The Last Time I Saw Richard

August 17, 2004

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by David E. Reiser, MD.

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My involvement in the Men’s Movement began after a traumatic divorce in 2000. Ultimately, I lost everything: my ex-wife, my assets, many of my friends, my retirement savings, and—worst of all—my son.

Facing the possibility of a divorce was obviously very painful. Trust and love go downhill fast after a spouse says, “I think that maybe I’ve had it.” My marriage was no exception to this. Nevertheless, initially my ex-wife and I did retain at least some modicum of empathy for one another. I hoped that we could possibly find some way to save the marriage. I honestly don’t know if she still harbored any such hope, but I do believe that we wanted to make a tragic situation as rational and humane as we knew how. Neither of us sought at first to destroy the other.

A problem of that magnitude obviously called for a lawyer…

My ex-wife soon found a doozey. After that, I saw an ominous change take place in her—a coldness and ruthlessness emerged that I had not known existed. This lawyer had a reputation for his recourse to dirty tricks and his belligerent personal style. My lawyer had said to me, with more than a trace of admiration, “His strategy never varies. It’s always ‘scorched earth,’ and ‘take no prisoners.’”

With this professional’s help, any lingering feelings of mutual compassion and respect that my ex-wife and I still retained were obliterated. Over a period of days she began to gather up tax records and remove them from the house. She refused to communicate with me any longer. She began to conceal financial records. Nor did it stop there. Shortly afterward, I was ejected from our home. It happened one morning when three Denver County Sheriffs showed up with a temporary restraining order. They told me I had fifteen minutes to gather my personal belongings before I must leave. I remember seeing my wife standing off to one side with a contemptuous smirk. I also remember the stricken look on my son’s face.

Out on the street, the day was already scorching, even at eight in the morning. I walked in silence along a main artery for an hour or so. A steady stream of commuter traffic snarled past, grinding transmissions and spewing out filth. Then again, what did it matter?

Finally, I found myself back at my car. The sun blistered on the back of my neck. Through the rolled up windows, I saw the bag of toiletries I’d tossed onto the front seat. I looked for a note on the windshield, but there was none. I looked at the house I used to live in. I was hoping to see a curtain drawn back an inch, perhaps a hand there, holding the edge, hesitating, keeping it open if only just a crack. But there was no hand. There was no crack. The curtains were still. There was no hope. Finally, I got into my car and drove away. There was nothing else to do.

I figured that the worst was now behind me, but I was wrong. The next day I was served with a second temporary restraining order where I was staying temporarily with a friend. This one supposedly had been initiated by my son. It was signed by him, I could see that. But the words were not his. My son and I were very close. I remain convinced to this day that he was bullied into requesting that order, and I have a mountain of evidence to support this belief. Then again, all of that doesn’t really matter. My nightmare had begun in earnest. When you’ve lost your own son, how much comfort is there in knowing that what was done to you was unjust?

I remember. When the sheriff handed the order to me I recall feeling the earth drop away under me. I began to fall. I was flabbergasted. I was emotionally destroyed.

I began to realize at that point that my wife had been transformed somehow into a stranger—a pitiless enemy who was intent on destroying me. She was even willing to use our son as a weapon. She had evolved very rapidly, in fact, into what Richard Gardner has called “an obsessed alienator.” She was not simply trying to lure our son into taking sides. To my horror, I realized that she was waging an all-out war to induce him to turn away from me completely. Ultimately, it was a war that she would wage with devastating success.

I didn’t know in the beginning anything about the depths to which lawyers routinely sink nowadays in divorce actions. I was unaware of the Men’s Movement. I’d never heard of Parental Alienation Syndrome. I had no inkling of the corruption that has spread like a metastasizing cancer through the entirety of family court system. In time I would learn, but in the beginning it all came as a shock. I only knew what I was seeing. And no one could persuade me that I was not. Many people tried.

Above all, what I saw was a woman whom I had known for twenty-three years who now had mysteriously transformed into someone without pity who was obsessed with destroying me and was willing to destroy my son in the process. I no longer recognized her. I didn’t see her lawyer more than a few times, but I felt him in the air nearby quite often. He was hovering malevolently just feet away, orchestrating much of the evil that was occurring. And I saw other legal professionals who, to a person, all played dumb when I brought these observations up with them.

“You’re being paranoid,” one said. How I wish that had been true, for then the problem would have been so much easier to fix. But I was not being paranoid.

At least, I told myself, the worse was over. I was wrong.

Three weeks later, at three in the morning, four Denver cops broke into my hotel room. This happened on the morning of my scheduled appearance in court on whether the restraining orders should be made permanent. They told me to get dressed. I was under arrest.

This is the story: My ex-wife’s lawyer had told my lawyer the previous day that both she and my son had planned to relax their requests for any restraints. My son planned to drop his altogether. As it happened, a mover was scheduled to show up at my former home the following morning and remove the last of my belongings. This was at my ex-wife’s behest. He was pushy. He was a creep, actually. He wanted to arrive an hour earlier and when he couldn’t get a hold of my ex-wife, he commenced to pester me. During the course of the day he probably called me six times, always insisting that the matter be settled. I, in turn, called my lawyer, perhaps three times. I was told that he was “in court.”

At that point, I did something foolish. Knowing that my ex-wife was at work, and reassured by the news I’d received that she was apparently coming to her senses about the absurd and unwarranted restraining orders that she’d unleashed on me, I left a message informing her of the change in when the mover would arrive.

That night, she took the taped message to the City and County Building and charged me with violating the restraining order.

The cops cuffed me hastily in my hotel room and put me into the back of a cruiser. From there, I was taken to jail. The following morning, I was attached to a long line of prisoners with a leg iron and taken in a bus to court. I appeared at the hearing that would determine whether I would be permanently barred from seeing my soon again hand-cuffed and dressed in jail scrubs. My eyes were swollen and red from weeping. My face was filthy from sleeping on a concrete floor. I was bewildered and inconsolable.

During the proceeding, my son could not bring himself to look at me. Eleven-and-a-half minutes after it had begun, a bored and cynical judge clacked his gavel. I was enjoined from ever having any contact with my son for the rest of my life. No witnesses were called to testify. I did not testify. No evidence was presented. There was no rebuttal. There was no trial. I was charged with no wrongdoing whatsoever. None of these safeguards is required for the issuance of a permanent restraining order. A judge can do so whenever he chooses, on the basis of whatever whim.

When the decision was read in m case, a whoop of jubilation arose from the section of the courtroom where my ex-wife was sitting. Three “Victim’s Assistance Advocates” on the prosecutor’s payroll now hovered around my wife stroking her hair and patting her on her shoulder. They were gabbling away when I was led past them by two deputies back to the chain of prisoners out in the hall. As I passed, I heard her snicker. That is the last time I ever saw my son. That is the condition I was in the last time my son ever saw me...

After my arrest, I noticed something else happening. People began acting strangely around me. Initially I was perplexed, but then the reason became obvious. To a one, I could tell that they assumed I was guilty of being abusive to my wife. I wasn’t. I never hurt either my wife or my son, nor did I ever threaten to. I wasn’t abusive to them physically, emotionally, mentally, psychologically, spiritually, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. I never raised a hand in anger to them and I have not done so to anyone since I was twelve-years-old.

I don’t know what people concluded about me exactly. They were very evasive. I suspect that many of them thought it was unlikely that I would physically assault someone. But they all thought, as one of them blurted out to me one afternoon, that, “Well, maybe you didn’t hit them…But you must be guilty of something!” In everyone’s eyes I was “guilty of something” and they retreated. It was the first time in my life that I understood the meaning of the old cliché, “fair weather friends.” I realized that I was very much alone.

Four years have now passed since that nightmare. I’ve made new friends. I’m remarried and I live in a new country. I’ve changed directions radically in my career. You could say that I have a completely new life, and it’s true. Looking back on everything that happened, I suspect this was necessary to allow my old self to die. In retrospect, I believe that in order to survive a new one had to emerge. I had to reinvent myself totally. This is a process that a friend of mine calls “egocide.” He coined the term after interviewing survivors who had jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge. It was his sense that the survivors would attempt suicide again eventually unless they underwent this kind of profound psychic rearrangement.

I did have such a rearrangement. All the same, I still often feel lonely. I endured many losses in that divorce and I lost touch with friends I’d had for years. They all just seemed to fade away, and I miss them sometimes. I wonder what has become of them. On several occasions, I’ve started to pick up the phone, but then I’ve always returned the receiver to its cradle before I started to dial. At least to this point I have. Apparently I am still not ready.

Then, the other night, one of those old friends called me. His name is Richard. We’d ultimately lost contact when I left the United States three years ago but we had really drifted apart long before then, certainly before 2000 when I got divorced. I was happy to hear from him.

He kept the conversation light for a time. Then he paused. “So, listen, man,” he said. “How in the hell are you? I mean really?”

“It’s been very hard,” I said. “It’s been very hard.”

“I don’t know if I could have found the strength,” Richard said. “But it sounds like you have gone on. That’s fantastic! And your new wife—you said she’s an artist. So you write and she paints. That’s terrific. There must be all kinds of things that you share.”

“Yes,” I said. “Finding her has been an unbelievable stroke of good fortune.”

It was true. In the course of my life, I’d occasionally seen people professionally who in their fifties and sixties had gotten married. Sometimes one or both of them had gone through the death of a former spouse. Mostly, they had previously been divorced. As one would expect, each couple was different. Still, I was struck by the fact that these marriages appeared to be ones which were quintessentially born out of practical necessity. Two people would meet and find that they shared common interests and felt affection toward one another. I suspected that they were well aware of the dwindling number of opportunities they would have to marry as time went on. These were sensible decisions, borne out of pragmatism. Who in the hell wants to spend his final days alone and then die completely alone?

I approved of this and I admired these couples for having the courage to face reality and to make their lives richer and better. Not everyone is able to be that flexible. But I was not convinced that any of them had fallen in love. I was put-off, therefore, by what I felt was a strained quality in their interactions—including their overly zealous demonstrations of physical attraction. It seemed vaguely unseemly to me.

After my divorce in 2000, I had no intention of remarrying. I believed that marriage should be based in passionate love and I neither expected to find that again, nor did I really want to. It was a personal choice, but I felt that there was just too much potential suffering involved in even trying. I figured that I’d end up alone and felt that it would be preferable to living a lie.

Then I fell in love. It was the last thing I ever wanted or expected. It’s passionate as hell, too. I’m consumed with passion. I wouldn’t have dreamed it was remotely possible.

As for those other couples, the ones who I thought were trying too hard to pretend, I’ve asked myself if my perceptions about them have changed. My ego inclines me to want to claim that my perceptions were valid; that I just happened to be very lucky. But the truth is that I suspect I was wrong—and not just a little wrong. I suspect that I was really wrong. Well, permit me to be candid…I was full of shit! Love, it turns out, is blind (This discovery could not have come at a better time. I’ve seen too many things that I’d previously been naïve about. I am deeply cynical at this point. But I am not without hope).

Anyway, I shared some of these thoughts with Richard that night on the phone. After a few minutes, there was a lull.

“That’s great, man!” Richard said. “That’s really great!”

The lull stretched into a silence and the silence became awkward. Richard cleared his throat. “There’s something I want to ask you,” he finally said. “But I don’t want it to upset you, or…Exactly how should I put this?...”

“Are you wondering what happened with my son?”

“Well, somebody told me that…Is it really true that…”

“That I never saw him again?” I said.

Richard was silent.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s true. I never did. In a couple of weeks, he’ll celebrate his birthday. This will be the fourth one that I haven’t attended.”

“Jesus! That’s got to be tough.”

“It’s hell,” I said. “A day doesn’t pass that I don’t grieve.”

“I’m so sorry,” Richard said.

“I know. Thanks for saying it, though.”

A somber mood now descended.

“Jesus!” he said. “I try to imagine if that had been me and a judge had just told me that I could never see Eric…I mean, even if the man has done things that are…I’m not saying you…But sometimes you figure that the man has abused his kid…”

“Sure.”

“But I find myself thinking: Even if the guy has screwed up, does that justify forbidding him to have any contact with his kid forever? Is that the best thing for him or the kid? What about therapy, supervised visits? You have to leave some room for hope…”

“The law isn’t interested in whether what it does hurts people. It doesn’t give a shit about keeping hope alive. It doesn’t give a shit, period.”

“That’s pretty cynical.”

“I’m pretty cynical.”

“What do you think is the motivation then?”

“‘Move the manila,’” I said. “That’s what it’s all about. ’Move the manila’—It’s an expression lawyers use.”

“And it means?”

“It means that the legal system is an industry. Its motivation has nothing to do with determining what is true; or who’s innocent or guilty; or what constitutes justice. It’s interested in expanding its market and maximizing its profits. When the judge issued that order, life as I knew it ended. A part of me died. But do you know how long the hearing took? Eleven-and-a-half-minutes. From start to finish, the hearing that permanently took my son away from me lasted eleven-and-a-half minutes. That’s what I’d call really ‘moving the manila.’”

We talked for a few minutes longer, but our conversation had started to falter. It was getting late. Right before we were ready to hang up, however, Richard said something that I never would have anticipated.

“Anyhow,” he said. “I’m so pleased that you have gone on. It took a lot of guts.”

“Thanks. That’s kind of you to say. I don’t know if it took guts, though.”

“Let me ask you something,” he said. “I assume that by now you’ve ceased to be involved in all of that Men’s Movement crap…”

“Why do you think that I’d be less involved?” I said. “And why do you call it ‘crap’?”

“Now don’t get so defensive,” he said. “It’s just that I always had the feeling that you were in it because you were stuck somehow, still living in the past. I’ve always had the feeling that I’d know when you were finally putting your life back together because you’d tell me you were letting go of all that crap. I mean, let’s face it—those guys are all miserable. Ten years later they still can’t talk about anything except the way they were betrayed by their ex-wives. I mean, sure—divorce is always tough. But it happens all the time, to lots of people. It’s horrible, but you go on. With these guys, though, it’s like they’ve never recovered, like they won’t recover, or can’t recover. You get the feeling that most of them never will”

Needless to say, I found Richard’s remarks disturbing. In truth, however, I was not particularly surprised by them. He was expressing prejudices that I’ve heard before, and more than once. The specifics may vary, but they all imply that the Men’s Movement is a refuge for men with a certain deficiency of backbone and character. The reasoning goes more or less like this: “Joe only appeared to be strong and self-sufficient. Behind that façade he was needy and dependent. His maturity was pseudo-maturity, and his ex-wife must have functioned in the role of being a mother to him. Now he’s down for the count, so he’s joined this Men’s Movement thing.

Other versions that I’ve heard claim that the Men’s Movement “lacks any scientific proof”; that it’s “exaggerated”; “polarizes”; “sure is a handy to externalize your own inadequacies and blame the rest of the world for them.” And so on and so forth. Perhaps you’ve heard people say similar things.

It’s tempting to dismiss this kind of bullshit, of course; and the other night I was tempted to dismiss my friend. That misses the point, however. What we really need to do is ask why the Men’s Movement is singled out for these kinds of prejudices.

We’ve not been very successful as a Movement, in my opinion, in raising the consciousness of mainstream America. I have yet to see one Network documentary, for example, that does justice to the issues raised by the Men’s Movement. And I see little evidence that we’ve been able to change many people’s minds. I’ve heard this decried by people, but that’s as far as it ever seems to get, and it’s not enough. We need to understand why we haven’t been able to get our point of view across more successfully. That clearly means exposing the corrupt practices of some agency or group of individuals—the Divorce Industry, for example, or the radical feminists. Sometimes, however, it may also require us to look in the mirror. There’s more resistance to that.

This column has been the first of four linked essays that address the subject in one aspect or another of obstacles and resistances. I’m attempting to focus in on impediments to the Men’s Movement’s progress. I do so because I have a sense that, on some fronts at least, we are stalled. I believe that some people in the Movement may experience frustration, as well, that progress does not seem to come more rapidly. Admittedly, this is only an impression. I have not come across any article that says this openly. Perhaps it’s because others do not see a problem. Still, I have heard many people complain about their sense of feeling stymied in private, off the record. This is especially true when people discuss this Movement’s ability to penetrate to the mainstream media.

I’ve heard many people at that point openly express consternation, for example, that in spite of many superb statements by a variety people in this Movement—the major networks, weekly news magazines, and cable news stations all stay eerily silent. Although each essay stands alone and can be read in any order, all of them will endeavor to look at this problem of achieving credibility (if you agree with me that there is one). We can’t fix something if we don’t know what is broken.

In the next column, which I’ve titled, “Why I Am in the Men’s Movement,” I will attempt to address my friend Richard’s challenge more fully and to explain why I am still involved in this Movement. Although it’s an ambitious undertaking, I’m also going to attempt to summarize what this Movement stands for and what is less important. I take this task on because I think that there is serious confusion in many people’s minds about what this Movement is truly about. And some of the confusion comes from within our ranks.

Hint: the issues the Men’s Movement addresses are huge ones. They are not just men’s issues, or divorce issues—they are everyone’s issues—and how they are handled will directly affect the future of our society.

To be continued…