Mother Faces 4 years in Jail for Lying in Custody Case

Covering Perjury In Family Court

Lake County, CA December 11,, 2017- Reporters, Editors and Publishers don't like covering divorce  and custody cases. 

​Every year  thousands of people reach out to the press begging to have their stories told. Most mainstream media outlets know covering cases where lawyers are allowed to lie, Judges are apathetic and litigants  are willing to say or do almost anything is nothing short of foolish.

District Attorneys across California subscribe to that  same philosophy, resulting in  most abusive and fraudulent conduct being ignored when it arises from a family matter.

However,  in Lake County a prosecutor  has spent the last two years committed to prosecuting perjury and trying to get other counties to do the same and the county is now beginning to see people being jailed for committing perjury in their divorce or custody cases.

A prosecutor in Santa Clara told Q:

" Look ALL women lie when it comes to their children and abuse. AND ...ALL all men lie when it comes to money, and Jeff Rosen will never do anything about that unless it gets him re-elected."

That philosophy appears to be taken up by the judges and court staff in family court as well. Sadly, while some claims of abuse are not true, women trying to report real abuse , or protect their children during divorce cases, often fall victim to the code of silence:  where women appear to face retaliation for being protective parents when domestic violence and child abuse issues are at stake. At the same time women making false allegations to gain an advantage  in a custody or divorce matter, continue to set real victims and women in general back decades.

On the other hand, men who fight for their equitable custody time who are not abusers, are often lumped into a prejudiced class of self -represented litigants where judges find them not only to be lacking credibility, but to be unworthy of parenting their own children.

Sadly what was missed here is that a woman may have in fact been a real victim  of domestic violence at the hands of her boyfriend , and like most victims of real abuse, she probably didn't trust the system, or didn't  know how to break the pattern of violence where she and her child were concerned, which is not uncommon for victims  in and out of family court.

We applaud  Paul Payne for telling this story, but he missed the details critical for fair reporting by not investigating more about the underlying family law case and what happened to the father , and the boyfriend . If a woman will go to jail for lying about abuse, then the abuser should also be in jail as well.  And to assure the safety of the child, the DA should be investigating  the lawyers and the father in this case to make sure their hands were not unclean.

New laws in California  require prosecutors  to seek the truth, not just a win, or plea out allegations. In cases district attorneys  opt to enforce, let's hope those laws are applied evenly as well and that DA's are not simply  using perjury as a mechanism to continue to carry out injustice woven so deeply throughout the state's family courts. .