My Affidavit against Jane Gallina-Mecca
A Judge the Advisory Committee on Judicial Conduct will Not Investigate, despite Numerous Violations, Multiple Murders, and Evidence of Incompetence, Outlined under Oath Below
1. My name is Bandy Lee, M.D., M.Div. I am a forensic psychiatrist who has performed for criminal and civil courts at least 200 mental competence evaluations over twenty-two years. I taught at Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School for seventeen years and am now at Harvard Medical School. I am cofounder of the Violence Prevention Institute and president of the World Mental Health Coalition. In 2007, I coauthored the United Nations Secretary-General’s chapter on “Violence against Children,” and since 2011, led a project group for the World Health Organization Violence Prevention Alliance. I served as an expert consultant for the U.S. Senate as well as multiple state and foreign governments on prison reform. I am a recipient of the National Institute of Mental Health’s National Research Service Award. I authored an internationally-acclaimed textbook, Violence; more than 100 scientific articles; and over 300 opinion editorials in major newspapers such as the Guardian and the New York Times.
2. This affidavit concerns Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca, presiding over the divorce case, Alan T. Chan v. Patricia J. Lee, FM — , in which Patricia Lee is my sister. It has repeatedly come to my attention that the Judge may be exhibiting signs of mental incompetence.
3. The extensive body of evidence I have accumulated on her ethics violations, criminal code violations, Constitutional law violations, and human rights violations, confirmed by the top legal experts of the country, suggest that her highly irregular conduct may also be consistent with mental incapacity.
4. Some of it seems to be plain abuse of power and apparent criminality: she proceeded with a predetermined verdict in the case, with an outcome of forcibly transferring two children from their healthy and happy household under their mother’s lifetime care to the “care” of their previously absent, abusive, duly-diagnosed psychopathic father with no experience in parenting but problems with substance abuse, pornography addiction, multiple extramarital affairs, and a family history of psychopathic abuse and abandonment. As a result, the father with no skills or interest in parenting recruited his feeble, 87-year-old father with chronic hepatitis B to relocate from Michigan to act as their surrogate mother and father.
5. Alan T. Chan makes a million dollars a year but lied about his income to his family and took almost 900,000 dollars from his in-laws. He is an unindicted co-conspirator in a financial fraud scheme that resulted in a 38 million-dollar fine for his former employer, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigated his current employer multiple times under his management. He attempted several times to cause the “medical” death of his wife, apparently to collect life insurance and to avoid his financial obligations. He almost caused the death of both his children by head injury and was on a temporary restraining order (TRO). When he filed for divorce — while deceiving his family he would not — he outlined a plan to seize the children, the house, child support, his legal fees, and to pay no alimony. He is now demanding 100,000 dollars per year in child support from his wife who has been a full-time mother for twelve years, and Judge Gallina-Mecca is in lock-step, planning to demand all this of the mother.
6. Judge Gallina-Mecca, in order to help her favored litigant achieve his goals, participated in the orchestration of false arrests as a form of witness intimidation; meddled in criminal cases in order to obstruct justice; tampered with or fabricated physical evidence with the goal of “fixing” her predetermined verdict; and tampered with witnesses to create false evidence to stigmatize my sister as “psychiatrically unstable.”
7. Judge Gallina-Mecca also deprived the mother of a legal defense by violating due process, holding ex-parte meetings without even notifying the mother or her lawyer, and without cause or evidentiary hearing, raiding the mother with five police officers and seizing her children, based solely on Alan T. Chan’s lies, to deliver them to him (the father, who actually tried to abscond with the children the week prior, had the delusional belief that the mother might be “absconding” with them, without basis). The mother has not seen or heard from these children for almost three years, but the Judge’s orders do not state a reason why.
8. My opinion that Judge Gallina-Mecca does not possess the capacity to perform her function is corroborated by three dozen other litigants under her who have reached out to me following my expert testimonies to state legislatures and my public interviews, and their experiences of her usurpation of their parental rights without due process, despite no prior problems parenting, in order to favor violent abusers, are almost identical to this case.
9. At least three other forensic mental health experts who examined the evidence and performed multiple collateral interviews expressed similar concerns regarding the Judge’s unfitness, in ways they never witnessed before in their decades-long careers.
10. At least one judge who has personally interacted with Judge Gallina-Mecca has expressed concerns regarding her mental fitness.
11. Here, however, are the reasons why I believe Judge Gallina-Mecca is deficient in mental capacity to perform her role: her alignment with Alan T. Chan, in giving full custody to a man diagnosed with psychopathy, which is a contraindication to parenting; her compulsive “fulfillment” of his delusional desire for total domination and control over his family; her taking his every word for incontrovertible truth for the past four years; and her seeming projection of her own mental compromise when trying to “frame” the mother as being mentally incompetent. Indeed, when the guardian ad litem she herself appointed — Linda Schofel — declared the mother “fit”, the Judge immediately fired her and refused to issue an order documenting the result.
12. Judge Gallina-Mecca has also ignored ten other reports in favor of the mother by renowned psychiatrists and doctorate psychologists, one of which is ninety-six pages long.
13. Among these reports by renowned psychiatrists and doctorate psychologists were six that declared or confirmed the father to be unfit and a danger to his children, but she suppressed them, including by ordering one of them to be destroyed.
14. Instead, she relied on the sole report that contradicted the above consensus, by an unqualified, unlicensed “associate counselor” — Tara Devine — who believed that the mother’s “tangential speech” disqualified her from being a mother.
15. When the mother’s lawyer had to recuse himself from the case for personal reasons relating to another client, just days before the trial by no fault of the mother, Judge Gallina-Mecca proceeded with the trial, without allowing the mother time to look for another lawyer.
16. In fact, Judge Gallina-Mecca altogether excluded the mother from her own trial, by revoking the Americans with Disabilities Act office’s grant of her remote access from home, as she had done for the past three years, due to a life-threatening medical condition.
17. Even more alarmingly, Judge Gallina-Mecca placed the mother under “default”, when she had been actively participating all along. She claimed that the mother “refused” a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation, but in truth, the children’s guardian ad litem, Evelyn Nissirios, who was charged with finding a psychiatrist, failed to find a single psychiatrist to the very end — while during the same period the mother was able to find and undergo ten evaluations by top professionals from around the country (all of which the Judge negated).
18. Finally, Judge Gallina-Mecca “sealed” all courtroom records, even from the mother who is a litigant (she cannot access transcripts or see motions and orders against her), for no apparent reason other than to escape accountability for her abuses of authority. She prohibited the mother from speaking to me about her case, even though I am her closest support and only financial resource, and ordered that fact-checked articles containing interviews about my personal knowledge of my sister’s case be “unpublished” (the news outlets refused — and the Washington Post cited her First Amendment violations dating back to 2015). When the Judge’s egregious deeds were separately exposed under an independent investigation for which the father’s attorney was an informant, giving out copious “sealed” court information, the Judge obsessively persecuted only the mother, despite her innocence.
19. Indeed, the mother, who had no psychiatric problems even after thirteen years of emotional, psychological, sexual, physical, and financial abuse and coercive control under her husband, was newly diagnosed of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), only after Judge Gallina-Mecca engaged in courtroom bullying, psychological abuse, false accusations, and threats against her, while supporting her husband’s violence against his family by denying its very existence — while she blocked my and others’ testimonies from her courtroom, the Division of Child Protection and Permanency (DCPP), and the Child Abuse Hotline.
20. From the very beginning, Judge Gallina-Mecca displayed temper outbursts against Patricia Lee, and if her lawyers mounted an effective defense, she cowered them into compliance (one of them stated he “almost had a heart attack”). The Judge made every excuse to exclude me as a fact witness, even though I was a primary, firsthand witness of the father’s daily violence against his wife and children for fifteen months. She also once accused me of standing in as an “imposter” in court for my sister, revealing her prejudice that “All Asians look alike,” and would not accept proof that I was at work that day. Additionally, she was caught on camera, exclaiming, “What do I do now?!” in relation to me. She unwaveringly favored Alan T. Chan in all her decisions, even after he tried to abscond with the children following a TRO for causing his son a head injury; indeed, she helped him kidnap them the very next week.
21. Judge Gallina-Mecca showed an inability to take in facts or information that she did not like or that contradicted her preconceived notions favoring the father. For example, when evidence of his violent assaults and financial fraud schemes surfaced, she obstructed all investigations, including by DCPP, to protect him. She overruled his TRO by mandating the children to visit him, even as they attempted suicide and were police-escorted. Instead, she barred the mother’s access without explanation, when she has no history of abuse. She even disbelieved medical records when she did not wish to admit that the mother was in the emergency room with a life-threatening condition, which she herself helped cause.
22. Judge Gallina-Mecca showed a rigid inability to correct course, but expended inordinate energy negating positive reports on the mother, no matter their caliber, while doing everything she could to help the father create false “evidence” to incriminate her. For example, she excused him and the children’s guardian ad litem from a mandatory court conference — which the mother had to attend — so that they could orchestrate the arrest of two world-renowned physicians on their way to report his abuse. Not even the prosecutor could see the secret orders for their arrests, and the charges were instantly dropped.
23. Judge Gallina-Mecca also facilitated the mother’s arrest through secret orders that not even the arresting police officer could see — which remain “hidden” for two years, to this date. The Judge has a history of concocting backdated “court orders,” one of which the clerk of court confirmed was “manually entered” months after the date.
24. Judge Gallina-Mecca showed an inability to consider consequences of her decisions, as she could not cease abusing her authority to arrest, harass, and punish the mother and members of her well-reputed, law-abiding family of doctors and professors (the mother herself was a trusted executive in the New York State governor’s office, in charge of coordinating federal and state law enforcement and all First Responders on Ground Zero after the 9/11 terrorist attacks). The ignominy of suffering arrest under Judge Gallina-Mecca almost caused her death while under custody. The Judge also caused me to be incarcerated for the first time, after a twenty-two-year career as an expert advising governments and international organizations on prison reform, including of Rikers Island.
25. Finally, Judge Gallina-Mecca aggressively hid information on the acute decline of the children she claimed to be protecting. Whenever evidence of their injury and trauma surfaced, she further restricted information access against anyone outside the father and his enablers. In response to reports of absences from almost one-half of school and drops in grade, she stopped access to all school records for the mother; to their arrestation of growth, going from average height and weight to becoming the smallest in their classes, she blocked pediatric records for the mother; and to repeated emergency room visits, orthopedic injuries, and the need for oral surgery from dental neglect, she overhauled all providers, so that the mother cannot even know whom the children are seeing.
26. The end result is that two children have been maximally harmed — now showing severe, medically-identifiable physical deformities from stress — without access to their loving mother since the court-conducted forced custody switch three years ago to their violently abusive father, who almost killed each of them on different occasions. The mother, on the other hand, has an impeccable track record of parents and teachers praising her parenting skills and seeking her counsel as “the best mom” — abruptly disrupted only by Judge Gallina-Mecca’s systematic slander of her with a fictitious “mental illness.” Separation from their primary caregiver since birth is one of the greatest traumas growing small children can face; isolation with their abuser causes “soul death,” or irreparable damage to personality development, and lifelong psychological and physical problems that shorten life by decades, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
27. For reasons of her apparent belief in her impunity, and her inability to adhere to laws or rules of procedure under the seeming assumption that she is exempt, I believe that Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca lacks the mental competence to perform her duties as judge. I attach my curriculum vitae for my qualifications to make this statement and recommend an urgent, formal evaluation to prevent further harm to countless children and loving parents.
Signed, Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div., and Notarized on the 3rd day of June, 2024.