The Temporary Order of Protection was granted at the first hearing.

The application was filed in Westchester County Family Court. The court issued the TOP.

A full evidentiary hearing was scheduled. Steve’s legal team prepared. Max Di Fabio, who had taken over from the string of prior attorneys, assembled witnesses and organized exhibits. The case for a permanent order was built from the same evidence that had persuaded the California court — supplemented by everything that had happened since: the Reno bottle, the bruise fabrication, the Guttridge letter, the two defaults on the kidnapping case.

The hearing date arrived.

Tara and her attorneys did not appear.

The courtroom had the particular quality of a room arranged for a proceeding that is not going to happen — the tables set, the files prepared, the clerk waiting, the judge on the bench, and the opposing chairs empty. A default was entered. The hearing was rescheduled.

The second hearing date arrived.

Tara and her attorneys did not appear.

A second default. The same empty chairs. The same clerk recording the absence. The same quiet courtroom absorbing the fact that the person accused of poisoning, of bruise fabrication, of custody manipulation, of fleeing jurisdiction — had simply chosen not to engage with the process designed to evaluate those accusations.

Steve’s default had been manufactured through a five o’clock denial and an overnight flight. He had appeared — just barely too late. Tara’s defaults came from not showing up at all.

His default had resulted in a custody ruling.

Her defaults resulted in a recusal.

Judge Wayne Humphreys — the judge handling the TOP proceeding — recused himself on April 6, 2021. The motion had come from Steve’s side. Di Fabio had filed it, arguing that the judge had displayed “persistent hostility and personal animus” toward counsel.

The court’s Decision and Order granted the recusal. But the order itself was a weapon — while removing himself from the case, Judge Humphreys used the decision to attack Di Fabio’s conduct. The judge wrote that counsel had “displayed a pattern of behavior that the undersigned has found to be disrespectful, discourteous, and borderline unethical.” That counsel had appeared for a virtual conference “in a bathrobe.” That counsel had conducted himself “in a disrespectful and hostile fashion toward chamber staff.” That the court had been forced to “admonish counsel on several occasions.”

Decision and Order April 6, 2021 Westchester Family Court — File No. 154703

The judge granted the recusal — and used the order to trash the attorney who asked for it.

LEGAL-HUMPHREY-RECUSAL — Decision and Order, Judge Wayne A. Humphrey, April 6, 2021The judge granted the recusal — and used the order to trash the attorney who asked for it.

The recusal was granted. The criticism was preserved in the permanent record. The next judge assigned to the case would inherit a file that now included not just the poisoning evidence and the double default — but a judicial opinion describing the petitioner’s attorney as borderline unethical.

Two judges gone. Tara’s defaults absorbed. The Temporary Order of Protection remained in place. The permanent hearing had not occurred.

Somewhere in Chappaqua, behind the electronic gate, Evie was learning to speak in full sentences. She was learning colors and animals and the names of the people around her. She was not learning her father’s name. The procedural machinery that surrounded her — the recusals, the defaults, the orders — had the effect of erasure. Each month without contact was a month in which the child’s memory of her father dimmed, and the family that controlled her access did not need to do anything active to achieve it. They only needed the system to keep turning.

Kelly drove with Steve to the Westchester courthouse for these hearings.

She had been writing up every visit — every observation, every detail of what she witnessed during supervised time with Evie. She wrote letters to the judicial review board. She documented patterns. She sent the documentation into the system and the system did not respond. She wrote more. She sent more. The silence on the other end was not the silence of consideration. It was the silence of a machine that does not have an input for what she was sending.

On the morning of one hearing, they walked to the car and found both front tires deflated. Not punctured — deflated, the valve stems depressed. They were in Westchester in January. The roads were icy. If they had driven onto the Saw Mill River Parkway at speed, the car would have pulled and they could have been seriously hurt.

It happened twice. Both times the morning of a court appearance.

Kelly checked the tires now before every trip to the courthouse. She added it to the list of things she did — the visit write-ups, the letters, the tire checks — the small accumulating labor of someone who cared about something a system had decided not to care about.

The case file grew thicker. The number of judges who had handled it grew longer. The distance between Evie and her father remained the same.