PRELUDE
Fate is fickle.
A simple, three-word cliché that describes the fragility of our lives and the speed with which everything we think is real can become an illusion. Before March 5, 2015, this simple truth was little more than a philosophical abstraction for me. I appreciated its implications. But I’d never experienced it, never endured a dramatic and unforeseen shift in fortune that I could not navigate—until that fateful day six years ago.
One moment I was a successful actor and producer living in an expansive Hollywood home with my wife of twenty years and two young sons I adored. But everything changed with a knock on the door by police, the first engagement in a battle with America’s unscrupulous and unstoppable family law cartel that has raged on for years and left me with scars, my family in ashes, and my boys without a father.
This book emerged from this devastating experience. Part memoir, part meditation, part manifesto, The Respondent is the story of my fall from grace—including the many ways I was the author of my own demise—and my consequent descent into despair and confusion as I was ushered through the gauntlet of the suffocating family law system.
But it’s also the story of a slow emergence and rising. An awakening, both intellectually and emotionally, and ultimately, a catharsis. James Hollis, in opening The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other, describes this journey from tragedy to self-awareness like this: “In Greek tragedy, one feels the earth shudder when a protagonist claims complete self-knowledge. At that moment one may be certain that the gods begin their work—to stun the person back to the proper humility of Socratic questioning.”
The spirit in those words lit in me a fire of curiosity that has brought me to uncomfortable truths, not only about myself, as I exorcise many of the demons that have clipped at my heels for decades, but about society at large. I believe America is in the grips of an epidemic that rages in plain sight and yet remains invisible to so many. The shocking reality is that 4,000 children are being ripped from their parents in American courtrooms every day, 1 in 3 children doesn’t live with their biological father in the home, and 40 percent of those children haven’t seen their fathers in more than a year. The fabric of society fraying as an unfeeling $60-billion-a-year family law system perpetuates the tragedy.
Fathers have a reputation for stoicism that belies a more complex reality in which we feel the pain of family separation every bit as deeply as mothers, a reality made clear by a grim statistic I restate more than once in The Respondent. Fathers who have become ensnared in the divorce system kill themselves eight times more than mothers. Pause and let that sink in for a moment. For every child who loses their mother to suicide during or after divorce, eight children lose their father. This is nothing short of a national health emergency demanding an honest accounting of the conditions driving such despair.
The Respondent is not intended as a vehicle for vindictiveness. But I believe we are all willing participants in a shameful, social kabuki dance, mindlessly fortifying the most destructive narrative of our era—that women, merely by virtue of being women, are the fairer sex. I realize this is provocative to many in our current social climate. But before jumping to judgment, I hope you’ll come with me as I visit not only the darker side of my story but also the shadow of our collective psyche in an attempt to answer this question: What is driving us to devalue fathers and family and perpetuate such a draconian divorce system?When I walked into a dreary courtroom in downtown Los Angeles for the first time more than half a decade ago, I passed from a world of rights and justice to a star chamber of withering and reflexive judgment where due process is extinct and the presumption of innocence is an illusion. In crossing the legal Rubicon from citizen to pre-judged villain, I no longer occupied the skin of a complicated human being. Greg Ellis was dead, and in his place stood the nameless Respondent, present only to receive the slings and arrows of a society determined to exact its pound of flesh in retribution for male sin writ large.
The Respondent is my humble submission to the struggling dialogue. My hope is that you find it to be many things at once: a white-knuckled ride through a dirty swamp, an intimate inquiry into love and separation, an exploration of my failings as a modern man and my trauma as a boy, and a helpful (if incomplete) map pointing to a more humane and collaborative future, not only for forsaken fathers searching for redemption and justice, but for the whole village of people who love them: aunts, uncles, cousins, grandmas, and grandpas. If we are to fashion a better world for our children, there is no more urgent project than rebuilding divorce court, revitalizing the image of family, and recasting fatherhood as the foundational and heroic role of a lifetime.
We have all been The Respondent—the person summoned to respond to the allegations of a petitioner or the provocations of our times. This book is my legacy petition. I am The Respondent. And this is my story.PART ONE
Fear
“I’m sick of this shit.
I’m gonna harm the children.”
CHAPTER 1
THE NOCTURNAL
TERRORIST
“If the eyes have no tears, the soul has no rainbow.”
My body is limp and naked but for a thin, sullied sheet strewn around my waist. I’m on my back, my arms hang outstretched in a submissive crucifixion. My hair is matted and caked with dried blood around my right ear, my eyes clenched shut with fear.
The downpour is relentless.
Then my body flinches, my nostrils flare. Small expressions pop and twitch as I recover consciousness. The invisible straitjacket of sleep paralysis loosens. The dream recedes.
And then my nightmare begins.
Desperately parched, I pry open my cracked lips to take in the water, only to be shocked by its bitterness. My senses now tripped into awareness, I peer up and shock turns to disgust as it dawns on me that the rain is cascading from a penis protruding from a tangled forest of pubic hair. A naked man is pissing on my face.
I can’t avoid the gruesome reality confronting me any longer. I am no longer a man with a family and a career forged over forty years of toil and triumph. I am now but an inmate sprawled in a bed of a dark holding cell, a scrap of tissue stuck to the boot of a legal system as foreign to me as a distant universe.
What a difference a day makes. I wouldn’t blame you for not believing that—a mere twenty-four hours before my unwitting experience as a human toilet—I was pitching a project to a Hollywood studio head, meeting with Joe Pesci and Andy Garcia, chatting it up with Sharon Stone and playing golf with Adam Levine, all before strumming my two sons to sleep on a ukulele in my beautiful Los Angeles mansion. You also could be forgiven for not understanding why—instead of striking back at the unspeakable violation with all the fury I could muster to reclaim at least a shard of dignity—I lay my head back down, shut my eyes, and submitted to the degradation in full.
Reclamations would come, but only after many years of my self-respect being starved, stripped, and assaulted, and endless efforts to uncover who I really am and how I wound up here.
But for the moment, with no reserves left, I would accept the piss.
•••
My fall into oblivion had started eight hours earlier at around 3:30 PM on March 5, 2015. My wife, Dana, was out of state on a business trip and I had given the nanny the afternoon off so I could spend quality time with our two boys. Charlie was ten at the time, Smith eight. Everything seemed so normal. We were laughing and joking in the playroom when the doorbell rang. I walked down the stairs, opened my front door, and found myself face to face with two police officers from the LAPD.
“We received a call about your sons. Are they here?”
What a strange question, I recall thinking. Why would the police be at my doorstep, seemingly randomly, asking about my sons?
“We just need to know they are safe.”
“Yes. They are upstairs. I can assure you they are safe.”
“Sir, we received a call that you threatened to harm your sons.”
“That’s nonsense. Who called you?”
“That’s confidential information. We just need to know they are safe, sir.”
“Confidential? If I’m to be accused of making threats to my sons, I’d like to know who’s making the allegation. Who called you? What danger are they supposed to be in?”
They were silent. I was baffled and unsettled—who could possibly have called the police to report that I’d threatened my boys? We stood there for a moment, locked in a bizarre standoff, an ominous look in the eyes of the officers garrisoning my door. Hoping to break the impasse, I moved again to defuse the situation, reassuring them that my sons were fine and that there was no reason for concern. Uncomfortable with the simmering hostility and sensing there was nothing left to discuss, I reached to shut the door. But one of the cops stepped on the threshold to keep the door from fully closing, and the first pangs of genuine anxiety struck. I didn’t know it then, but I had already migrated miles away from the world of suburban comfort that was mine just minutes before.
A shudder moved through me. Like midnight canaries in a coal mine, my mind went cold and my heart darkened. Panic was setting in, and I responded by gripping ever tighter to routine. I began making dinner for the boys, hoping that the act of domestication would calm the gathering storm. It didn’t. The police did not enter through the open door; instead, they meandered around my lawn in what felt like a predatory sortie. I thought, if I remained calm and measured and demonstrated normalcy, the police would surely realize their time was better spent elsewhere.
As the police began circling, my friend Patrick Fabian arrived, and I took immediate solace in the fact that someone else would assure the police of my benevolence. Patrick checked on the boys upstairs and reported to the officers that both Charlie and Smith were fine. But his reassurance fell on deaf ears—the officers responded with barely a shrug.
My stomach tightened. In the kitchen, I discussed the situation with Patrick and, after a few minutes, returned to the front door, determined to reason with the police. But there would be no reason, no negotiation. To the contrary, at that moment a sergeant walked up the garden path to join his fellow officers, bringing the assembly of law enforcement crowding my front door to five officers in total.
The newly arrived sergeant took his turn interrogating me about Charlie and Smith’s physical wellbeing, and my plaintiff response betrayed a mounting frustration.
“Sergeant, I’ve made no threats to my sons. They are safe, playing upstairs, and there’s a witness who’s corroborated that fact. You have no warrant, so please leave my property. I would like to know who called and lied about me threatening them.”
The sergeant cleared his throat. “Sir, we received a call. You were reported to have said, “I’m sick of this shit, I’m gonna harm the children.”
Ten short words—barely a sentence. And yet, strung together they formed a horrendous falsehood that was about to change my life forever.
It defied belief. Someone couldn’t seriously have called the police and told them I was a threat to my children. It has to be a big mistake, I tried to tell myself. And yet, beneath the shock, I sensed that someone had called the police and had lied about me. Not just any lie, but the worst, most carefully manufactured deceit.
The slowly developing interrogation continued, and, after a few hours of probing, the veneer of civility collapsed and the assembled force of officers broke the line and entered the house. They questioned me further, but that was a mere pretense. Before long, I was informed that a SMART (Systemwide Mental Assessment Response Team) from the DCFS (Department of Children and Family Services) was on their way.
Then I was handcuffed.
Somehow, I felt as if I was both wide awake and sleepwalking through this surreal moment. I stood in the living room of my California dream home that represented four decades of labor. My children were upstairs. Did they witness any of this?
My front door yawned at the manicured lawns, the bright lights of the interior spilling out past the handful of officers and onto the street where neighbors were doing a half-hearted job at hiding their morbid curiosity as they moved along the sidewalk at a snail’s pace.
Then the DCFS arrived and supplemented the existing police force, establishing a preposterously large crew to restore law and order to a situation lacking in neither. They evaluated me for approximately half an hour. I answered all their questions honestly—too honestly, it would turn out. Suffice to say that the right to remain silent is pointless unless you keep your mouth shut, and anything you say will be misquoted, then used against you.
The DCFS agents, having interrogated me, left the room to compare notes with the police. I awaited their verdict, still holding onto a sliver of hope that this would end peacefully with me bidding the cadre of officials a good evening. Soon they returned, set three items in front of me, and told me to pick one to take with me.
Take with me where? They wouldn’t tell me.
I was presented with a stark choice, one I had to make immediately. I could take my wallet, my phone, or a drink coaster with an image of my wife as a baby (a Christmas gift to her the previous year). I chose the coaster, and was soon ushered out of my home, essentially for the last time.
As I was led to an unmarked police car, my wrists burning from the shackles and my back in considerable pain from a recent surgery, Patrick agreed to watch my sons until Dana got home from the airport. I glanced up at Charlie’s bedroom window to see his silhouette. I wondered if he would sleep, what nightmares might haunt him, and what he must have been thinking as he watched his father being led away in handcuffs.
•••
Without offering a seatbelt, they drove me at breakneck speed, siren blaring, weaving through the Thursday night rush hour traffic of Highway 101, in and out and off and on the hard shoulder. The wild maneuvering buffeted me around so relentlessly that I eventually slid off the backseat and onto the floor. Wedged between the seat and the floor in the footwell, I was in agony, both physically and psychologically. I let out a guttural cry. The glass partition slid open.
“Please pull over and help me up.”
No response.
“Where are you taking me? I did not and have never threatened my sons,” I said from the floor.
“We’re nearly there.”
The glass partition slid shut.
I was jammed on the floor for another ten minutes until, mercifully, we stopped. As I was yanked out of the back, I caught a glimpse of a sign—UCLA Medical Center.
I was pulled to my feet and led inside like a common criminal. One of the officers checked in with reception while the other remained at my side. I continued pleading my innocence and asking why I had been detained.
The DCFS’ silence, in the wake of my plea, was chilling. We sat for an excruciating hour before they led me to the emergency room area and told me to sit in the hallway, which I did for yet another hour with not another shred of information.
My thoughts turned to my wife, Dana, who suffered from panic attacks and was due back from her trip. She would find the allegations ridiculous and fight for my release. I worried about what our young sons would go through without Dad to sing them to sleep and make them feel safe. It was my responsibility, as their father, to provide them with a sense of security, and I was now powerless to protect them. How could a single phone call and its lie unleash all this damage in just a matter of hours?
As I waited for some sort of clarity or explanation, things only worsened. Instead of receiving enlightenment from someone—anyone—I was stripped of my clothing, told to put on a gown, and led to a tiny room to give a urine sample. I looked at myself in the mirror. What stared back at me was a broken man, defeated and depleted, wrists red and bruised from the handcuffs, back spasming in pain, eyes animated by terror. The night caught up with me and I collapsed, slamming my head on the porcelain sink and crumpling onto the cold tile floor.
I lay semi-conscious on the ground, my head split open, blood trickling along the floor into a puddle. The timed light in the room clicked off and I fell into darkness. I peered hazily through the crack at the bottom of the door where the light shone through. My vision slid in and out of focus as I teetered on the brink of consciousness. There was loud banging on the door, but it faded as I struggled to stay awake. I rolled onto my back, pushed myself toward the corner of the room and, using the wall as leverage, willed myself upright. I swung my hands up in front of me toward the sink. I managed to get close enough for my fingers to grip the porcelain, and I pulled myself to a standing position, my body protesting the forced rigidity of being upright.
“What are you doing in there?” a DCFS officer yelled. The banging outside intensified.
I staggered, fell toward the door, and, in the same motion, turned the knob to unlock it before stumbling out. I was led to a nearby cubicle and instructed to sit and wait.
After an hour or so, still handcuffed, I was led to the rear entrance of the hospital and strapped to a gurney by two nameless men in white uniforms, who slid me unceremoniously into the back of an ambulance. I protested again.
“Where are you taking me? I have a right to know where you’re taking me.”
Again, silence.
The doors slammed shut and darkness descended on me, both inside and out. I was terrified beyond thought, stripped of clothing and control. My head pounded. My back ached. My wrists burned.
The ambulance eventually slowed to a stop. The back doors swung open and I saw a dimly lit compound with perimeter security fencing. They unloaded me from the ambulance and wheeled me toward the front gates. One of the orderlies swiped his security card over a keypad at the front door, and I was ushered into the stark building, through two more sets of doors, and down multiple cavernous corridors. It was deathly quiet but for the squeaking of the gurney’s wheels. We passed through one last set of security doors, then turned into a mess room with tables and chairs. They finally removed the handcuffs and a rakish man with a clipboard appeared, suggesting he was about to take control of my forced incarceration.
I was petrified.
My protests continued, though their force waned as I faltered. “Where am I? Why am I here? I need to know my sons are all right. You can’t just lock me up!”
“5150. Threatened his children,” the DCFS officer casually remarked to the rakish man, who pushed the clipboard into my midriff and ordered me to sign.
There is something uniquely punitive about the burden of paperwork amid a personal trauma of this magnitude. I had been forcibly removed from my home, falsely accused of threatening my children, and I was about to be involuntarily admitted into what was clearly a mental facility. And yet, somehow there were still forms to complete, and the dreariness of its normalcy only emphasized the extraordinary circumstances—the bureaucratic state, in all its bland menace, taunting me, forcing me to stipulate my own subjugation.
For all that, I was too incoherent to decipher what was written on the document and far too traumatized to care. The orderlies in white took all my personal belongings (the coaster, my watch, and my wedding ring), and gave me a pillow and a bed sheet.
“Please, tell me where I am,” I pleaded. Finally, an answer came.
“You’re being admitted to Del Amo Psychiatric Hospital.”
I had no idea where that was or why I was there. I had lost my orientation in the world, forgotten my place in it. I felt extinguished.
But the orders continued. I was told to stand. Through another door stood a short, robust man awash in facial hair, armed with a chunky set of keys hanging from his belt strap. I shuffled behind him wearing only the itchy, bloody gown, clutching my pillow and bedsheet. He led me into a stark, sterile holding space with two tiny, thick, barred windows and six beds that bore the look and feel of mortuary slabs. The one in the left corner was mine.
This small, rotund man in whose charge I was now placed—and who literally held the key to my fate—placed the plastic bag with my clothing into a little cubby in the wall. With that, he left the room and shut the thick, steel door behind him. I heard the jingle of his keychain, then the turning of the lock. He looked back through the frosted glass of the watch window. A flashlight assaulted my eyes.
“Go to sleep,” he commanded.
I placed my pillow on the slab and lay down, unruffling the bedding over the bottom half of my body. I tried to slow my racing thoughts and my breathing so that I might settle in for sleep inside the nightmare.
But the terror and disbelief and confusion would not relinquish their hold. My senses were raw and heightened, but my mind was dull and confused in an unfamiliar way. When I had awakened that morning, I could never have imagined the day would lead me here, alone in a psych ward, considered some sort of menace by faceless authorities and trapped in a legal spiderweb I’d never dreamed of. I knew I wasn’t crazy or a danger to myself or others—especially my children. Yet here I was, like R.P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the sane man trafficking among the ill, more convinced by the minute that this place could drive anyone to an emotional apocalypse.
Why? That nagging question persisted.
Why would someone make up such a story about me? I attempted to reconcile the impossible. Who hated me so much that they were willing to perpetuate this monstrous falsehood to the police and try and tear apart my family and career, and, most importantly, leave my sons without a father? I was with them on the day of their births, cutting their umbilical cords, embracing them, sharing the love and unbridled joy with my family and friends.
“I’m sick of this shit, I’m gonna harm the children.”
Those ten words kept ringing in my ears. Their author had used them like a weapon and condemned me in the process. I wondered where he or she was on this same night, probably sleeping comfortably in their own bed.
Harm my children? Is there a greater assault on a man’s integrity?
I finally, gratefully, fell into slumber.
It wasn’t long after that I woke to that rain of piss, and fresh horrors beyond.
