How the tactics that controlled a marriage become the tactics that control a courtroom — and why family court is designed not to see it
By Michael Phillips | Father & Co. / Riptide
Five days ago, I published the origin story of my own custody case.
I wrote about a marriage that ended the way it did because the tools used to manage me inside it — false allegations, institutional weaponization, the transformation of my own documented history into evidence against me — were never going to stay inside it. I wrote about my son Dylan, who turned seven just over a month ago. I have not been present for a single one of his birthdays. Not by choice. Not by accident. By design. By his mother, Christina Avgerinos.
The night that piece went up, I got on the phone with Brenna Gano.
Brenna is a mother in San Mateo County, California, who has been separated from her son Jacob since a Zoom call in February 2022, during which she signed a settlement agreement she has spent four years trying to undo. We talked for a long time. At some point, I realized I was not listening to someone else’s story. I was listening to mine, rewritten with different names, and a different jurisdiction, and a different child. The mechanics were identical.
That recognition — a journalist who covers family court accountability, understanding that he has been documenting his own case in other people’s files — is why this piece exists.
What follows is not a collection of sympathetic stories. It is a documentation of a structural failure: family court’s systematic inability to recognize that the tactics used to control a partner in a marriage do not stop at the courthouse door. They walk through it. They put on a suit. They file motions. They request continuances. They subpoena records. And the system, which was designed to evaluate discrete legal incidents rather than longitudinal patterns of control, cannot read what it was never designed to see.
This is what that looks like across five cases, in four states, over periods ranging from seven to fifteen years.
I. The Machine: Brenna Gano, San Mateo County, California
Brenna Gano was Jacob’s primary caregiver from birth to age eleven. She attended his school events, managed his therapy, navigated his anxieties, and did the work that primary parenting actually requires. Then her marriage ended. And two words entered the family court system in San Mateo County.
Mom yells.
That was the seed. Not abuse. Not neglect. Not any documented harm to a child. A child said his mother raised her voice. What followed was seven years of systematic litigation that stripped Brenna of custody, her home, her finances, and eventually her relationship with her son.
Court records document how the “Mom yells” refrain first surfaced with Jacob’s therapist and was picked up by a court social worker, who repeated it until it became, as Brenna describes it, “accepted as fact.” Meanwhile, documented concerns about the father’s behavior — Jacob telling a therapist that his father fell asleep at the wheel on Highway 101, that the father had been holding him down and forcing him to watch needle videos as unsanctioned exposure therapy — were not elevated to the same level of scrutiny.
By 2018, when Family Court Services first evaluated the case, Jacob’s own therapist at the time reported no concerns about Brenna’s relationship with her son. Six years later, the same therapist was quoted in a 2024 FCS report describing Brenna’s “stances” as “alarming and problematic.” The mother who had been described as caring and invested had become, in the court record, someone Jacob couldn’t trust. The court record did not explain what changed. It absorbed the new characterization as though the previous one had never existed.
Her ex-husband, Paul McNab, is a senior executive at Viavi Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ: VIAV). By the time a contested settlement conference occurred in February 2022, McNab had spent approximately $900,000 in legal fees. Brenna had spent approximately $300,000. California Family Code §§ 2030 through 2032 exist specifically to prevent this kind of financial disparity in family litigation. The disparity existed anyway.
On February 15, 2022, Brenna logged onto a Zoom call she had been told was a routine status conference. It was a Mandatory Settlement Conference. No court reporter was present. No transcript exists. Discovery was incomplete, with depositions scheduled for the two days immediately after. Financial disclosures before the adjudicator were three years out of date. Brenna attended alone, remotely, without ADA accommodations — despite having documented diagnoses and active accommodations in her concurrent law school program. She signed.
Her own attorney, when she attempted to rescind six weeks later, responded: “I respectfully decline to file this motion. You will not prevail. You will likely be ordered to pay Paul’s attorney fees.”
The investigation Riptide subsequently conducted documented what her attorneys did not tell her: the presiding judge had undisclosed concurrent cases with opposing counsel. The attorney who had misrepresented the proceeding as a status conference had been accused of the same coercive settlement tactic in a separate case in 2014. The network of professionals in San Mateo County — attorneys, evaluators, a privately compensated judge — had relationships dense enough to make independent advocacy for the lower-resourced party structurally nearly impossible.
The favorable psychiatric evaluation that diagnosed Brenna with PTSD and anxiety consistent with domestic violence exposure was dismissed by her own legal team. She was instead pushed into a costly forensic evaluation using the MMPI — a tool not designed for domestic violence cases. Her documented, rational fears were flagged as paranoia.
Here is what Brenna’s case demonstrates: the controlling party in the marriage did not need to change tactics when he walked into court. The financial control that had operated in the marriage became the financial attrition of litigation. The professional relationships that had advantaged him during the marriage became the professional network that advantaged him in court. The narrative about Brenna’s instability — constructed during the marriage — was simply handed to the legal system, which accepted it without examining its origins.
Jacob is 18. He has not had a meaningful relationship with his mother since February 2022.
II. The Numbers: Jeff Reichert, Anne Arundel County, Maryland
There is a number in Jeff Reichert’s case that should end the argument before it begins.
Twenty-six.
Twenty-six criminal charges were filed against Jeff Reichert based on allegations made by his ex-wife, Sarah Hornbeck. Every single one was dismissed.
In any other legal context — prosecutorial misconduct reviews, wrongful conviction work, civil rights litigation — a number like that triggers institutional scrutiny. A pattern of twenty-six dismissed charges is not noise. It is a signal. It means something is being done to someone, systematically, using the machinery of criminal prosecution as a delivery mechanism.
In family court, it did not slow the process down.
Jeff Reichert is a former Army JAG officer, a veteran, and a practicing attorney. In 2019, a court awarded him primary physical custody of his son Grant — largely because of Hornbeck’s documented alcohol and drug problem. In June 2019, Reichert obtained a Final Protective Order on Grant’s behalf against Hornbeck after Grant was found in her care while she was intoxicated. Hornbeck had been arrested for DUI, assault, and destruction of property in March 2018 while having custody of Grant. She was only placed on two years of probation.
The custody arrangement that followed included a critical provision: disputes would go to mediation, not court.
Hornbeck began filing protective order applications anyway. Courts entertained each one. In 2017 — before the 2019 consent order, during an earlier phase of the litigation — Hornbeck obtained a protective order against Reichert, claiming drug use and weapon possession. Reichert was hospitalized during those proceedings. He could not defend himself. The resulting default order severely restricted his parental rights and set the template for everything that followed.
The case has now been litigated for over fifteen years across more than sixteen judges and multiple jurisdictions. No single judicial officer has ever seen the complete picture. Each new judge inherited the accumulated weight of prior orders — orders that were obtained in proceedings Reichert was sometimes unable to attend, based on allegations that were later dismissed, in front of judges who had no way of knowing that the 26 charges before them were not 26 incidents of misconduct but 26 iterations of the same weapon.
Grant Reichert was on video during the custody trial saying he wanted to live with his father. The court heard that testimony. Custody flipped anyway. Jeff Reichert has not seen his son in years.
The case is now in federal court. The question before the court — whether the door to civil rights review opens at all before discovery, before evidence, before truth is tested — is itself a product of the same structural design that enabled everything preceding it. A system that generates sixteen judges who each see a slice of a pattern is a system that was designed, intentionally or not, to prevent the pattern from being named.
III. The Inversion: Rhonda Reyna, San Mateo County, California
If Brenna Gano’s case shows what happens when the controlling party has more resources, Rhonda Reyna’s case shows something more unsettling: it shows what happens when the protective parent does everything correctly.
Rhonda Reyna is a former criminalist for the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s crime lab. She is trained to read evidence. She documented everything. When her daughter Brooke described violence in the father’s home — the stepmother becoming violent when drunk, throwing objects, a door barricaded, Brooke hiding on the top bunk — Rhonda had it recorded. She had it professionally transcribed. She reported to the sheriff, to County Counsel, to the State Department, to CORA, the domestic violence outreach organization. She warned that Brooke’s father posed a flight risk.
Deputy Jim Christman of the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office investigated one of the incidents and cleared her. His report concluded that no crime had occurred, that Brooke was safe and calm, that Rhonda was appropriate and capable, and that Brooke went home with her mother. It is the only law enforcement report in the case based on real-time, in-person observation of Rhonda as a parent.
It was ignored.
What followed was a criminal charge, based on a report that contradicted Deputy Christman’s findings. Rhonda’s public defender — provided through San Mateo County’s contracted Private Defender Program — did not investigate the case, did not interview witnesses, and did not challenge the prosecution’s narrative. Rhonda accepted a plea without being informed of the exculpatory evidence her own attorney had failed to obtain.
That plea was then handed to family court, which absorbed it as established fact. The family court proceeding never stopped to ask how the criminal record had been created. It never weighed Christman’s report against the charge that followed it. It treated the plea as the conclusion of an honest proceeding rather than as the output of one that had failed at every stage.
On Mother’s Day 2025, Rhonda addressed the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors. “I had to celebrate my birthday last weekend without her,” she said, “and this weekend is Mother’s Day, and I haven’t seen her.” She was not asking for sympathy. She was asking three elected women — mothers themselves — to explain how the county planned to reunite her with her daughter.
Rhonda Reyna is a criminalist. She knows exactly what was done to her and exactly how it was done. The system separated her from her daughter anyway.
IV. The Endpoint: Marc Fishman, Westchester County, New York
Marc Fishman’s four children — Joanna, Jonah, Aidan, and Skye — are no longer young children. They are college-aged adults. Marc has not spoken to any of them since December 2018.
That is not a custody story anymore. That is what successful, uninterrupted litigation abuse looks like when it reaches completion. The children have aged past the family court framework. The machinery of separation keeps running anyway.
On December 15, 2018, Marc arrived for a prepaid supervised visitation with his autistic son in New Rochelle, New York. He was arrested by Officer Lane Schlesinger, who claimed Marc had violated an order of protection. A precinct video obtained years later through Marc’s federal lawsuit told a different story. At 12:05 p.m., Schlesinger was recorded telling Marc’s disability aide that Marc “had no malicious intent to commit a crime.” Two minutes later, he stated plainly: “I do not think Marc Fishman committed a crime.”
That video was never given to the defense. It was never shown to the jury. Marc was convicted.
Marc Fishman lives with a traumatic brain injury, tinnitus-related hearing impairment, cognitive occipital neuralgia, and post-concussion memory loss. He has two neurostimulators implanted in his chest. A federal appeals court ruled in 2021 that he was entitled to real-time captioning as an ADA accommodation during his criminal trial. The ruling came after he was already convicted — after years during which he could not hear witness testimony or fully participate in his own defense. The court that convicted him has never granted a retrial.
In May 2024, the New York State Attorney General officially designated Schlesinger a “pattern misconduct” officer — the only Westchester officer to receive that designation — citing more than 40 civilian complaints and a documented record of falsifying evidence. Schlesinger was subsequently fired.
Marc still has an active order of protection. He has never been retried. His children are adults who have not heard his voice in over seven years.
In a letter to the court in May 2025, Marc wrote: “I hope to be reunited with my 4 kids before I die.”
He wrote that sentence plainly, without drama. It is the sentence the entire system — the family court, the criminal court, the officer who lied on camera, the court administrator who denied his ADA accommodations and later became Chief of Staff to the District Attorney still prosecuting him — produced. A disabled father writing to a court to say he hopes to meet his children again before he runs out of time to do so.
V. The Pattern the Court Refuses to Name
These are four cases across four jurisdictions. They involve two mothers and two fathers. They span California, Maryland, and New York. They involve a corporate executive, a former criminalist, a veteran attorney, and a disabled father with four children.
What they share is not demographics. What they share is mechanics.
In every case, the controlling party in the marriage possessed a specific set of skills: the ability to manage institutional narratives, to deploy allegations strategically, to appear composed while the other party appeared chaotic, and to use the legal system as an extension of the control that had operated in the home. In every case, those skills transferred directly and completely into family court proceedings. In every case, the court — trained to evaluate discrete incidents rather than longitudinal patterns of control — read the output of the control system without recognizing the system itself.
This is not a new observation. It is documented in the research literature with a specificity that makes the courts’ continued failure to act on it difficult to explain as anything other than institutional inertia.
The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges has published guidance explicitly stating that a parent who uses coercive control may find litigation to be an effective means of continuing that control — that court processes provide regular, institutionally sanctioned contact with the other parent, that multiple pretrial appearances maximize emotional trauma, and that pretrial custody restrictions are an especially powerful trigger for further abusive behavior. That guidance exists. Judges are not required to have read it, trained on it, or applied it.
Evan Stark’s coercive control framework, Lundy Bancroft’s work on abusive partners in litigation, and a 2024 article in the American Bar Association’s Family Law Quarterly all document the same failure: when legal professionals cannot accurately distinguish coercive control from mutual high-conflict behavior, custody orders expose children and protective parents to ongoing harm while appearing, on paper, to serve the child’s best interests.
The Legal Abuse Scale, developed through research published in peer-reviewed literature, identifies two primary mechanisms through which family court proceedings are weaponized: harm to the survivor as a person and parent, and harm to finances. In every case documented in this article, both mechanisms operated simultaneously, in the same sequence, producing the same result.
Family court fails these parents not because individual judges are corrupt — though some may be — and not because individual attorneys are unethical — though some demonstrably are. It fails them because the system was designed to adjudicate incidents, and coercive control is not an incident. It is a pattern. It is the accumulation of ten thousand small choices, each individually deniable, that together constitute a comprehensive project of erasure. The system sees the ten-thousandth choice and calls it a he-said-she-said. It has never been asked to look at the nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine that came before.
VI. What Would Change This — And Why It Hasn’t
The reform exists. It has been written, piloted, and in some jurisdictions enacted.
Connecticut’s 2021 coercive control statute and Scotland’s Domestic Abuse Act 2018 represent the most developed models: legal frameworks that require courts to evaluate a pattern of behavior rather than a catalog of incidents, and that treat the marriage dynamic as relevant evidence in custody proceedings. Several states have moved toward coercive control definitions in their domestic violence statutes. Almost none have extended those frameworks into family court custody determinations — the precise context where the pattern does its most lasting damage.
The gap is not conceptual. Legislators understand what coercive control is. Researchers have documented it exhaustively. The gap is structural and political. Family court reform requires confronting a professional ecosystem — attorneys, custody evaluators, guardians ad litem, private judges — whose financial interests are served by high-conflict litigation that continues indefinitely. The Brenna Gano case documented a network in San Mateo County whose professional relationships made independent advocacy for the less-resourced party structurally nearly impossible. That network is not unique to San Mateo County. It is the operating model of high-conflict family court practice in the United States.
Custody evaluators — often the only professionals positioned to document the full pattern of a case — are not uniformly trained in coercive control dynamics. Many are not credentialed by any body with enforceable standards. The parental alienation counter-allegation, which research shows is applied disproportionately against protective parents raising abuse concerns, continues to be deployed effectively in courts that have no framework for distinguishing it from documented coercive control.
The procedural fragmentation that allowed sixteen judges to each see one piece of Jeff Reichert’s case is a feature, not a bug, of a system that prioritizes docket management over pattern recognition. It requires no conspiracy. It requires only a design that never asked whether the sum of the parts told a story the parts individually could not.
What would change this is deceptively simple to describe and genuinely difficult to enact: family courts must be required to evaluate the marriage dynamic as evidence of the litigation dynamic. The history of control in a relationship must be admissible and weighted in custody proceedings. Custody evaluators must be trained in coercive control and credentialed to standards that are actually enforced. Judges must be required — not encouraged, required — to receive that training before they adjudicate cases involving domestic violence allegations of any kind, including the psychological and financial forms that leave no visible mark.
And the legal community must develop and enforce sanctions for litigation abuse — for the use of court filings, protective orders, criminal complaints, and discovery demands as weapons of attrition rather than instruments of justice. When the record shows twenty-six dismissed charges, that record should follow the case to every subsequent judge who touches it. When the record shows a party spending three times the other’s legal fees to grind a case to resolution, that asymmetry should carry evidentiary weight. When a forensic evaluator’s recommendation contradicts the only real-time law enforcement report in a case, a court should have to say why it chose one over the other.
None of this is radical. All of it is currently optional.
Jeff Reichert has not seen his son in years. Brenna Gano’s son is 18. Rhonda Reyna addressed the Board of Supervisors on Mother’s Day. Marc Fishman wrote to a court that he hoped to see his children before he died. Dylan Phillips turned seven last month without his father present.
These are not individual tragedies produced by individual bad actors. They are the documented output of a system that was designed for a different problem — and has never been redesigned to meet this one.
The pattern was there in the marriages. It was there in the courtrooms. It will be there in whatever proceeding comes next, in whatever county, in whatever state, until the system is built to see it.
Michael Phillips is the Editor-in-Chief and founder of Father & Co. (fatherand.co) and Riptide (riptide.report). He is a subject in the Montgomery County, Maryland, custody case Phillips v. Avgerinos. Case accounts for Reichert, Gano, Fishman, and Reyna are drawn from direct conversations with each subject and from court records, billing documents, and correspondence reviewed by Father & Co. and Riptide. Each subject has consented to the use of their account in this piece. This article does not constitute legal advice.
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