Arrested in Florida, she was extradited to California, where she pleaded no contest to felony kidnapping and was placed on probation. Her daughter was taken from her and placed in Parson's full custody.
Six years later, it was Parson's turn to go to jail. In 2008, he was arrested on charges including child molestation, sex with a child, and creating child pornography. While Murphy and Parson's daughter was not among the victims listed in the criminal complaint against him, some of her friends were, including two girls under the age of 14 and one under the age of 18. As part of a plea deal, he admitted the molestation charges and was sentenced to six years in prison.
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
Murphy says she suspected that her ex was victimizing other young girls. After her past experiences with the family courts, however, she chose to stay silent, fearing that further accusations would lead to retribution from the court. (In the years prior to Parson's arrest, she had regained limited visitation rights.)
"It was obvious to me, but I couldn't say anything at this point," says Murphy, who today has full custody of her daughter. "Nobody would believe me, and anytime I objected to anything they would accuse me of 'alienating.'"
One of the judges who presided over Murphy's case was DeAnn Salcido. In 2010, Salcido resigned from the San Diego bench and was censured by the California Commission on Judicial Performance for, among other things, hamming it up in the courtroom in an effort to secure a deal for a court-based reality television show. She claims the misconduct complaints against her were retaliation for her criticisms of other court officials.
The dispute over Salcido's screen aspirations is less interesting than what she has to say, in retrospect, about the approach she took to the Murphy case. From the moment she arrived in family court as a new judge, she says, she was advised by veterans of the system to disbelieve accusations of child or spousal abuse arising in divorces. "I was basically told to be suspect of anyone claiming abuse," she says. "I had senior judges telling me, 'Be suspect. The dad probably has a new girlfriend, and the mom's upset.'" The concept of parental alienation, she says, arose in private discussions "all the time" among court officials who espoused it.
Salcido says, "In the end, it did turn out that Joyce was right. She was right to be crying, and hysterical, because no one would believe her. I signed a court order handing a kid over to someone who turned out to be a pedophile."
Salcido's observations on the culture of family court point to the common thread running through the stories of Anderson, Rivers, and Murphy: a reluctance on the part of court officials to upset what they deem an appropriate balance of child custody among parents. Particularly in the cases of Anderson and Murphy, the mothers' accusations, if true, would almost certainly have led to a denial of visitation rights for the father.
While the family courts' desire to equitably divide a child's time led to unfortunate and absurd results in these cases, it has clear historical roots. Decades ago, divorce courts often operated with a bias toward placing children with their mothers. As divorce became more common, however, swelling advocacy from fathers' rights groups started to alter this dynamic. A state law directing the courts to make a presumption of joint custody was passed in 1979, leading to the present inclination toward splitting a child's time more or less evenly between parents.
Joyanna Silberg, a psychologist with the Baltimore-based Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence, says this drive to assure each party due parental rights has evolved into a form of judicial prejudice. In cases where abuse accusations are true, she says, this prejudice has the practical affect of abetting the abuser. "What it is, is a family court culture that seems to be about dividing property," she says. "It's not about seeing whether a crime is committed."
Glenn Sacks, the Los Angeles–based executive director of the national fathers' rights group Fathers and Families, disagrees. He asserts that the courts still routinely demonstrate a bias against fathers, and are overly protective of moms and punitive of dads when handling abuse allegations. "They'll err on the side of caution," he says, "without ever stopping to think, 'Why am I erring?'" Even today, he adds, "The courts are very much biased against fathers. Usually it's 'She's the mom, she's the real parent; he's the dad, he's not the real parent.'"
Sacks adamantly defends the legitimacy of parental alienation. He also says that "a lot of the progress for fathers has been undermined by [stricter] domestic violence laws" that punish men for alleged acts of which there is insufficient evidence. To be clear, he says, "Not now or ever do we believe that wife beaters should be getting control of their children."
Sacks' remarks underline another truth about the family courts: Their problems are entwined with gender politics, and as such are difficult to approach. While the system's mistakes affect both mothers and fathers, men are statistically more likely to be the perpetrators of the types of serious crimes that highlight the family courts' shortcomings — as they are in all the cases, substantiated by criminal convictions, examined in this article. The topic of gender's correlation with violent crime is hotly debated, but studies have found that only 6 percent of sex offenses and 5 percent of serious incidents of domestic violence are committed by women.
