Parental alienation is a part of divorce steeped in maddeningly nebulous psychological jargon rendering the underlying information impenetrable. For instance, the WHO describes parental alienation as “substantial and sustained dissatisfaction within a caregiver-child relationship associated with significant disturbance in functioning.”
I learned that parental alienation is sometimes referred to as “malicious mother syndrome” because women are more often found to engage in its behaviors. The diagnostic criteria for divorce-related malicious mother syndrome reads as a veritable blueprint for Dana’s successful assault on me:
A mother who unjustifiably punishes her divorcing or divorced husband by:attempting to alienate their mutual child(ren) from the father;
involving others in malicious actions against the father;
engaging in excessive litigation.22
A mother who specifically attempts to deny her child(ren):regular, uninterrupted visitation with the father;
uninhibited telephone access to the father;
paternal participation in the child(ren)’s school life and extracurricular activities.
The mother’s behavior is pervasive and includes malicious acts towards the husband, such as:telling the child(ren) lies about the father;
telling others lies about the father;
acting against the father in ways that violate the law.
The syndrome is not specifically due to another mental disorder, but another disorder may coexist (in Dana’s case, panic disorder).
Chills assemble at the base of my spine when I read this clinical, nearly academic description of precisely what happened to me. Translated into plain English, parental alienation is where a spiteful and/or mentally ill parent brainwashes a child to reject and hate the other parent.
Dana conscripted our boys into every single one of these targeted attacks on me, and there was nothing I could do because the professionals of the family law system were either inadequately trained to spot the signs, or would simply turn a blind eye to them.
I endured systematic alienation from Smith and Charlie as Dana hijacked my relationship with them. Week after agonizing week, I was a forced participant in the process of being dissociated from my boys. They would arrive for a visit, chaperoned by the desultory monitor, and for the ensuing two hours it would become clear that Dana had enlisted all three as agents in her war against me. The boys would ask strange, pointed questions, clearly at Dana’s instruction and with the understanding that the answers would be reported back to her—with the monitor serving as a would-be court reporter, recording every word.
“I just want to live a normal life. A mom and dad, in a home,” Smith had told me. This comment was made during the same visit where Smith had informed me that, “Mum got a trained Germen shepherd attack dog. She said it’s to kill you if you come to the house.” Upon arrival for the following week’s visit I was shocked to see bruises, scars and stitches on Smith’s face. The dog had apparently pinned Smith down and mauled him, causing unspeakable psychological trauma. (At the hospital he had to be held down by restraints because he was so hysterical. Dana chose not to inform me.)
“We’re scared for Mosely,” said Smith. Mosely was our family dog, a boxer puppy I’d brought home when the boys were six and four years old. The new dog didn’t like her.
Dana had been ordered by the judge to allow Mosely to join the boys on our visits, but after only a few occasions she put an end to that. Four years later, at the bottom of an email from her attorney, was a p.s. Mosely died. This news, and the method of delivery, was another emotional blow that was hard to recover from. Having been denied access to my boys, as well as my dog, I was now forced to imagine how Mosely had died, how much pain she may have been in, and where she was finally laid to rest.
(...)
The scope of this diplomatic deception was profound, but to extend the metaphor to its logical conclusion, this is precisely the form of deception that Dana inflicted on me, and which is the foundation of the family law system. Deceive and subdue your spouse (soon to be the enemy) to complacency during the prelude to hostilities while setting in motion an attack at the same time.
The Six Silver Bullets of High Conflict Divorce
No one I know who has endured this process has not come out the other side deeply traumatized. The Silver Bullet in this maze of madness is the false allegation that I have spoken so much about.
My journey into the dystopian nightmare of high conflict divorce actually included six Silver Bullets speeding at me in quick succession, like that infamous scene in The Matrix—except with me displaying reaction times akin to those of the dead guy in Weekend at Bernie’s, as opposed to the magic bullet-dodging game of Neo.
These collective munitions of high-conflict divorce have become the battle-tested superweapons for disgruntled spouses who want to get rid of their primary partners immediately, and men in particular are vulnerable to their force. They debilitate husbands and can prove deadly to fathers. Such is their lethality that I have read of many men who, facing the crosshairs, have taken their own lives as a result.
Fathers, husbands, and men in crisis who have or may unwittingly become the Respondent are branded the familial black sheep, the proverbial systemic scapegoat, targeted by a Reputation Savage and shot through with these Silver Bullets.
Scape·goat: a person blamed for the faults of others, especially for reasons of expediency.
At their conceptual core, the six Silver Bullets are projectiles forged with innate, deeply ingrained psychological compounds; primed with the incendiary intergenerational dogma of the shooter’s family system of origin; encased in the human kryptonite of anticipatory shame and propelled by reputation savagery—word of mouth, hearsay, made-up stories, and spoken truth inversions.
In the hands of one devoted to destruction and retribution, the chamber unloads like this:
Silver Bullet 1: The Incarcerating Incident
This is the false allegation at the core of my story. A menace to every Respondent, the incarcerating incident is the moment when the stealth attack is revealed in the sunlight. The unsuspecting perpetrator, bathed in smug ignorance, becomes the victim, tagged with a defining mark that will haunt him for the remainder of the proceeding. No amount of context, explanation, or exculpatory evidence can overcome the emotional impact of the incarcerating incidence. Once a perp, always a perp. And the “perp” rarely expects the opprobrium that comes with his newfound title—he is blind to the coming tsunami of both legal and figurative contempt and thus cannot reconcile himself to the inverted circumstances in which he finds himself. By the time he regains his footing, he is swept under a ferocious current and the only imperative is bare, raw survival. All else must give way.
Mine was a particularly apropos example of this principle. Dana’s swiftness and efficiency in having me detained and designated a threat to the boys placed me in a legal canyon that I could never traverse. My ability to contest the divorce—or meaningfully fight for my rights as a father—were effectively exterminated before I ever walked into a courtroom.
Silver Bullet 2: The Order of Restraint
This is the legal equivalent of a film treatment, the moment when the basic morality play of every divorce is scripted in short form. The Respondent is a danger, threatening to his spouse, and thus is eternally condemned. Then comes the second sucker punch. The whole dynamic shifts once the scarlet letter of a protection order is seared on your chest. There is now a paper trail indicating that you are dangerous or unworthy. You have been made the villain, and it’s now incumbent upon you to prove otherwise. Temporary restraining orders abound, obtained quickly and easily—but only 15 percent of temporary orders are replaced with permanent orders after further examination by the courts, and that might tell you all you need to know about the validity of the temporary ones. Protection orders rip you from your home, your worldly possessions, your routine, your friends and neighbors, and your children. The firing of Silver Bullet 2 increases the potency and lethality of Bullets 3, 4, and 5 exponentially.
Again, Dana proved a skillful practitioner of this component of the faux melodrama of divorce court. She quickly seized on my detention and nefarious designation—both based on falsehoods she perpetrated—and slapped a restraining order on me before my mind had cleared the cobwebs of the Del Amo nightmare, swiftly hammering another permanent nail into my coffin.
Silver Bullet 3: The Security Lock
After securing the family home, the securing of everything else must immediately follow. Change all the locks, passwords, and codes. Put a virtual lockbox around the world, cutting the cord to children, devices, and paperwork. No computer, no cell phone, no connection.
Chalk up another notch on Dana’s championship belt—she accomplished each of these with withering speed.
Silver Bullet 4: The Private Investigation
Now amateurs and professionals alike can commence the poking and prodding detective work. Knowledge is power and information is paramount. The Petitioner dispatches the CIA of family war, the “Untouchable Cartel” of private Investigators—third-party facilitators who seek to promote and propagate the conflict.
In my case, when it wasn’t Dana or her mother, professionals were deployed to do their dirty work. Private eyes float around the fringes of the courts, experts at exploiting the cracks in the system and more than willing to commit crimes for lawyers who don’t want dirt on their hands. Dana went for the jugular here, as she did at every opportunity in our case. She retained the services of a dark master of the marriage dissolution arts named John Nazarian, a private investigator who once created a series of YouTube videos with titles like, “How to Get Your Husband Arrested.” He is a California barracuda adept at helping disgruntled spouses fire off Bullets 1 and 2.
But Nazarian’s presence wasn’t merely nefarious in my case, it was genuinely bizarre because, alas, and in a particularly toxic “coincidence,” I eventually discovered he was related to the monitor whom Dana and Judy had asked the court to appoint to accompany me on my visits with Charlie and Smith.
You cannot make this stuff up. The monitor, Michael Valdavinos, was a dour young man who betrayed no apparent personality, but who routinely appeared at my doorstep—with the boys in tow—in new cars, typically tricked-out SUVs with a self-consciously meretricious look to them. I labored to forge some kind of relationship with him, but he would have none of it. Were that all of it, I would be sick to my stomach. But there’s more, amazingly. Valdavinos was . . . wait for it . . . the offspring of John Nazarian, the PI who Dana had hired to turn over every stone of my life.
That extraordinary connection to Nazarian, Dana’s investigatory hitman, was never disclosed to me. I uncovered it doing a spot of my own amateur sleuthing, which I was prompted to do after three years of my visits with the boys being disrupted by Nazarian’s process servers handing me legal papers—in the boys’ presence—on Judy Bogen and Dana’s behalf. I initially was too overwhelmed to consider the fact that Nazarian always seemed, uncannily, to know my whereabouts while I was on these Valdavinos-monitored visits. But over time the frequency of these disruptions were simply too great to be a coincidence, and I became suspicious. That suspicion was compounded by Valdavinos’s arrogance and contempt for any sense of protocol and fair play. He unilaterally changed the means of my payment, announcing at one point that he would no longer accept checks. He would demand payment for amounts that were not yet due, under threat of canceling pending visits. After the infamous poppyseed muffin incident and the court prohibiting me from driving the boys myself, Valdavinos suddenly informed me that he would no longer drive me and the boys on any visits, blaming this inexplicable change on his insurance company—that change, notwithstanding that he had previously imposed a car cleaning fee on me by which I paid to have his various gangster SUVs cleaned after every visit, left me entirely captive to him during the visits. And, as if to emphasize the middle finger he so enjoyed directing my way, he would cancel visits minutes before the boys’ scheduled arrival and then charge me for the visits he had canceled.
All of which heightened my suspicion of what was transpiring, and facilitated my fleeting foray into the dark world of investigation. There I discovered not only Valdavinos’s paternity, but a great deal more about this obviously troubled individual whom Dana and Bogen had placed in charge of the boys. He apparently had a past criminal history, maintained a long series of aliases, and used to be a woman called Sonya. I repeat, this tale is beyond the capacity of the human imagination. It seems impossible, and yet it’s true. And while I’m not one to challenge the scruples of another man, if I were a wagering bloke I would lay down my life savings—an admittedly paltry sum after being almost cleaned out during my stint at Del Amo—on the proposition that Valdavinos reported everything he observed on my visits to Nazarian. An incestuously toxic stew, and Rod Serling would have rejected it as too outrageous for The Twilight Zone. But this was the man whom Dana wanted driving the boys around and monitoring my visits with them. Welcome to the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.
So, be keenly sensitive to Silver Bullet 4, because the private investigation might not only entail your soon-to-be-ex-wife ripping through your computer files and performing all sorts of insidious actions with your finances, but additionally placing a veritable mole in your midst in the form of a monitor with a connection to the investigator, which brings me to Silver Bullet 5.
Silver Bullet 5: The Financial Recounting
Creative bookkeeping that would make even the hardened cynic whistle is central to the pre-packaged destruction at the core of the divorce strategy. A cunning divorcée gets to this early and finishes the job after you are kicked out of your home. She and a team of forensic accountants cook the books some more, slicing and dicing the spoils of a lifetime of work. With the proper team at work, a financial picture can be bent into any shape. This creative historical bookkeeping is done in preparation to slant the diss-o-master—the computer software program used in family law proceedings that generates support guidelines based primarily on a party’s earnings and time share with the children, often in favor of the Petitioner.
Dana, at the risk of repetition, made quick work of our finances, appropriating all our bank accounts and passwords while I desperately sought escape from Del Amo. I was, from that point on, at her financial mercy—and she showed me none.
Silver Bullet 6: The Legal Retention
While I put this bullet last, it often comes first—the Respondent does not feel the pain until the other five bullets land. It is a stealth team of pros that packages and presents the results of the onslaught. It is the most awe-inspiring inversion of victimhood, the ultimate offensive team pretending to play defense. By the time this team of legal gunslingers ties everything up in a twisted bow, the Respondent is bleeding out on the floor, riddled with subversive shots.
In my case, Dana hired Judy Bogen.
The new social currency is victimhood, and its economy is booming.
This weaponized blueprint is, theoretically, gender neutral on its face. But no matter what you’ve been led to believe, my direct experience—and my extensive research of the broader system—is that the majority of the violent destruction of a family is done by women. I can hear some say, “That’s correct, sir! Smart women have learned they don’t have to accept a bad situation. They are going to exercise their right to walk from the oppressive marriage institution if they’re not getting what they need.”
That sounds pretty lean-in-cool and girl-power-chic, but if this empowerment was at the heart of it all, then these strong, modern women would be willing to walk away from the marriage carrying only what they brought into it and agreeing to a 50/50 parenting arrangement for the good of the kids. They would not become the Petitioner, sheltering themselves in victimhood and blanket immunity. They would not explode from the line with minds full of premeditated subterfuge, preconscious betrayal, and dark visions of winning the gold medal in the Limbic Olympics of family law.
All of which is to say that women—particularly smart, educated women—may have won the battle while losing the broader war. They have harnessed the plentiful tools of the family law system to empower themselves in its peculiar vacuum and exact breathtaking retribution on their former partner’s life. But in doing so, they may be perpetuating the conceit of a victimhood culture, one conserving the very social presumptions the women’s movement has fought against for decades. The result is tragedy and victimhood for everyone. This name-blame-and-shame game is now pathologized in the institutional monster.
That said, the system provides little incentive for women to evolve their present strategy. Were it rooted in a genuine search for truth, and not rotting with institutional prejudice, perhaps the Petitioners would lay down the smoking gun and put their doomed relationship out of its misery humanely. But it instead facilitates a synthetic morality play, where the threat potential of men is metastasized into a virtually irrebuttable presumption of actual menace—hence, an imaginary crime immediately becomes, in the eyes of the authorities, true by mere virtue of a woman making a charge against a man. Due process is for chumps.
So it was for me, writ large. I had no history of violence, no criminal record, no prior arrests, and there were zero instances of physical abuse in our twenty years of marriage. Dana’s first Silver Bullet, the incarcerating incident, was purely a figment of her imagination—a fabrication with no morsel of evidence. And yet, the consequences to me were devastatingly incalculable.
•••
I am one of millions of men who have suffered this fate, a statistical blip in a system built on my destruction and that of others like me. The problem is not simply the mechanics of family law—it strikes deep into the core of social pathology, and how men have become this corroded patriarchal caricature. The “frenzy whip” of collective Munchausen-by-proxy is evident in our modes of relating. There is currently no event horizon of apology in our present public discourse, as echoed in the smoke-and-mirror chambers of the adversarial family law system and amplified in our cancel culture wars.
The Silver Bullets strategy exploits this convenient and dismissive generalization and is so successful because of the power of social conceits. It is the ultimate magic trick, where only the magician knows the secret to the hoodwink. Even if the magician chooses not to reveal the trick, the audience believes them. They never see where the cards really are. They know it cannot be magic, yet when the effect is presented perfectly, it works like a charm.
And, like all magic, it leaves you questioning what is real. After Dana fired the first Silver Bullet, I still believed in miracles. I still trusted Dana; I refused to believe she would betray that trust. I give her credit for that, but the speed with which she moved to destroy me has—despite its strategic and tactical merit—shattered any residual belief I had in the choices we’d made and the life we’d built. She had obliterated all of it with such a withering indifference to the consequences that I could no longer trust the propriety of anything we’d promised each other, or the boys.
That notion of trust is critical, because trust is a basic biological necessity. It is impossible to imagine functioning as living organisms if we live in mistrust of each other. We could not only not make a choice, but we could not act effectively. Before we can make a choice and act, some degree of surety and faith must exist.
Once shattered, however, reconstructing the psychology necessary to trust is an immense challenge. If you’re a husband or father jettisoned into the noxious firestorm of high-conflict divorce, hold on tight to your faculties, dig deep into your emotional resources, and prepare to be pulverized in ways you could never conceive if your life depended on it (which it does). I have been in your positional purgatory; I have experienced the unrelenting death squads of family law, who pile up the bodies and line their pockets for their needy, greedy “greater good.” The system has scant mercy for good fathers and offers little, if any, meaningful relief to any male Respondent. I have endured, and continue to endure, the trust crisis that naturally accompanies this pathological system.
Rest assured, you are not mad. You are not insane. You are just stuck in an adversarial system whose sole purpose is to represent you as insane. Family law is, in that regard, a reflection of our society’s collective shadow self, and currently suffers from a pathogen of madness perspective.
per·spec·tivo mad·ness: an attitude or point of view that someone else is severely mentally ill.
Greg Ellis
The Respondent
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