Today, Explained - The kids defying family court

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

Two siblings in Utah are defying a court order to reunite with their father, who they allege abused them. ProPublica’s Hannah Dreyfus explains a controversial concept known as “parental alienation.” This episode was produced by Siona Peterous, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

life in the barricades it's hard i'll say that it's hard not seeing people and not leaving 15 year old ty larson updates his tiktok followers every day from inside of his bedroom the room is full of teenage boy stuff computer guitar board games also his little sister 12 year old brinley brinley's doing good she is sleeping. She sleeps nonstop. It's a way to cope. Ty and Brinley have been barricaded inside of that bedroom since last December. They're refusing to leave it because a judge says they must reunite with their father and they say their father abused them. Now, the judge believes the kids are victims of parental alienation, that Ty and Brinley's mom has poisoned them against their father abused them. Now, the judge believes the kids are victims of parental alienation, that Ty and Brinley's mom

has poisoned them against their father. Coming up on Today Explained, what the story of these two children exposes about family courts. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you

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Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Hannah Dreyfus is an Abrams Reporting Fellow for ProPublica. Hannah investigates abuses of power in many places, including in family court. And that's how she ended up looking into the story of these two kids, Ty and Bryn Lee. Here's Hannah. I was on TikTok. I saw a video of Ty Larson. Hey, guys, I got a story I need to tell you guys about my life. He's a 15-year-old living in Utah, and he was on a live stream and talking to his TikTok followers about why he and his sister, Bryn Lee, had decided

to barricade themselves in their bedroom for, at that point, a number of weeks. I'm so afraid I haven't even left my room. I wait till it's dead silent and I know I'm safe to leave and hurry go to the bathroom. And for food, we get food delivered to our door right here, and I wait until everybody leaves, and then I'll get it. So what Ty is telling his TikTok followers is that he's barricaded inside this bedroom because there's a court judge who has ordered him into the custody of his biological father, despite the fact that he and his younger sister have both made claims that the father sexually and emotionally abused them. The court has been trying to put us through

reunification, and reunification really only works for really young kids. It never works for teenagers like me. Ty and Brinley's mom, Jessica, and their father were married when they were younger. They got divorced. And until about 2018, Ty and Brinley were in part-time custody with their father and mother. I was abused by my father physically, sexually, and emotionally. This all started when I was about three years old and went till I was about 10. For my little sister, she was three to seven. And the mom, not knowing what to do, brought them to the Department of Children and Family Services in Utah, which investigates claims of abuse, to try and involve authorities in the situation and to figure out what was going on. Investigators interviewed them forensically, which means

they interviewed them to understand more about their disclosures, and they concluded that the children were credible and that the abuse that they were describing, there was a very high likelihood that it did take place. In the DCSF paperwork, they described the abuse as chronic and severe, meaning that it wasn't just a one-off, but that this is a pattern of behavior that they feared was taking place towards the children multiple times. The courts signed what's called a child protective order, which is akin to a restraining order that prevented the father from being in contact with his kids. So at that point, they paused visitation with their dad for some time. So the two kids report abuse. Utah authorities confirm the abuse. They say the kids' allegations are supported. How does that then lead to these two children barricading themselves in a room

after being ordered to see their father? There was initially a case opened, a criminal case, to see if the father would or could be prosecuted for these crimes. For a criminal conviction, you have a very high standard of evidence, beyond a reasonable doubt, which is very difficult to come by, especially in a case of sexual abuse. And because the district attorney decided that there wasn't necessarily enough evidence to convict the father, the district attorney put the case on hold. And so the father was no longer facing criminal allegations that he had sexually abused his kids. And so he petitioned the court to continue having custody rights with his children. And the court decided that reunification therapy was the best way to go about this. This is a type of therapy that the court will sometimes order when children are

resistant or refusing to see their parent for a variety of reasons. Sometimes kids are resisting or refusing to see a parent because they think the parent abused them or the parent did in fact abuse them. So in Ty and Brinley's case, they were encouraged by a mental health professional to forgive their father and to move forward and put what happened in the past behind them and continue a relationship with him going forward. When the kids continued to be resistant to being in their father's custody, the father stepped up his efforts to take back custody of the kids. And that's where we get into the claims of parental alienation. What does parental alienation mean? So parental alienation is the concept that one parent can alienate a child's affections for the other

parent, meaning one parent actually can cause a child, usually in the context of a custody dispute, to not want to have anything to do with the other parent. Okay, so the dad is making an explosive claim. I didn't do anything to my kids. Their mother has poisoned them against me. I'm thinking, if I'm the judge, I look at this and I say, well, the kids' claims of abuse were found to have been supported. What ends up happening? What they did next is they appointed on the recommendation of the father's attorney a mental health professional. She's a social worker in Utah. Her name is Michelle Jones, and she is a major public advocate for this concept of parental alienation.

It's a steady stream of negative messaging to the child that everything that other parent does is bad, wrong, stupid, contemptible, and an indication that the parent doesn't love the child. Sadly, many mental health and legal professionals are untrained. But even when a judge sees it, they don't know what to do about it. When they would try and tell Ms. Jones that they had been abused by their father and that is why they did not want to return to his custody, she would basically say, what happened in the past, we should leave in the past, let's ignore the fact that that may or may not have happened, and encourage the children to disregard their previous experiences in order to move forward and forge a new relationship with their father. And what Michelle Jones told the court in no uncertain terms after meeting with these kids on various occasions, that they were in fact not victims of their father for sexual assaulting them, but that they are victims of their mother for psychologically manipulating them to believe that they've been abused.

And Michelle Jones encouraged the court to force the kids back into full custody of their father. I see. Okay. And what happened then? It began to be a standoff between the kids and the court. The kids continued to tell their truth, which is that our father abused us. This was investigated by state authorities and found to be the case. And now all of a sudden, a court judge is choosing to ignore that and to force us back into the full custody of our father. The family court judge in this case wrote, you kids are not in control. You do not get to control who your parents are. You do not get to control who you see. The court is telling you that you

have to go back into custody of your father for your own good and you better listen or there are going to be extreme consequences. The court actually ordered late last year that the kids attend what's called a reunification camp. This is actually out of state facility where the kids would be forced to participate in intensive therapy with their father, and they wouldn't be able to bring any devices with them, no phones, no any sort of methods of contact with the outside world. And they also would be prohibited from contacting their mom, not only for the week when they were participating in this intensive reunification therapy, but also for 90 days after they returned from this program and were entered into the full custody of their father. Now, the very strange

thing about this case is that if you look closely at the court orders, the judge, the family court judge who ordered that these kids return into the custody of their father did not give the father total unrestricted custody. In fact, the court judge said that the father would not be able to spend overnights or unsupervised parenting time with his children. So clearly the court had some reservations about giving the father completely unfettered access to his children. However, they still believed the children need to be removed from their mother's custody because of the psychological harm that the father said she was imposing on the kids.

Hannah, tell me about the judge in this case, Derek Pullen. How did he make his decision? He's a well-respected judge in Utah. So the judge said, look, I'm relying on this mental health professional who says she knows a lot about this condition. I'm a judge. I'm not a mental health professional. I'm going to rely on what Ms. Jones is telling me is going on here, which is that the kids weren't actually abused, or we don't know if they were sexually abused, but what we do see is that they're

being psychologically abused by mom. Okay, and what does mom say during all of this? What has her response been? The way she describes it to me is she's watched this narrative develop around her, and she has almost no control to fight it. Anything that she does in response is wrong. If she tries to say that her kids are entitled to tell their truth, then she's criticized for continuing to psychologically manipulate them. If she doesn't say anything, she's accused of being a negligent mom. There's sort of a catch-22 here where just her existence is a crime because she is somehow encouraging her kids to continue doing this. And by even bringing them food up in their barricaded room, she is encouraging them to

continue to reject the father. And the court is holding her in contempt for this. What has been happening to these two kids? What have their lives been like in that bedroom? And what do you expect will happen next? They are terrified of leaving their room because they know that they are under a court order to go into the custody of their father, that police have been authorized to use reasonable force to take them there. And that if their mom tries to protect them in any way, she will be held in contempt of court and face jail time. They are live streaming around the clock.

I wanted to also give a mini update. I'm still in this room, still barricaded, still haven't left. I'm still over live on Twitch. So please go over there and watch me. Just say hi. Ty told me that the reason that they decided to turn to TikTok is because if the public is watching, then maybe they have some protection against what they believe is a terrible injustice that's going on. And that public outrage will consider the courts to reconsider what they're

asking them to do. The school has accommodated their situation and they are taking some online school. And the question of what happens next is truly unknown. I have infrequently worked on a story that's developing in real time in this way, where I myself, the reporter on the case, don't know what's going to happen next. I do think that the public pressure of all of this being under scrutiny now online and beyond has perhaps given the children more of a voice in this case than many other kids who face similar situations in family court. Ahead, Hannah Dreyfuss comes back with the surprising story of where this concept of parental alienation came from. Support for Today Explained comes from ramp ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to

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Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Earlier in the episode, Hannah Dreyfuss, a reporter with ProPublica, told us the story of Ty and Brinley Larson,

two siblings in Utah who have locked themselves in a bedroom after being forced to reunite with a father that they say abused them. Now, a judge made that decision after a court-appointed therapist said the kids were victims of something called parental alienation. Hannah, what is the history of this term? So the term parental alienation syndrome originated with a psychiatrist named Dr. Richard Gardner. My hope is we're on the brink of a change and that courts are going to start to do this more frequently. He practiced in courts in the U.S. in the 80s

and 90s. Now, the interesting thing about Gardner is that he was hired as a court expert to defend mainly fathers who were accused of sexually abusing their kids. So he came up with a theory, parental alienation syndrome, a mental health disorder in which the mom has brainwashed the kids to falsely believe that they had experienced this abuse. The treatment, number one, has to be to take the child, remove the child from the indoctrinator. You can see the child seven days a week. I don't care how skillful you are as a therapist.

If the child is turned back to the home of the indoctrinator, your therapy's a waste of time. And so the theory took off as a way to defend fathers from accusations of molesting their children. Is this an official term that psychologists use that is in the DSM? Courts seem to recognize it, but what is it exactly? It's a supposed mental health disorder that is not recognized by major psychological bodies like the American Psychiatric Association or the American

Psychological Association. It's not listed in any official code, and it's not a diagnosis that any professional can give to an individual. It is a dynamic that lawyers and some psychologists say exists within the context of high-conflict divorces, where you see kids being manipulated by one parent in order to resist contact with the other parent. So Richard Gardner coins the term in the 1980s. And then what's the reaction to it? So the reaction has shifted and changed over time. Defenders of the theory sort of dropped the term syndrome. And that's why I refer to it now more broadly as parental alienation. Michelle Jones, in the case of Ty and Bryn Lee, told me that she diagnoses parental alienation among her

patients as easily as she could diagnose strep throat. But others say that no, this is not a diagnosable theory. This is a family systems problem, meaning that it's a dynamic issue. It doesn't exist within one person's own mental health or inside someone's mind, but that it is a dynamic that comes up when there is a high conflict divorce situation. One of the most pernicious ways that a parent might manipulate a child to reject another parent is to cause them to believe that they had been abused when the actually abuse had not taken place. According to modern day alienation experts, if there is legitimate reason to believe that a child has been abused, that alienation cannot be the explanation for why a child does not want to

be with the parent. However, what you're seeing is that there are reunification therapists, lawyers, and court experts who continue to take on and defend cases in which abuse has been substantiated. If there is no certainty around the term parental alienation, if it's so disputed, why are courts still making rulings as if there is certainty about it? I'm going to quote Dr. David Corwin, and he is the immediate past president of ABSAC, an organization that defends against abuse of children. And what Dr. Corwin told me is that people understand that in a messy divorce, somebody might make false claims about the other parent and that people will say not nice things about the other parent to try and perhaps gain a custody advantage. However, the difference here is that the concept that a child could actually be manipulated to believe and disclose abuse is wildly unscientifically

supported. Meaning, the reason that the courts continue to be compelled by this theory is because it's very difficult and uncomfortable to believe that a parent would have sexually abused a child, even though we have statistics that there are a huge number of children who are sexually abused abused and most commonly by family members or close relatives. How common is it for claims of parental alienation to be used in custody cases? How often does this go on? ProPublica is actually collecting information on this now. It's not easy to collect data on this issue because many court cases are sealed, especially when they have to do

with minors. But what is important to keep in mind is that there are a lot of divorces taking place in the U.S. at any given time. A relatively small percentage of them fall into the category of high conflict divorces, which are divorces that continue to go through legislation over the course of frequently years. So we don't have specific numbers at this point. Who else benefits from this type of ruling? You mentioned that Ty and Brinley had been forced to go through a reunification program with their dad. Tell me about those. There are a relatively few number of these that exist in the U.S., but these are programs that take place

in various different locations frequently. I mean, actually almost exclusively not disclosed to participants beforehand. And they are brought there frequently from the back house of courtrooms. They are brought into the total authority of parental alienation experts who will give them intensive treatment to help cure them of all the psychological programming that they say they have gone through. I actually think my job is kind of easy. The hard part is getting the court to realize that their rejection is counterintuitive, meaning that the children really don't mean it when they say they don't want to ever see a parent again. Family reunification programs cost a pretty penny. I'm actually in the process of getting receipts myself,

but I have heard in the realm of $30,000 for a week of intensive reunification therapy and the follow-up treatment. This is big business. It is big business, yeah. What does this story tell us about how children in this country are protected or not protected by court systems from abuse? I think what this story tells us about the way that family courts handle abuse is that children largely in this country are not given the opportunity to tell family courts who they want to live with and why they want to live with that specific person or parent or caregiver. Even my own guardian ad litem slash my own attorney hasn't even been standing up for me in court.

So you see delegated in family courts the responsibility of speaking for kids given over to a third party instead of the ability for kids and teenagers, even teenagers 16 years old, them not having that chance to speak for themselves and address a court directly about what they want. I'm now almost 16 and I've been through this court case for almost five years now. I've been interviewed by DCFS thousands of times.

It feels like cops, police officers, anything, I've been interviewed by them. In the case of Ty and Bryn Lee, Ty has been desperate to communicate exactly why he does not want custody with his father. My own word does not matter and they don't believe my truth. So he has to resort to talking about his situation on social media. I think what this story tells us is that while America thinks of itself as a pretty advanced country when it comes to awareness about child sexual abuse and laws protecting victims of domestic violence, the courts so frequently go out of their way

to silence children who are claiming that they were sexually abused. I have been approached by hundreds of parents and kids who said the courts have completely disregarded their stories and their truths. Today's episode was produced by Siona Petros and edited by Amina El-Sadi. It was engineered by Patrick Boyd and fact-checked by Laura Bullard.

I'm Noelle King. It's engineered by Patrick Boyd and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.