decision.
Family court results in more violence
than any other area of law.
I haven't done anything to this court,
I haven't done anything to them.
She will be arrested for contempt of court.
They're all witnessing their entire life crashing
upon the rocks.
The court is so ominous. It's like armageddon.
People who feel backed in a corner
and are backed into a corner, sometimes strike out.
(gunshots)
All the shootings you hear about,
it's always a divorce.
Anyone who goes to court and has been through it,
knows it's far, far more severe and damaging
and expensive than they ever dreamed before they started.
Divorce isn't easy at all.
I think death would be easier than a divorce.
The judges and the attorneys work together
and the litigants are just grist for the mill
and the people that they are affecting have to deal
with the brutality of their decisions.
From what I experienced, they are neither wise enough
or intelligent enough to be making decisions
affecting other people.
Get over here. Bend over that bed.
Dad.
Bend over that bed. Bend over the bed.
(hitting sound)
Bend over the bed.
(hitting sound) Stop! Stop!
Bend over the fucking bed, dammit!
(crying and yelling)
Lay down, I'll smack your fucking face.
You want to put some more computer games on?
(crying)
You want some more?
(crying)
Fucking computer.
I told you I didn't want one in the goddamn house.
(music plays)
By granting so much power to a single human being
without imposing the checks and balances specified
in our Constitution, we have turned the family courts
into incubators of corruption, abuse, extortion,
and for some, even tragedy.
At a time when we feel intensely sad, lonely, or rejected,
the family courts insinuate themselves into our lives
and profit from the very conflict and confusion
that their laws create.
And they chastise and punish us if we dare to complain.
Do you think the system's broken?
Oh, do I think the system's broken?
Why don't you just go down to the courthouse
and sit there for a couple hours?
The US family courts may have been set up
with the best intentions, but the outcome is a disaster.
What Americans spend on divorce each year
could fund a healthy lunch every day for every child
from grade school through high school in both North
and South America and all of Africa or provide tuition
for five million college students or be used
to develop 50 new medicines each year.
US lawyers and judges who profit from divorce court
will defend it.
Family law is a great example
of what government can do for people.
We have the best system in the world,
in terms of divorces.
Methods intended to lower the cost,
like mediation outside the courtroom have been tried,
but they never caught on, because the financial incentive
to fight is just too powerful.
They are going to spend all their money
and their emotional resources and end up far worse.
They tell the litigants that you're spending the money
that you would use for your children's college education
for the college education of your lawyer's children.
While Scandinavians are by no means perfect,
the benefits of their system go beyond saving parents
the time and money of a court battle.
The less complicated it is, the better it is for the kid.
No one is going to tell me that fighting for money
that's going to make the kid more happy.
All four of us, me and the man that I live with now,
my ex-husband, and his ex-wife are all raising
these children up together.
It may be difficult for the first few years after a divorce,
but gradually things heal and people move
on in other directions
and then in a few years everybody meets
at a birthday party
for the kids and things work out.
Litigation is very poorly suited for family matters.
It pits loved ones against each other and the kids get caught
in the crossfire.
I don't know when you'll read this,
but I love you so much, mommy.
I just hope you know what an impact you've made on my life.
I have no idea what I would ever do without you.
Custody is for prisoners, but not children.
So far, we've missed Christmas '09 and Christmas '10.
And obviously, that takes a big chunk out of your
family, your celebrations...
and we go on, because that's what you have to do.
Our daughter Mackenzie had always been daddy's girl
and then, you know, it just changed and then she just started turning
against me and then, sure enough, I found out,
as my ex wrote a letter to my attorney and just said,
"I'm just to inform you that Mackenzie got married
"at the age of 17".
And then, I found out on Facebook a few months ago,
as my relatives looked into it, now she's a mom.
And I'm a grandpa.
I have a hard time.
I have to explain this to my nine year old son,
like how does he, how can I make him understand
why he can't see his brother?
How do you explain that to a nine year old?
These kids, they just get tortured.
Something must be done to change the laws in the US.
There are things that you can do
and you need to fight back and you need to take any anger
and hurt and, you know, anxiety you have and put it into action
and show up for things like what we have here today,
because only if the people stand up to tyranny
will things ever change.
What we have is judicial tyranny.
Every day, what I'm thinking is,
"What steps do I have to take to ensure that I reunify
"with my children?"
I am willing to fight this 'til the very end.
I felt that I owed it to my kids to keep trying
to do the right thing.
Today, it may be Dan Brewington.
Tomorrow, it could be you, it could be me,
or it could be anybody out there.
I think someday in the future,
when shared parenting is the norm,
when the family court systems have been reformed,
I think we're going to look back on this era
the way we look back on the dark ages,
as a very barbaric era where people are just going
to scratch their heads and they're just going
to not believe that this is the way we handled this.
Maybe we should get rid of family courts.
(music plays)