It was my daughter’s thirteenth birthday on the weekend
Shane Pinnegar
We haven’t seen her – or have meaningful, positive contact with her – for 16 ½ months.
We sent her a birthday card, an email with the link to a YouTube playlist I made her, and a text message, but she chose not to respond.
We eventually received an email from her Sunday, just before lunchtime. It was completely insincere, professing that she loved us and missed us [she’s chosen some pretty hateful and disrespectful ways to show it, so I don’t believe it was anything more than lip service], but the email was only sent because my sister told her off for not contacting us.
She’s been estranged from us because of her vermin mother, who is beyond the shadow of a doubt the most vile creature I have ever had the misfortune to meet. She has been whispering poison into my daughter’s ears since she was crawling.
When she was three, my daughter went to my now-wife and asked, “why is my daddy a bad daddy? Mummy says he’s a bad daddy…” What sort of scum puts those thoughts into a THREE YEAR OLD child’s head? Apart from anything else, it just wasn’t true – I was the poster boy for doting, loving fathers, relentlessly offering positive encouragement.
By the time she was six we needed to take her to a series of sessions with a child psychologist, to try and counter/make sense of the confusion and lies she’d been told.
For years, at the end of extended school holiday time together she would be begging to stay on with us rather than return to her mother’s. For years she would have night terrors and complain of stomach aches the night before she was due to return to her mother’s.
I could share a thousand more incidents of abuse, but who has the time to collate it all. It was relentless, and it ground us down in the process. Just imagine what being in the middle of all those lies did for the child. No wonder she is such a brainwashed mess now.
The woman stole thousands of dollars of furniture, clothing and cash from me. She told countless lies to me, and many, many more about me to others, including trying to estrange my own friends from me.
It all started, exactly to the day, halfway through the pregnancy. It was like a switch clicked over. For a long time I was unsure if it was bipolar or post-natal depression or something like that, but now I am certain that she was always a sociopath (compulsive liar, devoid of empathy, history of reckless social choices, history of short term relationships, history of drug use, inability to take responsibility for own actions, inability to feel guilt or remorse, always blamed others for their response rather than accept her behaviour might have been unreasonable, and a morbid fascination with serial killers), but she was extremely high functioning and wore her mask well for a long time before I saw the real person in all her toxic glory.
Soon after her mask started crumbling whilst still pregnant, the woman walked into my office desk, shouting incoherently at me for nothing. Without a word she stormed out and, I later discovered, drove to my parents’ house and showed them the bruise, claiming that, “your son beats me.”
She tried to claim to at least two councils that I use my home kitchen as a commercial premises, she sent me bankrupt after she sued me for money I never owed her, and lied about it so effortlessly that I didn’t stand a chance in court.
She physically attacked me at least three times, and told people that instead I attacked or hit her often. She answered the phone to friends calling to say congratulations when we had recently announced we were to be parents, and screamed abuse at them for the abhorrent crime that they were female.
I contacted the vile snake’s parents, pleading them to help when the woman was refusing to leave the bedroom, refusing to feed the child properly (she was not producing enough milk, but was insistent that I was not allowed to feed her formula), refusing to allow me to hold my own daughter. Her caesarean wound became infected and she refused medical help until I literally dragged her to the emergency ward and had her seen to. She might have died, the doctor said. Perhaps I should have left her.
Her parents proved to be absolutely complicit in the abuse of my daughter. Any normal person would discuss these issues with their daughter. I begged them to help me get her mental health help. All they did was gang up on me and accuse me of being the problem. Fast forward ten years and they – especially the mother – was actively whispering poison into my daughter’s ears, attempting to turn her against me, just like her daughter. The rotten apples don’t fall far from the tree.
I had my legal (and moral) custody withheld a half dozen times, for weeks or a couple of months at a time. Every single time the police kicked me out of whichever station I went to in order to place a report. Not their problem. The kid couldn’t possibly be in danger from her own mother – get out or we’ll charge you with disturbing the peace. True story.
The Family Court would offer no advice, and their legal representatives would only repeatedly encourage me to file recovery or contravention or begin another round of custody proceedings, each one OF COURSE costing hundreds of dollars just to lodge, each one taking months to process, and each one ending with no lasting change. The woman was never punished, never made to pay for her wilfully and repeatedly breaking legally binding orders. And yet the one solitary afternoon I kept my child with me past our scheduled handover time (because my custody had been illegally withheld for two months) and multiple police cars came hunting me as if I was a danger to my daughter.
Don’t ever tell me that every single stage of the family legal system isn’t broken and corrupt and gender biased and rotten to the core.
The rot extends right through the Family Court and the police, through Child Protection – and don’t even get me started on Child Support. A filthy organisation of bottom feeders, almost every conversation I have had with them has involved their incompetence, massive gender-bias and liar-bias, manipulative tactics and worse. They are despicable protectors of child abusers, rewarders of child abusers. A pox on them all.
Because what my daughter’s mother is doing IS child abuse, plain and simple. It is Parental Alienation – “a process through which a child becomes estranged from a parent as the result of the psychological manipulation of another parent. The child’s estrangement may manifest itself as fear, disrespect or hostility toward the distant parent, and may extend to additional relatives or parties. The child’s estrangement is disproportionate to any acts or conduct attributable to the alienated parent.”
It is emotional and psychological child abuse. My only child is the victim of child abuse.
All this because a toxic person can’t get their own way, and allowing their sociopathic tendencies to try to hurt those they consider their enemy using any means possible: in this case, my daughter.
Studies have shown that children who are victims of Parental Alienation have a far higher likelihood of experiencing guilt and anxiety, low self-esteem, early substance use and sexual activity, addiction and substance abuse, trust issues and relationship problems and clinical depression throughout adulthood.
And there’s nothing I can do about it. The courts are structured in such a way that to even take the battle the whole distance, would cost “a minimum twenty thousand dollars,” I was quoted by three different law firms. “And the best you could hope for is 50% custody.” Well, I don’t have that sort of money – but I do already legally HAVE 50% custody, it’s just not being observed, but the authorities, disgustingly, refuse to enforce it.
What is the point of a legal system if no-one will observe duty of care for my daughter?
Why is it in her best interests to just assume the vile and pernicious woman’s fabricated allegations are true, without even giving me the details of them so I can defend myself?
This has been the case with both Winterfold Primary School AND Fremantle College, my daughter’s primary and high schools. In both schools they have wilfully ignored their duty of care for my daughter, refused to action any of my repeated pleas for extra support for my daughter, and maliciously ignored the abuse she is suffering. In the case of the high school, they even had the audacity to, at her request not long after she was manipulated into running away from home, change her name on file to the woman’s surname, rather than the name on her birth certificate – the name which she was enrolled in the school under and which is legally binding. They only reverted that after I raised hell, but even after that they refused to action my claims of abuse or acknowledge that anything is amiss in my daughter’s behaviour.
This has also been the case with the low lives at Child Support. During one particularly fraught argument on the telephone with them, their representative lost her temper and shouted something along the lines of, “well no wonder she’s not with you since we have two doctor’s reports saying that you abused her.” I have repeatedly requested details of these completely spurious and unsubstantiated claims, but the organisation refuses to even acknowledge my requests and will not discuss the issue with me. Rest assured, though, they still want to steal money from me to give to the lying, child abusing filth.
Any person or organisation who supports, protects or facilitates a child abuser is themselves a child abuser. And I am looking fair and square at YOU Catholic Church, and YOU Child Support and The Family Court.
Shame on you all, every single person working to protect these scum abusers.
The despicable woman continues to lie to my daughter, with the support of a broken, filthy rotten family legal system. She has no interest in the longer term damage she is causing – has been causing for a decade – to the child. All she cares about is her hatred and ‘winning’ a game which only she has ever been playing. She is filth, and I only regret that I shouldn’t name and shame her here, for fear of it tainting my daughter further than it already has.
I know many people who would kill to have a father in their lives, even a deadbeat one. Some who would kill to simply know who their biological father was. Yet my daughter is being manipulated into wilfully ostracising me from her life and growing up sans a loving Daddy. Without her adoring grandparents, aunty, cousins. Effectively choosing to be erased from our lives. Words fail me as to how sickening that is.
So, my daughter turned thirteen at the weekend. Without me. Without even wanting to be in touch with us or acknowledge my wife and I for thinking of her on her birthday.
And I never knew there could be such sadness.