During my dissolution case, my ex-husband motioned the court to have a Psychological Evaluation performed under Evidence Code 730 citing I was an unfit mother. Prior to that motion being filed with the court, my ex-husband spent twenty days in jail for Domestic Violence and was placed on three years probation. Prior to that, my-ex-husband was arrested for suspicion of Murdering a drug dealer.
The Psychological Evaluation performed was absolutely a waste of my time, my money and proved to be a sham. My ex-husband had a women pose as a therapist, stating to the evaluator, I had been under her care and that I was a drug addicted person who should not be a parent. When I confronted the Psychological Evaluator, Dr. Fred Norris in Thousand Oaks, CA that I was not under this woman’s care, and that she was not licensed to practice psychology, he said, “It doesn’t matter.” I presented Dr. Fred Norris 137 pages of evidence to support that my ex-husband was violent, abusive, and to say the least not educated enough to be a nurturing parent. Dr. Norris undermined the documents and called himself a person certified with Domestic Violence. Dr. Norris undermined and discounted my ex-husbands conviction for Domestic Violence and his arrest record all together, he has a rap sheet. The Ventura County Superior Court’s Family Law division is nothing more than a court to hear traffic tickets.
I provided Judge Henry Walsh a motion to strike the Psychological Evaluation based on fraud and deceit. With that motion, attached as exhibits (evidence) to support the fraud were letters from The California Board of Psychology and Behavioral Medicine showing that the woman claiming I was under her care was not licensed to even practice Psychology. Judge Henry Walsh stated and I quote, “I don’t take this lightly” but he did nothing about it. My motion to strike the evaluation was denied.
While conducting research I found this article written by Claudia Rowe of the Seattle PI and I feel all women who are currently going through a Psychological Evaluation as part of a custody battle in court, need to read this.
Families’ futures decided with little oversight
Parent evaluators set own fees while wielding enormous power
By CLAUDIA ROWE
P-I REPORTER- Seattle PI
So-called parent evaluators need no particular credentials or training. They may use any method they wish, charge what they please and remain virtually free of oversight. Yet their word can upend families in a single stroke.
Kim McLauglin was one of a number of divorcing parents who hired psychologist Stuart Greenberg to be her court-appointed evaluator in a child custody dispute with her ex-husband.
In recent decades, as dockets have become clogged with warring parents battling for custody of their children, overwhelmed judges have turned increasingly toward this cluster of psychologists and social workers for guidance. But as there is almost no check on their influence, any human foible might result in a faulty or unfair report — with enormous implications for those families under the microscope.
This fact was thrown into sharp relief last month when Stuart Greenberg, a forensic psychologist with a thriving parent-evaluation practice, committed suicide while being investigated for surreptitiously filming women using the bathroom in his Montlake office and masturbating to the tapes.
For more than two decades, Greenberg had worked as a court-appointed evaluator, administering personality tests and voluminous questionnaires to the parents sitting in his office. The examinations often delved into minute detail: Did the father have a family history of arthritis? What about the mother’s childhood relationship to her pets — was it above average?
At the end of the process, which could stretch on for months, sometimes years, Greenberg issued his decision and a bill. Typically, the fee was triple that of other evaluators — one totaled more than $63,000 — but almost no one questioned him, at least not publicly.
Such is the case with the field in general. There is no central repository for complaints, nor any official registry of qualified practitioners.
“The truth is, you could be a psychologist or a social worker — or you could be nothing,” said Jorene Moore, director of Family Court Programs for King County Superior Court. “You could just hang your shingle and say, ‘I’m an evaluator.’ ”
At their best, evaluations can be a helpful tool for judges untrained to riffle through piles of psychological evidence.
But Elizabeth Robinson, a psychologist who recently left her position as a regulator with the state Board of Psychology, said she had seen enough complaints about evaluators’ ethics to warrant a serious concern.
Some had had improper relationships with one parent or another while purporting to conduct objective evaluations; others interviewed only one side in the dispute. Robinson saw children returned to abusive parents and others prevented from living with loving caretakers — all on the strength of a therapist’s report, against which there was virtually no recourse.
“It is an enormous amount of power, and I saw some evaluations that, frankly, I thought were terrible and were harmful to people,” she said. “Guidelines were needed.”
In June, after a decade of discussion, the board adopted newly binding regulations for psychologists working as parent evaluators. They must now document the reasons behind each recommendation, provide a written breakdown of fees and be free of previous relationships with either parent. Violating any of these conditions could be grounds for license suspension.
“I think that will be useful,” said Michael Trickey, presiding judge at King County Superior Court. “And hopefully, it will help reduce the cost of the evaluations, which always bothered me. Every evaluator sort of approaches things a little differently so it would be good to have some baseline standards.”
But the new measures apply only to psychologists. They have no authority over social workers or anyone else acting as a parent evaluator and for many, the rules come too late.
Kim McLaughlin, a real estate agent and mother of three, spent hours in Greenberg’s office, despite her increasing discomfort with his methods. She recalled taking a $1,500 personality test in a room crammed with other clients’ confidential files — everything unlocked and visible to anyone who might decide to peek.
During interviews, McLaughlin said, the psychologist sometimes had graduate students sitting in, listening to private information that she might not feel comfortable sharing with even her closest friends.
But the middle-aged woman could hardly object. A judge, after all, had appointed Greenberg to her case and as he would be recommending who should get custody of her children, she was loath to do anything that might alienate him.
“It was hell,” McLaughlin said. “He had you over a barrel — with your children’s future in the palm of his hand — and he knew it. But you didn’t dare say you minded because you’re in an evaluation with someone who’s going to say whether you get to see your kids.”
Over 2 1/2 years, McLaughlin said, she racked up bills over $63,000 — about twice what an expert witness charges for analysis and testimony in a murder case. But in the end Greenberg ruled against her, opining that the conflict between McLaughlin and her ex-husband had grown so bitter that it was harming their children.
The three, who were then living with their father, should have “no contact of any kind” with their mother, he wrote. “Including no e-mail, telephone calls letters, gifts, etc.”
On the strength of that recommendation, McLaughlin has been prevented from seeing her daughter for more than a year. “The fees were so astronomical,” she said recently. “But you were stuck with him.”
This scenario — desperate parents dutifully submitting to hours of pricey consultation in the hope of gaining a favorable ruling — was so troubling to William Proctor that he quit the business.
“It’s awful,” said the forensic psychologist, now a director of staff development at Western State Hospital. “This is not a win-win situation, or even a win-lose situation. Everybody is losing — except that everybody surrounding the drama is getting paid.”
Proctor said he typically charged about $2,000 per report — $3,500 was the absolute high end. At word of Greenberg’s fees, he gasped.
There is no official list of court-approved evaluators in King County, just a small pool of names that surface again and again. Typically, a judge will ask disputing parents to offer three mutually agreeable choices and appoint someone from that list. But just as customers have favorite mechanics or hairdressers, Family Court judges and commissioners have their preferred professionals. Greenberg, with his national reputation and 15-page résumé, was among the most popular.
“There’s a lot of people that make a lot of money off of divorces,” said Lawrence Hutt, a paralegal who was evaluated when his own marriage split up in the early 1990s and wondered how someone who barely knew him could make such a momentous decision. “I mean this is an industry, let’s face it.”
King County Superior Court is unique in Washington for employing 10 staffers to act as evaluators when a mother and father cannot amicably come to agreement about the best placement for their children. These social workers attend specific training and their fees are capped at $2,000 per couple. But of the 2,653 divorces involving children that were filed here last year, only 373 couples used this service, and most were lower-income parents with substance abuse, domestic violence or mental health issues.
Those who could pay more typically did.
“The people who have money don’t operate in our world,” said Moore, the Family Court administrator. “But if you’re on the edge, making $50,000 to $60,000 a year and you hire a private evaluator, you’re going to end your divorce poor.”
Andrew Benjamin, a psychologist and faculty member at the University of Washington, estimates that his Parent Evaluator Training Program has taught about 150 professionals how to handle high-conflict split-ups and completed about 800 evaluations. Greenberg often acted as an adviser to the group.
“There are legitimate concerns about how evaluations are conducted and those concerns are being addressed,” Benjamin acknowledged. Cost, he added, is a frequent complaint and at his program fees are determined on a sliding scale, up to a high of about $3,500.
“But to be blunt about it, this is the United States,” Benjamin said. “There is a market for this work, and that market dictates these rates. Evaluators are charging as much as $25,000, and I’m comfortable with them charging what they think they’re worth.”
