Rick Luthmann and I are back for episode 4 of The Unknown.
We started out talking current events, as usual.
Afterwards, Rick updated on Paul Boyne’s case. He and Paul had an interview from the McDougall Correctional Facility in Connecticut, where Paul remains a prisoner.
We also talked more about reunification camps. Last week, we featured an article in the Wall Street Journal.
Tori Nielsen was 16 when she and her 12-year-old brother were whisked away from their mother at the Maricopa County courthouse by four strangers in a white minivan on the morning of May 27, 2021.
The strangers wouldn’t tell Tori and her brother where they were going, she recalled, as the siblings held hands and cried in the back seat. After hours on the interstate, they arrived at a hotel somewhere by the ocean. The strangers, three men and one woman, barricaded the door to their room with furniture so they couldn’t leave, Tori said.
The next morning, she remembered one of them saying: “You’re going to have a meeting with your father now.”
What Tori didn’t know was that a judge had ordered the children to attend a four-day family reunification program in Ventura, Calif., with their father. The judge determined it was the only way to repair their relationship, damaged during a decadelong custody battle, court documents show.
The children had been living mostly with their mother, Angela Nielsen, and resisted seeing their dad because of his temper, Tori said. But court-appointed evaluators determined that Nielsen was poisoning the kids against their father. She was suddenly barred from contacting her children to ensure they no longer rejected their dad.
Check out my interview with Tori.
Since, there have been at least two more articles on the scourge of reunification camps. One was published in Medium.
This troubling pattern is not isolated to Judge Jackson alone but reflects a broader issue of judicial corruption in Maricopa County. One stark example of this corruption involves the assignment of providers such as therapeutic interventionists Raymond Branton, David Weinstock, and Robert DiCarlo, who own Intensive Family Transformations (IFT). These providers are accused of conducting intense, hours-long sessions aimed at manipulating children to reconcile with their abusive parents and subsequently recommending custody changes to the courts. For instance, Raymond Branton of IFT — who has an open police report against him from Mesa PD that documents a claim that he was masturbating in front of a child during one of his therapy sessions (see report below) — recommended unsupervised visits for an abusive father indicted in Kentucky (see case above in Daily Beast) a recommendation the court accepted, allowing the father to have unsupervised contact with his children. These providers often advocate for sending children to reunification camps with abusive parents, away from their preferred, protective parent.
Branton was one of the court appointees on Tori’s case. He was none too happy when he found out that I was working on a story.
Parties and Counselors,
Below is an email from a so-called "investigative journalist," Michael Volpe. Obviously I did not contact him back. However, I'm extremely concerned that this individual is even contacting me about this case. Please tell me who contacted or has communicated with Volpe about this case and what information or narrative has been provided already to Volpe. To be clear, I do not give Volpe permission to continue to contact me, I will not respond to him, and I do not recommend anyone talk to him about this case.
For your information, I consider Volpe to be an unethical hack, as he has harassed others in the past and seems to have no problem making assumptions and believing false narratives, and then trying to publish (or present online) those false narratives and opine about things he clearly does not understand or about which he does not have all the facts. By the way, upon research, it seems that several of his previously published stories have had to be retracted by the organizations that published them because it was found that Volpe included false and inaccurate information. In my opinion, he is akin to an "ambulance-chaser" and I caution anyone that might be interacting with him or providing him with information. I certainly do not think it is appropriate to interact with him specifically about this case (if anyone has already done so or is planning to) and I will be providing this information to the Court and asking the Court to consider a gag-order regarding this case.
Dr. Branton
{None of my stories have been retracted. The rest of his rant is his opinion.}
Another was featured in the Denver Gazette. In this story, a father has been charged with sexual molestation, but the family courts have continued trying to “reunify” him with his other children. Incredibly, the children’s mother has been sent to jail for refusing to go along with reunification therapy.
A retired Aurora police sergeant faces criminal charges for raping his daughter and continually sexually assaulting her and his two adopted daughters, but he remains free from custody while his ex-wife is in jail for objecting to court-ordered reunification therapy meant to repair his relationship with two of his sons.
The mother, Rachel Pickrel-Hawkins, said the reunification therapy by Christine Bassett, a licensed marriage and family therapist, has been harmful, abusive and counterproductive. For now, the mother has custody of the couple’s minor children, and they are living in a domestic violence shelter. She said that she has arranged for family members to care for her children when she goes to jail.
The mother said Bassett has supported the efforts by her ex-husband, Michael Hawkins, to gain sole custody of their two youngest sons, now 10 and 13, and has psychologically tortured the children along the way.
Rick wrote an article we discussed. He’s been trying to interview one of the more notorious figures in reunification therapy: Linda Gottlieb. He spoke repeatedly with her media person, but to no avail. In the end, she declined the interview.
Here are some of the questions he wanted to ask.
Each question gets to the heart of the problem I have with parental alienation. For instance, “how is PA medically/clinically diagnosed?”
The answer is that it is entirely subjective and the opinion of the expert. There are no standards, and in each case, the expert is shooting from the hip.
In the Rucki case, Sandra Grazzini-Rucki was deemed to be a parent alienator because all her kids said they were abused but the so-called experts didn’t believe the children.
In that broadcast, current Minnesota judge Laura Thomas stated, “The mom presents the child with a toy right before the father is scheduled to come and get the child for parenting time. So, the exchange happens with, well you know, now you have this great toy but now you can’t play with it.”
Judge Thomas’ garbage take is an example of what I say, “Parental alienation is whatever each person wants it to be,” including giving a child a toy.
No one who propagates parental alienation can say how it is diagnosed because no one diagnosis it. Each so-called expert decides based on their own subjective view if something is parental alienation.
Rick also wanted to know, “Why does parental alienation have a clinical basis?”
The answer is it doesn’t. There’s nothing standardized about PA. As such, Judge Thomas can determine that giving a child a toy is parental alienation.
In 2018, I did a story about Julie Goffstein. She, her then husband, and their six children were all orthodox Jews. Her husband, Peter Goffstein, stopped being an orthodox Jew and the rest of the family did NOT follow him.
He called that alienating.
Parental alienation “refers to a mental condition in which a child, whose parents are engaged in a high-conflict divorce, allies strongly with one parent (the preferred parent or alienating parent) and refuses to have a relationship with the other parent (with rejected parent or alienated parent) without a good reason,” according to Bill Bernet, a professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Vanderbilt University.
Dr. Joy Silberg, who is president of the Leadership Council on Interpersonal Violence, said the term is often misused; her organization found in 2008 that approximately 58,000 children per year are forced to live in an abusive home by American family courts yearly, largely due to the false diagnosis of parent alienator to a protective parent.
Peter Goffstein argued that his ex-wife’s religious choice was alienating him: “In so doing, Mr. Goffstein cited as reasons for the change in custody Mrs. Goffstein’s religious practices and the extent to which she imposed those religious practices on the children, which he claimed alienated the children from him,” a lawsuit filed by Julie Goffstein noted.
This sort of ubiquitous interpretation of parental alienation allows just about anyone to claim they are being alienated.
The rest of Rick’s questions are illuminating as well. Since PA is whatever each person wants it to be, so is treatment.
Ms. Gottlieb couldn’t or wouldn’t explain, “What is your/Turning Points {her company} methodology for treatment?”
In Rand’s case, Tori described being forced into a van with four strangers, driven for about ten hours, placed in a hotel where she was forced to sleep in the same room with these strangers.
Here’s what she said happened after that.
Then, for two days, she watched useless videos. Then, she was forced to answer numerous questions.
Her brother had strep throat and Dr. Rand didn’t bother to get him the medicine to treat it.
Repeatedly, she was told if she ran, or didn’t cooperate, she wouldn’t see her mom, but instead, she would be sent to a wilderness camp.
After that, she was kept away from her mom- the safe parent- until she turned eighteen and forced to live with her abusive dad. Her brother remains in his custody. That’s the methodology.
UPDATE:
In the case in Denver, the court is trying to reunify the father with children he’s not accused of molesting. I originally erroneously stated it was those children. I have fixed the error.
The Unknown Episode 4