Men and Divorce Court | Greg Ellis | EP 228

She had been diagnosed with panic disorder; she wasn't taking her medication. She was out of town, and she had called the police on this particular day, March 5th, 2015. She'd asked them to come to the house. I'd actually taken the afternoon off; I was at home with my sons playing in the playroom with them. She asked them to come to the house and said that I was confused. The dispatch said, "We can't go to the house if he's confused." She said, "Well, what do you need to hear?" They said, "We need to hear he's a threat to himself or the children." Then, allegedly, sometime later, I think 45 seconds later, she called them back and said, "My husband's just told me, quote, 'I'm sick of this, I'm gonna harm the children,' end quote." Those ten words, that ten-word lie, was the basis of law enforcement coming. First, it was two to my front door; then it was three; then it was five and a sergeant and the massing garrison at the threshold of my home, without cause, without a warrant.

Hello everyone, I'm here today with Mr. Greg Ellis, a best-selling author, TV director, Annie Award-nominated voice artist, and Emmy Award-nominated actor. He's appeared in Oscar-winning movies, directed Hollywood superstars, produced and written television shows, starred in Broadway musicals, and voiced animated characters for movies, television series, cartoons, and more than 120 video games. His major motion picture film credits include the "Pirates of the Caribbean" series, "Titanic," "Star Trek," "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," and "Beowulf." His television credits include "24," "X-Files," "CSI," "Dexter," "NCIS," and "Hawaii 5-0." With his production company, Monkey Toes, Mr. Ellis has written and directed projects for Kiefer Sutherland and Stephen Fry, who has been on this podcast. He's also the host of several popular video podcasts, and he additionally founded the child advocacy program, The Respondent, which inspires family champions through his non-profit CPU, Children and Parents United. His book, which we're going to concentrate on today at least to some degree, is "The Respondent: Exposing the Cartel of Family Law." It's a call to action, and a necessary one, to reform the one branch of our legal system that does not provide the presumption of innocence: family law.

Yeah, well that's quite a claim, that that branch of family law does not provide the presumption of innocence. So maybe we could start by exactly what you mean by that and why you would make that claim. Well, yeah, through personal experience. First of all, thank you for having me on, Jordan. It's great to be on your show; I've been looking forward to this for a while. Family law is the only branch of our legal system where there's no presumption of innocence. Murderers, rapists, terrorists, pedophiles all get more legal rights than law-abiding citizens. The silver bullet, as I call it—the silver bullet playbook or paradigm of high-conflict divorce—is the smoking gun of this corrupt legal system that's become the go-to strategy for divorce lawyers that guarantees victory. They encourage the petitioners and the respondents, usually petitioners, to utilize this strategy, usually the false allegation of domestic violence, to win in court to get the cash and prizes, for want of a better phrase.

You know, when I had no idea of the words "family law" before what happened to me in 2015. Once I started investigating, through experience and through talking with other experts in the system and outside the system, it became clear to me that we have a real issue here. If we can improve or reform the family court or the family law system, expose the cartel of family law, as I call it—because it is like a crime syndicate—these quasi-kangaroo courts that they have, you don't get the presumption of innocence, you don't get your rights read to you. I've spoken with fathers, in particular, who've ended up in court with false allegations of domestic violence. One told me a story about how he put his wrists up and said, "Your Honor, arrest me, have the bailiff arrest me." The judge said, "Are you crazy?" The gentleman said, "No, if I'm arrested, I'll get the rights that a criminal has: Miranda rights, access to an attorney, etc."

Of course, those who are suffering the most are the people who don't have the financial resources to be able to have representation. And even those who do, if you are the respondent, you are behind the curve. The presumption is that you, as the accused, have to prove your innocence rather than the accused, which is Western jurisprudence, has to prove their case. In our society, in a lot of strange ways, the accuser now seems to have almost an untrembled right to be believed, and there's an increasing insistence on that in our culture as well. For example, there was a this is a bit far afield but a German chemistry journal the other day published their new guidelines for authors in the aftermath of a scandalous chemistry paper they published, which hypothetically offended some people. Now authors have to be, what would you say, governed by the realization that their words will be interpreted by those who read them and that they have the final say, those who read them.

You can be accused of virtually anything online and then mobbed for virtually anything, and it's virtually impossible to defend yourself. This notion that merely because someone says they've been offended, let's say in the mildest of cases, that that means you have definitively done something wrong is well, there's a pervasive and broad-scale move in that direction in our culture.

So what happened in your case? You were the respondent in a divorce case which you didn't see coming, is that correct? I read your book; it was a while back, so I'm pulling all the bits of it back into my memory. But let's go through the story exactly.

Sure, and just very briefly, to that point, yes, victimhood has become the new social currency. Its economy is booming, and where victimhood is rewarded, responsibility never follows. It's part of the reason I call the book "The Respondent." It's the defendant in a family law case, and the petitioner is that person who actually instigates the proceedings. What happened to me, in the span of I'd say around eight hours, I had been married for 20 years, two children, two boys—the meaning of my life. We did everything together. I was that engaged, loving, present father; family was my everything.

How old were your boys at that point? Ten years old and eight years old at the time.

Okay, and you said you've had quite a stellar career, and obviously, you're very busy doing that. So in what sense was your family at the center of your life? That's a great question. Yeah, I think my now ex-wife and I drifted somewhat to become a well-oiled marriage machine. The avoidant in her and the anxious in me couldn't quite get close enough. I think Pia Melody calls it the co-addicted love tango, where we were kind of swaying back and forth, trying to get closer but drifting apart. I would be out of town filming a movie and return, and she'd go out of town because she wanted to work, and I supported that. I would have preferred she stayed home, but she wanted to work, so I was like, "Great." We worked our schedules out so we could be present, and much of my work was in town in Hollywood at one of the studios. I had a busy career, but I would still say, as you did, that my family was the center of my life. If I had to choose existentially between my family life and my career, I would have chosen my family life.

But I was busy working, and while you have to be busy and working to actually support a family. So, it's a strange claim, in some sense, right? If you have a career that's really moving forward at a rapid rate, how can you claim simultaneously that your family is still the most important thing to you? It means, partly because part of the reason you have a career, if you have any sense, is so that you can bring stability and opportunity to your family. That means, in some sense, you can't be with them all the time, but they don't need that anyway because they should have some autonomy.

So, now you said too your marriage you said you drifted apart a bit with your wife and so when this happened, this eight-hour period that you're describing, did you think afterwards, "Oh my God, I should have seen this coming," or "I did see this coming," or has it remained a shock to you? Then what do you think about the fact that it was a shock? I mean, because obviously, the thing to wonder is, well, were you willfully blind, and should you have seen this coming? I'm not claiming that you were; I'm just asking genuine questions, but people are going to wonder obviously.

Yeah, well, look, in the span of eight hours, I was ushered from my home in handcuffs at the behest, I later discovered, of my ex-wife. I was committed to a mental institution against my will—the first of five incarcerations. There was also an incarceration, and I called it solitary confinement, but it was a singular jail cell. I was subjected to a temporary restraining order in divorce court on the basis of a false allegation that eventually was disproven some six months later, but by then, of course, the reputation savaging had been done, and it was all over by the shouting. I became homeless and almost destitute overnight and lost my professional reputation. I wouldn't say it was irretrievably destroyed, but you know, in the small close-knit community that I lived in in Hollywood, close to the studios, it certainly took a big dent.

Everybody lives in a small close-knit community like that. If they're working, I mean the immediate people that you are in contact with and working with intensely tend to be quite a small number, and it's quite interesting when you get tarred and feathered; the people around you get afraid of the contamination real quickly. That's partly because they look at what happened to you, and then they also think, "Well, you know, we don't really know what went on in the marriage," and people are capable of terrible things and maybe there were things that we don't know about, and then they're split because they knew you and your wife. So, it gets complicated instantly, and then it's easier for people just not to have that much to do with you because they also have choices, right? They know a reasonable number of people, and it's then maybe you fall from number one or number two on their list of people to invite to like number fifteen, and they only ever invite the top ten. So people don't even have to turn their backs on you that much in order for you to be well friendless.

The allegation—what exactly was the allegation, and why do you think that your wife felt compelled to make it, and how do you think she rationalized that to herself if it wasn't true? That's a great question. She had been diagnosed with panic disorder; she wasn't taking her medication. She was out of town, and she had called the police on this particular day, March 5th, 2015. She'd asked them to come to the house. I'd actually taken the afternoon off; I was at home with my sons playing in the playroom with them, and she asked them to come to the house and said that I was confused. The dispatch said, "We can't go to the house if he's confused." She said, "Well, what do you need to hear?" They said, "We need to hear he's a threat to himself or the children." Then allegedly, sometime later, I think 45 seconds later, she called them back and said, "My husband's just told me quote, 'I'm sick of this, I'm gonna harm the children,' end quote." Those ten words, that ten-word lie, was the basis of law enforcement coming.

First, it was two to my front door, then it was three, then it was five and a sergeant and the massing garrison at the threshold of my home without cause, without a warrant. My rights were trampled, the police entered, a smart team from the DCFS—Department of Children and Family Services—came in. I was shackled in handcuffs with a bar behind my back in a quite affluent neighborhood with the curtains wide open on that Thursday evening.

Well, that would be a little hard on your reputation, all right, won't it? Yeah, I would say so. And then they're going to think—what are they going to think? They're going to think the whole police system is corrupt and that this is all made out of nothing, and he's actually innocent. It's pretty damn hard for people to jump to that conclusion, right?

Instantly, yeah that's... And then, of course, what then happened was, you know, I was kind of bundled into the back of an unmarked police car and, you know, raced off into the military. One of the actually most heartbreaking images I remember was looking up from the back of that police car, and seeing my son, my eldest boy, Charlie.

Oh, that's rough man, seeing your son's childhood at 10 was over. I knew what was coming: spousification, adultification, the vilification and the erasure of me as a man, as a father, as a patriarch, as a provider. I was also heading into a terrifying unknown, a dystopian odyssey. I talk about it as if it's some kind of Kafka trap, but it certainly was Kafkaesque.

Then, of course, the word on the street—I mean some of the stories I later heard back were absolutely insane. I mean, he's armed, he's psychotic—she was telling everyone that I was psychotic and I was bipolar—all of these messages came through my children as well when I eventually got to see them. There was no end in sight—it was just down the rabbit hole we go. And of course, I thought I would get justice. No, no, the justice system is mostly there to stop people who can't reconcile their differences from wreaking social havoc. That's basically what it's there for.

Do you think you're going to go to the justice system and get justice? It's like you'll be lucky if it doesn't destroy you once you're tangled up in it so... It nearly did. It nearly destroyed me. I mean, it didn't; it's amazing that it didn't. And that you managed to get through this.

Okay, so this happened, and then you're off to the police station. And the thing is, the police are going to view themselves in a situation like that as white knights, right? Because they've come in, and you can understand that they've committed to behest of a woman. God only knows how abused she's been because women do get abused, and that's for sure.

Of course, the guilty act innocent just like the innocent acting isn't probably the guilty or even better at it. And then you're going to be viewed with suspicion because men are going to be viewed with suspicion in a situation like this for sure, where there's allegations of abuse. And that's because there are a handful of bad men and bad impulses in all of us that can be dragged out one way or another.

So okay, so why did your wife double down on it, do you think? I think there are probably a few possible reasons. One, I think is shame—the emotion, or you know, we talk psychology—is an extremely powerful emotion. And I think once she'd let Pandora out of the box, if you will, I think the only thing left was hope.

It was hope for her existence; I think there was fear and panic that instilled in herself about that suddenly after 20 years of living a great life together and building a great life and a great home and a great family, which is so important. It's my primary reason for being.

That she perhaps was somewhat unaware of the system and how the system comes in and forces... I mean, you know, when I found out that the states get reimbursed $6,000 for every child that they place into foster care and 4,000 children a day lose a parent in family law, there are financial incentives in place. The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1974 offers financial incentives to the states that increase these foster or adoption numbers. To receive these incentives and bonuses, local child protection services must have more children; they must have more quote merchandise to sell. Funding is available when a child is placed in a foster home with strangers or placed in a mental health facility or medicated, as it's called, usually against the parents' wishes.

So, I think she was also—her family system of origin, her mother—a proud Appalachian woman, twice married, twice divorced. She came in strong, moved into the family home straight away. The same night, she actually got to the family home before my ex-wife returned when I was incarcerated. It was that psychological kind of hammering home, "You need to do this; you need to do that." When the CPS came in and said, "You need to start divorce proceedings; you need to file for divorce, you need to file for restraining order, otherwise your children will go into foster care." That threat, I'm sure, must have been terrifying for her as well.

So having opened why did they threaten her specifically? That was the child protection services—why did they threaten her with having the children go into foster care? Was it because she was hypothetically unable to protect them from you if she didn't take certain actions? What was the reason?

It's my understanding that this is what they do; this is the modus operandi of the CPS, because they need to, like traffic wardens, need to have enough tickets. The same people—if you ever get contact—God help you—if you ever get tangled up with child protective services, that's right.

And I got a few months later, I managed to get the report that the CPS—this woman, this social worker from CPS who came in and ruined—you know, played a large part in ruining my family with the system.

Yeah, well, social worker training is corrupt beyond belief. It's politically correct right to the bloody roots, and so the, you know, the many social workers will come into a situation like that armed to the teeth with the presumption that the whole system is a patriarchal oppressive system. It's based on the exploitation of women and children, and they just need the tiniest bit of evidence to make sure that you're one of those patriarchal oppressors who they're going to take care of.

That's right, and I got—I couldn't agree with you more. I've learned this through my experience. And look, my sons were—they led a privileged life; it was an earned privileged life. You know, I had to work hard to get out of my small little town in England and, you know, go to London, and, you know, I want to get into the whole earned and unearned privilege.

But that's why I'm a believer in—just the same as offense isn't given, it's only taken. If you choose to take it, go ahead. Look, we all have our privileges and our disadvantages, and some of them are earned, and some of them aren't earned, and hopefully we pay for the ones that aren't earned by trying to be good people and by taking the responsibility of that unearned privilege forward. But it's only a fool and an ideologue who goes after someone for their unearned privilege because the same question can be asked very quickly and very effectively of precisely them.

Now, I went to this Hollywood—I don't know what to call it—meeting on someone's lawn once where everyone there was talking about the one percent. And this was in, like, Beverly Hills, and it was on the lawn of a mansion. I thought, well, I got up and said, "You people might not be in the one percent by North American standards because you're not—you don't have a hundred million dollars—but you're in the one percent by global and historical standards." It's like, "Who the hell exactly are we talking about here with this unearned privilege nonsense?"

So a little of that goes a long way too, you know?

Yeah, I agree. I was going to quickly say, you know, my sons, you know, they led a privileged existence. But they were connected to their mother and their father, their biological mother and biological father. We had a family unit. Just to see, I mean, you know, a member of the country club, and I would take them golfing every Sunday, and family at least family dinner—because we were both out working—but we would all—that was my thing—we'd come together as a family if we could every day, and definitely on Sunday for the traditional roast dinner that we do in England.

Then to read that report, Jordan, four months later after I'd been in the fire, a 53-page report from the DCFS and the social worker, I wept. I wept as I read, you know, the questions asked to my sons: "Has daddy ever touched your penis? Has he ever put a needle in your arm?" I mean, the questions that my sons would just—and I was still...

Well, you think about what questions like that do to kids. It's like, okay, first of all, you're telling the kids that there are adults that do this to children. So that's the first thing you're doing with the questions, and that's a bit of a revelation to the average child who's, say, eight or ten, who's really not being privy to such treatment. So you're confronting them with the idea of malevolence itself, and you're a stranger, and you're asking them these weird questions about deep malevolence.

So what's up with the institutions, you might say? And then you're implying that their father did this, and if you're the typical, too typical social worker, trained in this sort of nonsense, there's the kind of insinuation that goes along with that that's likely to produce nightmares in the children and phobias, and there's a big documented literature on that. It's like, what do they call that? It's the false memory syndrome essentially.

Like, if you get into the hands of a bad therapist, and they start poking around in your memory structure—or they can listen to stories from children—there's great documentation of all the daycare, remember the satanic abuse scandals in the 1980s? My God. You read about what the social worker types and police too, what they did to children by asking these leading questions—absolutely pathological.

And then you'd get kids coming up with these fantasies about what happened that were just... Well, and then egged on by the police and the social workers until there was a satanic nightmare at the bottom of it, and none of it ever happened. One of the proudest moments I have of my sons at 8 and 10 getting to page 51 or 52 in that report, and they were asked about me as a father and how they rated me, having rated their mother.

And it was a plus plus plus. They could so easily, to your point, have been led down the psychological garden path to arrive at answers that were just fantasies and not real. But that lasting impression that was left on them—one of the saddest, I might—I was forced to visit with my sons, which the very notion of—I remember one father in family court who was told by a judge, "You know, visitation." And he said, "I will never visit my children, they are my children." And he turned and walked out.

I'll never forget that. I remember looking back years down the line at visitation, where that led because the visitation monitor happened to be—he had seven AKAs, used to be a woman, had a criminal record, and he drove around in, you know, a car with, you know, stickers of guns and NRA. And not that that's an issue, but just it all added up. And there was nothing I could do, and I was getting blackmailed, and there was no one I could go to. He was the only conduit.

And then I found out that he was there to supervise your visits, right? To basically let my sons know that I was dangerous to be around or to be feared, which I never had been. And every piece of documentation in the visitation reports, at least for the first 18 months, was "We love you, Dad! We want to live with you, Dad! Can't we see you and Mom? Why can't—why is Mom doing this?" The first visit was "Dad, Mom says to not get in the car with you because you're going to kidnap us and you have bipolar." I mean, these kinds of things were just harrowing to me to hear, but there wasn't really any... There's nowhere to go. There's nothing to... There's no one to speak to.

But my eight-year-old, I remember one visit, I think it was maybe my second visit, my eight-year-old not only had suicidal ideations at eight years old—my beautiful, innocent, playful lad—and he talked out loud about how he was going to kill himself. And I had to listen to that as this monitor listened to it and didn't even consider it a critical incident to report it. And anyway, who's he going to report it to? And what are they going to do? They would have probably said, "That's just one, guilt."

There you go. Absolutely, man. Absolutely. So this is why, Jordan, you know, I came back like a phoenix from the flames. I was dead and buried. I mean, I literally got to that edge of existential terror. Have you visited?

Yeah, I've been there for quite a while. Yeah, for about two years. So, I feel for you, and I'm interested, you know, we could talk more about my story, but I'm interested in how we teeter on that long edge.

Well, I was fortunate, right? The waves, you know, I was fortunate maybe in contrast to your situation. Because what happened to me didn't happen in a manner that severed my closest intimate relationships. They were still intact. And so when I got very ill and was also being attacked constantly, my friends and my family were like rocks, and so thank God for that. But I didn't think I would have lived if I would have lost that too.

And so, yeah, I remember talking—Mikaela came on my show, The Respondent, and we talked about, you know, that whole situation. Again, I was moved to tears in the podcast you did with her when you came back and just your struggle and what you've given to society and humanity and the outrageous attacks from cowards who are, you know, the cowards think they have courage, and they're placed on the pedestals of social media, and they're not.

And with what happened to me and my boys, that led me on a journey. I guess the big pinnacle moment for me, and I didn't read that much at school. I only read scripts as I went through my career, you know, whether it be screenplays or doing voiceovers. It was 2016. I went right to the edge, and I came back from the edge. I don’t know where this came from, but I asked myself the meaningful question: "Who am I?"

I opened up my iPhone, and I did a deep dive dialectical with meaningful question and meaningful answer of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis. I got over 1,000 answers and questions. I still have them. And that led me through to learn a little about philosophy, phenomenology, affect theory, and just epistemology in general, and how I could ritualize my way back to be on my feet again because I was fetal. My, I think, my parasympathetic nervous system was just shaking, and I was—and the blinds were closed; I couldn't see or hear another human being because there was probably going to be a child laughing, which would remind me of the devastation of losing my sons—the meaning of my life.

And so I had to I had to really get in that deep conversation with self—me, self, and the third-eye perception—and really get the walking going again and the talking going again and trying to get more precise with the words I was thinking and expressing, and rebuild and reform and restore, not the same life. You know, I say we have two lives, and the second life begins the moment we realize we have only one. But that new chapter, that new episode, and how to self-author, if you will. You know, life is remembered backwards and lived forwards. Well, how can I redraft that floppy disk in my mind, if you will, or outside?

Why did you decide to bother, do you think? I mean, was, you know, because I look, you tell a story in The Respondent of, well, it's not just an encounter—what would I say? It’s an encounter with arbitrary—with the arbitrariest form of authority. And then that reputation-salvaging: you're accused of doing something terrible. It's so terrible that it's very difficult for people not to view you with tremendous suspicion as soon as you're accused of that. And then everything you have is stripped away from you—well not everything; that's the issues. Like what isn't stripped away from you?

And why did you decide to continue? I mean, you lost your career, you lost your reputation, you lost your family, and then you're being pilloried constantly. And I went out with him and his children several times, and they were all, let's see, two, three, and five, I think—three boys. We went out to the science museum, which is a challenging thing to do with three young kids. And he showed up on time on the van, and he walked those kids through that science museum, and they just had a wonderful time.

And I watched him like a hawk, and he was a really good father, and she pursued him—her father mortgaged their house, and she spent all their money at which they deserved very nicely because they had raised her to be just exactly the way she was, and it was just a bloody disaster. I worked with him for like three years trying to help him negotiate through this without dying, you know, just because he wanted his kids.

And I pulled out every stop to strategize, and we were careful, and he did what we negotiated, and he was really dedicated to his kids, and he just got ground up, man. And then all this stuff blew up around me. Around that time, story, what you talk about right there, I think I heard you mention that maybe a few years ago—that particular story. It may have been that one when you were in practice but... that speaks to there is no escape. It's the zero-sum game of family law.

And it is a game to these attorneys. It's not just no escape for me as a respondent; it’s no escape for the petitioner to, like Johnny Depp and his situation, right? So, you know, the false allegation of domestic violence—it's—we need to remind people: Johnny Depp has not been found—not only not been found guilty of any crime, he's not been accused of any crime. He's been tried and found guilty in the court of public opinion—guilty 'til proven more guilty.

I think it’s that inability to escape the divorce trap. There's no trapdoor; there's no way out for both parties. My ex-wife spent, I believe, 1.8 million dollars on an attorney—her attorney Judy Bogan—and then after four years, this attorney just filed to the court to be released from the case and I believe is now suing my ex-wife for $450,000 on top of that. So the blatant plundering of an estate and how someone you've worked your whole life—you've started from not a lot, and you've plowed your field in your career. And the notion that just because you have a marriage contract, I believe in monogamy, I believe in family, obviously, I made some missteps along the way; I mentioned those in the book.

I was, you know, flawed—one thing I wasn't was a bad father. I was a great dad; I will shout that to the rooftops. I was a brilliant father. My sons loved me, and I loved them. So, if it could happen to me, and it can happen to Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, it can happen—it’s happening and it has happened for decades from my research to so many people, and there's a voiceless growing group of people who've had enough.

Well, the guys that it really happened to don't even hear from them. They're so done, man. Some of them are just dead. And the ones that aren't dead, they're done; they're exhausted; they're friendless; they're struggling. I've talked about the child support hustle; you know, skip child support, go to jail, lose job, repeat, you know? Poor non-custodial parents—many times forsaken fathers or the patriarch or the dad who lack the ability to pay child support end up in modern-day debtors' prisons, if you will.

A person who fails to pay child support can have their driver's license, professional license, and passport revoked. You're without any money. Yeah, yeah, and that's just in the hands of the bureaucrats who all that's turned over to. None of that has to go through court; it's like you didn't pay, okay, we'll start stripping you of that which makes it possible to make a living. So that's really going to be helpful? You're probably hiding money, and then maybe you're working below your capacity just for revenge, and that's not acceptable either.

It's like, yeah, that's—I mean, some people might be pushed to that extreme. You know, because they think, well how do you be motivated when your money is being stolen out from underneath you no matter what you do? It's kind of going to take away a certain amount of your drive to provide, let's say, especially if you don't have access to your kids anymore as well. It turns you into a kind of slave.

Well, that's just it; it's, you know, judges can set the payment on presumed income—presumed income. Yeah, yeah, is actually making—causing fathers to enter. And sometimes mothers too but mainly fathers—a crushing cycle of incarceration. I remember talking with one father who was in prison. He was in jail in New York, and there was a bail reform, and they let everyone out apart from the dads who owed child support.

And of course, while they're inside, the interest is accruing. And if they manage to pay the debts, the fines, and the high-interest rates charged, that money doesn't go to the custodial parent; it's going to the state. So the state is... That's its power. The additional problem here is, you know, there's going to be young men listening to this, and they're going to be thinking, "Oh my God, I better never get married."

And so this whole catastrophe is undermining the idea for young men that marriage is something that anybody sensible would ever enter into. But then that doesn't really help either because if you live with someone for six months or a year, you're basically common law, at least at some point along the way. And it doesn't matter anyways. So, what are you supposed to do? Just forego, you know, permanent relationships with women all together because—well, that's hardly a solution, although it's a solution that not so many—that a non-trivial minority of young men are seriously considering, and there are many reasons for that, but this is one of them.

Yes, why would—why would you? I mean, I was talking with someone the other day through my charity about an app they have called "I Do," and it basically marries you and divorces you automatically. So within a time frame, that will save you from actually paying, you know, alimony, and it's worked out by the state that you're in.

I mean, the notion that we have to contract marriage, that's where I arrived—I believe in marriage, but the institution now, the way it's set up, it's just—it's a fool's errand. Had I known now what I knew then, why can't we get married in the eyes of God or the eyes of religion or the eyes—it's a spiritual place of worship, whatever you, whatever the couple decides to enact that union ceremony.

Why does it have to be a contract with the state that the state can then come in and negotiate, without my say, without either say? They can—not even only negotiate, they could take away what they want when they want, so it's a real challenge. Like, where's the ideological line in terms of—I believe in marriage, but I would caution—I would caution younger people.

Well, then the question then is what exactly are you doing when you caution it? Because, you know, yes, but with caution—well, exactly what do you mean by that? And the answer to that is, well, it's by no means clear. I suppose the answer to that lack of clarity is something like, well, the laws need to be changed; they seriously need to be changed.

And so presumption of innocence would be a nice start, and default 50/50 custody. What about splitting of assets? Like, where do you stand on that? I mean, I can't help but think that it's absurd in some sense that Paul McCartney's ex-wife got half of his fortune, and perhaps that's not exactly true, but you know what I mean.

And we are talking about a default 50/50 child custody arrangement, is the right arrangement in relationship to assets? 50/50 once the marriage takes place, and is that also true? And I'm out of my legal depth here—is that also true in the case of common law marriage, and should it be the case?

Yeah, common law—I'm not too up to speed on that. I would say, you know, again, it's—you know, I've been talking with another technology company about software they have in divorce called what's called a Disa Master. So, all the financial numbers, the forensic accountancy—all of those numbers go into this machine, and it spurts out what people have to pay, what people receive in terms of child support and alimony.

And this app actually would take in that information before, during, and after if there isn't after while people are married, and if they decide to separate to actually calculate who brought what, how they brought it. But it's again, how do you determine that? Because the value of God—the value of the moment. I mean, that's a quick route to divorce right there, man, trying to negotiate all that.

Well, absolutely because, you partly what you do in a marriage is you enter into it and you have to—with trust—because otherwise how can you enter into it? And the trust has to be, I presume, that you're going to do the right thing here, and you presume that for me, and we'll struggle forward trying to do that. And if we have to negotiate the terms of our eventual disunion, well, it's like we're negotiating the disunion right now.

And so, I just can't see how that's going to work. Well, and so look, if you look back, what is you must ask yourself this, like a hundred times: what did you do wrong, do you think, that led to the dissolution of your marriage? Or is that an unreasonable question? What did you bring to the table that made things go sideways?

You said you were a great father, and so you're ready for that, but your marriage went sideways, and why? Well, the part that I'm responsible for, I can talk to that. I wasn't monogamous; I wasn't faithful. That was probably the biggest—she found out after all this happened that that was the case.

So that would be, I would say, the kind of biggest factor. Do you think that this marriage dissolution would have taken place if that had not been the case? I mean, because I'm sorry to push you, but I'm going to, because this is so bloody important. You know, and what happened to you was so terrible that—and happens to many men and not insignificant number of women—it's so terrible that it needs to be delved into deeply.

And so you were looking for something outside the marriage, obviously. And perhaps that was because there was something that wasn't in the marriage or God only knows why. And so that was an emotional intimacy that was—you go ahead.

Yeah, I was going to say there was an emotional intimacy; there wasn't physical intimacy. The sex had dried up after the first kid. I tried talking about it. You know, the male sex drive was there; it is there.

Okay, so let's go into that; that's a good one because that happens to lots of people in their marriages, you know? I mean, it happens as you get older, and it happens as you have kids, because you know, you have 15 priorities, but only 10 of them ever get implemented, and maybe like number 14 is sex or something like that, and so it goes away.

And it's really hard for people to negotiate. And you said that you tried to talk about it. I guess I would like to know how hard did you try, and how many times and how insistently, and why didn't it work? I mean, because if I have clients in this situation and I'm talking to both of them, I wasn't a marital counselor, but sometimes I would talk to both.

It's like, "How often do you think you should have sex?" Let's get a range here. Okay, zero times per year is too few, and like twice a day, that's too many. So, now we've got the parameters defined here, right? So we're not going for zero; we're not going for you never get out of bed; we're going for something in between that. And so we might look at what's acceptable for the average couple, and maybe that's something like twice a week or three times a week, and that's a place to start.

And so, because it's not optional; this isn't optional. This isn't—you know, and you're going to turn it into a routine; you're going to take all the spontaneity out of it. It's like, well, how's that spontaneity going for you, exactly? It's like, well, we haven't had sex in six months.

So, yeah, it's really important and really great points. And I think as well, it's not just the sex. I mean, there is—yeah, you know, there is emotional intimacy, there's affection, and there is, you know...

Hopefully that’s all part of the— that's all part of sex when it's really working properly. Like I had this one client who was terrified of women to a degree you can't possibly imagine. And he was so terrified of women he couldn't even get near one. And he was in his 40s, and he had his problems, believe me, and that was one of them.

And his mother, who was about 80, was still taking care of him to some degree. And she needed to because he had a lot of impairments that were real and profound. And I suggested to her that I take him to a strip club because that was the only place I could think of to expose him to women in any possible sense.

And she was a very conservative person, this woman, but she agreed immediately. And so we went once a week for quite a long time. One of the things I really learned when I was there, that a lot of the men that were there were there for emotional intimacy, for whatever they could get, for some touch.

Like you think it's pure sexual gratification, but—and of course that element is there—but most of these men were desperately alienated and lonesome, and they were there—and I'm not being naive about this; I've been in strip clubs; I know what they're like—but the idea that what you're negotiating in a relationship when you're negotiating sex is just the climax, let's say, that's just wrong.

You're negotiating physical intimacy, and that's not optional. And, you know, like babies die without physical intimacy, and children don't grow up properly unless they're played with and touched and cuddled, and even animals are like that. And so this negotiation is of crucial importance, and so I'll go again. You said that you talked about what happened when you talked about it; it was shut down.

I mean, how? I was insistent at times; I would continue to revisit the subject. I would implore to go and speak with a professional, a therapist. Well, there's nothing sexier than a man imploring. Well, sure, darling, let's go.

Yeah, no, but that was one of the tactics. I mean, that was, you know, you have to deploy multiple tactics. I tried courtship; I tried, you know, I was exasperated at times. You know, look, if what do you expect me to do? Go outside the marriage. You know, I have to—there has to be some, you know, patience.

What do you think?... Okay, so when I was doing this professionally, we'd start with these framing frequencies, let's say, and then we would—these were people who entered into this in good faith, so they were trying both to move forward. We'd say, well, you know, what have a date this week, and what you do as a marital counselor or sexual counselor in situations like that when people haven't been intimate for a long time.

You say, "What you're going to do, you're going to have two dates this week, or maybe one, and you're going to hate it because it's awkward, and you don't like each other, and you know, you're separated from each other." But here's the first rule: no sex to consummation, zero. You do not do that to begin with.

And so you kind of have the person revert to the first stages of what would have been a protracted courtship, right? And you go out, and you have dinner, and then they come back the next week, and they say, I say, "How'd it go?" And they say, "It was awful! All we did was fight; we're never doing that again."

And the answer was, "Well, I see you're never doing that again." It's like, "That's your solution? No romance now for the rest of your life? You're just going to live and you're going to hate each other? That's your solution?"

How about you need to do this 20 times before you're not absolutely bloody awful at it? And so with—but it's very hard, you know, if you haven't been trained to think about such things like that, you don't know that you need to take 10 steps backwards. You don't know that you need to forbid full sexual contact for a while while you're kind of reintroducing it.

And of course, this was being negotiated between two people and me, let's say. They had already agreed that they were going to do what they could to fix this, so they were both kind of—even though they're resistant to it in their individual ways—they were both willing to experiment to find a solution.

And I don't know what you do if you have a partner that just refuses point-blank to go there. Well, I think you said it right: the willingness to experiment and have a little nuance and a little doubt to rekindle and revisit.

Maybe why you came together to kind of that nostalgic savoring of the first meeting or the first few times and to try something new. Yeah, well, one of the things I often did with people was ask them, okay, well, what attracted you to the other person to begin with?

You know, and then they'd usually get misty-eyed, both of them, when they were talking about that because they weren't that happy that their love had disappeared. So, okay, so then I'll ask you a deeper question than that: So why do you think your wife was unwilling to engage in those negotiations with you?

I mean it could be we could say, well, lack of skill on your part in the negotiation, and that's... who the hell knows how to negotiate such things? It's not easy, you know, and it's not like we have professional training in negotiation even though we should because people are so bad at it; it's just beyond belief. They have no idea where to start.

And so, so why do you think you hit a brick wall? What did it—did you wait too long to start or did you...? I think I floundered because of much of what you talked about in terms of negotiation. You know, too many, from what I know now, I didn't know then, in terms of the use statements rather than the "I" statements.

Leading with the "I" rather than the right communication—the way to, you know, the way to understand and collaborate through and negotiate through without it being serious, to do it together, to put demands or non-negotiables down. Not that I did; it was just an exasperation.

Yeah, yeah. Well, couples will come in; they'll say to one of them, "You never want to have sex with me, and it's been like that for two years, and I don't see that it's going to change in the future." It's like, well, the other person is set on their heels right away because you basically said you've been bad for a long time, you're bad now, and I can't see how you're going to change.

It's like, oh my God, how are you going to start from that? And then maybe in a situation like that you ask the person, well, if you could have the sex life you wanted, what would it look like? And you can ask each of them that. And then, well, then you know at least you've got a mutual vision there.

And the right—I would say men generally would like to have sex more frequently than women; I don't think I'll probably get pilloried for that comment, but I don't think anybody reasonable would deny it. I agree with you, and I'll get less pilloried but probably pilloried too.

Yeah, well, it's generally the case—not always the case, but you can meet in the middle, that's for sure. Or no, that I shouldn't say that because that's not exactly right. What you want to do is you want to elaborate out a vision, then you want your partner to elaborate out a vision, and then you want to create a joint vision that's better than both of those—better sustainable.

And then it's not compromised, exactly. But if you start with accusations— which you're likely to do if you're frustrated and you have been for like three years and things are already sideways—you're just not going to go anywhere. And the other person will dig their heels in, and then you know they hit you with counter-accusations.

And, you know, it's one of the things—terrible failing of our education system is that yes, the rudiments of negotiation aren't taught. It's real— I agree—but particularly interpersonal relating. I mean, this is one thing we haven't—you know, the charity that I started, CPU—Children and Parents United—we have three basic focuses in terms of what we are: programs and what we want to do and what we are doing.

And the first one is communication. You know, we've been talking with Warren Farrell about bringing his couple's communication in and not just couples but interpersonally relating throughout the generations and friends and because to your point, when trust breaks down, how do you get that back? You know, we need to dr. John Gottman talks about, you know, one negative comment has way more power than 50 positive comments.

So how do you undo that negative? Yeah, you can tell that if you go on Twitter and see how you respond emotionally. Well, it's also easier to pick up on this. So, you know, the other thing I used to talk about—one other thing I used to talk about with my clients was, well, here's a tactic: how about you watch your partner real carefully?

And whenever they do something you would like them to do more of, you tell them that you saw it and tell them that you're happy about it. That's really hard because generally, we let normal go unnoticed, and we even let good go un-rewarded. Or you could really be foolish and punish someone when they do something good, like maybe you're a bit jealous, and your wife goes out of her way to make herself look attractive when you're going out for a date.

It might be an indication that she has some sense that maybe at some point in the future, she might sleep with you. But because you're jealous, you don't compliment her wardrobe, or you say something snarky about it, and then it's like, do that three or four times, and she'll never dress up for you again, ever. And then it's done.

And so this idea of watching people and then seeing when they do something you'd like them to do more of and then telling them, that's really— I think that's good. I think that's a really powerful thing. And you know, that's something that to your point can be—it's hard to take on new routines, new ways of being effective, of expressing affection, if you're not used to it.

If you're more stoic or if you're, but we have to—we have to give what we'd like to receive. And I think we all like to receive platitudes and affirmations, and you know, that was lovely that you did that, sweetheart.

Yeah, especially if it's specific. Especially if it's specific. You know, you say, "Hey, look, I just saw what you did; here's what you did that was specific." And like, yes, thank you, that's great. Yeah, that's great, you know? And it's funny too because you do have to negotiate details.

You know, it's like, well think, well, how often do you want to be hugged? It's like, I don't want to talk about it. It's like, yeah, no kidding you don't want to talk about it. But like, how about never? Okay, never seems a bit dismal. So okay, let's see if we can do a little better than never.

So maybe you have a couple in, and you're talking to them, and you think, well, why don't you try once a day? Or do I just try once this week and come back and say how it went? Then you have to be patient with your partner because if you've been estranged from them physically and you're doing this hug because your idiot therapist told you it was a good idea, it's going to be perfunctory and a bit cynical.

But it's a hell of a lot better than nothing. And so you come back, and you're kind of irritated about it, and you say, well, okay, you're practicing, and you're not very good at it. So it didn't go that well, but try it this week twice and see if you can just do it a little better, and that works.

You know, but you got to be humble enough to know how stupid you are when you start, and it's pretty pathetic how bad you are. Well, you can also laugh about it. You can also find ways to laugh about it, I think, in the room, if you're with a third—that third is a therapist.

You don't leave with the third, you know? So as much as a therapist can have ideas, I think it does have to come down to the individuals who actually take that suggestion and really believe in it and want to move it forward in a positive way.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, because therapists actually can't give advice. You know, you can only ask people; it's like you can say, "Well, how often do you want to get hugged?" They don't say never; it's like, "Okay, it isn't never." So you know, is it once a week or something? But you have to ask, and if you just tell people to do things, they just won't do them. They can't even tell themselves to do things and do them; it has to be negotiated.

You can't. You try not— you tell yourself to do things, Christ, no, you won't listen. Well, the conversation was... Oh, I always tell you: the two most important parts of the day, waking up and going to bed, and those mini-rituals. And if you go to bed to sleep, then you're not going to fall asleep.

If you go to bed to rest, sleep will handle itself. Great! How many times—I’m just curious; how many times do you like to be hugged? Are you a hugger? Yes! I mean, you must have a lot of people who come up to you and want to hug...

They have like a lot, right? Yeah, yeah, that's fine; it's fine, man. I don't mind that at all. I mean, with my... I'll give you an example of how this works. When my daughter—my daughter's a year and a half older than my son. And so kids that are spaced less than three years apart have a pretty high risk of fairly severe sibling rivalry.

That can get really out of hand, and it's partly because the older child is still pretty young to have an interloper in. You know? And as also is called upon to be quite mature very rapidly, because when you have a one-and-a-half-year-old and no other children, you think that's a pretty young kid. But then when you have a newborn, you think, "Oh, no, that's an adult, man; it's just a short adult."

So there's a big demand on the child to mature, and so then she or he can get jealous of the infant, and that can really wreak havoc. So we trained our daughter repeatedly to come and get a hug.

And we practiced it. It was like come and get a hug, and we practiced that till she got really good at it. And we said, "Whenever you're feeling upset, you just come over and get a hug." And then you can have some attention.

And so sometimes my wife and I would have a hug, and we'd have the kid come in between us, and then she could have a hug too. And so by the time our son was born, she was an expert at coming to get a hug. And so whenever she got upset, she could just come get a hug.

But that took like... You have to train someone to do that, and you think, "Well, you don't have to train that." It's like you would be surprised what you have to train and what you have to learn in practice.

And you know what? Yeah, and also it reminds what it reminds me of, Jordan, is my youngest—my eldest boy when he was born; he went to kindergarten, pre-kindergarten in kindergarten. We would tell him because we, as new parents, we were listening to the school, and it was a very you know Hollywood school.

It was like a Hollywood school house. It was all use your words! Use your words! So we drilled this into him: use your words, use your words. Then he went to kindergarten, and he got the crap kicked out of him every day. He was bullied mercilessly from kindergarten through first grade, no support from the school.

And realizing that the tool of use your words doesn't make—it doesn't do any good when a big kid is coming up and punching you in the face. So you know, then my youngest son, it was slightly different, and he's a little—and this may be, you know, second sibling—thing, second born of his boys, I don't know.

But that right of passage of, you know, just being a little bit more rough and tumble, roughhousing—the importance of that, you know, going back to the issue of Father's Day.

You got to use your words, man, but you got to have something to back them up with. Oh yes, absolutely! And kids are really good at sussing that out real quickly, especially the bully types. They'll come along and poke you. It's like anything to you? No? Oh, well, then I can just pretty much steal everything you have, including your reputation and your happiness, and there isn't a damn thing you're going to be able to do about that.

You think, "Well, kids aren't like that." It's like, "No, you're just naive." And like heaven help your kids, because being naive as a parent is not that helpful for your kids, and there’s plenty of bullies on the playground and plenty in adulthood too, so...

Aren't there? There are! You've experienced quite a few. But you seem to be holding your own, and you seem to be— you seem to be back and, you know, getting into a full schedule again. I see you're going on tour.

Yeah, yeah, well thank God for small mercies, you know, and for all the help I had too. So, but yeah. Hey, so tell me what happened with your kids? How old are they now, your boys? 17 and 15. My youngest turned 15 on November 22nd, the day before Thanksgiving. They—I don't see them; I don't hear from them. My arms are outstretched wide open for if and when, and maybe one day there will be that reckoning.

You know, so why do you think that—why is it that they're not seeing you? What happened as far as you can tell? Parental alienation, parental alienation is child abuse, plain and simple; it’s brainwashing.

And it’s clear if you look at the history of our family. And then for the 18 months—the first 18 months that I was mired in court and had to have a visitation monitor that they, you know, I actually published this in my book—at the end the two independent psychological evaluations that I was forced to partake in and pay for.

I published those; one is 2015 and one is 2019 in December at the end. Neither judge looked at either of them or cared but in the first one in 2015, December 2015, the psychologist, the psychiatrist included 70, I think it was 69 monitored visitation reports. And it's clear and unequivocal that my sons are suffering. They love me; they say in every report, "I love you, Dad. We love you, Dad. I love you, Dad. We want to live with you," and the system didn't care.

And so that spoke highly to me that this system needs reform; it needs improving. On a personal basis, they now have this image of me having not been around, that I'm someone to be feared, that I can't be trusted, that I'm dangerous, and none of that is the case, and none of that is true. But Jesus, their psyches have been so cemented at such a young age—10.

And now you talked about grief too, you know, and the never-ending consequence of this grief that comes from separation without finality. It's like they must have been experiencing that too.

And yeah, at some point, you know, they can't in the house of betraying the matriarch. Any time... I remember the youngest, where it was a year in, Jordan, and, oh my God, we had a visit, and he called me on the phone. I still kept the voicemail; it kept me going. It gave me—it was medicinal fuel for me to just hear his voice and know what it sounded like.

I knew always know what it sounded like, but he called me, and he was like, "Dad! Dad!" And then his older brother was like, "Get a phone; don't hang up the phone; we're going to be in trouble with Mom!" And he hung up the phone.

And it's that fear—the irrational, paranoid fear of me. Yeah, well at some point it's got to be easier for them to let you go than to be torn apart on a day-to-day basis when I realized that they were—after four years of monitored visitation, I finally got a visitation without a monitor watching my every move and writing it down.

And then I realized that they were both—and they weren't allowed to have their iPhones with them; their phones with them on visits; Mom wouldn't let them. But they both had their phones, and they were sticking—they were videotaping. And then, and then I—I—it became clear to me through other channels that they may have been fitted, at least one of them, with body cameras.

And when it got to that place, I—when my sons are being used as a tool against me to try and record incriminating evidence, that there has to be an end to that for them. So part of why I came to some kind of resolution and ending on it, and I gave up so much. I mean, she wouldn't even give me through the settlement agreement. She wouldn't give me the rights to know to let me know if either of our sons were on life support, and the button was going to—the switch was going to be, you know, permission was going to be given that they would die.

She didn't—I mean, she wouldn't legally have to let me know. And but I didn't even realize at the time that every everything in our settlement agreement that that I got, which was very little, she hasn't held to anyway because she knows that ultimately it's going to cost tens of thousands of dollars to go back to court in the same system—zero-sum.

And so on one of the things I learned from being a clinician was that restraining orders only work on the people on whom restraining orders work. For example, so I had some clients who had like six restraining orders on them. One of them, I remember he was really paranoid; he was hard to deal with.

I got somewhere with him, but it's very hard to deal with a paranoid client, and he was clinically paranoid, and it's like NDA's, non-disclosure agreements, that, you know, really they aren't worth the paper they're written on because people are just going to do what they're going to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so enforcing, that's very difficult. He used to say to people if they annoyed him, now and then he'd get tangled up with someone who was bureaucratic in their inclinations, and he'd say, "I'm going to be your worst nightmare." And you know, sometimes you might want to say that to someone, but you don't really mean it. He really meant it.

So it takes restraining order—and oh yeah, you have no... How do you tackle this false allegations of DVs and TROs? I mean, you know, over seven, I think it's around over 70 percent, and I'd have to check on the stat of domestic abuse allegations resulting in a TRO, a temporary response, yes, temporary restraining order, or EPO, emergency protection order are not sustained once the case moves to a permanency or evidentiary hearing.

But this shows that the majority—perhaps the majority of domestic violence allegations are perhaps false or unprovable. And I think, yeah, this correlation.

What's going on—the rub there, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, the correlation with cancel culture and victimhood being the new social currency. This is an affront to the real victims of domestic violence.

So how do you tackle this—the false allegation and the perjurer if the allegation works every time? The question is... Absolutely. Well, then the question is too, how do you stop people from using systems that are there to protect the vulnerable from being used as weapons?

You think, well, people wouldn't do that. It's like, yeah! You just wait till you tangle with someone who'll do that, and you'll change your—yeah, who is right?

I don't know why people always make that particular noise when they hear about such things, but yeah, yeah, I've seen those systems. Well, they've been weaponized against me continually, but I've seen people just brought to their—same place you were brought to—it's like, yeah, get tangled up with child protection services for a week and see what your life is like and hour.

Yeah, false allegations that these false allegations that are used in family law to thwart the non-resident parent and child relationship need to be dealt with in a way that protects the relationship that is under attack and in a way to dissuade the making of these allegations or accusations going forward.

And one of the things we could—one of the things we could warn people about in this podcast is if you're thinking about making such allegations, don't be so sure that your own arm won't get tangled up in the machine because...

You think you know you're going to leverage this enterprise to punish your partner, and maybe you're willing to do that because you've been pushed to your limit in some sense, or maybe just because you're feeling a bit malevolent.

It's like—you wear loose clothing close to that machinery and you're going to get pulled in and spit out, and so it won't just be you going down the negative pathway. And the problem with that is that some people, they get so inclined to wreak havoc and to extract revenge that they're perfectly willing to hang themselves in the window to block out their neighbor's sunlight, let's say.

Yeah, if you're going to go on a journey of revenge, dig two graves. You know, yeah, that's right, that's for sure. You know, and when I—this is what I think about with, you know, the Pandora's box that she let—she let out. The only thing that was left was hope, is those who, you know, God will forgive our sins; our nervous system won't.

And this is that false allegation, you know, that technique and tool being weaponized for financial gain. I just wonder when this will reach—a we have a president in America, we have a president who's a Catholic father and grandfather, and the Violence Against Women Act was his act in 1974.

And that—that's a series of—it was a series of law enforcement grants that shifted the focus away from the problems of the relationship to a law enforcement approach to domestic violence, resulting in a shift from the prior discretionary approach to mandatory arrest or detainment policies.

And I think that that's the kind of holding space now, like purgatory, where like in my case, Jordan, when the police came, they couldn't arrest me. I've never been arrested. They couldn't arrest me because I hadn't committed a crime, but they had to remove me because I was seen as a danger.

Where do they take me? They can't put me in a prison cell for long because I would need my Miranda rights read to me; I'd need an attorney. And access to one— you know, where people like me end up? 5150 holds! You know, those who need to be on 5150 holds, where they end up because they were thrown out of prison.

And those who are actually emotionally disturbed who need help and need assistance go to the worst place possible for them—jail. And prison—our prison system and those men and sometimes women like me who have false allegations, false accusations made. There is no real place for the system to—so the police used to have discretion, and now all this money that President Biden created through pushing through his act.

And by the way, VAWA, the Violence Against Women Act, is being looked at again.

They call it STOP grants; it was money for STOP grants. So to qualify for these STOP grants, law enforcement had to adopt these policies of mandatory arrests. So, you know, forcing law enforcement to prosecute or persecute every man who's accused of domestic violence to keep the coffers full.

Like this is the incentivized structure that we have. So how can we change that? That then, you know, comes back to... I guess we start to change it by having conversations like this, right? And trying to specify what the problem is, because it's really complicated what the problem is and then what the solution should be on a legal basis, what the solution should be ethically, and on an individual basis.

So, you know, a thousand conversations like this is a place to start. So I think so too, and I think I think more proactive solutions, I mean, that's what I'm trying to do through my new fledgling charity, is to have, you know, the communication programs.

Where can people find out about that? That's Children and Parents United. Where? Yeah, that's right now. Sorry, go ahead with the charity. Yeah, right now, Children and Parents United or CPU is our mission is to promote and improve child well-being by providing information and resources to policymakers, the public, practitioners, resulting in reduced conflict and enhanced relationships for those children and parents negotiating our current family law systems.

And we have three—the place to find that is TheRespondent.com. We will—we'll be launching the website for the charity soon, but right now, it lives at TheRespondent.com. But we have three cost-effective, practical solution-based programs right now: communication workshops and programs that we're working out and developing that promote improved interpersonal relating, mediation—CPU Mediation, which we call it, is to provide mediation services.

I just actually—I mediated my first case; I wanted to do one myself just to see. And it was a couple who'd been in family law for six years, spent nearly two million dollars, no resolution.

I was able to find resolution and settlement within six hours on a Saturday and three hours on a certain way because that's a way different process than trying to get each person all they can grab from the spoils of the relationship. Yeah, it's like it's not... I heard someone tell me once, it's not—you don't get what you deserved; it's what you can live with because you’re always going to walk away from mediation, you know, feeling somewhat aggrieved.

Yeah, at least you could walk away, right? You have life. And then the other is a public interest law firm providing legal advice so that supports the mediation process, oversees the legal procedures so that if people do want to get divorced, that they do want to separate long term, that there's the ability to actually draw up those legal agreements and deliver them.

But really, we just need to keep people out of court. I joke that we are the Red Cross of divorce. We're growing and building out, but we need resources and infrastructure, and we're hoping to get that because hopefully, this podcast will help.

So that's Children and Parents United, and that's at—the respondent, what's the—dot com—TheRespondent.com. And that's after your book, The Respondent: Exposing the Cartel of Family Law, which is a description of your journey through—well, let's call it first purgatory and then maybe hell.

I think you're probably right. And by the way, the audiobook will be out soon, and I've just we've added— we've been adding sound effects and ambience and atmosphere to that to make it to make it really feel like that hellish journey, you know, so you're actually there and present, more so than just a regular, like me reading the audiobook, and I've got a couple of great people who’ve helped with that: Andrea Romano, who's one—99-time Emmy Award winner. She voice directed it and actually read as one of the psychologists at the end of the book.

So hopefully, hopefully, we’ll do some good, and you know, the emails that have been coming back from— you know, I was asked early on by, you know, how it is that the Hollywood, you know, marketing and publicity and the publishers, you know, who's your target demographic. I said, "Look, if we can get the suicide rates down, if my book can get to one person that then they can feel like they’re not alone—well, that's a big deal for people to know that they're not alone. You know, they're not crazy." I’ve got—I had a military father who lost his legs in Afghanistan—two tours of duty; he served with false allegations of domestic violence papers.

He came home homeless, hasn’t seen his kids, I think for six years; he's been representing himself in family law. And I think about that, Jordan, and it just—it makes me— we talk about being punished for your virtues, man! Whoa! You said it! You said it!

All right, well, Mr. Ellis, it's good to see you on your feet and through this piece of some degree. Thank you very much. Pleasure talking with you, man.

Yeah, you too, man! Really, keep up the astonishing work! [Music]