This work is personal, but it is not only personal.

We fight for our own children, yes. But if we only fight for our own children, the industry keeps operating, undisturbed. The only way this ends is if we fight for all children, all protective parents, and every family being forced through a system that punishes the very people trying to tell the truth. We must become disruptors.

I want the core of this work to remain free.

That matters to me; I do not want information to be locked from people who need it the most and are already financially devastated by litigation, custody battles, GAL fees, expert fees, attorney fees, lost income, housing instability, and the emotional toll of fighting tooth and nail to protect their children inside systems that appear to do the complete opposite.

The public advocacy, the writing, the education, the documentation, the systemic analysis, and the resources I am building are meant to reach people. They are meant to be shared. They are meant to help protective parents, advocates, journalists, lawmakers, professionals, and anyone willing to honestly look at what is happening.

At the same time, I also need to be honest about what it takes to keep doing this.

I am working on several major pieces of this fight: a website, the federal lawsuit, the appeal, public education, advocacy strategy, and resources that I hope will be useful far beyond my own case.

Some of that work cannot be discussed publicly in detail for legal and confidentiality reasons. Some of it is still being built. Some of it requires time, research, documentation, technical support, legal work, filing costs, transcripts, and the basic stability necessary to keep going.

And the financial pressure has been staggering.

In 2024, while being unemployed, the court cut $4,000+ a month in child support while also ordering me to pay an additional $4,000+ a month in order to see my own children; that was only the first phase after my children were taken over 967 days ago. That is before mandatory GAL costs, legal costs, filing costs, transcripts, advocacy expenses, and the cost of trying to stabilize my housing after some extremely difficult stretches.

There is no pretty way to say this: it has been drowning-level pressure.

I decided if I was going go open paid subscriptions here, it was important they help sustain the mission, not to hide the mission behind a paywall.

If you become a paid subscriber, you are helping make the free work possible. You are helping support the research, writing, organizing, documentation, advocacy, and infrastructure behind this fight.

Paid supporters may also receive occasional behind-the-scenes updates on projects I am working on, including the website, advocacy efforts, and broader movement-building work, when those updates can be shared safely and appropriately.

But the heart of this work will remain free.

Because this is not just about one case. It is not just about one family. It is about children. It is about protective parents. It is about the systems that are failing them. It is about what happens when courts, professionals, and institutions punish the people trying to tell the truth, refer connected services, and continue to ask for uninsured, unregulated “treatments” which literally line their own pockets.

If you are able to become a paid subscriber, your support means more than I can say. It helps create stability around work that is emotionally heavy, financially costly, and urgently necessary.

If you cannot become a paid subscriber, you are still part of this. Reading matters. Sharing matters. Commenting matters. Sending posts to the right people matters. Witnessing matters. Refusing to look away matters.

For those who prefer to offer one-time support, I also have a GoFundMe linked here. That support helps with immediate stability and the ongoing costs attached to this fight.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for witnessing. Thank you for helping carry this work in whatever way you can.

If this was not still happening, my children would be safe. They would be home.

This fight is heavy, but it is not hopeless. Every person who reads, shares, supports, documents, speaks, or stands with protective parents becomes part of something larger.

And that is how this changes, when we refuse to look away.

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Help bring Christina's children home

Donovan has pleaded not guilty and the family court and child-protection questions raised by this case are alread already horrifying. And they are happening here, in Massachusetts.

This is the kind of story people need to read and say, “Holy crap, this is happening in Massachusetts?!” Because yes. It is. A mother reported suspected child sexual abuse again and again. The system did not protect the child, a restraining order was denied, parenting time was reinstated and the father was awarded makeup time. According to Boston 25, court-ordered visits only stopped after another child came forward.

Every parent in Massachusetts stop breathing for a second. Every person who, without any experience of factual basis, believes “Massachusetts favors mothers” need to wake up to what protective mothers have been all the while screaming from the rooftops: Massachusetts may actually favor abusive fathers.

Boston 25 identified the mother only as “Samantha” to protect the child’s identity. Court records reviewed for this article include her full name, but I am using only the name Samantha here for the same reason: the issue is not exposing a mother or a child. The issue is exposing what Massachusetts family court and child-protection systems do when mothers report danger.

According to Boston 25, Samantha provided a paper trail of DCF, police, and hospital records dating back to 2024. The reporting says DCF repeatedly deemed the allegations unsupported and even documented concern that claims of abuse were “consistently coming” from Samantha and her family. This implication is tiny, but mighty, because it exposes one of the ugliest patterns in family court and child-protection systems: a mother’s persistence can be treated as evidence against her instead of evidence that she is desperately trying to protect her child.

You report once, and they say there is not enough. You report again, and suddenly the fact that you keep reporting becomes the problem. The focus moves away from the alleged abuse and onto your credibility, your motives, your emotions, your supposed hostility, your alleged inability to co-parent. The court does not have to say, “We do not care if your child is safe.” It can simply keep raising the burden until protection becomes impossible.

According to Boston 25, Samantha said DCF told her, “Unless she’s broken, bruised, or bleeding, there’s nothing we can do.” If that was threshold used for DCF to find the case “unsupported,” why in family court does unsuported translate to “false report” when it actually means the injuries weren't “bad enough.”

This case should be front and center immediately in a legislative hearing about family court and child protection in Massachusetts. Because if that is how suspected child sexual abuse is being treated, then the standard is not safety. It is visible injury. It is a threshold set so high that a child may have to be harmed in a way no one can publicly ignore before the system feels compelled to act.

And this is where we need to stop giving institutions the benefit of the doubt. It is not that judges, DCF, and court professionals have never heard that child sexual abuse often leaves no visible injury. Experts know that. Judges hear that. DCF should know that. Retired judges know that. So why does the operating standard still seem to become: come back when the damage is undeniable? Why does the system keep acting as if it does not want the answer?

A March 16 Braintree Police report noted that the four-year-old disclosed to a victim advocate with the Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office that Donovan had touched her private parts “again and again and again.” During the same interview, the child also denied that sexual abuse had occurred. Sixteen days later, at a court hearing where Samantha sought protection, a DCF investigator testified that the child denied touching during a different interview. The protective order was denied.

Then, according to a May 12, 2026 temporary order reviewed for this article, Associate Justice Timothy P. Horan reinstated the father’s parenting time and ordered that within the next 90 days, Donovan “shall receive makeup parenting time” for missed visits.

Let’s break down how this really played out: A four-year-old child gave inconsistent statements, which retired Judge Carol Erskine later said investigators should expect from young children. And yet the system appears to have treated inconsistency as a reason not to protect her. Then, after protection was denied, the father was not merely allowed continued access. He was awarded makeup time. Makeup time.

The message to a protective mother could not be clearer: not only will we keep access going, but if you try to interrupt it to protect your child and we decide you have not met our threshold, we may give him more.

What does that say to a mother? It says the risk is not only that the court will refuse to protect your child. It says the court may punish the attempt. It says every report could cost you your child. It says every disclosure could be turned into another reason to restore, replace, or expand access for the accused parent.

The docket identifies Judge Patrick W. Stanton as the case judge. Though Horan signed the order that restored access and awarded makeup time, Stanton, according to the docket, was the judge assigned to the case itself.

Samantha’s timeline states she spent more than two years trying to protect her child. If the docket reflects Stanton as the case judge during that history, then this is not about one isolated order signed in May 2026. What happened over the life of the case, what evidence was heard or not heard, how abuse concerns were weighed, and why a mother reporting suspected child sexual abuse over and over still ended up watching access restored.

This is also not the first time mothers have raised concerns about Judge Stanton. Mothers have described cases involving Stanton in which protective mothers say they were found not credible, warned against speaking, financially depleted by years of litigation, or separated from their children after raising abuse concerns. One protective mother who had Judge Stanton in Plymouth reported her children had allegedly been removed to live with an abusive father under a 90-day no-contact order. Can you imagine your child disclosing abuse and the result is 90-day no-contact order. A no-contact order? Why? What benefit is a child receiving who reported abuse from being immediately cut off from a parent they feel safe with? Who tucks them into bed at night. Can you imagine what that would be like? I can. And 90-day no-contact can last years. It can last until a child turns 18.

Another mother described years of fighting to protect her children while being treated as not credible. Another described concerns about a child’s safety, alleged withholding, and restored unsupervised overnights after prolonged litigation. Another mother described being warned to “shut my mouth” in front of an advocate and threatened with legal fees if she continued speaking.

Their stories are not identical but they are relevant because they echo the same institutional pattern: mothers reporting danger, mothers being treated as the problem, children’s access to protective mothers being restricted, and court procedures being used in ways that leave mothers feeling silenced, punished, and disbelieved.

That is the theme running through this case. That is what is happening in Massachusetts. It is not only that one mother says DCF failed her. It is that multiple mothers describe a Massachusetts family court culture in which raising abuse concerns can become the very thing used against them. In that context, the Stanton docket is not a footnote. It is part of the public-interest question: how many protective mothers have to describe the same courtroom pattern before Massachusetts stops calling each case an isolated custody dispute?

Horan was nominated by Governor Maura Healey to serve as an Associate Justice of the Probate and Family Court in September 2025. The Governor’s office described him as having spent more than two decades in private practice, including work focused on divorce, custody disputes, probate, and family law, as well as prior experience as an Investigator and Prosecuting Counsel for the Division of Professional Licensure and as an Analyst and Victim Witness Advocate at the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office. He was confirmed by the Governor’s Council in October 2025.

This was not a judge with no professional background in custody, family law, or victim-witness systems. Again, the question is not simply whether the court had enough training. The question is why, in a case involving repeated abuse concerns and a very young child’s troubling disclosure, the practical result was restored access and makeup time.

It is also worth noting who helps decide who gets placed on these benches. Massachusetts does not elect judges. Judicial nominees are confirmed by the Governor’s Council, an elected body that votes on judicial appointments. Controversial member Mara Dolan took office on the Governor’s Council in January 2025 after winning the 2024 District 3 race, and Horan was one of the Probate and Family Court judges confirmed after she took office.

I have written about concerns involving Governor’s Council member Mara Dolan, and why candidate Margie Palladino decided to run. Readers deserve to understand that these elected officals determine who gets the power to decide whether a mother’s evidence is heard, whether a child’s disclosure is believed, whether parenting time is suspended, restored, or expanded, and whether protective mothers are treated as credible reporters or as problems to be managed.

Retired Worcester County Juvenile Court First Justice Carol Erskine, who spent 20 years presiding over thousands of child abuse and neglect cases, reviewed records for Boston 25 and said she was “really disturbed by the way the process was carried out.” She said the system “all placed the weight on a four-year-old child to basically validate whether or not sexual abuse had occurred,” calling that “a dangerous mistake.”

That is exactly what protective mothers are up against: an adult system places an impossible burden on children, then uses the child’s inability to carry that burden as permission to keep access in place. If a child says too little, she is not believed. If she says something inconsistent, she is not believed. If she uses language adults think sounds too adult, she was coached. If she uses childlike language, adults may claim it is too vague. The child cannot win, and neither can the mother trying to protect her.

It feels like a trap. Children are expected to disclose abuse in exactly the right way, but there is no right way. Too much detail can be framed as coaching. Too little detail can be framed as unreliability. A delayed disclosure can be dismissed as suspect. A partial disclosure can be dismissed as inconsistent. Fear can be treated as confusion. Confusion can be treated as proof nothing happened. Then the court calls that process neutral.

It is not neutral when the burden is placed on a four-year-old child. It is not neutral when the protective parent is punished for acting on the danger she sees. It is not neutral when the accused parent receives restored time and makeup time after reports of suspected abuse. It is not neutral when the system’s threshold for intervention appears to be set at the level of harm that can no longer be denied in public.

Erskine also criticized the idea that physical injuries are required to support an allegation. She told Boston 25, “In 90% of cases, studies show there’s no physical evidence of sexual abuse,” and added that in a four-year-old being inappropriately touched, physical injury would not necessarily be visible. She also said preschool-aged children making these kinds of disclosures should be referred immediately to one of Massachusetts’ specialized Child Protection Centers for science-based evaluations.

The question is not simply whether someone made a mistake, but whether Massachusetts family court and child-protection systems are operating from assumptions and incentives that make children less safe. If a mother is not believed unless her child is broken, bruised, or bleeding, then the system is not investigating abuse. It is waiting for damage. If a four-year-old is expected to prove sexual abuse with a level of consistency many adults could not manage under trauma, then adults have abandoned their responsibility. If a protective order is denied and makeup visitation is awarded after this kind of warning, then family court is not a neutral space. It is a place where access can be prioritized over safety.

And at some point, we have to stop pretending the problem is simply that judges and agencies do not understand. Retired Judge Erskine understood. Researchers understand. Survivors understand. Child abuse experts understand. So why does the system keep narrowing the inquiry, refusing the evidence, discounting the disclosures, and then calling the outcome justice?

A real inquiry looks for danger. A performative inquiry looks for reasons to dismiss the person reporting it.

Joan Meier led a major empirical study on custody outcomes in cases involving parental alienation and abuse allegations. The study was funded through the National Institute of Justice, which is part of the U.S. Department of Justice. NIJ describes the research as examining whether parental alienation is gender-biased in practice and outcome, and how custody courts respond when abuse allegations and alienation claims collide.

The study speaks directly to the pattern so many mothers describe and what happened to me: when mothers allege that fathers are abusive or unsafe, courts become more receptive to claims that the mother is alienating the children than to the abuse concerns themselves. NIJ’s summary of Meier’s work says parental alienation labeling often results in the dismissal of women’s and children’s reports of abuse, and sometimes even overrides expert child-abuse evaluations.

That is federally funded research describing the same systemmothers have been reporting for years. A mother reports abuse. The father denies it. Then he claims alienation. Suddenly the court’s attention shifts. The urgent question is no longer, “Is this child safe?” It becomes, “Is this mother interfering with the father’s relationship?” The mother’s protective behavior is recast as misconduct. Her fear becomes pathology. Her evidence becomes hostility. Her refusal to be quiet becomes the problem.

Boston 25 reported that Donovan denied wrongdoing, described Samantha as a “narcissist,” characterized her abuse claims as false, and claimed she was intentionally trying to alienate him from his daughter. He also reportedly argued that her DCF reports were retaliatory.

That is not an unusual counterclaim, but the stereotypical counterclaim. It was the counterclaim in my case. It is the same structure mothers describe across Massachusetts family courts: deny the abuse, attack the mother’s character, reframe her reports as malicious, and make the court investigate her instead.

This is why “parental alienation” language is so dangerous in abuse cases. It gives courts a ready-made story in which the mother’s alarm becomes the threat and the father’s access becomes the remedy. Once that frame takes hold, almost anything the mother does can be used against her. Reporting becomes retaliation. Fear becomes instability. Evidence becomes obsession. Protectiveness becomes alienation.

The United Nations has warned about this, too. In 2023, Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, issued a report on custody, violence against women, and violence against children, focusing on the use of parental alienation and similar concepts in family courts. The report examined how family courts in different regions refer to “parental alienation” or similar pseudo-concepts while ignoring histories of domestic violence and abuse.

The UN report describes a pattern in which mothers who raise concerns are depicted as vengeful, delusional, obstructive, or malicious, and says protective mothers can be placed in an impossible position where presenting evidence of domestic violence or child abuse is treated as an attempt to alienate the children from the other parent. That is what happened in my case. The Department of Justice's research, the UN reports, they all show a known family court pattern: mothers report harm, and courts respond by treating the report itself as the harm.

This is not only happening somewhere else. This is Massachusetts. This is DCF. This is Probate and Family Court. This is a mother saying she tried for years. This is a child reportedly making troubling statements. This is a denied protective order. This is parenting time reinstated. This is makeup visitation ordered. This is another child later coming forward. This is the father now held without bail while awaiting his next court appearance, according to Boston 25.

This is why I cannot accept the comforting explanation that mothers are simply “not believed.” Sometimes that is true. But sometimes it feels worse. Sometimes it feels as if we are believed enough to be treated as a threat to the system, but not believed enough for our children to be protected. Sometimes the evidence is there, the reports are there, the disclosures are there, the pattern is there, and the court still behaves as though the real emergency is the mother who will not stop speaking.

My children were not believed. Or perhaps they were believed but intentionally silenced. When evidence is refused, when records are not meaningfully reviewed, when children’s statements are minimized, when professionals ignore the science of child disclosure, when courts punish the parent asking for protection, it becomes harder and harder to believe there was ever a real inquiry in the first place.

Mothers are told to protect their children, but when they try, they are accused of interfering. They are told to report abuse, but when they do, they are accused of coaching. They are told to bring evidence, but then the evidence is minimized, excluded, or ignored. They are told the court cares about the best interests of the child, while being forced to watch the court define those interests around access to the very person they fear.

I know this pattern because I have lived my own version of it. I know what it is to offer evidence and feel the court has already decided not to see it. I know what it is to be slapped by the court, not once, but again and again, until the lesson becomes clear: every time your child speaks, there will be consequences. Every report your child makes will be followed by less access to the safe parent. Every attempt to protect will be reframed as interference. And somehow, interference only seems to matter when it is alleged against a mother trying to limit access to a potentially abusive father.

My own children had restraining orders issued for their protection. One was issued by the current Chief Justice of the Probate and Family Court in Massachusetts. So why was video evidence refused the day my children were taken? Why did an order describe restraining orders as having been denied when I had served restraining orders in my hand? Why did I have to experience that sickening moment of panic, the gaslit moment where even though I knew what happened, even though I knew the documents existed, I still thought: what if they are right? What if I am wrong?

That is what these systems do to mothers; they not only take access but attack reality itself. They make you prove what is already in your hands. They make you dig through emails for documents you know exist because someone with authority has written a version of events that makes your own memory feel suddenly unreliable. And then they call you unstable for reacting to the instability they created.

Other Massachusetts mothers describe the same experiences. Some mothers summarized here are not named but the pattern they describe is chillingly familiar: children removed from protective mothers, no-contact orders issued after abuse allegations, mothers told they are not credible, judges allegedly refusing to meaningfully review evidence, and fathers accused of dangerous behavior being granted, restored, or expanded access.

One mother I interviewed described a Norfolk County case in which, she says, the father admitted in court to sleeping naked with an older daughter and claimed in text messages that this was an integral part of a father-daughter relationship. According to this mother, the court still granted unsupervised overnight visits with her then-four-year-old child. Her point was not that the court lacked information. Her point was that confirmed conduct still was not enough.

Another mother reports that after her medically complex child and older sibling raised concerns about their father and resisted living with him, the financial consequences fell on her: child support and expense sharing were denied, the child's health insurance was terminated despite significant medical needs, and she was ordered to cover substantial expenses for a father earning six figures. She describes the result as financially devastating the mother while the children's concerns went unheard.

Another described a protective mother whose children were removed to live with an allegedly abusive father under a no-contact order. Another mother, a trauma-informed professional, described DCF as failing to meaningfully investigate her abuse concerns while appearing to adopt a biased posture against her as the reporting mother.

Even women trained to recognize trauma and abuse describe being treated as biased, unstable, or unreliable when they report danger. The system does not merely doubt mothers because they lack expertise. It doubts mothers because the mother’s report itself becomes the problem.

Massachusetts has been warned about DCF and child-safety failures for years. Boston 25 has also reported on Massachusetts child-safety failures in other institutions, including state laws that enable secrecy around sexual abuse in public schools.

Another mother's DCF records illustrate the problem. DCF acknowledged there were “some validities” to concerns reported about the father and documented substance use, unstable housing and “underlying untreated mental health” concerns. Yet the Department also acknowledged it could not verify his residence or confirm his mental-health treatment with his psychiatrist. Rather than resolving those unanswered questions, the report pivots to the parents' “contentious custody battle,” inability to co-parent and “point[ing] the fingers at each other,” before closing the allegations as UNSUPPORTED. It raises a troubling question: when legitimate safety concerns arise in family court, are they being fully investigated, or too easily reframed as nothing more than two parents fighting over custody?

So when DCF gives the public Concerns documented. Questions left unanswered. Allegation: “Unsupported.” statement saying it takes all allegations seriously, are we really supposed to accept that as enough? Are we supposed to ignore the mothers whose children made multiple direct reports and were treated as more of an inconvenience to the department than a crisis requiring protection?

Families do not need more corporate approved language about seriousness. They need systems that act like child safety is serious before another child comes forward. They need agencies that do not wait for a child to be broken, bruised, bleeding, or publicly undeniable before they move.

This is what Massachusetts has to confront. Family court does not have to openly say it is silencing protective mothers. It can do it procedurally. It can do it by refusing evidence. It can do it by narrowing what counts as proof. It can do it by treating trauma responses as inconsistency. It can do it by calling a mother high-conflict. It can do it by calling a father’s counterclaim “alienation” and a mother’s safety concerns “interference.”

And when a mother is slapped down by the court, the slap is not only emotional. It is structural. It can mean less time with her children. It can mean more access for the person she fears. It can mean children learn that every time they speak, they lose more of the parent who believes them. It teaches a child that asking for help can make things worse, while every school poster and public-safety campaign tells children, “If you see something, say something.”

And then, when the danger becomes undeniable, everyone acts shocked.

Mothers are not shocked. We have been screaming. We have been filing reports. We have been bringing evidence. We have been begging courts to understand that children do not disclose abuse on command, on schedule, or in the tidy form adults demand. We have been saying that parental alienation rhetoric is being weaponized. We have been saying that family court is not just failing to protect children; in some cases, it is creating the conditions for continued access after warnings have already been raised.

The Boston 25 investigation should be a breaking point for Massachusetts. A mother reported suspected abuse for years. The protective order was denied. Parenting time was reinstated. Makeup time was awarded. Court-ordered visits stopped only after another child came forward. A retired judge reviewed the records and called the process “a dangerous mistake.” The research has already warned us. The UN has already warned us. Mothers have been warning us.

The question is whether Massachusetts will finally listen before more children are harmed, or whether family court will keep doing what it has done for too long: treat protective mothers as the problem, and call it the best interests of the child.

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It took 950 days for me to get these transcripts.

Not 950 days to find out what happened. I knew what happened. I was there, I heard it. I was also able to obtain the court audio recordings before these hearing dates were sealed, and I have had those recordings ever since.

It took 950 days to get it on paper.

Advocacy and working with the legislature taught me unless something exists on an official eight and a half by eleven piece of paper, it isn’t real. You can know exactly what happened to you, you can have the audio recording of it happening, you can repeat the words verbatim. You can play the recording. Somehow none of it carries the same weight as an official transcript with a court caption across the top.

Now I have the words, the threats, the gross accusations on eight and half by eleven paper.

The transcripts are from December 18, 2023 and January 4, 2024, two of the most consequential dates in my custody case. When I tried to obtain these transcripts in January 2024, I was told by the transcriber that these two dates were impounded. My case was not impounded at the time. There had been no motion to impound these hearings presented to me, no hearing about impounding them, and no explanation given to me for why these two specific dates were being treated this way.

The Words on the Page

One of the most disturbing things in the December 18 transcript is not something the judge said. It is what my then-husband’s attorney, Calvin Heinle, was permitted to say about me while arguing that my children should be removed from my care.

He told the judge:

My attorney responded:

“Your Honor, there’s no evidence that the kids are in danger with mom.”

An attorney stood in a Massachusetts courtroom where the custody of my children was being decided and predicted that I might murder them. Drive them into a lake. The next family on Dateline. She’s lost it.

My attorney’s response was that there was no evidence my children were in danger with me, and elsewhere in the same hearing, my then-husband’s attorney pleaded with the court to act:

Again, a prediction that I would kill my children.

Those were not the conclusions of a psychiatrist who had evaluated me. They were not the findings of a clinician who had determined that I presented an imminent homicidal risk. They were not based on threats I had made against myself or my children. They were predictions of maternal violence introduced into a custody proceeding where portraying me as dangerous could help determine whether I left with my children.

The timing makes those words even more disturbing.

This was Massachusetts in December 2023, less than a year after the deaths of Lindsay Clancy’s three young children in Duxbury. That tragedy was hanging over Massachusetts. It had become one of the most horrifying and widely known stories involving a mother and her children in this state.

My then-husband’s attorney did not have to say Lindsay Clancy’s name. The imagery did the work for him. A mother who had “lost it.” A murder suicide. Children killed by their mother. A family on the news. Dateline.

It is difficult for me to read that language without seeing the fear of a recent Massachusetts tragedy being pulled into the courtroom and attached to me. But fear is not evidence, and my actual mental health history was discussed in court. I had sought treatment for anxiety and depression beginning when I was 25, over a decade prior. On January 4, I explained why I had done it. I said I had sought treatment “so that I could be a more balanced adult and a future better parent.” I told the court that I had put in that hard work for more than ten years.

I got help, that is what people are supposed to do.

It is also incredibly common. According to the CDC, 23.9 percent of American adults received mental health treatment in 2023. That is almost one in four adults. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that 31.1 percent of American adults experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their lives. This does not factor in the amount of American adults who should seek mental health treatment, those are the ones we should worry about.

There is an enormous gulf between receiving treatment for anxiety and depression and presenting an imminent risk of murdering your children. The publicly documented mental health history surrounding the Lindsay Clancy case makes that distinction crystal clear; evidence presented in her criminal case has described an extensive period of serious psychiatric symptoms and treatment before the deaths of her children, including severe depression, insomnia, intrusive thoughts, numerous psychiatric medications, multiple mental health providers and psychiatric hospitalization. Her defense has argued that she suffered from postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder. Prosecutors dispute the defense’s account and maintain that she was criminally responsible. Regardless of Prosecutor’s allegations, there was an extensive contemporaneous psychiatric record to examine.

Where was that evidence about me?

Where was my documented homicidal ideation? Where was my psychosis? Where was my postpartum psychiatric crisis? Where was my psychiatric hospitalization establishing that I presented a danger to my children? Where was the clinical assessment concluding that I was at risk of murdering them?

It did not exist. What did exist was a history of treatment for anxiety and depression and somehow an attorney was able to stretch that all the way to “drive them into a lake,” and a judge allowed it to happen and violate my federal rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Does that mean every mother who has ever done exactly what we tell people to do and sought mental health treatment can be accused of predicted homicide? We tell people getting help is responsible. We tell mothers to take care of their mental health, then a family court proceeding can take the fact that a mother sought treatment and fold it into a narrative of instability. Cry and you are unstable. Get angry and you are volatile. Remain composed and you are cold. Fight for your children and you are obsessive. Seek treatment and the fact that you sought it can later become part of an argument that there was something wrong with you all along.

My treatment was responsible health care. Predicting that I might murder my children was not a mental health assessment, it was the weaponization of mental health care.

And there is something else in the December transcript that matters because it shows what happened when the court was presented not with a prediction about something I might theoretically do, but with information about an actual investigation involving one of my children.

I am deliberately not going to disclose the intimate subject matter of that investigation. What matters here is the process.

My attorney told the court that the DA had said it would not proceed with the criminal investigation if the child returned to the father’s custody before they could interview her. She then told the judge:

“They stated that they would not continue with the investigation into the criminal matter if the children were given to dad.”

“Your Honor, then the DA’s Office cannot continue with their…”

The judge interrupted her.

I also find this key because a later report from my GAL Patricia Brady would state the Detective involved in the case, the one who believed my children were being abused, didn’t quote “know why” I contact him, he has no concerns. Except, I hold a DCF record which shows he too stated he wasn’t closing the case because he wanted to interview my son, and he could not if he was living in the “abuser’s home,” meaning his father’s.

My attorney answered:

“They specifically informed us that they couldn’t.”

I then explained that this information had come from the DA and that DA had said the interview scheduled for the following day could be biased or harmful if the children. The father could bias them. There was never a concern I could bias them.

The people involved in the investigation had reportedly explained what they needed in order to conduct a child’s interview without compromising it. My attorney put that warning directly in front of the court.

The response was: “That’s their problem.”

Except it was the very essence of my judge’s responsibility to act in the best interest of children. These were my children. If there was a question serious enough to involve DCF, the District Attorney’s Office, and a scheduled child interview, wouldn’t you want to know the truth? Wouldn’t you want to give the child the opportunity to be interviewed under the conditions the professionals responsible for that interview said they needed? Wouldn’t you preserve those conditions long enough to allow the investigation to do what an investigation is supposed to do, which is investigate?

To me, that exchange reveals something fundamental about what was happening in that courtroom. There was an urgency to solutionize where the children would go, even when slowing down might have allowed professionals outside the custody fight to gather information. Children are not a logistical problem to be divided between two households as efficiently as possible and finding out what happened to a child should matter more than reaching an immediate parenting arrangement.

And yet the court was simultaneously willing to entertain extraordinary predictions about what I might someday do, a hypothetical future in which I might murder my children was urgent enough to be invoked repeatedly whereas an actual investigative process involving a child could apparently become “their problem.” That is disparate behavior between how I was treated as a mother, and how my then-husband was treated as a father.

There is one subject contained in these transcripts that I am deliberately not going to discuss in detail. I would not be discussing it at all except that my daughter recently told me that her father told her that I accused him of r-ping her. She used that word, specifically. I find it disgusting and profoundly inappropriate that a child would be told something like that about herself and her parents.

Since that characterization has now been brought directly to my daughter, I will correct the record once: I repeatedly made clear that I was not making that allegation. The transcript records me saying:

“I am not claiming this, I don’t have any concrete evidence.”

My attorney likewise told the court that I was not accusing him and DCF was the entity saying an investigation needed to occur.

That is all I am going to publish about the substance of that issue.

What makes all of this more extraordinary is what the court itself ultimately said about the situation: “I have concerns in both homes.” Both homes. Yet I was the parent being described through fantasies of lakes, Dateline, murder suicide, and maternal filicide. And after all of that, the court put the power of the state directly on the table. My attorney asked that the children remain with me while the DCF investigation was completed and the judge responded: “They’re not going to. They’re not going to.”

The judge said she was leaning toward placing my children in the care and custody of the Department. My then-husband’s attorney immediately responded: “We will reach a stipulation and be back here.”

Then the court recessed. When we returned, there was a stipulation. I signed it.

The judge asked whether I understood it, whether I had reviewed it with my attorney and then:

“And did you sign it freely and voluntarily?”

I said: “I did, your Honor.”

The person with the legal authority to place my children into state custody told the attorneys that unless something was worked out, my children would go into DCF custody that day. A stipulation was produced. I signed it. Then I was asked whether I had signed voluntarily. Family court can put the word “voluntarily” in a transcript but cannot erase the circumstances that preceded it. I call that coercion. Of course I signed.

January 4

Barely more than two weeks later, I was back before the same judge. My attorney withdrew at the beginning of the hearing and I was left representing myself in a proceeding about the custody of my children.

I told the court:

“Basically since we were last here, at the threat or notice from the Court that the children would be put into state custody if we didn’t sign a stipulation in 10 minutes, I was extremely anxious, terrified of what that might be.”

I called this a threat then. I made the judge aware of it then.

My then-husband’s attorney provided his own description of what had been hanging over me. While arguing that my parenting time should be suspended, he said:

The threat of foster care. His words, not mine. I was threatened, being told if I did not do something, my kids would go to foster care.

Then he said:

That was it. The judge awarded temporary custody of both children to their father, on the spot. She ordered their schools not to release them to me. My contact with them was reduced to recorded Zoom calls every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday at 7:30 p.m.

After that decision was announced, I (miraculously) calmly and respectfully raised what I had been told by the Appeals Court about whether another major change in parenting time could occur while my appeal was pending.

The judge said: “That’s not my understanding.” I explained that I had just called the Appeals Court and was relaying what its clerk had told me. The judge responded that the children were not going back with me and said she was concerned that my representations to the court had not been “forthright and totally honest.”

I had spent years hearing competing versions of conversations and events. But this time I had something that could settle at least some of those disputes.

I had the recordings.

I told the judge:

“I respect that, that’s why I have the audio recordings to validate what I had said…”

The judge answered:

Read that in the context of what had just been ordered.

Temporary custody of both children transferred to their father.

Their schools prohibited from releasing them to me.

My relationship with them reduced to three recorded Zoom calls each week.

I was standing there saying that I had the actual recordings capable of validating what had been said in prior hearings was “totally honest.” Judge Elizabeth Teixeira did not want to hear it. Why?

There should always be time for accuracy when the consequence of being wrong is changing the course of children’s lives. If a court is questioning a parent’s honesty based partly on what the court remembers happening in previous proceedings, and that parent is standing there offering the recordings, how can there not be time to review them before making a custody decision of that magnitude?

And this is where December 18 and January 4 begin to look like more than two isolated troubling exchanges. In December, counsel warned the court that the custody decision could interfere with the investigative process professionals said they needed.

“That’s their problem.”

In January, I told the court I had recordings capable of validating what I had said in prior hearings was indeed truthful.

“I don’t have the time to go through them.”

The statements are different, but they reveal the same underlying problem to me.

Information that could complicate, slow down or challenge an immediate custody decision was not given the weight the consequences demanded. Meanwhile, there was plenty of room for prediction. Plenty of room for speculation about what kind of mother I was. Plenty of room for an attorney to predict that I would drive my children into a lake. But when information existed that could be investigated, checked or listened to, speed and a father’s grandiose predictions won.

That is not how decisions this consequential should be made.

950 Days

There is something different about finally reading an official transcript after having the audio for years. The audio preserved what happened but the transcript shows how what happened becomes a court record. A transcript can contain the words “freely and voluntarily” and make them look definitive until you read what happened immediately before them. It can record an attorney making catastrophic predictions about a mother without putting a label beside those words explaining that they were predictions rather than clinical findings, or have any basis or evidence to back them up. It can reduce hours of fear, pressure and enormous disparities of power into orderly lines on a page. And apparently a judge can seal records allegedly trying to make them go away but, like my children, I refuse to let them disappear.

December 18 documents an extraordinary willingness to speculate about what I might do while an investigative process involving my child was being treated as something the court did not need to accommodate. It documents the court’s acknowledgment of concerns in both homes. It documents the threat of DCF custody and the “agreement” that followed.

January 4 documents something different. It shows me offering the court the audio record and being told there was not time to review it before a custody decision that fundamentally changed my children’s lives.

There is a bitter irony in spending years inside a system that demands documentation for everything and then being unable to obtain the documentation of what that system itself said and did. Family court demanded records from me. It evaluated my words, my behavior, my mental health, my parenting, my decisions, and my credibility. Lawyers could take pieces of my history and put them under a microscope. Predictions about what I might someday do could be spoken into a courtroom where the consequences for me and my children were enormous.

But when I wanted the paper record of what they said and did, I could not get it. The imbalance of power, the disparate behavior a mother faces in court, compared to a father, and the things my then-husband and his attorney, Calvin Heinle were able to say about me become the backbone of what happened to my children, to me, and how a system which we were taught was there to protect us actually became the system trying to silence us.

Now Show Me the Order

Family court demanded documentation from me for years. Fine.

Now I am asking the court for the same thing: Show me who impounded these hearings. Show me when it happened. Show me the motion. Show me the hearing. Show me the order. Show me the legal authority. Show me why I was not given access to the official written record of my own proceedings for 950 days.

And explain why these two dates, of all the dates in my case, were the ones I was prevented from getting on an eight and a half by eleven piece of paper for nearly three years.

I already knew what was said.

Now everyone else can read it too.

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I am not going to re-establish every piece of that history here. The short version is this: many of us supported Mara Dolan. We believed her when she told us she cared about survivors. We believed her when she acted like she understood the stakes of the Governor’s Council. We believed her when she said she wanted a more just judiciary.

I believed her personally.

On August 20, 2024, after I contacted Dolan about what was happening to me and my children, she emailed me back.

“I am more sorry than I can say,” she wrote. “I’m also horrified. Will also do whatever I can when I can. Please keep me posted.”

Those words mattered to me.

They mattered because my children were taken from me 950 days ago. They mattered because I have not seen them, heard from them, or known where they are since June 22. They mattered because my daughter was hospitalized in April and May after making disclosures about her father and saying she did not feel safe in his home. They mattered because I have lived, in real time, what happens when family court gets it wrong and nobody in power wants to look too closely.

So when Mara Dolan told me she was horrified, when she said she would do whatever she could when she could, I took that seriously.

She failed that promise.

And now, when survivors and advocates ask her to answer for that failure, she has apparently decided we are “extremists.”

No.

We are not extremists.

We are mothers. We are survivors. We are constituents. We are advocates. We are people who have watched the family court system destroy families while the same insiders tell us everything is working exactly as it should.

We are asking for accountability.

We are asking for transparency.

We are asking for change.

That is not extremism. That is democracy.

The Governor’s Council is not some harmless ceremonial office. It is one of the only elected checks Massachusetts voters have on judicial appointments. The Council provides advice and consent on gubernatorial appointments, including judges, parole board members, pardons, and commutations. Dolan herself has understood the power of the office. Reporting has described the Council as an obscure but enormously powerful body, and Dolan ran on bringing a new perspective to it.

That is exactly why survivors paid attention.

Massachusetts voters do not elect judges. We elect the people who confirm them. That means when domestic violence survivors and family court litigants raise concerns about a judicial nominee, we are not being disruptive. We are participating in the only part of the process available to us.

And we tried.

Mass Family Advocacy Coalition members had already spoken with Dolan during her 2024 race about trauma-informed judging and the ways the court system can be weaponized against survivors. When Mary Ferriter was nominated to Probate and Family Court, advocates raised concerns based on lived experience, including direct experience with a domestic-violence forced-parenting class where survivors were required to have contact with their abusers.

These were not abstract concerns. These were warnings from people who had lived the consequences.

And Dolan was warned.

People emailed her. People offered to connect her with others who knew the nominee personally. People asked her to slow down and listen.

She voted yes anyway.

The final vote was 4–3. That matters. A 4–3 vote means there were serious questions in the room. Councilors Paul DePalo, Tara Jacobs, and Eunice Ziegler voted no. Mara Dolan voted yes.

What makes this even harder to swallow is the campaign finance record.

According to Massachusetts campaign finance records, Mara Dolan received $3,000 from attorney Marty Kane.

Marty Kane escorted Mary Ferriter into her judicial nominee interview. He donated $3,000 to Mara Dolan. Dolan then voted yes on Ferriter.

I am not saying a donation alone proves why someone voted the way she voted. I am saying voters are allowed to look at that sequence and ask what it means.

We are allowed to ask whether family court attorneys should have that kind of influence over the people who confirm family court judges.

We are allowed to ask whether Governor’s Councilors who return to family court practice should be appearing before judges they helped place on the bench.

We are allowed to ask why survivors’ emails could be forgotten, dismissed, or blocked, while insiders always seem to know exactly which doors to walk through.

That is not extremism.

That is accountability.

So when Dolan dismisses the people who raised those concerns as extremists, what she is really doing is trying to turn accountability into an attack on herself.

That is the oldest move in the book.

At the debate tonight in Concord, I watched the same pattern play out in person.

Dolan said she would never betray domestic violence victims.

But several people in that room raised their hands and told her, directly, that they had emailed her, warned her, and offered to connect her with people who knew the nominee personally. They said she ignored them.

Her answer was that she did not recall the email.

How convenient.

“I don’t recall” is not accountability. It is not transparency. It is not survivor-centered leadership. It is a politician’s escape hatch.

And after the debate, I watched a constituent approach Dolan, offer her hand, and say, “I am one of the victims you betrayed.”

Dolan did not respond with compassion. She did not pause. She did not listen. She jerked her hand back and refused to shake hers.

That moment said more than any campaign literature ever could.

That is not how someone behaves when she is genuinely committed to hearing survivors. That is how someone behaves when she is defensive, angry, and embarrassed that the people she ignored are still in the room.

And we are still in the room.

That seems to be the problem.

We were welcome when we supported her. We were welcome when our stories helped show that the old Governor’s Council needed change. We were welcome when we were useful.

But when we asked questions about a judicial nominee? When we raised concerns? When we wanted her to do the thing she said she would do?

Suddenly we were “extremists.”

I want to be very clear about this: acknowledging a problem with the status quo does not make someone extreme.

I am not an extremist.

I am a mother who has been fighting for the return of her children for 950 days.

I am a mother whose daughter was hospitalized after making disclosures and saying she did not feel safe.

I am a mother who has watched the court system bend itself into knots to avoid accountability while demanding endless compliance from the parent trying to protect the children.

I am an advocate because I had no choice but to become one.

We are not extreme because we name what happened.

We are not extreme because we ask who benefits when the same attorneys, judges, evaluators, and court-connected professionals keep protecting one another.

We are not extreme because we believe domestic violence survivors should be listened to before judicial nominees are confirmed, not patted on the shoulder after the damage is done.

We are not extreme because we refuse to pretend the system is working just because the people inside it say it is.

And we are certainly not extreme because Mara Dolan liked our support better when we were clapping for her.

What is extreme is asking survivors to trust you and then dismissing them when they tell you that trust was broken.

That is why Margie Palladino entered this race.

Margie is not running because this was easy. She entered late, against an incumbent with money, endorsements, and the machinery that comes with already holding office. She entered because survivors and advocates watched Dolan vote yes after we raised the alarm.

Margie Palladino is the Executive Director of Mass Family Advocacy Coalition, a grassroots organization founded by women dedicated to improving the Massachusetts family law system. MFAC works on issues including coercive control, abusive litigation, and family court reform. She is also a Boston College Law School graduate and co-founder of MFAC.

That matters.

Because this race is not only about personality. It is not only about who performs better at a debate or who has more endorsements.

It is about whether the Governor’s Council will be treated like the serious public accountability body it is supposed to be, or whether it will remain a quiet corridor where insiders move nominees through while survivors are told to sit down, be nice, and stop making everyone uncomfortable.

I am angry. I will not apologize for that.

Anger is an appropriate response when public officials court survivors, accept their support, and then dismiss them when they raise concerns about power.

Anger is an appropriate response when mothers are told to trust a system that has already harmed their children.

Anger is an appropriate response when an elected official says she would never betray domestic violence victims while actual victims are standing in front of her saying: you already did.

Mara Dolan promised me she would do what she could.

She failed.

She failed when survivors warned her.

She failed when she voted yes anyway.

She failed when she dismissed legitimate questions as attacks.

She failed when she treated accountability as extremism.

I am not an extremist.

I am an advocate.

I am advocating for transparency. I am advocating for accountability. I am advocating for children, survivors, and families whose lives are shaped by judges they never got to vote for.

If that makes Mara Dolan uncomfortable, good.

Public power should be uncomfortable when it is challenged by the people it failed.

They are not hard to find. They are public. Anyone can read them.

That is part of what makes this so hard to understand.

This is not one of those situations where a parent needs an insider to explain some secret court practice. The written guidance is right there. It explains what professional parenting-time supervision is supposed to be, how it is supposed to be ordered, who is supposed to do it, and who can be made to pay for it.

My order did not match.

In my case, I was ordered to pay to see my children eleven hours a week. Patricia Brady and Associates charged me $95 an hour. So, for me to see my own children under the schedule the court ordered, it cost $1,045 a week.

That is $4,180 in a four-week month.

It is more than $54,000 a year if it continued at that pace.

That was just my case.

I do not think people understand what paid supervision means in real life. It is not just a restriction on parenting time. It creates a private billing system around a parent’s access to their own children. Every hour a parent is forced into paid supervision is an hour someone else can charge for. The order may say “parenting time,” but if the parent has to pay a private provider first, then the real condition is money.

Mass.gov says professional parenting-time supervision is supposed to be safety-based, short-term, and used when less restrictive options cannot protect the child. The court order is supposed to state the reason for supervision. It is supposed to identify the safety concerns. It is supposed to say who pays. It is supposed to include a review date unless the order is time-limited.

The Massachusetts guidance says that under G.L. c. 209A, § 3(d), the court can order an abusive parent to pay for supervised parenting time without consent. But for other supervised parenting time, payment must be agreed to by the parties. The guidance also says there is no authority for Probate and Family Court to pay the professional supervisor, and no authority to order a parent to pay over objection except as noted.

So I keep coming back to the same questions.

Was I found to be the abusive parent under that statute?

Did I agree to pay?

If not, where was the authority to order me to pay?

Because my children refusing parenting time is not the same thing as a statutory abuse finding. My ex-husband saying I needed “clinical supervision” did not answer the legal question. His story was treated like evidence. It was not evidence.

And “parental alienation” should not be used as a shortcut around the rules.

If someone wants to use a psychological theory to justify restricting a mother’s access to her children, then there should be an evidentiary standard. There should be a qualified expert. There should be a reliable method. There should be an actual finding. Massachusetts uses the Daubert-Lanigan standard for expert testimony, which means courts are supposed to look at whether expert testimony is based on sufficient facts or data, reliable principles and methods, and reliable application.

So why does family court so often act as if saying “alienation” is enough?

Enough to supervise a mother.

Enough to make her pay.

Enough to keep children away from her if she cannot afford the bill.

In my case, the judge did not appoint a supervisor in any meaningful way. She listed four names. That matters because the Massachusetts guidelines do not say a judge can hand a parent a list of private providers and call that an appointment. They say the court is supposed to enter an order of appointment. They also say the appointment is not effective until the supervisor files written acceptance with the court.

That is not what happened in any meaningful way.

I was left to contact people myself. I had to find out who would respond, who was available, who would take the case, what they charged, and whether I could somehow make the court-ordered parenting time happen around all of that.

I do not see how that counts as the court actually arranging supervision.

It put the burden back on me. It made my access depend on private providers, private schedules, and private fees. Then the order still treated it as if I had parenting time.

On paper, I had Wednesdays and alternating Sundays.

In reality, I had to pay a private business before I could see my children.

The first time I was ordered into paid supervision, I used Patricia Brady and Associates. Patricia Brady had also been my guardian ad litem.

That should have been a problem.

A guardian ad litem already plays a major role in shaping what the court believes about a family. When someone from that same professional orbit later profits from supervision, I do not understand how that is treated as clean or neutral. This was not an abstract ethics concern for me. This was the person connected to the process that restricted me, and then I was paying that same professional ecosystem to access my children.

I paid Patricia Brady and Associates approximately $9,000 to see my children.

Nine thousand dollars.

Not for therapy. Not for reunification. Not for some clear safety intervention with a defined endpoint. I paid that money because the court order made paid supervision the condition for seeing my children.

Even after all of that, the supervision records did not show parenting concerns. The reports I have from supervised parenting time state that there were no concerns found and that the visits were appropriate. If anything, the reports called attention to disclosures made by the children.

I still do not understand why that did not matter.

If the purpose of supervision was safety, and the paid supervisors were reporting that I was appropriate with my children, why did the supervision continue? Why did I keep paying? Why did the court keep treating the restriction as necessary?

One of the supervisors also filed a 51A based on the appearance of how my son arrived at my home.

I did not make that report. I did not create that concern. A parenting-time supervisor filed it.

Later, that same 51A was folded into the story that I am “always falsely reporting.” But that is not what happened. The report came from the person the court-approved supervision arrangement put in the room with us.

That should have forced a different question.

If the concern came from the supervisor, why was it used against me?

The court treated these supervisors as professional enough to observe me, document me, and participate in a restriction on my parenting time. But when their records did not show parenting concerns, the supervision did not end. And when one of them filed a 51A based on how my son arrived, that somehow became part of a narrative against me.

I do not know how else to describe that except as a distortion of the record.

In April 2024, Patricia Brady stood up in court and suggested paid supervision continue so she could “explore” things further.

I still want to know what that meant.

Explore what?

At whose expense?

For how long?

If the supervision notes were not documenting concerns about my parenting, why was I still being supervised? If the concern was something the children disclosed, why was the response more paid supervision for me instead of serious attention to what might be happening away from me?

Patricia Brady and Associates charged me $95 an hour.

I later found a job ad from the same business offering parenting-time supervision work for $25–$35 an hour.

No experience necessary.

This was not someone watching children at a playground for an afternoon. This was court-ordered supervision of a mother with her children. This was the condition placed between me and parenting time. This was the service I had to pay for before I could see them.

Massachusetts guidelines talk about professional parenting-time supervisors. They talk about qualifications. They talk about an order of appointment. They talk about written acceptance. They talk about the appointment being personal, not casually delegated.

So I want to know who was actually supervising me.

Was that person personally appointed by the court? Were they on the approved list? Did they file written acceptance? What training did they have? Were they a mandated reporter? Did the judge know who was actually showing up?

And if nobody checked, why was this treated as a lawful barrier between me and my children?

The money matters here. At $95 an hour for 11 hours a week, one parent generates $1,045 a week. If the person supervising is being paid $25–$35 an hour, that leaves a difference of $60–$70 an hour before overhead. For my schedule alone, that difference would be $660–$770 a week from one family.

One family.

And I was not the only parent in this system.

That is why I think people need to look at the money, because the money is not incidental. Multiply those hours by multiple parents, multiple orders, multiple weeks, multiple cases. This is not just a court restriction. It is a business model the court is feeding.

When a court order creates that kind of private billing system, the court should be making sure its own rules are being followed. It should not be enough for a judge to say “supervision” and send a parent into the private market. It should not be enough for a provider to charge professional rates if the actual supervision can be done by someone hired through a no-experience-necessary job ad.

And it should not be enough for everyone to look away because the parent being billed is already overwhelmed, already separated from her children, and already trying to survive the court process.

When I complained, I got the usual loop.

The Commission on Judicial Conduct said no error was found.

The district attorney’s office said it was not their purview.

An appeal requires money, transcripts, legal work, deadlines, and time.

Meanwhile, the order stays in place. The children wait. The private provider can bill. The other parent benefits from the delay. And I am left trying to fund access to children I never should have been separated from this way in the first place.

That is the part that is almost impossible to explain unless you have lived it.

The appeal process does not tuck your children in at night. It does not give back the missed weeks or months. It does not repair the damage of children being kept from a loving parent while adults debate whether a judge followed rules that are literally posted online.

Paid subscribers here have already made a real difference. I hate that this is true. I hate that a mother has to fundraise her way back to her children while a private supervision system profits from the separation. But that is the system as it is operating.

If I had more money, my children would be home sooner.

I know how that sounds. It sounds too blunt. It sounds like something nobody wants to admit out loud.

But it is true.

When a parent has to pay a private provider before she can see her children, money controls the relationship. When she has to pay lawyers and transcript fees to challenge it, money controls the remedy too. So the parent with fewer resources loses time, and the children lose time, while everyone else calls it process.

I know other parents have stories like this. Mine is the one I have records for.

I have the orders. I have the supervision records. I have the payment records. I have the communications. I have the job posting. And I have the Mass.gov guidelines sitting next to all of it, saying something very different from what I was ordered to live with.

That is why I am writing about this.

Massachusetts has published the rules. The court can read them. The providers can read them. Parents can read them.

So if the rules say this kind of forced payment is not allowed except in limited circumstances, the question is not whether anyone knew.

The question is why it was still done.

Sources and records referenced

Massachusetts Guidelines for Professional Parenting Time Supervisors, including the Introduction, Section II on qualifications and duties, and Section III on court order and process. These guidelines describe professional parenting-time supervision as a safety-based intervention and outline requirements around appointment, qualifications, written acceptance, payment, reports, and conflicts of interest.

Probate and Family Court Standing Order 1-23: Professional Parenting Time Supervisors. This standing order states that the guidelines are intended to promote uniformity and consistency for professional parenting-time supervisor appointments and respect for the rights and safety of parties and children.

Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 209A, Section 3. This is the abuse-prevention statute referenced in the parenting-time supervision payment guidance, including the provision allowing the court to order an abusive parent to pay the costs of supervised visitation.

209A Guideline 12:00: Probate and Family Court Parenting Time and c. 209A Proceedings. This guidance addresses parenting-time orders in Probate and Family Court where abuse-prevention proceedings are involved and emphasizes safety for the abused parent and children.

Massachusetts Guide to Evidence, Section 702: Testimony by Expert Witnesses. This section addresses expert testimony and the Daubert-Lanigan reliability framework in Massachusetts, including whether expert testimony is based on reliable principles and methods.

Records in my possession include court orders, supervision records, communications from the other parent, payment records, and the job posting referenced in this article. I am redacting identifying information about my children where appropriate.

A note to readers

I am appealing this.

That means transcripts, filings, legal work, deadlines, and more money. More money spent trying to challenge an order that already cost me thousands of dollars just to see my children.

I already paid to see them. Now I have to pay again to prove I should not have been forced to pay in the first place.

Paid subscribers here have already helped more than I can explain. I hate that this is how it works. I hate that a parent has to fundraise to fight her way back to her own children while private providers are allowed to make money from the separation.

But this is where the system puts families.

If you become a paid subscriber, it helps fund the appeal and the work of documenting what happened here. I am not writing about this because it is easy. I am writing about it because I have the records, and because the records do not match the rules Massachusetts publishes for the public to read.

This is bigger than my case.

But right now, my case is the one I can prove.

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A mother is not described as crying because she is terrified of losing time with her children. She is described as “dysregulated.” A child is not described as noticing that his mother is upset and responding with the empathy children learn from being cared for. He is described as having to “comfort” her. A mother is not described as emotional while under observation, under pressure, and facing the possibility of state involvement in her family. She is described in language that implies she is unstable, irrational, unsafe, or incapable.

That translation matters because once those words enter a court record, a filing, or a media article, they begin to shape how everyone sees the mother. They create a mood around her. They invite suspicion. They imply that her emotions are not ordinary human responses, but evidence of risk.

This is what concerns me about the reporting around Taylor Frankie Paul and the recent DCFS filing. I am not writing about this because I am interested in celebrity gossip. I am writing about it because the pattern is familiar. Mothers in custody litigation see this kind of language all the time. They know how quickly an emotional response can be stripped of context and turned into a parenting concern.

The word “dysregulated” is a good example. In ordinary human terms, emotional dysregulation can simply mean that someone’s nervous system is activated. They are overwhelmed. They are crying. They are scared. They are having an intense emotional response to an intense situation. That does not automatically mean they are unsafe or irrational. It does not automatically mean they cannot parent. It may mean they are responding in a completely understandable way to a situation that would overwhelm almost anyone.

But in custody court, words like “dysregulated” often carry a much heavier implication. They are not heard as, “This mother is under extreme stress.” They are heard as, “This mother is unstable.” That difference is not small. It can affect custody, supervision, credibility, and whether a mother is seen as a protective parent or as a problem to be managed.

This is especially important when the emotional subject is the children themselves. A mother talking emotionally about her children can be acting from love, fear, grief, protectiveness, or trauma. She can be overwhelmed precisely because her children matter so much to her. Yet the system often takes that same emotion and treats it as evidence against her. The deeper the love, the more intense the fear; the more intense the fear, the more easily the system can label her “dysregulated.”

That is a dangerous loop, and many mothers know it well.

The same is true with the idea that a child “comforted” a parent. There is a real issue when children are chronically made responsible for an adult’s emotional stability. I am not minimizing that. Children should not be turned into therapists, regulators, confidants, or emotional caretakers for adults. But that is not the same thing as a child seeing a parent upset and offering comfort in an ordinary, loving, developmentally normal way.

Children learn empathy because empathy is modeled to them. Mothers comfort crying children all the time. Children see that care. They absorb it. They learn that when someone is hurt, you notice. When someone is sad, you may move toward them. When someone is scared, you may offer comfort.

That is not automatically harm. Sometimes that is what secure, connected family life looks like.

If a mother were at an event and tripped, fell, bruised herself, and cried from fear or pain, and her child came over to hug her, most people would not immediately call that parentification. They would probably see a child responding with empathy. They would see a child who has learned that people matter and that pain deserves care.

But when a mother is already being framed as unstable, that same moment can be written differently. The child did not comfort his mother because he loves her or because empathy has been modeled in the family. The child “had to comfort” her. The wording does the work. It takes a human moment and gives it a sinister undertone.

This is how mothers get turned into cases.

The system does not always need to say outright, “She is unfit.” Sometimes it only has to collect the right words around her: dysregulated, concerning, dependent, protective supervision, emotional instability, lack of insight, inability to regulate. Those words sound clinical. They sound objective. They sound professional. But professional language is not automatically neutral.

It can carry bias. It can carry assumptions. It can carry gendered expectations about what mothers are allowed to feel and how calmly they are expected to perform while their children are being discussed by courts, agencies, lawyers, and strangers.

That is one of the central problems in custody litigation. Mothers are expected to be emotionally available enough to prove attachment, but not so emotional that they look unstable. They are expected to care deeply, but not visibly panic. They are expected to fight for their children, but not appear combative. They are expected to explain themselves, but not seem defensive. They are expected to need support, but not so much support that it becomes evidence they cannot cope.

There is often no safe emotional lane for a mother once suspicion has attached itself to her.

And this is where the comparison to fathers becomes impossible to ignore.

A father can be framed as concerned, protective, frustrated, firm, or imperfect. A father’s conduct can be softened into a lapse in judgment. A father can be spoken to delicately. A father can be corrected without being pathologized.

But a mother’s emotions become the headline.

Last I saw reported, Dakota Mortensen had been scolded by a judge for driving his and Taylor’s 2-year-old son on a motorcycle during a custody exchange. A 2-year-old on a motorcycle during a custody exchange is not a vague emotional presentation. It is not a tone issue. It is not a mother crying under pressure. It is a concrete safety concern involving a toddler.

So the question becomes: why is institutional weight so often placed on a mother’s emotional state while a father’s concrete safety risk is handled with more delicacy?

If child safety is the standard, then child safety should be the standard. Not just when the mother is emotional. Not just when the mother is public. Not just when the mother is easy to ridicule. Not just when the mother’s distress can be described in language that makes her sound unstable.

If a father puts a 2-year-old on a motorcycle, that should raise obvious safety questions. A father who does that needs scrutiny. A father who does that may need supervision. And yet, again and again, family-court systems seem much more comfortable scrutinizing maternal emotion than paternal risk.

That is not neutrality. That is a pattern.

This is also where the DCF/DCFS involvement matters. When child-welfare language enters a custody dispute, the whole case changes. Now the mother is not simply a parent in conflict. She becomes a risk category. Now the case can involve protective supervision, guardian ad litems, case plans, assessments, professional observations, paid supervisors, therapeutic recommendations, and agency language that carries enormous authority.

Sometimes child-welfare intervention is necessary. Children do need protection from real abuse and neglect. But child-welfare systems can also be weaponized, especially inside custody disputes where one parent benefits from making the other look unsafe.

The danger is that the process itself becomes punishment.

A mother can suddenly be forced to spend enormous amounts of money, time, and emotional energy proving she is not the unstable figure the paperwork implies she is. Lawyers cost money. Evaluations cost money. Therapists cost money. Supervised visitation costs money. Parent coordinators, custody evaluators, guardian ad litems, reunification professionals, and third-party providers all become part of a paid ecosystem surrounding access to children.

Paid supervision is one of the clearest examples of this. The idea is presented as safety, but it can function as a financial barrier between a parent and their child. A mother may be told she can see her children, but only through a paid structure, on someone else’s terms, under observation, with every interaction potentially documented and interpreted.

Dollar signs everywhere.

For what?

That is the question we should be asking. What exactly is being protected when maternal emotion is pathologized, but paternal conduct is softened? What exactly is being protected when a child’s empathy is made to sound alarming? What exactly is being protected when access to children becomes something a parent has to purchase through supervised time, professionals, reports, and compliance hoops?

There is an entire industry built around family separation, and mothers are often the ones paying to prove they are not the caricature created about them.

This is not just emotionally devastating. It is financially punishing. The machine feeds on conflict. The more allegations, the more professionals. The more professionals, the more reports. The more reports, the more recommendations. The more recommendations, the more compliance demands. The more compliance demands, the more opportunities to say the mother has failed, resisted, misunderstood, overreacted, or not shown enough insight.

The process becomes the punishment.

And when this moves toward juvenile court or child-welfare proceedings, the accountability concerns become even bigger.

I do not think the move into juvenile court should be treated as a neutral procedural detail. Moving a custody dispute into child-welfare and juvenile-court territory can be strategic because it changes where the fight happens and who gets to see it.

In a more public-facing custody dispute, especially when the parties are public figures, there is at least some possibility of public scrutiny. People may see filings. Reporters may attend hearings. The public may be able to compare what is being alleged with what is actually being said and done in court.

Juvenile and child-welfare systems are different. Even where some hearings may technically be open, the records, reports, agency information, child-welfare documentation, and professional recommendations often become much harder for the public to access. Privacy rules are often justified as protecting children, and of course children’s privacy matters. But privacy can protect children and also conceal power.

Both things can be true.

The public may only see fragments. The mother may be limited in what she can say. Reports may be summarized instead of scrutinized. Professionals can make recommendations that carry enormous weight, while the reasoning behind those recommendations becomes difficult for outsiders to examine. Serious things can be said about a mother while the details are placed behind a wall.

That creates an accountability problem.

It allows the system to use words like “dysregulated,” “protective supervision,” “dependency,” “neglect,” and “best interests” while the public is left with insinuation instead of transparency. It allows the mother to be judged in public but constrained in how she can defend herself publicly. It allows a parent pushing the narrative to benefit from the seriousness of child-welfare language while also benefiting from the privacy of the forum.

That is a very convenient arrangement for anyone trying to turn a custody fight into a reputational and legal trap.

This is why the juvenile-court issue matters so much. It is not only about where the case is heard. It is about whether the process is visible enough to be accountable. It is about whether professionals, agencies, litigants, and courts can operate behind the language of child protection without meaningful public scrutiny.

When coercive control is part of the concern, opacity is not a minor issue. It can become part of the control.

Coercive control is not always someone screaming in a kitchen. It is not always one obvious incident. In custody cases, coercive control often becomes administrative, legal, procedural, expensive, and respectable-looking. It can look like taking the mother’s most vulnerable moments and converting them into evidence. It can look like recording her distress and then presenting that distress as proof that she is unstable. It can look like calling agencies, creating records, seeking supervision, demanding evaluations, and saying, “I am only concerned for the children.”

Sometimes people really are concerned for children. And sometimes “concern for the children” is the cleanest language available for control.

That is why timing and context matter.

Who benefited from the mother’s public identity before custody became contested? Who was comfortable with her visibility before it became useful to call that visibility harmful? Who entered the relationship knowing exactly who she was online, knowing she had an audience, knowing she had notoriety, knowing her life was already public?

Taylor’s public life was not a surprise. Her online presence was not hidden. Her platform did not suddenly appear after custody became an issue.

This is another pattern mothers recognize. A man enters the picture knowing who a woman is. He knows she is visible. He knows she has an audience. He may even be drawn to that world. He may benefit from the attention, access, money, proximity, or relevance that comes with being near her. Then the relationship breaks down, custody becomes contested, and suddenly the very thing that was accepted before becomes dangerous for the children.

That is not a bait and switch by the mother.

That is a reframing by the person who now benefits from making her look unsafe.

This happens constantly in custody disputes. The mother’s job, platform, personality, sexuality, friendships, family support, trauma, tone, past, and emotional life all become usable material. Everything is repackaged as a parenting concern.

A mother’s online work was fine until custody. Then it became exploitation. Her family support was fine until custody. Then it became evidence she cannot cope. Her emotions were understandable until custody. Then they became dysregulation. Her visibility was attractive until custody. Then it became dangerous. Her children’s empathy was ordinary until custody. Then it became parentification.

This is how the frame gets built.

And once that frame is built, fathers are often given the benefit of complexity while mothers are reduced to risk. A father can be reckless and still be “learning.” A father can escalate and still be “concerned.” A father can use the court system aggressively and still be “protective.” A father can create fear and then point to the mother’s fear as evidence against her.

That is not child protection.

That is power.

And the family-court system is often very poor at telling the difference. It rewards the person who can perform calm concern while punishing the person whose nervous system is showing the cost of being controlled, threatened, litigated, surveilled, or separated from her children.

This is why coercive control is so often missed in custody court. The system looks for isolated incidents instead of patterns. It looks for who appears composed instead of who has power. It looks for emotional presentation instead of strategic behavior. It asks whether the mother is calm, not whether there is a reason she is terrified.

And then it calls the terror instability.

This is also why legally careful public statements from mothers in these situations are so painful to read. When a mother says she respects the concerns raised, is committed to complying with the court, and is focused on doing whatever is required for her children, I understand the purpose of that message. I understand why that is the message. I understand why, legally, publicly, and strategically, a mother in this position may have to sound cooperative, measured, humble, compliant, and grateful for the opportunity to prove herself.

That is the language a mother is often forced to use when the state, the court, and paid professionals now have power over her access to her own children.

So yes, I understand the statement.

And also, every ounce of maternal rage in me is screaming.

Because from the outside, this looks like the very thing so many of us have seen before. It looks like the thing I feared when this began. It looks like the machinery starting to move exactly the way the machinery moves. The language is changing. The forum is changing. The allegations are being translated into institutional terms. Now a guardian ad litem is being requested. Now the case risks moving deeper into a system where the mother has less control over the narrative, less access to public accountability, and more people standing between her and her children.

That is not a small development.

That is the part mothers recognize in their bodies before the rest of the world catches up.

There is a reason Meredith Marks’ postnup conversation on The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City stuck with me. On the show, Meredith explained that when she moved with her three children from Chicago to Park City, Utah, she wanted a postnuptial agreement. She clarified that it was not about money. It was about custody. She said she was afraid of moving into a system where, if the marriage ended, she could be vulnerable in a custody fight.

And Seth met that with shock. The idea that he would ever do something like that seemed unthinkable to him.

But that is the thing women know.

Men often say they would never. They would never fight you like that. They would never try to take the children. They would never use the system. They would never become that kind of man.

I remember my own version of that conversation. I remember walking with my husband on the Esplanade. I remember the weekend clearly because he had mixed up a date and was supposed to be in Connecticut for something involving his sister. His family was upset with him, and he was panicked because he had gotten the date wrong. I do not remember exactly how the conversation turned, but I remember what he said.

Not that we would ever divorce, but if we did, he would never fight me for the children.

That sentence stayed with me.

It stayed with me before I knew why it needed to.

It stayed with me for years.

It stayed with me even before he went to court to take my children.

That is what people who have not lived this often do not understand. Sometimes the warning signs do not arrive as threats. Sometimes they arrive as reassurances. Sometimes a man tells you he would never do the very thing some part of you already knows he is capable of doing. Sometimes your body files the statement away long before your mind has permission to understand it.

This is bigger than Taylor Frankie Paul.

She is a public figure, so people are watching. But mothers who are not famous know this script intimately. They know what it feels like to have normal human reactions turned into evidence. They know what it feels like to have a support system reframed as incapacity. They know what it feels like when a father suddenly develops moral objections to a life he previously accepted or benefited from. They know what it feels like to be told the system is protecting the children while the children are being used as leverage.

They also know what it feels like to be silenced by the process itself. Once a case moves deeper into child-welfare or juvenile-court structures, a mother may be more restricted in what she can say, while public narratives continue to form around her. That is a brutal bind. She can be smeared by implication but unable to fully answer. She can be judged by fragments while the full record is inaccessible. She can be forced to comply with paid systems that drain her financially and emotionally, all while being told this is for the children.

That is why transparency matters.

Children’s privacy should be protected. But protecting children should not mean shielding courts, agencies, paid professionals, or litigating parents from accountability. Privacy should not become the pretty curtain pulled over coercion, profiteering, and institutional mother-silencing.

We have to stop pretending that the use of child-protection language automatically means child protection is what is happening.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes children are genuinely unsafe and intervention is necessary.

But sometimes child-protection language is used to launder control. Sometimes it is used to make a mother look unstable. Sometimes it is used to move a dispute into a more private, less accountable system. Sometimes it is used to create financial pressure, reputational damage, and restricted access to children.

And when the system treats a mother’s emotion as more alarming than a father’s concrete safety risk, we should all be paying attention.

Children are not protected by pretending mothers should be emotionless under threat. Children are not protected by teaching them that comforting a crying parent is automatically pathological. Children are not protected by turning a mother’s support system into evidence against her. Children are not protected by making parents pay for access to their own children while calling it safety. Children are not protected when courts treat fathers’ conduct with delicacy and mothers’ emotional responses with suspicion.

And children are absolutely not protected when coercive-control tactics are laundered through custody language.

Maybe the issue is not that a mother cried.

Maybe the issue is that the system knows how to turn crying into a custody weapon.

Maybe the issue is not that a child showed empathy.

Maybe the issue is that empathy becomes suspicious when it is attached to a mother already being framed as unstable.

Maybe the issue is not that a mother is “dysregulated.”

Maybe the issue is that we refuse to distinguish between a person having an appropriate emotional response to an extreme situation and a person who is unsafe.

Maybe the issue is not privacy.

Maybe the issue is that privacy can be used to hide what is being said and done to mothers in the name of protecting children.

And maybe the real danger is not a mother having feelings.

Maybe the real danger is a system that keeps confusing maternal humanity with maternal unfitness.

Some of us remember the walk.

Some of us remember the sentence.

Some of us remember the reassurance that later became the wound.

And some of us can see the machinery moving before the public knows what to call it.

That is the part I need people to understand.

What is happening now is not some sudden new conflict that appeared out of nowhere. It is the same pattern from December 2023, only somehow we are all standing here pretending we have not seen it before.

In December 2023, things got bad enough that a hospital crisis team was involved. Reports were made to DCF and the District Attorney’s Office. Referrals were made for support. A child was evaluated by trained, licensed professionals whose actual job is to assess children in crisis.

They determined she was not coached.

Let me say that again, because family court has a funny little habit of treating mothers like shadowy puppet masters every time a child says something inconvenient. She was evaluated. She was believed. She was determined not to have been coached. And based on that professional evaluation, referrals were made.

Then a judge decided she knew better.

On the spot, sua sponte, I was stripped of physical and legal custody. Not because a crisis team said I was the danger. Not because the child was found to be coached. Not because trained professionals said the concern was fabricated. But because somehow, in that courtroom, the fact that I responded to my child’s crisis became more suspicious than the crisis itself.

Because there was no evidence.

What there was, apparently, was a court-transcribed warning from their father that if the court did not take the children from me immediately, I would drive them off a bridge in a murder-suicide.

What.

The.

Actual.

Fuck.

And since we are airing this piece of dirty laundry, I am going to say what a friend recently reminded me: if the laundry is dirty, wash it.

So let’s wash it.

I was not stripped of custody because of evidence. I was not stripped of custody because a hospital crisis team identified me as the danger. I was not stripped of custody because trained professionals found the child had been coached or the concern had been fabricated.

I was stripped of custody after an outrageous, catastrophic allegation was made in court, and somehow that allegation carried more weight than the professional crisis evaluation that had just taken place.

That is the pattern. The children communicate distress. Professionals get involved. The children are not dismissed as liars. Support is recommended. And then the court somehow manages to turn the entire thing back on me.

And now here we are again.

This spring, the children began refusing to return. Not once. Not casually. Not in some ordinary transition struggle that anyone could reasonably brush off as kids being kids. For weeks, their bodies said no. Their fear said no. Their refusal said no.

He would leave them with me Sunday night. I would drive them back Monday morning. Then it would happen again. And again. And again. Everyone wants to talk about schedules and orders and compliance, as if the children were not using every available form of communication to say that something was very wrong.

Eventually, the distress escalated to a level no parent should ever be expected to hear and then calmly file away as a scheduling issue. So I filed an emergency motion asking for support.

The response was that it was not an emergency.

Apparently, in this system, a child has to be harmed in precisely the correct procedural format before anyone is required to treat the situation as urgent.

So my emergency sat.

Then he filed his.

And his was scheduled.

Of course it was.

And because people ask, yes, I was seeing them.

But I need people to understand what “seeing them” has meant.

I have been supervised for 922 days.

For a period of time, by his agreement, there was no supervision. The children could sleep over. We could have something that resembled normal time together, or at least as close to normal as this situation allows, in small doses.

Then Imogen behaved in a way they did not like, and just like that, it was pulled again. Back to supervisors. Back to being watched. Back to having my relationship with my own children treated like a threat that needed managing.

And no, not paid supervision anymore.

That changed because I rang the alarm bell to anyone who would listen about the absurdity of being forced into paid supervision through the company owned by our guardian ad litem, Patricia Brady, while she continued recommending paid supervision to the court at $95 an hour, which I paid to her. Conflict of interest? Violation of State rule? I digress.

Money kept moving through a system that had every incentive to keep calling me dangerous. Meanwhile, the person actually following me and my children around was a young woman being paid $25 an hour while she also worked another job scooping ice cream.

That is not an insult to her. She was not the architect of this system. But it is an indictment of the system.

Because the court was being told I needed supervision at $95 an hour, and in real life, what that looked like was a young woman trailing me and my children through ordinary moments while the adults with power kept pretending this was child protection.

True story.

This year, I saw them for Mother’s Day. That was the last time he allowed Skylar to see me.

I saw Imogen at a dance competition despite not being given the details, because mothers learn how to find their children in the cracks of systems designed to keep them out. He allowed her to come back to Boston with me. The next morning, she barricaded herself in her room and refused to leave.

Again, I need people to understand what that means. That is not a child being difficult. That is not a child being dramatic. That is not “high conflict.” That is a child communicating distress with the only power she has left.

And this is the point.

Every time something happens again, the cord gets pulled.

The children are stopped from seeing their mother, and the message is obvious: this is what happens when you do not stay silent.

We can dress it up in court language. We can call it orders, concerns, transitions, supervision, parenting time, whatever sanitized vocabulary makes adults feel better. But the practical effect is always the same. The children lose access to their mother right when they are most distressed, most destabilized, and most in need of safe, consistent connection.

And somehow, everyone is supposed to pretend this is stability.

What we actually know is that stability matters for children. Every professional says this. Every child development expert says this. Every person with a functioning nervous system knows this. Stability matters. Safe attachment matters. A child’s relationship with their mother matters.

What we do not know is the thing they keep asking the court to assume.

We do not know that I am secretly creating instability by saying terrible things about their father. We do not know that I am influencing them. We do not know that I am orchestrating their distress from the sidelines like some kind of custody-case supervillain.

What we do know is that I have been supervised for 922 days.

What we do know is that I have had less than five percent of the parenting time in a week.

What we do know is that my time has been watched, restricted, interrupted, reduced, and controlled.

So please explain to me how I am both too dangerous to parent my own children normally and somehow powerful enough, with less than five percent parenting time, to override the daily reality of their lives with their father.

How does that work, exactly?

If he is the stable, safe, wonderful father they keep insisting he is, how does the allegedly unstable mother with scraps of supervised time become the almighty puppeteer?

Five percent parenting time barely allows me to be a parent.

It certainly does not give me magical mind-control powers.

And that is where the story they keep telling starts to fall apart.

Because if children spend the overwhelming majority of their time with one parent, and only a tiny, supervised sliver with the other, and those children are still refusing, resisting, shutting down, escalating, and telling adults they are not okay, Occam’s razor would suggest the simplest answer is not that their mother has somehow hypnotized them through a supervised keyhole.

The simplest answer is that the children see their father for who he is.

And instead of asking what they are seeing, the system keeps punishing them for reacting to it.

Because when I ask for help, I am treated like the problem. When he asks for control, the system finds a calendar opening.

That is the part that makes me feel like I am losing my mind, except I am not losing my mind. I am watching the same machine do the same thing it did before.

It sees children in distress and calls it conflict. It sees a mother trying to respond and calls it interference. It sees professional concern and decides the judge knows better. It sees children refusing to return and asks whether the schedule is being followed.

At some point, we have to stop pretending this is neutral.

There is nothing neutral about a system that treats a protective parent’s alarm as more suspicious than the conditions that caused the alarm in the first place.

There is nothing neutral about a system that takes children seriously only after they have been harmed enough to satisfy the paperwork.

There is nothing neutral about calling it “conflict” when children are shutting down, escalating, refusing to go, barricading themselves, and begging with every available language except the one the court prefers.

Children should not have to become evidence.

They should not have to make themselves impossible to ignore before adults decide to listen.

They should not have to perform crisis in a way the court finds legible.

And they should not have to survive the court’s confidence.

This is what it is to be a mother in Massachusetts, and we need to stop pretending otherwise.

I wish I could tell you I was surprised by what happened. I wasn't. Before I walked into Suffolk Probate and Family Court to file my Affidavit of Indigency, I printed not only the form itself but also the Supreme Judicial Court's published instructions explaining exactly how that form was supposed to be processed. Most people don't do that. Most people assume the court will follow its own procedures. But after years of navigating Family Court, I've learned that assumptions are a luxury you can't afford. You bring statutes. You bring highlighted court instructions. You bring copies of everything because experience has taught you that even when the rules are written down, they are not always applied consistently.

That instinct didn't come from paranoia. It came from experience. This wasn't my first Affidavit of Indigency. A previous affidavit had been denied under circumstances I still struggle to reconcile with the published procedures. Did you know it cannot be denied without a hearing? Apparently my Judge didn't either. So when I walked into the Registry this time, I wasn't trying to be difficult. I was trying to prevent history from repeating itself. When questions arose about my application, I insisted they accept evidence as well. Not because I believed the rules required it, but because I knew exactly what happens when a litigant is later told they failed to provide enough information. Family Court teaches you to over-document everything because you learn very quickly that protecting yourself is your responsibility.

When I asked the Assistant Register for her last name so I could accurately document our interaction, she told me she didn't want to give it because she "didn't want to be involved." I have replayed that sentence in my head more times than I can count. Involved in what, exactly? Processing a public filing? Following the Supreme Judicial Court's published procedures? Being accountable for decisions made while exercising public authority? Public officials perform public duties. Asking who is making decisions that affect your case should never feel controversial. Yet somehow, inside Family Court, moments like this begin to feel almost ordinary.

Then my affidavit sat.

It sat for seventeen days.

Seventeen days while my appeal deadlines continued to run. Seventeen days while transcript funding remained unresolved. Seventeen days during which I could not meaningfully move forward with preparing a motion for a stay pending appeal. Seventeen days that delayed my ability to continue fighting for time with my children. When people talk about court delays, they often describe them as administrative inconveniences. They aren't. Delay changes outcomes. Delay changes leverage. Delay changes what arguments become available to the other side. Most importantly, delay changes families. When children are waiting to see their mother, seventeen days isn't just a number on a calendar. It's seventeen days they don't get back.

By the time I filed my Chapter 211 petition with the Supreme Judicial Court, I wasn't expecting the same problems. In fact, I expected the opposite. The Supreme Judicial Court publishes the procedures governing Affidavits of Indigency. I assumed it would apply its own procedures in the ordinary course. It did.

The irony wasn't lost on me. I expected the Supreme Judicial Court to follow its own published procedures, and it did. I expected Family Court to be different because, after years of navigating that system, experience had taught me to expect friction where there shouldn't be any. Unfortunately, that expectation proved correct.

I filed the same Affidavit of Indigency with both courts. The same applicant. The same financial information. The same Commonwealth. One court processed it. One court held it for seventeen days while my appeal deadlines continued to run.

That's the story. Not that one court approved my affidavit, but that identical paperwork received fundamentally different treatment depending on which courthouse I walked into.

What troubles me most is not that my experience is unique. It's that so many mothers tell versions of the same story. Before they ever step into Family Court, they already expect something to go wrong. Think about what that says about public confidence in one of the most important institutions in our state. Imagine walking into any other government office carrying copies of the agency's own instructions because you no longer trust that the people behind the counter will follow them. Imagine expecting conflict before you've even introduced yourself. Somewhere along the way, that became normal in Family Court, and I don't think it should be.

At 12:22 p.m. on June 29, after more than two weeks without resolution, I emailed the Register Stephanie Everett, Probate and Family Court Administrative Office, and Judge Elizabeth Teixeira’s clerk Amanda Bourgeois asking a simple question: "Is there a resolution before the next step of the SJC filing for compliance?" I emailed everyone involved so there was no mistake and everyone involved was aware of my request.

No one responded by advising me that a determination had been made. No one sent me the approval. The following day, the Register replied to my email but still did not provide the determination or advise that my affidavit had been approved. I first received notice of that approval only when the Attorney General filed an opposition asking the Supreme Judicial Court to dismiss my petition as moot.

That was the first time I became aware that a determination had supposedly been made. If the affidavit had been approved, why wasn't I notified? Why wasn't the determination sent to me? Why was I still emailing the Register on June 29 asking whether there had been "a resolution before the next step of the SJC filing for compliance?" Why did the Judge's own clerk not reply to my email? Why did the Probate and Family Court's Administrative Office not reply? Did they think if they didn't reply I would simply go away? These questions remain unanswered.

People often assume that what breaks litigants in Family Court is losing. I don't think that's quite right. People lose cases every day and still believe they were heard, respected, and treated fairly. What wears people down is something much harder to describe. It's the feeling that the rules don't operate consistently. That my ex-husband's emergency is heard the day after tomorrow while mine for the same issue was scheduled over a month away. His motion moves quickly while mine disappear into silence (case in point, a Judgment was issued while we still await pending orders for over a year). That one affidavit is processed immediately while another sits for seventeen days with no explanation. It's not any one event by itself. It's the accumulation of those experiences until you stop expecting the process to work the way it's written. At least not for you.

My Chapter 211 petition is now pending before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, docket SJ-2026-0272. The filings are public, and so is the story they tell. The Court will decide the legal questions before it. I hope it also recognizes what this case represents beyond my individual circumstances.

Because this was never just about one Affidavit of Indigency.

It was about a system that tells families they have equal access to justice while too many leave feeling they experienced something entirely different.

It was about discovering that identical paperwork can receive entirely different treatment depending on the courthouse where it’s filed.

It was about learning that delays don’t just consume time; they consume opportunities, appellate rights, and precious days families never get back.

And it was about asking a question that every Massachusetts resident should care about:

If the Supreme Judicial Court can process the very same affidavit on its face, why couldn’t the Family Court?

I’ll continue publishing every public filing, every decision, and every development in this case because transparency is one of the few tools ordinary people have when institutions stop explaining themselves. If the public is expected to trust the Family Court, then the Family Court should be willing to withstand public scrutiny.

Real confidence in our courts is not built by asking people to stop asking questions.

It is built by answering them.

I did not have the life experience to understand all of it. I was thirteen. I could not possibly comprehend the full weight of what the show was carrying: AIDS, addiction, death, poverty, chosen family, queer love, art, illness, survival, grief, dignity, and the desperation of young people trying to make their lives mean something while the clock was already ticking.

But I felt it. I felt it in my body before I understood it in my mind.

And then the songs stayed with me.

From thirteen to forty one, they followed me in and out of different versions of myself. Through high school. Through heartbreak. Through motherhood. Through survival. Through the kind of pain that makes you realize your younger self was not being dramatic at all. She was picking up on something.

For years, Rent lived in me the way certain things live in you when you are young and dramatic and secretly hoping the world will turn out bigger than the one you are standing in. I sang the songs alone. I imagined myself inside them. I thought about who I would be if I were brave enough, wounded enough, beautiful enough, alive enough.

I did not understand everything the musical was about. I was thirteen. But I understood wanting life to feel urgent. I understood wanting to be chosen, noticed, wanted, remembered. I understood being drawn to people who seemed broken and luminous at the same time. I understood the idea of a room full of outsiders becoming a family because the outside world had failed them.

I loved Mimi. Of course I loved Mimi.

Mimi was desire and aliveness. Mimi was glitter on a bruise. Mimi was the part of me that wanted to be impossible to ignore.

In high school, when part of my hair was dyed, classmates asked me why. I told them it was a color test because I was auditioning for a local production of Rent. They asked if I was auditioning for Mimi, and I remember the butterflies in my stomach because yes, obviously, I wanted to be Mimi.

But the truth is, I think I was always Roger too.

And that part confused me.

I could understand why I loved Mimi. That made sense. Mimi was alive in a way that felt aspirational. She was magnetic, wounded, funny, and bright. She wanted to live even when she was being swallowed by things that could kill her.

Roger was harder to explain.

Roger was shut down. Guarded. Angry. Afraid. He had survived something, but not in the triumphant way people like to imagine survival. He was alive, technically, but some essential part of him seemed locked behind a door he could not open.

And somehow, even as a teenager, I recognized him.

I recognized the isolation. I recognized the hopelessness. I recognized the feeling of having something inside you turn off and wondering whether it would ever turn back on.

Back then, I did not know why I knew that feeling.

Now I do.

Having my children taken from me has made me understand Roger in a way I never wanted to understand anyone.

There is a particular kind of grief that does not simply make you sad. It shuts off the lights. It disconnects you from ordinary life. People talk about plans, errands, weather, dinner, birthdays, weekend activities, and you are standing there like a person who has been exiled from the human world.

You are alive, but something in you is not participating.

You move through the day. You answer emails. You go to court. You pick up the phone. You write. You fight. You try to sleep. You wake up and remember.

Every morning there is that moment before memory returns. That tiny mercy before the truth comes rushing back in. Then you remember where your children are. You remember what has been taken. You remember that there is another day ahead and you are expected to survive it.

Another day.

Another chance, people say.

But another day can feel less like a chance and more like a sentence when your children are not with you.

That is the part of Rent I did not understand at thirteen. I thought “no day but today” meant freedom. I thought it meant romance and rebellion and dancing on figurative tables and choosing connection because life is short.

And sometimes it does mean that.

But sometimes “no day but today” is not a philosophy. Sometimes it is all your nervous system can manage. Sometimes there is no day but today because tomorrow is too unbearable to imagine.

Sometimes living in the moment is not enlightenment. It is trauma.

It is the mind saying, do not look too far ahead. Do not calculate how many birthdays you have lost. Do not count the mornings. Do not count the school events. Do not count the holidays. Do not think about the years.

Just get through today. Just breathe through today. Just do not disappear today.

That is not the carefree version of no day but today. That is the custody war version. That is the mother without her children version. That is the version where survival is not beautiful. It is brutal.

There is a short song in Rent that asks whether dignity will survive the nightmare, whether anyone will care, whether morning will come. I know that song was written in the context of AIDS. I know the grief of that story is specific, historic, and sacred. I am not trying to take that away or flatten it into something else.

But art becomes part of us because it gives us language that keeps changing as we change.

At thirteen, I heard that question as theatre.

At forty one, I hear it as my life.

Will I lose my dignity? Will anyone care? Will I wake tomorrow from this nightmare?

That is the question of family court trauma too. Not because the circumstances are the same, but because institutional abandonment has a sound. Public suffering has a sound. Being disbelieved while something is killing parts of you has a sound.

Mothers in custody wars know that sound.

We know what it is to be treated as inconvenient evidence of someone else’s cruelty. We know what it is to have our pain pathologized. We know what it is to be told that speaking means we are unstable and silence means we have accepted it. We know what it is to live inside a night other people keep insisting is morning.

Dignity becomes one of the things you fight to keep.

Not the polished kind of dignity. Not the respectable kind that never cries too loudly, posts too much, or makes anyone uncomfortable. I mean real dignity. The dignity of refusing to lie. The dignity of continuing to love your children in public when people would prefer you mourn them privately. The dignity of saying, this happened. The dignity of saying, this is still happening. The dignity of saying, you do not get to take my children and then also take my voice.

Maybe that is why I always understood Roger.

Maybe I recognized the ache of being alive after devastation. Maybe I recognized someone who had been told to keep going when the part of him that knew how to keep going was gone. Maybe I recognized the terror of hope.

Because that is another thing people do not understand. When you are living through custody loss, hope is not always comforting.

Hope can be violent.

Hope makes you imagine an end. Hope makes you picture your children coming home. Hope makes you think maybe this motion, this hearing, this report, this piece of evidence, this witness, this truth will finally matter.

And then hope drops you from a height.

So you learn to protect yourself from it. You become guarded. You become angry. You become practical. You become the person who says, just let me be, because being reached for hurts when everything you love has already been ripped from your hands.

That is Roger too.

And still, underneath all of that, there is the song he cannot write. The thing he wants to leave behind. The proof that he was here. That he loved. That he mattered. That the suffering did not swallow every trace of him.

I think that is part of why I write.

I think I am trying to make something out of the wreckage. Not because writing fixes it. It does not. Not because advocacy gives back the lost years. It does not.

But because silence would mean the story belongs only to the people who harmed us.

And I cannot accept that.

I cannot accept my children growing up inside a version of events where their mother simply vanished, or became a cautionary tale, or was reduced to a diagnosis other people invented because it was easier than facing what was done.

I cannot accept a world where mothers are expected to lose everything quietly.

So I write.

For dignity. For memory. For evidence. For the mothers who know this nightmare. For the children who may one day need to know we did not stop loving them.

For the part of me that is still Mimi, still hungry for life, still refusing to be erased.

And for the part of me that is Roger, sitting alone with the guitar, trying to make one song out of grief before the lights go out.

I saw Rent when I was thirteen years old. I thought it taught me how to live in spite of pain and suffering.

Maybe it did.

But now, at forty one, I think it also taught me something else. It taught me how to recognize the sound of people fighting to stay human inside systems that had already decided they were disposable.

And maybe that is why it stayed.

Because somewhere in me, long before I had the words for custody trauma, coercive control, family court, institutional betrayal, or children being taken from a loving mother, I understood the question.

Will anyone care?

Will I wake tomorrow from this nightmare?

And every day, somehow, I am still trying to answer.

It is not simply that people make accusations. Human beings have always accused one another. Sometimes accusations are true. Sometimes they are exaggerated. Sometimes they are misunderstood. Sometimes they are completely false. Courts exist, at least in theory, because truth can be difficult to untangle.

What I cannot reconcile is something deeper.

It is the expectation that once those accusations enter family court, the mother on the receiving end is supposed to quietly absorb them, accept whatever happens next, and then disappear.

Somewhere along the way, we decided that speaking publicly about your experience in family court is somehow more offensive than the accusations that brought you there in the first place.

I have never understood that.

If a company harms consumers, people leave reviews. They file complaints. They contact the Better Business Bureau. The BBB describes part of its work as helping consumers through business profiles, customer reviews, complaint resolution, and alerts when risks emerge. It exists because public accountability matters when private resolution fails.

If a hospital fails a patient, families become advocates.

If a government agency ignores corruption, citizens organize.

If police fail to solve a crime, communities turn to journalists, social media, and public pressure.

We have seen cases where ordinary people online helped surface evidence that mattered. In the Gabby Petito case, social media attention became part of the story, and a YouTube couple’s footage of Petito’s van helped investigators narrow the search area before her body was found.

We do not automatically call those people bitter.

We do not automatically accuse them of being unable to move on.

We recognize something very simple.

Advocacy is often what happens after institutions fail, so why is family court different? Why is it that the person making extraordinary accusations inside a courtroom is protected by the process, but the mother trying to explain what happened to her children is told that she is the problem? Why is silence expected only from the parent who lost the most?

I have thought about that question more times than I can count because I have spent years listening to narratives about myself that bear so little resemblance to reality that, outside of family court, they would collapse under the weight of their own contradictions.

Think about this for a moment.

Imagine a man tells a court that a woman is such a severe alcoholic that she cannot get out of bed in the morning to take her child to school because she is still drunk from the night before.

Now imagine that same woman is training for and completing the Boston Marathon, one of the most physically demanding endurance events in the world.

Now imagine that his girlfriend donated to her Boston Marathon fundraising campaign, which had direct evidence that she was not, in fact, a liver failing, bedbound alcoholic who could not function in the morning.

Would you stop and ask whether those two stories could possibly exist at the same time?

Would you ask how a person supposedly too drunk to take a child to school is also disciplined enough to train for a marathon?

Would you ask whether the story makes sense? Or would you simply accept whichever version lets you keep believing what you need to believe.

Family court often feels like a place where those questions are never asked. Instead, allegations accumulate. One becomes two. Two become five. Five become ten. The burden quietly shifts from proving accusations to surviving them. And when one allegation loses traction, another appears.

First the story is that the children are dirty, unfed, neglected, smelly, and wearing clothes with holes.

Then the story is that their mother spends too much money on them, buys them too many things, takes them on vacations, takes them to pool clubs, and gives them too much.

Which is it?

Are they deprived or spoiled?

Are they neglected or overindulged?

Are they abandoned or obsessively cared for?

At some point, the contradiction is not a detail. It is the story. When someone can claim mutually exclusive versions of reality, and the system keeps treating each new version as equally plausible, the process itself becomes the weapon. This is how coercive control often works after separation. It is not always one enormous lie. Sometimes it is a rotating machine of accusations, emergencies, reversals, insinuations, and official sounding claims that force the other person to spend every waking hour defending herself. Researchers on post separation abuse describe tactics that attack a woman’s autonomy, resources, and connections to other people.

You are not allowed to be quiet because the allegations are being used against you.

You are not allowed to speak because speaking is used against you.

You are expected to defend yourself privately against public consequences.

And if you finally say, “No, this is what happened,” suddenly the problem is not the accusations.

The problem is your refusal to disappear politely under them.

It is not simply one person saying, “That did not happen,” but a whole ecosystem teaching a mother that the evidence of her own life, the cries of her own children, and the contradictions in the official story are less important than maintaining the appearance that the system knows what it is doing.

I need people to understand something.

A gag order is not just a legal concept when you are a mother in family court. It becomes a culture. Do not say too much. Do not name too much. Do not look too angry. Do not post. Do not explain. Do not make people uncomfortable. Do not let the neighbors know. Do not let other mothers know. Do not let the public see how this works. And then, when the mother obeys all of that silence, the record becomes the only story.

If the record is wrong, too bad.

If the report omits context, too bad.

If a child is crying, too bad.

If the person who created the emergency is now claiming the emergency proves the mother is dangerous, too bad.

If the mother finally speaks, that becomes the new evidence against her.

This is the part that people outside family court often do not understand.

A mother can be accused of traumatizing her child by taking her to…

…a place she only went because of a police intervention he called for.

A mother can be accused of causing distress because the child cried during an event the other parent set in motion.

A mother can be blamed for the child’s terror while the person holding power over the child’s access to her stands just off camera, whispering, watching, managing the narrative.

Then, if the child records what happened or describes what happened or begs not to go, the mother is blamed again, not because the facts make sense but because blaming her is the organizing principle. This isn't confusing and there is no mix-up here: this is control. And children pay the price. For decades, child development research has told us that children form deep attachment relationships with primary caregivers. Attachment research has been studied for roughly half a century, including the work of John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, and many others who followed them.

The Society for Research in Child Development put it plainly: “The science is clear.” Its evidence statement says that separating children from parents, except where there is evidence of maltreatment, is harmful to children’s development. The same statement says parent child separation has long term effects on child well being, even after reunification. It also explains that separated and reunited children can struggle with emotional attachment, self esteem, and physical and psychological health.

Let that sit for a moment.

Even reunification does not magically erase the wound.

Children do not experience the loss of a loving primary caregiver as a scheduling change. They experience it in their bodies and their nervous systems. In their sleep. In their anxiety. In their school lives. In the way they learn whether love is stable or whether the person they depend on can be removed without explanation.

The SRCD statement also describes parental separation as a toxic stressor and explains that children rely on primary caretakers to navigate stressful and traumatic events. Access to a primary caretaker can reduce children’s physiological stress responses.

So I keep coming back to the same question.

Even if someone believed every accusation ever made about me, how does anyone justify ignoring what decades of child development research tells us about the harm of unnecessarily separating children from a loving primary parent? How does that become the solution How is the alleged harm weighed against the documented harm? How is it child protection to remove a child from the person they are crying for, begging for, and visibly attached to, while adults in the room pretend not to hear it? And how does anyone who claims to care about children professionally live inside a home where those basic facts are ignored?

How do you work around children and then stand close enough to hear children begging for their mother and still participate in the story that the mother is the problem? How do you hear children cry and then call the mother unwell for telling the truth about it? How do you watch a father make one outlandish claim after another and never stop to ask whether the claims can all exist in the same universe?

Was I a neglectful mother whose children were dirty, unfed, smelly, and uncared for?

Or was I the excessive mother buying too much, doing too much, taking them too many places, giving them too much?

Was I the alcoholic who could not get out of bed in the morning?

Or was I the marathon runner disciplined enough to train for Boston to which you donated money?

Was I so dangerous that my children had to be protected from me?

Or was I so central to their safety that their distress at being kept from me was obvious to anyone willing to look?

You cannot keep choosing whichever version makes the current cruelty feel justified.

At some point, you are not believing facts, you are choosing a side. When the side you choose requires you to ignore crying children, contradictory accusations, and the basic science of attachment causing lifelong harm, you are not neutral. You are participating.

That may be difficult to hear, but it is true. Complicity is not always loud, sometimes it whispers with the father in the background of a Zoom call within earshot. Sometimes it waits until a child goes to the bathroom and tells the child’s friend that the child’s mother is unwell, needs help, and is a bad person.

Sometimes it dresses itself up as concern. But what is that really doing?

It is not protecting a child. It is controlling the child’s access to information. It is shaping the child’s perception of her own mother. It is teaching the child that her mother’s voice is dangerous, but the accusations against her mother are not. That is narrative management.

And I want to be very clear about this.

If a mother publicly repeats the accusations being made against her, and the people making those accusations are embarrassed by their own words being seen in daylight, the problem is not the mother’s transparency. The problem is the accusation.

If you are comfortable saying it in court, why are you uncomfortable with people knowing you said it?

If you are comfortable filing it, arguing it, building a custody case around it, why does it become “crazy” when the mother names it publicly?

If it is true, why fear scrutiny?

And if it is not true, why are children living with the consequences?

This is where family court silence becomes so dangerous.

It protects the appearance of order while disorder is happening behind closed doors.

It protects professionals from accountability.

It protects bad reports from challenge.

It protects contradictions from public examination.

It protects powerful narratives from being tested by ordinary common sense.

And it leaves mothers alone with the impossible task of proving reality in a room where reality keeps moving.

Research on custody cases has raised serious concerns about what happens when abuse allegations and alienation claims collide. Joan Meier’s work on U.S. custody outcomes found that fathers’ cross claims of parental alienation were associated with courts rejecting mothers’ abuse claims at higher rates and with mothers losing custody to fathers accused of abuse. We are not making this up, it is published on our government's own website. That's right, mine and your government. The Department of Justice ordered, funded, and published George Washington University's national study which concluded the same pattern many mothers recognize immediately and I am living as a statistic.

I know, I know. Mothers who talk about this are all “crazy.” It is much easier to call us unwell than to ask why so many of us are describing the same pattern.

But here is George Wasgington University.

And here is Forbes saying it too.

So at some point, maybe the question is not why mothers keep speaking but maybe the question is why everyone is so dedicated to ignoring it?

A mother raises concern. The concern is reframed as alienation. The mother’s distress is reframed as instability. The child’s fear is reframed as coaching. The father’s control is reframed as protective parenting. The mother’s advocacy is reframed as obsession. The original issue disappears, replaced by DARVO in a courtroom suit. Deny the harm and attack the person naming it. Reverse victim and offender until the mother is defending herself against the consequences of what was done to her and to her children and then, when she speaks, call her unstable.

No.

A mother speaking after institutional failure is not automatically unstable.

A mother documenting contradictions is not automatically bitter.

A mother refusing to let the public record be the only record is not automatically vindictive.

Sometimes she is doing the only thing left.

Sometimes advocacy is what survival looks like when every official door has closed. People ask why mothers speak publicly but I think the better question is this:

If your children were being harmed and nothing was stopping it, what would you do? Would you quietly accept it because a judge signed an order? Would you stop asking questions because someone might call you difficult? Would you stay silent because people prefer mothers who suffer privately? Would you let your children believe you abandoned them because the truth made adults uncomfortable?

Or would you speak? Would you educate? Would you connect with others? Would you try to make sure another family does not have to learn the same lessons in the same brutal way? That is not revenge, is advocacy. It is what happens when a mother understands that shame is part of the cage. And I reject the cage.

I reject the idea that mothers should be publicly accused in private systems and then privately destroyed by public consequences.

I reject the idea that children crying for their mother is less important than adults preserving their chosen narrative.

I reject the idea that the person naming harm is more dangerous than the person causing it.

I reject the idea that silence is maturity when silence protects abuse, neglect, coercion, or institutional failure.

And I reject the idea that family court should be the one place in public life where transparency is treated as the crime and harm is treated as a confidential inconvenience.

It may be too late to give my children back the years they have already lost, that is a grief I carry the weight of every second of every day, but it is not too late to ask why this keeps happening. It is not too late to ask who benefits when mothers are silent. It is not too late to ask why contradictory accusations can be used to separate children from loving parents. It is not too late to ask why the known harm of separation is treated as less urgent than disputed allegations.

It is not too late to ask why the public is allowed to demand accountability from businesses, hospitals, police departments, schools, and governments, but mothers in family court are told that speaking about their own children’s suffering makes them the problem. And it is not too late to say this plainly:

When a system fails children, silence is not virtue.

Silence is surrender.

And mothers have surrendered enough.

That is not how political articles usually begin. They usually start with dates, districts, endorsements, credentials, committee names, filing deadlines, and campaign language polished until all the blood is gone.

But this did not begin as politics for me.

It began as betrayal.

It began with family court. It began with children. It began with mothers trying to understand how a system could take the language of safety, best interests, trauma, and child wellbeing, then turn that language against the very people begging the court to protect their children.

My journey through family court led me somewhere I never expected to go. It led me to the Massachusetts Governor’s Council.

Most people have no idea what the Governor’s Council is. I did not. Not really. Not until I had to. Not until I began to understand that judges do not simply appear on the bench. In Massachusetts, the Governor nominates judges, and the Governor’s Council provides advice and consent on judicial appointments, pardons, commutations, and other matters. The Council approves judicial appointments. These are the people who vote on who gets the power to decide where children sleep, who mothers are allowed to see, which evidence matters, and whose fear gets translated into “conflict.” The Massachusetts Constitution created a council to advise the governor in the executive part of government, and the modern Council’s role in judicial confirmations remains one of its most consequential powers.

That matters because Massachusetts judges are not elected. They are appointed. Since 1780, Massachusetts judges have been appointed by the governor with the advice and consent of the Executive Council, also known as the Governor’s Council, and state judges now serve until mandatory retirement at age 70.

So when people say judicial appointments matter, that is an understatement

Judicial appointments shape the lives of families for decades. They decide who gets believed. They decide what gets called abuse. They decide what gets called conflict. They decide whether a mother is treated as protective or pathological. They decide whether a child’s fear is treated as information or as evidence of alienation.

Once I understood, I became determined to learn everything I could.

There were names that came up again and again. Patrick McCabe. Marilyn Devaney. The Governor’s Council. The people who show up. The people who apply pressure. The people who understand that if you care about what happens in courtrooms, you cannot ignore the rooms where judges are confirmed.

Boston Magazine had already written about the political force of men’s rights and fathers’ rights groups in Massachusetts, including their focus on judges, courts, and the political machinery surrounding family law. That article mattered to me because it showed that other people had understood something I was only beginning to learn: family court power does not begin at the hearing. It begins long before, in the places where judicial candidates are vetted, questioned, supported, and confirmed.

I started showing up.

I went to events to learn about judicial appointments. I asked questions directly. I wanted to understand the process because I had learned the hard way that mothers and children cannot afford to ignore it.

Then came Mara Dolan.

Mara met with members of the Mass Family Advocacy Coalition. She listened. She wrote personal emails. She seemed to care. Many of us believed her. Many of us supported her because she seemed to understand what family court was doing to women and children.

We advocated for residents to vote for her. We educated people about the Governor’s Council. We explained why this obscure office mattered. We told people that judicial appointments shape whether survivors are protected or punished.

And she won.

She defeated Marilyn Devaney. For many advocates, that felt like proof that showing up mattered. That survivors could organize. That mothers could educate voters. That maybe, just maybe, people who had been harmed by family court could help change the pipeline that feeds it.

And then something really bad happened.

A Probate and Family Court nomination came forward that many family court and domestic violence advocates believed deserved serious scrutiny. I wrote about it at the time because the nomination was not, to me, routine. It raised questions about high-conflict custody systems, AFCC influence, court-ordered programs, family court professionals, and the frameworks used to repackage abuse as conflict. My concern was not simply one person. It was the ecosystem. It was the pipeline. It was the way certain ideas become normalized, then taught, then ordered, then enforced.

Advocates wrote letters. We commented on social media. We raised concerns. Some councilors listened. Some appeared to understand that survivors were not objecting because they were “radical.” They were objecting because they had lived inside systems that often punish disclosure and reward silence.

But Mara Dolan voted yes.

That vote landed hard because it did not feel like an ordinary political disagreement. It felt personal. Survivors had shared stories they did not owe anyone. They had explained the stakes. They had supported a candidate because they believed she understood what family court was doing to women and children. Then, when the confirmation vote came, many felt that the system had absorbed their pain and moved forward anyway.

MassLive reporter Heather Morrison later covered the backlash from domestic violence survivors who said Dolan had betrayed them. That reporting mattered because it moved the story out of private advocate circles and into the public record. Survivors were not simply upset about one political vote. They were describing a deeper rupture: the feeling that they had been invited to share their experiences of family court harm, believed they had been heard, and then watched those concerns set aside when it mattered.

The MassLive reporting also matters because it puts words and facts around something advocates had been watching closely: the people who show up around judicial nominations and the access those people appear to have. Attorney Marty Kane was not, to advocates, simply another person in the room. He was a familiar figure in family court circles, and MassLive reported on campaign donations he made to Governor’s Council members over time. Advocates also noted his visible role when Mary Ferriter appeared before the Council. When many nominees bring family, mentors, or ordinary personal supporters, Ferriter’s appearance with Kane stood out to survivors watching the process. To people outside this world, that may sound like a minor detail. To people who have lived inside family court, it looked like a signal of proximity, familiarity, and influence within the very process that decides who becomes a judge.

No single donation or appearance tells the whole story. That is not the point. The point is that access matters. Patterns matter. Who gets treated as credible before they speak matters. Who knows how to move through these rooms matters. Who can accompany a nominee through the process matters. Who has relationships with councilors matters. Who survivors write to, and who councilors actually listen to, matters.

For protective mothers and domestic violence survivors, the contrast was impossible to miss. Mothers arrive with pain, documentation, court orders, medical records, police reports, and children’s disclosures, and they are often treated as emotional, biased, or radical. Court-connected professionals arrive with titles, networks, donations, and institutional familiarity, and they are treated as neutral.

That is the imbalance.

That is why the Ferriter nomination felt bigger than one vote. It felt like a lesson. Survivors could tell their stories, but professional networks still had the room. Mothers could write letters, but insiders still understood the process. Advocates could warn about harm, but the machinery could still call the nomination routine and move forward.

There are moments in advocacy when the betrayal is not only the vote. It is realizing that your pain was welcome when it was useful, but inconvenient when it demanded action. It is realizing that you can be invited into the room, heard with sympathy, and still be outmatched by the networks that already know how power works.

That is when the room changes.

That is when you stop believing that access is the same thing as power.

That is when someone has to say: no more.

Margie Palladino said no more.

Margie is not new to this work. She is the Executive Director of the Mass Family Advocacy Coalition, a grassroots organization whose mission is to support women and children by promoting a family court system that is efficient, accessible, fair, safe, and uniform. MFAC describes itself as founded by women whose own experiences with Massachusetts family court revealed systemic shortfalls, unpredictability, expense, delay, and barriers to justice.

Margie had already been doing the work long before this campaign. She had been meeting with survivors, organizing testimony, educating the public, and pushing for family court reform in a state where most voters still do not understand how much power the Governor’s Council has over the judiciary.

So when Margie entered the race, it did not feel like a standard political announcement.

It felt like a response.

It felt like an answer to the message survivors had just received: that they could show up, speak, write, organize, educate, warn, and still be ignored when the vote mattered. Margie’s campaign said something different. It said that if the existing Council would not carry survivors’ concerns into confirmation votes, then survivors and advocates would work to put someone in the seat who understood those concerns before the hearing began.

But getting on the ballot is not symbolic. It is work.

It takes signatures. Real signatures from qualified voters. It takes clipboards, sidewalks, parking lots, folding tables, conversations with strangers, and people willing to stand outside stores explaining an office most voters have never heard of.

We had only a short window to gather more than a thousand qualified voter signatures.

So we showed up.

Amid my own grief, I showed up. I stood outside Home Depot. I stood outside Target. I attended protests in Wellesley. I talked to voters. I explained who Margie was. I explained what the Governor’s Council does. I explained why judicial nominations matter. I explained that if you care about family court, you have to care about who confirms the judges.

I watched other advocates show up too. Mothers. Survivors. Women who had lost years. Women who had lost homes. Women who had lost custody. Women who had been told their children’s fear was alienation. Women who had learned, brutally, that family court is not an abstract civic institution. It is a place where your life can be rewritten by people who never understood it.

To some of us, getting Margie on the ballot felt bigger than signatures. It felt like one small way to answer the harm. Not to undo it. Not to erase it. But to answer it. The appointment that broke so many survivors’ trust had made people feel like nothing we did mattered. Letters did not matter. Testimony did not matter. Lived experience did not matter. Research did not matter. Survivors did not matter.

Then came a clipboard.

Then came a voter.

Then came another.

Then came the possibility that betrayal did not have to be the end of the story.

That is what people outside movements often misunderstand. They think political action is always strategic, always polished, always planned in conference rooms by people wearing name tags. Sometimes political action is grief with sneakers on. Sometimes it is a mother standing outside a store with a clipboard because she cannot make the system give her back the years it stole, but she can help put someone on the ballot who may keep another family from being destroyed the same way.

Sometimes it is not hope exactly.

Sometimes it is refusal.

Refusal to disappear. Refusal to be used. Refusal to let survivors be invited in for campaign season and dismissed in confirmation season. Refusal to let judicial appointments remain the quiet back room of family court harm.

This is why Margie Palladino’s campaign matters.

Not because one person can fix family court alone. She cannot. No one can. But one person on the Governor’s Council can ask better questions. One person can refuse to rubber-stamp nominees. One person can insist that trauma-informed understanding is not a campaign slogan. One person can demand transparency when judicial candidates come from professional ecosystems that survivors say have harmed families. One person can remember the mothers who wrote. One person can remember the survivors who testified. One person can remember that every judicial appointment eventually becomes someone’s custody order, someone’s restraining order hearing, someone’s supervised visitation order, someone’s appeal, someone’s childhood.

The Governor’s Council is obscure by design or by neglect. Either way, obscurity benefits power. When people do not know who confirms judges, they do not know where to apply pressure. When people do not know councilors are elected, they do not know they can vote them out. When people do not know what questions nominees are being asked, they do not know what questions are being avoided.

When ordinary people do not show up, the professional networks show up instead.

That is how systems reproduce themselves. Quietly. Politely. Procedurally. Then a mother loses custody and wonders how a stranger in a robe got so much power over her children. A survivor watches an abuser framed as an equal co-parent. A child’s fear gets called resistance. Everyone shrugs and says, “That’s just how family court works.”

No.

That is how family court keeps working when no one interrupts it.

Margie Palladino is interrupting it.

And those of us who gathered signatures were not just helping a candidate. We were pushing back against the idea that survivors should be grateful for being heard, even when their warnings are ignored. We were saying that listening is not enough. Votes matter. Appointments matter. Records matter. Questions matter. Who sits on the bench matters. Who confirms them matters. And who is willing to stand with women and children after the campaign photos are over matters most of all.

Something really bad happened.

But something else happened too.

We learned where the power was. We learned how the process worked. We learned that the Governor’s Council is not irrelevant to ordinary people. It is one of the places where the future of family court is shaped.

And then Margie ran.

So yes, I am going to talk about the Governor’s Council. I am going to talk about judicial appointments. I am going to talk about family court. I am going to talk about the survivors who were promised care and then felt betrayed. I am going to talk about the mothers who stood outside stores with clipboards because they know what happens when the wrong people get lifetime power over families.

And I am going to talk about Margie Palladino because this is what advocacy looks like when betrayal becomes action. Not silence. Not defeat. Not polite disappointment. Action. The kind that gets cold hands and sore feet. The kind that asks strangers if they are registered voters. The kind that explains, again and again, that judges do not appoint themselves. The kind that says children’s safety should matter before the confirmation vote, not after. The kind that says survivors are not props. The kind that says if you betray the movement, the movement may just run someone against you.

Something really bad happened.

Now we do something about it.

All registered Democrats (Margie is a lifelong Democrat) and Unenrolled voters (often called Independent voters) in these District 3 communities can vote for Margie Palladino for Governor’s Councillor on September 1:

Acton, Arlington, Ayer, Bedford, Belmont, Billerica, Allston-Brighton area of Boston, Boxborough, Brookline, Burlington, Cambridge, West Cambridge section of Cambridge, Carlisle, Chelmsford, Concord, Harvard, Hudson, Lexington, Lincoln, Littleton, Marlborough, Maynard, Newton, Southborough, Stow, Sudbury, Waltham, Watertown, Wayland, Wellesley, Weston, Woburn

It is not peace. It is not closure. It is not the clean ending people imagine when they hear the word “judgment.” It is the silence after years of screaming into systems that record everything and understand nothing. It is the silence of paper arriving after a process that has already taken your children, your time, your health, your sleep, your name, your reputation, your ordinary life, and still somehow expects you to stand there politely while it explains what happened to you.

A judgment is supposed to be an answer.

In family court, sometimes it feels more like a branding.

Nathaniel Hawthorne gave us Hester Prynne and the scarlet letter. The red “A” stitched onto her chest was meant to make her shame public. It told the town what to think of her before she ever opened her mouth. It reduced a woman to one accusation, one label, one story that powerful people decided would define her.

Family court has its own scarlet letter.

Only this one does not stand for adultery.

It stands for alienation.

Once that word is placed on a mother, it becomes nearly impossible to remove. It sticks like tar. Like smoke in fabric. Like a stain no amount of truth can wash out because the system has already decided the stain is the truth.

Alienation becomes the explanation for everything.

Your children prefer the parent who loved them consistently from birth? Alienation.

Your children feel safe with the mother who packed the lunches, scheduled the appointments, knew the stuffed animals, held the fevers, remembered the fears, and built the daily life? Alienation.

Your child says something hurts, scares them, or makes them uncomfortable? Alienation.

Your child cries before transitions? Alienation.

Your child refuses? Alienation.

Your child discloses? Alienation.

Your child deteriorates? Alienation.

Your child says they want to die? Somehow, still, alienation.

The word is not just a label. It is a cage. Once it is placed around you, every movement becomes suspicious. If you comfort your child, you are reinforcing resistance. If you report what your child says, you are coaching. If you document, you are obsessive. If you panic, you are unstable. If you stay calm, you are cold. If you fight, you are high conflict. If you stop fighting, you abandoned them.

That is the brilliance and cruelty of the scarlet A.

It does not have to prove you harmed your children. It only has to make your love look dangerous.

My story has been especially difficult lately. As my children get older, they face new challenges, and so do I. The fight changes shape. It becomes less about proving that something happened and more about surviving what happens when everyone knows enough to act and still does not. It becomes a fight for reconnection, for truth, for a future in which my children and I are allowed to be together again without our bond being treated like a crime scene.

Recently, I filed an emergency motion. Mother’s emergency motion. Not an emergency, apparently. It would be held two months later.

Then, for the sake of argument, let us say the circumstances worsened. Let us say Father filed his own version of the same issue. That emergency was treated as an emergency.

And then, after what can only be described as a legal kerfuffle, came the judgment.

A judgment after a process spanning more than three years. A process that began, in many ways, when my previous judge retired and a new judge was assigned to our case. Everything changed after that.

Or maybe it did not change all at once. Maybe it was more like a bad dream you cannot wake from. One hearing, then another, then another. Each one leaving me more nervous, more disoriented, more aware that I was on a ride I could not get off. A roller coaster. A merry-go-round. Something moving too fast and in circles at the same time, headed somewhere I could feel but could not yet name.

People who watched pieces of it were confused. Supporters would see hearings and describe them as something close to Judge Judy, only full of judgment and without the comedy. They could not understand how the same patterns kept repeating. They would ask, every so often, “Is it still the same judge?”

Yes.

Still the same judge.

Still the same feeling that nothing I said mattered in the way it should.

Then came the comments. The threats. The coercion. And that word I had never heard before all of this.

Alienation.

It arrived like a verdict before the verdict. It explained away my children’s attachment to me. It explained away their distress. It explained away their words. It explained away the parts of our family story that did not serve the preferred narrative.

A trial was scheduled for May 2024. But when the unimaginable happened and custody was reversed on January 4, 2024, everything changed. Now, I say everything changed, but maybe that is not quite right. Maybe what changed was not the system. Maybe what changed was that I finally saw it clearly.

I saw how quickly a mother can go from primary caregiver to suspect. I saw how the ordinary intimacy of mothering can be reframed as pathology. I saw how a child’s preference for the parent who has been loving, consistent, and emotionally available can be treated not as attachment, but as evidence. I saw how the accusation of alienation can become the system’s favorite shortcut.

It is easier than asking why children are afraid.

It is easier than investigating harm.

It is easier than admitting the court may have empowered the wrong person.

It is easier than admitting a child might be telling the truth.

For more than two years, I have been fighting for something a mother could never abandon: my own children. In all the lies, all the false statements, all the false filings, there was one thing Father said that was true.

“She will never stop.”

He was right.

I will never stop.

I will never stop fighting for my children. I will never stop fighting for what is right. I will never stop fighting for the truth, for justice, for what happened to us, and for the lives we lost that we will never get back. I cannot restore the years that were stolen. I cannot rewind my children’s childhoods. I cannot unlive the court orders, the missed birthdays, the school events, the ordinary days, the nights I should have been tucking them in.

But I can keep fighting so that someday we have the chance to build a new path. One we choose. One that is not stolen from us. One that is not dictated by a system that mistook control for stability and silence for peace.

Receiving a judgment is hard to describe because the word itself is loaded. Judgment. It sounds final. It sounds moral. It sounds like someone weighed the facts and reached the truth.

But what is a judgment when the process itself was broken?

What is a judgment after a trial where witnesses were denied?

What is a judgment when evidence could not be fully tested?

What is a judgment when the system being relied upon is the same system being publicly criticized across the country, in legislative advocacy, investigative reporting, documentaries, survivor accounts, and federal conversations about family court failure?

What does “judgment” mean when the scarlet letter was already sewn onto your chest before you entered the room?

Family court is being challenged everywhere now. Locally. Federally. Nationally. In journalism. In documentaries. In survivor movements. In advocacy spaces. In the stories mothers whisper to each other in parking lots, text threads, emergency rooms, school offices, and courthouse hallways. People are beginning to see what some of us have been forced to live.

So if someone finds themselves a victim of this system, what exactly are they supposed to expect?

A fair trial?

A reasonable outcome?

A clean review of the evidence?

A sudden moment where the people who got it wrong decide it is never too late to do the right thing?

That is the part that still hurts. Not because I was naive. Not anymore. But because somewhere, buried under years of gaslighting and survival, there was still some tiny, stubborn part of me that hoped truth would matter. That evidence would matter. That children’s wellbeing would matter. That someone in power would stop and say, “Wait. This is not right.”

Maybe that is what makes the judgment feel traumatic even when you knew it was coming.

It is not surprise.

It is confirmation.

It is the body saying, “I knew,” and still collapsing under the weight of knowing.

A friend of mine, practical in the way only someone outside the daily trauma can be practical, said something like, “Isn’t this the same judge who hates you? What did you expect? Now we go from here.”

And he was right.

I did know where this was going. I have known the next steps for years. I have discussed them openly. I have laid the groundwork. I have made the notations. I have objected. I have dotted my i’s, crossed my t’s, and gathered the receipts.

But knowing the next step does not mean the wound does not bleed.

That is something people misunderstand about resilience. They think if you keep going, you are not shattered. They think if you can write the motion, make the call, gather the exhibits, publish the article, and plan the appeal, then somehow the damage did not land.

It landed.

It lands every day.

It lands when I see the date on a court order.

It lands when another birthday passes inside litigation.

It lands when my children are treated like property to be transferred rather than people to be heard.

It lands when my own motherhood is recast as the problem.

It lands when the system calls my refusal to abandon them “alienation.”

There are things I have come to know with absolute certainty over the last three years. The first is that family court does not care about the wellbeing of children in the way the public believes it does. Allegedly, of course. Because we live in a world where mothers are expected to soften even the truth that has destroyed them.

But I know what I have lived.

I know what I saw.

I know the difference between a system that protects children and a system that protects its own decisions.

I know the difference between justice and procedure.

I know the difference between neutrality and cowardice.

I know the difference between documentation and protection.

When you spend years defending yourself against things that never happened, something strange happens to your mind. You start anticipating every possible argument against you. You start building proof against lies that have not been told yet because you have learned that the lie is coming. You start organizing your life around rebuttal. You start writing like everything will be twisted because everything has been twisted.

That is what family court does to protective mothers.

It turns you into an archivist of your own destruction.

You save the emails. You save the screenshots. You save the medical notes. You save the school records. You save the messages. You save the proof that a thing did not happen, that a thing did happen, that a person said what they said, that you were where you were, that you did what you were supposed to do, that you did not do what they claimed.

You become fluent in your own defense.

And then people wonder why you sound exhausted.

When I first landed back in Boston in January 2024, shortly after being stripped of custody of my children, someone told me I was trying to turn the Titanic.

Maybe I was.

Maybe I still am.

But here is the thing about the Titanic. Everyone remembers the iceberg. Everyone remembers the sinking. Everyone remembers the disaster as if it began the moment of impact.

But disasters begin long before impact.

They begin with warnings ignored.

They begin with arrogance.

They begin with speed.

They begin with people in power believing they are too important, too certain, too insulated, too unsinkable to be wrong.

Family court is full of unsinkable people making decisions about children who are already drowning.

And mothers like me are treated like the problem for pointing at the water.

So the judgment came.

The scarlet A was stitched a little deeper.

Alienation.

That is what they call it when a mother refuses to stop loving her children loudly enough to embarrass the system.

That is what they call it when children prefer safety.

That is what they call it when the truth would require accountability.

But I do not accept the letter.

I do not accept the branding.

I do not accept that my children’s love for me is evidence of harm.

I do not accept that their pain is proof of my wrongdoing.

I do not accept that a system can steal years from us and then demand gratitude for its procedure.

I do not accept silence.

If this judgment was meant to end something, let it end the illusion that I am waiting quietly for justice to be handed down by people who have already shown me what they are willing to ignore.

Let it end the chapter where I begged institutions to care.

Let it end the fantasy that the system will correct itself because the truth is obvious.

Let it end the version of me that thought being reasonable would save us.

Because trial number one may be over.

But the story is not.

The record exists.

The receipts exist.

The children exist.

I exist.

And I will never stop.

Not because I am alienating.

Because I am their mother.

And because one day, when my children ask who fought for them, I want the answer to be unmistakable.

I did.

I always did.

I still am.

As the Kelsey Fitzsimmons case continues gaining national attention, many people are being introduced to an entirely unfamiliar world. A world filled with terms most people have never heard before unless they have personally been through family court themselves. Guardian ad Litem. Parenting coordinator. Reunification therapy. High-conflict custody. Therapeutic intervention. To outsiders, these terms sound reassuring. They sound child-focused, professional, clinical, and protective. Most people naturally assume these systems exist to protect children from harm and help families navigate difficult situations safely.

That is exactly what I used to believe too.

Most people hear the words Guardian ad Litem and imagine an unbiased advocate for the child. Someone neutral. Someone independent from the conflict. Someone brought in specifically to investigate concerns objectively and protect children’s wellbeing above everything else.

Protective mothers know better.

I used to think GALs were unbiased too, before I started learning how deeply interconnected the family court industry actually is and how much money exists inside prolonged custody conflict. Before I understood that many GALs are not operating outside the system at all, but inside overlapping professional networks made up of evaluators, mediators, parenting coordinators, reunification therapists, expert witnesses, court-connected psychologists, and organizations that actively shape family court culture and custody ideology.

The more I learned, the more impossible it became to ignore the overlap.

What most people do not understand is that many of the professionals involved in these cases are not isolated actors independently checking one another. Many train together. Many belong to the same organizations. Many attend the same conferences. Many participate in the same consultation groups. Many influence judicial trainings. Many refer families to one another professionally. Many move fluidly between different court-appointed roles throughout their careers.

The public imagines independent child advocates.

Many protective mothers see an industry.

That does not automatically mean every individual professional is malicious or intentionally harming families. But it does challenge the simplistic public fantasy that these systems operate independently from one another or without institutional bias and financial incentive structures influencing outcomes.

The recent identification of Steven Nisenbaum as the Guardian ad Litem connected to the Kelsey Fitzsimmons matter has opened a window into exactly this world.

Publicly available biographies show Nisenbaum is not simply a Guardian ad Litem. He is also a psychologist, attorney, mediator, parenting coordinator, parenting evaluator, expert witness, former president of the Massachusetts chapter of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (AFCC), founding member and former board member of the Massachusetts Association of Guardians ad Litem (MAGAL), and board member of the Massachusetts Council on Family Mediation.

Historical AFCC records also identify Steven Nisenbaum as president-elect of AFCC Massachusetts during the organization’s early years, placing him within leadership as the chapter was helping shape professional culture surrounding custody disputes, mediation, GAL work, family evaluations, and court-connected interventions in Massachusetts.

What most people do not realize is that AFCC is not an obscure little organization with no real influence over family court culture. It has spent decades helping shape the way judges, evaluators, GALs, therapists, and court-connected professionals are taught to think about custody conflict, co-parenting, parental behavior, and family dynamics, and manages a professional, for profit referral system of third party professionals.

AFCC describes itself as an interdisciplinary organization made up of judges, attorneys, psychologists, mediators, evaluators, parenting coordinators, Guardians ad Litem, and other court-connected professionals working to improve family court systems. On paper, that sounds collaborative and child-centered. The problem is that many protective mothers and domestic violence advocates argue AFCC has played a major role in shaping the exact culture that has made family court so dangerous for protective parents and children reporting abuse.

AFCC does not simply observe family court culture from the outside. It actively participates in shaping it through conferences, publications, judicial trainings, professional networking, interdisciplinary consultation groups, continuing education, and custody frameworks that influence how judges and court-connected professionals are taught to interpret conflict, family dynamics, child resistance, abuse allegations, and to pathologize parental behavior.

That influence matters enormously because the way professionals are trained to interpret behavior can completely change the trajectory of a custody case.

Protective mothers and family court reform advocates have spent years warning that many family court systems increasingly interpret abuse allegations through the framework of “high conflict co-parenting” rather than through the realities of coercive control or post-separation abuse. Mothers attempting to create safety boundaries may instead be reframed as alienating, gatekeeping, emotionally unstable, resistant to co-parenting, or psychologically problematic.

Fear becomes pathology.

Protection becomes obstruction.

And once a family enters the “high conflict” pipeline, the financial machinery surrounding family court can expand rapidly.

This is the part the public rarely sees.

Once a case is labeled high conflict, an entire network of court-connected professionals can suddenly become attached to the family. A Guardian ad Litem may be appointed. A custody evaluator may become involved. A parenting coordinator may be recommended. Reunification therapy may be ordered. Supervised visitation providers may enter the case. Additional therapists, coaches, evaluators, and intervention specialists may follow.

Each professional generates reports.

Each report can generate further recommendations.

Each recommendation can justify additional intervention.

Each intervention creates additional cost.

Families already drowning emotionally can suddenly find themselves financing a sprawling web of court-connected services while being told every layer of intervention is necessary for the “best interests of the child.” The bill for Steven Nisenbaum is likely at least $24,000.

This is why so many protective mothers warn each other about GAL appointments:

Because many entered family court believing abuse allegations would be investigated seriously, only to find themselves absorbed into a system where the act of trying to protect a child can itself become evidence against them.

Many mothers describe feeling as though every attempt to establish safety boundaries becomes reframed negatively through the language of family court. Concern becomes “high conflict.” Fear becomes “emotional dysregulation.” Resistance becomes “noncompliance.” Protective parenting becomes “gatekeeping.” And because these interpretations are often reinforced across overlapping professionals operating within the same broader ecosystem, mothers can feel as though the system itself is slowly redefining reality around them.

This is also why organizations like MAGAL matter.

MAGAL openly describes itself as an organization made up of judges, attorneys, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, visitation supervisors, family service officers, and other professionals involved in Probate and Family Court systems. MAGAL and AFCC both openly promote interdisciplinary collaboration and consultation among the very professionals the public often assumes are operating independently from one another.

Again, none of this automatically proves corruption by every individual professional involved.

But it does expose how misleading the public image of family court often is.

Most people still imagine a Guardian ad Litem as an independent outsider arriving to objectively protect children from harm.

Many protective mothers describe something very different. They describe entering a tightly interconnected professional ecosystem where the same organizations, trainings, consultation groups, evaluators, court-appointed professionals, and referrals appear repeatedly throughout the system itself. And over time, many begin feeling less like these professionals are independently investigating what is happening and more like they are trying to fit families into preexisting narratives that justify continued intervention.

This is not simply about parents being unhappy with reports or disagreeing with recommendations.

Protective mothers across the country have spent years documenting concerns about reports containing major factual inaccuracies, omitted evidence, distorted collateral statements, copy-and-paste language repeated across cases, and conclusions that do not appear supported by the underlying documentation itself. Many describe discovering that the confidentiality surrounding these reports can become a barrier not only to challenging inaccuracies, but even to exposing them publicly once they begin influencing custody decisions.

I have personally reviewed records where interview summaries did not match later-reviewed recordings of the sessions themselves. I have reviewed cases involving one-sided communications with opposing parties, omissions of documented abuse allegations, concealment of evidence, and failures to report or accurately document concerns involving child abuse. These are not isolated frustrations about unfavorable outcomes. In many cases, mothers believe they possess documentation directly contradicting representations made inside reports that later shaped court decisions affecting their children.

And this is where many protective mothers begin questioning whether the system is actually structured to resolve conflict at all.

Because once a family enters the “high conflict” pipeline, every additional allegation, evaluation, recommendation, therapeutic intervention, reunification program, or parenting coordination process can generate further court involvement, further litigation, further professional participation, and further profit.

To many mothers, it begins feeling less like child protection and more like an industry financially sustained by keeping conflict alive indefinitely.

Especially when the parent raising abuse concerns is repeatedly treated as the problem while the system surrounding the case continues expanding.

The Kelsey Fitzsimmons case is now introducing thousands of people to this reality for the first time.

And for many mothers watching this unfold, the fear is not simply losing custody.

It is entering a system where trying to protect your child can itself become evidence against you.

That is the part the public still does not fully understand.

But more people are beginning to.

That question is not neutral. It has a history.

Before “parental alienation” became a courtroom buzzword, before reunification camps, custody evaluators, expert witnesses, therapeutic transport, parenting coordinators, and court-ordered interventions, there was Richard Gardner. Gardner was a psychiatrist who popularized what he called Parental Alienation Syndrome in the 1980s. In its sanitized form, the theory is often presented as a concern that one parent can manipulate a child into rejecting the other. But the sanitized version leaves out the context that matters most. Gardner’s theory emerged in custody litigation where mothers and children were alleging abuse, including child sexual abuse, and it offered courts a way to reinterpret those allegations as the product of a vindictive or pathological mother.

That is not an accidental side effect of parental alienation theory. That is its origin story.

VAWnet’s research review by Joan Meier explains that Gardner invented Parental Alienation Syndrome in the 1980s to explain what he considered an epidemic of child sexual abuse allegations in custody litigation. According to that review, Gardner claimed, without empirical basis, that the vast majority of such allegations were false and fabricated by vengeful or pathological mothers. The same review notes that although Parental Alienation Syndrome itself has been widely rejected, the broader label of parental alienation has continued to function in court in much the same way, used to penalize mothers who allege that fathers are unsafe and to label those mothers as alienators.

This is the first transformation the alienation framework performs. It takes a child’s fear and moves the inquiry away from danger. A child’s refusal is no longer simply a refusal. A disclosure is no longer simply a disclosure. A panic response, a school email, a hospital visit, or a suicidal statement can all be folded into the same suspicion: someone must have made the child feel this way. Once that premise enters the room, the court can stop investigating what the child is describing and start investigating the parent who believes them.

That is how children are silenced while everyone claims to be acting in their best interests.

The public often encounters parental alienation today in its cleaned-up form. It appears under language like “resist and refuse dynamics,” “parent-child contact problems,” “high conflict custody,” “reunification therapy,” “therapeutic intervention,” or “family systems work.” The words sound modern and clinical. They sound safer than Gardner. They sound less radioactive than Parental Alienation Syndrome. But if the operating logic remains that a child’s rejection of a parent is suspicious, that fear may be irrational, that abuse disclosures may be coached, and that the protective parent may be the true danger, then the costume has changed but the machine has not.

Gardner’s own views are not some minor historical embarrassment that can be brushed aside as irrelevant to the modern industry. The Leadership Council on Child Abuse & Interpersonal Violence, an organization focused on educating courts, professionals, lawmakers, and the public about child abuse, interpersonal violence, and pseudoscience in the courtroom, has collected passages attributed to Gardner’s own writings that child-protection advocates have long found disturbing, including statements minimizing or rationalizing adult-child sexual abuse and urging continued connection between children and sexually abusive parents. Its collection includes Gardner’s statement that removal of a pedophilic parent from the home should be seriously considered only after attempts at treatment and family rapprochement have failed. It also includes passages in which Gardner frames social condemnation of adult-child sexual encounters as exaggerated and punitive.

Insider did a brief documentary on the Reunification Industry and Parental Alienation. At 8 minutes 50 seconds Richard Gardner says what a parent should do if they report sexual abuse of their father: “say I don’t believe you and beat them”

This matters because theories do not float above their origins. They carry assumptions. They carry loyalties. They carry suspicions. Gardner’s framework did not arise from a child protection movement demanding better investigation of abuse. It arose from suspicion toward abuse allegations in custody litigation. That suspicion then became portable. It could be carried into courtrooms, evaluations, trainings, reports, and expert testimony. It could be repackaged as science, then as clinical insight, then as therapeutic necessity.

The result is a framework that can make the mother’s belief in the child look like pathology and the child’s fear look like proof that the mother has done something wrong.

One of the most dangerous ideas in the parental alienation world is the claim that children do not naturally reject abusive parents. Linda Gottlieb, a parental alienation specialist whose website presents her as an expert witness who has testified in more than 1,500 adversarial custody cases, writes that it is “anti-instinctual” for a child to reject a parent, “even an abusive parent.” On the same page, she states that in her work with 3,000 abused and neglected foster children, not one rejected a parent. She also frames false allegations of child abuse and domestic violence as common behavior by severe alienators and describes alienated children as making allegations that can appear credible even when, in her view, they are false.

This clip shows Linda Gottlieb stating a child would never reject a parent who is abusive, there is “no question” it is “programming.”

That premise should terrify everyone who cares about children.

If a practitioner begins from the belief that even abused children do not reject abusive parents, what happens when a child does reject a parent? What happens when a child cries, refuses, discloses harm, says they feel unsafe, says they cannot live there, or says they would rather die than go back? Inside that framework, rejection itself becomes suspicious. Fear becomes something to be decoded. Refusal becomes something to be overcome. The child’s words are not taken as a possible safety signal. They are treated as possible evidence of manipulation.

This is where the framework becomes circular. Alienation theory often claims it only applies when the rejected parent is safe. That sounds reassuring until you understand how safety can be assumed rather than investigated. The child says the parent is unsafe. The framework says the child’s reasons are weak, exaggerated, or borrowed. The mother reports the child’s fear. The framework says the mother is reinforcing the fear. The child becomes more distressed. The framework says the mother is causing emotional damage. The accused parent becomes the victim of alienation. The protective parent becomes the suspect. The child’s distress becomes the reason for a more aggressive intervention.

That is not safety analysis. That is a closed loop.

In a safety-first system, a child’s refusal would be treated as information requiring careful investigation. It would not automatically prove abuse, but it would not be dismissed as pathology either. A competent system would ask when the refusal started, what the child says, what happens before and after transitions, whether there are suicidal statements, whether the child has disclosed to neutral adults, whether there are changes in sleep, school, behavior, affect, aggression, regression, panic, or shutdown, and whether the accused parent has a history of coercive control, intimidation, violence, substance abuse, neglect, or retaliation.

A safety-first system would understand that children respond to abuse in different ways. Some cling to abusive parents. Some comply. Some freeze. Some protect the abusive parent. Some minimize. Some disclose in fragments. Some reject. Some become suicidal. There is no single correct trauma response, and there is no ethical child-safety framework in which rejecting an allegedly abusive parent becomes evidence that abuse did not occur.

Family court often does not operate as a safety-first system. It operates as an order-enforcement system. The question becomes not “is this child safe?” but “how do we make this child comply?” Once that happens, the child’s body becomes an obstacle. The panic attack becomes an obstacle. The suicidal statement becomes an obstacle. The hospital visit becomes an obstacle. The disclosure becomes an obstacle. The mother becomes the obstacle. The only thing that remains sacred is the order.

This is where parental alienation becomes so useful to the system. It gives courts a tidy explanation for messy, frightening, high-stakes facts. It relieves the court of having to sit with the possibility that the child might be telling the truth. It relieves professionals of having to investigate coercive control, family violence, sexual abuse, emotional terror, or the way abusive parents use court systems to continue control. It relieves everyone of the burden of believing a child when believing the child would require action.

The allegation becomes a mirror pointed back at the mother. The accused parent no longer has to answer only the child’s allegations. The protective parent must now defend the very act of believing the child.

The research should have stopped this machinery long ago. Joan Meier and colleagues studied United States custody cases involving parental alienation and abuse allegations and reported that mothers’ abuse claims, especially child physical or sexual abuse claims, increased their risk of losing custody. The study also found that when fathers cross-claimed alienation, that risk virtually doubled.

That finding is not an abstraction. It describes the terror protective mothers live inside. Report abuse and risk being seen as unstable. Believe your child and risk being accused of poisoning them. Seek help and risk being labeled high conflict. Document too much and you are obsessive. Document too little and you have no proof. Comfort the child and you are reinforcing refusal. Do not comfort the child and you are cold. Push the child to comply and you are failing to protect. Do not push the child to comply and you are obstructing contact. The system creates the bind, then punishes the mother for being trapped in it.

VAWnet’s review also explains that professionals without an in-depth understanding of domestic violence are more likely to label abuse allegations as alienation and less likely to identify abuse as a serious concern. It also notes that alienation labeling has entered child welfare agency practices, where agencies may discount or even turn against mothers who report child abuse by a father, especially in the context of custody litigation.

This is why “custody conflict” is such a dangerous phrase. It sounds neutral, but it can become a disposal bin for child-safety disclosures. A child can be in a custody case and still be abused. A mother can be in litigation and still be telling the truth. A child can prefer one parent because that parent is safer. A child can refuse contact because contact feels dangerous. The presence of a Probate or Family Court case should never become a reason to downgrade a child’s disclosure. Yet again and again, that is exactly what happens.

A child’s words remain in the record, but their meaning is stripped away. “I am afraid” becomes resistance. “I do not want to go” becomes refusal. “He hurt me” becomes an allegation. “I cannot live there” becomes dysregulation. “I want to die” becomes a crisis to manage rather than a safety warning to investigate.

This is not neutrality. It is institutional disbelief.

The industry surrounding parental alienation did not grow because courts became better at protecting children. It grew because once courts accept alienation as the problem, a market opens. Someone must diagnose it. Someone must testify about it. Someone must treat it. Someone must supervise the preferred parent. Someone must coach the rejected parent. Someone must write the evaluation. Someone must run the reunification program. Someone must transport the child. Someone must bill the hours.

Linda Gottlieb’s own website lists services including parental alienation, domestic violence by proxy, forensic evaluations, family systems evaluations, trial consulting for high-conflict cases, parent coordination, continuing education, and Turning Points for Families. It also states that she has testified in more than 1,500 adversarial custody cases. Whatever one thinks of any individual practitioner, the scale matters. A theory born from suspicion of mothers’ and children’s abuse disclosures has become a professional ecosystem.

This is the part the public rarely sees. Parental alienation is not just one theory. It is not just one expert. It is not just one courtroom phrase. It is an economy of interpretation. It is an industry that can profit from converting a child’s fear into a treatable condition and a mother’s protection into the alleged source of harm.

This video of Linda Gottlieb bragging about the power she holds over children, and admitting that she lies to children during her reunification camp. The fact that she finds this funny is chilling, and the fact that the other “professionals“ from the alienation industry, are laughing along with her is equally alarming. Linda owns Turning Points for Families reunification camp with locations in New York, Texas (in partnership with Loretta Maase) and in California (in partnership with Caitlin Burgess)

The Wall Street Journal has reported on backlash against court-ordered reunification therapy programs, including programs that separate children from a parent they love in order to repair a relationship with the rejected parent. The reporting described fierce opposition from some mental-health professionals and family-law experts, who argue that Gardner’s theory dismissed legitimate abuse allegations and has been weaponized, often by fathers seeking custody of children living with their mothers.

This is where the language becomes obscene in its politeness. A child is removed from the parent they trust, and it is called reunification. A child is isolated from the parent who believes them, and it is called treatment. A child is forced toward the person they fear, and it is called repair. A child’s refusal is crushed, and it is called therapy.

The industry does not need to say it disbelieves children. It only needs to say the child has been influenced. It does not need to say mothers should be punished for reporting abuse. It only needs to say the mother reinforced the child’s fear. It does not need to prove the accused parent is safe. It only needs to make the protective parent look more dangerous.

This is how violence becomes paperwork. This is how disbelief becomes clinical language. This is how forced compliance becomes the child’s “best interests.”

The myth of the neutral expert is central to this machine. Courts often treat experts as if they arrive above the conflict, untouched by ideology, incentives, assumptions, or professional identity. But no expert is neutral if they begin from the premise that child rejection is unnatural, that even abused children do not reject abusive parents, that abuse allegations by alienated children are often false, or that the preferred parent is likely the source of the child’s fear. Those are not neutral premises. They are a worldview.

When that worldview enters court, it moves scrutiny away from the accused parent and onto the protective parent. It turns the child’s reasons into rationalizations. It treats fear as evidence of contamination. It treats the mother’s alarm as evidence of instability. It treats the father’s demand for access as reasonable and the child’s refusal as pathological. It then sells intervention as the cure.

But what if the child is not alienated?

What if the child is afraid?

What if the child is not rejecting a parent because the mother poisoned them, but because their body is screaming danger?

What if the child is not giving “weak” reasons, but child-sized reasons?

What if “he yells at me,” “he grabs me,” “he scares me,” “he hit me,” “I cannot live there,” and “I want to die” are not weak at all?

What if the child has been speaking plainly and the adults have been trained not to hear?

That is the central obscenity. The system does not always silence the child by refusing to write things down. Sometimes it silences the child by documenting everything and acting on nothing. A child can tell school. A child can tell police. A child can tell EMS. A child can tell a hospital. A child can tell a crisis clinician. A child can write an email saying they cannot live there and want to die. A child can repeat that they have asked for help and no one does anything. Every adult can take notes. Every agency can open a file. Every professional can say the right words about concern. And still the child can be sent back into the same danger.

That is not child-centered. That is system-centered. It protects the order. It protects the adult’s access. It protects the appearance of neutrality. It protects the professional narrative. It does not protect the child.

A safety-first system would slow down when a child deteriorates. It would understand that suicidal ideation connected to a home environment is not a visitation dispute. It would understand that a child’s refusal after disclosures of fear and harm is not simply noncompliance. It would require an abuse-informed assessment before any alienation label is entertained. It would treat mandated reporting as a floor, not a bureaucratic inconvenience. It would insist that school records, hospital notes, police body camera footage, EMS reports, crisis notes, and child statements be reviewed together, not chopped into disconnected fragments until each agency can say the problem belongs somewhere else.

A safety-first system would not allow Probate Court involvement to become an excuse for child protective services to screen out. It would not allow child protective services to become an excuse for hospitals not to report. It would not allow a prior report to become an excuse to ignore later, different disclosures. It would not allow schools to receive suicidal statements and then treat the child’s pain as ordinary adolescent drama. It would not allow every adult to document the child’s distress while no one acts to make the child safer.

That is the difference between documentation and protection.

Family court is very good at documentation. It can produce motions, affidavits, orders, evaluations, treatment plans, reports, transcripts, emails, and findings. It can create enough paper to bury a child alive. But documentation is not protection. A child can be documented into oblivion. A child can have their terror entered into records, referenced in motions, summarized by clinicians, witnessed by police, and still be ordered back into the very circumstance they are begging to escape.

This is why protective mothers often sound desperate. Not because they are irrational. Because they are being forced to prove the obvious while watching their children deteriorate. Because every new disclosure becomes another document. Every document becomes another hearing. Every hearing becomes another risk. Every risk becomes another accusation that the mother is high conflict. The system creates panic, then punishes the mother for sounding panicked.

This is not a flaw in the process. This is the process working exactly as it has been trained to work.

The alienation machine is powerful because it offers courts a story that is easier than accountability. It is easier to believe a mother is interfering than to investigate whether a father is unsafe. It is easier to order therapy than to confront coercive control. It is easier to enforce contact than to admit the order may be harming the child. It is easier to call the case high conflict than to identify the parent who benefits from the conflict. It is easier to force a child toward a parent than to ask whether the child has been right to resist.

But children do not live in theories. They live in homes. They live in bodies. They live with the consequences of adult disbelief. They live with the judge’s order, the evaluator’s report, the therapist’s interpretation, the agency’s screen-out, the hospital’s non-report, the school’s silence, and the police officer telling them to say something to someone else.

Children are not symptoms of their mothers. Children are not extensions of custody orders. Children are not therapeutic projects for reunification entrepreneurs. Children are not unreliable because they are distressed. Children are not manipulative because they are afraid. Children are not alienated because they say no.

Sometimes a child says no because no is the only power they have left. Sometimes a child refuses because their body understands danger before the court does. Sometimes a child minimizes and discloses at the same time. Sometimes a child says “it was not major” because they have already learned that adults minimize it for them. Sometimes a child says “I do not feel safe” because they do not feel safe.

That should be enough to stop the machinery long enough to investigate. Not punish. Not diagnose. Not force. Investigate. Protect. Listen.

The question is not whether parental manipulation can ever happen. Of course it can. Adults can behave terribly in divorce. Parents can pressure children. Children can be pulled into conflict. But the existence of manipulation does not justify a framework that treats abuse disclosures as suspect by default, punishes protective parents, and turns child fear into evidence for forced contact.

The real question is why parental alienation has become so powerful in cases where children and mothers report harm. Why are courts so quick to suspect mothers and so slow to investigate fathers? Why is a child’s fear treated as a problem to overcome rather than a warning to heed? Why are experts who profit from alienation claims treated as neutral while protective mothers are treated as hysterical? Why can a system hear a child say she wants to die and still ask how to enforce the order?

That is the question.

And it is not abstract.

Children are living inside the answer.

When a child says she is afraid, the first question should never be who taugh

t you to say that. The first question should be what happened. The second should be are you safe. The third should be what do we need to do right now to protect you.

Anything less is not neutrality.

It is complicity.

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People keep asking why her lawyer is not doing more. Why isn’t her attorney filing this? Why isn’t someone forcing the judge to fix this? Why is she still on supervised parenting time if she was not charged with anything?

The reality is much darker and far more complicated than most people realize.

What people do not understand is that once a child is removed from a mother in family court, getting that child back is often one of the hardest things imaginable, even when allegations fall apart, even when criminal charges never materialize, even when the narrative that justified the removal begins to unravel.

Family court does not operate the way people think it does.

The court issued the restraining order that helped set all of this into motion. If the system were now to fully acknowledge Kelsey as innocent and Justin as the problem, it would require acknowledging that devastating mistakes may have been made from the very beginning. Systems rarely admit wrongdoing, especially when children have already been removed and outside agencies and professionals have become involved.

So instead, what often happens is that mothers are forced into a long and exhausting process called “reunification,” even when there was never any legitimate reason for separation in the first place.

Kelsey was not convicted of harming her child. She was not charged with anything related to abuse against her baby. The fact that she was hospitalized for being shot and incarcerated did not ultimately result in criminal findings against her. She was exonerated. Yet despite this, she is still only permitted to see her baby through supervised parenting time, with supporters celebrating an extra two hours on Mother’s Day as though this is some enormous victory.

And I understand why people are celebrating. Truly. When you are living inside this nightmare, you learn to celebrate crumbs because sometimes crumbs are all you are given.

But it is also important for people to understand what this actually feels like for mothers living through it.

Yes, Kelsey is fortunate to have support. She is fortunate that thousands of people are paying attention to her case. She is fortunate that her son has not been forgotten by the public. Many mothers never receive that kind of visibility. I believe 100% the reason Kelsey received such “wins” in Family Court is because of the public microscope on this case and because of exposure from supporters such as Gator Boy. Would Karen Read be “free” if it weren’t for such public scrutiny?

But being forced to celebrate tiny “wins” while separated from your child is psychologically devastating. People cheer because a mother got one more supervised visit, one extra hour, one holiday extension, while inside that mother is still breaking apart every single day without her child.

That is not a true victory. It is survival.

People also do not understand what supervised parenting time actually means financially and emotionally.

Supervision is often paid for by the parent being supervised. In many cases, supervision costs around $100 per hour. Hypothetically speaking, if a mother is receiving ten hours of supervised parenting time per week, that can equal $1,000 every single week just to see her own child. It is also unnatural. Kelsey’s child is young enough to not realize the watchful eye of a stranger following her around with a notebook. He is too small to notice why someone has to “monitor his mother,” making him uncomfortable and wondering what kind of heinous crimes she committed to warrant this level of surveillance.

At the same time, she may not be receiving child support. She may have lost work. She may be traumatized, publicly humiliated, isolated, or financially destroyed by litigation.

Kelsey is fortunate that people have rallied around her through donations and public support. Most mothers do not have that. Most mothers suffer in silence. Many literally cannot afford to see their own children because the system has monetized access to them.

That is the part people do not see.

People also continue asking why her lawyer is not “doing more,” but family court judges have enormous discretion. A lawyer can file motions, present evidence, argue passionately, and still lose because ultimately the judge has the power to decide what they believe is in the “best interests of the child,” often without the level of evidence people would expect in criminal court.

A judge can decide they do not trust a mother’s judgment. A judge can decide supervision should continue. A judge can delay reunification indefinitely through evaluations, programs, supervised visits, therapists, parenting coordinators, guardians ad litem, and endless procedural hurdles.

And there is very little accountability when that discretion is abused.

People point to oversight agencies, but the public watched in real time during the Karen Read case how little confidence many citizens have in systems meant to oversee judicial conduct. In Massachusetts, complaints against family court judges are extraordinarily common, yet meaningful discipline remains exceedingly rare.

There have even been Bills of Address filed against judges such as Judge Abbe Ross and Judge Patricia Gorman, extraordinary measures seeking removal from the bench. Yet what people often do not realize is that these efforts rarely result in meaningful accountability. In one instance, Judge Ross was ultimately moved from Essex County to Suffolk County rather than removed from the judiciary altogether. All this accomplishes is moving bad players to different areas, much like the Spotlight Boston priests.

Many mothers have spent years sounding alarms about these systems with little response.

And that brings me back to why media attention matters so much in cases like Kelsey’s.

People ask why mothers go public. Why they speak out. Why they post online. Why they fight so loudly.

Because for many mothers, public attention is the only thing preventing them and their children from disappearing quietly into a system that can stretch separation out for months or years.

The tragic irony is that there was never any need for “reunification” between a mother and her baby if there was no legitimate reason for separation to begin with.

Children can be removed in an instant. Returning them often becomes a maze of paid professionals, prolonged supervision, evaluations, monitored visits, and slow incremental “progress” that generates ongoing profit for third parties while mothers and children remain separated.

And every removal, every goodbye after a visit, every transition back to the other parent can become retraumatizing all over again.

Some mothers describe overwhelming anxiety leading up to visits, not because they do not desperately want to see their children, but because they know what comes afterward. They know they will once again have to hand their child back and watch them leave.

That repeated separation takes a psychological toll on both mother and child that people outside this system often cannot fully comprehend.

I share all of this not to discourage people from supporting Kelsey or celebrating the small wins. Those moments matter deeply when you are surviving this kind of trauma.

I share this because it is important for people to understand the system Kelsey is navigating and to understand that her experience is not an anomaly.

There are mothers across Massachusetts and throughout this country living versions of this same nightmare every single day. They have no support, no microscope keeping the system “honest,” no group of enraged neighbors with pitchforks demanding accountability. Many will not see their children for Mother’s Day. Many do not receive status hearing updates a month later; most wait months for orders, months of follow up hearings, and years for relief which may never come, and yet will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is the Massachusetts people do not realize until it happens to someone they know. I am so very thankful Kelsey has our support, lord knows she needs it.

A parent becomes increasingly concerned about a child’s welfare during a high conflict custody case. Multiple professionals raise concerns. An emergency motion is filed in Probate and Family Court because the parent believes the situation requires immediate judicial attention.

The motion sits.

Days go by without even a hearing date.

The parent contacts the court administration looking for help. They are told the office cannot intervene in cases. They contact the Chief Justice’s office. They receive a generic response explaining that judges are independent and the office does not get involved in individual matters.

So the parent asks a larger question:

If nobody can review what is happening administratively, then who exactly is responsible when the system itself breaks down?

That question led me into researching something most people in Massachusetts probably do not even realize exists: the DCF Ombudsman’s Office.

And more importantly, what it does not do.

At first glance, the existence of an ombudsman sounds reassuring. Most people hear the word and assume it means there is an independent office somewhere capable of investigating complaints, reviewing failures and stepping in when systems become dangerous.

That is often true in other states.

It is not really true in Massachusetts.

But before even getting to the ombudsman issue, there is another question Massachusetts families should be asking:

What exactly is the role of the Chief Justice of the Trial Court?

One of the most frustrating parts of trying to report systemic concerns in Massachusetts is the immediate response that “the Chief Justice cannot interfere in cases.” That answer avoids a much bigger question: no one is asking the Chief Justice to decide custody disputes or overrule judges based on emails from litigants. The issue is whether anyone is responsible for oversight when the administration of the court system itself appears to be failing.

Massachusetts law is actually very clear that the Chief Justice does have administrative responsibilities over the Trial Court system. Under Chapter 211B, Section 9 of the Massachusetts General Laws, the Chief Justice of the Trial Court is described as the “policy and judicial head” of the Trial Court and is specifically tasked with improving the administration of the courts and ensuring their “proper and efficient administration.” The statute also assigns responsibility for monitoring “case processing and case flow management capabilities” throughout the Trial Court departments.

The law even specifically requires the establishment of a “mandatory emergency judicial response system” for matters requiring immediate judicial action. That distinction matters enormously because concerns about emergency scheduling failures, prolonged delays, administrative breakdowns or case flow problems are not the same thing as asking the Chief Justice to interfere with judicial decision making.

The public is also funding this administrative structure at a very high level specifically because these responsibilities are supposed to matter. Under Massachusetts law, the Chief Justice of the Trial Court currently receives a salary of approximately $220,160 annually. Recent legislative proposals would increase that compensation even further, to over $250,000 per year.

The public is left asking an uncomfortable question: what exactly is that administrative structure providing when litigants reporting systemic failures are repeatedly told no office can review concerns related to delays, emergency scheduling failures or breakdowns in court administration itself?

Massachusetts law specifically assigns responsibility for the “proper and efficient administration” of the Trial Court system, including oversight of case flow management and emergency judicial response systems. Yet families experiencing apparent operational failures are often told nobody has authority to help.

At some point, the public is justified in asking whether the administrative oversight functions taxpayers are funding are actually being meaningfully exercised.

And while judicial independence is critically important, judicial independence cannot become administrative immunity. Otherwise, the public is left with a court system where no office claims responsibility for operational failures, even in emergencies involving children. Right now, that is exactly how Massachusetts feels to many families.

Now back to the ombudsman issue:

According to Massachusetts, the DCF Ombudsman’s office exists to help resolve concerns related to DCF services, explain policies and facilitate communication between families and the department. There is a critical distinction people do not understand: The Massachusetts DCF Ombudsman is not independent from DCF itself. In fact, it exists within the same overall system it is supposed to help families navigate. And its authority is extremely limited. But here is the thing: this is true in Massachusetts. This is not true in other states.

During my own conversations while trying to understand where families are supposed to turn during systemic failures, one point became very clear very quickly: if there is no open DCF case, there is often very little the office can actually do. This should alarm people: by the time families are desperately escalating concerns to the Governor’s office or searching for oversight mechanisms, many are no longer dealing with active DCF investigations at all. They are dealing with the downstream consequences of family court decisions, screened out reports, delayed hearings, administrative failures or systemic gaps where every agency says the problem belongs to someone else.

And that is where Massachusetts begins to look very different from many other states. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 33 states have independent children’s ombudsman or child advocate offices specifically tasked with oversight of child welfare systems. Many of these offices are structurally independent from the agencies they oversee.

Some can subpoena records.

Some can independently investigate complaints.

Some can issue public reports.

Some report directly to the Governor or Legislature rather than internally through the child welfare system itself.

That distinction makes the difference between being functional versus being just “operational.” Because oversight is not truly oversight if it ultimately reports back into the same system being criticized. In Massachusetts, advocates have already raised concerns about this issue for years. Friends of Children, a Massachusetts child advocacy organization, specifically argues that the state lacks meaningful enforcement and accountability mechanisms in child welfare oversight and has called for stronger independent review structures.

The issue becomes even more concerning when viewed alongside Family Court. Massachusetts families are often told to trust the system.

Trust DCF.

Trust the courts.

Trust the GAL process.

Trust the oversight mechanisms.

But many parents eventually discover something unsettling: there is no clear place to go when the problem is not one bad ruling, but the system itself.

Court administration says it cannot interfere.

The Chief Justice’s office says judges are independent.

DCF says there is no open case.

The Ombudsman says their authority is limited.

And the Governor’s office refers families back into the same loop.

Meanwhile, families continue living inside the consequences.

Another issue rarely discussed publicly is how DCF involvement itself becomes weaponized in Family Court, particularly against mothers. Mandated reporters such as pediatricians, therapists, teachers and school counselors are often the ones making reports. But once a report exists, the narrative can quickly shift inside custody litigation. Unsupported or screened out reports are frequently framed not as inconclusive, but as proof the reporting parent was dishonest, manipulative or attempting to alienate the other parent. This understanding matters and can mean the difference of irreparable harm to children in the Commonwealth.

Unsupported does not mean fabricated.

Screened out does not mean false.

It often simply means DCF either lacked enough evidence to substantiate abuse under its standards or chose not to investigate further. But inside Family Court, nuance disappears quickly and once that happens, many parents stop reporting concerns entirely because they fear the system will use the act of asking for help against them. That is not a functioning child protection system. That is a system teaching parents to stay silent out of fear. That is coercion. This is a system causing mothers to literally beg providers not to file a 51A out of fear of retaliation in Family Court.

The larger issue here is not about one case, one parent or one judge; it is about whether Massachusetts has created the illusion of oversight without creating actual accountability. There is a difference between an office that listens and an office that has power. Right now, too many families are discovering that difference only after they are already in crisis.

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Massachusetts Department of Children and Families worker Richard Magrath, 31 of Quincy, is accused of raping a mother he was assigned to help. He has been charged, fired, and is now facing the legal system; officials have called it an extraordinary abuse of power and access, while the agency has described it as a disturbing breach of trust.

That version is clean and contained, and it suggests something rare.

But if you have spent any time around this system, or lived inside it, the story does not start there. It starts with power, and with fear.

A DCF report is not just paperwork; it becomes a narrative that can follow a parent into court, into custody decisions, and into the long-term shaping of how they are perceived. What gets written down matters, and how it is framed matters just as much. Parents understand this, often more clearly than anyone outside the system realizes.

They know that the person walking into their home is not simply there to help; they are there to assess, document, and interpret. Every interaction carries weight beyond the moment itself, and that awareness changes how people behave.

Parents manage themselves carefully; they choose their words with intention and try to avoid being seen as difficult, uncooperative, or defensive. Those labels do not disappear once written; they follow families, sometimes long after the case itself has closed. Pushing back, even when something feels wrong, does not always feel safe.

According to investigators, the worker in this case went to the home of a Boston mother to discuss services for her two children with special needs. During that visit, he crossed a boundary by complimenting her and touching her arm in a way that made her uncomfortable. He left, and then, later that same night, he returned.

That return is not incidental; it marks the point where professional access shifts into something else entirely.

He entered her home again, told her that nobody needed to know about what was happening, and, according to prosecutors, raped her. Before leaving, he told her he would see her at the next scheduled visit.

That statement only carries weight in a system where silence can feel safer than speaking.

It is also a reminder that language inside this system carries meanings that are often misunderstood outside of it.

Consider the term “unsupported.” Within DCF standards, “unsupported” does not mean that something did not happen; it means that there was not sufficient evidence, under the agency’s criteria, to substantiate the claim at that time. Outside that context, particularly in court, the distinction is often lost; “unsupported” becomes synonymous with untrue.

That shift is not minor. It has the effect of minimizing experiences while still allowing them to shape how a parent is perceived. It is one of the many ways documentation can carry consequences that extend beyond its intended purpose.

All of this operates within a system that depends heavily on trust and on the accuracy of what is recorded after the fact. A 2024 audit by the Massachusetts State Auditor found that DCF failed to consistently meet its own documentation and oversight requirements, raising concerns about how effectively the system monitors itself in practice.

Investigations conducted by the Massachusetts Office of the Child Advocate have documented recurring failures in communication, follow-up, and supervisory oversight, pointing to systemic weaknesses rather than isolated mistakes.

In-home visits, like the one described in this case, often occur without direct supervision; what happens during those visits is largely documented afterward by the same individual who was present. This structure does not simply leave room for error; it creates conditions where misuse can occur without immediate detection.

Massachusetts has already seen the consequences of oversight failures in devastating ways.

Massachusetts has already seen the consequences of oversight failures in devastating ways. The case of the revealed how a child with prior involvement in the system could fall through gaps in tracking, follow-up, and communication between agencies.

In 2019, custody of Harmony Montgomery was granted to her father in Massachusetts court proceedings overseen by Essex County Probate and Family Court Judge Mark Newman, who retired later that year.

At the time, her father was living in New Hampshire and had a documented criminal history in both Massachusetts and New Hampshire, including prior convictions involving violence and firearms. Court records show he had served time in prison before regaining custody.

Harmony was subsequently taken out of state, and the system lost track of her. She was later confirmed dead.

Subsequent reviews and reporting exposed a series of missed opportunities for intervention, including failures to follow up on welfare concerns and breakdowns in coordination between agencies responsible for her safety.

That case is not identical to this one; however, it underscores a consistent pattern. When oversight is fragmented and accountability is inconsistent, decisions made within the system can carry consequences that extend far beyond the moment they are made.

Questions about culture also remain difficult to ignore. In Arizona, investigators with the Arizona Department of Child Safety were disciplined after posing for a photograph wearing a shirt labeled “professional kidnapper.” The reaction to that image was not simply about poor judgment; it reflected a deeper discomfort with how authority can be perceived and internalized within these systems, and abuse of authority and power.

The situation in Massachusetts is not the same as that incident in Arizona; however, both point toward a broader concern. Systems that operate with significant authority over families require not only procedural safeguards but also a culture that recognizes the weight of that authority.

At its core, this case is not only about the actions of one individual; it is about access.

A worker was able to enter a private home, leave, return later that evening, and again be alone with a vulnerable parent. There were no safeguards present in that moment, no oversight, and no interruption; there was only authority, proximity, and the expectation of trust.

The agency’s response was immediate, and that matters; however, it came only after the harm had already occurred.

That pattern is not unique to this case. Investigations conducted by the and audits by the have repeatedly documented breakdowns in communication, failures in follow-up, and inconsistent supervisory oversight within the child welfare system. These are not theoretical concerns; they are established patterns.

Against that backdrop, the questions are no longer abstract.

What meaningful supervision exists for workers conducting private, in-home visits where no one else is present?

What safeguards are in place to prevent the misuse of authority in those settings, beyond the expectation that it will not happen?

What realistic protections exist for parents who feel unsafe reporting the very individuals responsible for evaluating them?

How are complaints tracked, and how often are they acted on before harm escalates?

A system that depends on documentation and self-reporting cannot rely on those mechanisms alone to ensure accountability. When oversight is inconsistent and monitoring is limited, authority is exercised with fewer constraints, and the consequences of that imbalance fall on the families required to engage with it.

Families are not being asked simply to open their doors; they are being asked to submit to a process in which power is uneven, scrutiny is constant, and recourse is uncertain.

That is not a neutral dynamic, and it is not without risk.

The issue is no longer whether that risk exists. The issue is how often it is overlooked, and what it takes for it to be taken seriously.

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According to a newly released statement from Bennington Police, Janette MacAusland arrived at a family residence in Vermont Friday night appearing “highly distraught” with a visible neck injury and was bleeding.

While speaking with MacAusland, Vermont police say they became increasingly concerned about the welfare of her two children and contacted Wellesley Police to conduct a welfare check at her Massachusetts home.

Approximately 35 minutes later, the two children, ages 6 and 7, were found dead inside the home.

MacAusland was subsequently taken into custody and is currently facing two murder charges.

Sources familiar with the family tell Fight Like A Mother that MacAusland had recently been under significant stress related to her divorce and was worried about her children. Those who knew her say the allegations are difficult to reconcile with the mother they knew and feel like half the story is missing.

However, being charged does not mean someone is guilty, and at this point, the public still has very few facts about what happened inside that home.

Authorities have not disclosed:

• what led to the children’s deaths

• how MacAusland sustained her injuries

• whether anyone else was present

• where the children’s father was at the time

• whether prior concerns were raised during the family’s active Norfolk Probate and Family Court case

As previously reported by Fight Like A Mother, court records reviewed by this publication show this family was involved in an active family court matter before the children’s deaths, and a Guardian ad Litem, Dr. Dante Spetter, had recently been appointed.

At this point, far more questions remain than answers.

This remains a developing story.

Their mother has been arrested in Vermont and charged with murdering them.

And Fight Like A Mother has uncovered another deeply troubling detail: these children were at the center of an active Norfolk Probate and Family Court case before their deaths, with a guardian ad litem appointed just three days prior.

Authorities say two children, ages 6 and 7, were found dead Friday night inside a home on Edgemoor Avenue in Wellesley after police conducted a wellness check.

That wellness check reportedly came after Vermont authorities contacted Massachusetts authorities.

Their mother, Janette MacAusland, 49, was later located in Vermont and arrested. She now faces two counts of murder and is expected to be extradited back to Massachusetts. Janette is a practitioner at New England Integrated Health, a Nationally Board Certified Acupuncturist and also works at Massachusetts General Hospital.

The criminal investigation remains ongoing.

But public court records reviewed and uncovered by Fight Like A Mother show this family was also in the middle of an active custody case in Norfolk Probate and Family Court at the time of these children’s deaths.

The case was assigned to Judge Dubin.

Court records also show a Guardian ad Litem (GAL) had recently been appointed, Dr. Dante Spetter, on April 21, 2026.

For those unfamiliar, a GAL is typically appointed to investigate concerns involving children and provide recommendations to the court regarding custody and parenting arrangements.

That revelation raises serious questions.

What concerns led to the GAL appointment?

Who requested it?

What was happening behind closed courtroom doors before these children were killed?

And one glaring question remains unanswered:

Where is the children’s father, Sam MacAusland?

Despite widespread media coverage naming the children’s mother and detailing her arrest, there has been little public reporting about the father’s whereabouts, role, or whether he had raised concerns prior to this tragedy.

Was he seeking help?

Did he raise alarms?

Was he involved in the events leading up to the wellness check?

At this point, the public simply does not know.

But when two children are dead while their family is actively involved in family court litigation involving a court-appointed investigator, transparency matters.

These children deserved better than silence after their deaths.

And the public deserves answers.

This is a developing story and Fight Like A Mother will continue investigating.

If you have information related to this case and wish to speak confidentially, contact us.

But paper is cheap.

What families face in court is something else entirely: an unofficial culture in which shared parenting is treated as the enlightened default, cooperation is demanded even where coercion exists, and the parent raising safety concerns is too often forced to prove, and then prove again, that abuse should count. Massachusetts may deny a formal presumption of 50/50 at trial, but it still builds in a sharing-oriented baseline. In divorce cases, absent emergency conditions, abuse, or neglect, parents begin with temporary shared legal custody. That early baseline matters because early baselines become expectations, and expectations become outcomes.

This is how a state can claim neutrality while families experience something very different. The official question is supposed to be: what is in this child’s best interests? The real question too often becomes: why shouldn’t this be shared? Why shouldn’t this be equal? Why are you resisting? Why can’t you co-parent better? That is not a small shift in language. It is the whole game. The burden quietly moves from the system having to protect the child to the protective parent having to justify why the child should not be divided into neat, adult-approved halves.

And that is exactly why the propaganda around 50/50 custody is so dangerous. Every time some social media post celebrates lower divorce rates in a “shared parenting” state as proof of domestic stability, it is asking us to swallow an obvious lie: that fewer divorces must mean healthier families. That is not evidence. That is ideology. A drop in divorce can just as easily mean women are more trapped, more afraid to leave, and more afraid to lose half their children’s lives to a dangerous man. There is nothing pro-family about a system that makes leaving abuse feel more dangerous than staying in it.

The most obscene part is that abuse does not even have to be disproven to become irrelevant. It only has to be diluted, reframed, or outsourced. A parent can bring evidence of abuse: firsthand child disclosures, documentation, corroboration, surveillance footage, witness accounts, and still watch the court sidestep the actual question. Suddenly the issue is no longer abuse. It is “high conflict.” Or “communication problems.” Or “mutual animosity.” Or, most conveniently of all, “parental alienation.”

That move is not neutral. It is a system trap door.

Once abuse is recoded as alienation, the abusive parent is no longer defending his conduct. He is attacking the protective parent’s credibility. He is no longer the source of danger. He is the parent whose relationship is supposedly being obstructed. The child is no longer a child reacting to harm. The child is a child whose distress can be dismissed as influence, coaching, or loyalty conflict. Even when trained child responders report children do not appear coached. And the protective parent is no longer the parent trying to keep the child safe. She becomes the problem to be managed.

This is where family court shows its hand. Abuse allegations are often treated as messy, inconvenient, and fact-intensive. Alienation claims, by contrast, fit neatly into a framework the system finds easier to administer. They turn danger into a dispute over attitude. They turn fear into pathology. They allow decision-makers to avoid the moral clarity of naming abuse and instead retreat into the procedural comfort of “both sides.” And once that happens, the case can be handed off to the sprawling industry of paid third-party professionals: evaluators, guardians, parent coordinators, therapists, reunification specialists, who may never have to fully resolve the abuse evidence before families are ordered deeper into expensive, coercive, and often profoundly unaccountable processes.

That is not a child-protection system. It is an abuse-obscuring income generating machine.

Massachusetts law itself helps reveal the problem. Section 31A sounds protective until you read it closely. The rebuttable presumption against custody with an abusive parent only comes into play after the court finds, by a preponderance of the evidence, that there was a pattern or serious incident of abuse. And the law also says that the issuance of an abuse prevention order under Chapter 209A does not, by itself, establish that pattern or serious incident. So even where abuse has already been serious enough to generate protective orders, survivors can still be pushed into relitigating reality before the statute’s supposed protection truly bites. In practice, that leaves enormous room for minimization, reinterpretation, and evasion.

And this is the point the 50/50 evangelists never want to touch: children do not need mathematically equal time with two parents in order to be healthy. They need safety. They need predictability. They need emotional regulation, stability, and protection. Above all, they need at least one stable, committed, supportive caregiver relationship. That is not radical, fringe theory. That is mainstream developmental science. Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child states that the single most common factor for children who do well despite hardship is the support of at least one stable and committed relationship with a parent, caregiver, or other adult.

That one fact alone should puncture the entire cultural myth that fairness between adults is the same thing as well-being for children. It is not. Children are not improved by being shuttled equally between households if one of those households is governed by fear, volatility, intimidation, addiction, coercion, or chronic hostility. They are not healed by “frequent and continued contact” with a parent who terrifies them. They are not made resilient by being told that adult symmetry matters more than their nervous systems do. The law may describe shared physical custody in terms of frequent contact with both parents, but developmental reality is much less sentimental and much more demanding: children need at least one reliably safe base.

And the research on high-conflict divorce is not nearly as flattering to equal-time ideology as its advocates pretend. A review of studies on shared parenting in high-conflict divorced families found that higher levels of shared parenting were associated with poorer child adjustment in samples with high conflict many years after divorce. Janet Johnston’s long-cited review of high-conflict divorce likewise found that ongoing interparental conflict and the primary parent’s emotional distress are jointly predictive of child maladjustment. In other words, the things that damage children are not magically cured by cutting the calendar in half. Conflict still harms. Fear still harms. Instability still harms. A 50/50 schedule does not transform a dangerous dynamic into a healthy one.

That is why the slogan of “fairness” is so empty. Fifty-fifty custody appeals to adult ideas of equality because it sounds clean, modern, and impartial. But children’s lives are rarely clean, and safety is never impartial. A child’s best interests are not measured by whether adults received identical slices of time. They are measured by whether the child is safe, stable, emotionally held, and protected from harm. In low-conflict families with two safe and cooperative parents, shared time may work well. In abusive or high-conflict cases, it can hardwire the conflict into daily life through constant handoffs, forced communication, repeated opportunities for control, and unending exposure to the very parent the child or protective parent may be trying to escape.

And let us be honest about what this means for mothers in particular. When the courtroom culture treats shared parenting as the morally superior answer, women do the math. They know leaving may no longer mean greater safety. It may mean surrendering their children to unsupervised access with a man they know to be abusive, coercive, reckless, or cruel. It may mean being compelled to facilitate contact, fund evaluations, comply with professionals, and perform reasonableness for a system that is far more suspicious of maternal alarm than of paternal entitlement. It may mean that the safer parent becomes the parent on trial.

So yes, divorce rates may fall in a system like that. But that is not proof the policy works. It may be proof the trap works. And it begs the question: is this the point, to encourage women to stay married?

Massachusetts says there is no presumption of shared custody at trial. Then the system should stop acting as if there is. It should stop treating abuse as something that can be wished away through jargon. It should stop pretending that “alienation” accusations automatically neutralize evidence of violence, coercion, or child harm. It should stop outsourcing child safety to for-profit professionals while courts avert their eyes from the evidence in front of them. And it should stop rewarding the performance of co-parenting in cases where what is really being demanded is ongoing access to power.

Children do not need equal time at any cost. They do not need adult fairness theater. They do not need courts congratulating themselves for appearing balanced while ignoring the imbalance of danger. They need safety. They need stability. They need one solid, protective, emotionally available adult who is not asking them to survive the unsurvivable for the sake of appearances. The science is clear on that. Families are clear on that. The only thing still pretending otherwise is the system who stands to profit.

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