DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND SEXUAL ABUSE CASES GROSSLY MISHANDLED.
On February 15, 2011 eight year old Max Liberti's behavior was so extreme that his mother, Sunny Kelley, had become desperate. All the evidence indicated that Max was being raped and tortured. At the time, Dr. Eli Newberger, M.D., an expert in child abuse who teaches at Harvard Medical School, heard that Max was having suicidal thoughts. Dr. Newberger was seriously concerned for the boy's life.
Furthermore, Max had become increasingly psychotic and uncontrollable, running around groping adults' privates, singing songs about killing himself, or dissociating, staring off, lost in space, unreacheable by his mother or the other women trying to protect and care for him. Max was hitting himself in the face, and talking about death.
Similarly, Lori Hanrahan faced her own nightmare. Her daughter, Mila, was being raped by her husband. As she explains it, in June 2009 her daughter, Mila, came home with a shredded vagina and experts concluded that her husband, Igor, had raped her.
Both Sunny Kelley and Lori Hanrahan are well respected members of their community. Sunny is a white, middle class, affluent, 38 year-old professional sound engineer living in Southern Connecticut.
Lori Hanrahan is a Professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C. Her credentials are impeccable: Over 20 years of work in international development and human rights all over the world. She was a guest on CNN and her op-eds about human rights and sex trafficking were often published in The New York Times.
AUTHORITIES AND FAMILY COURTS COLLUDE WITH SEXUAL ABUSERS TO PERPETUATE THE ABUSE.
"I spent two years in Maine, from 2008 to 2010, where by court order I was forced to traffick my daughter and deliver her to her father." Lori breaks down and sobs over the phone. "They made me traffic my daughter or go to jail."
In Sunny's case, there was a divorce trial which was held over the course of fourteen days in August 2011 with four additional days in October. The end result was that the Judge in the case, Lynda Munro, gave full custody of Max Liberti to his father on a silver platter. Since that time, Sunny has been denied access to her child.
Instead of the protection that they deserved from the legal system, that system delivered both Lori Handrahan's daughter, Mila, and Sunny Kelley's son, Max, to their sexual abusers. Both of these abusers were supported by the courts and appear to be part of sex crime networks. Both mothers are fighting for their children's lives at the expense of their own. They have been slandered, disabused, ridiculed, harassed, ignored, humiliated, threatened and attacked. They have been financially devastated.
Still, they have fought back on behalf of their children, but the more they have fought the more the system has restricted hammered and punished them. Every move they have made has brought further retaliation upon them. And they are not alone. It is the same story for Susan Skipp (Tittle v. Tittle), Sandra McVicar (McVicar v. Buggy), Marlene Debek (Bhatia v. Debek), Lisa Foley (Foley v. Foley), Elizabeth Richter (Richter v. Richter), and many more.
Yet, unlike some protective mothers who now live on the streets or in their cars or committed to mental health asylums, mothers like Sunny Kelley, Lori Handrahan, Susan Skipp, Sandra McVicar, Marlene Debek, Lisa Foley and Elizabeth Richter have not succumbed to the institutionalized corruption and criminality served on them in an effort to silence and destroy them--and deliver their children to the abusers. They are broke; they are exhuasted; they are depressed and disillusioned: How can society have let them down so badly? And yet, they are courageous beyond belief. And they are still fighting.
Some mothers have taken the law into their own hands and attempted to flee. For example, the documentary film "No Way Out But One" tells the story of Holly Collins, a protective mother persecuted by the family court system for trying to protect her children. A family court ignored Holly Collin's complaints of sexual and domestic violence, and the physical evidence of serious child abuse, and gave full custody of her children to her abusive ex-partner. Holly Collins became an international fugitive when she fled the United States in 1994 and became the first U.S. citizen to gain asylum in the Netherlands.
In January 1993, Linda Wiegand, a resident of the State of Connecticut, found out that the father of her second son, Thomas Wilkinson, had sexually abused her older child Ben as well as Thomas. Even though there was overwhelming evidence that the children had been sexually abused, it was not enough evidence for the Connecticut Family Court System. Thus, in January of 1994, Linda Wiegand disappeared with her children. Then in July 1996 Wiegand was found and arrested in Las Vegas, and both children were delivered to their abuser.
THE MEDIA IS SILENT.
Every effort to get media exposure for these two women's stories--whether through the New York Times or Nightline or the Associated Press, or CBS-affiliated local TV stations like WABI in Portland, or regional papers like the Portland Herald Press or the Hartford Courant--was initially met with great interest as journalists and bureau chiefs recognized "hot" stories. After a short time one promise of imminent and certain publication after another turned into refusals to return phone calls or emails. Threatened or silenced by someone, the "hot" stories went cold.
While Sunny Kelley ad most other protective parent's stories of judicial abuse and destruction remain disbelieved, unheard and unknown, Lori Handrahan's efforts to save Mila have resulted in a very high profile case garnering national atatention--thanks to the internet and the outrage of thousands of people across the country. Still major social netowrking media--Twitter and Facebook and others--have also censored Lori and Mila's story.
WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?
The roads to these mothers' hell are virtually the same, and they are unique only in particulars, not in generalities. Each year, tens of thousands of families across America are being ripped apart through Family Courts and private profiteering, protecting and growing trafficking in women and children in America.
Investigations have uncovered a web of corruption involving state agencies from Connecticut to Maine, from Georgia to California. Investigations have involved FBI agents, but as often as not the FBI is part of the problem, not the solution and information delivered to the FBI is suppressed, ignored or used against the people trying to defend children and mothers from abuse.
The problems with Family Courts pervade all levels of the federal and state systems, and no United States citizen are immune: rich and poor are exploited, only differently. At the root of the problem are these central truths:
1. The five billion dollar a year budget of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) provides a black hole of funding that filters millions of dollars down to "gatekeepers" posted to key positions in Family Courts, State Agencies, Law Enforcement, and affiliated non-profit organizations that have learned to milk the system;
2. Over the past 40 years, the destructive 'Father's Rights movement has evolved into a hydra that has overtaken judicial systems and social services, and it now uses them to persecute mothers and destroy families according to the otherwise reasonable dictate that access and visitation with both parents is in 'the best interest of the child';
3. The United States is both a domestic and an international hub for a trillion dollars a year sex industry trafficking in women and children.
Of course, it is not only women and children who are abused--across the nation, good men and good fathers are waking up to the national epidemic of pedophilia and sex trafficking involving federal and state governments and officials, and the horrors of 'Family Courts'.
READ ON.
For more information on these matters, please locate the more lengthy article at the following link:
Great article Cathy!
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Hi. I understand that there are many women who have been wronged by a corrupt system. And I guess I consider myself to be one of the "good men who are also being destroyed by judicial abuse in Family Courts, though the percentages are far fewer". However, I wish the article did not portray it as a movement by men to destroy women. Do you know how easy it is for a woman to get a man arrested in CT? I've called the police a number of times to complain that my ex-wife started a fight with me at an exchange but they refuse to get involved. But my ex-wife calls them after she starts a fight and they are at my door within a half hour. VAWA is being abused by underhanded women to hurt men as much as it is being used to protect women. I strongly agree that the women described in this story have been abused by a corrupt system as I have been but I wish it wasn't portrayed as a cabal by men to destroy women's lives. As a work at home father, for 7 years I was the one involved in the PTO and dance and other activities. At a dance class one time, I offered a working mother with limited time to cook dinner, who complained she hated the chemical taste of jarred pasta sauce, a quick and easy homemade pasta sauce recipe. Everyone (all females) in the waiting room looked at me as if I had two heads. After a long, awkward pause, another mother confirmed that my recipe works. Why is it that a man is expected to treat women colleague as an equal but when a man seeks to be an equal to a stay at home mother, he is considered an anomaly? I stand behind you fully in reforming the corrupt CT court system and abusive GAL's and mental health professionals BUT please do NOT portray it as a concerted effort by men to destroy women. You risk losing a segment of the population who too is being abused.
ReplyDeleteBTW, I am a man and Hiebel, Pines, Humphrey and Bozek all came after me after I tried to expose what I felt was harmful behavior on the part of my ex-wife. So these players really just care about getting paid, not merely going after women. Money seems more the motivator than one gender's superiority over the other. Thank you for listening to me.
I do think there are rabid and extremist father's rights organizations out there that is organizing against women in the way I describe. However, I am hearing more and more about the fact that men in the State of CT are dealing with circumstances similar to what you have described. So I really hear you on this. I think that the situation really warrants another article just dealing with the issues that you have described. I also think that gender roles in marriage are shifting and this is causing a lot of tragedy because some people are just not prepared to handle that and they have the expectations and assumptions of a previous generation.
DeleteIt's two years later. The issues you speak of have intensified across the nation. Anonymous, I hope justice prevailed for you. Being targeted by a corrupt system...there are no words for it
DeleteI too am experiencing corruption with lawyers, GALs and the Courts. Not in Connecticut. In Texas.
I don't believe all men are evil nor women. I do believe we are casualties of a machine started by corruption and fed by contempt, pious egos and greed. Mostly I agree this is not a gender war. Rather a war against domestic violence, sexual abuse and safe parents. Sociopaths, narcissists and other sub B personalities have and are benefitting from this war.
The sad thing, when you research and peel back the history on this issue, father's rights groups, corrupt Judges known for favoring rapists or child abusers or accused of it themselves, have created this war and ultimately the unlawful corrupt behavior you experienced. Yes, your wife called the police and her lawyers stepped outside the law, as did the court and GALs. But the freedom in which to operate unlawfully, the training to teach them how to do that, the money to support the training or government bonuses, the backwards belief system of abusive parents have more rights than a child's safety or we'll being is in fact the work of these father's rights groups and corrupt judicial organizations.
These are the men at war against safe parents, real science, child development, morality, and domestic violence. They waged this war to be able to continue incest, rape, profiteering, and all forms of abuse. Unfortunately, you sound as if you were also in a emotionally abusive marriage like me.
I hope you speak out. I hope you share your story and join a group of people who want to correct this. Class action law suits are being filed against their agents in the courts. Consider that, consider standing up against this tyranny so your children are not faced with it too.