On August 27, 2021, Schauer addressed Jennifer Jackman’s application to be relieved, which the court said had been filed the night before. She had been the Attorney for the Child since the case arrived in Westchester — across four judges, three courthouses, the bruises, the ambush, the defaults, the revolving supervisors. She had seen the laboratory reports. She had received Steve’s correspondence about the poisoning evidence. She had watched the case file grow into the largest Schauer had ever encountered.

DiFabio had already been relieved from representing Steve and Linda and had left the virtual proceeding. Steve did not object; he said he appreciated her services and thought she was making the right decision. Weddle had no objection. The court granted the application on consent. Jackman asked to be excused, and the court agreed. The transcript does not record her reasons for seeking release or what her written application said.

The case now had no attorney for the child. Schauer noted that limited progress could be made until a replacement was assigned.

By October 2021, Donna Genovese had been appointed as the replacement Attorney for the Child.

Genovese had spent thirty-five years in Westchester family law. She was a Fellow of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers and certified for the Attorney for the Child Panel by the Appellate Division, Second Department — the same panel that Cambareri screened, the same roster that had produced Jackman. The pipeline did not pause when one of its attorneys departed. It produced the next one from the same inventory.

In October 2021, Genovese filed two Orders to Show Cause, one directed at Steve, one at Linda Russell. The relief sought was specific: prohibit all postings about the case, and delete all existing blog content. StevieLovesEvie.com. ChappaquaPoison. Everything Aunt K had built. Everything Linda had written. Every photograph, every court document excerpt, every blog post documenting what the institutions had refused to examine.

The motion was not filed by Tara. It was not filed by Tara’s attorney. It was filed by the Attorney for the Child, the person appointed to represent Evie’s interests.

Steve was served. The hearing was set for November 5, 2021, at 3:30 PM in Yonkers.

In the same October, Walsh Sr. signed a two-page declaration under penalty of perjury — “Signed this 7th of October, 2021, in Chappaqua, New York” — captioned for the San Francisco civil case, as Tara’s response to a motion for summary judgment there. The motion in Yonkers went forward. The hearing was set.

Walsh Sr.’s declaration denied and admitted in consecutive paragraphs. Paragraph one, as printed: “I never gave any deposition, nor agreed to any deposition, on October 21, 2021. I only gave a deposition when forced to do so in an order from New York State courts. I also know that my wife, Maura Walsh, and son, Brendan Walsh, did not give any depositions on October 22, 2020 and never agreed to do so.” Paragraph two: “I gave a deposition on April 26, 2021 that was moderated by Joy Llaguna. The deposition lasted six hours and was a series of questions that were not relevant to any actions witnessed in California for the period of 2017 to 2018. My wife and son also gave depositions at the end of April 2021. They also were highly upset and felt harassed as to the nature of questioning in the depositions.” And then: “I do not think there is any merit to any of his accusations against my daughter, Tara.”

The document did not explain how the depositions could be both irrelevant and harassing — if the questions were not relevant, they could not have been harassing; if they were harassing, they were relevant enough to cause distress. The signature was at the bottom of page two, under penalty of perjury, under the laws of the State of California and the State of New York. Four months after he signed it, the jury in that San Francisco case found Tara liable to Steve for battery, domestic violence and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

November 5, 2021. 131 Warburton Avenue, Third Floor. This time the proceeding was in person.

The proceeding opened at 3:38 PM. Weddle appeared for Tara. DiFabio appeared for Linda — not for Steve, for Linda — who was present in court. She had driven from Punxsutawney again, six and a half hours each way, and she was present in a courtroom in Yonkers because the case had consumed her family and there was no version of being a good mother and grandmother that did not include being in the room where the decisions were made. Genovese appeared for the child.

Steve was not present. He was in California, three thousand miles from the courtroom. He had told this judge on August 27 where he would and would not be: “I won’t be present at any further conferences. And you’re welcome to make a ruling and take negative inference for that. I will be present with an attorney at trial.” The same day he had asked when that trial would be — “I’m looking forward to the trial, Your Honor” — and, now representing himself, for a copy of the court file. The answer was that files are not sent: “You sit in the Clerk’s Office and, under supervision, you can review the court file.” The orders to suppress his documentation were about to be granted from the bench. The written orders would come later.

The hearing was on the calendar as numbers three through ten — eight dockets consolidated into a single afternoon in Part 17. Among them was the matter of Linda Russell’s visitation. A scheduling conference. The kind of proceeding where attorneys negotiate dates and parameters for a grandmother to see her granddaughter.

The court officer swore in the parties. Tara stood, raised her right hand, and when asked for her name and address for the record, gave her name and said her address was confidential. The court officer turned to Linda. Linda stood, raised her right hand, and when asked for her name and address, said: Linda Russell, Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. The woman who had driven six and a half hours gave the court her apartment number. The woman who lived twenty minutes away gave the court nothing.

Both were sworn. Both were seated. The court opened the hearing.

DiFabio spoke next. He acknowledged service of the order to show cause. And then he said what he had come to say.

“I’m not going to — I’m going to — I’m not going to make the legal arguments that I think the order’s in effect. Notwithstanding that, we’ll consent to the relief.”

The stammer mattered. DiFabio knew the legal arguments existed — prior restraint, the constitutional weight of suppressing speech before it occurs. He was telling the court, in the same sentence, that the arguments were there and that he would not make them. He was consenting to the relief. His client was sitting in the gallery.

The court noted that Steve had not appeared. It was 3:41 — eleven minutes past the scheduled start. “Normally I would give a party a fair amount of time to appear, but I think we’ll proceed.”

What followed was Tara’s financial disclosure. Weddle told the court that Tara had depleted her life savings — $120,000 — paying for private counsel. Her income was roughly $40,000 a year. The court pointed out that with child support, her total income was $100,000. Weddle said child support was not income. They went back and forth. The court held off on the question, and said why: “At this point, Mr. Russell has not appeared. He’s in default. It doesn’t seem like there’s really much of a case.”

Then Genovese spoke. She adjusted her mask — “sorry with the mask” — and told the court what she had found that morning. The Chappaqua Poison website continued. There were new postings as recently as November 4. The blog addressed the court’s own gag order. She wanted the postings stopped.

DiFabio asked to respond. He separated his client from the blog. “I’d like to focus on my client, Linda Russell, not Mr. Russell. Ms. Russell has nothing whatsoever to do with any posting, any Chappaqua Poison or anything of the sort.” Then he made the case for the grandmother he had already consented away.

“She’s capable. She’s a nurse, a retired nurse. She’s raised children. You can see her demeanor. She’s not a monster. She huffs it all the way up here from Pennsylvania to do this.”

Weddle was not reassured. “Because of what has transpired thus far, we are not confident of Ms. Russell’s ability to keep her son away from Evie until the Court makes a decision. There was an order before. Mr. DiFabio argues that it was a misunderstanding with respect to the Court’s direction. I am not inclined to agree.” Earlier, before Genovese spoke, he had put his characterization of Steve on the record: “really it’s Mr. Russell that’s our concern, is that his actions in this matter have been erratic, irrational. They have been unpredictable. They have been frankly contrary to his own best interests, and we are very concerned about Ms. Russell’s ability to keep Mr. Russell away from Evie until these issues can be resolved.” Counsel’s argument; no witness was examined on it. DiFabio’s answer had come before it and came after it. Before: “Because her son, in the Court’s view, may be misbehaving or not complying, she shouldn’t be punished for that.” After, on the FaceTime order Weddle meant: “You’re not going to take my word for that? It was my misunderstanding, Chris.” “I read the transcript. In good faith, I brought it to the Court’s attention. I brought it to Counsel’s attention, and I showed passages in the transcript where I believe, Your Honor, perhaps incorrectly, I believe Your Honor permitted FaceTime access with my client, Linda, and Mr. Russell so long as my client was present.” “— that was a mistake, and I’ve admitted to that.”

The court, in the discussion of what visits might look like, stated its own premise and its own concern. “Things involving the visits between your client and Evie wound up online. That’s a fact.”

“I am concerned that your client is controlled or bullied or fearful of Mr. Russell, and —”

Linda stood. She interrupted from the gallery, her voice cutting across the courtroom.

“I’m not — I’m not —”

The judge was telling the room that the grandmother was controlled by her son, and the grandmother was answering. The sentence didn’t finish. The transcript records it as inaudible. Schauer continued past the interruption as though Linda had not spoken, as though the woman sitting in the courtroom, the woman whose attorney had just consented her into silence, did not have the right to speak her own objection to the characterization of her.

“— that she can’t control him.”

“And so if I were to come up with a solution for this access, I would have her have supervised visits. And that’s not because I think she’s not capable of being safe around Evie. I think she certainly is. It’s that I think she can be manipulated by her son to do whatever it is he wants to do.” DiFabio answered the premise: “I disagree that it’s a fact that there was stuff shared from that visit. I think it was old stuff.” The court: “Whatever it is, Mr. DiFabio, whatever it is, it was inappropriate, improper.” DiFabio: “But it wasn’t Linda.” The parties had been sworn; no one was examined on any of it.

Schauer laid out the conditions. If there were to be visits, they would be conditioned. If one sliver of what happened at a visit got posted online, the visits would end. The court would find it was not in Evie’s best interest to have any contact with this grandmother.

DiFabio said he agreed with the conditions. Then Schauer said it thought Ms. Genovese would agree. And the court was waiting for Genovese’s assent when Linda spoke again.

“So would I.”

Two words from the gallery. The grandmother who had been consented over, who had heard her attorney agree to suppress her voice, was now agreeing with the court’s conditions. She was trying to participate in the proceeding that was being conducted over her. She was offering her own consent to terms her attorney had already consented to on her behalf.

DiFabio asked for once-a-month visits. Linda would call Tara, give reasonable notice, come up from Pennsylvania for a few hours after school or on a weekend. Something simple. The attorney advocating for the grandmother who had driven across the country to be in this room.

“Or less.”

The third interjection came as DiFabio finished. Linda was asking for less than what her own attorney was requesting. The grandmother was bargaining herself down, offering the court the smallest possible claim on the child she had driven thirteen hours to see. Once a month, DiFabio had said. Or less, Linda said.

“That would be wise,” the court said.

“Sometimes I am,” DiFabio said.

Asked whether he needed time with his client, Weddle said no. “My client is not reassured that Mr. Russell won’t manage to insert himself into any arrangement that the Court comes up with. I mean, Mr. Russell hasn’t followed a court order so far. Why would we expect him to now?” DiFabio: “Mr. Russell has not traveled back from California during any of the visits my client had with the child. That’s a fact. He hasn’t been in the state in, I would say … two years minimally. The last time he was here, I think we went to court. There’s no risk of Mr. Russell coming here. And Ms. Russell will have a duty to report.”

DiFabio had once been willing to fight. He had filed a Petition for Enforcement on Steve’s behalf, challenged the court’s unilateral decisions, pushed back on the rotating judges. The court’s response was structural. Judge Gordon-Oliver blanket-recused from all DiFabio cases — not just Steve’s, all of them. A second judge followed. A third. The blanket recusals eliminated roughly a third of DiFabio’s Westchester Family Court practice. The stick was not subtle: represent this client, lose your other clients.

During the case, a Democratic Party official approached Steve directly and asked for $30,000. Steve told DiFabio. DiFabio’s response was not surprise. That’s how things are done in Westchester. The attorney who knew the constitutional arguments existed and chose not to raise them also knew how the local political apparatus worked and did not pretend otherwise. The $30,000 was never paid. The request was never repeated. But the fact of it — the party’s fundraising arm intersecting with active litigation, the attorney unsurprised — illuminated the room in which the consent was given.

DiFabio stopped representing Steve. He consented to the gag order on Linda’s behalf. And in the years that followed, the Westchester County Democratic Committee — the same organization that had renominated Horowitz after her censure — endorsed Max DiFabio for Town of Rye Justice Court. He took the bench. The attorney who had been punished for challenging the court was absorbed into it. A judge cannot represent clients.

At 4:01, the court asked the parties to step out so the lawyers could stay on for a conference. Off the record. The fluorescent lights. The hallway. Twenty-nine minutes.

At 4:29, they came back.

The record resumed at 4:29:58. Then the court granted both motions from the bench.

“At this point, it’s 4:30. It’s clear that Mr. Russell’s not appearing so both of those Orders to Show Cause are granted, and you may submit the orders on notice.”

Both orders. The one against Steve, on his absence. The one against Linda, on the consent her attorney had given at the start: “we’ll consent to the relief.” Her own words in the room — “So would I,” “Or less” — came in the discussion of visits and of what might wind up online, not on the motion itself. The grandmother who was sitting in the room, who had driven from Punxsutawney, whose attorney had consented on her behalf — her order was granted too. She was present. She had spoken three times. She had agreed. The proposed orders that followed carried two headings: for Steve, ORDER ON DEFAULT; for Linda, ORDER ON CONSENT. Consent was the paper’s word for what she had agreed to under the conditions the court had just described.

The language of the order was precise.

The court directed the removal of existing blog content. Not a modification. Not a redaction of specific identifying information. Not a tailored restriction addressing particular posts that might affect the child. A blanket directive.

Erase. Deactivate. Delete.

The three words carried the weight of institutional authority directed at the act of documentation itself.

StevieLovesEvie had been built by Aunt K — Steve’s partner, a woman with no custody claim, no legal standing, no obligation to any of it — over months of careful, systematic work. One hundred and forty-six blog posts, organized into four hardbound volumes on a shelf in Steve’s house. The blog contained nanny incident reports from the period when Evie was in the Walshes’ care. It contained photographs of bruises on a child’s body. It contained Aunt K’s written accounts of supervised visits — what Evie said, what Evie ate, whether Evie seemed afraid. It contained court filings that the court system had generated and that the court system now wanted removed from public view. It contained a grandmother’s letters to judges.

The order did not distinguish between the grandmother’s letters and the bruise photographs. It did not carve out the nanny reports or the visit documentation. It directed the removal of all existing blog content. The word was “erase.” The four volumes on the shelf. The act of building them. The fact that someone had thought the evidence deserved not just documentation but permanence, binding, arrangement — erase.

Schauer made the consequences explicit during the portion of the hearing that addressed Linda’s visitation.

“If there is a visit and one sliver of what happens at that visit gets posted online, that’s the end. There’s no more chances.”

“If there’s one tiny bit of something that winds up online that can be traced back to her visit, it’s over. It is over.”

The grandmother who had driven thirteen hours, who had been turned away at the Walsh compound, who had bought her own car seat because the Walsh family claimed Steve would bug the one they had, this grandmother could visit Evie, conditionally, provided nothing she observed ever reached the public record. The price of access was silence.

The order raised a constitutional question the court did not address in the hearing.

A prior restraint on speech, a court order prohibiting publication before it occurs, carries the heaviest burden in First Amendment law. The standard requires demonstration that the speech would produce a clear and present danger of a serious, substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance, or unrest. The restraint must be tailored as precisely as possible to the exact needs of the case.

What the court granted on November 5 was not tailored. It was total. Erase everything. Delete everything. It was granted from the bench, on Steve’s absence, with the written orders to be submitted on notice; the written order on the motion is dated December 3, 2021, on the father’s default. He was not present to argue that the speech being suppressed was documentation of harm to a child, not the cause of harm to a child.

From the bench on November 5, the blog was ordered taken down. The documentation was ordered erased.

And the court scheduled the inquest. January 5, 2022. In person. A half day.

The court had read the blog. The court had seen the letter. And the court’s answer to a grandmother’s question — “You went to law school for this?” — was to order the question erased.