Critogenic Death

We Should All Care, for We are All Catherines

It did not take long to happen: someone I know has suffered Family Court-caused death. It was not just anyone, but a brilliant former prosecutor and special attorney to the governor who actively used her knowledge of the law to seek justice. But since Family Court is a lawless land where criminal violence is not prevented but permitted, promoted, caused, and directly dealt to loving mothers (and occasionally fathers), nothing she did would matter.

I did not know her well, but my conversation with her — at the time over a common client, who was another victim of Family Court — left an impression with me of her intelligence, compassion, and psychological development. She was Catherine Kassenoff, former U.S. attorney, former special counsel to the New York State governor, and devoted mother.

She chose to end her life by medical suicide, after she was stripped of her children, her homes, her job, her assets, and her health — and was diagnosed of terminal cancer after not seeing, for several years, the children she raised, ages 9, 12, and 13 in 2018.

“I cannot survive this torment and the grief that comes from such a prolonged separation from my children,” she wrote in her farewell letter. “The court system did this to me…. It is a predatory system that functions in darkness — through ‘gag orders’ like the one in my case, through a publicly-inaccessible docket, through a closed courtroom, and through ex parte ‘temporary’ orders that are in place for years.”