An Open Letter to San Diego’s District Attorney Summer Stephan

There is violence happening in the family courts, and it needs your urgent attention.

Listen to the audio version of this post here.

Dear Ms Stephan

Two months ago I attempted suicide because I could not see a way to escape my husband’s abuse subsequent to our separation. I’d tried to report the abuse multiple times to the north county sheriff’s department, but the system failed me. Desperate, starving and suffering chronic pain, I could see no escape from his relentless attacks. It’s self-explanatory that I failed, and I am subsequently writing with aim of preventing another situation such as my own. I hope that by sharing my concerns about how the city handles the reporting and processing of domestic violence, along with my learnings from the past two years with you, that you will receive my letter in the spirit that it has been written: with a view to educate officials, improve law enforcement’s approach in recessing domestic violence, and create safe spaces for those who have suffered harm in similar situations.

Firstly, if I may state that law enforcement and the family courts are failing to protect those who are vulnerable to and victims of domestic violence. The city is directing its resources in such a way that it  is protecting those who seek to prey on society’s most vulnerable, and enabling a culture of ‘legalized abuse’. The legal system - specifically the family courts and its adjacent industries - which is supposed to protect the people who need it most, is being exploited by the predatory and the wealthy. This manifests in a number of ways:

The sheriff’s office is inadequately trained in handling and identifying domestic violence and is more concerned with its internal processes.

Victims of abuse suffer extreme trauma, and need to be handled by professionals trained in this field. Trauma’s impact on the brain includes shutting down the part of the brain responsible for executive and rational decision-making, and focusing all energy on survival. Traumatized survivors are operating in survival states: fight, flight, fear and freeze. Victims are hyper-reactive, hyper vigilant and have largely lost their ability to trust and communicate effectively. This has a huge impact on how victims share their stories, and how those stories are received; whether they are taken seriously, if heard at all. In my experience, law-enforcement officials are not trained in the nuance of abusive situations, defaulting to the calmest person in the room, who is almost always the perpetrator, further enabling the abuse to continue.

Victims cannot trust law enforcement because it sides with wealthy abusers and powerful citizens.

True victims - those without resources to defend themselves and take their abusers to task - are cast into a dangerous wilderness when they report or attempt to leave, and are made to suffer having their vulnerabilities exploited, invalidated, ignored and dismissed by the authorities who have the power to protect them. This is forcing victims to remain silent, or to seek help anonymously from communities where they will not be shamed or punished for their suffering. All the while, abusers and perpetrators are protected from harm, and sheltered from the consequences of their actions through a myriad of ‘legal tricks of the trade’. It is impossible to ignore the injustice of the situation.

Victims are not able to advocate for themselves and it works against them.

In my experience, it is all but impossible to advocate for yourself or even functionally communicate from a state of trauma. Nobody enjoys dealing with an emotionally hyper-reactive person, and they are less likely to believe them. Throw a disability or similar divergence into the mix, and you have the perfect storm which enables an abuser to get away with their actions. In the four times I have attempted to report what was happening at my home, I have been treated as if I am crazy, accused of lying, not only about the abuse but also about my disability, dismissed, gaslit and punished for seeking help. When I called the sheriff on 23 May 2020 and reported to them that I was captive and hostage in my own home, without access to medical treatment or any finances whatsoever, I was abandoned by the officers who showed up at my door, who were not equipped to handle the situation adequately. I was left alone with my abuser, sheriffs citing that the situation was ‘a civil matter’. Subsequent attempts to report the abuse have elicited the following reactions: a deputy sighing down the phone; another didn’t even listen and defaulted to reinforcing my husband’s abuse; another deputy over a year later, not even wanting to hear my story but concerned rather with processes, ‘Do you have witnesses? Will they testify in court? They don’t count if they won’t testify in court,’. How sheriffs and police are trained in identifying and handling domestic abuse situations is crucial, and at present they are not adequately trained.

Victims of domestic violence are blackmailed, extorted and silenced by not only their abusers but also the legal system, forcing them to resort to extreme measures to survive, or to self-destruct.

Those who follow me online are aware that I am a victim of domestic violence, coercive control, kidnapping, entrapment, and spousal rape. I have not been allowed the privilege of staying silent about what I’ve been through, because the way that both the courts and law enforcement have handled my case has seen me left to fend for myself.  A real and rational fear for my safety, the basic need to survive starvation and endure chronic pain, has necessitated that I talk about what is going on through my online platforms, as part of my appeal to friends, family, followers and fans for their help. This has made me even more vulnerable, having to explain the details of my experience even more traumatizing, and has been compounded by the fact that I am autistic. I’ve gone for weeks without eating, too scared to attempt to report the abuse again and face rejection. I’ve lived with chronic pain for two years, because the courts have ignored the fact that my husband is willfully forcing me to go without medical treatment. I’ve gone through withdrawals from psychotropic drugs because the courts have refused to acknowledge that I am a victim, which has resulted in a suicide attempt.

Disabled or otherwise divergent victims are being routinely exploited, despite the Americans with disabilities act.

The definition of a disability is a physical or mental condition that limits a person’s movements, senses or activities. This means that a person with a disability cannot do things a ‘normal’ person takes for granted. It seems self-explanatory, but it is something I have had to explain over and over to the courts, only for them to doubt me and accuse me of lying. This experience has forced me to ‘come out’ and share my autism diagnosis. I was not ready to do this, but truthful disclosure in court required it, as did the need it to educate the courts, and dispel misconceptions about autism. I have been forced to become a disabilities advocate while fighting for my life, and going without the vital support I need to simply exist. Because I have been able to do this (technically, but not without extreme harm to myself), and because of popular stigma around what autism is, which holds the belief that autistic people are not capable of making sense, that I should be ‘less able’, my diagnosis has been further dismissed. I have lost access to my medications and my doctor, and have been left to struggle on my own. I have been gaslit by both the courts and my husband’s attorneys, who have subjected me to ongoing vexatious litigation, implied and explicit intimidation and harassment through the courts - tactics which they have also extended to people on my supportive circles in an attempt to alienate and isolate me. On Christmas Day, when I attempted to end my life, I believe it is truthful to say that they have succeeded, while the system that purports to look out for the vulnerable has watched with apathy, and failed to take the appropriate action.

The legal system fails to recognize who truly holds the power, and prizes courtroom process efficiency over the truth.

The family courts are not trained in identifying perpetrators of abuse. An abuse of power is only possible if the perpetrator actually has power. I have no power. I am an immigrant, who came here for work, and have been intimidated and threatened into capitulating to a man who has made a habit of manipulating the family courts for his own gain. I am the victim of a serial conman who exploits the family courts as his way of making money. This has been documented through previous records pertaining to his prior marriage, yet the rules of evidence have blocked these documents from being presented in court. As a self-represented litigant, I’ve been instructed to make use of legal aid channels, yet these are staffed part-time by busy attorneys who cannot cope with the complexity of a case involving deception, fraud and human trafficking. The courts have defaulted to their processes, failing to examine the crucial evidence in my case, which is what we as victims depend on them to do.

Domestic violence victims are not in a position to defend themselves from the abuse that will ensue when they attempt to help themselves.

Post-Separation Abuse is the name for a form of coercive control that abusers use to maintain power and control over victims after a relationship or marriage is over. Post-Separation Abuse employs the family court system as a weapon of harassment and intimidation, the abuser forcing their victim to surrender their lives to fighting through attorneys. Because my husband took great care to make sure I had no access to finances, neither joint or my own, I have been unable to get legal representation, which has left me entirely defenseless to his ongoing attacks subsequent to our separation, but more importantly, it has disallowed me from being able to function the way the courts require a victim to function. Like many victims, I have struggled with PTSD due to my experiences. This has all but rendered me entirely dysfunctional, struggling to get through a day without falling apart. Having to take on the burden of defending myself in a legal setting is a task that is beyond me, and expecting a victim to be able to defend themselves is like forcing a person with no arms into a boxing match.

Courts require victims to function a certain way, to claim a cool high ground, to be civil at all costs, which is another way they are dismissing victims’ lived experiences, and further abusing them.

You would not punish a person who was sick from cancer, or a person who had a heart attack, for contracting their illnesses. Yet domestic violence victims - who are suffering from spiritual cancer in the form of their abusers, along with the physical effects of continued abuse resulting in illness and irreversible symptomatic damage - are penalized in court for their hyper-reactive behavior, their breakdowns and their flashbacks. I have been told many times by a judge that ‘we need to conduct ourselves in a civil manner’. I ask, Ms Stephan, would you be the ‘cool calm bigger person’ if you were forced to scour your trauma - most recent past but also, the hell you are currently going through - with a fine-toothed comb, and present it in a process-palatable manner? Could you be civil when treated as if you’re lying scum while trying to get the support you need to function? Would you be calm, being told your experiences are not real if they do not fit the pleading page limit or correct presentation format? Could you remain calm when forced to cross-question your abuser while his attorney shuts down the facts by throwing out legal objections you don’t understand, papered over with lie upon lie? To expect a victim to remain calm in the face of these circumstances is unrealistic and cruel, let alone expecting them to hold their own on the litigation battlefield. And to be clear, it is a battlefield.

Greedy, empathy-deficient attorneys are running the family courts like a syndicated crime unit.

There are a number of family law attorneys operating in San Diego that pride themselves on instigating baseless conflict in order to enjoy the spoils of war, their underhand tactics employed expressly to beat victims not into equitable mediation, but into submission and fees orders. It is an open secret amongst divorce attorneys that they lie, cheat, steal and threaten to win their cases. Everything is about ‘winning’, which is sold as a certainty by some. The extent of deceit and intimidation is joked about amongst attorneys, some of them openly boasting about being ‘aggressive’ and ‘bulldogs’. The family law legal industry - and it is an industry - treats the lives of people on the edge as if they’re a punchline on the way to the bottom line. But our lives are not a joke. People are losing everything because of the sanctioned terrorism that the law affords attorneys. They are running the courts like a mafia, and they are ruining innocent people. There is violence going on in the San Diego family courts, Ms Stephan, and it needs your urgent attention.

Victims are traumatized, and cannot be their own attorneys, yet they are the group most often required to to represent themselves.

This stands to reason, as financial abuse is extremely common in domestic violence situations. Those who have experienced domestic violence are familiar with how the system sets you up to fail. Abraham Lincoln said ‘He who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client’. By this adage, every victim comes to the courts as an idiot, a clown ready to be mocked, drawn and quartered.

Court processes are not designed in a way that accommodates trauma, which enables abusers.

Healing is a messy, difficult business. Just getting your head-around ‘mild’ once-off trauma takes a guru-like skill, rarely attained even by the most privileged of society, those who have the comfort and safe space of a supportive circle, ample financial resources, a healthy low-stress life, routine and maybe ten years of therapy with a good therapist. And that is the minimum. At present, the family courts ask this kind of extreme spiritual evolution of victims while they are still experiencing their trauma. It is an abusive demand to make of anyone, let alone those displaying symptoms such as an inability to regulate emotions, enduring flashbacks, or dissociation from overwhelming situations, a defense mechanism that allows the mind to survive. Trauma-affected victims’ reactions are taken out of context, over-analyzed, mistakes they make as a result of anxiety, depression, or trauma-based reactivity or memory-loss are used against them by perpetrators and their attorneys.

Money decides whether victims will receive justice or not.

Attorneys are meant to buffer a victim, but like many victims of domestic violence, my husband controlled our finances and would not allow me access to any money, which has left me strategically without such an impartial champion to advise me, coddle me or engage in civil niceties and lie on my behalf. Unsupported, disability real but denied, I have been dismissed, laughed at, mocked by law enforcement officials to whom I turned in my most vulnerable moments for help; I have also had my diagnosis scoffed at and doubted by my husband’s attorneys, as well as by the judges involved in my case. Most disturbingly, even after producing evidence of the diagnosis - which went unread by the courts for a year - I have been treated as if I am a liar. The courts now insist on a more recent diagnosis, having failed to read the one I submitted timeously, to hear nothing of my lived reality: that I cannot afford to go and get a more recent diagnosis. If I could afford it, this narrative might go very differently. As it stands, the courts are sanctioning abuse. They are encouraging it and making it ‘legal’.

Judges are overworked and want to keep things moving, so they make hasty decisions.

In my experience, presiding family court judicial officers - and those substituted in when they are not available - have not read their cases, and are only aware of the most basic details when they are made aware of them. The rules of court dictate certain communication channels between attorneys, plaintiffs and judges, which prevent the victim from speaking up out of fear of offending the judge or intimidation. In my experience, judges have not been aware of vital facts, despite insisting that they’d read pleadings thoroughly. I have had filed evidence ignored by judges for two years, and then been penalized because the date on my evidence is two years old. I have listened as a judge justified this by saying he’d missed it because the file was ‘too big’, which confuses me because surely bigger files demand closer attention? Which brings me to my next point.

The rules of evidence prevent victims from bringing vital information forward to be considered by the judiciary.

There is no shortage of evidence to argue my case. I am hindered by my lack of guidance in navigating a system that I don’t understand, further impeded by the constraints of ongoing trauma, chronic illness and autism. But if I was able to afford an attorney, the evidence would be filed correctly, accepted because it’s following court processes. So, ostensibly, this all comes down to money, and my vulnerabilities are being used against me by the system and it’s participants.

Abusers are using the courts to legally get away with financially destroying their victims and silencing them.

My husband has been able to get away with his during-relationship and post-separation abuse because he has been able to afford lawyers to do his dirty work. Through them, he has attempted on various occasions to extort me, defame me, attack my close personal relationships and fabricate ongoing lies to throw before the courts in an attempt to get me to buckle under pressure and flee the country. He has used the family courts as a means to prevent me from gaining re-entry into the US, and pursuing the career I came here to pursue. His attorneys have threatened that they will thwart any attempts on my behalf to attain a work visa. They have said all the above in multiple emails, while hiding under Evidence Code Section 1152 - a black hole Bermuda Triangle in California’s penal code where the truth goes to die. They cannot be allowed to get away with it any longer.

Abusers are using attorneys to continue abusing their victims.

My husband has used his attorneys to attempt to extort me, threaten me, silence me and prevent me from speaking about the abuse, further attempting to gaslight me and erase my lived experiences as a victim of my husband’s continued assaults and harassment, and deny my medical diagnosis. The more I react - because who wouldn’t react in the face of ongoing abuse, when your life and livelihood is threatened, you are alone in a foreign country with nobody you know around you, no money and starving - the more they have used this of evidence of my mental ‘instability’ (all his exes just happen to be ‘crazy’, as an aside). I am no Ghandi for sure, but those who have engaged with and enabled this ongoing system of abuse are torturers, laughing at their victim. It is intractably cruel, and I find it disturbing that it is not only allowed to go on, unchecked, and treated as an insider joke by those who know the system. I have been advised to drop the case, to submit to my husband’s his attorneys demands, because ‘that’s the way it is’. I’m sorry but I cannot accept this. I do not believe that any person with integrity would feel any different. It is this last point, integrity, which leads me to ask the following question, one that has plagued me for some time:

Are resources being effectively allocated, and who decides who needs help?

On 3 November 2021, I was informed that the FBI had come to my home, wanting to speak to me regarding an investigation involving a prominent San Diego doctor and his recently deceased much-younger ex-girlfriend. I did not speak to the FBI, and I did not return their calls, because I had enough of my own problems, and as far as I knew, the civil case surrounding the matter had been settled. But I had to wonder why FBI resources were being deployed to protect a man who did not need protecting - for reasons I won’t detail here, but they involve wealth and a high degree of power and influence, as well as a self-proclaimed close friendship with the district attorney’s office - especially when the case had been settled. What was there to investigate? And where were priorities focused, that a federal government agency could see fit to ask a starving, chronically ill, disabled domestic abuse victim - the same person they’d denied help to - for help protecting a person who enjoyed a vast degree of power and wealth, and whose problems had ostensibly been resolved? I found it bizarre that after trying to report my case to authorities for months, that I was being approached to assist in the protection of a man who did not need protection. The question that has been on my mind is why do some citizens - who all tend to have certain gender, racial and demographic similarities - seem to get more protection than other citizens? By other citizens, to be clear, I mean those less rich, less white and less male.

Just whom is the state and federal government protecting, and who do they have an obligation to protect?

As I mentioned, the FBI arrived on my doorstep, wanting to know about a dead girl, from a dying girl. Fact is, I would be dead had I not failed at my Christmas Day suicide. I was slowly dying from neglect, chronic pain, extreme mental distress, psychotropic drug withdrawal and isolation. It is really a marvel I survived, and that I continue to, a touch-and-go affair daily, but I digress.

Ms Stephan, something very wrong is happening here, and I am writing because I request your assistance with figuring out the truth. Let us forget for a moment that I have firsthand experience in the nightmare that is domestic violence. From a purely rational, operational point of view, to say I am concerned about what is going on here is something of an understatement.

I ask humbly that you take the time to review my case, and to investigate what is happening in the San Diego family courts, attorneys who operate within its system and consider the questions I am asking. I write with the hopes that whatever answers you may come up with help improve how domestic violence victims are treated, and give the victims the assistance they so badly need.

Sincerely,

Alex van Tonder

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