Unabridged Conversation with Leah McGowan

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So much for making the time to talk to us.

I'm really excited to finally be doing this interview.

So I just wanted to start off with having you give us your full name and what you do.

My name is Leah McGowan

and I am a family law attorney in California.

Thank you.

So tell us about what you do for work.

Like what kind of cases you're typically involved in?

I help people navigate the dissolution process.

I help people craft custody plans that are in the best interest of the children and that work for families.

And I help people divide their assets and figure out support amounts that also work for the family and serve the best interests of the children.

Okay.

And when you say dissolution, you mean dissolution of marriages.

I'm guessing.

Okay.

So I was curious about something I read in

your bio, which is that you worked as a student attorney at U of M's law school child advocacy law clinic before you switched over and did a brief stint in corporate law.

And then you clerked for a judge and then you came back to family law.

So, what sort of called you back to family law?

What appeals to you about family law?

So, I started with family law when I was in law school, and

it's a very intense practice, and you feel like

what happens in a family law case has such a direct and profound impact on people's lives.

And it was a little overwhelming at first as a law student.

I think family dynamics are so complex and to have,

I felt very young to be handling these kinds of cases and these kinds of issues.

So I explored different areas of law and I did corporate law for a while and I did commercial litigation

and again clerked for some judges.

And then my husband was doing a fellowship in forensic psychiatry and case law.

He had to read different cases as part of his training.

And I started reading some of these cases with him and was drawn to it again because I have a reaction to these cases.

And the same reason that kind of

encouraged me to take a step back years later made me want to come back to it because it was just so important and so impactful.

And I felt like I would love to serve these families and be a part of this process.

And at that point, I was a parent.

so I felt like I understood some of the dynamics a little better, or at least had a different perspective.

You know, not a lot of attorneys practice family law.

It's a small bar in California, and it's highly personal and highly impactful.

So it feels like this huge responsibility.

That's interesting that you say it's a smaller bar, which when you refer to a bar, that means the group of lawyers within a state that handles those kinds of cases.

Oh, that's interesting.

So I would assume you probably see a lot of the same people and a lot of the same judges over and over again.

Yes.

In San Mateo County, each judge has over 2,000 active cases sometimes.

There are three active family law judges, and their docket is so impacted.

Wow.

They are true public servants and they are doing the best they can, but they are their docket, so the cases that they are in charge of, it's incredible.

The volume and the magnitude, the depth of the issues and the breadth of them.

Yeah, and you said you mostly work with families on things like custody, and that makes a lot of sense being in family law.

How often do things like abuse come up in those cases?

So not all people who are going through the dissolution process, and when I say the dissolution process, I'm talking about a divorce.

Some people call it divorce, some people, the legal term is dissolution.

Not all people need family law attorneys.

So when someone comes to me, they feel that they haven't been able to work it out with their former partner.

Some people come to me, I serve as a consultant to kind of give them some ideas of what the law is,

the black and white aspects of it.

When people have a custody issue and they need an attorney, that usually means that they're having troubles coming to a child-centered agreement on their own and they need some assistance.

I don't see the

swath of cases where parents are able to work it out by themselves.

So I don't have a representative sample.

So already the people that come to me need some help.

And then of those cases, there are abuse issues.

And so those tend to be the conflict, the high conflict cases where attorneys are needed.

Right.

So you were talking about just how overloaded really the family court system is in California.

I assume that's probably true in all states.

That's certainly what I have gleaned.

So what do you make of that?

Why is it such a small bar?

Why is it fewer judges are taking on this kind of work?

It's a tragedy.

I mean, not every judge wants to practice family law.

It's a tough position.

And in San Mateo,

the judges rotate.

And so the presiding judge will, when a new judge is appointed, the presiding judge will assign them to a department.

It's not a department that a lot of people want to be in.

It has a bad reputation.

You know, not all areas of law have the same cachet.

And family law does not, it's not a prestigious, stereotypically, it's not one of those prestigious positions.

Okay.

It's like teachers.

You know, teachers don't get the respect they deserve.

They don't earn the income they deserve, But their role is essential to the world working as it should.

It's not a cachet.

It's not a fancy role.

But those who do it and are drawn to it don't care about that.

Right.

I mean, that I see a lot of parallels with teachers and also, you know, even having talked to Detective Mike Weber a lot about working in crimes against children and how that really is a difficult line of police work to be in, especially long term, just because of the things you see.

So, I wonder if you could just

briefly kind of take us through

how the family court system works and how that's different from criminal court, because that's something that, especially in the cases that we talk about in medical child abuse cases, which should be ideally covered by both, but often only end up in the family court system or end up there first.

There's a lot of confusion, I think, for our listeners and even for me at this point about how

what those differences are.

So very generally, family law court is part of the civil justice system.

So it's one civilian against the other.

It's one person against another person.

In juvenile court, it's the county against a parent.

So it's the government versus an individual.

So just structurally, that's going to look very different.

In family law court, anyone can bring an action and you're bringing it against the other person.

So it's two grown-ups who are bringing a case, or one grown-up who's bringing a case against the other.

You know, structurally, sometimes the person who's going to win is whoever can afford better justice.

The state legislators have tried to remedy the situation of unequal representation, and it's really good legislation, but Family Code 2030 equalizes attorney's fees.

So if you have one parent with a lot of resources and the other parent doesn't,

this parent with more resources will have to pay the attorney's fees.

So they want it to be a level playing field when it comes to family law cases.

And that's a piece of legislation.

That's a piece of legislation that has passed in California?

Okay.

Okay, interesting.

Yes.

Interesting.

That's one structural safeguard that helps ensure that cases, at least they're supposed to have equal representation because these are important matters.

So it makes sense that there are safeguards to one side over litigating the other.

So

in juvenile court, you have the county.

So it has to come to the government's attention.

So if in the instance of abuse, there are mandated reporters out there, it has to come to their attention, they have to take up the case, they have to be interested in it, they have to understand or see what's going on, and they have to take it up.

So that's really interesting.

So in something where you have the state filing for dependency, meaning

that that child should be taken away from a parent because of abuse, that is not something that would come from a civil action,

from merely a civil action by an aggrieved parent or one family member or something.

That's something that would be the result of like a CPS investigation and those sort of steps from the state itself to get to that point.

Right.

So in family law court, you'll see a lot of cases that the government doesn't pick up.

So I have a lot of cases where CPS is involved, but the government doesn't ultimately take action.

So all those cases that come just up to that line of where the government decides they want to get involved are going to be addressed in family law court.

So you get a lot of gray area.

And the standard for determining custody schedules is the best interest of the child.

So that is a broad standard.

And I've heard it said it is so broad, it can hold a lot of bias, it can hold a lot of prejudice.

You know, it's not a black and white term, it's a standard.

And so everyone has their own views that they bring to the bench, that they bring as an attorney, that they bring as a parent.

When you have

a standard that's that broad, it's hard, it's hard to get, it's hard to know for certain how a case is going to land.

Right, because something like that could encompass everything from child, from actual abuse of some kind, though there may not be the evidence to pursue a dependency case or a criminal case.

And I think that that's one of the trickier things that we talk about.

on this show is that there are forms of this abuse that would not meet you know something like a criminal if it's educational abuse or you're these you know sort of more subtle things that are damaging to a child, but not sort of would not meet a specific law.

So it could be anything from those kind of behaviors to, well,

this parent works more and this one's more involved and this is the parent the child's more attached to to like, to like going over those kind of things, I would imagine happens in family court.

Yeah, there's a full range of issues that the court hears.

And there's the best interest of the child standard.

And the court, when it starts to hear these allegations, facts that people say are happening in a house.

I've heard a lot.

It depends, if it doesn't involve the child,

then it's okay.

You know, what the parent does on their own time, on their own custody time, that's up to them.

You know, a lot of these facts will go into parental judgment.

You know, if someone is engaging in high-risk behavior, even if they're not with a child, they're putting their life at risk.

And so that

demonstrates poor parental judgment, even if the child isn't there.

So a lot of stuff comes in, and these judges hear a lot of

different facts.

And then there are safeguards that it can put in place.

The juvenile court has more authority, which they call jurisdiction.

So the juvenile court can order mental health services and therapy for the kids, therapy for the family.

Family courts have a little less discretion in that area, but family courts can structure custody plans.

They can do, they can restrict one parent's access to a child through, they can can only order supervised visitation.

They can really restrict the amount of time, you know, one hour a week supervised visitation or via Zoom.

So there are a lot of different safeguards.

If they think there's something happening that's not in the best interest of the child, there are many things they can do to kind of ensure that a child has the contact with a parent that

you know, maintains that relationship, but protects the child.

But it's a very tricky balance.

If you look at the code, the first mandate of the court is to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the child.

And then the court's mandate is to ensure frequent and continuing contact between a child and both parents.

So abuse is supposed to trump, but again,

the definition of abuse is not

It's it's specific.

There are examples of abuse, but it's not exhaustive and so when you get into kind of rarer forms of abuse It can take a long time to get protective orders in place.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's interesting because we're sort of talking about like these different standards, right?

So there's recommendations that can be made by the court.

There's a full-on filing for dependency, which sounds like something like filing for dependency would be

a much higher bar, like something where the state feels there is.

pretty significant evidence.

Do I have that right?

Yes.

Beyond that, then there's some of these things that we talked to Detective Mike Weber about where it's a criminal investigation and that's a whole other thing talking about sort of not just that person's relationship to the child, but whether or not there should be other punishments for them.

I want to know, as we were talking about rarer forms of abuse or

forms of abuse that are seen as more rare, whether or not they are is sort of an open question.

So you mentioned your husband, Mike, earlier, who I know, he is a member of the AppSec committee with me and he's also a member of my board for Munchausen Support.

So I wonder, was it through Mike and his work that you first learned about Munchausen by proxy?

Or did you have some awareness of that from your previous work?

I had general awareness of it just

through school.

I took some courses and was familiar with the term.

So I knew about it in college.

And then I learned a lot about it through Mike's cases, but I see it in the family law context.

When I see it, when I have seen it typically, it can be an allegation, a tool used in a high conflict custody situation.

I see a lot of false allegations.

Interesting.

Where the court finds that it's not happening and

it can be used as a tool, which

hurts everybody, right?

Because

it's not a term that should be thrown around.

I think it's a very complicated and difficult to understand

condition.

And when there are false allegations, it's not helping.

No, it's not helping.

And create the right type of awareness about it.

100%.

I mean, I think that's...

That's so fascinating.

And I would love to kind of talk through where those accusations happen when they are false, because I think this is something we really want to, you know, we're really diving into this season is this idea of a false, either a false accusation where someone's knowingly making a false accusation, right?

Which is what it sounds like you may be talking about here.

And then other instances where, you know, we've talked to a couple of the other experts about cases they've worked on where there was a suspicion of Munchausen by proxy because of the way that something about the child's situation was presenting.

And then once they took the first couple of investigative steps, it turned out that was not what was happening.

And the child did have some rare genetic disorder in one case, or there was just something else going on that was not that.

And so I really want to sort of like kind of talk through the anatomy of a false accusation if we can, because we do know that these come up, you know, I've heard this

many times kind of anecdotally that this is an issue that comes up in high conflict custody battles.

And you can sort of see that two ways, right?

It's like, okay, well, that could come up because there's a high conflict custody battle and someone reaches for that as a thing that they could accuse their partner of.

Or if it was really happening, that would almost certainly lead to a high custody conflict battle if one parent was a knowing, non-abusive parent.

You know, we talked to a couple of dads last season that have been through legitimate cases and the custody situation got very ugly in light of what was happening.

So we could sort of see it both ways.

So I wonder if you can talk about this process of finding an accusation to be unfounded.

Like, what does that look like?

Because I think, you know, I've seen cases where the dependency petition failed or the criminal charges were not pursued.

But to me, that does not speak to it disproving abuse by any stretch of the imagination, because those things can happen, you know, for all kinds of reasons, right?

So it sounds like to me, the way you phrase that, you're talking about situations where you genuinely feel like a parent was knowingly, falsely accusing another parent of abuse.

Is that what you're talking about?

Knowingly or ignorantly accusing the other person of this.

So in the situations where I've seen it, oddly, they had eerily similar fact patterns.

There was, you know, one parent was alleging sexual abuse against the gay other parent and the other parent said, well, she's engaging in munchhausen by proxy.

She takes the child to the doctor too much.

In those situations, and I've seen a couple of them,

people's defenses are so up and so high when these kind of charged issues enter the case.

And in those situations, it was, you know, she took him to see the doctor

six times in the last two months.

The child didn't go to school 10 days and you know, it was an earache or something like that.

Very kind of benign.

things.

And there was no medical substantiation.

I think in the cases where it's just kind of summarily dismissed, where it's dismissed kind of quickly, is when there's no support from the medical community

because

one parent saying, oh, well, you know, the other parent takes the child to the doctor too much.

That's the kind of thing that I'm talking about.

So there's zero substantiation from the medical community.

If there's some substantiation from the medical community, it would be an entirely different situation.

So I really think, it's easy for me to say because I'm in the legal community, but I really think the medical community

is really empowered to help in these situations because lawyers and judges have no idea about Munchausen by proxy.

They really don't.

They need to be educated and

they may know just what they've seen in the media.

Judges have some training and family law attorneys will have kind of continuing education courses that they do.

But the medical community can really serve the courts.

And family law courts do require actually, whenever there's a disputed custody situation, the parties in San Mateo are required to go to family court services, which is a mental health professional.

It's rarely an MD, rarely a PhD, but someone with some mental health training and they present the custody issue and

they give a recommendation to the judge.

So that way the judge isn't completely tasked with hearing everything in this 20-minute calendar where the judge is supposed to decide an appropriate custody schedule.

They have the aid of the mediator's recommendation.

Right.

So yeah, because you were talking about how overloaded these judges' dockets are.

And when you're talking about something like munchausen by proxy or medical child abuse,

when it is something more involved than a parent just throwing it out there, especially when you're talking about something like in response to an accusation of sexual abuse, which that's just, I mean, that, yeah, that would seem highly suspect to me if that was seemed like it was a defensive move to not something that, you know, this person had been sort of suspecting for, you know, all these years.

You mentioned relying on the doctors, right?

And we've talked about that at length, that

really the evidence of this abuse is found in

hospital records.

In some cases, there's things like video evidence, but, you know, a lot of it is what's in the medical records, how those don't match up, et cetera.

So it is, they are these voluminous cases, and they take forever to investigate, whether you're investigating them from the juvenile court or on the criminal case.

There's just a lot of documentation to look through.

A lot of the cases that have been covered in the media, from the Justina Pilotiera case to the one that was in New York Magazine a couple months ago, those cases, they're presenting them as

false accusations where a parent had their child removed and unnecessarily, that's the way it's being presented.

And all of those cases that I've read about in the media, it was not

a parent or a family member or like one person that made an accusation and then somehow the system overreacted and separated that child.

It was all because of doctors' reports.

So

I hear what you're saying.

I feel like obviously doctors have to report their mandated reporters.

It's absolutely the right thing to do.

But I worry that the system is failing those children and is failing those doctors who are reporting and then end up getting their reputations destroyed in the media.

This may be just my impression, but I have a hard time believing that many doctors would take that step of testifying in juvenile court and testifying in criminal court if there wasn't evidence to back up what they were saying.

Right.

Due process is a safeguard, but it's when it comes to child abuse, it has to happen

before the court can protect the child.

So, you know, due process, the concept is, you know, you can't take away someone's rights unless there's been this process where it's been proven with evidence that they've done something wrong.

And in a child abuse context, that means the child has to have been abused first before protective measures can be taken.

And the abuse needs to be

evident enough that it's going to make a judge feel comfortable restricting a parent's access or terminating a parent's right.

It's a high bar.

Keeping families together, it's a priority.

And each judge kind of carries out that mandate differently.

But to your point, the evidence of child abuse has to be proven at a pretty high level in order for something to happen.

And which basically means a child is going to have to be abused before it could be protected from that abuse.

You can't preemptively

get in front of this stuff very easily in the case of one child.

Yeah.

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But, you know, and I wonder also, do you think that people in the, within the family court and juvenile court system, because it sounds like there is a fair amount of crossover between those two, because if you have, you know, any family court situation, there's going to to be custody involved with the parents and then there's also going to be sort of these protections of the child and I'm assuming juvenile court is when you have those bodies like the CASA or a guardian ad litum that get involved on behalf of the child does that only happen when there's a juvenile court case or does that happen also just in

custody cases

yeah if especially in cases where there's allegations of abuse they'll be minor's counsel a guardian ad litum so in some of the high conflict custody situations there's an attorney for each parent and then an attorney for the child.

Okay.

And do you think, I mean, just the sort of system as a whole, in particular, the judges who are making these calls, I mean,

do you think that they are knowledgeable about medical child abuse?

I think the judges on the bench are very smart and always want to do the right thing.

and I think they are severely overburdened especially in the last couple years

and I think the best case scenario is if you have a team so an attorney and a mental health expert that can clearly show the judge what's going on so that the judge understands this rare form of abuse.

Okay.

I appreciate your framing.

Have you worked on any cases where there was a criminal investigation of child abuse happening simultaneously?

Yes, a past criminal conviction for child pornography.

I've had cases that involve sexual abuse of children.

Okay.

Mike Weber has talked a lot about that this is very analogous in terms of like the, this is sort of the female version of that, right?

That there's that there are a lot of parallels and that one of the reasons that we think it's rare is because it's actually just not discovered very often and it's not convicted very often.

So most people I've talked to have described it as rare, except when I started talking to all the experts on the committee and then none of them think that it's rare.

You know, something that has been sort of endlessly

like just has so much complexity looking at these cases is that sort of interplay between

what the family court and the juvenile court and like the guardian ad litem are doing and then what is going on in a criminal investigation and how those sort of do and don't work together.

So I wonder just kind of what your

like what your observations have been about when you've had those cases where there is a criminal context, how those come into play in family court.

Well, just procedurally, if there's a criminal investigation going on, the family law court is typically going to be put on hold because the parent has a Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves.

So I mean if there's an active criminal, like the government is prosecuting someone.

What about just investigating?

So that's obviously in the case of when there's, if there is, if they've been charged, then family court will be put on hold until there's a decision.

Is that?

If there's a pending criminal, like someone has been arrested but not charged, often the family law case will be put on hold.

I mean, if you try to depose someone, they'll plead the fifth.

You can't depose depose someone, and they won't make the parent talk at court hearings.

They can if they want, but if they have an attorney, most of the times the attorney will tell the court or tell the client, advise the client not to talk and not do anything, and put everything on hold until the investigation is complete.

So

there is overlap, and there isn't.

The juvenile court trumps family law.

If the juvenile court is involved, one of the parents can't then open an action in family court because they, because there is overlap.

And so there should only be one custody order.

And so the juvenile court, as soon as it's involved, it's in charge of custody.

And then when the case is complete, there'll be an exit order.

And then the family law court can enforce that exit order.

What is an exit order?

A custody plan.

A plan for therapy, for treatment, for drug testing, things like that.

So if a parent isn't following the exit plan or following that quarter, someone can open, file a petition in family court and say, I think

to ask the family court to enforce that exit order.

This is making some of these nuances make a little more sense that I've seen.

So if you have a case where there is,

there are some suspicions of abuse, but there is not a dependency order filed.

But the juvenile court, it sounds like, can make some recommendations about what they think that family should do.

Like

that they should seek some counseling, that they should see therapy, that there should be some restrictions on who's taking the child to what, like that kind of thing.

In the cases where those happen, who is enforcing that?

That's a great question because in family law court, if one parent isn't following the order, they go to the family law judge.

So a parent can kind of make sure the other parent is on track and following the orders.

In juvenile court, it would be up to the government.

So there

ideally is some kind of system of checks and balances.

If they're not showing up to the drug test, you know, there'll be review hearings.

And so at the review hearing, the parent who is subject to the orders will provide an update and proof that they're complying with the order.

And then if they're not, you know, then the government can change the order or do what it needs to do to protect the child.

But it's on the government to make sure that the order is being enforced and there'll be a series of review hearings.

But when a court is so impacted

the time between one review hearing and another and what can happen in between review hearings is you know not in the best interest of the child yeah I mean it can't it's not quick enough right we've seen both in the cases we've looked at we've seen cases where

the not offending parents when our case is mostly the father is protective and does

is the person that brings it to someone's attention and is really standing up for that child.

And then we've seen about, I would say about half the cases look like that.

The other half look like the father is not, is disbelieving that that parent is abusive.

And those accusations have been brought by some other outside person.

And so that father is not going to be the person that brings it up if their spouse is not following whatever sort of court-ordered thing.

So in that case, it sounds like pretty likely to slip through the cracks just because of

the overload on the system.

Well, that would be right.

And it's the family court that I'm familiar with those statistics.

I don't know the statistics in juvenile court, but I have to, I imagine that they are equally impacted.

Well, and we've seen the same thing with CPS when we talk to, you know, we talked to a former CPS supervisor and have done some unpacking of that whole system.

And one of the things that you see in, you know, the second case that we're talking about this season, there were many previous reports to CPS.

And those reports sort of end with this

family was offered services.

Nothing happened ever again.

And that those were things that didn't necessarily like meet that threshold of the state's going to file for dependency, which it seems to me is a pretty high threshold for the state to do that.

And obviously, it also did not meet this kind of criminal statute.

The reason I keep asking about the criminal investigation is we have two cases that we've talked about on this show or that we will talk about.

One being my family's case, the other one being the Mary Welch case, where you had this really

confusing interplay.

And I guess in this case, it is the family court and the juvenile court because of the nature of the charges, but where you had

those two systems, the sort of civil side and the criminal side, playing off each other or like interacting in a way that made absolutely no sense to me.

And I'm just trying to like sort of get a perspective on why things would have unfolded the way that they had.

So in the case of Mary Welch, you had the family court making decisions as though the criminal court didn't exist.

She'd been charged and indicted with this crime.

And the family court, it ended up getting bunted back to family court because the DA decided not to press charges.

And the family court decided that that meant that they didn't have to look at anything that had happened over there, which just seems completely baffling to me.

And in my sister's case, the family court judge who oversaw the dependency hearing

ignored what the doctor said and gave her custody of her kids back.

And that was while the criminal investigation was still ongoing and they hadn't filed charges.

And so I'm trying to unravel all of that.

But you sort of had this thing where a year and change into the investigation, the dependency hearing and my sister's lawyers, I believe, were like really pushing hard for that dependency hearing to happen faster so that they could beat the criminal charges.

That was what I found in sort of the email communications that are in the public record.

That family court decided in their favor.

They then took that to the media as though it was an exoneration.

And I'm pretty sure it impacted the criminal investigation.

You know, obviously don't want you to comment like on any of those specifics, but like, because this is pretty representative of what I've seen in a lot of these cases that get trotted out to the media as false accusations that I don't believe are false accusations.

And so I'm sort of trying to like

just understand like why

and if it's and also if it's specific to this issue, like would the same thing happen in family court if there was an active investigation into a father for child sex abuse?

Because I think like what you said was right on the money where because there's these sort of wide

mandates of sort of like best interest of the child,

there's such a bias, it seems, towards mothers.

And I think that's so deep-rooted that it seems to me that that really affects these cases.

And so I'm just trying to like unravel all that in my head, if that makes sense, because it seems like there's something really, there's something really like specifically wrong that's going on between those two sides in these cases.

Yes, I agree with everything you've just said.

The system is imperfect.

And with child abuse, there's I mean, there's two instincts.

There's some of these, some of the abuse is so horrible you don't want to believe it.

Some of the abuse is so

unique that you can't relate to it, so you don't believe it because it just

sometimes we can't believe what we don't understand or what doesn't seem intuitive on any level.

And something like medical child abuse, it is not black and white.

It's not a single instance.

It's a pattern and the collection of that evidence takes a long time.

So it is one of those instances where the problem and the tools we have to solve it are imperfect.

It's the same with

other kinds of abuse too, where there's a range.

It can be difficult to detect.

But in terms of the interplay between family court and the juvenile court,

the family court in some ways, might be able to pick up something quicker and faster as long as the other parent is not also participating in the abuse.

So it can be picked up much quicker, and it's a more sensitive, responsive,

in my experience, it's more responsive to these kinds of issues.

In terms of just getting some kind of protective orders in place, I don't have a lot of experience in the juvenile court, but it's again, it's the county.

So,

you know, whatever their prosecutorial discretion and caseload and, you know, what

currently is funded,

it's not that simple.

Yeah, there's a lot of.

So you were saying that sort of, it sounds like things have gotten much worse in terms of impact on the court over the last couple of years.

Is that a byproduct of COVID or what is making things worse?

in terms of caseload and impact on the courts.

Well, a lot of cases didn't move at all for a while, right?

The courts ceased so many, have so many hearings every single day, and the courts were shut down for a period and everything was delayed.

So it just, things kept building up and becoming more and more impacted.

So the courts literally had to stop functioning for a while.

And then there were some budget cuts.

And now in a lot of family court proceedings, there aren't court reporters, which I think it's a very dangerous situation.

I mean, talk about due process.

I mean,

a lot happens in family court that has a really big impact on everyone's lives.

And when there's no court reporter, you don't have a transcript of the hearing, and you don't get to hear exactly what the judge's reasoning was, what they heard, what was said, how precisely they ruled.

And also in California, the attorneys are in charge of writing the order that follows after the judge will make an order and the attorneys are in charge of writing it up.

And there are huge delays because one party will write it up, the other side will disagree.

And then usually you solve that by asking the judge to clarify between the dueling versions of the orders or waiting for the court transcript, which in courts where there still is a court reporter, they are so backlogged it'll take months to get the actual court order.

And then there's this period where people are fighting over what the judge actually ordered.

And that has caused a lot of in the custody in a high conflict custody.

This is making some things make sense that didn't make sense before.

Because yeah, I mean, and there's no public record of

you can get in instances where there's no public record of what was said in court.

And there's no, if there was no court reporter there, then there's no transcript.

And what you have is the judge's order.

I strongly believe that court reporters should be in every family court hearing.

I completely agree with you because, again, it's like baffling to me that it's almost treated like it's less sensitive than these other kinds of cases that end up in criminal court where it's like property crimes, but the impact is

a thousand times bigger on someone's life than what happened when someone knocked over a convenience store or, you know, or whatever it is that ends up where you do have transcripts and public records and all of those things that you don't have in these cases.

And transcripts, just the act of having a court reporter in the courtroom makes everyone more accountable.

Yeah.

And just there's the presence of the court reporter.

And then there is a record.

And that's how you can appeal something.

You can't appeal a final decision unless there's a court reporter so parties are buying paying their own court reporters to appear if it's a sensitive hearing you have to bring your own court reporter

and i just wanted to clarify because i think just the difference between an investigation and an arrest and a conviction the right against self-incrimination that's going to kick in once you're arrested So that might have been the gray area.

If there was an investigation, if the court, if a case hadn't actually been opened in juvenile court, then the family law court, at least in California, could still proceed.

But if there was actually

an action that was open and active, in California, the family court should not have jurisdiction over that same case because they don't want what you're describing to be happening.

They want the juvenile court to be handling it and then for it to work its way through the system until there's an exit order.

And at that point, the family court can come in because it shouldn't,

a case shouldn't be in both places at once.

Okay.

Yeah.

I mean, I think I had a lot of confusion about the difference between juvenile court and family court and criminal court.

So I sort of didn't, I sort of was thinking of family court and juvenile court as one entity.

If you have time for, do you have time for one more question?

Yes.

I just wanted to know kind of from your perspective,

what and knowing, you know, being married to Mike, I think you know a lot more about this issue than

maybe a lot of other people in your position.

Like, what can the courts do better?

I mean, is this primarily an issue of like awareness and education, in your opinion, or is there something else that sort of courts can do to better protect children from this specific kind of abuse?

I think awareness and education are key.

And the courts are so overburdened, but that's their job.

That's their role.

They're civic servants.

They do a fantastic job.

But yes, I think the best thing the courts could do is, you know, continually educate themselves and be aware.

And then the attorneys have to assist in that as well.

It's the family law judges often, their rotation is only three years.

So every three years, you get a new judge who doesn't have experience in family law necessarily.

And so it's the family bar,

meaning the lawyers that practice family law in a county.

It's their job to educate the court.

And not in a condescending way, but they need to present things clearly and succinctly and bring in experts when necessary.

Of course, all this takes money.

And time.

I mean, so much time.

And that's the other thing is, you know, these cases where you don't have a lot of resources and

not every parent can afford to hire an expert and an investigator.

I mean, that all costs money.

And if you're in a situation where there's abuse, you're spinning so many plates and unless you have a lot of resources, it's difficult to bring an effective case.

But that's what's needed is expertise and precision and knowledgeable attorneys and a judge who is already educated and understanding the issues or open to being educated and understanding the issues.

Right, right.

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Okay, well, thank you so much, Leah.

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Amazingly helpful.