Domestic abuse is often viewed as a private affair that should be dealt with discretely. However, without public scrutiny, domestic abuse festers like a cancer, metastasizing to take over families and communities. My greatest sadness in failing to publicly expose the years of financial abuse and the years of extreme emotional abuse was that my sons must now struggle with learning that the norm in relationships is not what they saw and heard while growing up. They must learn that the black eye/bruised orbit, broken nose/gash (12 stitches), broken finger, and torn rotator cuff/ruptured bicep that I experienced while “cleaning up” my Ex’s damage/messes in the house only happened, were only “accidents” because of his cruelty. He knew enough to avoid going to a high school reunion with me when I had my black eye, because he was afraid of public scrutiny.
Oh, but he wasn’t afraid of public scrutiny when he could use it to facilitate his abuse. On multiple occasions, he used the police to threaten to arrest me after he locked me out of my own house and home office. He used the courts to file false affidavits, claiming I was abusing him and that I had dissipated funds to hide his own abuse and dissipation.
How did he get away with this in divorce court? First, he cut off all of my access to funds, including monies to pay an attorney. Then, he shut down my ability to run my practice. He used the courts to stall providing my attorneys with “level playing field” monies, until my attorneys would give up and quit. He never produced the discovery that indicated the monies he hid, the monies he dissipated, and the size of the retirement accounts. Since evil hates the light of day, he got away with all of this because his attorneys did his dirty work behind closed doors, in the judge’s chambers, so that I could not protest the lies they perpetrated.
Our country’s Constitution has protections requiring one’s right to confront one’s accuser as well as equal protections. Evidently, due to a wide latitude of judicial discretion, our society’s gender bias allows fraud to be perpetrated behind the closed chamber doors of divorce court.
How could he get away with saying I “refused to work” when I’d filed a schedule C profit and loss statement for my private practice every year for over 20 years? How could he get away with claiming I did not contribute to the family when I always paid for the private nanny/housekeeper for our kids, instead of investing in a retirement account for myself?
Because I failed to leave soon enough, his indirect physical abuse began escalating to direct shoving & threatened strangling (i.e. hands on neck, but no actual bruises to prove it), and his financial abuse escalated from withholding funds to using the courts to take the entirety of retirement assets after 26 years of marriage (including my own tiny non-marital IRA, which I had carefully kept segregated from marital funds).
Domestic abuse does not just affect the woman. Domestic abuse produces a twisted legacy, passed on to the generations. It is easy to say a woman should “just leave.” Especially if the woman still has young children, the courts will force her to continue to expose her children to the abuser (but probably without her being present to protect them). Especially if there are young children, if the choice involved in “just leaving” means staying in an abusive house (with access to food, clothing, and transportation) or homelessness and destitution, then it is really no choice at all.
If someone you know is escaping domestic abuse, please help her in any way you can. 70% of women who are murdered by their domestic abusers are murdered after they have left.
If you know of corruption in the courthouse, are there ways you can get documents to investigators? Lawyers and judges are ethically bound to report the fraud of attorneys and judges. As long as fraud and corruption remains hidden, it will continue to kill our communities, one family at a time.
Tags: abuse, domestic abuse, gender bias, hidden abuse
