Rivers was also requesting a restriction of Perryman's custody rights for Derrick Jr., the pair's child. In light of Perryman's actions, she asked that his visits with the baby be supervised by court-appointed professionals, a standard practice in custody disputes involving potentially violent parents. "I would rather him get some counseling for himself, do whatever it is he has to do," she said. "But, for now, I will be happy with supervised visits for an hour a week."
During the hearing, Perryman admitted to the judge that the incident took place — "I slapped her, yes," he said — though he denied he had hit her with a closed fist. He said he "didn't see the need" for a restraining order, "because there is no issue of violence at all."
Courtesy of Joyce Murphy
Joyce Murphy (right) fled California with her daughter because family-court officials wouldn’t listen to her accusations against her ex-husband. He was later
sentenced to prison for sex crimes.
Courtesy of Califonia Department of Justice
Rex Anderson (left) and Henry “Bud” Parson were both convicted of child molestation after family courts awarded them custody of their daughters.
Related Content
More About
Sing agreed to issue a restraining order — protecting Rivers alone, not her family members, and issued for one year, instead of the customary five — "so that you both can cool down and calm down and hopefully be better to each other and the kids." The judge refused to modify Perryman's joint legal custody of his son. "It is good for the child and it's in the best interest of the child to have continuous and frequent contact with dad and with mom," she said. She also denied Rivers' request, made out of concern for her own safety, that custody exchanges take place at a police station. Instead, she ordered that the child would be handed off between parents at the home of Perryman's mother in San Francisco.
Under California Family Code Section 3044, findings of domestic violence are supposed to carry a "presumption" against any form of custody for the abusive parent. Sing confirmed at the April 14 hearing that Perryman had abused Rivers; he admitted as much in open court. Had there been any doubt about the question, however, it was quickly dispelled.
Later in April, Rivers hired Kim Robinson, the Oakland attorney, who discovered that Perryman had pleaded guilty just a week before the hearing to misdemeanor spousal battery in Alameda County, where Rivers had reported the incident to police. (He had originally been charged with one count of felony domestic violence, one count of misdemeanor battery, and misdemeanor child endangerment, since his son had been present at the time.)
In light of this further evidence, Robinson urged the judge to modify the custody order. Sing again refused, in what Robinson says is a violation of state law.
"She just did not care. I gave her a second chance, and she did not take it," Robinson says of Sing. "Her explanation was that she did not see the father as a danger to the child."
Ann Donlan, spokeswoman for the San Francisco Superior Court, said Sing was on vacation and would not be available to comment on the case. Even if she were available, Donlan added, "it is not permissible for her to comment on the specifics of any case."
Perryman, a soft-spoken man with a warm demeanor, acknowledges during a recent interview at his home in the Lower Haight that he struck Rivers. "I did make a mistake," he says. But he asserts it was done in self-defense, after she pushed him to the floor during an argument while he was holding their son.
"When I was pushed down, it put me in sort of a protective mode," he tells a reporter, with Derrick Jr., now 16 months old, perched on his lap and sucking from a baby bottle. "I did strike her. My thing is, I wasn't the one who started it." Rivers' facial bruising, he says, did not come from his slapping her but from a shove during the same altercation: "I pushed her in the face, and her eye caught the bottom of the palm, and that's how her face got bruised."
Perryman says he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor domestic violence only so he could get out of jail — where he was held for more than three weeks after his arrest — to appear in family court, ensuring continued custody of his son. "I would have pleaded to murder as long as I could have gotten out to make the court date," he says.
"This is about the child," he adds. "Both parents should have custody. If neither parent is a danger to the child, why shouldn't they?"
What Robinson says was an unwillingness to appropriately weigh evidence of criminal behavior in the Rivers case is, according to court officials elsewhere, characteristic of the culture of at least some of California's family courts. In one instance that recently came to light, an officer of the court was actually punished for seeking to investigate such evidence too thoroughly.
Emily Gallup, a Stanford-educated mediator in the Nevada County Family Court, was fired after her supervisors criticized her for reviewing parents' criminal histories when making her custody recommendations. In a March 2010 written reprimand of Gallup prepared by Court Executive Officer Sean Metroka, and obtained by SF Weekly, Metroka states that it was "unprofessional and unacceptable" for her to have requested a criminal history report in a recent case she was handling. "I admonished you not to take the role of a court investigator," he wrote.
