For most of my family court case, Judge Manzi was the presiding judge. She made it clear to me at my initial hearing on May 28, 2003 that in her courtroom fathers are all criminals to be punished and removed from the lives of their children while mothers are all selfless, innocent victims to be pitied and excused from accountability for their actions.
Manzi and the incompetents who work in the court system as mediators also introduced me to the family court mindset that a mother's demand for sole custody is honorable and praiseworthy, but a father's pursuit of a 50/50 joint physical custody compromise is proof that he is selfish, rigid, and demanding.
It should be noted that this "mindset" has nothing at all to do with the "best interests of the children", as hypocritically alleged, and everything to do with the fact that it is the "winner takes all" rulings in family court that generate money for this "industry".
The fact is that if 50/50 joint physical custody were the rule rather than the exception in family court; then billable litigation would be significantly reduced, the child support services department would need to be downsized, the domestic violence industry would lose the customers that it gets with the incentive for mothers to make up false allegations as a court strategy, the state would lose Federal Title IV-D funding that it gets by turning every family break up into a welfare case, and radical feminist groups would lose the uneven playing field that they have worked so hard to obtain with their rhetoric that constitutional rights should not apply to men in family court because they are all violent, evil monsters.
Manzi was consistently rude and condescending toward me at the initial hearing, but polite and patient with the attorney for my son's mother. Before I was even called before the judge, I witnessed her rolling her eyes and asking the court clerk to point me out when she was handed my file.
During my opening statement, she repeatedly interrupted me to preach and change the subject. I was interrupted in the first minute of my opening statement when I expressed my desire to avoid a legal battle. Manzi took issue with my use of the word "battle" and lectured me about how family court was not a battleground.
When it was opposing counsel's turn to speak, she was allowed to make her entire statement without interruption. When she finished, Manzi sought out the opinion of the Mother's hired attorney as if she were some impartial social worker on the case.
With regard to the child support, Manzi asked me where I got the proposed child support amount listed in my documents. I told her that I used the financial statements that had been exchanged between parties to input the figures into the Massachusetts child support formula and then checked that amount online at a site that automatically calculates Massachusetts support orders. In an annoyed tone, Manzi snapped back, "We're not online here!"
What is alarming about Manzi's comment is that it is mysteriously missing from the court-recorded tapes, which were ordered AFTER I had filed a complaint against her with the Commission on Judicial Conduct.
I emphasize that the tapes were ordered AFTER my formal complaint because several individuals who work regularly in this courthouse implied that I was naive to believe that the tapes would not be "altered" after the court became aware of my formal complaint against one of its judges.
I lost motions in Manzi's courtroom that I could not possibly lose based on the objective evidence. Although the child support guideline formula produced a support order of $475 per month, Manzi arbitrarily decided that $615 per month plus family group health insurance costs would be better.
And after proving with receipts that I had never been a single day late in my payments of child support, Manzi allowed the Mother's motion for an insulting wage assignment order.
Every attempt to present evidence to confirm the Mother's fraud on the court was thwarted by Manzi, who made it clear to the Mother and her attorney that they were not only in a favored position to influence her, but that they could commit perjury in her courtroom with impunity.
Although the Mother and I have identical jobs, identical work hours, and live five minutes from each other, Manzi's temporary orders gave sole physical custody to the Mother in defiance of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and M.G.L. Chapter 208, section 31, which states:
In making an order or judgment relative to the custody of children, the rights of the parents shall, in the absence of misconduct, be held to be equal.
The only one guilty of "misconduct" in the case was the Mother, who had to make up for the fact that she is the significantly less fit parent by resorting to perjury.
According to the court, I was guilty of “misconduct” for having the audacity to resist the court's law-defying "one size/mother takes all" custody arrangement and, instead, fight for an equally balanced parental relationship with my son.
On March 22, 2006, Manzi banned a book that I had written about her and four other corrupt judges titled, "Exposing the Corruption in the Massachusetts Family Courts."
To ban this book, Manzi had to ignore her clear conflict of interest as a judge criticized in the book and the fact that opposing counsel did not serve a summons and complaint on me, as mandated by Massachusetts Civil Procedure Rules 3 and 4, for her to even hear the case.
Her orders impounded content from the book until the year 2021 and permanently restrained me from disseminating it.
Without any references to law or the book's content, Manzi's rationale for her restraining order was that the information contained in my book would cause "irreparable injury" to the Mother and the minor child.
Without any references to law or the book's content, Manzi's rationale for her impoundment order was that "impoundment is necessary to protect the best interests including the privacy interests of the parties' minor child."
Manzi could not reference the law because the law requires detailed written findings and a compelling reason to justify any restraints on speech.
And Manzi could not reference the book's content because the Mother, as the moving party, did not submit the book itself into evidence for Manzi to even know what was in it.
I brought the book into court myself for the March 22, 2006 hearing. At this hearing, Manzi asked me what I was holding. I responded, holding the book up so that she could see the cover, "this is the book that you are ruling on today."
What is significant to note about this exchange is that it is also missing from the court-recorded tape from this hearing. Since this exchange, independently confirms that Manzi banned a book that she had never opened, I had a couple of witnesses at this hearing write affidavits to verify that this exchange had taken place.
A hearing was scheduled for April 19, 2006 to hear my motion for relief from her "book ban" orders - orders that were reported by the Boston Herald, the Lowell Sun, Lawyers Weekly, and Mass News. Television interviews followed at Fox News, WNDS, WGBH, and MSNBC. Several national columnists also wrote about the case.
Consequently, there was a lot of media attention connected to this hearing including a protest outside the courthouse. Protesters were carrying signs that read "Ban Judges, Not Books."
Since my motion for relief from her orders described in detail her incompetence, I was not surprised when Manzi refused to hear this motion before the large number of "protesters" and media people in attendance on that particular day.
Manzi refused to hear my motion with the claim that the rule that I had cited to bring this motion before her, Massachusetts Civil Procedure Rule 60(b), applied to judgments, but not orders.
When I challenged this claim, Manzi would not allow me to show her a copy of the rule itself to confirm that "Rule 60" does in fact apply to both judgments AND orders.
Additional evidence exists, namely an email that Manzi mistakenly left in my file, which confirms that Manzi solicited the help of a law clerk (i.e. Nan Sauer) to provide her with an additional "loophole" excuse to avoid hearing this motion.
The loophole excuse provided to Manzi was that my motion for relief was not compliant with Standing Order 2-99.
Rather than share with me and the witnesses in court the specific reasons why the motion was not compliant, she handed me a copy of the standing order itself.
Apparently, the motion was not compliant with Standing Order 2-99 because Manzi was not referenced by name in the heading of the motion, but in the motion's first paragraph, and because Manzi's orders, issued three weeks earlier and contained in the file that she was holding, were not attached to the motion.
To put this in perspective, Manzi refused to hear my motion for these trivial reasons, which could have easily been corrected in her courtroom, but just six weeks earlier, on March 2, 2006, Judge Peter C. Digangi allowed the Mother's attorney, Debra Dow, to "handwrite" an entire complaint in his courtroom, which Dow had incorrectly filed as a motion, so that he could temporarily ban my book at an ex parte hearing held in Salem.
This was just the first of several trips to court over the next year that proved to be a complete waste of time and money for my son's mother and I.
On April 21, 2006, Manzi scheduled a pretrial conference on the matter of my book for June 20, 2006.
As ordered in her pretrial notice, the parties met on a day prior to the pretrial and showed up to court on June 20, 2006, only to be told by the clerk that Manzi had cancelled the pretrial conference three days after scheduling it for reasons that remain a mystery.
On June 16, 2006, a single justice of the Massachusetts Appeals Court (Justice Kantrowitz) referenced the scheduled June 20, 2006 pretrial conference to initially deny my motion to vacate Manzi's book ban orders.
When Kantrowitz was updated to the fact that the pretrial had been cancelled two months earlier without notice to the parties, he overturned his initial denial and vacated Manzi's orders on July 25, 2006, remanding the case back to family court for specific written findings that would justify a restraint on my speech.
A hearing was scheduled by the court for August 2, 2006 on a complaint that I had filed for modification of my child custody orders.
After spending the entire morning session in mediation on this matter, Manzi refused to hear this court-scheduled case with the claim that she does not ever hear complaints on Wednesdays.
This claim contradicted her ruling on the Mother's complaint to ban my book, which was heard and granted on Wednesday, March 22, 2006.
At a December 1, 2006 last-minute hearing called by the Mother's attorney to postpone a scheduled December 4, 2006 pretrial conference on the same complaint for modification that had been filed six months earlier, Manzi granted the Mother's motion to postpone the pretrial by allowing the Mother's attorney to get away with fraud on the court.
Specifically, Manzi refused to look at my evidence, which proved that the Mother's attorney was lying to the court with her claim that she had not received notice of the scheduled pretrial and lying to the court with her claim that I was "swearing" at the Mother's attorney over the phone the previous night when the Mother's attorney notified me about this hearing.
My evidence included email messages between the Mother's attorney and I, which confirmed that the Mother's attorney was well aware of the pretrial conference weeks earlier, and a tape of the phone conversation the night before, which I had recorded specifically to protect myself from the Mother's attorney, Debra Dow, who had a habit of alleging anything if she thought that she could get away with it. The tape confirms that the closest word to a "swear" that I used in this phone conversation was calling the Mother's attorney a "liar".
As it pertains to admissibility, it should be noted that I did not secretly tape our conversation. I gave notice to the Mother's attorney that the call was being recorded, which can be verified with the tape itself.
The December 1, 2006 hearing was educational because Manzi revealed exactly how she planned to sabotage the trial on my complaint for modification. Her plan was to deny me my right to confront witnesses against me, deny me my right to present evidence favorable to my case, ignore perjury and suborning perjury, believe everything uttered by opposing counsel with the argument that the Mother's hired-attorney is an officer of the court, and underestimate the evidentiary value of my email journal, which I had been keeping to document the events and communication that had occurred to necessitate a modification.
In response to the information conveyed at this December 1, 2006 hearing, I filed an affidavit to get on record my objection to Manzi as presiding judge of my child custody case, citing everything that has been conveyed above.
On January 9, 2007, without any prompting from the parties or prior communication from the court, Manzi appointed a guardian ad litem ("GAL"), Brian T. Cuffe, to the case to investigate the issues identified in my complaint for modification and in the Mother's one-page "answer" to the complaint. Manzi also scheduled a June 26, 2007 trial on the matter.
The GAL proved himself to be both incompetent and unethical. He was given three months for his investigation and to report his findings to the court. And although he assured me that he would examine my supporting evidence prior to his report and satisfy the task that he was appointed to perform, he instead avoided my phone calls and went to court on April 18, 2007, nine days after the deadline for a written report to the court to motion for additional hours.
The GAL also requested in his motion that the June 26, 2007 scheduled trial be postponed - a trial that was already scheduled more than a year from the date that the complaint was filed!
To deceive me into submitting to a psychological evaluation (a request that he made in the first two minutes of meeting me), the GAL left out the fact that I would be responsible for the costs. When I discovered that he intended to stick me with the costs of the evaluation after the fact, I refused to agree to this frivolous request.
Actually, I presented a compromise to the court. I suggested that each parent have the option to pay for the costs of the other parent. Since I already had more than enough evidence to prove that the Mother is unstable, I told the court that I would pass on this costly option.
I also argued that if the Mother felt that I was suffering from some dormant mental illness that would be exposed by a psychological evaluation, then she should be more than happy to purchase such evidence against me.
To explain away his failure to complete his investigation prior to the deadline, the GAL blamed the unresolved issue involving psychological evaluations, despite the fact that my refusal to pay for the evaluation was not communicated to the GAL until after the deadline for his report to the court and after I had discovered that he intended to foot me with the bill.
I objected to the GAL's motion to postpone the trial and filed my own motion to remove him from the case.
After hearing on April 18, 2007, Manzi denied my motion; postponed the trial to July 30, 2007; gave the GAL 20 additional hours for his investigation and 95 additional days to submit his report on the dime of the taxpayers of Massachusetts; and ordered the Mother and I to undergo and pay for psychological evaluations. The Mother's confirmed fraud on the court on this day, in a failed attempt to put me on supervised visitations, was also ignored by Manzi.
The Mother, who had become accustomed to alleging anything in Manzi's court without a requirement to submit proof, falsely alleged that I took our son to a swim class a day after he was "hospitalized and observed overnight" for dehydration. When the GAL requested that the Mother provide him with evidence of this hospital stay and explain why she had not mentioned this hospital stay in an email that I had received from her the previous night OR notify me of this hospital stay pursuant to the custody orders, which mandate that I be immediately informed of all medical issues involving our son, the Mother had to admit that she made the story up.
I also videotaped my son on the day in question to prove that he was "full of life" and more than healthy enough to attend his swim class.
On April 25, 2007, the GAL filed a second motion to postpone the trial, which was heard and allowed on May 2, 2007. The trial was rescheduled to August 21, 2007 - more than 14 months from the time that the complaint was filed and 6 months beyond the time that the matter was to be heard and ruled on according to the 8-month track assignment that the case was put on.
When I referenced that Manzi's order for me to take and pay for a psychological evaluation was clearly illegal at the May 2, 2007 hearing, she claimed that I was wrong without a reference to any law, case law, or reason to justify her order.
On May 14, 2007, I filed a motion for reconsideration of Manzi's orders regarding the postponed trial and a motion for relief from her orders regarding the psychological evaluations.
These motions were actually my second attempt to get redress, since my original motions for reconsideration and relief, hand-delivered to the Lawrence courthouse on April 21, 2007 mysteriously disappeared.
On June 8, 2007, more than three weeks after filing these motions, Manzi recused herself from the case, vacated the order for psychological evaluations, vacated the appointment of the guardian ad litem, and cancelled the August 21, 2007 trial on my complaint for modification of the child custody orders.
Manzi's recusal did not come without a parting shot at me. She canceled my thrice-delayed trial on my complaint for modification and slandered me in the process with her fraudulent claim that she was recusing herself and withdrawing the GAL because I chose to be uncooperative.
For the record, I met with the GAL in his office, I was the only litigant who timely completed his 15-page questionnaire, I allowed him into my home to observe me with my son, and I agreed to submit to a psychological evaluation. The only thing that I did not cooperate with was Manzi's attempt to extort the psychological evaluation fees from me by defying M.G.L Chapter 215, Section 56A, which states:
Any judge of a probate court may appoint a guardian ad litem to investigate the facts of any proceeding pending in said court relating to or involving questions as to the care, custody or maintenance of minor children... The compensation shall be fixed by the court and shall be paid by the commonwealth, together with any expense approved by the court, upon certificate by the judge to the state treasurer.
As I stated in her court and in documents:
These laws do not cease to exist simply because they are defied behind closed doors in your courtroom before litigants who do not know any better and lawyers who know to keep their mouths shut.
In defiance of the fact that Manzi is listed as a defendant in a lawsuit that I filed in federal court, is the subject of two complaints to the Commission on Judicial Conduct, is heavily criticized in a book that I wrote on judicial corruption; and is required to recuse herself from any case where there exists an appearance that she cannot be impartial; Manzi denied multiple motions for her recusal from my case.
These motions were denied so that she could ban a book that she never opened (due to the fact that it was not submitted into evidence by the moving party); delay a ruling on my complaint for modification of my child custody orders to a date well beyond the deadline for the matter to be heard and ruled on; continue to ignore the perjury, contempt of court orders, and bad faith litigation that I proved was committed by the Mother and her attorneys; and attempt to extort from me the fees proposed by a court-appointed guardian ad litem, which by law are to be paid by the state.
Only after I reported Manzi's attempt to extort the fees proposed by the GAL, who was appointed to the case for no other reason but to add to my costs and bankrupt me, did Manzi finally recuse herself from my case.
It should be noted that everything communicated above was conveyed in two complaints to the criminally-negligent Commission on Judicial Conduct, which dismissed both complaints with the claim that no judicial misconduct had occurred.