Introduced by state Sen. Susan Rubio, D-Baldwin Park, the bill — Piqui’s Law: Keeping Children Safe from Family Violence — “gives voice to the 920 children that are calling out to us from their graves,” the lawmaker said in introductory remarks before the committee. One way the state could do that, she said, would be to better train court staff and judges.

The bill is named after Piqui, a 5-year-old boy murdered by his father, who suffocated his son while he was sleeping in his car seat in 2017 during an unsupervised visit.

Piqui’s mother, Ana Estevez, gave tearful testimony, saying her son would not have died had the judge approved her request for sole custody and issued a restraining order against her abusive ex-husband.

Piqui’s Law would direct the Judicial Council of California — the policy-making body of the California courts responsible for ensuring the impartial administration of justice — to expand training for judges on domestic violence and child abuse as part of continuing education requirements.

If approved by both houses of the Legislature and signed by the governor, Senate Bill 331 would establish judicial reporting requirements on these trainings and expert testimony in child custody proceedings.

“One thing is clear,” Rubio said. “We need to educate” the judiciary on domestic violence issues.

Another controversial provision in the bill would prohibit courts from ordering family reunification therapy for children of estranged parents. Judges sometimes forcibly send children to camps that often last no more than four days and cost $25,000 to $40,000, to persuade them to bond with the parent they say abused them. Frequently, the children are taken to other states, where they are prevented from having contact with the other parent. Afterward, court ordered separation could last for months or years.

Through tears, with her mother, Jill Montes, by her side, 10-year-old Zoe Winenger testified at the April 25 committee hearing that she was traumatized at a reunification camp. On her way home after the hearing, she told her mother that testifying was the best thing she had done in her life, according to Rubio’s office.

Some at the hearing defended reunification therapy. One father said that without the judge in his case ordering it, he would not have gotten custody of his daughter. “Reunification therapy does in fact work,” he said.

In a press release after the hearing, Rubio said: “Protecting our children should always be a priority, but the legal system failed Piqui and so many other children. SB 331 will begin a systematic change in family court to prevent another family from suffering such pain.”

This is the second time the senator has introduced such a bill. Last year, pushback from the Judicial Council, which objected to the provision that mandated additional training for family court judges, forced Rubio to withdraw her bill. SB 331 is an amended version of that bill.

Several states are considering similar bills to comply with a provision in the federal Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2022. The act promises states up to $25 million in grants if their reforms comply with national requirements.

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State Sen. Susan Rubio is planning to introduce a bill that would allow California’s 58 trial courts to digitally record civil and family law cases, a controversial effort to address statewide courtroom staffing shortages that deprive low-income litigants of official court transcripts.

The move comes two weeks after Los Angeles County Superior Court announced a slew of unprecedented financial incentives to recruit and retain court reporters.

Court reporters provide verbatim documentation of proceedings that are critical to filing appeals, reviewing judges’ behavior and reading back proceedings to jurors.

If approved, the legislation would sidestep the issue of recruiting and training more staff, which has proven a financial and logistical challenge statewide.

“This is very positive,” said Jennafer Wagner, director of programs at the Family Violence Appellate Project, which is sponsoring the bill. The nonprofit provides pro bono assistance to domestic violence survivors and their children appealing trial court decisions in California and Washington.

California law requires courts to provide court reporters in criminal felony and juvenile matters, but not in civil courts, which include family law, probate cases or matters assigned to the writs and receiver departments.

In early February, the Los Angeles County Superior Court announced that it would use nearly $10 million — its portion of $30 million the state had given to all 58 of its courts for fiscal year 2023 to provide financial incentives to “hire, retain and reward” court reporters. The court has 100 vacancies. San Francisco’s share of the state funding is $703,092.

For more than a decade, California has been experiencing an acute shortage of court reporters that has forced nearly all its courts, including San Francisco Superior Court and Los Angeles County Superior Court, the largest trial court in the nation, to hustle to fill vacant slots.

The shortage is severe and longstanding; trial courts have been eliminating court reporters in family and civil law cases as a cost-saving measure since as far back as 2012. In November, Los Angeles County Superior Court announced that it would not provide court reporters for family court hearings, despite a 2018 state Supreme Court ruling, Jameson v. Desta, that requires they be provided to poor litigants who have fee waivers. Typically, litigants must pay for court transcripts for civil hearings and trials. If an official court reporter is not available, litigants who can afford to do so may hire their own certified shorthand reporter.

The state Legislature tried unsuccessfully twice in the last decade to introduce electronic recording in courts, which faced opposition from the union that represents court reporters.

“We’re going to push back at any attempts” to switch to electronic recording, David Green, president of SEIU 721, which represents some 2,000 court reporters in Southern California, said in an interview last month when asked if the union continued to oppose California courts going digital. The move, he said, “puts people at risk,” because transcriptions generated from digital recordings are not as good as those produced by a court reporter. Green did not respond to calls seeking comment on Rubio’s bill.

Rubio’s office said the Los Angeles-area Democrat has been trying to work with the union, and that transitioning to electronic recording would not take jobs away from court reporters, but would make their jobs “better.”

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The council, which represents judges and other judiciary branch staff, sent a letter to the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Aug. 24, saying additional continuing education requirements would “overwhelm” judges with work. The group called the mandate “duplicative and unnecessary in light of the robust training that judicial officers and court-connected staff already receive.”

The Judicial Council also argued that imposing targeted training topics could “implicate an advocacy agenda intended to improperly influence judicial impartiality” and open the door to pressure from other special interests that could skew its ability to rule fairly.

State Sen. Susan Rubio, a Democrat from Baldwin Park who introduced Senate Bill 616, nicknamed Piqui’s Law, said she wanted to continue to work on it, add amendments and reintroduce it later. The Assembly unanimously passed a version in early August.

“It is unfortunate that the Judicial Council’s resistance stifled our ability to include stronger protections for victims,” Rubio said in a Sept. 1 statement. She said that in early June she put forward the bill “because children continue to be murdered at the hands of an abusive parent during custody disputes.”

Piqui’s Law would have included provisions that:

• Required evidence-based training for judges and court personnel on domestic violence and related topics. The training would have added 25 hours of orientation training for new judges who sit in family law on top of the 30 hours they are currently required to undergo. Additionally, the bill required a minimum of 20 hours of continuing judicial education every three years thereafter. The training includes coercive control, the subject of a 2020 California law that allows victims to claim nonviolent abuse or manipulation in cases involving custody or temporary restraining orders. The Public Press found in a recent series that not all judges apply the law equally.
• Restricted expert testimony in custody hearings to those who have previous first-hand experience in such cases.
• Done away with the court-ordered “reunification therapy” services, which a judge can order if a child is reluctant to see one parent after a divorce. The nationwide practice is designed to encourage children to emotionally reunite with an abusive parent they have been separated from.
• Required judges to consider any past or current sexual or physical abuse by the accused parent.

Much of the language in Piqui’s Law was inspired by a federal regulation called Kayden’s Law, a provision in the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2022, which President Biden signed in March. It was named after a 7-year-old Pennsylvania girl, Kayden Mancuso, murdered by her father in 2018 during an unsupervised visit. Her death spotlighted the country’s weak child custody process.

The child’s death spurred Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican, to work with Joan Meier, a professor of clinical law and director of the National Family Violence Law Center at George Washington Law, to introduce Kayden’s law, a court reform measure in Congress. Meier hoped the legislation would serve as a blueprint for states to pass their own versions. The federal reform promised grants, capped at $25 million, to states with child protection systems that adhere to its guidelines.

Rubio’s bill earned its nickname, Piqui’s Law, in honor of Aramazd Andressian Jr., a 5-year-old South Pasadena boy whose father suffocated him in 2017 in the back seat of his car. The father later said his motive was anger at his wife for divorcing him. He is serving a 25-year-to-life sentence.

Ana Estevez, the boy’s mother, had fought unsuccessfully in family court to get full custody, saying she was worried about her estranged husband’s abusive behavior. Eight months before the killing, a judge denied her request for a restraining order.

“Piqui was among those innocent children and one of the reasons behind our national movement to reform the judicial system,” Rubio said in her public statement.

Meier said she had worked with Rubio in drafting Piqui’s law. She said last month that the bill had been significantly weakened as it made its way through the Legislature and was a “fragmented version of the original federal model.”

Despite repeated requests, Rubio’s office declined to tell the San Francisco Public Press what provisions had been stripped from the original bill.

Among groups that opposed the bill were Mothers Against Child Abuse, Family Reunion and The Hero’s Circle, which advocates for adult children who live in homes with only one parent after that parent had “alienated” them against the other. Members of The Hero’s Circle said they opposed Piqui’s Law because it just focused on domestic violence training while neglecting “many other aspects of child development, personality disorder and family dynamics.”

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Aug. 24, Sen. Andreas Borgeas, R-Fresno, said that “as meritorious as more education and continuing education are” for the judiciary, he was “initially concerned” that we are “building and building a curricula on top of those that work in the system.”

He said that some of his judicial districts have some of the busiest dockets in the nation and by mandating more training judges will be so overwhelmed that “at some point the system could break.”

But supporters of the bill who showed up at the hearing said such legislation could improve child welfare and, as one speaker put it, stop “preventable homicides.”

The Center for Judicial Excellence, a San Rafael-based nonprofit group founded in 2006 to hold judges accountable, had worked closely with Rubio on Piqui’s Law and sponsored the bill. The center’s Executive Director Kathleen Russell said Rubio would likely reintroduce the bill next year with unspecified amendments.

Russell said she had fought for more than a decade to eliminate reunification therapy programs in California and across the country, describing the practice as “harmful and traumatic.”

On Aug. 28, the Institute on Violence, Abuse and Trauma hosted a conference in San Diego in which three people who were sent to “reunification camps” told their stories. One of them compared her experience of being taken out of her home as an “abduction.”

Ally Cable, 20, said she was forced by the courts to “reunify” with her father when she was 16. Cable said she had been sexually abused by him and forcibly taken to a camp in Bozeman, Mont. There, therapists worked alongside her father, who shared custody of her, to try to recreate an emotional bond between them. “They treated me like a criminal,” Cable said. “It was terrifying.”

But at least one person who disagreed that the therapy was harmful, spoke at the Aug. 24 senate hearing. Beverly Hills-based family law attorney and psychologist Virginia Griffin Donnell said that that provision in Rubio’s bill was a “blind spot” and advocates who speak against the therapy have a “nefarious agenda.” 

“It’s an insidious form of child abuse called parental alienation,” asserted Griffin Donnell.

California’s child custody laws, despite some good provisions, are not working, say childcare advocates. According to data from the Center for Judicial Excellence, since 2008 the nation has logged at least 859 reported cases of children killed by abusive parents during divorce or separation proceedings. Many died during family court-ordered visitation despite evidence that they were in danger.

Russell said California has the highest number of preventable child murders in the country, three times more than Texas and five times more than New York.

“These deaths are not just random, violent tragedies,” Rubio and Russell co-wrote in an Aug. 17 opinion piece in The Sacramento Bee. “They are often preventable and due to mistakes or bias in the family court system.”

They added that in California, “the courts operate with almost no meaningful oversight and very limited training for judges and other court personnel on domestic violence and child abuse.”

In Pennsylvania, a bill called Kayden’s Law is now working its way through the Legislature. Its aim is to make child welfare and safety primary concerns in custody disputes. It too calls for domestic abuse training for judges and court personnel.

Meier said about 20 states are currently readying to introduce their own versions of Kayden’s Law, and nearly all of them are facing headwinds from judges.

CORRECTION 9/16/22: Corrects the number of Senate Bill 616, which is nicknamed Piqui’s Law.

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Emily provided written documents and audio to show how he had allegedly abused her time and time again. In her testimony, she said he monitored her phone conversations, even those related to the web design business they jointly set up before their marriage. Sometimes, she recalled, in a fit of jealousy he would hang up on male clients while she was negotiating a business deal.

Trevor was so controlling, she said, “I felt I was not allowed to have my own thoughts.”

So she bit her tongue and said nothing, afraid of his mercurial temper. In November 2020, after receiving a bruised arm from him — an episode his lawyer says was mostly her fault — representatives from his church told her she should accept physical discipline from her husband, she said in an interview. Their message: She needed to learn to forgive.

Her attorney, Minty Siu-Kootnikoff, filed for a temporary restraining order in February 2021 and custody of the couple’s then 6-year-old son. It was a complicated case, with accusations of bad parenting and disruptive drug use flying back and forth between the couple.

Siu-Kootnikoff was one of the first lawyers to invoke a new legal tool California had enacted just a month earlier that expanded on the law’s long-standing conception of domestic violence. The reform allows victims to claim a pattern of “coercive control” — psychological abuse that does not necessarily end in physical harm. Siu-Kootnikoff is the legal services director at Sojourn, a domestic violence shelter in Santa Monica.

Siu-Kootnikoff viewed the recently enacted law as the best tool for getting her client a legal remedy. “Domestic violence is about control, and is not limited to physical abuse,” Siu-Kootnikoff said. “Therefore the amendments adding coercive control to the definition of ‘disturbing the peace’ are critical to addressing abuse that is not dealt with in the criminal codes, yet is as damaging and destructive as a black eye or broken arm.”

Not all judges are sympathetic to the stories of intimate partners who claim emotional abuse, and some even exhibit misogynistic conduct, women’s rights advocates say. More than six in every 10 California judges are male, down from seven a dozen years ago. It is not uncommon to hear a judge cast doubt on a claim of domestic abuse if one partner returns to the other after the abuse was alleged to have started. But the conclusion of the judge who heard Emily’s case shows that at least a few jurists seem to have gotten the message.

“The dynamic of domestic violence is not subject to black-and-white rules,” Judge Michael J. Convey of the Los Angeles County Superior Court noted in his Feb. 5, 2021, ruling on the case. “It is individual. It is nuanced. It is changing. The court’s views of domestic violence are evolving over the years to reflect a more proscriptive assessment — and a set of orders designed to recognize more subtle, more insidious, if you will, behaviors that can be called violence or abuse.”

Convey echoed the observations of sociologist and forensic worker Dr. Evan Stark, whose prize-winning book “Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life” helped to stimulate the conversation on the newly recognized crime of coercive and controlling behavior in the United States and throughout the United Kingdom and Australia. “It’s not about hitting or hurting, but taking away women’s autonomy,” Stark said in an interview.

Convey agreed with Siu-Kootnikoff that what Emily had undergone for years was indeed coercive control, that there “was an exercise of coercive control by Trevor and that it was pervasive and that it was long-standing and that it was part of the dynamic between them.”

The judge also said that by going back to Trevor a year after they divorced in 2015, he was not persuaded to discredit her story, citing research showing that it is not uncommon for victims to return to their abusers.

It remains to be seen how many more judges affirm what proponents of the concept say is the purpose of the reform, which is to give victims like Emily the benefit of the doubt.

The 2020 California law, introduced by state Sen. Susan Rubio, herself a survivor of domestic abuse, widens the definition of domestic violence and allows victims to introduce evidence of coercive control in applications in family court for a restraining order or child custody. The coercive control law applies to civil, but not criminal, cases.

California became the second state in the nation to adopt such a reform, following Hawaii in September 2020. In July 2021, Connecticut passed a law similar to California’s, with a couple of additional provisions: It set up barriers to vexatious litigation, preventing abusers from dragging their intimate partners to court for frivolous reasons, said Meghan Scanlon, president of the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence. The law also established a grant program to provide low-income survivors with access to legal assistance when making an application for a restraining order in five of its cities where the most domestic violence cases are heard. California’s law has no direct funding provision.

All of the laws passed so far recognize coercive control as a subtler form of abusive behavior that is often overlooked when a victim testifies about abuse. It occurs when an abuser isolates an intimate partner from friends and family, takes over their personal finances and surveils their activity, or uses verbal attacks to reinforce authority.

In her book, “Invisible Chains: Overcoming Coercive Control in Your Intimate Relationship,” author Lisa Aronson Fontes, a survivor of domestic abuse, says coercive control describes an ongoing and multipronged attack, with tactics that include manipulation, humiliation, isolation, financial abuse, stalking and sometimes physical or sexual abuse.

Coercive control is “about domination and control,” noted David A. McLeod, an associate professor in the Social Work Department at the University of Oklahoma, who has researched and published papers on intimate partner violence. “If the abuser feels he is losing control, he will push his partner back into compliance.”

The view from the bench

Women’s rights advocates say it is hard to convince court officials that victims who claim coercive control should be taken seriously, rather than wait for them to be bruised or hospitalized.

“We prefer to use the term abuse rather than violence because it means so much more than physical violence,” Convey wrote in his ruling on Emily and Trevor’s case. “And the term has been used here, coercive control.”

He continued: “Where appropriate, it can be found to be mental abuse. It can be found to be upsetting enough to cause one’s peace to be disturbed and their calm, their emotional calm to be upset.”

The education of judges in how to apply the law will be key to its success. Women’s rights advocates say enshrining the concept of coercive control gives family courts additional options to punish behaviors that have severe mental and financial consequences for victims, and might become violent if not addressed early.

On average in the U.S., more than 1 in 3 women, and 1 in 4 men, will experience physical violence, rape or stalking by an intimate partner, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

During the pandemic, domestic violence in the U.S. has risen by more than 8%, studies show. In response, the Biden administration last year invested nearly $1 billion from the American Rescue Plan to support services for domestic violence survivors, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Even prior to California, Connecticut and Hawaii passing coercive control laws, some jurisdictions in the United Kingdom and Australia had broadened definitions of abuse. But it may take at least 10 years to know how well the laws are working, said Chitra Raghavan, a women’s rights advocate and forensic psychologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Meanwhile, in California at least, some judges, inspired by the intent of the new law, are taking action.

Drawn-out court battle

Emily tied the knot with Trevor in 2011, two years after they began dating. She was 30 and he was 28. He checked all the boxes: charismatic, tall, attractive, a good business partner with a shared interest in travel. And she loved how he showered her with attention.

They ran their web designing business out of their home in Castaic, in Los Angeles County. Her skill was in designing animated cartoons and games. Between them, they were pulling in between $15,000 and $20,000 a month, Emily said.

But early on she also noticed how “controlling and narcissistic” Trevor could be, she said. Even so, she kept excusing his behavior and was determined to make the relationship work. That didn’t happen, and in 2015, they divorced. They shared joint custody of their son, then a toddler.

Three years later, they got back together because they decided that it would be better if Trevor were more involved in the child’s life, according to both parents.

“He’s absolutely my world,” said Trevor about his son in a recent telephone conversation. When Emily went to his church, he added, “I took it as a hopeful sign.”

But once they were back together, she said the abuse she had earlier experienced only intensified and at least once turned physical.

In November 2020, when Emily was trying to get her son ready for school and sought Trevor’s help because the boy would not cooperate, Trevor held her by her arms and pushed her “multiple times” in front of their son, according to testimony presented at the February 2021 trial. She included pictures of bruises on her arm as exhibits.

Trevor’s attorney, Matthew J. Chung, defended his client’s behavior on that day.

“Emily was the one that was getting up in Trevor’s face,” Chung told the court. “Emily was the one who was pushing forth towards him. Emily was the one who was yelling” at the boy.

“Had she not gotten into Trevor’s face,” Chung said, “he would not have a need to have defended himself and pushed Emily away.”

In his conversation with the San Francisco Public Press, Trevor alleged that he was a victim too. “It’s difficult to summarize these very personal events,” he said. “But I can tell you there was a lot of violence perpetrated by her against me.”

In testimony, Emily alleged that Trevor manipulated the boy, telling him Emily’s opinion didn’t matter and encouraging the child to side with him against her. She heard the boy once tell Trevor, “It’s OK to hit mommy if she doesn’t do what you say.”

She told the court that Trevor did not allow her to “actively parent,” or have a say in what school he attended. Trevor also made all the household decisions.

She accused Trevor of spanking their son, sometimes so hard that it left welts, a claim Chung sought to discredit in court. He suggested it was a “light clap.”

“Nothing more than that,” Chung said. “No lasting redness, no lasting lumps on the minor child’s body.”

But Judge Convey dismissed that claim. After pointing out that Trevor did testify that he used physical discipline on the boy, evidence “also shows that the physical discipline caused red marks on the child. That is excessive physical force to a child.”

Chung said that if anything, it was Emily who, through a deluge of text messages, kept gaslighting Trevor — making him question his own sanity. The messages cast Trevor as “always a bad person,” paraphrasing them as “Why are you abusing me? You should stop abusing me.”

At the trial, Chung said that Emily smoked marijuana in the presence of their son. “Emily used marijuana at the household and at family events to excess,” and even in the presence of the boy, to deal with her diagnosed anxiety disorder, diminishing her parenting skills, said Chung.

But Convey dismissed that allegation: “There has been insufficient evidence that this use of either prescription drugs or marijuana has altered or impacted her ability to care,” he said.

He just as emphatically dismissed Emily’s accusations that Trevor was using non-prescription opioids and alcohol to excess. “The evidence was absolutely to the contrary,” he said, finding that Trevor had been sober for several years.

Convey said he believed Trevor when he said that after the November 2020 incident, he did not “kick” Emily out of the house, that she left the premises voluntarily.

In his ruling, Convey granted Emily a temporary restraining order against her ex for three years and denied Trevor one against her. He also gave Emily sole custody of their son. Trevor was given unsupervised visitation rights three weekends a month.

“I made mistakes,” Trevor said in an interview. “I wasn’t perfect.” But he said he found the judge’s decision distressing: “I’m having to entrust our child to someone who’s not stable.”

Emily said she did not ask for child support from Trevor because she wanted to make a “clean break from him.”

Both Trevor and Emily were ordered to attend parenting classes separately. Emily said she continued to take medicine to treat her anxiety disorder and migraines, and attended court-mandated group therapy.

Asked why she went back to Trevor after she experienced so much psychological abuse during the four years she was married to him, Emily said that’s a question she has often asked herself.

“All that I went through,” she said, “is behind me now.”

This article is part of a series on California’s coercive control law, underwritten by a Domestic Violence Impact Reporting Fund grant from the Annenberg Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California.

The post ‘I Was Not Allowed to Have My Own Thoughts’: California Courts Start Penalizing Psychological Domestic Abuse appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Kimberly’s husband, Albert Abutin, “had a hair-trigger temper, would slam doors,” and often hurled sexist insults at his wife, the lawyer told the court.

While Albert denied fault in one altercation that left Kimberly with a head injury, attorney DeAnn Salcido instead built her case around a legal concept that was relatively untested at the time called coercive control — a pattern of financial, emotional and psychological manipulation that victim advocates say can be a precursor to domestic violence.

But Judge James A. Mangione was unimpressed. He denied the request to order Albert to stay away from Kimberly. If Kimberly were speaking the truth, Mangione asked, why would she remain for five years in a marriage with an abuser and have a child with him?

“To this court, having a relationship as she’s portrayed it, and yet conceiving a child with him is inconsistent,” Mangione wrote in his Aug. 4, 2021, ruling, agreeing with the argument put forth by Albert’s attorney. “I found her not credible.”

Experts in domestic violence say judicial skepticism of abuse victims, often with misogynistic overtones, has long been widespread in U.S. family court, creating dangerous hurdles to justice. The expanded conception of domestic violence on paper is of limited use if judges continue to cast a skeptical eye on testimony, usually from women, of manipulation within intimate relationships.

Mangione was appointed to the Superior Court of San Diego County by former Gov. Jerry Brown in 2015 at age 61.

If Mangione had ever heard of the then brand-new California law allowing victims to claim coercive control — a broad range of behaviors including humiliation, surveillance, intimidation, gaslighting and isolation that strips an intimate partner of a sense of autonomy and personhood — it seemed lost in the courthouse.

Sandra Ross, a board member of California Protective Parents Association, said that as important as California’s law is, for it to be used effectively, “a lot depends on the personal biases of judges and attorneys.” She maintained that victims are at the mercy of judges’ experiences and prejudices.

The California Judicial Council, which oversees the state judiciary, said it has “always included content on coercive control as a form of abuse, even before the statute was enacted.” The council said it has included training on the law in at least 10 of its courses, with another three planned for this summer.

Under the 2022 California Rules of Court, every judge who hears family matters “must participate” in a periodic update on domestic violence education. But it doesn’t have to be through the judicial council, but may be through other providers approved by it.

The San Diego County Superior Court’s public affairs office said it could not disclose whether Mangione had received this training prior to hearing the case because the judicial code of ethics would “prevent the judge from speaking about this case.”

When state Sen. Susan Rubio introduced California’s coercive control bill, which was signed into law in September 2020 and took effect the following January, she said victims would be able to use a “pattern of abuse as part of their testimony in court” when seeking custody or a restraining order. For Rubio it was personal —- she survived an abusive relationship. She said the new law would give victims another tool to escape dangerous situations in the home.

But the success of a plea for court protections depends on many factors. Navigating a justice system that tends to favor those who can afford protracted litigation can become a nightmare. Some women obstructed in this pursuit end up feeling let down by the justice system and regretting their decision to come forward.

Mothers and ‘monsters’

Sociologist Evan Stark, who first articulated the concept of coercive control in 2007, said in an interview that behavior of the kind experienced by Kimberly was a manifestation of “gender oppression rooted in patriarchy.” He also emphasized that coercive control is not just what men do to women, but what men prevent women from doing for themselves. And, he noted: “Patterns of behavior and instances of control can add up to abuse.”

In Kimberly’s case, attorney Salcido said that threshold had clearly been met. In her five-year marriage to Albert, a deputy in the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office, the couple constantly argued, according to testimony from Kimberly’s two teenage children from a previous marriage.

“Why should anybody have to live their life that way on eggshells, waiting for his next hair-trigger temper tantrum to happen?” Salcido said in the courtroom.  She pointed out that one of the significant provisions in the law is that it includes behavior that threatens the victim’s peace of mind. She warned that Kimberly would never get the peace of mind she was entitled to if “Mr. Abutin escapes the consequences of his behavior.”

ABUSE THAT LEAVES NO MARKS | Second in a Series

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• Expanding View of Domestic Violence Gives Survivors New Tool, but Unsympathetic Judges Remain an Obstacle

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• ‘I Was Not Allowed to Have My Own Thoughts’: California Courts Start Penalizing Psychological Domestic Abuse

Without a protective court order, Salcido told the court, Albert “will be emboldened to continue to verbally harass her at exchanges, at any school events, to mutter under his breath like he did when he would walk away from fights to the point where their children would hear the mother called the C-word.” Salcido said the restraining order would help to prevent the escalation of Albert’s behavior into something even worse.

But Mangione was having none of it. He also dismissed the claims of Albert’s first wife, Heather who, in testifying on behalf of Kimberly, said he had abused her, too.

“With regard to Heather Abutin, I found her not credible — again, ‘He was living hell,’ that ‘He’s a monster,’ ‘He’s out of his mind,’” Mangione said according to the court transcript,  paraphrasing Heather’s side of the case. “And yet, she had three children with him. And not only had three children with him, but after they broke up, is so frightened and intimidated by Mr. Abutin, she continued to stay in contact with him asking for advice and asking him for money.”

Kimberly said Heather had no stake in the outcome of her case, yet “she felt brave enough to let the judge know it is a cycle.” And Heather volunteered to testify, Kimberly said, because “she wanted to finally tell her story since she never did when she divorced him.”

During the trial, Salcido said Heather had warned Kimberly, an emergency nurse at Kaiser, even before their child was born that she should leave Albert “as his behavior would never change.” Salcido told the judge that Albert made every effort to keep the two women “isolated from each other.”

Albert’s attorney, Ermilla A. Martinez, argued that Heather should not be trusted because in her declaration, she accused Albert of having hit her when they were married, and then asked that that statement be retracted during Kimberly’s hearing.

Martinez argued that Kimberly should not be trusted either. How could she say he had financially controlled her when a year before they separated she had bought herself a $75,000 BMW, Martinez asked.

Martinez questioned why Kimberly married Albert even after noticing his allegedly explosive temper in the two years they dated. “And then she planned and she had a child with this person that had an explosive temper,” Martinez said.

That kind of reasoning has long been discredited by research on why women stay in intimate relationships even if they are abused. In a recent case in Southern California, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Michael J. Convey said studies and case law helped him decide in favor of a woman seeking a restraining order against her abuser. “Many studies have shown and cases have addressed situations where parties continue to have, for example, sexual relations after the breakup, or after a restraining order was already in place.”

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most women will, on average, attempt to leave an abusive relationship between five and seven times before successfully and permanently doing so.

Salcido told the court that Albert blew up again in March 2021, after he and Kimberly had signed a “civility agreement” outlining the terms of the divorce that Kimberly had long wanted. Soon after, Kimberly told him he could no longer share their bed, and he should move out.

“He lost his temper for whatever reason,” Salcido told the court, and he threw a clipboard he was holding at the headboard of the bed where Kimberly was sitting. According to Kimberly’s testimony, the clipboard ricocheted and hit her in the back of the head, causing a concussion.

“She was taken to the hospital that day by her son, and she has been seeing a therapist ever since to deal with the PTSD and the anxiety that it created,” Salcido told the court.

Martinez questioned that claim, saying she has “absolutely no medical records to show that she had an exam that day by a doctor, and that she had a CT scan that day or in the future.”

She argued that Albert lashed out only when Kimberly “threatened,” soon after signing the agreement, to take their son to Menifee, a city one hour away from Chula Vista in San Diego County, where they were living. Kimberly said in an interview that she owned a house there. Martinez said Kimberly’s motive in seeking a restraining order was to get more child support and get Albert to pay her attorney’s fees. The two are also entangled in a custody battle over their 4-year-old child.

Women’s rights advocates would say that the abuse Kimberly said she experienced in her marriage is not uncommon in families of law officials. As the National Center for Women and Policing noted, “Two studies have found thatat least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10 percent of families in the general population.”

Anna Lvovsky, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School, where she teaches the history of policing and criminal law, wrote in an article published in the June 2017 issue of the Harvard Law Review about the “judiciary’s undue willingness to accept what the police say as gospel truth.” Kimberly said she often wonders how fair a judgment she received from Mangione.

She decided not to appeal the denial of the restraining order, which she could have done within six months of the ruling, said Julie Saffren, who practiced family law in Santa Clara County for 15 years and is currently an adjunct professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, where she teaches a course on domestic violence. Kimberly said she let the deadline expire because she did not have the money to pursue that option. “I have spent $50,000 on this case so far,” she said.

Just last month, a judge denied her the child support she had sought from Albert, saying she was earning as much as he was.

A pattern of misogyny

A 2019 study by Joan Meier, a law professor and director of the National Family Law Violence Center at George Washington University, shows an apparent “systemic gender bias against women” in U.S. family courts.

Her study found that women often grapple with the high cost of legal help and are penalized by courts that favor fathers. Women risk losing custody if they accuse men of abusive behavior toward their children. Family courts do not provide public defenders because the two parties in the controversy are individuals on a relatively equal footing, unlike in a criminal court, where it is a state versus the defendant. So women with little financial means are sometimes forced to act as their own attorneys.

“Mothers who allege abuse are losing custody at disturbing rates, and children often face grave consequences when they are forced to return to their allegedly abusive parent,” Meier said. 

Some advocates for domestic violence victims say the courts have become a venue for more abuse. After hours of preparing for court, survivors are likely to be re-traumatized there, especially if the judge is not sensitive to interpersonal issues and traditional gender dynamics.

Kimberly Abutin would be the first to agree.

“The system is horrible and disgusting and I was mistreated by it,” she said in a recent interview. “What is it going to take before an abused woman can get help? Should somebody get killed before she can get justice?”

Women’s rights advocates underscore Kimberly’s concerns.  According to a 2017 CDC report, the most recent available, more than half of women slain in the U.S. are killed by intimate partners.

“Too many are forced to go through our courts without legal representation and the expert support needed to have a fair chance at justice,” said Dr. Aleese Moore-Orbih, executive director of the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence. “That’s why legal assistance for survivors is a key funding priority for the partnership at both the state and federal levels.”

Mistrust of the system

Feelings of structural disadvantage in the courts can drive victims of abuse away from pursuing their legal rights. Such is the story of one woman living in Southern California, the African American mother of an 8-year-old.

The former actress, currently working as a wine salesperson, spoke about her case on the condition she not be identified by name. Here, we’ll call her Iris.

She said she cycled in and out of Southern California courts, making at least 80 appearances there over seven years, running through a number of attorneys and sometimes even representing herself, all to protect herself and the child from the father who, she alleges, has a documented history of abuse.

The child was born after what she described as a “brief entanglement” that lasted all of 97 days. He represented himself as a pharmaceutical sales representative. He showed up on their first date in a sports car. But “from the first moment there were red flags,” Iris said, adding: “I thought I was to blame.’’ He would keep deriding her passion for acting and gaslighting her. “He would tell me I was too old to pursue a Halle Berry, and kept comparing me to other women in the industry.” He would also “initiate an argument and then record my response.”

Three months into what she described as a coercively controlled relationship, Iris, then 41, found out she was pregnant. “Oh, so now you are carrying my child,” was how her ex reacted, she said. She recalled him also telling her, “It’s an inopportune time to get pregnant,” and encouraging her to terminate the pregnancy.

But Iris decided to continue with the pregnancy, even though she had made up her mind to end the relationship. Throughout her pregnancy, she said, he refused to assist in prenatal care. “He felt that because I was having his child he could control me,” Iris said. Eventually, she gave up acting and started working as a paralegal. By that point, he was regularly parking and loitering outside her job and home, as well as calling her repeatedly, including during working hours.

Initially, “I didn’t know I was being abused,” Iris said. “I had no black eye or broken bones.” She said she just thought he had a personality disorder.

When their child was born, Iris said her ex did not want to sign the birth certificate, but at the same time filed for sole custody when the child was 2 weeks old. The parents have 50-50 custody.

“Abusers will sue for custody because they don’t want to pay child support,” said Lisa Aronson Fontes, author of “Invisible Chains: Overcoming Coercive Control in Your Intimate Relationship.”

According to Iris, “there were no less than 27 hearings related to his requests for a reduction in child support,” and it still has not been resolved. The court calculated in October 2020 that the child’s father owed her more than $79,000 in child support, attorney fees and accrued interest.

Iris claimed he ceaselessly engaged in so-called litigation abuse, where an abusive partner tries to retain power and control over the victim by misusing the court system against the victim, according to the nonprofit WomensLaw.org, a project of the National Network to End Domestic Violence.

Court documents showed her ex filed repeated petitions and motions requesting multiple adjournments or violating the judge’s orders by not paying the right amount in child support.  Or he would take repeated action to force her to come to court. These actions are similar to those described by WomensLaw as litigation abuse.

“The court allowed him to come in and create utter chaos in my life,” she said.

Iris said the protracted legal fights forced her to spend so many hours in court and away from work that it ruined her financially. Fearing that he still might be stalking her, she said she has changed her telephone number five times over the last few years. She said she has been forced to learn how to advocate for herself, something she is planning to do at the next custody payment hearing.

“I have lived my entire life fearing he can harm my child,” Iris said. She said she has been diagnosed with depression and PTSD.

“If you are constantly feeling you are living under siege, it harms your body and mind,” noted Chitra Raghavan, a professor in the psychology department at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and the director of its forensic mental health counseling program. “It leaves you no longer feeling human.”

Like with many domestic abuse survivors, Iris said she has lost faith in the justice system. Too many judges have discredited her. “The overall issue that faces litigants like myself is patriarchy,” she said. “If you are not male and white, then you are at a severe disadvantage.”

Iris said she did not want to even try seeking legal remedies from California’s coercive control law because one of her former attorneys told her it would be futile. Besides, her experiences have led her to believe that women like her risk facing more trauma in courtrooms.  “Our legal system has become a springboard for abuse,” Iris said, noting that she is on her “third trial judge and technically, third trial.”

Asked about Iris’ comments, Pallavi Dhawan, director of Domestic Violence Policy for the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office, who helped craft the coercive control law, said they echoed “the documented trend in family courts where judges will sometimes interpret allegations of domestic violence in a manner unfavorable to the alleged victim.” But she noted that each survivor would have her own experience.

The bigger picture is that without a culture of understanding within the courts, systemic bias will continue, regardless of the laws on the books, said Moore-Orbih, the domestic violence activist.

“Gender and racial bias,” she said, “are significant barriers to ensure that survivors are believed and therefore treated fairly.”

This article is part of a series on California’s coercive control law, underwritten by a Domestic Violence Impact Reporting Fund grant from the Annenberg Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California.

The post Expanding View of Domestic Violence Gives Survivors New Tool, but Unsympathetic Judges Remain an Obstacle appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

The emotional abuse had been going on for years, according to Blanca. She said he constantly denigrated her appearance and Spanish-accented English. He refused to put her and their two sons on the health insurance provided by his job as a mechanic, telling her to buy her own. He rejected her pleas to let her write checks and have access to their joint bank account. He made her pay all the rent on the Bay Area home they shared with his relatives.

Experts in sociology and family law have a name for the kind of behavior Blanca experienced: coercive control. It refers to the way people — usually men — nonviolently manipulate their intimate partners into doing their bidding. But while this type of abuse by itself leaves no telltale signs such as black eyes, broken bones or marks on the victim’s arms, it can be a steppingstone to physical violence, research shows.

Coercive control is under-reported, much like all abuse. Often, it is hidden in plain sight.

“I began to feel worthless and ugly,” Blanca said. “I began to feel depressed.”

As with many victims, it is hard to tell Blanca’s story completely. She spoke on the condition that we not reveal her last name and that her husband not be contacted for comment, for the safety of her family. This reporter has been one of her housekeeping clients since 2017.

Blanca said she was aware that leaving an abuser was the most dangerous time for a woman.

After decades of damage to her self-esteem, Blanca has finally severed ties. Under a California law passed in 2020, the government is finally offering some acknowledgment of the harm she experienced. But the reform applies only in civil court — and can be used only in limited types of cases.

Recognizing the damage coercive control can cause

Coercive control encompasses a broad range of behaviors that cause emotional distress, according to social scientists. Common practices include isolating someone from friends, relatives or other support. Depriving them of basic necessities. Controlling communications, daily behavior, finances and economic resources. It could also include gaslighting — making victims question their sanity.

At its core, “coercive control is a power imbalance obtained through cruel, forceful and manipulative means,” said Chitra Raghavan, a forensic psychologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Raghavan is often called by the courts as an expert witness in cases of intimate partner violence, sex trafficking and trauma.

In the U.S., more than 1 in 3 women, and 1 in 4 men, will experience physical violence, rape or stalking by an intimate partner, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

There are no federal laws addressing coercive control in this country. But as academic researchers and advocates worldwide are calling attention to these behaviors, a handful of states have recently taken action to make them illegal.

In 2020, the California Legislature revised the state’s Family Code to include coercive control as evidence of domestic violence, expanding the definition enshrined in the state’s 1993 Domestic Violence Prevention Act. The statute defines coercive control as “a pattern of behavior that in purpose or effect unreasonably interferes with a person’s free will and personal liberty.”

California acted one month after Hawaii added coercive control to its definition. In Hawaii, though, it is incorporated into criminal statutes. When someone is convicted of coercive control that person is required to participate in an intervention program and spend two days in jail, said Nanci Kreidman, chief executive officer of the Domestic Violence Action Center in Honolulu.

Last June, Connecticut passed a similar law. But there, the bill also establishes a grant program to provide low-income victims with legal representation when applying for a restraining order. Bills in New York, South Carolina and Maryland are pending.

“The fact that so many different jurisdictions want to codify coercive control into law means that it is recognizable as a harm for which there should be a legal remedy,” said Julie Saffren, who practiced family law in Santa Clara County until 2019, and who now teaches a course on domestic violence at Santa Clara University School of Law as an adjunct professor.

In California, if a court finds a person has committed coercive control, the petitioner can get a restraining order against the abuser in family court. “The law can also be used separately when the victim is seeking child custody and the court is making a finding about the best interest of the child,” said Pallavi Dhawan, director of domestic violence policy and prevention for the Los Angeles’ City Attorney’s office, the bill’s sponsor.

“In other words, a court could make a finding of domestic violence, including coercive control, in the absence of an existing restraining order,” Saffren said. “This is because, courts recognize that domestic violence, in all its forms, is detrimental to children.”

A violation of a restraining order, whether or not it comes from family court, is a crime. Once served with one, the restrained person cannot own or purchase firearms as long as the order is in force. The recent fatal shooting of his three children and a friend at a Sacramento-area church by a father who had a restraining order slapped on him shows that there are many holes in enforcing this provision.

Scotland leads the way

The coercive control legislation was introduced by state Sen. Susan Rubio, herself a domestic abuse survivor. She said in an interview that she was propelled to get the law passed because of her own experience and after hearing the experiences of many women.

“I dealt with domestic abuse myself and I know what survivors go through,” she said, adding: “It was time people recognized that domestic violence is more than just physical abuse. This bill protects survivors of domestic violence by making their cases harder to dismiss and easier to prosecute. It will also empower victims to come forward.”

Dhawan, who worked closely with Rubio in crafting the legislation, said the bill initially faced resistance in the legal and women’s rights communities, with some abuse survivors wanting to make coercive control a crime.

Rubio said she decided against criminalizing it because as it was, the issue was “foreign to some of my colleagues and making it a criminal offense would have stalled the bill.”

Women’s advocates also point out that a criminal response is not the most effective way to get justice for survivors. They just want it to end.

“Criminal response creates barriers to reporting,” said Shiwali Patel, who advocates for policy and culture change for women and girls at the National Women’s Law Center near Washington, D.C. “If it’s a civil matter, the survivor will have more control over the process.”

In 2007, Dr. Evan Stark authored a book: “Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life.” A forensic social worker in Connecticut and founder of one of the first battered women’s shelters in the United States, Stark has helped shape law and policy across the globe, in both the civil and criminal arenas.

In an interview, Stark called coercive control “oppressive behavior grounded in gender-based privilege” that is “typically ongoing rather than episodic. Its effects are cumulative rather than incident-specific.”

In 2019, Stark helped Scotland enact comprehensive laws criminalizing coercive control. Today, that country’s law is considered the gold standard, he said. Even before the law was enacted, thousands of police officers and support staff received training on how to enforce it, thanks to the government allocating 825,000 pounds in funding to the national police force of Scotland.

Marsha Scott, chief executive of Scottish Women’s Aid, a nonprofit that helps protect women’s financial independence, who helped craft the law, said that the bill’s supporters realized that to succeed, enforcers had to be trained beforehand. In the first year of its implementation, the government pursued about 1,000 cases and secured an 80 percent conviction rate, she said.

California’s coercive control bill didn’t have an “outreach and education component,” Rubio said. Nor did it have a funding provision, she said.

There is no available data that shows how many survivors have benefited from the law because there are no reporting requirements, Dhawan said.

Born of patriarchy

A nearly 30-year U.S. resident born in Mexico, “Blanca fit the textbook definition of a coercively controlled person,” said her attorney, Sara MacDwyer, in an interview three months before she recently died.

Blanca, 50, said that at first her husband, a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent, seemed nice and caring. She considered his financial control of her something to be expected because he came from a society organized in a patriarchal structure, a culture that tells men it was normal for them to dominate their wives. It was similar to how, in Blanca’s childhood, her father treated her mother, except that he was also physically abusive to both his wife and daughter.

But within months after Blanca was married, her husband began to belittle her. The insults became more personal after she confronted him about an affair he was having with another woman. He would tell Blanca that he hated her and loved his mistress because unlike Blanca she took good care of him. “Your hands are coarse and rough,” he would tell her. “You have chicken legs.” “You have a masculine build and stretch marks on your stomach.”

MacDwyer said “the barrage of malicious comments” psychologically harmed Blanca. “He made her feel unattractive, so how could she have any self-esteem?”

But it was his actions, not just his words that made the relationship coercive. Blanca had no control over her finances, even though the self-employed woman was making as much money cleaning houses as her husband did as a mechanic.

He insisted she pay the entire rent for the four-bedroom house they shared with their sons, his mother and his brother in Contra Costa County. She did not complain when he said he expected her to pay for utilities, groceries and other household expenses.

“But I felt bound all the time,” Blanca said, crossing her wrists in front of her and tearing up.

Particularly humiliating, Blanca said, was when her husband had his new girlfriend call her to tell her she had only herself to blame. Blaming the victim is a tactic many abusers use to maintain power and control, according to MacDwyer.  

Saffren drew upon her years of experience representing abused women in family court. “In mental health terms, I think it’s a form of projection where it is unbearable for the abuser to acknowledge their behavior because at some deep level they know it’s wrong, so they project outwardly to their partner to make them responsible; that’s how they reconcile their self-view with their violent behavior.”

Last fall, Blanca filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. Court documents show that her husband has also filed, citing the same reason. Blanca said she was unlikely to get financial support from him because he has filed for bankruptcy.

Asked why she did not leave her husband sooner, Blanca said she could not imagine a life without him.

“I would always keep excusing his behavior,” she said, frowning. After a pause, she continued. “Now, while I am going through divorce, I wonder why.”

This article is part of a series on California’s coercive control law, underwritten by a Domestic Violence Impact Reporting Fund grant from the Annenberg Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California.

The post How California’s Coercive Control Law Could Help Women Manipulated by Partners appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

This special report appeared in the Spring 2012 print edition of the San Francisco Public Press. (Read in Spanish at La Opiñon/Impremedia. Leer en español en La Opiñon/Impremedia.)

More than a decade after she was freed from a sex trafficking ring in Berkeley, one survivor still has nightmares about Lakireddy Balireddy.

“Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night after I dream that he is lying next to me, or see someone taking me to him,” said the young woman, now in her late 20s, who agreed to an interview on the condition of anonymity. “I jump out of bed and turn on all the lights to make sure he’s not in the room.”

The media circus that resulted as the sex trafficking case broke in early 2000, with daily outraged headlines about Lakireddy’s “sex slaves,” started a statewide conversation that led directly to the passage in 2005 of Assembly Bill 22, California’s first law setting higher criminal penalties for human trafficking.

This year’s campaign to get tougher anti-trafficking laws on the November ballot as a voter initiative is the latest attempt to deal with what proponents call the unfinished business of legal reform.

Former Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, the chief sponsor of the 2005 state law, said the Lakireddy case “was confirmation of what the problem was,” and “was definitely on our minds” when she and colleagues in the Legislature drafted the law. The final version established human trafficking for forced labor or services as a felony, punishable by a sentence of 3, 4 or 5 years (depending on severity of the case) in state prison for trafficking of an adult, and a sentence of 4, 6 or 8 years for trafficking of a minor.

The law also provides for monetary restitution and allows trafficking victims to bring civil actions against traffickers.

It might seem like a potent tool, but Lieber said tougher laws are needed.

The new initiative, a reform that proponents are calling the Californians Against Sexual Exploitation Act, would extend prison terms and allow fines of up to $1.5 million for human traffickers. It would also require training for law enforcement, something that could have helped police detect the sex trafficking ring much sooner, said San Francisco attorney Michael Rubin of the law firm Altshuler Berzon LLP, who represented some of Lakireddy’s victims in a 2002 civil suit.

An accidental death

In 2001, federal law enforcement officials convicted the then 64-year-old restaurateur and real estate tycoon — one of Berkeley’s richest landlords, who raked in at least $1 million a month from his 1,000 or more rental properties — of two counts of transportation of minors for illegal sexual activity. He was also convicted of conspiracy to commit immigration fraud and filing a false tax return.

A federal investigation also found that Lakireddy had been “carrying out a widespread conspiracy since 1986 to bring at least 25 Indian laborers into the United States through false pretences,” according to a March 2001 Department of Justice statement. The immigrants were brought from his native village of Velvadam in southern India.

The sexual abuse of the girls began years earlier in the village and continued after he trafficked them into the United States, prosecutors said.

“He turned Berkeley into a Velvadam-by-the-Bay,” Rubin said.

In addition to subjecting the trafficked girls to what federal prosecutors called “sexual servitude,” Lakireddy allegedly forced many of them to work in his downtown Berkeley Indian restaurant, and do cleaning and maintenance work on his rental properties. He justified not putting them on payroll, or paying them very little, by saying he provided them free food and accommodation. Few of the girls were sent to school.

The abuse might have gone undetected even longer but for a carbon monoxide leak in November 1999 in one of his Berkeley apartments that killed Chanti Pratipatti, 17, whom he had trafficked months earlier. She and her 15-year-old sister had been brought to the country by two of Lakireddy’s relatives who masqueraded as their parents, and were siblings themselves.

Lakireddy was arrested on Jan. 14, 2000, two days before his planned departure to his native land with one of his trafficked victims.

A March 7, 2001, Department of Justice press release said Lakireddy might face up to 38 years in prison under a plea deal he struck with prosecutors. But that April, before he could be sentenced, his attorneys managed to bargain it down to a 97-month term. Lakireddy also agreed to pay $2 million in restitution to the surviving sister, her parents and an 18-year-old girl who was living with the sisters at the time of the accident.

Lakireddy spent a little less than eight years in Lompoc federal prison. After his release in 2008, he registered as a California sex offender.

Asked why the real estate tycoon received so much lighter a punishment than originally threatened, the two main prosecutors declined to comment. The presiding judge did not return several phone calls seeking comment.

‘Creative’ ways to sue

Anti-trafficking activists said the legal reforms that later made prosecutions easier coincided with growing public awareness about the problem of human trafficking — transporting people for labor through force, fraud or coercion.

“Until 2000, nobody knew what human trafficking was, what the term meant,” said Cupertino-based Kavitha Sreeharsha, executive director of Global Freedom Center, a recently launched nonprofit organization that fights trafficking worldwide.

Sreeharsha, who has been at the forefront of women’s rights for nearly 20 years as a lawyer and activist, said the case of the notorious Berkeley landlord was a game changer. It “galvanized” victim assistance providers in the Bay Area and ultimately served as “the building block for the state’s anti-trafficking movement.”

But when Rubin filed the civil lawsuit against Lakireddy, he did not have the benefit of the state’s anti-trafficking laws. Nor could he apply any of the provisions of the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the nation’s first anti-trafficking law enacted in 2000.

“When we filed the civil suit, federal law did not yet provide civil action for victims of sex and labor trafficking,” Rubin said.

The federal act strengthened criminal sanctions for forced labor, mandated that victims receive social and legal support and gave victims the right to remain in the United States if they cooperated with law enforcement. But that was only for federal cases. California prosecutors would wait another five years for the state’s own anti-trafficking law.

Rubin had to base his case on other laws. He said he thought the victims had not received justice in the criminal case, and that they should be compensated for the harm done to them.

“We had to pursue our lawsuit in a very creative way,” Rubin said. “We had to develop new theories because there were no applicable anti-trafficking statutes back then.”

The civil complaint, filed in Alameda County Superior Court in Oakland, accused Lakireddy of “slave labor,” “false imprisonment,” and “infliction of emotional distress,” among other claims. The allegations of the civil complaint also accused Lakireddy of having raped the women he trafficked.

The complaint also included claims brought under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization, or RICO, statute. Filed on behalf of nine alleged victims of the Lakireddy clan, the lawsuit sought up to $100 million in damages.

In the complaint, Rubin accused the defendants of exploiting the victims’ “youth, their fear, their caste status, their poverty, their unfamiliarity with the American legal system, their inability to speak English, and their immigration status” for the defendants’  “personal pleasure” and “illicit profit.”

The class-action lawsuit resulted in an $8.9 million settlement in June 2004.

Lakireddy Balireddy did not act alone to mistreat the women he brought to America. He had help from several members of his family, prosecutors discovered.

Five members of Lakireddy’s family were also implicated by law enforcement in various aspects of his criminal activities. His sons, Vijay Kumar Lakireddy and Prasad Lakireddy, were indicted in 2001 on several counts of rape and conspiring with their father for more than a decade to smuggle women and girls into the U.S. to have sex with them, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. In an agreement with prosecutors, the most serious charges were dropped and Vijay Kumar Lakireddy  pleaded guilty to immigration fraud conspiracy. He was sentenced to two years in prison and agreed to undergo drug treatment and pay $40,000 in fines. Lakireddy Balireddy’s brother and sister-in-law were also convicted of related crimes.

Beyond the criminal case, Rubin’s civil suit also brought in several other relatives as defendants.

Influence in Indian village

The Lakireddy trafficking saga revealed elements of feudalism and casteism that clashed with American cultural and social norms. Those factors made it complicated to address what prosecutors and lawyers in the U.S. saw as a broader trafficking operation.

In Velvadam, an agrarian village of about 8,000 in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, Lakireddy’s immense wealth — his Berkeley properties alone are worth an estimated $60 million — and his long ties to America earned him both respect and fear.

Western journalists who descended on the village soon after his arrest were surprised by the extent of his power among locals. Minutes after reporters entered the village, banners went up on buildings. One read: “Lakireddy Is Our God. Leave Him Alone.” Another declared: “Lakireddy Is Innocent.”

Lakireddy used his inherited and earned wealth to launch several philanthropic ventures. Starting in the mid-1980s, he built two elementary schools and a high school in Velvadam. The state-of-the-art Lakireddy Balireddy College of Engineering, opened in 1998, lent a certain cachet to the neighboring township of Mylavaram. He also created new sources of clean drinking water. Bus shelters sport the Lakireddy name.

Many of the girls he was accused of exploiting belonged to the so-called untouchable communities, their parents barely making $1 a day from menial jobs. Most lived in one-room thatched-roof houses.

Prosecutors said during his criminal case in U.S. District Court in Oakland Lakireddy convinced villagers that an American lifestyle was within their grasp if they just gave him their young daughters. Many obliged, including the parents of the two sisters who had lived in the Berkeley apartment where the fatal gas leak occurred.

The girls’ older sister had already been married off when the two younger sisters went to live with Lakireddy. “We couldn’t have afforded the kind of dowry we paid for our older daughter,” explained their mother, Lakshmi Pratipatti, in an interview in Velvadam in 2000. She said she and her husband felt that sending two of the daughters off to the United States with Lakireddy would save them a fortune.

The two sisters, like nearly all the other girls, had ostensibly been recruited to work as servants in his opulent three-story home in Velvadam that sat on a beautifully landscaped two-acre plot. Behind those walls, they also worked as his sex slaves, Rubin’s civil lawsuit alleged, something that some trafficked victims said their parents must have known would happen.

Victims still uneasy

“I was given to him when I was nine,” one trafficked woman said, adding: “The day I was given to him, my childhood ended and my misery began.”

Lakireddy “was unimaginably wealthy, all-powerful and in apparent full control of the world in which they were brought to live,” prosecuting Assistant U.S. Attorney John Kennedy said in court papers during the criminal proceedings.

The Lakireddy case may have led to California’s first anti-trafficking law, but reform advocates say its longer-term aftermath is less heartening. Victims and lawyers say the Lakireddy case continues to haunt its victims.

Even as the momentum grows to combat trafficking in the state, the survivors have been unable to find peace of mind. More than a decade after she was rescued, one young woman still needs to take sleeping pills to help her cope with flashbacks.

Meanwhile, Lakireddy Balireddy, now 75, roams freely in his village, which he visits twice a year, and continues to enjoy the admiration of many of those around him, according to his brother, Lakireddy Hanimireddy, a cardiologist who lives in Merced.

“He has the 100 percent respect of the people of Velvadam,” the brother said. “His overwhelming good deeds and not his bad deeds are what earn him so much respect.”

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