Guest View: In Family Court, I Lost My Child Because I Was a Stay-at-Home Mother and He Had the Money

Here is a story from Illinois. It is not an unfamiliar pattern. This mother’s words show us that the problem may not be found exclusively in Connecticut.

She was good enough then.

By An Illinois Mother

Hello Frank

I sincerely cannot thank you enough for writing this article. The biggest mistake I made, on the advice of an attorney, was to get a Guardian ad Litem [GAL] involved in my custody hearing.

She only spoke to two out of many character witnesses on my behalf. My witnesses would call her office and not have calls returned. They would email her and not get a response. They wrote letters that went unread.

The GAL did decide to speak to my abuser, my biological mother, and her husband – a man who abused his own daughter, myself, and my daughter. The state’s attorney would not act on what happened to my daughter because my biological mom’s husband didn’t make my daughter “act” on the penis in her face.

We were laughed at and mocked in court when I brought this up, and my estranged husband has been screaming alienation; he even tried to get an OP after he hit and drug me with his vehicle, with my daughter inside.

My daughter is on the 13 side of 12, and I’ve raised her – been a homemaker and even homeschooled her. She is very much like me in how she acts and responds, but also very much has a teenager attitude.

Alienation was used to explain away her teenage behavior and attitude, and her disliking her father.

She was good enough then.

She disliked her father because, when he left us, he moved in with my biological mom and her husband. Anyone in their right mind would understand why my daughter felt fear living in that abusive home with her dad.

I urged her to have a relationship with her father because, while he was absent most of the time while she was growing up, he wasn’t bad all the time.

When she was in about first grade, her dad choked her and turned her upside down as punishment, but I didn’t find out about that for quite some time. He threw not one, not two, but three vacuum cleaners at us out of rage. He’s not an alcoholic, but he is a binge drinker, and according to my daughter, he drinks daily.

Yes, I should have left him more times than I can count, but, as a homemaker, I didn’t have anything to fall back on. The GAL has recommended that I’m all but taken out of my daughter’s life completely – so my daughter can “move on.”

I’m not exactly sure why, other than alienation and false testimony from my biological mom – including her accusing me of being a drug addict. I’m not on drugs. I don’t drink, except on a rare occasion with my girlfriends. I don’t run around. I don’t go to bars. I don’t get into fights, and I keep to myself.

Again, I was a homemaker and volunteer!

She was good enough then.

I went through educational courses on protecting children, not harming them. PTSD from the Family Court is a real thing. Mothers losing their children is a real thing.

My story is much more extended and involved than what I have written but I wanted to take a moment to let you know that this has become the norm in our family court system. I live in Illinois, and it used to be that mothers had all the rights. Now the script has flipped, and it’s 100% for the fathers, whether alcoholics, abusers, pedophiles, drug addicts, you name it. There is no balance, and the scales of justice do not exist.

And good enough then

Since I was a homemaker and he took all of the money, I don’t have the finances for attorneys to even to fight this. I do the best I can when I show up, and I deal with the abuse over Zoom Court. This began in Aug. 2020.

Again, I sincerely thank you for writing your article from the bottom of my heart!

In Family Court, he who holds the money, holds the fate of their child.

She want to Family Court and they appointed a GAL who knew how to take a mother from a child using Parental Alienation Syndrome. Need I add that the father had the money.

Now, according to family court, she is not good enough to see her child at all. 

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  • Any state that allows children to be isolated from their mother, without just cause (and parental alienation is not a just cause) needs to have their whole family judicial system overhauled!

  • I’m sorry for this woman’s suffering, but “the dad has money and that’s why he got the kids” rationale doesn’t hold water. I’d guess that in the majority of two-parent affluent households, the man is the primary earner, and the woman chooses to forego paid work to raise the children and maybe volunteer. And yet, the majority of those divorces don’t end with rich dad getting custody. Go figure!

  • There is only one ideology in modern society advocating separating children from mothers … only one.

  • Keep writing, Frank!

    It’s time for parents in these situations to speak out! They are threatened and silenced to keep the racketeering operation hidden.

    It’s difficult to consider the possibility of such mass corruption, but the AFCC is now well known and documented. They operate throughout the country. The power is far reaching, and they have contacts in every part of the community- the police, DCF, CPS, you name it. All to deliver children to one parent and erase a healthy parent forever.

    The Connecticut branch of the AFCC was shut down for corruption – but the judges, psychologists and attorneys who led the CT chapter continue to abuse children, violate all due process and civil rights, and fleece families of their life savings to deliver sole custody with the abusive parent and “no-contact” with a protective parent.

  • This is insanity! Our US family judges are literally KILLING off mothers (and to a lesser extent, fathers). Where is the outrage? Children need both parents and there are not findings of abuse or unfitness in these cases.

    Criminal enterprises- RICO in family courts.
    There are NO psychiatrists leading these cases because they have a duty to do no harm! Instead they use lawyers as GALs (who are not even mandated reporters of child abuse), psychologists, social workers and other hired guns with no accountability.

    This is child abuse occurring within our courts.

    Thank you Frank! Please get these criminals who destroy childhoods and determine loving parents are if no value fir they have no money to pay for custody delivery.

  • Frank- I’ve been telling you the states that receive the most federal funds to do this to mothers are Connecticut, Texas, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Texas. They all get afcc training that pervades their systems. Illinois put forth the bill to make this funding. It’s legal to discriminate against women everywhere except Connecticut. The fall needs to happen there

About the Author

Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist.

His work has been cited in hundreds of news outlets, like The New York Times, The Daily Mail, VICE News, CBS News, Fox News, New York Post, New York Daily News, Oxygen, Rolling Stone, People Magazine, The Sun, The Times of London, CBS Inside Edition, among many others in all five continents.

His work to expose and take down NXIVM is featured in books like “Captive” by Catherine Oxenberg, “Scarred” by Sarah Edmonson, “The Program” by Toni Natalie, and “NXIVM. La Secta Que Sedujo al Poder en México” by Juan Alberto Vasquez.

Parlato has been prominently featured on HBO’s docuseries “The Vow” and was the lead investigator and coordinating producer for Investigation Discovery’s “The Lost Women of NXIVM.” He also appeared in "Branded and Brainwashed: Inside NXIVM, and was credited in the Starz docuseries "Seduced" for saving 'slave' women from being branded and escaping the sex-slave cult known as DOS.

Additionally, Parlato’s coverage of the group OneTaste, starting in 2018, helped spark an FBI investigation, which led to indictments of two of its leaders in 2023.

Parlato appeared on the Nancy Grace Show, Beyond the Headlines with Gretchen Carlson, Dr. Oz, American Greed, Dateline NBC, and NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, where Parlato conducted the first-ever interview with Keith Raniere after his arrest. This was ironic, as many credit Parlato as one of the primary architects of his arrest and the cratering of the cult he founded.

Parlato is a consulting producer and appears in TNT's The Heiress and the Sex Cult, which premieres on May 22, 2022.

IMDb — Frank Parlato

Contact Frank with tips or for help.
Phone / Text: (305) 783-7083
Email: frankparlato@gmail.com

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