Keith Harmon Snow - The Worst Interests of the Child

THE WORST

INTERESTS OF

THE CHILD

Keith Harmon Snows meticulously documented investigation into sex-trafficking of children by American judges is not to be missed. This scandal is one of the most important censored stories in our country today. I might not believe what Mr. Snow has written if I had not independently investigated two dozen cases not discussed in his article, and found ample evidence of the precise dynamics he lays out for us here. Anyone who says they care about child welfare needs to learn what is happening in family courts and take action until it is stopped. Once you start reading this expos, you wont be able to put it down.

Lundy Bancroft

Author of Why Does He Do That?

Historys largest-selling book on domestic violence

It is a national scandal that family courts systematically fail to protect children from physical and/or sexual abuse by a predatory parent. What is equally scandalous is the silence of the mainstream media to cover the issue. Helen Keller wrote, Until the great mass of the people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each others welfare, social justice can never be attained. With luck, when reporters like Keith Harmon Snow shine a light on the grave injustices taking place in family courts, Americans will be filled with a sense of responsibility and take action to protect children from family court abuses.

Garland Waller

Producer, No Way Out But One

THE WORST

INTERESTS OF

THE CHILD

THE TRAFFICKING OF CHILDREN

AND PARENTS THROUGH U.S. FAMILY COURTS

keith harmon snow

BURNING SAGE

ATLANTA

Copyright 2016 by Keith Harmon Snow

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the author except for the inclusion of brief quotations included in critical articles or reviews.

Library of Congress Control Number : 2015930914

First Edition: January 2016

Cover design by Nur Tiven

Cover photo from the family archives of Sunny Kelley

Author photo by Gwendolyn Roit

Publisher's Cataloging -in-Publication data

Snow, Keith Harmon.

The Worst interests of the child : the trafficking of children and parents through U.S. family courts / Keith Harmon Snow.

pages cm

ISBN 9780981611488

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Domestic relations courts--United States. 2. Dispute resolution (Law)--United States. 3. Family mediation--United States. 4. Child welfare--United States. I.Title.

KF505.5 .S66 2016

346.7301/50269 --dc23

2015930914

For Max Liberti and Mila Handrahan

The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out.

Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.

Judith Lewis Herman, M.D.

Trauma and Recovery, 1992

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

KEITH HARMON SNOW HAS WRITTEN a devastating book about the dysfunction of Family Courts in the United States. Snow has somehow penetrated curtains of Family Court judicial secrecy that have allowed horrible abuses to occur. This is in an extensive and excellent job of investigative reporting.

Snow reveals what he describes as an epidemic of violence and corruption involving Family Courts in the U.S. He states: Children all over the United States are being taken from their protective mothers and delivered to abusers. Behind this epidemic of judicial abuse are organized networks involved in racketeering and corruption, channelling and disappearing billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayers money each year.

He writes that judges and inside lawyers use and abuse the Family Courts system to destroy prospective mothers and deliver life sentences of suffering to innocent children.

Declares Snow: Rich, poor, middle-class No child in America is safe.

Critically, he documents this awful situation with story after story about the victims. He validates their accounts with solid evidence. He provides all the ghastly details.

Snows book is a landmark work on a subject that calls out for exposure.

A key to the Family Court dysfunction that Snow exposes is the secrecy of the institution. Considering that these cases involve children and young people and highly personal issues such as the break-ups of marriages, child custody, adoption, domestic violence, alimony, and the like, such secrecy might be understandable. As a result, the Family Court is unlike other courts that are open to the publicand, crucially, to the pressand in which what has happened and what is going on can be known. The publicand the presscan attend court proceedings and, of course, also have access to documents.

This lack of Family Court transparency encourages, as Snow ably shows, terrible things to occurand not rarely, but regularly.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in his 1914 book Other Peoples Moneyand How Bankers Use It famously wrote, Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.

In the United Kingdom, the newspaper Daily Mail has long been leading a campaign to open to the public Family Court proceedingsto bring sunlight to the Family Court systemso the British people can learn what their Family Courts are doing. And this crusade has had some success in recent times.

Bringing sunlight and accountabilityas much transparency as possibleto the Family Court system in the United States also is vitally needed.

And considering the abuses that Snow uncovers in this book, the systemic failure of the Family Court system, even more is required. Tough and comprehensive monitoring and review, rigorous programs of check-and-balance, must be brought to the Family Court system. As Snow reveals, the Family Court system has been functioning and now still is largely unchecked and out-of-controland the consequences of this have been horrendous human tragedies.

Monitoring through ombudsmen, inspectors general, and review mechanisms of many sorts have increasingly been imposed on government institutions at all levels in the U.S. The Family Court system in the nation can no longer operate as Snow shows it has and still doesin the dark, allowing frightful and shocking things to go on.

Snows book is a clarion call for the far-reaching, much-needed, necessary reform.

Karl Grossman

Professor of Journalism

SUNY College at Old Westbury

(State University of New York)

PREFACE

THE MAIN STORY in The Worst Interests of the Child first appeared in May 2012 as an expos under the title A Life Sentence: U.S. Family Courts Sacrificing Mothers & Children Behind and Epidemic of Pedophilia & Judicial Abuse. It is a story about a young mother named Sunny Kelley and how the Family Court system in Connecticut destroyed her life, took away her child and gave full custody of her little boy, Max, to the abusive narcissistic father.

It is a story about the unspeakable, and without a full examination of the court documents and lacking an understanding of the organized crime involved, the story of Sunny Kelley and Max Liberti is not believable.

A few years after my original expos was published, I was invited by Connecticut state representative Minnie Gonzalez (Democrat) to testify at a public hearing in Hartford. On January 9, 2014 I testified at the Legislative Office Building in Hartford at the special public hearing entitled: