Appearance alert: on The Doc Washburn Show
We talk about a wide range of topics but specifically about the use of the silver bullet technique.
I was on with Doc Washburn on his podcast today.
Catch the show here.
We primarily discussed my investigation of Silicon Valley executives using the courts for their own gain.
We talked about Google founder Sergey Brin being able to hide his divorce from public view; we talked about how former Google executive Allan Thygesen misused a protective order to take a child from his mother in Utah and move the four-month-old to Silicon Valley.
Finally, we talked about former Cisco executive, David Hillard, misusing a protective order to shut down a relationship between his ex-wife, Joanna Rivera, and her children.
We touched on a topic that needs further explanation: the silver bullet technique, which is the misuse of protective or restraining orders to gain leverage in divorce and child custody.
I have been talking about the silver bullet technique for almost a decade. It is featured prominently in my book Bullied to Death: Chris Mackney’s Kafkaesque Divorce.
Here is part of an article for the Capital Research Center.
In April 2008, the divorce between Chris and Dina Mackney hadn’t yet officially started—no papers had been filed—but both spouses had hired divorce attorneys while they lived in the home they owned. That’s when Dina’s attorneys fired off a letter strongly encouraging her estranged husband to leave the home: “You need to address the enormous tension in the household.” The letter added, “The tension in the household can be reduced if you move from the home.”
Chris Mackney refused to move out, later telling an evaluator that he was “fearful that he would be seen as abandoning the children. Further, he could not afford such a move.”
So, on May 25, 2008, Dina Mackney did what hundreds of thousands of people—mostly women—do every year in conjunction with their divorce: she filed for a restraining order. At first glance, filing for a restraining order appears unusual in this case. Chris Mackney had never been in trouble with the law, and he’d never been accused of being physically violent toward her. Months earlier he had called police, accusing his wife of scratching him and ripping his shirt off his back during an argument. The police refused to file charges in that incident.
But because Dina Mackney filed for an emergency restraining order, Chris Mackney couldn’t be there to argue against the order.
“Chris has become increasingly irrational and physical especially since we began talking about divorce. I simply cannot feel ok in a house when a heated argument inevitably becomes physical. He keeps a gun in the house and [I] don’t want my kids or myself exposed to continued hostility which I feel could harm me,” Mrs. Mackney stated in her application in support of the restraining order.
She even turned the tables on her husband, citing the argument during which Chris Mackney called the police after his shirt was ripped: “This began from an argument about his continuing to text and on-line date with other women on the internet. He then took (while I was sleeping) my studio (jewelry) keys. He wouldn’t give them back so I took his. An argument ensued and ended with physical pushing and his throwing and destroying thousands of dollars of jewelry around my studio. He threw trays at me and all around the room.”
The emergency order was granted the same day it was filed, and 13 days later a “settlement agreement” was reached that removed Chris Mackney from his home. He was never allowed back into that home. Although there was about $500,000 in equity in the property, he received nothing in the final settlement.
On Dec. 29, 2013, Mackney sat in a parked car, put a rifle underneath his chin and ended his life. At the moment he ended his life, he was penniless, homeless, jobless, with no access to his two children, and he had been jailed, always at the behest of his ex-wife, on four separate occasions since the divorce proceeding began. (Mackney’s story was told in my book Bullied to Death: Chris Mackney’s Kafkaesque Divorce.)
While no one can get inside Dina Mackney’s head, there are several reasons to doubt she was really as afraid of her ex-husband as she claimed and in desperate need of a protection order. For example, her father, Pete Scamardo, is a murderer, convicted of hiring a hitman in 1968 to kill his friend and business partner in order to collect on insurance money, and Dina never expressed any fear of him. Throughout the process, Dina Mackney, her father, and their legal team didn’t respond to numerous requests for comment including one for this profile.
If in fact Dina Mackney was not really afraid of Chris but was using the restraining order as leverage, it would be an example of something referred to as the silver bullet technique, “a system of stripping you of your property, your right to own a gun, and your freedom. It can put you out of your own home, with no access to your own money, your children, or your possessions. It can cause you unlimited legal expenses. It can turn your friends and family against you,” according to the Family Rights Association.
Greg Hession, a Massachusetts lawyer, said the proliferation of the silver bullet technique is largely the product of the way individual states define domestic violence. He said that although each state writes its own law, he’s found that nearly all of them look remarkably similar, which leads him to suspect feminist influence must be at play.
He said the standards in most domestic violence laws include three categories: prior physical violence, prior sexual assault or attempted sexual assault, and the third category, “placing a person in fear of imminent of physical harm.”
Ninety percent of domestic violence restraining orders are based on claims of fear, Hession said, and that includes Dina Mackney’s order. Hession said the so-called fear standard allows almost any spouse in a household where there have been arguments or other turmoil to obtain a restraining order against the other spouse.
As many as 500,000 individuals are removed from their homes each year based solely on so-called psychological harm, according to a 2006 study by Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting (RADAR) entitled VAWA: Threat to Families, Children, Men, and Women. The study said, “This represents a serious breach” of the accused persons’ civil liberties.
As I told Doc, the poster child for the silver bullet technique is Neil Shelton: find my two previous interviews with Neil.
Neil went into greater detail on his experience with the silver bullet technique when he appeared with Megan Fox and I in 2021: starting at approximately thirty-three minutes in.
Neil’s ex-wife, like Hession noted, claimed she too was afraid of Neil, even testifying that while he never actually hit her that he intimidated her, and she was especially worried now that they were divorcing.
This sort of marginal evidence is often all it takes to get a protective order. With the protective order in place, his ex-wife repeatedly called the police to claim he was driving by her home and violating the order. This caused him to be arrested numerous times.
To understand just how widespread the use of the silver bullet technique is, consider a video now available on YouTube.
The star of the video is Leslie Levy, an Assistant District Attorney with Williamson County, Texas. She spoke to a group of Texas divorce attorneys and schooled them in the most effective way to get a protective order.
“Who here has handled a divorce, filed a protective order and referred it to my office? I’m going to tell you why you shouldn’t do that,” Levy said shockingly.
“A protective order carries criminal consequences. Accordingly, that makes it a pretty heavy tool in negotiating a divorce. If it goes through my office, it’s a lot harder to use it to negotiate a settlement to your divorce.” Levy said. “So, I would encourage you very strongly, if you have one of those cases, to do the protective order as part of your case. It gives you more leverage in negotiating a settlement.”
A protective order is supposed to offer protection, not be used for leverage, and yet, here is an Assistant DA explaining how to manipulate the system to use it as leverage.
The silver bullet technique is very real.
