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The Unknown Episode 19

In the last half of this episode, Rick and I interviewed Dave Wiegel, a Wall Street guy who was put through the ringer in his divorce. He has some ideas for AI and DOGE.

Richard Luthman and I were back for the usual banter on current events and more.

In this episode, we had an interesting guest on: Dave Wiegel.

Mr. Wiegel saw great success on Wall Street as a money manager. None of that success helped him in New York courtrooms in his divorce and child custody case.

He’s been arrested multiple times. He’s faced the silver bullet technique, where a bogus protective order was used as leverage in his child custody case. His ex-wife used specious claims of abuse to get a protective order and then made even more specious claims that he violated those protective orders.

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He’s been housed in Riker’s even. In fact, after the broadcast, the latest chapter in this “silver bullet technique” saga occurred. Rick Luthmann had more.

The latest alleged plot peaked on December 20, 2024, just days before Christmas. Weigel recounted how he discovered his ex-wife’s plans to have him arrested during a family gathering.

“Imagine being taken away in front of 14 family members and 10 kids, ages six to nine,” he said. “This is the kind of sick, calculated chaos Nottes thrives on.”

Weigel, who has been documenting systemic corruption in New York’s family courts for nearly two years, believes his whistleblowing has made him a target.

“I’ve been contacted by lawyers, cops, and insiders who confirm what I’m exposing,” Weigel said. “This isn’t just about me. It’s about dismantling a system built on fraud.”

The silver bullet technique is one I’m very familiar with. About a decade ago, I participated in a news story from North Carolina journalist Bob Buckley, who detailed Neil Shelton’s saga. Like David Wiegel, Neil was hit with a specious protective order and then even more specious charges of violating the order.

This technique is potent because it’s much easier to get a protective order than it is criminal charges. The label of “abuser” still sticks to the target. The person getting the protective- most often it is the woman- then goes into family court and uses the protective order as evidence that the other side is dangerous or violent.

Rick, Dave, and I also discussed the funding streams which create an industry around false protective orders.

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I wrote about this in 2016, in a treatise about the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). VAWA provides money from the federal government to state and local governments which incentivize filing false allegations.

The enactment of VAWA created what is now a burgeoning bureaucracy. That apparatus, headquartered in the Office of Violence Against Women (OVW) within the U.S. Department of Justice, funnels taxpayer-funded grants to the states and then to local nonprofits. OVW has handed out “more than $6 billion in grants and cooperative agreements to state, tribal, and local governments, nonprofit organizations, and universities.” OVW administers most of the grants, but other federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Office of Justice Programs, also manage some VAWA funds. (Sacco)

Because VAWA grants are filed under such categories as domestic violence protection, training, sexual abuse protection, and victim services, politicians rarely question them, perhaps for fear of being labeled as soft on domestic abuse.

Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley is an exception. In prepared remarks for a congressional hearing in 2013, he observed, “The Justice Department Inspector General conducted a review of 22 VAWA grantees from 1998 to 2010. Of these 22, 21 were found to have some form of violation of grant requirements ranging from unauthorized and unallowable expenditures, to sloppy recordkeeping and failure to report in a timely manner. We should make sure that VAWA money goes to the victims. That hasn’t been the case under the current situation.”

{Ronald} Pierce had three kids, a city job, and lived in a $200,000 home in Dinuba, Calif., in Tulare County, at the time of his divorce. At different times, both sides engaged in adultery, and the marriage ended in 2008.

Pierce had no history of physical violence, and his ex-wife could produce no photos, police reports, or any other documentation to back up her claims. Instead, she used a tactic in the legal battle that is so common, we shall see, that it is has a name, “the silver bullet”: She said she was scared.

The same day he filed for divorce, his soon to be ex-wife filed for an emergency protective order. “I didn’t get accused of domestic violence until I filed for divorce,” Pierce said.

A Tulare officer wrote on March 4, 2008, that Pierce’s ex-wife “told me [she] and Pierce have been married for several years and during that time she has been in fear of his temper. She told me Pierce has an anger management issue. She told me he has never hit her in the past, but he has intimidated her by fear.”

Because she filed for an emergency protective order, Pierce wasn’t allowed to respond to the charges when the judge signed the emergency order from a stack of orders. A formal hearing was scheduled about a month later, but the emergency protective order effectively carried with it a presumption of guilt.

“The hearing wasn’t a hearing at all.” Pierce told me. “A judge had already signed a restraining order,” and so the hearing was a rubber stamp for the restraining order, which was renewed repeatedly for the next two years.

Pierce’s nightmare was only beginning. He was forced into a battery of services at his expense, all to be conducted at the local domestic violence shelter, Family Services of Tulare. The shelter ordered an assessment on him, his ex-wife, and their children, all at Pierce’s expense, and if he didn’t go along and pay, the program implied that he would be punished with denial of access to his children.

When the assessment couldn’t find any hint of anger issues, the shelter became creative: “I was accused of creating an ‘atmosphere of abuse’ because I wouldn’t leave the home when she demanded it,” Pierce said.

“The DV [domestic violence] shelter recommended its next service be court ordered—reunification therapy. Of course the court ordered it, and for the next year and some, I attended reunification therapy as did my children—separately. We were never reunited in this therapy. Always the promise dangled out there, but never actually happened.”

(Reunification therapy is a controversial so-called therapy (see https://www.yahoo.com/parenting/the-controversial-therapy-thats-shaping-custody-128797596692.html) which puts a court-appointed professional in charge of re-introducing a parent who has previously been removed from children’s lives.)

The total for all these services quickly exceeded $10,000, and Pierce could no longer afford rent. He lived for months out of his car.

About a year and a half into the process, penniless, homeless, and still with no access to his children, Pierce had had enough; he pulled records on his judge and all the financial records of all the judges in his courthouse. Along with that, he pulled the public tax filings of Family Services of Tulare. In the IRS filings, Pierce found a line item which explained the source of his problems: VAWA. Family Services of Tulare had contracted with the courthouse to provide domestic violence services for anyone deemed a victim or perpetrator by the court.

In 2009, Family Services of Tulare received $1,716,138 in violence and abuse response, prevention, and intervention grants. The same year, the group’s total revenues were $2,109,647. In other words, VAWA accounted for nearly all the group’s grant funding that year. In 2014, the latest year with tax filings available, the group relied less on VAWA, receiving $1,477,561 in similar grants out of a total revenue of $3,312,030.

Pierce discovered an insidious conflict of interest: The more cases of domestic violence identified and put through the bureaucratic process, the more grant money Family Services of Tulare County received. That means it was financially beneficial for this nonprofit to deem as many men domestic abusers as possible.

VAWA was introduced into Congress in the 1990s by then Delaware Democratic Senator Joe Biden.

As the three of us discussed, the elimination of programs like VAWA was something that we hoped that Elon Musk and others at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) would take up. Other programs like VAWA including the Fatherhood Initiative, Social Security Title IV B, D, and E.

All these programs provide financial incentives to pervert the family court system. Social Security Title IV D, as one example, provides federal money to states and local governments to chase after deadbeat non-custodial parents- mostly fathers. This creates incentives for local courts to create deadbeat parents.

Dave Wiegel also talked about an AI program he continues to work on which he hopes will replace judges in child custody cases.

Dave came on about halfway through.

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Michael Volpe Investigates
Michael Volpe Investigates
I give voice to the voiceless with true original reporting on topics the rest of the media is too afraid or lazy to cover.