New Power Plays in Family Court : Divorce: A growing number of women who were once married to influential men are challenging a legal system that they say cheats them.
As Shirley Kirsten tells it, her divorce over the past few years has been less a dissolution of marriage than a postmodern version of the 1944 film “Gaslight.”
Her psychiatrist husband, she has alleged in court, falsely labeled her psychotic, coerced her into a seven-week hospital stay and forced Prozac down her throat.
She claimed in an interview that in the ensuing divorce and custody dispute, her husband used his credentials and influence to sway the medical and legal professionals in Fresno. (Neither he nor his attorney responded to interview requests.)
But unlike the Ingrid Bergman character, Kirsten--a concert pianist--taught herself legal procedures and sued her husband and the hospital. She spoke to the press. She went on “Sally Jessy Raphael.”
The divorce is now final but the custody dispute is ongoing. She remains in the family’s six-bedroom home with their six children, she said. The hospital settled but she lost the battery and defamation suit against her husband, who claimed he was only trying to help her with her delusions and depression.
Nevertheless, Kirsten sees herself as the moral victor. The point, she said, is that while many traditional women divorcing powerful men might walk away in tears, “This community saw someone fight back.”
She is among a growing number of women formerly married to doctors, attorneys, judges, entrepreneurs and celebrities who are challenging a family law system they say still functions according to the old saw, “He who has the gold makes the rules.” They say this bias cheats them out of money and property, and damages their relationship with their children.
“We’re angry,” she said. “We’re doing stuff about our cases. We’re not just crying in our pillows.”
In organizing other Fresno wives, Kirsten is following the example of the growing Alliance for Divorce and Marriage Reform, a 4-year-old support group based in La Jolla, where emotions still run high over the case of socialite and convicted murderer Betty Broderick.
The middle-aged homemaker had been losing a bitter legal dispute over property and custody of their children with her ex-husband, Dan Broderick, a prominent San Diego attorney, when she shot and killed him and his new wife in 1989.
Alliance co-founder Ronnie Brown said many members, including some men, can relate to Broderick’s anger and frustration over a perceived lack of justice in family court--a legal outpost where they say judges are rarely held accountable.
Brown said alliance members don’t condone the Broderick shooting. But, she added, “The legal and judicial system in this town bears a large responsibility for that tragedy. . . . There are some honest attorneys out there who say she got a bum rap (in family court).”
Particularly in smaller cities and towns, she and others said, family court decisions seem to be based less on the law than on gender bias, good-ol’-boy back-scratching, and the ability to pay for aggressive attorneys and sympathetic psychologists.
The group claims a mailing list of 400, mostly full-time homemakers, and a chapter in Denver.
Task forces in 21 states--composed of judges, lawyers and social scientists appointed by states’ chief justices--have found disproportionate gender bias in family law, affecting women more often than men, said New York attorney Lynn Hecht Schafran, who directs a national program to promote judicial equity for men and women, sponsored by the National Assn. of Women Judges and the National Organization for Women. Nineteen others are studying the issue.
The problem is not new, just more openly discussed, Schafran said.
“Now people talk about it all the time,” she said. “But it isn’t getting any better.”
She said complaints of injustice are particularly common in smaller towns, where the power base comprises people who “all hold hands.”
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In California, family court is part of the Superior Court system, handling divorce, child custody, child support and any other issue related to the breakdown of a family. The structure varies from state to state; last summer the American Bar Assn. supported a motion to consolidate all such matters under a family court judge.
Growing frustration in several cities is reflected in the installation of metal detectors in family court and the rising number of people representing themselves, now 40% in Southern California, said Janet Bowermaster, professor of law at California Western School of Law in San Diego and a consultant to women’s rights activists. In Santa Barbara, judges have been given bulletproof vests. “We’re close to crisis level,” she said.
While divorced men have gained attention recently by protesting what they say are custody and support biases against them, the ex-wives of prominent men talk of never-ending legal battles with controlling husbands who hide assets and use tactical delays to wear them down financially and emotionally.
San Diego attorney Sharron Voorhees, chair of the family law advisory commission to the State Bar of California, said some high-powered men manipulate their assets in anticipation of divorce.
In one case, she said, a man reduced his annual income from $3 million to $400,000 by restructuring his business loan to make higher payments. “Then, of course, he was awarded the interest in the business,” she said. The wife was awarded spousal support, which is subject to modification at any time. “He’s totally in control of it.”
Beyond losing money, Voorhees said the affluent longtime homemakers experience a “psychological undertow” of lost identity marked by dramatic drops in status and lifestyle.
Beth Waggoner, founder of the Denver chapter of the alliance, said she has watched the divorced women in her affluent neighborhood move out with their children into small apartments. “When I run into them at school functions, they’re exhausted, they’ve worked all day and taken care of the kids at night. Now they’re trying to come back to school in the evening to hear the orchestra concert. They look tired. I’m watching them get old--old in a hurry.”
One Alliance member, a mother of two school-age boys, said she is facing eviction and taking church handouts while her ex-husband, a developer and civic leader, is donating to charity and taking expensive vacations. They are fighting for custody and her share of what she says was once a $2-million business. “I get so frustrated, I end up crying all the time. It’s abusive, what he’s doing to us. Lying all the time. He doesn’t send support. I don’t have an attorney to represent me.”
Another member said she is now seeking her sixth attorney in 11 years to settle a dispute with her ex-husband, a physician, over his pension and profit-sharing plan. Meanwhile, she said she has applied for food stamps and has no health insurance.
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The most wrenching stories involve accusations of child abuse. While some accusations that arise in custody disputes are indeed false, some mothers said judges have sided with abusive husbands, awarding them custody on grounds that the mothers trumped up the accusations and alienated the children from their fathers. Moreover, they said the judges ordered records to be sealed, or gag orders on the mothers.
One 44-year-old mother said that after she ended a brief marriage to an abusive attorney, he was awarded custody of her son even though he was not the biological father. She said she is now $80,000 in debt and homeless. The judge, her ex-husband and the court-appointed attorney he paid for were “in cahoots,” all agreeing she had brainwashed the child into thinking he was molested, she said.
“They found me guilty of abusing my child without arresting me or having a trial,” she said. “I’m going ballistic.”
Bill Harrington, national director of the Washington, D.C.-based American Fathers Coalition, said there is “partial truth” what the alliance says on economic issues.
“Any type of high-income client can manipulate the court system to their advantage if they are willing to spend the money to reach that goal. The other party is at a definite disadvantage,” he said, noting that those cases are in the minority. But, he said, “courts tend to favor mothers in custody and child-abuse claims, where high-income men are just as easily derailed as low-income men.”
In regular meetings, the groups of activist divorcees are helping each other with support, information on court procedure, and names of judges and attorneys to be avoided. Alliance co-founder Ronnie Brown often accompanies women to court.
Some, such as Kirsten, represent themselves in court and teach others how to take depositions and file briefs. As her own attorney, Kirsten said she questioned her ex-husband on the stand for eight hours.
Another judicial activist, Cindy Hart of Santa Barbara, has been representing herself for two years in her divorce settlement and has become a force behind a drive to unseat Superior Court Judge Bruce Dodds. “He (said) in court, ‘All I have to do is look at her to see if she had psychological problems’ and I walked out of his courtroom with a psychological ruling,” she said.
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Acknowledging in an interview that he might appear insensitive at times, Dodds affirmed that he found Hart had a mental disability: “After listening to her, it was clear she had some psychological, emotional problems.”
In general, he said litigants find themselves in family court through a “self-selecting process. We see the ones who have problems. . . .”
Many litigants come in seeking vindication, Dodds said, but civil courts deal only in financial resolutions. “We turn people’s sorrow into dollars and cents,” he said.
Dodds, recently re-elected, said confidentiality requirements prevent him from commenting at length on a report in the Santa Barbara News-Press that he is being investigated by the state Commission on Judicial Performance for judicial misconduct. But, he said, “There are no allegations relating to Cindy Hart,” or a second woman who complained that Dodds minimized the sexual molestation of her son.
An American Bar Assn. official said family court reforms are necessary, but would be superficial and would not address the real problem: the inherent emotion and trauma in a contentious divorce. “When a man and a woman break up a relationship, all hell breaks loose,” said attorney Raymond Trombadore, chair of the ABA’s professional discipline committee.
An ABA report, following a series of national public hearings in 1989 and 1990, concluded that most charges of bias and injustice were individual, based on perception, and not systemic. “I don’t doubt people come out of this system with tremendously bruised sensitivities,” he said. But “it’s the bitterness, the rage of those two people which produces the result, not the court, not the lawyers.”
Alliance member Lori Graham of Del Mar replied, “I think they want to protect their own. The system itself is incestuous. The (Bar Assn.’s) highest income earners are family law attorneys. . . . The system itself creates trauma. It’s pure vampirism.”
Both agreed a new system would help.
“Maybe what we need to do is ask whether we ought to be in this business in the first place,” Trombadore said. “Maybe these people ought to be turned over to a more predictable, less conflict-laden system so they don’t use the system to generate all this Sturm and Angst. “
Meanwhile, NOW’s Schafran said, “Women have to be much more savvy about the system. Women have to be much more independent about their finances. Women who chose to stay home are making a perfectly respectable, wonderful choice. They should know the risk they run in making that choice.”