Disgraced Principal Michael Piacenza Leaves Ridge Elementary School

Bandy X. Lee
7 min readSep 14, 2024

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A Principal who Aided and Abetted Child Abuse, Now being Federally Sued, Transfers to Another School

Michael Piacenza abused his authority to arrest falsely three innocent people, including a world-renowned physician, in order to intimidate them as witnesses and to tamper with the creation of evidence. The reason? To protect and criminally collude with a duly-diagnosed psychopath and violent abuser and abductor of children. Now, he has been demoted to his previous position, and the atmosphere at Ridge Elementary School is already improved. At the time of Piacenza’s false arrests, the mother wrote a heartfelt letter to him, which others deemed moving enough to publish: “Who will You Be, Mr. Piacenza?” Rather than repent what he had done, Piacenza punished the mother with yet another false arrest, for doing the same volunteer work she had done the previous five years! All charges against these three people were dropped within five minutes of being heard, with the prosecutor calling Piacenza’s charges, “obviously overblown.” Whether the former principal did all this to satisfy his need to be a “pseudo-jock,” or whether there was financial incentive involved, he would not have dared such acts without the involvement of a corrupt Family Court. In June of this year, I added Piacenza to my federal complaint, alongside Family Court actors who seem to believe that piling on co-conspirators will somehow “justify” my niece’s and nephew’s violent abuse and abduction, which continue to this day. Regardless, the Ridgewood School District has failed to investigate these allegations of abuse — despite complicity with child abuse carrying equal legal weight as commission of child abuse — and merely transferred the contemptible man to another school. I cannot help but recall how the Catholic Church handled abuse allegations among its ranks until an outcry and overwhelming pressure came from the public. Far from taking the lead in investigating or mitigating harm against children, it abdicated its role until forced from the outside. If institutions charged with protecting the most vulnerable members of society are busy covering up their exploitations of them instead — and Family Courts veritably creating an industry of doing so — who will safeguard our children? Is it any wonder that child murders by parent in the U.S. are among the highest in the developed world, and Family Courts responsible for up to one-fifth of them? I can now finally publicize the letter I wrote to Piacenza before the false criminal charges he heaped on us were heard:

March 9, 2023

Mr. Piacenza:

I have learned that you lied to the prosecutor on the deceitful machinations of an abusive, pathologically-lying parent who is ironically using the school system to hide his abuse. You personally caused and are solely responsible for the arrests of three innocent people, including a world-renowned doctor and expert on child abuse I was escorting, who had come down from Massachusetts specifically to do his legally-mandated duty to investigate child maltreatment. You embellished and rescripted the facts for your malicious, vindictive, and slanderous ends. Your malfeasance and dereliction of duty not only caused grave injury by arresting these three innocent individuals but caused great disruption to the entire school body, students, teachers, parents, and the Ridgewood Police.

You violated the law by believing one parent without even bothering to consult the other — an egregious breach of the inherent responsibilities of a school principal. As if arresting three innocent people was not enough, you are willing to give false testimony to have us imprisoned to justify your false arrests. I do not believe you realize how much you have incriminated yourself, and you have no idea of the severe legal consequences you are going to face for acting as if you had impunity, which is certainly not the case.

Giving false testimony to the district attorney is a crime, and you are putting yourself in serious legal jeopardy. Therefore, think twice before you continue to tell your contrived, fictitious stories and indict yourself further, because this is all going to be publicly known when I file my suit against you and the school — and specifically against you personally for your unprofessional and disgraceful conduct.

You are not going to ruin the life of an innocent mother, or the careers of two doctors who have dedicated their lives to protecting victims of violence, because you were foolish enough to be bamboozled and manipulated by someone who has been diagnosed by three prominent forensic psychiatrists to be a psychopath. If anything happens to these two children, I am going to hold you personally responsible. You are the sole cause of the arrest of three innocent people, abusing and exceeding your authority as principal. I can only conclude that your actions are motivated by your willingness to serve as a lackey of a pathological liar and a sadistic perpetrator of child abuse without any investigation.

Others are giving you deference right now only because they do not know how you have aided and abetted a sadistic abuser of children, and the harm that you have done in the arrests of three innocent people. When they find out, they will deem you a dishonor to all the principals who preceded you at Ridge Elementary School, as well as all the other principals in the Ridgewood School System.

How dare you pick on an innocent mother. Is this what you do? Is this your idea of intramural sports, to take a petite woman grieving for her children, and to have a whole police department descend on her as your lynch mob? [It came out in the discovery that, after the police chief deliberated for forty-five minutes, mumbling to himself, “I can’t arrest her based on this,” and finally told Piacenza that he could not arrest the innocent mother based on what he gave him, Piacenza told additional lies in order to ensure her arrest.] Why would you do this? Do you have an issue with Asian women or against Korean-Americans?

To say that you are the shame and embarrassment of any educational institution is an understatement. You are out of control. While you have been trained by Alan T. Chan to do his vicious bidding, what you do not know about him is that, when charges are filed against you, he will act like he does not even know you. And as he has done to many others, he is going to throw you under the bus and disappear.

Because of you, the custody of these children has been given to a sadistic, pornography-addicted, substance-abusing, and psychopathic father. He has a history of a temporary restraining order for giving his son a head injury, and since he has taken the children, his daughter has a shoulder injury that was neglected for months.

Not only that, you helped him further hide his abuse by denying Patricia Lee her constitutionally-protected right to access her own children’s school records, when all she wanted to do was to monitor their wellbeing, after one of her children had fifty-six absences in the first seven months after their violent abduction [she was a prodigy student with perfect attendance before; of note, Piacenza further tampered with the electronic attendance record system called Skyward, not only to block the mother from access but to reduce the confirmed absences by half!].

Why would you hide these records if you were innocent? Are you so gullible to be taken by the lies of an abusive father, that you are willing to go to these extremes to jeopardize your own position, not to mention these children?

And most disgracefully, you willfully and maliciously sabotaged the urgent medical mission of two doctors who were investigating the unspeakable abuse these children have suffered. Instead of welcoming and supporting their investigation, as any competent principal concerned about the welfare of children would have done, you vindictively and maliciously orchestrated their false arrests. Why would you commit such heinous acts? You are acting more as the protector of a violent father than a protector of innocent and vulnerable children.

I do not think you can even begin to fathom the enormity of your crimes for actively colluding with a man who is hiding his abuse, and your aggressive enabling of his abuse by going as far as to arrest two internationally-respected physicians to prevent their seeing them — or even discussing this urgent matter with you, which was the purpose of our visit. And if this weren’t unscrupulous by itself — you have now gone out of your way to compound your indefensible, illegal actions with a series of appalling and abhorrent lies to the prosecutor, in which you have perjured yourself with the deplorable intent to justify your false arrests.

You have simply gone too far. Because of your actions, I will have no choice but to hold you personally responsible for your malfeasance and abrogation of your solemn responsibility as a school principal. You do not know that the web that you have woven against myself, my sister, and a renowned forensic professional is for your own legal entrapment.

I therefore suggest that you act as a responsible school principal entrusted with the solemn duty to protect innocent and vulnerable children.

Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div.

P.S. Attached are the New Jersey statutes on child abuse. The violations of Alan T. Chan, the parent whom you have chosen to protect, are notated in red. The statutes which you have illegally violated are notated in red and bolded.

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Bandy X. Lee

Forensic psychiatrist, violence expert, president of the World Mental Health Coalition (worldmhc.org), and New York Times bestselling author.