Editor’s note: The following article was written by the Lovefraud reader who posts as “Robert in Seattle.”
It happened to me over a period of several years while my first wife and I were divorcing and fighting over custody of our two kids. She managed to game her lawyer, the child advocates office, the judge and most other people along the way. The only thing she couldn’t game was the MMPI test that my psychologist conducted under court order (at my request and that I had to pay for on my own). While short of actually just coming right out and declaring it, the psychologist conducting our tests identified her scores as strong traits of borderline personality disorder (BPD).
Unfortunately – and you have to appreciate this tale – our assigned advocate was an alcoholic single mother of five kids with a deep hatred for men. (And I also discovered she – and most of the other advocates in the program – had NEVER been tested or qualified to do this work!) She got an advance copy of our tests and immediately got an ex parte meeting with our judge, days before our final hearing on custody. Intentionally, she never even brought up the MMPI’s but instead used her position of authority to “advise” the judge that the children would be better off under the custody of their mother. So based on her “official advice” from the county Child Advocates office, the judge immediately signed off on the order two days before our hearing!
That night just before I was about to pick up my kids from their Wednesday evening dinner visit with their mother during my week with them, my son called crying on the other end to inform me they weren’t coming home. He told me, “We’re not coming home, Dad. You lost in court!”
Then she gets on the line and starts ranting at me, telling me how she had won and I had lost. Nothing about the kids and what was important for them. It was probably one of the most depressing and helpless moments of my life.
Changing What You Can Change
I’m finally writing about this because some of it will either already sound familiar or may soon happen to many of you in the future. This happened to me over 20 years ago back in ’91. And it was a prime example of how easily these people can game the system and the people who work in it, especially when they have others to enable their games.
The good ending is that I live by the motto, “I never get mad. I always get even.” I continued my custody battle both with the system and the courts, getting custody of my son less than a year later and eventually also gaining full custody of my daughter a couple of years after that.
I later discovered that the judge was buddy-buddy with the corrupt, rich sociopath who started and ran the Child Advocates program as part of his own earlier court-ordered community service portion of a grand felony conviction! So how did I get even? Through a lot of homework and the help of great friends, we managed to dismantle this entire corrupt child advocacy program in our county in Florida and replaced it with a professionally-run and certified Guardian Ad Litem organization instead. And the judge? Let’s just say that many of us had enough information to encourage him to announce his early retirement from the court system. <Ahem>
With hindsight, I can say that my children have since grown up to be terrific and responsible adults with full lives after we managed to survive those years of abuse together. And we remain very close to this day as a result of having each other as an integral piece of the support process needed to fight these people.
So hopefully, I’m sending along a positive story with a good ending for those of you currently in a similar situation fighting these soulless excuses for human beings. Sharing our collective knowledge can only make each of us that much stronger to deal with these people when they do cross our paths.
Because they truly live among us…
Just don’t let your guard down.
Glory to God: My ex was sent to a psychiatrist who specialized in diagnosing pedophilia for an evaluation. My ex was given 4 to 6 weeks notice of the appointment. According to his second wife, who told me years later, he went to the library of a major research university, lied about who he was, and got access to all sorts of books about what this testing would likely entail, and how to answer specific questions & what to draw and what to avoid drawing, if he were asked to draw pictures, etc. Needless to say, the evaluation came back as “normal.”
I wouldn’t trust any of these evaluation protocols. Especially not by the Child Protective Services people, as they can “interpret” the results any way they want, and they are absolutely shameless about doing so.