MAJOR NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE HIDDEN EPIDEMIC OF FAMILY COURT VIOLENCE: ATTY. KAREN WINNER’S SPEECH

On November 11, 2025, for the very first time, some of the best minds and the most committed legislators in the country gathered together—in the historic National Press Club Grand Ballroom, for the Major Landmark Conference on the Hidden Epidemic of Family Court Violence—to ponder solutions to the raging national epidemic of injustices and human harm.

Family Courts are too often places devoid of ethics or law. Worse, they hide this fact from the public or even from other courts through secrecy and abuse of the law. Reporters from the mainstream media left the Conference, enthusiastic of what they learned, but are still unable to get a single article approved (the same seems to hold for independent investigators). This is the backdrop against which we invited pioneering investigative reporter, renowned consumer attorney, and author of Divorced from Justice, Atty. Karen Winner, who was the first to expose nationally abusive practices in family and divorce law. She spearheaded New York’s Statement of Client Rights, a landmark legal framework protecting women and children from exploitative attorneys, and successfully challenged a major law firm in a widely publicized case. She explained that the Family Court system, dominated by self-regulated legal professionals and lacking accountability, often transformed post-separation abuse into “legalized” coercion—punishing victims, enriching lawyers, and enabling abusers through judicial power.

Below are some highlights:

I am the author of a book called, Divorced from Justice. It was the first book that exposed the divorce court industry, how people are often exploited by lawyers and judges whom the system is supposed to protect. Earlier I wrote the first consumer protection report for New York City to extend basic rights to consumers in divorce cases, basically to protect consumers from their own lawyers. And it is something called the Statement of Client Rights that I wrote and is now institutionalized in New York for about twenty-five years, where every divorce lawyer has to give the client the statement of client rights, so the client knows how to protect themselves from their lawyer….

We know from research that victims of domestic violence face their greatest risk of being harmed, not during the relationship, but after the relationship. A 2021 study by Freidel found that nearly half, 46 percent, of family-related mass homicides happened after separation…. Family Court is supposed to protect families and reduce conflict, but what I have found through years of research, investigation, and case review is that it too often amplifies the conflict in every case…. I coined the term, “divorce court industry,” because it is not just the two parties that are dividing up the assets or fighting over their children. It is the lawyers who are profiting from this, and it is really a four-way financial split. Often with the assets and the system of entrenched interests where the protection of the family is not recognized, it gets even worse, because the legal profession is self-regulated. And there are really no guardrails to protect people from unscrupulous lawyers or from judges who overstep their power.

So, a woman who has been abused, who is just trying to protect her children, can walk into a courtroom expecting justice. Instead, she finds herself punished again. She can be forced into debt, sanctioned, stripped of her rights by the very court that supposedly protects her. In truth, the Family Court has become the new arena where domestic violence continues. Only now it is legalized…. In this way, the Family Court becomes the enabler of continued abuse and the judges, they have almost unlimited power. As we heard, judges cannot be sued civilly for damages, even when they act maliciously or corruptly. This means a judge can do almost anything. They can do almost anything they want, knowing that they are not going to be held accountable. I have seen this as an investigator, and I have seen this as a lawyer, and there is very little person can do to challenge it.

In the late 1990’s, citizen groups in South Carolina and California hired me to investigate allegations of misconduct by judges, evaluators, and guardians ad litem. Citizen groups formed a collective in order to pool their resources to commission me, so that I could research what was going on, where the media would not dare to go. I conducted three separate investigations in Sacramento, San Jose, and Marin Counties. People came forward: mothers, fathers, grandparents to share their cases. They did so at great personal risk. In many states, Family Court files are sealed, and judges can issue gag orders against anyone who speaks publicly.

Women know, if they anger the judge, they can lose their child or children entirely. So, when these parents, when they chose to come forward, it really was an enormous act of courage. The media, too, has been afraid to cover this issue. Reporters, they fear of being accused of bias or interfering with the judicial ruling. They are afraid of being sued. But what I learned is that when you gather patterns, when you show not just one case, but you show eight, nine, ten cases with the same judge, same evaluator, the same harm, it becomes undeniable. And that is when the sunlight breaks through, and the results were powerful. In Marin County, within six days of the release of my report, the judge that I investigated left the bench and family law, never to return again. The same happened with the commissioner who had quasi-judicial powers and heard many, many children. The same day that my report was issued, she resigned.

So that is what the sunlight does. It disinfects, it protects, it reforms the entrenched interests, and we know there are entrenched interests of the legal profession, the unchecked power of judges. These are formidable barriers, but transparency, truth telling, and citizen action work. The lesson is this: when people come together, when they refuse to be silenced, when they expose patterns of harm instead of isolated stories, change becomes possible. So, my message today is simple: we cannot continue to allow our courts to operate in the darkness. We cannot allow secrecy to shield injustice. The Family Court must be accountable to the people, not to itself, because justice at its heart is not a private matter. It is a public trust.