Guardian Ad Litem Demands Dad 'Coerce' Children into Controversial 'Reunification' Therapy
"What has he done to coerce them into compliance?"
Guardian ad litem Shannon Morreau of Cozart Morreau Law in Washington state wants a father, Jake Burkhart to “coerce” his teen children into quack therapy that is highly controversial called “reunification therapy” with their biological mother, Katrina Adkins, who abandoned them twice for drugs and is now back after many years demanding time with them.
Moreau wrote to Burkhart’s attorney.
[W]hat has he done to coerce them into compliance? For example, has he taken away any privileges, grounded them, taken their phones, etc. Or is he leaving the choice to participate up to them?
Reunification Therapy Nightmares
This guardian tasked with what’s in the “best interest of the children,” believes it’s appropriate to use intimidation and fear to coerce children to go into therapy that can include going to shady sleepaway camps where children have reported abuse to the press. NBC Reported in 2018 that Family Bridges reunification camp is shady, to say the least.
And despite being ordered by SC judges, the program has virtually no oversight and results that aren’t proven.
The program is called Family Bridges. Through the program, children are ordered away from their custodial parent and placed in the home of an estranged parent in an effort to reconnect parent and child…Repeated attempts to reach the founder of the program, Dr. Randy Rand, have gone unanswered. His license is inactive in California following a case where he was cited for “extreme departure from the standard of practice.”
These types of camps have been compared to abusive boot camps used by talk show hosts like Dr. Phil and other “reparative therapy” camps where children suffered psychological and physical abuse. Burkhart’s children are in ever-growing danger of being stripped of their father’s protection and forced into this scenario.
The “Parental Alienation” Grifters
A growing trove of emails found in discovery show Adkins buying the advice of the infamous “Parental Alienation expert” Dorcy Pruter. Pruter is controversial and has been sued in the United States District Court for the District of Wyoming, Breen v. Pruter, No. 14-cv-81, that alleges fraud.
On April 17, 2014, Ms. Breen filed a complaint in the United States District Court for the District of Wyoming against Ms. Pruter and Dorcy Inc. (collectively, Ms. Pruter) alleging twenty causes of action. These claims included contract rescission, trespass to chattels, intentional infliction of emotional distress, fraud, negligent misrepresentation, negligence per se, and a claim for violation of the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act (CLRA). Ms. Pruter counterclaimed for breach of contract or, in the alternative, unjust enrichment.
Parental Alienation Syndrome has been discredited and kept out of the DSM-5 by the entire medical community. In Spain, the theory has been compared to Nazi ideology and is illegal to use in court because abusers regularly employ “experts” on the theory to take children from the protective parent and give them to child molesters and batterers.
Dorcy Pruter, Lynn Steinberg, and Dr. Craig Childress are the nation’s leading PAS “experts” who leave a trail of broken families and abused children in their wake. And their “services” are not cheap. In the Washington case, emails show Pruter, a life coach and high school graduate with no medical or psychological training charging $500 an hour for phone consultations and $5,000 to implement a scam to take Burkhart’s children from him. But not to worry. Adkins, who has hired Pruter, won’t pay for it. The colluding court actors will go after Burkhart for it just like MLB’s David Segui who ended up paying $70,000 to Family Bridges for the pleasure of having his sons stripped from him.
In an email to Adkins, Pruter admitted that using the term parental alienation will land them in hot water since the theory has been dismissed by the entire medical community. Instead, Pruter suggests they diagnose the children with “child psychological abuse” in collusion and coordination with GAL Moreau and the reunification therapist, Cynthia Buckley. Burkhart has never been accused of being an unfit father until reunification therapy began. Pruter wrote:
These “investigative” journalist [sic] is part of the flying monkey brigade of delusional peeps trying to claim alienation is junk science. This should reinforce even more for you, the GAL and most importantly Cynthia [Buckley] the importance of using proper terminology. If Cynthia needs anything for assessment and diagnosis let me know. I provided her a lot of information as you know, so hopefully she got what she needs and she avoids using any of the terminology pf [sic] parental alienation…I am not talking about alienation, I am talking about child psychological abuse DSM 995.51.
Adkins paid $500 for consultation with Pruter and is going to pay $5000 more in exchange for Pruter’s collusion with the reunification therapist who is supposed to be unbiased to diagnose the children with “child psychological abuse.” It’s interesting that Pruter knows she cannot use the term “parental alienation” anymore because it literally is “junk science” that has been totally repudiated by the entire medical community.
According to all of the records uncovered in discovery, there isn’t one allegation of child psychological abuse against Burkhart in any of the children’s therapy notes. All of their distress, according to their therapist stems from Adkins's abandonment of them and her unending demands that they spend time with her and pretend she’s their mother. A “mother” is more than a birthing person. One of their court-ordered supervisors called the children’s visits with Adkins, “the most painful visits” she’d ever witnessed children go through. Who is the one subjecting the children to psychological trauma?
ABC 10 did a great segment on so-called PAS experts and showed how people like Pruter and Steinberg put children in danger. In the segment, Steinberg is on camera claiming that she disbelieved a child who alleged sexual molestation because her father told Steinberg he “couldn’t get an erection” because he has diabetes. ABC fact-checked that whopper and found out it was totally false. Steinburg believed an alleged child molester on nothing but his word and put that child back in his care.
Steinberg: This father was being accused of sexually molesting and assaulting his daughter and I knew he had diabetes and couldn’t get an erection. And nobody ever wanted to do that to his daughter.
Interviewer: How do you know he couldn’t get an erection?
Steinberg: He told me.
Is it reasonable to take an alleged child abuser at their word? This is the same philosophy that GAL Elaine Pudlowski in St. Louis uses to deny children help who are being abused. “Did he stick his finger up her butt? I don’t know….he says he didn’t, she says he did,” she said about a child suffering extreme signs of abuse including nervous vomiting and incontinence. That child made over a dozen outcries about sodomy and Pudlowski covered it up claiming the mother was “alienating” the child from her father. You can read my investigation of that story on PJ Media.
After being disinvited to speak at the AFCC because of a backlash from the American Psychological Association, Childress was questioned by ABC about whether or not his subject matter, PAS, is evidence-based. His answer? “Not at this point. There’s nothing really out there at this point that is evidence-based.”
The APA put out a statement strongly denouncing these people as money-grubbing shysters.
Acceptance of the Childress and Pruter presentation by the AFCC was beneficial to these people’s commercial interests and their ongoing involvement as expert witnesses in child custody cases…but in our opinion the presentation was not beneficial for education of psychologists or other professionals.
The thousands of parents losing their kids to abusers because of this snake oil-pushing group of grifters seem to have no recourse. Even though the PAS pushers have been debunked and kicked out of all real science communities, family courts still listen to them and make decisions based on their fraudulent theories.
Actual data and evidence-based research found that only 4% of child sex abuse allegations were false, but according to PAS proponents, there’s a rash of false allegations coming from children even though the data say otherwise. The children are never believed by PAS cultists even when there is documented evidence of abuse.
Collusion and Conspiracy
In the Burkhart case, no one denies that Adkins abandoned them for years for drugs multiple times. Discovery documents make it clear that everyone agrees that Adkins has a troubled past that led her to abandon her children. It’s a sad and unfortunate situation. All evidence points to recovery for the former addict and that’s a positive and welcome development. But it doesn’t insulate Adkins from facing the natural consequences of her choices to do drugs instead of taking care of her kids when they needed her the most. They are now teens and are not ready to have a relationship with a woman who is more like a stranger than a mother to them.
GAL Moreau and therapist Buckley refuse to acknowledge that Adkins's own choices could have led to the children's resistance to seeing her. Instead, they lay all the blame on Burkhart, supposing that he is forcing the children to be resistant and they are “parroting” his words as if teenagers can be programmed like robots (and if they could, that Burkhart is some kind of master genius at brain reprogramming). None of it makes any sense.
Our court system has no business forcing children into a relationship they are not ready for and charging the parent who did take care of them tens of thousands of dollars to facilitate his children being psychologically abused by radical and uncaring therapists.
What’s happening to Burkhart and his children is criminal and the questions that remain are: will the Washington courts take notice of the obvious collusion between Adkins, Buckley, Moreau, and Pruter who appear to be working together on behalf of a litigant to pervert justice? Or do the courts know what’s going on here but don’t care because ending this in favor of Burkhart would turn off the spigot of cash that is being pumped into the wallets of attorneys, therapists, guardians, and judges by the continued imprisonment of the Burkhart children in the family court system?