In the Courts
1st allegation: 1991. It was a little more than 30 years ago when I was an intern. I had learned in college that I was a mandated reporter, and as such, I was protected. It was the time when the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) was raising Cain, such that allegedly there were "no recovered memories". Therapists were writing on the subject in the CAMFT magazine, The Therapist, raising fears and concerns of reporting sex abuse by clients. The greatest concern was a client remembering sexual abuse in session or a small child claiming such abuse. Some refused to take these cases anymore. However, at the time, I knew nothing about the controversy. I simply reported a wealthy father for molesting his daughter, as his little four-year-old girl had no problem remembering what often happened at daddy's house.
The mother contacted me for help, so I prepared with my video camera and created footage of my single interview with the child. I asked no leading questions. I gently challenged the child's memory, but she was insistent and articulate. Unfortunately, by the time she was interviewed by DCFS at Stuart House in Santa Monica, she refused to talk, repeatedly zipping her mouth. No one wanted to see my video, except a cop, who said the father had won everyone over at Stuart House. Since the experts were at Stuart House, he wouldn't be proceeding but wanted to tell me after seeing the video that he believed the child and me.
I believed the little girl too. She explained to me, "It feels like he's drilling a hole between two holes... He puts Vaseline on my belly, so the bad stuff will slide off." I came to call such telling language "Child Speak", because I knew no adult had coached this child. I could never imagine such a description from my adult mind. The allegation that a stranger (me) brainwashed this young child in one session to be so spontaneously articulate was preposterous.
I reported to DCFS, and the father went after me with a vengeance. The father accused me of brainwashing his daughter, even on FOX News. The mother fled with her daughter. Someone hired an actor to meet me at a restaurant to tell me her daughter was being molested, and "Did I know of an underground railroad to help them escape?" Her story was outrageous, and the woman was not a good actress. When I pushed for specificity, she floundered. I knew I was being set up, but neither did I know where mom and daughter went. The father put out postcards all over the country, "Have you seen this child?" They were found in Tennessee. Mom was jailed for kidnapping her daughter. After she was bailed out, she had to pay expensive fees for monitors to see her daughter.
Mother told me that father made his millions from his S&M magazine. I went to a news stand and found a copy, which I still have. It advertised to provide shelter for runaways. I later did research and learned that the founders of the FMSF were both self-acknowledged pedophiles. The primary owner's daughter became a psychologist and outed him in her book, because he had threatened her career if she talked. The lead "forensic evaluator" at the FMSF provided an interview to a Scandinavian newspaper that printed in Danish and English, wherein he stated that sexual contact with children by adults could be a very positive thing for the child.
My attorney notified me that the father in this case hired a forensic evaluator and attorney, both affiliated with the FMSF, which my attorney believed afforded them credibility and funds. I was interviewed by the child custody evaluator, who wrote a scathing report against the mother, in part because she cried during the interview, but blamed me. She never mentioned the father's source of income. My attorney was not much interested in what I had to say and even said I would make a bad witness in my own defense. I was sent to take one of their classes provided to attorneys about the low credibility in psychotherapists who report sex abuse where memories are allegedly recovered, or the accuser is a young child that was probably coached by an overzealous therapist. The more I insisted that I was a mandated reporter, and I believed the child, the more my attorneys saw me as one of the "true believers". They settled against my wishes. I didn't have a vote. A few years later I sought and won employment at the Department of Children and Family Services, with an alternative agenda to find out how it was that the child wasn't believed. One reason, I learned, was that children who are too articulate are not believed. I find that children who are very articulate usually enjoy extensive conversation with their primary caregiver(s).
The Board of Behavioral Sciences sent a man to interview me, and they dropped the case, saying they found no basis for the complaint, and I was protected by the law that mandates therapists to report. Later psychologist and ethicist Ken Pope stood against this FMSF movement. Much has been written since by researchers, including Bessel van der Kolk, about the fake claims of the FMSF. I ended up writing a book, myself, entitled The Politics of Memory, about the position of the FMSF.
As a sort of postscript, I later worked for the Department of Children and Family Services. One day I got off the witness stand, and the court clerk took me aside and said, "I have been the court clerk here for 20 years, and I have never before heard such competent testimony." It was healing.
2nd allegation: I graduated in 1992 and got my license and opened a parenting education agency, now a non-profit. I was immediately overwhelmed, as people were pouring in. Graduates of the class began volunteering. A few volunteers asked to do therapy with me, and I told them I couldn't because it would be a dual relationship, something I explained. I learned I should have told them first, before they volunteered, that I could not have a dual relationship. They started to fight amongst themselves. Students complained to me about their unveiled public hostility, so I gathered them together to teach them a very underdeveloped version of relationship skills, pushing them to talk it out instead of arguing. The fighting escalated in my office, and I became exacerbated. I, too, didn't have particularly great skills because I ordered them to stop arguing or leave.
Around this time, 1993, I officially lost the case against the pedophile, and the volunteers found out that he won. They were surprised as much as I was. They united and began meeting! I thought that was one positive outcome from the case, not really grasping the situation. One volunteer, my husband's cousin, told me that they had a plan to report me for doing therapy with them on the day I was trying to teach them relationship skills. She said one of them had declared, "If a pedophile can get $180,000, can you imagine what we could get!" They joined together in a civil suit against me. My attorney, who had worked on the other case, settled again. I protested until he explained that he just worked it out that the other attorney, a beautiful young woman, would drop the case if she just got her expenses paid. I was again very naïve. I had no idea that it was a negotiated loss for me, as they won an insignificant $11K, but it went on my record, something I found out only a few years ago, when I sought to work in prisons.
Once I realized my own relationship skills were barely better, I matured. I spent years learning and developing a protocol for teaching the relationship skills of healthy people to those who didn't know better. I developed a boundary-setting, negotiating skill while remaining mellow and understanding when under attack. That led to expertise in domestic violence, anger management, co-parenting, and reunification therapy. Further, the lessons from both cases gave me clearer insight into credibility or the lack of it.
3rd allegation. In 2008 I made another DCFS report on another millionaire before I learned that this was about a couple who reportedly made a fortune suing doctors. They weren't even my patients. They were neighbors of some friends. Their daughters told their friends at school that they were able to watch their parents having sex, because the parents were taping it. They invited their friends to come watch. I called DCFS and asked the social worker if they could just keep it to a warning. I thought maybe the parents could put a lock on the video equipment, somehow. I was very concerned about the girls. I had never known of anyone who didn't recoil at the thought of their parents having sex.
Mom opened a case against me in record time. DCFS told her who I was, even though my report was anonymous. Dad dropped out. I found out too late that these parents had their own attorney in the back of their Beverly Hills antique store, from where they had, at that time, filed 187 lawsuits. I was number 188. I won the case. They took it to another venue and sued again. I won again. They appealed, and I won. Two years later one of their daughters reportedly committed suicide.
4th Allegation: In 2018 the Board of Psychology received a complaint that I had seen their child without permission. A former client of mine wanted an emergency session with his new wife and step-children who were with them for the week. Mom showed me she had shared custody and legal custody for medical emergencies if the father was notified. They had driven from San Diego, and it seemed like a worthy concern. The teenage boy had been in a fight, bullying another child. The father was notified. The boy went home complaining that I had criticized him. I did question him about his ethics and why he would bully and strike a child smaller than him. The board notified me that they found no good cause to file an accusation.
A note: I don't know if other child custody evaluators get as close to the fire as I do. It seems to me that child custody evaluators have more legal protection and options, although the field requires much personal discipline. Working in domestic violence, with children with Reactive Attachment Disorder, with referrals from the Department of Children and Family Services, and most of all, with reunification and parents feuding over custody, is very close to the fire, especially as I find that a substantial percentage of these children are alienated from the other parent and suffer from what the field calls the "emotional cutoff". I find the phenomenon in the child similar to sociopathy, even when the alienation is unconscious and not deliberate. Usually, behind the child's cruel behaviors, there is a parent seeking loyalty against the other parent. Such an expectation is initially excruciating and unbearable. It is resolved when the child finally chooses. By doing so the child losing the empathy developed in attachment and develops black v white thinking, loss of the ability to believe a person can change, lack of forgiveness, blaming behavior, and will likely end up with his/her own child(ren) bouncing back and forth between two homes.
The Public
To my knowledge, there are three parties with whom I have had encounters that have written quite negatively about me on The Internet. Here's my side:
1st Allegation: This complaint was by a woman who was referred, rather forced, by the Department of Children and Family Services. She was very angry. She continuously interrupted the class and caused other students to complain that the teachers didn't handle the situation well enough to contain her. As I understand it, DCFS took her infant daughter into custody. I would be furious too. I planned at one time to help her get her baby back and to teach her how to heal her infant from the attachment break. I never got the chance.
The woman ended up making multiple claims about me on many websites, the greatest of which was called Ripoff Report. Another one was called Complaints Board. She used three, maybe four different pseudonyms on that site, all men. She said that I was a documented or certified sociopath amongst other things. She said he was also a sex offender. No one has ever been certified to be a sociopath. What hurts me to this day is what she liable my son. He is a public figure. Fortunately, he didn't think much of it.
2nd Allegation. This complaint was made by the founder of the Church of Satan, under a pseudonym in an online article. He wrote a review of my book, The Politics of Memory, in defense of The False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF). I think he called me wacky and incompetent, or something like that.
3rd Allegation. This complaint was made on Yelp, as I recall, by a woman who sought my help for her son. As I became involved, I promoted a family therapy session with the intention of facilitating relationship skills, listening to injuries, and offering mutual forgiveness. What I discovered was that she turned out to be so hostile toward her husband that her other two children sided with him. Her husband apologized to his stepson who needed understanding. He apologized to his wife for not being sensitive enough. She wasn't having it. She continued to berate him. She accused him of not being a good Christian and of stealing their children from her. It was a terrible abuse of Christianity, where one is admonished to turn the other cheek, not throw stones, forgive others for they know not what they do. Instead, she accused me of being an enemy of Christianity and of breaking up her family. If only she could have let me teach and guide her and understand what she was doing to drive her precious family away.