The depositions had taken three years to arrange.

In May 2019, Brienne Walsh was subpoenaed for a deposition in the California battery case. She did not appear. Her family told her to throw out the subpoena, and she did. In September 2020, she sat for a deposition anyway, the one that produced the testimony admitted at trial, the testimony the family screamed at her for giving. But the rest of the family had not been deposed, and they did not intend to be.

Abby Tedla, the nanny whose signed declaration confirmed the drugging, was subpoenaed in February 2020. She appeared, was sworn in, and sat for approximately five minutes before refusing to continue. Her attorney said she would not answer questions. The deposition was terminated.

Walsh Sr. evaded service by the Westchester County Sheriff on three separate occasions. He was not hiding. He was at the family compound on Whippoorwill Road, where the gate was electronic and the driveway climbed a quarter mile through woods. He simply did not open the gate. On one occasion, service was accepted by another family member on his behalf, and he later testified he had no recollection of receiving anything.

In February 2020, the Enenstein firm, Tara’s attorneys in the California case, withdrew during active deposition scheduling. They were the sixth firm to exit the case. Their withdrawal did not prevent the depositions. It delayed them by a year.

By April 2021, four depositions had been scheduled across three days. All four conducted on video. All four with the same attorney representing the deponents: Frank S. Moore.

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On April 23, 2021, at 1:08 PM, Brendan Walsh was sworn in at the Carriage House, the secondary structure on the Walsh compound at 394 Whippoorwill Road, set back from the main residence along the same wooded driveway that three sheriff’s deputies had climbed without ever reaching a person willing to accept service. The Carriage House had its own entrance, its own rooms, its own address for purposes of appearing to be somewhere other than the family home. In the video frame, the exposed dark beams of the Carriage House ceiling are visible above him, timber beams that could have belonged to a farmhouse built decades before the Walsh family built their compound. He wears a teal zip-up jacket. White earbuds. He is looking down and to the side — away from the camera, away from the question, the posture of a man who has been told what not to say and has arranged his body accordingly. Joy Llaguno, the attorney representing Steve in the California battery case, was deposing him by video from Pennsylvania.

The phrase arrived early and it did not leave.

“I have no current recollection.”

It is not a phrase ordinary people use. It is not a phrase that appears in casual speech, in text messages, in emails, in any of the tens of thousands of communications produced in this case. It is a phrase that appears in deposition preparation, in the binder an attorney hands a witness the week before, in the session where the attorney says: When you do not want to answer, say this. Not “I don’t remember.” Not “I forget.” Say: “I have no current recollection.”

Brendan used it for his own deposition notice. He used it for his own subpoena. He used it for his own signature, whether the signature on a document was his. He used it for whether his sister’s name was pronounced “Bree-anne” or “Bry-anne.” He had no current recollection of any of it.

But Brendan’s deposition was not defined by what he could not remember. It was defined by what he chose to do with the time.

Llaguno asked him to confirm Brienne’s name. Brendan told her she was pronouncing it wrong. She asked him how it was pronounced. He refused to tell her. She tried again. He corrected her again. She asked him to say it. He refused. This continued for six exchanges, the deposing attorney asking the witness to help her pronounce his sister’s name, the witness refusing while insisting she was saying it wrong.

“That was not a compliment in case you were confused.”

He accused the court reporter of “making faces” and “rolling her eyes.” He asked Llaguno: “Can you please stop smiling?” She was not smiling. He told her she was smiling again. He asked questions to be repeated three and four times, then said he had already answered. It was not obstruction through silence. It was obstruction through performance — a man making the process of questioning him so unpleasant that the questioner would stop.

Then Moore entered the record.

“I’ve made many depositions. And I can tell you haven’t. So let’s move on and we’ll see how you stumble through this.”

When Llaguno attempted to make her objections for the record, the standard practice in any deposition, the practice Moore himself exercised freely, Moore interrupted her. “So, no, no, no, no. I’m making a record. Just shut up. Shut up. I’m making a record.” Then: “I’m not listening to you. I’m making a record.”

He told Brendan to stop smiling approximately six times across the deposition, the instruction itself revealing what the transcript could not show. When confronted with evidence, Brendan smiled. Moore did not tell him to stop because it was inappropriate. He told him to stop because the video was running.

There was one moment the preparation could not reach. Brendan’s own text message, read into the record by Llaguno: “Mr. Russell did not attack any of the Walsh family.” The text had been sent to Brienne. It directly contradicted Tara’s assault allegations, the allegations that had produced the restraining order, that had been used to block visitation, that had justified years of court proceedings. It was Brendan’s own words in Brendan’s own message, and when Llaguno read it into the record, neither Brendan nor Moore objected. There was nothing to object to. The text said what it said.

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Moore was Walsh Sr.’s cowardice made operational.

At the driveway confrontation, Walsh Sr. had retreated from a five-foot-one nineteen-year-old nanny in a passenger seat when she attempted to hand him a letter at the compound. He could not confront a young woman holding a piece of paper. So he hired a man to tell women to shut up on the record.

Kelly had been watching this pattern for years. Six attorneys had represented Tara in the California case. Six had withdrawn, each departure following the same sequence. The attorney accepts the case, receives Tara’s version, files aggressive motions, encounters the actual evidence, and resigns. Kelly called it “a twisted version of Groundhog’s Day with each new attorney following the same pattern.” She wrote this to Moore himself, on the day of Brendan’s deposition, in a letter that attached LaMelle’s signed statement and the letter to Judge Furman.

The seventh attorney did not resign. Moore was not Tara’s attorney in the way the previous six had been. He did not file motions. He did not appear in court. He appeared only at depositions, all four, across three days, and his role at each was identical: interrupt, demean, obstruct, and when Llaguno attempted to preserve the record, tell her to shut up.

His obstruction was not strategic. It was territorial. He recited case law at Llaguno’s objections: Prince v. Massachusetts, Matter of A and M, People v. Fitzgerald, Allstate v. Hague, Kearney v. Solomon Smith Barney, not because any citation was relevant to the questions being asked, but because the recitation itself consumed time and established dominance. “Your position is weak so why don’t you come up with something better.” “Come on. Get with it, man.” He clapped sarcastically when Llaguno asked a direct question.

Walsh Sr. told Llaguno under oath: “I would — I would — I would humor him because I — I — you know, I viewed him as unstable and dangerous.” Moore told Llaguno on the record: “Shut up. I’m making a record.” Same aggression, different registers. The patriarch’s institutional politeness and the attorney’s institutional brutality served the same purpose: making the other side stop talking.

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That same afternoon, at 4:18 PM, Maura Walsh was sworn in at the Walsh family residence at 394 Whippoorwill Road, Chappaqua. She gave her address under oath. It was the same address where Walsh Sr. had told the sheriff she no longer lived, one of the three occasions he evaded service on family members by claiming they were not there.

Maura was deposed in the house where Evie lived. She testified about drugging and kidnapping and psychiatric fraud in the rooms below the finished attic where Evie lived. The setting was not incidental. It was the architecture of the family’s position: everything that happened, happened here, in our home, and it is none of your business.

“Private family matter.”

The phrase functioned as Maura’s version of Brendan’s coached blank — not “I have no current recollection” but “I’m not discussing that.” She invoked familial privacy against every substantive question about Tara, about communications, about finances, about medical decisions. “My relationship with my family is private information.” “I’m not discussing family matters. It’s private.” “Tara has a right to privacy.” Kelly counted forty-seven accusations of harassment directed at Llaguno across the deposition.

When asked whether she knew Tara had given Steve drugs without his knowledge or consent, Maura answered: “Um, no.”

The “um” was her only tell. On most questions the denial came clean: “No,” “Absolutely not,” “I have no knowledge of anything that went on in San Francisco.” But on the drugging question, the filler arrived before the denial. A syllable of hesitation that the transcript preserved and that the word “no,” arriving after it, could not erase.

Maura’s diagnostic authority came from a single credential. “I have a training as a registered nurse, and I know when someone’s psychotic and when they’re not.” She had diagnosed Steve from inside a parked car, across the street, outside his apartment. That diagnosis had remained unchanged through five psychiatrists who attributed the episode to being drugged. A registered nurse who observed a man from across a street outranked five board-certified psychiatrists who examined him in clinical settings, because the nurse was family, and the psychiatrists were not.

She confirmed she had no knowledge of anything, no part in anything, had never been in San Francisco. She confirmed this from inside the house where the coordination had been planned, from the address she was not supposed to live at, on the same day her brother had smiled his way through three hours of coached amnesia one building over.

Above them, in the finished attic of the same house, Evie was three. The compound had five buildings and a gated road that climbed a quarter mile through woods. She had lived in the attic with Tara since she was a toddler. Four adults would testify in the rooms below her and across the driveway over the course of three days, and none of them would mention her by name except as a case caption. The girl in the attic had not seen her father since she was one and a half. She was learning to talk in full sentences. She had nine more years ahead of her in that compound before she would have any say in whether the women testifying in the rooms below her told the truth or lied.

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Three days later, on April 26, 2021, at 12:03 PM, Walsh Sr. was sworn in. He was alone at 394 Whippoorwill Road, sitting in front of a Chromebook with no other programs open and no documents in front of him. No documents, though the subpoena had requested them. No search, though six years of emails and text messages sat in the device in his hands.

His first question was not about the case. It was about whether Steve was watching. “Is Stephen Russell participating? Is he in your office, by any chance?” Llaguno told him no. “So he’s not — he’s not tuned in anywhere?” No. “I — I’m sure he’s on right now, but whatever.” The man who had evaded three sheriff’s deputies to avoid being served was now, under oath, performing the same vigilance in a different register: not hiding from the process but scanning the room for the person the process concerned.

His stutter had a seismographic quality. In ordinary conversation, questions about his career, his address, his family’s general circumstances, the stutter was minimal, a tic, barely noticeable. As questions approached the drugging, the coordination, the departure from San Francisco, the density of the repetitions increased until the transcript recorded four and five consecutive false starts on a single pronoun.

“I – I – I – I – I didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention.”

“I – I – I – I – I witnessed Stephen Russell acting absolutely bizarre.”

“I – I – I’m not sure if they’re still on my phone or – no, I – I don’t believe so.”

The stutter was not a speech impediment. It was a verbal seismograph — the tremor correlating with the proximity of the question to truth.

Walsh Sr. had not searched for any documents responsive to the subpoena. He had not searched his email. He had not searched his phone. When asked whether he would agree to search after the deposition ended, his answer was one word: “No.” Moore told Llaguno: “I’m not going to listen to this babble every single time.”

When confronted with his own text messages to Steve, messages in which he had written “Excellent. Thank you Steve, we appreciate your assistance and understanding. And thank you for the timely updates,” Walsh Sr. was asked whether he had been genuine.

“I would be less than 100 percent genuine, yes.”

The admission sat in the transcript like a stone in a river. He had written Steve grateful, warm, cooperative messages over a period of months, messages expressing appreciation for updates about Tara’s welfare, messages saying “works for us,” messages that read as a concerned father communicating with the man caring for his daughter. Under oath, he admitted that the communications were deceptive. The word he used was “defray,” a financial term, a bond trader’s verb, deployed to describe lying to the father of his grandchild.

“I would — I would — I would humor him because I — I — you know, I viewed him as unstable and dangerous.”

Llaguno asked him to confirm what he had just said. “So you… wouldn’t be completely genuine so as to humor him?”

The deponent did not answer. Moore spoke before Walsh Sr. could: “He himself decided not to answer the question.”

Llaguno: “So your client is declining to confirm his own admission?”

Walsh Sr.: “That is correct.”

The man who had admitted deception refused to confirm his own admission when it was restated back to him — and the moment landed not as an outburst or a retreat but as an institutional performance, his attorney framing the refusal as a right rather than an evasion.

The word was humor. Not “manage” or “de-escalate” or any of the clinical terms that might suggest concern for a person Walsh Sr. believed to be unwell. Humor — the verb of condescension, the verb a parent uses for a child’s fantasy, the verb that means: I let him believe I cared because it was easier than telling the truth. He had used the word before. In an email to Audrey Courson months earlier, Walsh Sr. had written that Steve’s own security guards “were only humoring his fantasies.” The word lived in his correspondence before it surfaced under oath, the same word, the same contempt, the same conviction that the man who documented his daughter’s bruises was performing delusion rather than recording evidence.

He claimed Dr. Gopal, the psychiatrist Walsh Sr. himself had insisted Steve retain, had called Steve “a whack job” during a phone conversation while Walsh Sr. sat in a car at his daughter’s swim meet. When pressed on whether those were Gopal’s exact words, Walsh Sr. admitted he was paraphrasing. The psychiatrist he had attacked as “ethically challenged” and “not to be trusted” had never used the phrase Walsh Sr. attributed to him. Walsh Sr. had taken his own contempt and placed it in a doctor’s mouth, under oath.

When asked whether he had any psychiatric training to support his repeated claims that Steve was psychotic, Walsh Sr. delivered the line he had come prepared to deliver:

“If I was to see a man walking down Fifth Avenue naked playing a violin, I wouldn’t need psychiatric counseling to think that there was something wrong.”

It arrived too complete. The imagery too specific, the structure too polished, the hypothetical too perfectly suited to the question it answered — not wrong, exactly, but wrong in the way a memorized speech is wrong when delivered as conversation. A man who stuttered through four consecutive pronouns on every dangerous question produced a fully formed analogy with a street name and a musical instrument and a rhetorical pivot, without a single hesitation. It was a prepared line delivered as spontaneity.

Llaguno followed up: “But you did not witness someone walking down naked down Fifth Avenue playing the violin —”

Walsh Sr. interrupted. “I witnessed someone drilling holes in walls, running wires, painting mirrors, painting walls, hearing voices. So you — you make the determination.”

The court reporter intervened. “Stop. Counsel, please speak one at a time, or your record will not be clear.” Her name was Monica. She had introduced herself at 12:03 PM and would not speak again for the record until this moment, the neutral professional, the one person in the room whose job was to preserve the record, attempting to do her work while Moore attempted to make the record useless and Walsh Sr. attempted to make it a performance.

Flying six hours was not something Walsh Sr. would do for his daughter. But performing outrage for a video camera — that he could sustain all afternoon.

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Matan Gavish was deposed first, on April 20, 2021, chronologically before the other three, though placed last here because his deposition contained the one moment that the family’s coordination could not survive.

Moore opened the deposition by identifying himself as counsel “for Matan solely.” Tara identified herself as a “pro se litigant representing myself.” The distinction mattered: if Moore represented only Gavish, his obstructive behavior served Gavish’s interests. If he represented the Walsh family, his presence at Gavish’s deposition was a conflict. Tara’s status as a pro se litigant meant she had no attorney present and no authority to make evidentiary objections.

Later in the deposition, Tara slipped. Moore was her attorney too. The careful framing of the opening, “for Matan solely,” “pro se,” collapsed. They tag-teamed Llaguno’s questions, Moore objecting and Tara adding her own interruptions, the pro se litigant and the attorney she claimed not to have working in coordination that the opening statements had been designed to deny.

But the slip that mattered was not Tara’s. It was Gavish’s.

Llaguno asked whether Walsh had told Gavish that anyone had helped her put drugs in Steve’s drink. Gavish began to answer, stopped, corrected himself, then continued:

“So I think the nanny and some of Steve’s security were aware of it.”

Llaguno asked him to clarify. Walsh explained this to him?

“I mean, at some point, I got — yeah. I mean, it’s not going to be Steve. I mean, Steve and I have never talked. So, yeah.”

Llaguno pressed: “So just to clarify, Ms. Walsh told you that the nanny and Steve’s security guards had helped her put drugs in Steve’s drink; is that correct?”

“They were aware of it. They were encouraging it, yeah.”

The outsider who had not been coached deeply enough. Or who did not understand the family’s wall of categorical denial. Or who simply — for a moment — answered the question he was asked instead of the question he had been instructed to answer. Brendan had no current recollection. Maura had no knowledge of anything. Walsh Sr. would be less than 100 percent genuine. Gavish said yes. They knew. They helped.

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Three days. Four depositions. One attorney. One family. One set of identical denials.

“Absolutely not” on the drugs. Total amnesia on the coordination. “Private family matter” on everything else. “I have no current recollection” from the son who was told to stop smiling. “I’m not discussing that” from the mother who diagnosed psychosis from across a street. “I would be less than 100 percent genuine” from the father who would not fly six hours but would spend six years in litigation. “They were aware of it” from the outsider who forgot, for one sentence, which answer he was supposed to give.

The court reporter’s voice threaded through all four transcripts, the neutral professional trying to preserve a record while one attorney tried to make it useless and four witnesses tried to make it empty. “Please speak one at a time.” “Counsel, your record will not be clear.” She was the only person in the room whose job did not require choosing sides, and the record she preserved would outlast every denial on it.

Kelly wrote Moore the same day Brendan was deposed. She attached LaMelle’s signed statement. She attached the letter to Judge Furman. She told Moore what she had told every attorney before him: the evidence exists, the evidence is clear, the evidence is enclosed. “You may have thought Tara gave you a good sense of the case, but now you may suspect you’ve been carrying water for nonsense.”

Moore did not reply. He was not the seventh attorney who resigned. He was not the sixth, or the fifth, or any of the ones who encountered the evidence and left. Moore stayed. Six attorneys had seen the evidence and concluded they could not represent Tara Walsh in good conscience. Frank S. Moore saw the same evidence and concluded that his job was not to represent Tara Walsh. His job was to make sure that when the other side asked questions, no one had to answer them.

The depositions were discovery for the battery case. The trial was months away. The family had spent three days denying everything under oath: the drugging, the coordination, the kidnapping, the deception, the obstruction. Three days of coached amnesia, privacy walls, performative outrage, and one unguarded moment from the man who married in.

In ten months, a jury would hear the evidence the family refused to address. Twelve neutral citizens, none of them named Walsh, none of them coached by Frank S. Moore, would listen to the same questions and reach a different conclusion.

But first, the appellate court would speak.