Vivian Wang is seven months into her first judgeship, assigned to family court with no family law background, and unlikely to stay. The families appearing before her don’t get to leave.
By Michael Phillips | Riptide — Part of the California Custody Cartel Series
On May 20, 2026, Judge Vivian Wang denied Brenna Gano’s motions to set aside a 2022 Memorandum of Agreement in Case No. 18FAM01991. The ruling was procedural — time-barred under Family Code § 2122(a) — and it locked the MOA in place. A full-day trial is now set for December 28, 2026. That trial is not Brenna Gano’s day to press her fraud claims. It is her ex-husband’s motion to terminate her spousal support.
Riptide has covered the Gano case extensively. We’ve documented the 2022 Zoom settlement she says she signed under duress, without disability accommodations, without a support person, and without understanding its binding implications under CCP 664.6. We’ve documented the alleged non-disclosure of approximately $1.8 million in earnings. We’ve documented the network of attorneys, therapists, and court-connected professionals whose financial interests are woven through this case.
What we haven’t fully examined until now is the judge sitting at the center of it.
This is that examination.
Who Is Vivian Wang?
Wang was appointed to the San Mateo County Superior Court by Governor Gavin Newsom in October 2025. She is seven months into her first judicial appointment. Before the bench, she was a federal prosecutor — an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Northern District of California from 2022 to 2025. Before that, a deputy California Attorney General focused on higher education matters. Before that, private practice. She clerked for a federal circuit judge after graduating from Stanford Law School on a full scholarship.
Her credentials are impeccable. Her family law experience is essentially zero.
She now presides over Department 17 in Redwood City, one of San Mateo County’s family law departments — handling child custody, support, abuse allegations, and the wreckage of marriages involving children whose futures depend on what she decides.
This is not unusual in California. It is, in fact, the system working exactly as designed.
The Rotation System: How California Trains Judges on Families
In California, newly appointed superior court judges are typically assigned to a department, not cross-trained across specialties. Family law departments — high volume, emotionally grueling, legally unglamorous compared to federal litigation — are among the assignments new judges frequently receive. The reasoning is practical: family court generates enormous caseloads of mostly non-jury matters, offering new judges rapid exposure to judicial decision-making without the complexity of major civil or criminal trials.
The typical rotation is two years. After that, a judge can transfer to a different department.
Court watchers and practitioners familiar with San Mateo’s structure confirm that Wang is expected to serve her initial assignment in family law and can seek a different assignment thereafter. Several observers noted she “has neither background nor interest” in the field — an assessment that was shared independently by more than one person present at the May 20 hearings.
The structural implication is stark: a judge assigned to family law as a training ground, with no prior investment in the field and a clear path out after two years, has limited institutional incentive to become a genuine expert. She can develop good judicial instincts — and Wang shows signs of having them — without doing the deep doctrinal work that would make her rulings bulletproof on appeal and credible to experienced practitioners.
The families who appear before her don’t get a two-year rotation. They get whatever she gives them while she’s there.
What Happened in Brenna Gano’s Hearing
Gano appeared pro se, as she has throughout the past several years of this long-running case. She had a support person with her. She addressed the court directly, clearly, and with evident preparation.
Wang had already issued a tentative ruling denying both RFOs before the hearing began. That is standard practice — judges issue tentatives, parties argue, courts rule. What was notable was what happened between the tentative and the ruling.
Wang questioned Gano extensively on the elements of fraud under Family Code § 2122. The questions were pointed, structured, and rapid. When did Gano first learn of the alleged non-disclosure? Why did she wait? What was the specific discovery that triggered the limitations clock? What distinguished duress from ordinary pressure in the context of a settlement conference?
Court watchers who attended the hearing described the exchange as resembling a law school examination — a Socratic interrogation of a self-represented woman on legal doctrine — conducted by a judge who had already made up her mind. One observer, a litigant who has appeared in San Mateo family court herself and watched the proceedings, put it plainly: Wang was “pounding” Gano on fraud while making clear the orders weren’t changing.
That observation matters. There is a legitimate judicial function in probing a litigant’s argument — testing whether the factual record actually supports the legal theory. But there is a different dynamic when a judge uses the hearing to conduct a seminar on a statute’s requirements against an unrepresented party, after the ruling is effectively done, in a way that appears designed to demonstrate the inadequacy of her arguments rather than genuinely consider them.
Gano is a former UC Hastings law student with documented ADHD and an anxiety disorder. She had no attorney. She was being questioned by a federal prosecutor turned judge on the fine distinctions of fraud discovery doctrine in a case that has already cost her years of her life and, by her own account, her home.
The ruling, when it came, adopted the tentative. Both RFOs denied. Trial set for December 28.
The Doctrine Problem
The May 20 hearings didn’t only include Gano’s case. Court watchers observed Wang across a full calendar — seven cases in a single day.
In a separate custody matter involving allegations of child abuse and reunification therapy, an experienced family law attorney challenged Wang directly on her reasoning about issue preclusion — whether an administrative abuse finding should collaterally estop relitigation in family court. Wang had signaled she was inclined to reject preclusion, reasoning in part that the administrative proceeding involved different “incentives to litigate.”
The attorney told her flatly that “incentives to litigate” is not one of the five established requirements for collateral estoppel under California law. He asked her to cite the authority for that standard.
Wang’s response: “I believe it’s in the cases.”
He pressed: “Your Honor, that you are talking about incentives to litigate? I’ve never really seen that.”
Wang: “I believe it’s in the cases.” And moved on to scheduling.
This is significant not because the ultimate ruling was necessarily wrong — it may land correctly on the merits — but because of what it reveals about Wang’s relationship to family law doctrine at this stage of her tenure. She is ruling on complex legal standards that she cannot cite when challenged by practitioners who know those standards cold. In Brenna Gano’s hearing, she was testing Gano on fraud doctrine. In the very next case, she could not defend her own legal reasoning to a practicing attorney.
That asymmetry is worth naming.
The Limitations Analysis Wang Didn’t Conduct
Family Code § 2122(a) imposes a one-year limitations period on fraud claims seeking to set aside a marital settlement agreement. Wang applied that period to deny Gano’s RFO. What she did not do — and what the statute actually requires — is conduct the threshold analysis that determines when the clock starts running.
Under § 2122(a) and California’s delayed discovery rule, the limitations period does not begin on the date the agreement was signed. It begins when the defrauded party discovered, or through the exercise of reasonable diligence should have discovered, the facts constituting the fraud. That is not a technicality. It is the foundational question the limitations analysis depends on. Without determining when discovery actually occurred, a court cannot determine whether the claim is time-barred.
Wang’s ruling applied the statute without resolving that question on the record. She tested Gano extensively on the elements of fraud — when did she learn of the alleged non-disclosure, why did she wait, what specifically triggered her awareness? Those are the right questions. But the hearing record does not reflect that Wang made a finding about when discovery occurred before concluding the claim was time-barred. She appears to have treated the date of the 2022 MOA signing as the relevant anchor — which is precisely the mechanical application of the limitations period that California appellate courts have repeatedly reversed.
Compounding this is the doctrine of equitable tolling, which California courts recognize as applicable to § 2122 claims in circumstances where the defrauded party was prevented from timely discovery or action. The conditions for equitable tolling in Gano’s case are not marginal. She has documented ADHD and an anxiety disorder. She alleges she did not know the 2022 Zoom proceeding was a binding settlement conference — believing it to be a status conference — and that she signed without disability accommodations, without a support person, and under conditions she describes as coercive. She alleges the financial information she is now claiming was concealed was in the exclusive possession of the other party throughout this period.
Each of these facts, if credited, is relevant to equitable tolling. A party with documented cognitive disabilities who did not understand what she signed, in a proceeding conducted without required accommodations, and who could not independently access the financial information forming the basis of her fraud claim, has a facially colorable argument that the limitations clock did not run from the date of signing — or that it was equitably tolled during the period her disabilities and the information asymmetry prevented meaningful discovery.
Wang did not engage with any of this. There is no indication in the hearing record that equitable tolling was analyzed, that the disability accommodation failure at the 2022 signing was considered as relevant to the discovery question, or that the information asymmetry created by the alleged non-disclosure was weighed against the limitations clock.
That is an incomplete legal analysis. And it will be before the December 28 trial judge — or an appellate court — as an unresolved question in the case record.
The ADA Problem: A National Pattern Wang Stepped Into
Wang’s quick dismissal of Gano’s request to attend the May 20 hearing remotely deserves more scrutiny than it has received — not because remote appearance is always required, but because of what the law requires before it can be denied.
Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, 42 U.S.C. § 12132, prohibits public entities — including state courts — from denying individuals with disabilities meaningful access to their services and proceedings. Its implementing regulations at 28 C.F.R. Part 35 require reasonable modifications to policies and procedures when necessary to avoid discrimination. A state court that denies a disability-based accommodation request without analyzing whether the requested modification is reasonable — and without explaining why it is not — is not complying with Title II. It is not enough to say no.
Gano has documented ADHD and anxiety disorder. Her request to appear remotely was not frivolous. It was consistent with exactly the kind of accommodation that federal courts have found reasonable for parties with anxiety and stress-related disabilities in non-trial proceedings. Wang’s response to that request, documented in notes and witness accounts, does not reflect the analysis Title II requires.
This is not a problem unique to Wang or to San Mateo. It is a documented national pattern — and families are now fighting it in federal court.
Jeff Reichert is a U.S. Army veteran with VA-documented PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury who has spent five years fighting the Anne Arundel County Circuit Court in Maryland for the same accommodation Gano sought: remote appearance in a custody case. His requests were denied repeatedly, consistently without explanation. In July 2025, a Maryland judge went further — ordering Reichert never to file another ADA accommodation request in that court. He subsequently filed a formal complaint with the DOJ Civil Rights Division under Title II and brought federal litigation against the court itself.
A federal magistrate judge in Reichert’s separate malicious prosecution case — ruling in January 2026, four months before Wang’s May 20 hearing — granted him remote appearance for all non-trial proceedings based on his PTSD documentation, finding that Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the ADA require courts to provide meaningful access to parties with documented disabilities. The ruling made clear that disability-based accommodation requests in civil proceedings must be evaluated on their merits, not dismissed without analysis.
Wang dismissed Gano’s remote appearance request without that analysis. That is, at minimum, inconsistent with the standard a federal court applied to an analogous request four months earlier.
But the ADA issue in Gano’s case extends beyond the May 20 hearing. Gano alleges she did not receive disability accommodations at the 2022 Zoom signing that produced the MOA she is now seeking to set aside. If that allegation is accurate — if the court failed to provide reasonable modifications that would have enabled her to meaningfully participate in and understand the nature of that proceeding — it is directly relevant to every question Wang was asked to answer on May 20: when did Gano discover the fraud, was the agreement signed under duress, did she have the cognitive capacity to understand what she was agreeing to.
Wang’s limitations analysis treated the 2022 signing as a clean starting point. The ADA accommodation failure Gano alleges makes it anything but.
Reichert’s DOJ complaint documents precisely the harm this pattern produces. Among the consequences he attributes to the court’s repeated denial of accommodations: loss of meaningful access to hearings, prejudice to substantive rights in time-sensitive family court proceedings, exacerbation of disability symptoms, and — most starkly — complete loss of custody and contact with his son for nearly four years.
Gano is living a parallel version of that outcome. The accommodation failures she alleges did not happen in a vacuum. They happened in a system that, as Reichert’s litigation shows, has treated disability accommodation requests in family court as obstacles to be managed rather than rights to be honored.
That system arrived in Wang’s courtroom on May 20. Whether she understood that is unclear. Whether she engaged with its implications is not: she didn’t.
A System That Fails Before the Judge Speaks
It would be dishonest to lay all of this at Wang’s feet. Some of what Gano and others experienced on May 20 is structural — the predictable output of a court system under severe resource strain.
A separate enforcement matter on the same calendar illustrates this clearly. A father had been fighting for years to enforce a 2012 trial order requiring his ex-spouse to pay certain student loans. He described appearing in court five times on the same issue. On May 20, his attorney had filed an FL-300 with no supporting declaration and no exhibits. Wang had, in her words, “no information or background” about the substance of the motion. She could not adjudicate it.
The continuance date offered by the clerk: October 14, 2026. Nearly five months away.
The father told the court he was going to default on loans his ex-spouse was court-ordered to pay. Wang expressed sympathy. She also explicitly told his attorney how to file an ex parte application to shorten the timeline — clear, specific, actionable guidance. But the father’s distress was visible and real. “I’m going to default on these loans that she’s supposed to be paying and hasn’t paid for years.”
In Gano’s case, the trial was pushed to December 28, not because of anything Gano did, but because the case was reassigned to Wang, who was unavailable on the previously scheduled August date. Wang acknowledged this directly: “I don’t have any availability until at least December. I’m sorry for the delay. It’s what it is.”
A woman facing foreclosure, estranged from her son, proceeding without an attorney, gets told her trial is seven months away because the new judge assigned to her case was already full. That is the San Mateo family court calendar. That is not Vivian Wang’s fault. It is, however, the environment in which Brenna Gano is trying to survive this system.
Who Writes the Order?
When the Gano hearing concluded, Wang did not draft the Order After Hearing herself. She assigned that task to Petitioner’s Counsel — Amy Sherman, Paul McNab’s attorney, the winning side.
That is a documented fact from the hearing record, not an inference. The action item was noted by Gano, as well as the many court observers in attendance: “Petitioner’s Counsel (Ms. Sherman) — Prepare the Order After Hearing reflecting the court’s rulings.”
This practice — assigning order preparation to prevailing counsel — is not uncommon in California courts. But in the Gano case, it carries a weight that cannot be ignored. Amy Sherman is the same attorney Wang had, minutes earlier in the same hearing, accused of fabricating claims about a prior judge: “Ms. Sherman, I find that you create stories about Judge Padillia.” Wang rebuked her for dishonesty, then handed her the pen to write up what the court ordered.
Brenna Gano, self-represented, facing foreclosure, walked out of that courtroom while the attorney she had accused of misconduct throughout this case would get to draft the formal record of her defeat.
This is also not the only case where Wang assigned order preparation to counsel rather than drafting it herself. In the issue preclusion matter heard the same day, she asked Mr. Young — the attorney who had just publicly challenged her on the collateral estoppel doctrine — to prepare that order after hearing as well. It appears to be her standard practice, not a case-specific choice.
To understand why this matters, it helps to understand how the system is supposed to work — and where it breaks down.
Under California Rules of Court, prevailing counsel prepares the proposed Order After Hearing. The rationale is efficiency: judges carry enormous caseloads, and drafting orders consumes time the court doesn’t have. The supposed safeguard is that the opposing party receives the proposed order before it’s submitted, reviews it, and either approves it as to form or objects to language they believe mischaracterizes the ruling. If there’s a dispute, the judge resolves it.
That safeguard assumes both parties have counsel — attorneys who know what to look for, understand the timeline for objection, and have the legal vocabulary to identify when operative language has been subtly shaped in the winning side’s favor. When both parties are represented, the system functions tolerably. Attorneys on both sides understand the game.
When one party is self-represented, the safeguard collapses. A pro se litigant typically doesn’t know they have the right to object to proposed order language. They may not recognize when a ruling has been characterized more broadly than the judge intended, when favorable context has been omitted, or when specific wording forecloses future arguments they haven’t yet thought to make. They receive a document drafted by the opposing attorney, and they often sign off on it — or fail to respond in time — without understanding what they’ve agreed to.
The order then becomes permanent record. Future judges, including the trial judge in December, read it as an accurate reflection of what was decided. The framing chosen by opposing counsel becomes the official history of the case.
The Orders After Hearing are not neutral administrative documents. They capture operative language, frame the court’s reasoning, and shape how future judges read the record. In cases involving self-represented litigants, the party without counsel has no meaningful ability to contest how the winning side characterizes what was ordered — unless they know to object, know how to object, and have the resources to do so before the order is filed.
A separate question — raised by court observers and warranting a direct answer from San Mateo County Superior Court — is who authored the tentative rulings themselves. Judicial research attorneys and clerks routinely assist with tentatives, and that practice is both legal and common. But in a department where the judge is seven months into her first appointment, with no family law background, managing a saturated calendar across complex cases involving children, disability accommodations, and alleged financial fraud, the question of who is actually exercising the judicial reasoning in those tentatives before they reach the courtroom is legitimate public information.
What Comes Next
Brenna Gano described her situation in a message to Riptide this week:
“You can be a stay-at-home in CA, raise a child, support your ex’s career, then in divorce get zero community property, inadequate support, legal fees, and your child gets brainwashed.”
That is what December 28 looks like from where she stands.
The trial set for that day is not Brenna’s opportunity to finally litigate the fraud claims. Those are foreclosed — Wang’s May 20 ruling locked the MOA in place. What Gano faces on December 28 is Paul McNabb’s motion to terminate her spousal support entirely.
Let that structure settle for a moment. McNabb will argue, in a hearing before the same judge who just reinforced the MOA, that Brenna has had sufficient time since the 2022 agreement to become self-supporting. His motion to end her support will be evaluated against the baseline of that MOA — an agreement Brenna alleges was signed under duress, without disability accommodations, and against the backdrop of concealed earnings she was never given the chance to contest. Wang just ruled that contestation is time-barred.
Brenna is defending that motion as a woman facing foreclosure, without an attorney, against a man represented by Amy Sherman — the same attorney Wang rebuked for dishonesty in the May 20 hearing and then assigned to draft the official record of Brenna’s defeat.
Wang will likely still be in Department 17 in December. She may have developed considerably in the role by then. But the architecture of what happens at that trial was set on May 20, in a hearing where the judge applied a limitations bar without conducting the analysis the statute requires, dismissed a disability accommodation request without the analysis Title II requires, and handed the pen to the attorney she had just accused of making things up.
The question December 28 will answer is not whether Wang has grown as a judge. It is whether a woman who stayed home, raised a child, supported a career, and signed a document she says she didn’t understand — in a proceeding where she had no accommodations and no support person — will end that day with her support intact or with nothing left to lose.
This article is part of Riptide’s ongoing series, The California Custody Cartel. Previous reporting on the Gano case is available at riptide.report/cases/brenna-gano-case-california-custody-cartel/
All courtroom observations are drawn from personal observational notes and witness accounts of proceedings in Department 17 on May 20, 2026. This article does not constitute legal advice.
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