Family Courts as Purveyors of Abuse

Bandy X. Lee
5 min readJun 2, 2022

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Over the four months that my article on Family Courts has been up, many have reached out to me, and already several have shared their stories of similar miscarriages of justice under the same New Jersey judge, Jane Gallina-Mecca.

Here is one of the worst: When a father was accused of abuse, the Court of Judge Gallina-Mecca did something extraordinary. She declared the mother a danger and placed the children under full, unsupervised custody of the father. The mother was to be placed under a gag order, and not even be able to access court records on her own case. No one from her side of the family, including the elderly grandfather, was to have access to the children. No evidence of danger was necessary for usurping the mother’s parental rights; abundant proof of abuse by the father, on the other hand, got buried.

Worse, no further proof can be created. Hence, the children, as they are brutally and abruptly separated from their mother, cannot be allowed to see any medical professional other than those the Court has approved. The pediatrician they were seeing, who previously recognized the abuse and recommended a psychiatrist, soon changed her story. Nine months later, the children have still not seen a psychiatrist. Instead, a Court-mandated “therapist” locked them in her office if they refused her “therapy”. A Court-appointed “guardian ad litem” intercepted all emergency room follow-up appointments after the children tried to burn down the house, not wishing to go to their father. Despite all this orchestration, medical and school records do not lie: the children plummeted in height and weight from 50–75 percentile to 3 percentile, and they went from perfect attendance to missing half their days of school this year, with falling grades despite genius-level intelligence.

The father actually has a diagnosis of “psychopathy”: this means he lacks the normal human qualities we take for granted — such as the ability to love. A masterful disguise easily deceives adults, but not children, as they depend on the real thing like food. This is how we know these children are dying: once they give everything they have to their famished father, they will have nothing left. We just hope the one emotion that drives a psychopath — revenge for whatever he did not receive as a child — does not actively harm them, although we know this is a tall order.

As it turns out, the playbook of Family Courts is well-known:

  1. The rich husband — rarely the wife — tricks the wife into believing she is the crazy one.
  2. Family Court picks up the cues and drives the wife crazy by design — usually by pushing her to her limits, such as by taking her children away and deliberately torturing them (in the above case, the Court actors taunted the mother with details of what they were going to do to the children while prohibiting all contact).
  3. The Court, Court actors, and their overpaid, unqualified — and possibly otherwise unemployable — “experts” declare the wife crazy and the husband sane.

The more psychopathic the husband, the more effortless the process, since the most psychopathic persons are also the most skilled at manipulating others, eliciting sympathy, and covering up atrocities.

These children have now been consigned to their abuser for almost seven months, when they used to find even a few hours with him to be “torture” and “worse than death.” “Gesetz Macht Frei” ought to be the sign at the family court gates, for the principle is the same as, “Arbeit Macht Frei.” Few on the outside will wish to know or to believe what is happening on the inside of those gates, and so collusion is the automatic course. The Allied soldiers had to bring the German people to the camps, so that they might see for themselves what they refused to believe. We will no doubt discover in the aftermath of the current war that what the Russians are doing to Ukrainian civilians is far more horrific than what we are currently capable of believing. It is little different for the countless child victims of the Family Courts.

Corruption in Family Court is a fantasy fulfillment for the psychopathic parent. Just as a world order weakened by corruption allows despots like Vladimir Putin to aggress as if they were ruler of the universe, a Court system weakened by corruption allows the despotic family member to violate as if he were king of the household. Rather than being held accountable, or the rest of the family receiving protection, a psychopath fantasizing about having godlike power over others — as many do, to overcompensate for intolerable inner feelings of worthlessness and inferiority — gets to act out his fantasy when the Court is merely an instrument for hire.

The scam would be seamless, except when there are clear-eyed observers. While the victims have been rendered voiceless through “gaslighting” and intimidation — and what child can prevail against the mind-bending maneuvers of a masterful psychopath, when even adults cannot? — experts, journalists, and (increasingly) fellow litigants can step in. The mother of the said case now has three experts on her side, all highly trained and internationally renowned, unlike the hardly trained and shockingly corrupt (if caught, few would keep their licenses, but meanwhile they make millions) Court-selected “experts” (the highest degree known so far is an “LAC” — whatever that is I do not know). Now, the Gallina-Mecca Court deems highly qualified professionals “dangerous” — which evidently means “dangerous to its plans” — and is on a campaign to track down and terrorize, reminiscent of dictators who target and even kill journalists for daring to tell the truth.

Family Courts, awarded with absolute immunity and impunity under the law, get away literally with murder. In a nation where five children are dying from abuse per day, almost 20 percent of those killed by a parent will have been placed there by family courts. An even greater number will be affected by suicides, and yet these are still only the tip of the iceberg of a legalized system of child abuse, family annihilation, and (potentially) child sex trafficking*.

*Another case under this Judge that may surpass the above, once we have more details, involves the Judge’s similarly isolating young children with their sexual abuser. The grateful abuser, now close to gaining full custody, is expected to “lend” his children to a criminal organization that handles child sex trafficking, in return for his exoneration and unencumbered access to his victims. According to a sociologist who has researched this issue around the country and reported to the U.S. attorney general, Family Courts are an unfortunate “mecca” of child sex trafficking to powerful pedophiles, as an avenue for judges to trade “kids for cash.”

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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.