Predatory ‘Officers’ of the Family Courts

Bandy X. Lee
5 min readFeb 18, 2023

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Since I testified for the Colorado legislature, I have learned a great deal more about Family Courts. The picture keeps growing darker, with stories of horrific harm being done to children and the (especially) mothers who try to protect them.

Family Courts could, theoretically, be antidotes to violence and be promoters of justice, as they are supposed to be. But nowadays, a 50 billion-dollar industry underlies American Family Courts, directed at going beyond even selling “justice” to the highest bidder, to outright subversion of the law. Vulnerable women and children are often losers of their life. Indeed, Family Court judges would make the Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, “kids for cash” judges look like benevolent benefactors.

Among the “officers of the court” who make these immoral schemes possible are the guardians ad litem of children. Evelyn Nissirios is a name I will note, first because her deeds are public knowledge, secondly because transparency seems to be the only antidote to the corruption of the Family Courts (never have I seen Courts more exceedingly fearful of sunlight!), and thirdly because the New Jersey State Police contacted me about a particular article on her.

I will start with my call from the State Police. There was indeed an alarming article on Nissirios, and apparently she believed I wrote it, since I have a family member whom she victimized. While the facts in the article are true, I have no knowledge of who wrote it, never gave any such information, and the article contains far more than I could ever obtain.

I therefore wish to use this opportunity to denounce any violence or racist rhetoric, noting that I have devoted my 25-year career to preventing violence.

I tried to use the opportunity to get information from the State Police on how one can hold Family Court actors accountable. He, like all other law enforcement personnel, did not have a satisfactory answer. This is the problem: while law enforcement believes Court affairs are being dealt with in the Courts, judges and Courts almost never punish wrongdoing among themselves.

This is perhaps how Nissirios could get away with 150 lies to the Court (as documented with the police in this one case), aggressive character assassination campaigns against the mother, and sadistic messages intended to “break” her children psychologically (that their mother has abandoned them; that their mother wants nothing to do with them; that they will not see their mother for a long time; and that their mother no longer loves them, etc.). Nissirios has full control after forcibly transferring the children to their violent abuser — a wholly unnecessary, Court-created crisis.

She did so by helping the violent father seize them from their loving mother, through criminal co-conspiracy in a malicious prosecution and a surprise police raid. The malicious prosecution was that the mother was “absconding” with the children, despite it being the weekend Nissirios herself had scheduled for the mother, as her first full weekend with her children in one-and-a-half years. A lone father lying to the police would not have been believed, but a “guardian ad litem” of Family Court buttressing his words helped to dispatch a SWAT team.

Even though the father illegally ripped away children who were crying and clinging to their mother through a criminal act, with the help of a “guardian ad litem,” once the children were seized, the Family Court legitimized his abduction. Additionally, it endorsed his refusal to give the children even one minute of contact with the mother who raised them — for fifteen months and ongoing.

Why was a violent, philandering, pornography-obsessed absentee father suddenly interested in the children he never cared for before? The answer is simple: he did not wish to pay child support or alimony. And whatever he needed to give the Family Court judge and the guardian ad litem to get the result he wanted would be a pittance compared to the money he would save and could extort from the mother, once he warehoused the children. Apparently, this unbelievable scenario is not only common but typical.

Yet, corruption in the Family Courts can be extremely dangerous, since the vast majority of deadly violence children and women experience is within the family. The father in this case almost killed his infant daughter by throwing her in the air to land head first on a concrete floor. He also almost crushed the skull of his seven-year-old son when he slammed the child between a chair and a wall-length window. Other injuries are too numerous to count and well-documented, but evidence does not matter in Family Court.

Far before the forced abduction, the children complained to the mother that their “guardian ad litem” would only talk to them within earshot of the father, but Nissirios doubled down on her practice. When the children became physically sick from having to go to their father, vomiting and becoming immobile from panic, she increased the father’s “parenting time.” When these peaceful, prodigy children started engaging in violent fights for the first time in their lives, as well as injuring themselves and even attempting suicide — because going to their father was “torture” and “worse than death” — she transferred custody entirely to the father.

This was when she and the father orchestrated the police raid, accusing the mother of “absconding” with her children when she, together with her over-stressed offspring, merely wished to access a pool at a nearby hotel. That the father took the children out of state, to a resort hours away in Pennsylvania just a week before on his weekend with them — in defiance of Court instructions to inform the other parent before taking the children out of state — did not bother the guardian ad litem.

In fact, the children had secretly video-called their maternal grandfather for help, with looks of abject terror. Just the summer before the grandfather had experienced them crying out to him, “Please don’t leave us alone with that maniac!” — terrified of being left with their father for even five minutes. Because of this, the 84-year-old grandfather rushed back from Canada, leaving behind a dying friend, but he has still not seen his grandchildren since their violent abduction by police raid, over fifteen months ago.

What would be felonies outside the courtroom — kidnapping, malicious prosecution, and child abuse — are condoned in Family Courts, even as Court actors invoke the law when it advantages them. When the mother tried to sue Nissirios, the latter asserted “absolute judicial immunity” and slapped the mother with a 27,000-dollar penalty for “frivolous litigation.”

Indeed, Nissirios attempted to bribe and extort from the mother, stating that she would need to pay “only” 5000 dollars if she agreed not to allow any more articles on her to post, and to pay “liquidated damages” if anything were published. A third party posted an article on Nissirios within a week without the mother’s knowledge. Does this mean that, if the mother had agreed to those terms, she would be paying Nissirios on a weekly basis for Nissirios’ own crimes? Would she have had to pay for this article? The absurdity that emanates from Family Court corruption knows no bounds, and that is why the mother is appealing her lawsuit.

(To be Continued.)

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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.