Thread by @Hannah_Dreyfus

His father has been accused 3 dozen times of physically & sexually abusing him.
His mother has been accused by the father of brainwashing & alienating him.
The custody battle lasted 8 years — nearly his entire life.
I wanted to know: How did the court decide who to believe? 🧵

When I first started reporting on this story, it seemed unbelievable to me that a court tasked with protecting the best interests of children could dismiss so many indications that a father posed a risk to his son.

Calls were made by doctors, educators and psychologists to child protective services in Colorado over the course of 8 years, voicing concerns that the boy was being abused by his father. He denies all of the allegations.

Medical professionals reported physical evidence of harm since the child was 19 months old, including:
• multiple head injuries,
• a leg injury that left the toddler unable to walk,
• bruising around his rectum

“I've been in education for 16 years and I've never seen a child as traumatized," the child's former school principal told me. "There’s not a damn thing being done.”

As child welfare workers began turning away reports from mandatory reporters, the child’s mother, Christine, began to fear the worst:

Instead of causing caseworkers to fear for the child’s safety, the stream of reports seemed to be causing caseworkers to believe she was brainwashing the child. “I had no power to defend myself,” she told me.

But a family court judge did not seem to believe the father was harming the child.

In fact, the judge found it was the mother who posed a danger to the child through parental alienation by definition, a disputed psychological theory in which one parent is accused of brainwashing a child against the other parent.

If you're unfamiliar with parental alienation, here's some background on the theory: propublica.org/article/parent…

I spent 2 years reporting on this custody dispute, grappling with a foundational question: How could so many adults in the child’s life believe he was being abused while others who saw the same reports came away believing it wasn’t possible?

Read the full investigation here: propublica.org/article/both-p…