Travis County

Family Court:
A National Crisis


A National Crisis

Family Court routinely ignores abuse, treating clear signs of danger as mere “conflict.” When a survivor leaves, the violence doesn’t stop — it simply shifts into the courtroom, where abusers use litigation as a weapon of control. Judges are not trained on domestic violence or coercive control, yet they are responsible for decisions that determine children’s safety. As a result, mothers who report abuse are more likely to lose custody, often because courts rely on “parental alienation,” a debunked theory still embedded in their decision-making. These same courts depend on unqualified “experts” and experimental reunification therapies, giving harmful, unregulated practices enormous influence with no oversight. Families have no safe way to give feedback, no tracking of outcomes, and no accountability anywhere in the system. Meanwhile, financial abuse continues through relentless litigation. Ultimately, this system places children in danger because it prioritizes parental rights over child safety and the appearance of neutrality over the truth.

Yes, this is happening in Travis County.

When mothers allege abuse by fathers (intimate partner violence, child physical or sexual abuse) in custody litigation, they face a significantly increased risk of losing custody.

When fathers counter-claim “parental alienation” or the court refers to “alienation,” the risk for mothers increases further — custody loss can nearly double.

When a mother told the court that the father physically abused the child, the court believed her only 29% of the time.


When a mother reported that the father sexually abused the child, the court believed her only 15% of the time.

At the start of Family Court proceedings, 83% of children lived with mom. At the end of proceedings, only 14% of children lived with mom.

A new survey reveals rising child removals from mothers in family courts, often linked to pseudoscientific ‘parental alienation’ claims amid domestic abuse concerns. – Right To Equity

Associate Judges are hired by the Elected District Judges, not chosen by voters, not confirmed by any public process, and not subject to public interviews or oversight. No public vetting, no hearings, no transparency. The “hiring” is essentially internal — judges choose someone they know or someone recommended by lawyers or other court actors. They serve at the pleasure of the elected judges. Elected judges can: appoint, reappoint, and remove associate judges, usually without explanation. This means associate judges are incentivized to keep judges and lawyers happy — not families. They are often former family-law attorneys, while many are former attorneys in the same courthouse and former colleagues of the same lawyers who appear before them. This can create a tight ecosystem of referrals, familiarity, and bias. They are essentially unaccountable to the public. Parents cannot vote them out. There is no safe way to complain. And they oversee life-altering hearings — temporary orders, enforcement hearings, emergency orders, visitation disputes — without ever facing the public whose lives they impact.


James Arth
Bradley Temple
Julio de la Llata

Children Are Not Safe
→ Children Are Harmed

Family Court repeatedly ignores abuse and places kids back with the parent they fear.

Kids are forced into unsafe homes, retraumatized, silenced, and in the worst cases, seriously injured or killed during court-ordered visitation.

Judges and “Experts” Are Unaccountable → Bad Decisions Go Unchecked

Unqualified professionals hold enormous power, and there is no oversight, tracking, or way to report harm safely.

Harmful rulings repeat, abusive parents win custody, and families have no meaningful recourse — allowing systemic failure to continue in secrecy.

Pseudo-Science Drives Decisions → Protective Parents Lose Custody

Debunked theories and experimental treatments lead courts to punish the safe parent, remove kids from the only parent protecting them, and hand power to abusers.

Our judges are falling for the Alienation Pipeline: accusations of enmeshment, gatekeeping, projection, Munchausen by Proxy, etc

Judges Ignore DV Data
→ Family Court is Not Safe for Victims

Only ~4–5% of custody cases go to trial — but these are the most dangerous, complex, and often overlooked cases.

More than half of these contested custody cases involve allegations of domestic violence or abuse.

“The small percentage of cases that go to trial are not representative. These are the complex cases where the court’s failure to understand domestic violence and coercive control causes the most harm.”
Professor Nicholas Bala, Queen’s University Faculty of Law

Family Court and Judges Label the Parties at High-Conflict
→ Women are Disbelieved

“When courts treat high-conflict custody as a ‘both-sides’ issue, they ignore that in many cases, the conflict is a continuation of abuse by one parent — often the father — trying to regain control.”
Joan Meier, JD, DV LEAP

Judges Treat “Experts” Like Doctors or Scientists → A New Narrative is Spun

Family Court “experts” are easily influenced by the parent who is louder, wealthier, or more aggressive, and many protective parents report their ex running a smear campaign that the experts simply accept as fact. Because judges rely so heavily on these unqualified or biased experts, their opinions carry more weight than evidence, lived experience, or patterns of abuse. The result is devastating: protective parents lose custody, children are forced into unsafe situations, and abusers are empowered by the very system meant to stop them.

Data is very clear across decades of research.

False reports of child sexual abuse are extremely rare.
False reports by children are even rarer.
Most victims do NOT disclose immediately.
Domestic violence allegations are overwhelmingly true.

The real problem is NOT false allegations — it’s courts disbelieving true ones.

Harm at the hands of Travis County

“The day I told my story – and had (Travis County) Judge Maya Gamble scoff at the proof of abuse – and tell me to ‘let my kid toughen up.’
$100,000 dollars of lawyers, therapists and evidence, to be thrown out at the hands of the patriarchy.
Daphny Ainslie suggested a 90 day detox from mom – because somehow that would help my son like his abusive father. She also had never met me or my child.
I’ll never forget this day. I fell to the floor in disbelief that I would have to tell my son that he indeed would be receiving no protection from his father. It has damaged me to my core.
7 days later- my son came home from a forced visit with a bruise on the side of his body- from his dad shoving him into the car door. We fled the country 4 weeks later + have been gone, safe, thriving since.”

Women on Trial

Originally scheduled to air on HBO in 1992, the film played only a single night before being pulled from the public after inciting a million dollar lawsuit initiated Texas family court judge Charles Dean Huckabee. The story unfolds as woman after woman loses custody of her children to fathers who have either a documented history of abuse, or admittedly do not want custody of the children.

In 2019, distributor Hope Runs High programmed a Lee Grant retrospective at New York’s Film Forum, initially including Women on Trial. The announcement made headlines because it would have been the film’s first public showing since its 1992 HBO broadcast. But when the series opened in December, the screening was suddenly pulled for “legal reasons”—the same defamation concerns that suppressed it in the 1990s. Once again, Women on Trial was blocked from public exhibition, showing how decades later, legal pressure still keeps the documentary out of view.

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17-Year-Old Testifies

Abbey O’Brien, a 17-year-old from Austin, Texas, and her mother, Tiffanie O’Brien, are bravely sharing their story in support of the Safe Haven Act (HB 3515).

What they’ve endured at the hands of Travis County Family Judges and “Experts” should have the attention of people around the world. Their willingness to speak out—to turn pain into purpose—is nothing short of inspirational.

Watch

Bias Against Women Obvious, Yet Ignored by Travis County Judges

The “Cases of Sherry” series exposes how Alissa Sherry, a forensic psychologist regularly appointed in Texas family courts, wields immense power over custody battles despite serious complaints about her practice. Defendants claim Sherry held little to no direct contact with children or parents, yet produced reports diagnosing parents with personality disorders and recommending custody shifts—often in favor of fathers even when mothers allege physical abuse.
Watch

Mother blames Hays County family court for failing her daughters

Several families have reached out to the Hays Free Press/ News-Dispatch in regards to what they believe are concerning experiences in Judge Karl Hays’ family law court. The following is the finale of a four part series discussing assertions against Judge Hays and the alleged failure to consider the best interest of the child(ren) involved in cases in his courtroom.

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Petition with 1k+ signatures

Bias Against Women Obvious, Yet Ignored by Travis County Judges

15+ Complaints and 800+ signatures for an investigation, yet Travis County Judges are still working with Dr. Alissa Sherry. Dr. Sherry opines that alienating parents are most often mothers.
She gives no valid and reliable scientific evidence to support her opinion. In fact, research on alienation states the opposite.

How can a custody evaluator with a preconceived known bias against women perform unbiased custody evaluations and psych evaluations? It is no surprise that she sides against the mothers around 80-85% of the time in family court cases. 

Watch

Medium: From Mom to Inmate: Julie Valadez Jailed in Wisconsin Because Son Ran to Her For Help

6 min read· July 19, 2025

ProPublica: Parental Alienation: A Disputed Theory With Big Implications

The impact of junk science in criminal cases is well known, but family courts have allowed a disputed psychological theory to persist with little scrutiny.

August 19, 2023
Read

ProPublica: In The Child’s Best Interest

A child said he was being sexually and physically abused by his father. The father alleged the mother was brainwashing the child against him. One reporter dug into years of case files to understand how courts decided to interpret the facts.

August 19, 2023
Read

1,000 Signatures: Stand for Justice and Get Jrue Home to His Mother

We are calling on the Family Court of Wichita County TX Judge Gary Butler, District Attorney John Gillespie, to do the right thing, to stand on truth and challenge their wrongful decisions of jailing a protective Mother during an ongoing investigation of sexual abuse by his father in Louisiana.

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ProPublica: A Court Ordered Siblings to a Reunification Camp With Their Estranged Father. The Children Say It Was Abusive.

Family courts are increasingly using programs like Turning Points for Families to treat the disputed psychological theory of parental alienation. But little is publicly known about the programs’ controversial methods.

Continue Reading

Inside Investigator: High Conflict: Is Connecticut’s family court system ignoring abuse?

“And, they say, Connecticut’s family court system is not only ignoring those abuse allegations – some substantiated by police and social workers, others not – but enabling it. They claim their exes use the court system to exert control over them and their children through its web of judges, attorneys, and guardians ad litem (GAL) who dismiss their safety concerns in a concerted push to side with fathers, even in cases when there is abuse against both the children and mother.”

Continue Reading

These stories are five-alarm warnings from real women around the world who have been FRAMED. Just like you perhaps, they had no idea what happens in the gender biased family court underworld—until they found themselves in a divorce or custody fight.

Dr. Christine Cocchiola and Amy Polacko are both survivors of domestic abuse who work with family court victims daily. This exposé not only validates the experience of millions of women—but also warns about what mothers are up against in these battles, the harms inflicted on children, red flags to watch for while dating, and ways to protect yourself during marriage.

Learn more

In the family court, traumatized women seek safety and justice, often to find only disdain and cruel insensitivity. Survivors of sexual, physical and emotional violence are called liars because they lack evidence for their claims, and deemed unreliable witnesses compared to the men who abused them. They are forced to recall the worst moments of their lives in excruciating detail, sometimes face-to-face with their violent ex, and always confronted with a lawyer who will do anything to destroy their story.

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How Family Court Works

The relationship ends

Roughly 65–70% of divorces in the United States are initiated by women, according to long-standing sociological research.

20-25% of divorced persons report abuse (physical/emotional) as a major contributor to the dissolution of the marriage.

A NEW AVENUE

When the relationship ends, the unhealthy parent loses power and control, yet their need for it doesn’t end. They turn to controlling their co-partner through the children and Family Court.

Only ~4–5% of custody cases go to trial — but these are the most dangerous, complex, and often overlooked cases.

A NEED FOR POWER

The responsible and protective parent is preferred by the child. The unhealthy parent cannot handle this. The preferred parent begins to field accusations of gatekeeping, enmeshment, projection, and false reports to CPS of abuse.

A BOOMING BUSINESS

Lawyers and Judges get “experts” involved in the case. “Experts” continue with the false accusations, as it is more business for them. The preferred and protective parent finds herself living in fear of the very people who were supposed to help. She spends all of her time, money, and energy trying to regain credibility instead of parenting in peace and protecting her children.

The unhealthy parent is emboldened by Family Court.

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Most legitimate mental-health professionals avoid Family Court—not because they can’t handle difficult cases, but because the system is riddled with bias, misinformation, and a disregard for evidence. As a result, only a very narrow—and often problematic—subset of providers chooses to work in this arena. These providers refer one another, attorneys refer them, and together they form a closed referral loop that functions more like a business ecosystem than a safeguard for children.

Kelly Baker, PhD, LPC-S

Believes in pseudoscience: parental alienation. Provides and requires families to participate in experimental, harmful, and unregulated therapies: reunification therapy.

Amy Eichler, PhD, LPC-S

Believes in pseudoscience: parental alienation. One of only five Austin-area providers that is a member of the Parental Alienation Study Group. Provides and requires families to participate in experimental, harmful, and unregulated therapies: reunification therapy.

Alissa Sherry, PhD, ABBP

Believes in pseudoscience. One of only five Austin-area providers that is a member of the Parental Alienation Study Group. Uses outdated methods on psych evaluations.
800+ signatures on petition to investigate. Charges $30k-$50k per Court Ordered psych evals for parents, yet spends very little to no time with the parents.
15+ complaints to the Licensing Board.
Investigative Journalist Mini Documentary



Thao Phan, LPC, M.A., M.P.H., M.S

Believes in pseudoscience: parental alienation. One of only five Austin-area providers that is a member of the Parental Alienation Study Group. Provides and requires families to participate in experimental, harmful, and unregulated therapies: reunification therapy. Does not maintain a website, does not have a Google listing, and moves often, to avoid negative reviews.
15 parents have sought one another due to the harm Thao creates. 87% of the time she sides with dad.

Daphny Ainslie, PLLC

Provides subpar psych evaluations. Does not investigate abuse claims by mom. Recommends families to participate in experimental, harmful, and unregulated therapies: detox from mom, reunification therapy. Charges families $20k-$50k+ for services.

Lisa Rothfus, LCWS

Believes in pseudoscience: parental alienation. One of only five Austin-area providers that is a member of the Parental Alienation Study Group. Provides and requires families to participate in experimental, harmful, and unregulated therapies: reunification therapy. At the center of testimony to the Texas Legislature. Using a new last name now at times.



Loretta Maase, LPC

Believes in pseudoscience: parental alienation. One of only five Austin providers that is a member of the Parental Alienation Study Group. Provides and requires families to participate in experimental, harmful, and unregulated therapies: reunification therapy. Works with one the worst offenders: Linda Gottlieb

Summer Allen, PdD, LPC

Believes in pseudoscience: parental alienation. Provides and requires families to participate in experimental, harmful, and unregulated therapies: reunification therapy.



AFCC is a trade organization. Their interest is to protect the interest of their membership. AFCC has been influencing policy include custody laws.

Listen

“Family courts have become one of the deadliest places for children and the adults who try to protect them.”

Forensic Psychiatrist and Violence Expert Dr. Bandy Lee
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Family Court is Bankrupting Families

-Arizona State Senator Mark Finchem

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To Our Travis County Family Court Judges, we ask: are you part of the problem or the solution?

We’re afraid the answer is already clear. It is time for you to meet with the very people whose lives you reshape—the children and parents who walk into your courtroom and are forever changed by your decisions.
Right now, there is no safe path for families to speak up, share their experiences, or be believed. Instead, concerns are routinely dismissed as we are labeled “disgruntled” and “unhappy with the outcome.” Even if we are unhappy, that is our right—we are taxpayers, voters, and constituents, and we deserve to be heard.
You do not track the impact of your rulings. You do not review outcomes. You have no system to measure safety, success, or harm. You are making life-altering decisions without ever looking back to see what happened to the children involved.
This is unacceptable for elected officials charged with our community’s safety. This must change now.

We demand answers.

Do you believe children are safe in your courtroom’s decisions — and how would you know, if you don’t track outcomes?

Would you send your own child or grandchild through the system you preside over?

What safeguards do you have to ensure a child is not returned to the parent they fear?

How many children under your rulings have been harmed, traumatized, or placed in danger — do you even know?

Are you trained in foreign proven methods on how to communicate with children while meeting in chambers?

How can you rule on domestic violence when you have no real experience, trauma-informed training, or specialized education in abuse dynamics?

Why are abuse allegations from mothers believed so rarely, when research shows they are overwhelmingly true?

Do you understand coercive control — the main form of abuse in custody cases? If not, why are you deciding these cases?

Why does your court continue treating abuse as “conflict” instead of danger?

Why does your courtroom rely on “parental alienation,” a debunked, unscientific theory rejected by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and World Health Organization?

How do you vet the qualifications of court-appointed experts — and what makes them “experts” at all?

Are you aware that many of your experts are financially dependent on your referrals?

Why are unregulated, experimental therapies being forced on children in your court?

Why is there no safe way for families to provide feedback on their experience with your courtroom?

How do you evaluate the impact of your decisions when you track nothing?

Why are judges the only public officials who make life-altering decisions and face no meaningful oversight?

If you never speak with the people you’ve ruled over, how can you claim to understand the consequences of your decisions?

Are you aware that your courtroom is being used to continue financial abuse through endless litigation?

How do you justify ordering families into expensive therapies, evaluations, and experts with no regulation or scientific basis?

Do you believe your courtroom is living up to the responsibility of protecting children — or simply preserving a broken system?

When will you meet with the constituents your decisions affect most?

Are you willing to confront the failures of the system you lead — or will you continue dismissing families as “unhappy parents”?

Our Mission

Family Court is a public health crisis. We need help and we need to fix this for those who come after us. The family court system affects the safety of children and the lives of parents. This site brings together facts, personal experiences, and expert insights to ensure transparency and accountability.

Timing

Issues in Family Court have been going on for way too long. Travis County Judges are up for re-election in 2026.
The public needs to be aware of who and what they are voting for. Without public awareness and pressure, change will never happen.

We want to hear from you.

What You’ll Find Here:

Data and research about Family Court
Personal stories and anonymous reviews reflecting family court experiences
Expert voices urging reform and safety measures
Evidence around controversial practices—like overuse of unregulated custody evaluators and pseudo science being used
How to be an informed voter in the upcoming 2026 election