After Judge Gordon-Oliver recused herself from all of attorney DiFabio’s cases, eliminating roughly a third of his Westchester family court practice, the case was reassigned to Judge Nilda Morales-Horowitz. She inherited it with no context — no prior docket history, no familiarity with the jurisdiction disputes, the supervised visits, the ambush at the driveway.

A visitation conference was scheduled for February 6, 2020. The custody case had stalled since the last supervisor was removed in September 2019. Steve had not seen Evie since the ambush at Tara Knoll. Five months of silence, and a conference to discuss what came next.

Before the hearing, the record preserved Horowitz’s voice. A voicemail on another judge’s answering machine, from an earlier case, an earlier favor: “It’s Nilda. How you doin’? Give me a call on Monday. I need to ask a favor.” This was the voice before it acted — casual, familiar, the favor asked the way favors are asked between people who have never been told no.

In late January, Aunt K required surgery in San Francisco. The procedure was days before the hearing — not the day of, not the night before. She had the surgery. She recovered. The timing mattered only because it was the reason DiFabio wrote the letter.

On January 24, DiFabio wrote to the court. The letter was straightforward: Steve’s fiancée was recovering from surgery in California. He requested permission to appear by telephone at the February 6 conference. The letter also noted a second concern, the spread of COVID-19 in the San Francisco Bay Area, the travel advisories that were beginning to discourage cross-country flights. The request was routine. Remote appearance at a scheduling conference three thousand miles away. They expected it granted.

The court did not respond.

On February 4, two days before the conference, DiFabio sent a follow-up. Still no response. The letter asked, for the second time, to confirm that Steve would be permitted to appear by phone.

Late afternoon. The day before.

The denial arrived at the hour when the act itself was the message. They had waited weeks. Two letters. No response. And then, at the last possible moment — late afternoon the day before a next-day conference three thousand miles away — the court informed them that the request to appear by telephone was denied. In-person attendance required.

The timing was not an accident. A denial issued weeks earlier would have given them time to arrange travel. A denial issued at the last minute forced a choice between an impossible scramble and an absence the court would treat as voluntary. The denial was timed to produce the absence.

Steve booked the only available flight: 6:20 a.m. the next morning, due into JFK at three in the afternoon, by the confirmation DiFabio would describe to the court; the conference had been scheduled for 2:30. Six hours in the air. The arithmetic was simple and the answer did not change — it depended on the landing, on the ground transit, on the traffic between JFK and White Plains, on whether the court would wait.

The court did not wait.

Steve arrived at the Westchester County courthouse in White Plains. DiFabio was in the hallway. The conference had been called. Steve’s name had been called. The record had noted his absence. The orders had been entered. The case was over.

At the counsel table, DiFabio had tried. His client’s fiancée was recovering from surgery. Two letters requesting a phone appearance, both unanswered. The denial at five o’clock — the evening before a next-day conference three thousand miles away. His client had booked a 6:20 a.m. flight and was crossing the continent at that moment, represented, with meritorious defenses. A brief continuance.

“Anybody knows that if you land at JFK you’re not going to be anywhere for three hours.”

A temporary order, then. Pending his arrival.

“Oh, nope. Nope, no temporary.”

The forensic evaluation. The examination that would have documented the poisoning. Evidence the court had never seen.

“I don’t need the forensic. I don’t need anything. We’re done today.”

Judge Horowitz entered a default. Not the kind from an empty courtroom. This one was manufactured — the court had denied the phone request at five o’clock, waited twelve days to answer the letters, then treated the absence it had created as the absence it would punish. DiFabio was standing in the room. Steve was above Ohio. The default was entered over a represented party’s objection, at a scheduling conference, in minutes.

What happened next was not a scheduling conference.

A visitation conference, a scheduling matter, a procedural checkpoint, had been converted into a ruling on the merits of every pending petition. Permanent custody. Permanent protection order. Release from mental health evaluation. Reversal of the prior judge’s safety conditions. All of it entered in the absence of the party whose daughter was being permanently removed, whose attorney was present and objecting, whose airplane was at that moment descending over the eastern seaboard.

He filed a motion to vacate the default on January 12, 2021, eleven months later, after assembling the record: the two letters to the court, the court’s denial, the flight confirmation, the surgical records, Aunt K’s testimony. His affidavit was fourteen pages. It described the January 24 request, the twelve days of silence, the five o’clock denial, the next-morning flight, the meritorious defenses: the California restraining order against Tara, her sworn admission to drugging him, the sixteen supervised visits, the five supervisors’ consistent findings.

The motion argued what the record showed: Steve’s absence was not willful. His attorney had appeared. The conference was not a hearing. The orders were entered without testimony, without evidence, without argument. There was no default — there was a manufactured absence, converted into a permanent disposition.

The motion was transferred to Judge Humphrey.

Wayne Humphrey wore a bow tie. He had spent twenty-two years in the Westchester County Attorney’s Office before being elected to the bench in 2019, the same government office that, decades earlier, had produced Guttridge, the attorney who now represented Tara. The pipeline was not complex. It was a single hallway in a single building in a single county, and the people who walked it in one direction as government attorneys walked it in the other direction as private practitioners, and eventually some of them walked it a third time as judges, and by that point everybody knew everybody and the system operated less on precedent than on familiarity.

On January 26, 2021, the case came before Judge Humphrey for the first time. The transcript’s cover calls it a Virtual Proceeding: numbers 15 through 26 on the day’s calendar, in the matter of Walsh and Russell. DiFabio appeared for Steve. Jennifer Jackman appeared for the child. Tara appeared for herself. The court officer swore the two parties and asked each for a name and address “unless confidential.” Tara gave hers. Steve gave his name: “My address is confidential.”

“Mr. DiFabio, has your client filed the appropriate papers in court to establish that his address should be confidential?” DiFabio believed he had, “a while ago with Judge Horowitz” — “Either I filed them or prepared them for my client’s signature; I’m not entirely sure.” “Well, Counsel, I did a deep dive in this court file yesterday, and I don’t see it in there anywhere.” “So then he needs — he needs to put his address on the record, please.”

“I’d rather keep it confidential per the permanent restraining order against her in San Francisco court,” Steve said, “not in your file.”

“Sir, I’m in New York. I’m not in California. Please put your name and your address on the record, sir.”

The court officer repeated it — “Mr. Russell, Judge asked you to put your current address on the record” — and then, to the bench: “It appears Respondent’s ignoring you, Judge.” The next lines of the transcript are DiFabio calling into the line, “Mr. Russell, can you hear me? Steve? Hello?”, and Steve’s answer coming back as “(Inaudible) you, Max.” DiFabio explained that with no order of confidentiality filed, “the law requires that you put your address on the record.” “Okay,” Steve said. “Please provide him my address.” The officer: “He wants you to put it on the record, sir, now.” DiFabio: “Judge, I’m sorry, I’m not hearing completely well.” The officer told him Steve wanted to provide it to the court separately, and that he had just advised Steve the judge wanted it on the record “right now in open court.” “Steve, I can’t do that for you. The judge wants you to do it.” “Still nothing, Judge.” “Mr. Russell, do you hear the Court?”

He did. He read his address into the open record, spelling the street and the town, and added that it “should be kept confidential per my (inaudible) restraining order.”

“Sir —” and, over an inaudible word from Steve, “— sir, don’t tell me why (inaudible), please. Sir, don’t tell me what’s inappropriate.”

The word “ignoring” stayed in the transcript. So did the rest. Before the sixteen-minute proceeding ended, the court would say, twice, that it could not hear him: “Can’t hear you again, sir.” “I can’t hear you again, sir.”

The deep dive had taken in the default. When DiFabio, on the fee dispute, said that “Judge Horowitz dismissed this case without a trial. We never had the opportunity to present or —”, the judge finished the sentence for him: “She dismissed — she dismissed it because he defaulted and failed to appear in court; is that right?” “That’s correct,” DiFabio said. “He failed to appear but he did not default, is our position, Your Honor.” “That’s your position but Judge Horowitz felt it was a default and dismissed those petitions and granted (inaudible) requested.” “Correct, Judge. There’s an appeal pending presently. It’s fully submitted at the Appellate Division 2nd with respect to that issue.” “Okay.” The phone request denied the afternoon before is not in the transcript. The 6:20 a.m. flight is not in the transcript. What is in it, in three lines: he failed to appear but he did not default; the court’s “felt it was a default”; and the appeal of that default, fully submitted.

The hearing spent its sixteen minutes on procedural housekeeping: Jackman’s fee application — twenty-four thousand dollars for representing a child neither parent was allowed to discuss — a jurisdictional challenge from DiFabio, an 18b attorney assigned to Walsh, who had appeared without counsel. The motion to vacate, the fourteen pages with the surgical records and the flight confirmation, was noted — “I do see that you have a Motion to Vacate the judgment issued by Judge Horowitz; is that correct?” — and not reached. The court adjourned the matter to April 27 at 3:00.

The briefing schedule came later, in writing. By the order of March 10, 2021, Tara was given until March 26 to respond. Reply papers were due April 2.

Aunt K was watching. On March 23, 2021, she wrote to Judge Kathie M. Davidson at the Westchester County Family Court; the letter’s CC line lists Judges Gordon-Oliver, Morales-Horowitz and Humphrey, among others, “by certified mail.” Two judges, she wrote, had recused themselves “not just from Steve’s cases - but from ALL of his cases. We expect the same of Judge Humphrey. Beyond that, each bright-eyed clerk who has promised to get Mr. DiFabio the docket ‘by the end of the day’ goes silent and disappears after learning the case.” Near the letter’s end: “two weeks ago I had an opportunity to witness an interaction between Hon. Humphrey and Steve. The Judge refused to make eye contact. His voice and body language were that of someone who knew what he was doing something wrong, even shameful.”

On April 6, 2021, Humphrey recused himself. DiFabio had moved for it. The decision and order recites the motion, dated March 24, 2021: recusal requested “based on what counsel perceives to be ‘persistent hostility and personal animus’ toward counsel by the undersigned which counsel claims creates ‘an appearance of impropriety’ requiring recusal pursuant to 22 NYCRR 100.3(E)(1),” with a memorandum in which counsel said the judge had “displayed animosity” against him “in many cases.” The motion was granted. The order ran two pages. In it the judge wrote that counsel “has displayed a pattern of behavior that the undersigned has found to be disrespectful, discourteous, and borderline unethical in various matters before this Court,” and listed some of it: “appearing on a virtual conference in a bathrobe, conducting himself in a disrespectful and hostile fashion toward chamber staff and attempting to abandon clients after he has engaged in questionable and unproductive litigation tactics.” Then: “in an effort to avoid even the slightest appearance that the undersigned cannot be impartial, the undersigned will be recusing himself from any and all matters involving Max Di Fabio, Esq.” The decretal paragraph recused him from this matter, “any and all related matters and any and all future matters” involving DiFabio, and sent the case to “a part to be determined by the Clerk’s Office.”

The motion to vacate the default went with him. The case was transferred again, to Yonkers, to Judge Schauer — and it was she who undid it, in 2021, on consent: the Horowitz orders entered on default, the permanent order of protection and the custody order, were vacated, and Steve’s family-offense petition reinstated. In November she said she should have specified that the interim order giving Tara sole legal and physical custody came back with them. The default orders were vacated. The custody arrangement continued.

Evie turned three during the recusals. She turned three in the Walsh compound, in the household where Brienne had described being hit, where a grandmother’s nails had left marks on forearms a generation earlier. Steve did not send a gift. He did not know if a gift would reach her. He did not know what she liked now, which books, which toys, which foods. The girl who had taken her first steps during Visit 9 was walking and talking and becoming a person in a house he was not allowed to enter, while three judges in sequence decided they could not decide.

Aunt K wrote letters.

Not to Steve’s attorney. Not to the opposing counsel. To the judges themselves.

In February 2021 she wrote to Judge Furman, who was handling interim support. She described their actual life, a shared Ford, a pop-up camper, the modest reality behind the Walsh family’s portrait of extravagance. She described what the default had cost: permanent custody to a woman who had been caught drugging Steve, who had been ordered confined to her family’s compound, who had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder with sociopathic tendencies by a forensic psychologist recommended by her own doctor. All of it reversed at a conference Steve’s attorney attended and Steve tried to attend.

In March she wrote to Judge Davidson at Westchester County Family Court. In May she wrote to Judge Egitto, the Supervising Judge for Family Courts in the Ninth Judicial District.

Aunt K’s letter to Egitto ran four pages. She described six attorneys recusing over ethical issues. Three judges recusing. The Horowitz default. The Humphrey recusal. She called it what it was: “an awful version of Groundhog’s Day.”

She described a second default, Tara’s. On March 10, 2021, Tara had failed to appear at an actual hearing. Her attorney had not appeared. She had been properly served. Judge Humphrey rescheduled. On March 24, Tara defaulted again. Same hearing. Same proper service. Same absence.

Two absences, two outcomes. One manufactured into a default, and a permanent custody order, against a represented father. One by the mother, twice, on the same matter, rescheduled without consequence.

Judge Egitto’s office responded on May 12, 2021.

The Supervising Judge’s office did not address the six recused attorneys. Did not address the three recused judges. Did not address the default entered over a represented party’s objection at a scheduling conference. Did not address the twelve days of silence before the five o’clock denial. Did not address the surgery, the flight, the two letters.

The response was three paragraphs. The first noted that “Judge Egitto strives to insure that all litigants receive from court personnel, the respect, fairness and attention to which they are entitled.” The second declined to discuss the case due to confidentiality. The third suggested Steve speak with his attorney.

Steve had an attorney. His attorney had appeared at the conference. His attorney had explained the circumstances. His attorney had filed the motion to vacate. The motion had been transferred to a judge who recused himself before deciding it. The suggestion to speak with his attorney was the system’s final word on a default that had removed a father from his daughter’s life — a father whose attorney had been in the courtroom the entire time.