Steve came to Westchester holding an order he had already won. In 2018, after a hearing in San Francisco, a court had issued a restraining order protecting him from Tara. When it expired he asked Westchester to carry its terms forward: a family-offense petition against Tara, docket O-03599-20, filed June 16, 2020.

What became of that petition is in two records. The court’s was read from the file fourteen months later, on August 27, 2021, by the fourth judge, Judge Schauer: the petition “that you filed that was dismissed, I guess by Judge Morales Horowitz, was reinstated. I reinstated that.” On its docket, O-03599-20, “there is actually a current Order of Protection that I signed on July 23rd requiring that Ms. Walsh stay away from you, your home, your place of employment.” The history as she read it: “This — this was filed in June of 2020. It looks like it was heard by the duty judge on that date and then it went to Judge Morales Horowitz and she dismissed it.” Aunt K’s record is her May 10, 2021 letter to the Supervising Judge, written after the judge in this chapter had come and gone: Steve “requested protection in Westchester and a temporary order of protection was granted by Hon. Naber after reviewing the case and questioning Steve. But that mysteriously disappeared, without comment, from police databases in November 2020 after Hon. Morales-Horowitz recused herself according to police.” He “reapplied for protection,” she wrote. “Hon. Humphrey refused to provide protection on a temporary basis.”

The order below is the later one on that petition, dated August 27, 2021 — by Judge Schauer’s account that day, she had already signed one on July 23. It is interim protection on Steve’s petition. It is not the ruling he asked for on Tara’s two missed appearances before Judge Humphrey. Those appearances are this chapter.

On January 26, 2021, months before the evidentiary hearing would be reached, the parties appeared for the first time before Judge Wayne A. Humphrey in Part 2 of the Westchester Family Court. The proceeding was virtual. Steve was at his desk in Novato. Tara was somewhere in Chappaqua. DiFabio was in his office. Humphrey was on the bench in White Plains. The Court Officer put them on the record.

The judge began by telling counsel he had done a deep dive in the file the day before.

“I don’t see it in there anywhere,” Humphrey said, when DiFabio tried to explain that an order of confidentiality for Steve’s address had been filed under the prior judge. Whether the document existed or not, it was not in the file Humphrey had read. The judge directed Steve to put his address on the record.

Steve asked to keep it confidential. He cited the permanent restraining order against Tara that the San Francisco court had issued — the order that was the reason he was in California at all, the order that named Tara as the person he needed protection from, the order whose whole purpose was to keep his presence in that town on that street in that house private from the woman he had been poisoned by.

The judge was not persuaded.

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

Steve understood that the judge was stating a fact about geography and a fact about jurisdiction at the same time. He understood that the judge was telling him that a California court’s protective orders had no purchase in Westchester, that this file would not inherit the findings of the San Francisco file, that he was in a new room with a new set of rules and the new rules did not carry the protections the old ones had established. He complied. He read his address into the virtual courtroom, and the number and the street and the ZIP code went into the open transcript, where anyone with access to the court file could read them.

A few minutes later, Tara asked for her address to be kept confidential. She said she had been “recently” granted address confidentiality from New York State. She said she had filed an affidavit at the end of the prior week. The judge asked her when she had filed it. He said he did not have the filing yet. He said they could not do much with it today. The tone of that exchange was different. The tone was patient. The tone was accommodating. When the hearing adjourned, Tara’s address would remain confidential. Steve’s had already been entered.

Then Humphrey turned to the matter of scheduling. The next appearance would be April 27. Steve had appeared remotely today. The judge wanted to make sure he would appear remotely on the return date.

“Mr. Russell, you need to make sure on the next date that you have access to a computer or Apple, Mac, whatever, some way so you can appear remotely on these proceedings. Okay? Do you understand that, sir?”

His answer did not carry on the recording. The judge warned him that if he failed to be present on the return date, the court could proceed in his absence, and asked again whether he understood.

“Yep, yep, I understand that,” Steve said.

The judge went further. He stated, with the clarity of a rule announced before it will be applied, what the consequence of failure to appear would be:

“So that means that if you fail to appear on the return date, this Court can issue judgment, dismiss your petitions just like Judge Horowitz did in the past. Do you understand that, sir?”

Steve knew what Judge Horowitz had done. He knew it the way you know something you have lived through. In February 2020, the afternoon before a visitation conference in White Plains, the court had denied his request to appear by telephone. He was in California. His signed January 14, 2021 affidavit describes booking the next available flight, at 6:20 a.m., and his counsel telling the court why he could not arrive in time. The court proceeded and held him in default. The January 26, 2021 transcript records the continuing dispute: DiFabio said he had failed to appear but had not defaulted; Humphrey described Horowitz’s dismissal for nonappearance.

Now Humphrey was citing that disaster as the rule. If Steve failed to appear on April 27, the same thing would happen.

“If that’s the law, I’ll be available,” Steve said.

“That’s the law of this case, sir,” the judge answered.

The exchange was recorded. The transcript was filed. The rule was on the record: fail to appear, the court dismisses the petitions. Judge Horowitz was the precedent. Judge Humphrey was the enforcer. The date was set.

Steve had also reapplied for protection: a new family-offense petition against Tara. On February 24 the clerk summoned her for it through the state’s address-confidentiality program, and the lawyer assigned to her on the other petitions agreed to accept service of it on her behalf.

The petition was on Judge Humphrey’s calendar on March 10, 2021.

Tara did not appear.

There was no ruling. The matter was put over to March 24.

On March 24 the court sat on a Microsoft Teams link. Steve was in California.

Tara did not appear again. The lawyer assigned to her on the other petitions had not been assigned to this one and had not received a link.

The next day the Attorney for the Child wrote to the judge that Tara “was properly served and had notice of the pending petition but failed to appear.” She added that she could not conclude the failure was willful, because no affidavit of service had been filed to show that Tara received the Teams link. The matter was set down for a conference on April 6. The person accused of poisoning, of bruise fabrication, of custody manipulation, of fleeing jurisdiction, had not appeared to answer any of it.

Steve’s default had come from a telephone request denied late the afternoon before and a 6:20 a.m. flight; his attorney had been at the table. Tara’s absences came from not showing up at all.

On January 26, in this same file, before this same judge, the rule had been stated and the precedent had been named. If a party failed to appear on the return date, the Court could issue judgment, dismiss the petitions, just like Judge Horowitz did in the past. Steve had acknowledged the rule on the record. He had not failed to appear. Tara had. Twice. The rule Humphrey had announced in January was not applied. No judgment was issued. The petitions were not dismissed. The hearings were rescheduled.

Steve understood, watching from California on each of those days, that the mechanism was not a matter of interpretation and it was not the work of an unstated assumption. The rule had been stated. The same judge who had stated it chose not to apply it. The word “default” was available in both directions, and the court used it in one. His default had resulted in a custody ruling. Her absences resulted in a rescheduling. The court had one definition of absence for the father and another for the mother, and the record establishing that the definitions were the same had been made two months earlier, in the same file, by the same judge.

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

The recusal was granted — and the order itself became an attack on the attorney who had pushed too hard.

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.

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 — written by the judge who, three months earlier, had stated the fail-to-appear rule on the record and then chosen not to apply it to the other side.

Two judges gone. Tara’s absences absorbed. The order of protection against Steve remained in place. The permanent hearing had not occurred.

While the judges rotated and the absences accumulated and the motions went undecided, Aunt K investigated.

She had been tracking Raymond Griffin since November 2019, when Steve first raised concerns about the court-appointed evaluator to AFC Jennifer Jackman. Jackman had deflected: “Please ask Max to read the report.” The Attorney for the Child, whose fiduciary duty was to the child, sent the father’s concerns about the evaluator back to the father’s own attorney. No investigation. No independent review. The system’s response to a question about one of its instruments was to tell the person asking to consult his own lawyer.

Aunt K did not consult a lawyer. She opened a browser.

The search began as due diligence — the kind of thing a person does when she has been taking notes on visits and writing letters to review boards and documenting what she sees and none of it is changing anything and the one thing she has not done is look at the evaluator himself. She typed his name. The results came back in the way search results do: a professional listing, an office address, a credential. 5 Waller Avenue in White Plains. “Dr. Raymond Griffin, PHD” on one directory, “Griffin Raymond A MD” on another. The CASAC credential — Credentialed Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Counselor, issued by the New York State Office of Addiction Services and Supports. It looked, for the first few screens, like an evaluator’s digital footprint. Then the OASAS investigation page loaded, and the footprint became something else entirely.

OASAS notified Griffin of summary suspension in July 2019 and revocation in August. On August 23 he signed a stipulation surrendering his CASAC credential; OASAS executed it on August 30. The stipulation settled two complaints without reciting findings. In October 2020, the Journal News reported the agency’s cited violations, including mishandling toxicology tests, inaccurate documentation, misrepresenting medical qualifications and using falsified documents to renew the credential. For Aunt K, this went to the reliability of an evaluator whose work had affected the family.

The Journal News reported that Griffin lived and held a counselling license in Connecticut. It quoted a New York court-system spokesman saying judges had stopped using him for evaluations in July 2019 and that reviewing every case for his involvement would be too burdensome. Families whose custody outcomes depended on his evaluations were left with orders built on a fraudulent foundation. The court’s position was that examining its own instrument would be too burdensome.

The Griffin discovery led to a second recognition, one that had been sitting in the case file since the bruise photographs, waiting for someone to see it.

Jonathan Guttridge, Tara’s attorney, had practiced at Guttridge & Cambareri P.C. The firm occupied offices at 222 Bloomingdale Road. Jo-Ann Cambareri was the named partner. In any other context, this would be a biographical footnote — an attorney’s firm name, a partner’s name, a street address.

But Cambareri sat on the screening committee for the Attorney for the Child panel in Westchester County Family Court. The 18-B panel — the list from which judges selected attorneys to represent children in custody proceedings. Cambareri screened the applications. Cambareri decided who belonged on the panel. And Cambareri practiced as an attorney in the same court system, from the same firm that represented one of the parties, against attorneys her committee had approved.

Jackman, the Attorney for the Child appointed to represent Evie, had been selected from that panel. Jackman, who had deflected Steve’s concerns about Griffin back to Steve’s own lawyer. Jackman, whose May 2019 fee motion described a $400 hourly rate and sought an outstanding balance of $46,920 for December 2018 through April 2019, after crediting payments, for representation of a child who was then about one year old.

The screening committee and the practicing attorney were the same person, at the same firm, on the same street in Westchester County.

Evie was learning colors and animals. She knew her father’s name. She was being told he was sick and the court would not let him see her. Three miles away, judges rotated, defaults accumulated, and the hearing never occurred.

Aunt K 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.

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.

The word kept its place in the file. The record has the dates.

February 6, 2020, White Plains: Steve on the next available flight from California, due into JFK that afternoon; his attorney at the table, objecting. The court: a default. Custody and an order of protection entered against him.

March 10 and March 24, 2021, White Plains, before the judge of this chapter: neither Tara nor her attorney. The court rescheduled, then recused. The ruling Steve had asked for on those two absences, Humphrey did not make.

November 5, 2021, Yonkers, before the fourth judge: Steve not present, and no one appearing for him. He had told this judge on August 27 that he would not attend further conferences, that he would “be present with an attorney at trial,” and had asked when the trial would be. “At this point, Mr. Russell has not appeared. He’s in default. It doesn’t seem like there’s really much of a case.” An inquest was set for January 5, 2022, “given that Mr. Russell has failed to appear in this proceeding for quite some time.”

January 5, 2022: Steve not present in person; his attorney present, objecting and cross-examining. The order that followed, dated February 2, 2022, gave Tara sole legal and physical custody.

March 22, 2023, the Appellate Division, Second Department, on that order: “contrary to the contention of the mother and the AFC, the order appealed from was not entered upon the father’s default. Although the father failed to appear in person at the hearing, his counsel appeared on his behalf and participated in the hearing.”

That sentence is about February 2022. Steve’s attorney had been at the table in February 2020.