The unspoken side of domestic violence

For countless survivors of domestic violence who muster the courage to leave their abusers, the court system becomes a breeding ground for more subtle manipulation and abuse tactics.

“When I hear people talk about leaving abusive relationships and why it’s so hard, a lot of the reasons involve emotional ties, fear and how you get caught in a cycle, and all of that is true, but there’s another side of it that is less talked about,” said Molly Kate, a domestic violence survivor from Massachusetts. “Part of it is that leaving isn’t a direct line to safety – and I didn’t know that.”

In domestic violence cases, litigation abuse remains largely unchecked and tends to pass without repercussions.

Common abuse tactics include filing repeated, baseless motions against a victim to force them into court and drain their financial resources; cross-petitioning for protective orders to confuse the court as to who the perpetrator is; and, in cases like Kate’s, where the abuser and victim share children, seeking custody of the children, despite never having expressed any interest in them, as a way to retaliate against the victim.

“A lot of these things go on right beneath the awareness of the judge in family court,” said Dr. Lisa Goodman, an award-winning clinical community psychologist and professor at Boston College who studies intimate partner violence. 

“The harming partner just gets away with it, and the survivor can be slowly diminished, controlled, sabotaged and financially drained, and without any recognition on the part of the judge that this is happening.”

In Kate’s case, in the four years since she divorced her abusive ex-husband, she’s had to undergo 43 court hearings and counting. He’s made more than 400 court filings and has spent millions of dollars in attorney fees to keep her in court.

“I am drowning and drowning in fees, and there’s just no way I can keep up,” Kate said. “He once told me I’d never be able to really leave him. I understand now what he meant.” 

In a case closer to home, Patty Rickman, a domestic violence survivor living in Long Neck, left her abuser three years ago and has been trapped in a whirlwind of litigation abuse ever since. She alleges her abuser has repeatedly lied under oath, violated protective orders, blackmailed and coerced her and her friends, and filed motion after motion against her in multiple courts across Sussex County.

She has submitted evidence of this abuse, but said the courts are not coordinating to put the pieces together and are failing to recognize the pattern.

“There is no justice if a victim is supplying evidence and [the courts] are not looking at it; they’re not cross-referencing with other agencies, they’re not coordinating,” Rickman said. 

According to intimate partner violence researcher and University of Tennessee associate professor Dr. Megan Haselschwerdt, America’s courts lag far behind in understanding post-separation abuse, assuming that victims are automatically safe once they leave an abusive relationship.

Even in the intimate partner violence research field, post-separation abuse is a relatively new topic of exploration, despite in no way being a new phenomenon.

“This pattern, in which coercive control within a relationship extends, even after separation, into the legal system has been going on forever, and it is so shockingly common,” Goodman said. “It’s like a hidden world.”

She gets calls and emails all the time from women in situations like Rickman’s and Kate’s.

“They say, ‘Please help me. I’ve used up all my resources. I don’t know what to do. I’m being skinned alive in court,’” Haselschwerdt said.

Indeed, at the hands of her abuser, Kate has drained her savings, put her career on hold and lost precious time with her children in an effort to keep up in court.

“Even when I win, I lose – time, money, peace of mind,” she said.

Judges in probate and family court see litigation abuse so frequently that they often become immune to it or jaded, said Massachusetts attorney Alexandra Deal, who represents Kate and has more than 20 years of state and federal litigative experience.

“There’s a really demeaning, horrific saying that goes around probate and family court that ‘Tens don’t marry twos,’” Deal said. “I’ve heard that from a number of attorneys there, and it gets thrown around between judges and clerks. The idea being, both of these people are crazy, both are at fault.”

If that attitude persists, Deal said, then those judges will never be able to realize that this is a real issue, and that it’s not an instance in which both parties are equally culpable. 

Acknowledging it is the first step.

“Without the legal recognition of litigation abuse, judges are left to apply bandages rather than solutions,” Kate said at a hearing in June for a proposed Massachusetts bill aimed at identifying litigation abuse.

Only four states – Washington, Idaho, Vermont and Tennessee – currently have specific laws to address and prevent litigation abuse. 

In Delaware, Rickman and Jacqueline Sterbach, founder of the Sussex County nonprofit What Is Your Voice, are proposing such a law. They’re calling it Patty’s Law.

It would define litigation abuse, use party- and case-specific analysis to identify abusive patterns across jurisdictions, prompt better coordination between courts and aid judges in differentiating between abuse and legitimate use of the legal system.

Read more about the proposed legislation in Part 1: The courts as a weapon.

“Once this is in law, it will affect the whole State of Delaware,” Sterbach said. “And so many people are crying out for it.”

“I will fight for myself and other victims,” Rickman said. “I will be the one to challenge the norm, to stand up for other victims behind me. I will forever be the person to speak my voice, because the need is here, and the time is now.”