The Cost of Custody When Your Pain is Profitable

How badly have you been bilked?

Protective parents, how badly have you been bilked?

How much have you had to pay to lawyers, custody evaluators, visitation supervisors, therapeutic interventionists, guardian ad litems, court-appointed psychiatrists— in the continuing effort to maintain contact with your kid(s)?

I’m working on a pitch for the McGraw Fellowship in Business Journalism, hoping that I could get the fellowship’s support and bring more attention to the plight of protective parents. The fellowship includes funding up to $15,000 for reporting expenses and, importantly, they can help place the story.

(As you may know, I launched this Substack partially out of frustration that I could not get an outlet to host the story of Ruth and Boy, the protective parent and her son who I came to know through my two year investigation. This was for my master’s thesis; I received a MA in Journalism from Columbia University a few years back.)

Could I ask for your help? If you have had to pay and pay and continue to pay in order to maintain contact with your kid(s), could you drop me a note? You can message me here or email me at <protecttheparents@proton.me>.

I’d like to speak with a couple protective parents and learn about the costs they’ve had to incur in their custody battle.

Here is the initial, draft pitch I’m working on for the fellowship.

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Ruth’s fridge is decorated with drawings from her son, Boy. It’s a capsule collection that includes finger painting from kindergarten, then crayon and pencil drawings from elementary school. An assortment of hand-made cards traces time’s progression through the holidays. In a Valentine’s Day card dotted with pink and green hearts, Boy wrote, “I love you Mom, you never force me.”

Evidence of Boy is everywhere– drawings, photographs, half-built Lego structures– but he’s not here. His room is upstairs, the small bed neatly made and encircled with buckets of plush toys and books. Boy has never slept there. Since Ruth moved into the townhome five years ago, she has not had custody of Boy.

Ruth and her ex-husband, Josiah, divorced shortly after Boy was born. While in Josiah’s care, the child has sustained a steady stream of injuries. These include lacerations encircling the wrists and ankles, genital bruising, and five-inch burn marks on his torso–in the shape of Josiah's metal smithing tool. Since Boy could speak, he’s been talking about his father touching his “privates” and taking photos of him without clothes. In spite of all this, Maricopa county family court judges have continually allowed Josiah to maintain primary custody and full legal decision-making.

Josiah alleges that Ruth is guilty of “parental alienation” and has brainwashed her son to make false allegations. “Parental alienation syndrome,” (“PAS”) is a term first coined in the 1980’s by Richard Gardner, a controversial psychiatrist whose ‘research’ was not peer-reviewed. PAS has been rejected by the World Health Organization, the UN Human Rights Council, and the American Psychiatric Association. Yet the debunked theory holds sway in family courts across the U.S. and the world. Once accused of “being an alienator,” Ruth was restricted to ten hours of supervised visitation per week.

Why?

The prevailing theory for why PAS persists is because it is so lucrative for a cottage industry of unregulated roles acting as the intermediary between parent and child. Over the course of the ongoing custody battle, Ruth has been required to pay for custody evaluators, visitation supervisors, therapeutic interventionists and court-appointed psychiatrists. She estimates she has spent $300,000 over the past five years in order to maintain contact with her child. In ProPublica coverage Dr. David Corwin, former president of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, commented that, “[parental alienation] almost exclusively affects children with higher socioeconomic status.”

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I want to do an investigative feature about Ruth’s experience with the Maricopa family court, focusing on the financial costs that the protective parent incurs when accused of alienation. From my research on media coverage of this topic, and conversations with experts who have worked on this issue for decades – there has not been an investigation that drills into the financial element of this problem.

Detailing the charges surrounding these high conflict custody cases will help a national audience see through the facade of junk science and expose the racketeering that is harming, and sometimes killing, kids.

Thank you for your consideration; I hope we could work together.

[end of pitch]

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Trying my dang darnest to make this pitch successful, I’ve reached out to previous fellows for their advice on my pitch. Here is what they’ve shared with me:

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I have three pieces of advice for the app:

1) Because it’s McGraw, you need to follow the money. The storytelling is great but it’s only the last paragraph of the pitch that really gets at the systemic/economic issues of these cases. Bring that nutgraf up higher in the pitch.

2) Include a roadmap for how you’re going to report this. Aside from Ruth, who else are you going to talk to? Name specific lawyers, judges, parents, psychologists, adult children who were once caught in these cases. The experts who make a living doing these visitations and offering testimony. Also, is this story specific to AZ or is it national in scope?

3) Don’t show your bias so much. It’s clear you think PAS is phony. But you’ve got to at least demonstrate a willingness to engage with its proponents, even if it’s to show why/how they are wrong.

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The question I'd have here (and that McGraw will definitely have) is: Beyond the one family's story, what evidence do you have (or know you can get) that shows the bigger pattern -- that there's a cottage industry/racket of folks making big bucks peddling junk science?

The evidence would need to be strong enough to convince editors that (a) readers will find it persuasive, and that (b) their publication's libel lawyers will believe you're on solid ground.

I for one would definitely be super-cautious about hitting the livelihood of folks who use the court system for what sounds like a good living -- and whose reputations are the core of that livelihood.

This might be the kind of story that requires a deep-pocketed outlet like ProPublica to really execute. The money from McGraw might not be enough? (In our case, it wasn't -- we were lucky to get additional support from other sources.)

Actually: MAYBE what you really want is one of those ProPublica local-reporting fellowships. (I know: Those aren't easy to get, and of course you'd be piggybacking on their reporting already, which who knows whether they'd be flattered or ... )

So... I dunno! There's no reason not to pitch McGraw. You could get feedback, money, and other support, and I don't see what you've got to lose.

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Thanks for reaching out! I think this is a really interesting pitch. Since the McGraw fellowship is business focused, I'd really hone in on the structural factors at play and the money. Following Ruth is great for storytelling and for the intro to the pitch, but later in the pitch, it often helps to zoom out and explain the bigger picture - how many people does this impact? What systems allow this to continue? Is there a way to 'follow the money'?

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First, and most importantly: It's clearly a deeply worthy story on an under discussed topic.

Second: I think for McGraw specifically, you will need to more comprehensively detail what we do know about the financial costs of the various intermediaries. And what if any regulation/credentialing/etc exists around these cottage industries? And what if any benefits they're proven to have (or not)?

Third: you will want to detail the impact those costs have on parents who suffer them. Mental health? Bankruptcy? Eviction?

Fourth: it might also be worth getting a sense of who pays for what (ie, does the court pay for some), and when parents are saddled with the costs, why--and is that legal? (Usually states have statutes about what services CPS agencies must cover.)

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Thank you for reading. And if you have any comments on the pitch, ways to make it better, anything that’s unclear or you think is left out— please share.