Family Law Needs A Revolution
Toxic former spouses wield far too much power because courts are obligated to err on the side of both parents having equal rights
This is somewhat different than much of my writing here, but it’s an issue that’s important to me and that I’ve seen wreak havoc on the lives of good, smart, strong, hardworking women (I’m not ashamed to say that I also needed a mental health break from writing about the disaster in Gaza).
Family law is one of those areas that many lawyers avoid and judges loathe. It’s vitally important to millions upon millions of people across America, but it’s considered so third-rate by the legal system that much of the decisions are handled by appointed magistrates, who are hired by judges to oversee traffic fines, ordinance violations, and, you guessed it, family law matters like divorces and custody cases. I admit, it would be tedious to constantly adjudicate matters between people who hate each other. At the same time, there are a lot of children and a lot of abused spouses who need the protection of the law, and this is where family law utterly fails in its mission.
I’ve witnessed this failure play out with people close to me in California and Michigan; journalistic coverage shows it is an issue everywhere from Manhattan to Manchester, England. What strikes me is the consistency of the failure, how the evidence submitted by these (almost always) women demonstrates clear patterns of abuse, and how the system refuses to halt the abuse. One case cited in the linked articles involved an abused woman who recorded her ex-husband’s threats to drown her in litigation and get the kids taken from her if she didn’t come back to him—clearly coercive behavior—and the judge shrugged it off as “typical arguments between ex-marital partners.” This is the favored tactic, of course, by abusers. They either file repeated, frivolous motions that take forever to move through a glacially slow family law system; or the abuser refuses to comply with court orders, knowing that the enforcement mechanism requires the victim to do all the work. In such cases, a victim of this “vexatious” litigation must endure repeated court costs and lost time to fight the same battle in front of a judge repeatedly.
I’m going to write about one particular person, who we will call M for purposes of privacy. M is a successful career woman, making over six figures, having worked at the same scientific firm since graduating college. She met her now ex-husband soon after purchasing her first house four years into this job. He’d drifted around the country some, but he was charming and intelligent, and she was rather innocent in terms of relationships. She married him two years after they started dating. The trouble started fairly quickly. He began controlling her time with friends and family, made financial decisions without her consent (including a successfully forged loan application that was approved and incredibly was not prosecuted years later when the forgery was reported), and urgently wanted a child with her. He changed jobs frequently, and then acquired a collegiate degree paid for entirely by her. Her haircut was dictated. He placed hidden cameras to record her movements in the house. After two children and nine years of this, M decided she’d had enough, and they separated. During COVID, while separated, he abducted the children at night from their house by breaking in through a back window. Shockingly, because there wasn’t an actual divorce and because the kids were returned, prosecution was once more declined. Apparently, when it comes to families, major crimes are acceptable to prosecutors.
He also managed to successfully drag out the divorce process to pass the ten-year mark, which in many states gives the lower-earning spouse a greater share of assets, and indeed, over half of M’s 401K was handed over to her abusive ex-husband, along with a requirement that she pay hundreds a month in child support. They are supposed to split medical, dental, and other expenses, and here, dear reader, is where the dysfunction of family law comes into full effect.
One of the largest issues for decades was parents not paying child support, and so enforcement mechanisms were voted into law, and as such, this is rarely an issue any longer. There is electronic monitoring of accounts, a requirement for payments to be submitted through the court, and garnishment of wages if payments are not made. However, for reasons beyond understanding, these mechanisms do not apply to any other components of family court orders. For example, M’s ex-husband was ordered, and then re-ordered in a subsequent hearing, to do the following:
Pay medical & other child expenses he had explicitly refused to pay
Use a court-monitored communication app to prevent further emotional abuse
Delete social media accounts he created for their children without M’s approval
Cooperate in mental health evaluations of the children at a court-selected facility
The ex-husband continues to frequently disregard these orders. He hid the social media accounts from public view instead of deleting them. He says he cannot afford to use the app (there’s a subscription fee that is easily affordable) so he sends text messages, which include abusive language, accusations of criminal behavior, and even nonconsensual nude photos. On days where he has custody, the children miss school at a much greater percentage than normal. He regularly refuses to consent to necessary medical, dental and vision treatments—because he doesn’t want to pay. This has extended to “losing” one child’s prescribed glasses multiple times; calling the dentist for the other child and threatening to sue if they treated the child for cavities; fighting the court-ordered mental health evaluations of the children, and refusing payment for submitted joint expenses.
M had to find a new dentist and pay for the cavity treatments herself to prevent his interference. She had to purchase additional glasses to be kept at school for the one child so they would be able to read the whiteboard whenever they were sent without them. And you might think, well, why not go back to court? Well, CPS investigated and found no evidence that was considered “abusive,” and between the cost of filing motions and legal bills, it’s cheaper to take on the payments alone and absorb the abuse. Because the courts refuse to monitor compliance for their own orders, the victim in such cases is presented with a Hobson’s Choice: accept the abuse, or pay exceeding expensive court costs when there’s no guarantee of winning regardless of evidence. It makes a mockery of the law and the courts, but they don’t seem to care.
In the California case, the ex-husband of a different woman that we’ll call B did the following over a five-year period:
Physically assaulted B on multiple occasions while married, inflicting cuts, bruises, and broken bones, resulting in arrests for domestic violence. These incidents were photographed by police and hospital staff.
Manufactured and sold drugs, landing him in prison twice
Smoked crystal meth around an infant child
Repeatedly skipped his scheduled custody days, requiring B to rearrange her schedule or scramble for a babysitter
Nonpayment of child support
During a transfer of the children after their divorce, he choked B in a public park, in front of the children, requiring intervention by other parties.
I was witness to some of his actions when I lived in California and I filed a sworn affidavit with the court on B’s behalf when she attempted to remove his joint custody in a lawsuit. Despite all of the above evidence of his abuse and gross negligence, the court not only refused the request, but increased his parenting time, ruling that it was vital for children to have two parents. And that, right there, is why women are so often abused without recourse in America. The worst offenders, the repeatedly violent, abusive offenders, are still allowed access to their victims if they’ve had a child or children together.
There’s a law firm here in Michigan that renamed themselves ADAM in the Nineties, the American Divorce Association for Men. Their entire gig is defending men in family court against “unfair accusations by wives” and “protecting your rights to your children and property in divorce cases.” An entire cottage society grew up around these beliefs, and many of these people now fit in the “Men’s Rights Activists” category, publicly decreeing that men get a raw deal in family court and women lie to get child support and full custody. The truth is, women have always had the more difficult path in court. Clear, documented abuse, as demonstrated in the two cases I detailed and reporting I linked, is somehow not enough to convince judges that an abuser should no longer have access to their victims. Even in the rare instances where judges do remove that access, the abuser can continue the abuse through indirect means, such as threatening text messages, phone calls to family members, workplaces, etc.
Since the courts show little to no interest in resolving these issues, decent people need to petition their lawmakers to change the laws. It’s astounding that only Tennessee has laws to prevent this legalized continuing abuse of former spouses by vengeful exes. It cannot be allowed to continue this way. The human cost is already far too steep.