Episode 12: MY SON WAS MURDERED during court ordered unsupervised parent time.
I think this has been my most important conversation yet, and my hope is that you will first and foremost; CONTACT YOUR LEGISLATOR/SENATOR and urge this bill to be passed (HB 272-OM'S LAW) and secondly, share this with your friends and family and ask them to do the same. So many women and children are being abused and don't say anything because it is almost always made worse for them. "Getting out" or "Walking away" isn't that easy. No one should have to live a nightmare like Leah did for YEARS. She is my friend. I have other friends facing the same consequences she did, as a result of legal abuse and uneducated "experts" who have no expertise in domestic violence or child abuse. Please message the senator in your county and urge HB272, "Om's Law," to PASS. We have one week. This goes to the senate last week of February.
YOUR LEGISLATOR
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12u3w5Fxb9_upRC2kWWlkcNjK2MnzYYfDsfvJ4CZp6Qc/edit?usp=sharing
TO CONTACT YOUR SENATOR: https://senate.utah.gov/contact
Power and Control Wheel
https://www.thehotline.org/identify-abuse/power-and-control/ Utah
Domestic Violence Coalition
The Safe Child Project
National Safe Parents Org
https://www.nationalsafeparents.org/kaydens-law.html
House Bill 272 Bill language: https://le.utah.gov/~2024/bills/static/HB0272.html
Watch proceedings: https://le.utah.gov/FloorCalendars/
House Floor reading and vote 22:18 Cutler’s presentation https://le.utah.gov/av/floorArchive.jsp?markerID=126353
Om's Law: Keeping Children Safe From Family Violence
Utah House Bill 272
House Judiciary Committee Testimony
February 8, 2024
My name is Leah Moses, I’m Om’s mom.
9 months ago, my 16-year-old son Om was murdered by his father on Mother’s Day weekend during court-ordered parent time. Om was brutally shot twice in the back and once in his face by a 45 caliber handgun bought from a pawn shop on the same State Street in Salt Lake City as the courthouse where I fought in family court for 14 years trying to keep my children safe. I supplied the courts with extensive evidence of Om's father's abuse and the risk to my children, but it fell on deaf ears.
This morning it is my impossible task to represent thousands of protective parents and children who share their own, but similar experiences living in violence and who are not safe to speak out because they will be abused, tonight, tomorrow, and this weekend.
I mothered in violence for the entirety of Om’s 17 years. I never imagined I’d be safe enough to speak the truth publicly, but now I’m no longer hunted. My son stood in the face of lethal danger and freed me. And now I will speak for all of us, in his honor.
Om was conceived in the violence of rape and executed as a hostage in the violence of control. Despite years of begging for relief, he was powerless to escape, trapped in childhood by a psychotic parent and ultimately trapped and killed in an enclosed office. Throughout the litigation, even as a young child, Om asked me when the court would allow him to speak. They never did.
My ex-spouse was always abusive. I’m not sure during which of the countless early rapes Om was conceived, whether it was when I was shoved in a closet, suffocated in the front seat of a car, drugged and abandoned on a couch or forced under a blanket in a crowded room, but when I was dropped off to planned parenthood with an ultimatum between an abortion or my life, I gave up the life I knew to keep the pregnancy. I chose Om, and our life as prisoners began.
He was a 6’3” 280lb PhD psychologist. In public, he maintained a professional appearance using the guise of a model parent, the persona of an enlightened religious yoga instructor, intent on healing sexual trauma, but in private he perpetuated a lifetime of relentless, systematic rape and calculated psychological control. This is what countless abusers do, but court professionals sometimes have little understanding about how abusers operate, and they rarely believe it when told, thanks in large part to attorneys for the abuser and so-called experts attacking credibility and asserting the protective parent is lying, hysterical or alienating.
When Om was a baby, I did everything I could to protect him from abuse, but there was no escape from his dad’s volatile tirades. It was impossible to avoid the spit spraying our faces when he screamed profanities. When he came home angry, I wedged a chair under the back door handle to buy enough time to hide under Om’s crib, breastfeeding to keep him quiet. When he backed us into corners, I shielded Om from his fist brushing our faces, smashing the wall next to my head. Drunk and enraged, he would throw Om crying into the backseat, force me into his car, and then try to push me out speeding down the freeway.
I had no reproductive choice. He prohibited contraception. Emotionless, he forced me to watch him flush the small, formed fetus from a miscarriage down the toilet as I bled on the bathroom tile. Rapes continued, and I hid my next pregnancy as long as possible, desperate for my daughter to survive. His power and control escalated, and after a year of secret planning, I moved out at 6 months pregnant. Desperate to lure me back, he promised improvement and I moved back just before delivery. Terrified that hospital staff might detect abuse and take Om from me, I avoided most prenatal care and went to a birth center for delivery. I wanted to protect my child before all else.
Towering over us, he would declare “I own you" as if we were his property, and “you’ll never survive without me”. We were under constant surveillance, stalked, and required to report every action. I wasn’t allowed to work. The threats to kill me and take the children escalated, and I moved out again. People ask why don't victims just leave? It's not that simple. This time I was homeless with a baby and preschooler. We lived in friend’s spare rooms, basements, above garages, or out of a car. Isolated, without money or options and convinced by him that I was rejected by my family and friends, I reluctantly forfeited my pro se protective order and moved back. The domestic violence case detective was so mad she said I should never ask for help again, that I’d never be believed.
To maintain control, he bought an old mouse-infested cinderblock duplex and demanded that the kids and I live on one side while he lived on the other. He cut all financial resources, forced me to get Medicaid and food stamps. Om and his sister bravely risked kidnapping each time they walked out the door for their normal events like going to preschool, he would take them and refuse contact for days. I stopped calling police when they said “he’s the dad, he can do what he wants, you chose him in the first place.” Victims are often blamed constantly in these systems instead of protected, as if we deserve to be further tortured and terrorized.
I finally decided to leave for good when I found his old journal stating “I’m a sex addict and a child molester… I’m afraid I’ll do it even to my own children”. The flood of realization confirmed years of clues, he was molesting my children. I took the journal and my 15 page statement documenting years of sexual, physical, psychological abuse to police who handed it back to me saying “your statement is too detailed, we could also say we’re millionaires, but we’re not. You should really be careful out there.”
Thinking the court system would protect us, I scraped together a retainer for an attorney. They told me no matter what I presented, the courts are a gamble. Insisting the court call him “doctor”, the commissioner got angry and gave me full temporary custody with usual shared statue parent time, but not based on any of my evidence of abuse.
With unsupervised parent time, his arrogance skyrocketed to unrestrained child sexual abuse. My 3 year old daughter disclosed to the pediatrician, therapist, babysitter and children’s justice centers about abuse happening at daddy’s house. Om consistently described masturbation with dad as “yoga” and the naked boys on dad’s computers. The pain of pediatric speculum exams yielded no helpful DNA. The child abuse detective told me they believed the kids, but the prosecutor doubted the win because dad was too smart, and the child was too young. For 90 days I was ordered to restrict all contact with dad or I would be considered complicit in abuse. Then I was told to stop reporting, that I could be jailed if I didn’t comply with unsupervised statutory parent time, with extra overnights to make up for his loss. Protective parents are in a double bind, blame on us comes from everywhere, protection from nowhere, or only temporary. Later his relatives disclosed his insidious incest of child cousins, it never stopped.
Having custody does not mean children are safe if you must share it with a predator, and send your children to face him alone. Like all protective parents, I faced the impossible choice between living with my children under the crushing weight of perpetual violence, or pursuing divorce and a life of co-parenting with a sociopath, with police, with child protective services, and with the evaluators of the court system. If I had known court orders would not be followed or enforced, that the system wouldn't really help me to protect my children, I might have stayed in abuse, but I’m confident I wouldn’t have survived to be in front of you today testifying of the importance of this bill. I always expected he would kill me first.
Statistically, the first few months after leaving abuse are the most dangerous. His retaliation for reporting was channeled into our first custody evaluation, entangling us in the complexity of expensive, forced engagement with experts who demonstrated no experience with domestic violence and no understanding of what was happening, yet their opinions determined how our case progressed, in fact, the trajectory of our lives. I was warned by multiple attorneys never to call child protective services, and to never to tell the real truth, or risk losing custody. The court-appointed evaluator declared him to be a loving father, downtrodden by my supposed alienation tactics to hurt the children. I was the problem, according to this expert. This was absurd, but now Om's law will attempt to stop this injustice from continuing in cases in which protective parents are trying to keep their kids safe. I was denied a copy of this expert's report, but it influenced my children's entire childhood, and dramatically changed how our case unfolded, jeopardizing my children and discrediting me.
My children continued to disclose abuse to court-ordered experts, while professionals who may have helped us were threatened by the abuser and his attorneys. One therapist had to secure legal counsel when he threatened to have her license revoked for writing a letter detailing her fears of the severity of his child abuse. A custody evaluator formally wrote the court for personal relief from his incessant demands and inappropriate behavior. Not one court-appointed expert petitioned to remove the children from abuse, no matter how obvious their trauma symptoms.
This represents a small part of Om’s first five years of life. The abuser continued to use the court system and experts as his personal hammer for another 11 years.
Family court may appear as small claims court, but it maintains the highest stakes claims. Children are not property. The right to unlimited hearings led to pro se courtroom monologues where he carefully crafted lies to redirect attention away from children’s safety and accused me of alienating, which is a pseudo construct abusers frequently rely on to defend themselves. Om's childhood isn’t documented in photo albums, but in a thick court docket.
Every type of court-ordered therapy and intervention failed. Despite my children’s countless pleadings to live with me, we were sent into reunification therapy with a parent coordinator who had no experience with abuse. As a Ph.D., she immediately aligned with him, writing lengthy, outrageous letters to the court and telling my children to “stop asking to live with me, because it would never happen”. I paid thousands for my children to be subjected to her reunification attempts to convince them that by teaching healthy boundaries and body safety, I was alienating them from their loving, well-meaning father. During that time I discovered heavy porn sites he set up in Om’s name, and continued to receive more calls from new rape victims reaching out for support.
There was nothing therapeutic about “reunification”. It was forced upon us to reunify with the abuser and terrorize us more. For-profit professionals forced us to cooperate or risk contempt. However, reunification therapy was never needed because he already controlled our entire lives.
The court labeled us "high conflict" and ordered high-conflict parenting courses with the only trauma-informed expert in all 14 years of our case to recognize abuse. She excused me from the course.
14 years is too long for a child to wait. I had one last way to save my children. I could choose to use the preponderance of evidence to pursue a criminal case which requires a higher burden of proof, or continue with a family court civil case. I expected we would not survive portraying him as a criminal, so I gambled everything I had documented and gave it all to the court-ordered experts.
Our second custody evaluation resulted in the most important legal proceeding of our case, when for-profit court experts listed concerning reports including excessive deadly prescription drug DEA records, sexual assault allegations with personal interviews with victims, his solicitation arrest, police investigation of drug-induced rape, andreports of harassment and stalking. Yet, out of fear of being sued by him, my two children were split from each other, and custody of Om was given to his dad. I remember stating on record, “so you’re telling me I have to sacrifice my son to save my daughter?” If he was dangerous to one of them, he was dangerous to both, but the court evaluators felt an obligation to appease the abuser. Over a year later, the third custody evaluation was filed in the court without warning, removing all custody from the abuser. No one talked to me or asked if this approach would be safe, even though I knew the abuser better than anyone. I never saw Om again, 3 weeks later he was dead.
Most court experts told me that this was an impossible case, to stop trying, that my children would just have to age out. Standing with homicide detectives in the moment I confirmed my son was murdered, we thought to call the current court experts to find out if they were still alive. One answered, “well, that wraps up the custody evaluation” This is who is arguing against this bill, people who see us and our lives as a business.
One of the abuser's for-profit, private practice attorneys, has led ardent opponents of this bill intended to increase victims’ protection and save children's lives. Opposition typically argues for more ways attorneys can insert alienation in cases like mine, where a parent is desperate to save the children. They also profit from getting courts to order victims to be forced to "reunify" with abusers as a "fix" to this unscientific, undiagnosable nonsense called alienation, which is routinely used to discredit victims begging for protections. Don't be misled by them. They may sound professional, but are profiting off of pain. Supporters of this bill have no financial interest. We simply want to protect children. The legislature is tasked with caring for all Utah citizens, but especially our most vulnerable children desperate for protection.
The more I tried to protect, the more I was accused of lying and alienation, to the point of my child murdered. Even with all of the protracted abuse and allegations of rape, I was never able to get a court finding of abuse. Our case was littered with over a decade of court-ordered experts, yet after tens of thousands of dollars, thousands of data points, and following the letter of the law in every order, I was accused as "high conflict", with any protective parenting behavior used against me, while more and more custody was given to the abuser. You don't have to imagine the torment of this, I have shared it with you and I ask you to consider it today. Finally, in the end, the custody evaluation got it right, but it was too late, issued without children's protections in place or notification to me. No one else should have to live like this. What happened to Om will happen again if we do not raise our standards and fix our custody laws.
In closing, I ask,
What more must a child say to be heard?
What must a protective parent do to overcome the credibility deficit?
How bad does abuse have to get to be called abuse?
How many more children must sacrifice their childhood before we take action?
Will we show the nation that Utah does prioritize the child first and always?
Thank you.
