Who’s Afraid of Making a Ruling?

Bandy X. Lee
8 min readJan 7, 2024

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The Most Terrifying Thing for a Family Court is Exposure — and the Most Frightening Thing for a Family Court-Shielded Predator is Accountability

Family Courts rely on public presumptions to escape scrutiny. For example, something so benign-sounding as, “Family Court,” does not inspire inspection; the very name absolves it of criminality! People may think of shows like “Judge Judy,” where issues such as who would have the couch after divorce, and how to divide up holidays with the kids, are weighed — nothing as dark as the actual entity. But what if it were named closer to its actual function? “Children’s Slaughterhouse” would stimulate far greater interrogation for the same number of child murders — one every six days — either orchestrated or ignored by Family Court.

This is partly why Family Courts are terrified of the truth getting out. As of now, it defies public imagination that an entity called a “Court” would be breaking the law, much less be a criminal enterprise. It is difficult to consider that, hidden in a judicial system that is supposed to be a pillar of civilization, there lies an island of barbarism that rivals any genocidal camp. Most would find it inconceivable that court “seals”, claimed to be for the protection of children’s privacy, are in truth being used to hide heinous crimes against children. Secrecy is precisely what makes the vulnerable even easier prey.

Judges are assumed to be upstanding members of society, not ringleaders of criminal cartels. Guardians ad litem for children, furthermore, are perceived to be professional officers of the court, not hatchet jobs hired to harm — and sometimes kill — those under their “care”. But secrecy is precisely what allows Family Courts to get away literally with murder.

Therefore, when major magazines published my fact-checked interviews on Family Courts, Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca panicked. She immediately ordered that they be “unpublished” — which caused one outlet to take down its article for two days, and another to do so for two months. She eventually received a stern warning from one of their legal departments, as follows:

this order requires that the [referenced article] must “be immediately removed, deleted, and unpublished”…. I would appreciate hearing from you as to how the order possibly could apply to [Magazine], given that [Magazine] is not a party to this lawsuit, had no notice that such an order was being sought, and almost certainly is not subject to the court’s jurisdiction. In addition, it appears obvious to me that even if the order expressly covered the [Magazine] article, it would functionally be a presumptively unconstitutional prior restraint against ongoing publication.

Gallina-Mecca apparently never learned, despite becoming a subject of national ridicule when, in 2015, an author of the Washington Post reported on her extraordinary act of ordering the takedown of a newspaper article. The newspaper responded at the time:

While the Bergen Dispatch reviews its options we have confirmed that Bergen County does currently remain part of the State of New Jersey and that currently New Jersey is still part of the Union of states that is governed by the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. As such, Bergen County citizens continue to enjoy the right to freedom of speech and the right to a free press.

The newspaper editor sued Judge Gallina-Mecca, whose motion to dismiss was denied. Curiously, just two days after the his triumph against Gallina-Mecca’s attempt to dismiss the lawsuit, the editor was found dead, after a sudden incarceration for “child neglect.” He had just won an award for “Courage under Fire” from the New Jersey Society of Professional Journalists.

Now, the same judge cannot seem to make a ruling in my sister’s case. An initial trial date was postponed from July to August, September, October, and November 2023, and now to mid-January 2024. Will it happen this time? We will have to see: terrified of exposure, she and her accomplice, Evelyn Nissirios, have also not been able to grant the children even one minute of visitation or phone call with their mother in two and a half years, depriving the Christian children a third Christmas to be with their Christian mother — even mass murderers have more parental rights than this model mother, once reputed to be “the best mom” in her neighborhood! They know that the crime of imprisoning these children with their violent, hedonistic, substance-abusing, and porn-addicted father — not to mention duly-diagnosed psychopath and anti-Christian who screamed at the children for wanting Christmas decorations — will be explosively obvious within a half-minute of exposure to any adult who truly cares about them.

Draconian, airtight secrecy is how they disguise what is in truth a child theft operation — to be sold not only to the highest bidder, but to known child abusers and murderers (in cases where a sibling has been murdered). Thus, whenever evidence of injury and trauma surfaces, the response of Gallina-Mecca and Nissirios is to tighten information access even further: absences in one-half of days of school and drops in grade since the custody switch have led to a block in access to all school records for the mother; a failure to thrive, going from average height and weight to becoming the smallest in their classes, has led to a blockage of pediatric records and instructions to all other parents not to send photos to the mother; and notifications of repeated emergency room, orthopedic, and dental surgery visits have led to a complete overhaul of providers, so that the mother cannot even know whom the children are seeing. Who does this unless guilty? Here are the players in her case:

‘Child Therapist’ Barbara Maurer

As the Family Court-mandated children’s “therapist”, she charged the highest rates the mother has ever seen, with barely a non-social work master’s degree. Since the mother is well-versed in psychology — as a social psychology major, daughter of a child psychology professor, and sister of a psychiatrist — she recognized that Ms. Maurer was not performing anything remotely resembling therapy, but could not reach her (she would not return calls, whereas any message from the father was answered within minutes). The children, who were suicidal because of the father’s abuse, became acutely more suicidal following each session. Finally, when the children refused her “therapy”, she locked them in her office and traumatized them. I reported her to her licensing board, which adjudged her guilty and removed her — only for the Family Court to mandate the children to another “therapist” — this time, sealing the identity of the new “therapist”.

‘Guardian ad litem’ Evelyn Nissirios

More brutal than a street gangster, that this “children’s” guardian ad litem from the start worked only for “the best interests” of the monied child predator was apparent from the degree to which she had to lie — almost 200 documented times on the record. When the children asked to talk outside the earshot of their father, who threatened them with police and jail if they said the “wrong” thing, she refused. When the children started vomiting and becoming immobile with panic before visiting, in their words, “the scariest person” with a “black heart,” she increased their time with him. When these children became suicidal, injured themselves, and tried to set the house on fire because going to their father was “torture” and “worse than death,” she wholesale helped him kidnap them via violent police raid, by falsely framing the mother as “absconding” with her children on a weekend Nissirios herself assigned the mother to have them. Now, he has the children full-time, and the mother has not seen or heard from them in two and a half years. In order to achieve this illegal “custody switch,” Nissirios buried suicide notes, attempts to set the house on fire in protest, emergency room visits for suicide attempts, emergency follow-up visits after suicide attempts, and letters to the Court asking to fire her, so as to crush their voices and hand them over to a man who nearly killed each of them on different occasions.

‘Judge’ Jane Gallina-Mecca

That the Family Court “judge” was the orchestrator of these crimes is obvious from her extreme control of the narrative, as noted above. She also endlessly appointed needless court actors, simply to increase the number of people parroting her concocted stories. This included a guardian ad litem for the mother, Linda Schofel — despite nine psychiatrists and doctorate psychologists unanimously declaring that the mother had “excellent mental health” and did not need a guardian ad litem, whereas the father was deemed dangerous and unfit to parent. First, Gallina-Mecca refused to hear any medical testimonies, and when one expert submitted his report anyway, she ordered it destroyed. Secondly, she obstructed three Child Protective Services (CPS) investigations by allowing the father to threaten the agency, after which they promptly closed down. Thirdly, she forbade the children from seeing a psychiatrist but mandated them to go only to “therapists” willing to program them. Fourthly, when two forensic psychiatrists tried to make a legally-mandated report of child abuse, she arrested them, in a form of witness intimidation. Lastly, she threw out reports from nine psychiatric experts of national and international renown, but admitted an unqualified, unlicensed “associate counselor,” Tara Devine, because the latter was willing to contradict all nine actual experts. Also involved was pediatrician Karen Wu, who retracted her statement that the children are being abused and falsified her medical records to match. When no true psychiatric expert would render an “assessment” to her liking, Gallina-Mecca even suggested that the mother be blindfolded and taken by chaperone to a third, clandestine location to see a no-name “psychiatrist” of Gallina-Mecca’s choice, whose identity and credentials would never be revealed, even to the mother’s lawyer — who is the crazy one here?

The Father

The father in this case is unhinged enough to jump at the chance of hiring Gallina-Mecca and Nissirios as his hitwomen, believing he would gain an edge in his divorce, and therefore not much needs to be said about him: abusers act as abusers — it is Family Court availing this “opportunity” that is anomalous. A corporate lawyer and student of Alan Dershowitz, this father thought he was being clever when he hid his extensive background of psychopathic abuse and neglect, in order to marry into a family he thought would improve his social standing. He attempted to murder his wife six times, twice with the hired help of the Gallina-Mecca/Nissirios duo (it would not be the first time, at least for Gallina-Mecca). Incompetent in anything real, he is a criminal mastermind, having wiggled himself out of a financial fraud scheme he helped orchestrate, while his former boss was fined 38 million dollars. At home, he led a parasitic lifestyle, pleading poverty to extract money from his in-laws. When his custody was in jeopardy for almost killing each of his children on different occasions, he stole their passports and fled with them across state lines — in violation of Court directives — only to be discovered when the terrified children called their maternal grandfather. But all this was unnecessary: with the help of Nissirios, he turned around and maliciously prosecuted the mother for “absconding” with the children, after he himself agreed to her having them that weekend, accusing her of his crimes, so that he could seize the children and imprison them for the extortion of six-figure “child support” from the mother (the real reason for his interest, and the Court’s interest, in these children).

*The father will be named in my upcoming book, The Dangerous Case of Family Courts, where several other accomplices in child endangerment, such as school officials, will also be named. Additionally, there will be a documentary and a television series designed to expose bad actors and to hold them accountable, where Family Court would rather assist them.

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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.