Last week, I featured the story of Dr. Luigi DiRubba.
He had his life destroyed by the Connecticut family court system.
He started his divorce in 2016 worth millions and the father of six.
Now, he still has his business and little else, but he’s also not seen any of his six children in years.
The judge who primarily presided over his case was Judge James Kenefick.
Judge Kenefick is a retired judge. He now serves as a referee, or junior judge.
Despite that, Connecticut law allows him to preside and make all decisions over divorces.
Sunny Kelley contacted me after the story with her own run in with Judge Kenefick.
Check out my first podcast with Sunny here.
Sunny’s is arguably the most notorious child custody case in Connecticut history. It was covered by numerous places, though almost never in Connecticut.
I first covered it in “Making Divorce Pay”.
No one understands how corrosive this is better than Sunny Kelley. Her son came home from a visit with his dad and was displaying signs of sexual abuse, she told me. When she took her son to his pediatrician, he described the abuse in detail. Her son was hitting himself, cutting himself, and asking how he would die. Kelley also took her son to Dr. Eli Newberger, the founder of the Child Protection Team and the Family Development Program at Children’s Hospital in Boston, who concluded Kelley’s ex-husband was sexually molesting his son.
As soon as Kelley’s son told her of the molestation, she immediately reported it to the Connecticut Department of Children and Family (DCF). Within days, the allegation became a topic in a court-ordered mediation, and the court appointed more than 10 professionals, all AFCC members, to look into it. Kelley and her family spent about $1.2 million paying for all these court-mandated professionals, and no one throughout the process ever disclosed that all of them, along with all her judges, were members of the AFCC.
“There were, to my knowledge, 11 professionals involved in my case who are AFCC-affiliated, either directly as founders and members, or through publicly funded, AFCC-run [guardian ad litem] trainings,” Kelley said to the Connecticut legislature in January 2014.
Ken Robson, an AFCC member who was appointed to evaluate her son by Judge Lynda Munro, who is also a member of AFCC, said Kelly “was gratified by [her son’s] sexualized behavior like a French whore” and that she “saw him as another rapist in her bed.” Robson, when asked to name psychiatrists who influenced his protocol in Kelley’s case, named Gardner along with several other proponents of PAS.
Kelley remembers AFCC member Maureen Murphy acting extremely inappropriately during Dr. Newberger’s deposition. As Newberger described intimate details about her son, Murphy, sitting with her wife, made sounds which Kelley described as reminiscent of the famous scene from the movie When Harry Met Sally in which Meg Ryan simulates an orgasm.
As the dozen court professionals involved themselves in Kelley’s divorce, her son was never removed from her ex-husband’s care, a blatant violation of protocol when child abuse is alleged. Dr. Newberger was deemed a hired gun by the court and his testimony was dismissed by the judge, Lynda Munro, in favor of testimony from members of the AFCC who deemed Kelley the problem.
Kelley was forced in November 2010 to pay $10,000 monthly for the services of Nick Sarno, another AFCC member, to monitor each of her visits. She has not seen her son since March 2012, when she ran out of money.
The judges in Sunny’s case became notorious, however, Judge Kenefick was only briefly on it.
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