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The Family Court system in the United States is broken.
More than just being in disrepair, it’s dangerous. It ruins lives. It destroys families. It tears children from loving men who are perfectly fit to be fathers. It rewards dishonesty. It promotes hostility.
Under the idea that litigation is the best way to solve family disputes, the Family Court system only escalates problems, with no safety valve. Lawyers dump fuel on the fires because they have no incentive to settle.
Family Court is a meat grinder that cares nothing for the truth or children. Through kickbacks, Family Courts have financial incentives to order lopsided custody so they can order fathers to pay huge support payments which are matched by the federal government. Unlike fathers’ child visitation orders (which go unenforced), judges and lawyers – and ultimately men with guns – enforce payments to mothers.
When I got divorced, I was ordered to abandon my children and pay my ex-wife more than 100% of my after-tax salary. Although my ex-wife and I each earned 1.6 million dollars during our 12-year marriage, I was ordered to finance her retirement at the expense of my own. We weren’t even 46 years old yet. Why should divorce be profitable for anyone? Why should any parent get rich simply by raising their own children?
When the US Housing Bubble burst in 2008, my ex-wife and I were dangerously overextended. Our entire net worth was wrapped-up in real estate that we couldn’t sell. We quickly lost everything. To keep food on the table and a roof over my family’s head, I volunteered to go to war. From 2009 to 2013, I worked in Iraq and Afghanistan, as a civilian defense contractor, where I earned more than three times my base salary. But it came at a steep price. I left just three days after my second daughter was born. The first time I heard her cry was over a satellite phone at an Iraqi base the Marines called Dreamland (video). I missed it all: her first words and first steps. By 2010, my ex-wife left Hawaii with my girls. It had been my home for 20 years, and the dream was finally over.
Several long years later, at my divorce, the support I was ordered to pay my ex-wife was based on my wartime income. The judge didn’t care that the war in Iraq was over, and the war in Afghanistan was ending. He didn’t care that, in Afghanistan, I worked 84 hours a week, in hardship and hazardous conditions. I slept in a bunkbed in a tent, and shared a shower in a filthy bathroom with a hundred other men. The internet there wasn’t fast enough to Skype my daughters. I missed birthdays. I missed Christmases. The judge didn’t care that I was weary of years in war and weary of living without my kids. I wanted to return to the USA to be with my children, my friends, and my family.
After the divorce, I filed a motion to have my payments reduced. When I explained to the judge the payments were unreasonable and impossible – using tax returns and salary surveys to prove my earning potential – his reply was “Pay what’s ordered or go to jail.” His exact words. Apparently, subjecting me to rape and violence in jail, purely for financial motives, is how Family Court works. With the court’s help, my children’s mother wants to put their father in a cage simply because she wants more money.
The support guidelines in a divorce are clear: find the “high water mark” of the father’s recent income (cherry-pick the data to determine his highest possible earnings) and award the mother some percentage of that income. In the two-year period prior to my divorce, I made less than $7,000 per month on average. I made even less after my divorce. But I was making $29,000 a month in 2009 – six years earlier. Naturally, my ex-wife’s lawyer waved my 2009 tax return around like a flag, insisting I can keep earning that much.
The judge apparently “split the baby”, and decided I should pay support based on a theoretical income of $18,000 a month (the average of $29,000 and $7,000). The judge called me “the Goose that lays the Golden Eggs,” but nevermind that such a job was unavailable to me. Lawyers who represent women will tell you the support guidelines are Holy Gospel, etched in stone tablets. When men complain they can’t afford the payments (like me, forced to pay $10,000 a month), the lawyers will shrug their shoulders and concede: “Hey, those are the guidelines. Tough luck, asshole.” By then, my ex-wife’s income had fallen about 95% since I went to war. The judge never told her to go get a better job. She let her real estate license lapse. No one noticed or cared.
I have always paid to support my children, without hesitation, with or without a court order. Of course I have a responsibility to support my children. OF COURSE. No one needs to explain that to me. I pay thousands of dollars every month, sometimes having to borrow to do so. But it’s never enough. Courts order support payments that have nothing to do with the actual cost of raising children. It’s merely a matter of how much they can squeeze from the father. It’s a shakedown.
MGTOW is not a movement, it is a way of life.
Atton 3 years, 5 months ago.
