1388: Family Court | Skeptical Sunday

Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer, and researcher, Nick Pell.

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Today on the show, if you ask the average guy what family court is like for men, he's going to tell you it's a grim, shadowy kangaroo court run by man-hating judges seeking the destruction of the nuclear family and his home especially. It's a persistent idea that the mom always wins and walks away with half of what the man owns in custody of the kids. If he's lucky, he's going to get every other weekend and a couple of weeks during the summer for a trip to Disneyland.

But how true is this in 2026? Is this a caricature based on the truth or an outdated stereotype that bears no resemblance to reality today? And if gender bias is gone from our nation's family courts, why are some activists seemingly intent on bringing it back?

Here today to help us take custody of the truth is writer, researcher, and family court veteran Nick Pell. Nick, you spent, uh, well, a lot of time in family court. I'll just leave it there.

Nick Pell: Yeah, it was about two years just on my divorce and then my ex-wife came back three months later. I'm only legally allowed to talk so much about my specific case. Obviously, my sole experience isn't what we're here to talk about today, but I think my experience is fairly typical.

Okay, how so? I know everyone probably expects me to be like, oh man, family court sucks. They just soak these poor guys dry and then take their kids away.

That was not my experience at all. Part of this is a function of living in Arizona, but my experience as we'll learn is going to be much more typical than the horror stories you might've heard.

Jordan Harbinger: So just to highlight this, Nick, you got divorced in Arizona. So this is the state that you have direct experience with, but you've also researched other states and you know, the usual disclaimer applies here. None of this is legal advice.

You've got to talk to a lawyer for your state, for your situation, et cetera.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Anytime some guy has a horror story, I'm just like, dude, who was your lawyer? I mean, one of the lawyers I spoke to, but didn't hire, she got 50-50 custody for a Coke dealer.

Jordan Harbinger: You've told me this before and that's kind of crazy to me because of course I'm thinking about the stereotypes as well. Like, oh, the mom usually gets custody and it's like, nope, this was a dad. He was a Coke dealer and he got 50-50 custody.

How does that happen?

Nick Pell: The court's decided that for whatever reason, him being a Coke dealer wasn't compelling evidence that he was an unfit father. I'm guessing like he was selling eight balls at the bar or something, you know, like maybe I don't think, I don't think this guy was Scarface.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. He's not a cartel Sicario that happens to sell Coke on the side. Right.

Okay.

Nick Pell: No. But you generally have to prove in family court that somebody is an unfit parent. That's the standard.

If you want to deprive them of their parental rights. Now what constitutes unfit that varies from state to state. And there are still some pockets where, yeah, it's possible. Maybe men are getting a raw deal, but for the most part, no, this is just not the case.

Jordan Harbinger: So we'll get down into the nitty gritty here because I know that this is a persistent claim, especially online. I see it all the time. Men simply have no rights in family court.

The judges always side with the moms. They rubber stamp maternal custody. They make you pay for the privilege.

Yeah. I do see conflicting accounts, but usually when someone's ranting about it, it's that.

Nick Pell: Well, when someone's ranting, it's usually something negative, but this is a completely false caricature of family court in virtually every jurisdiction in the US today.

Jordan Harbinger: There's a sense among men that any allegation against them in family court is just going to be taken as face value.

Nick Pell: Here's the thing, and I figured this out very early on. Every single man I have ever spoken to who's been through family court has had allegations of some unseemly quality or another thrown at them.

Jordan Harbinger: That's such a... What a coincidence.

Nick Pell: Yeah. So I think there's definitely an impulse with some women to just start throwing accusations of abuse at men once they're in family court. Anecdotally, this is particularly true in cases where men initiate the divorce, which is not...

I think it's about 30% of divorces are initiated by men. But here's the thing, this is not the first time, not the first time this year, not the first time this week, probably not even the first time today that a judge has heard these accusations. And if it's just an accusation without any corroborating evidence, he probably doesn't care.

Jordan Harbinger: I think there's a tendency among people to think that their divorce or their custody battle is very special. It's very unique. It's totally different than any other one.

In reality, they're all just... They're pretty similar.

Nick Pell: Yeah. There's not a lot of variation. You know, women go into court and say, my ex-husband is an asshole, and, well, that's probably why you guys are getting divorced.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Not a lot of people like the person they're divorcing at the moment they're divorcing them. On the men's side, what I've seen is that sadly a lot of them give up because they just accept these myths about family court at face value.

The alleged bias against men, the ease with which accusations are entered in as evidence, the notion that you only get joint custody when the mother agrees. So what do the actual laws look like? Every state in the union has gender neutral custody laws.

That does not mean that they default to 50-50 custody. 50-50 is not the default. So what is the default?

Best interests of the child, which all things being equal, includes both parents and probably with 50-50 shared custody.

Jordan Harbinger: That's super vague, like a lot of legalese, to give judges wide discretion, I would imagine. So what does best interests of the child mean?

Nick Pell: This is more or less what you're going to see in every state, by the way, best interests of the child. There are some rare exceptions. Florida gives some leeway to single mothers until the fathers pursue parental rights.

And that starts with a confirmation of paternity. But for the most part, this is it, coast to coast. Best interests of the child is the North Star in all 50 states.

What that means, however, that is what varies from place to place. In many jurisdictions, best interests of the child does not automatically mean a presumption of joint legal or physical custody.

Jordan Harbinger: So joint legal custody that pertains to decision making and joint physical custody is about where the child is physically present for people who don't know. So the legal is like, can we send him to school here? Can I get him this doctor?

Physical custody is where is he spending the weekends? Where is he spending the week?

Nick Pell: Arizona, which again, where my divorce took place, is generally considered the hardest 50-50 parenting state in the country. They don't really deviate from this unless somebody doesn't want a parent or one parent is very, very clearly unfit. Joint custody is a starting point, but judges do have leeway to change that based on circumstances.

In Arizona, it is extremely difficult to deprive someone of their parental rights. Anything short of abuse or neglect probably isn't going to fly.

Jordan Harbinger: So why did your divorce take so long? I felt like it just lasted forever. You thought it lasted forever.

Nick Pell: I was the one going through it. It was really hard on me, Nick. Your divorce.

It was hard on your wallet, but I paid you back. Lawyers is the main reason. Like, lawyers.

We'll get into the specifics of that kind of later on, but yeah, I mean, lawyers. What's wrong with this country, Jordan? Lawyers.

Yeah, exactly. No, I'm kidding. I love my lawyer.

Jordan Harbinger: What are other states like? What's the story about how we get from the 80s where, I don't know, every divorce kid ended up with mom and now where parents share parenting duties even after they split up? How did that happen?

Nick Pell: Kentucky was the first state to assume 50-50 was in the best interest of the child. Utah, likewise, has very father-friendly states, which is why it's being targeted by activists. Again, we'll get a little deeper into that later.

Minnesota is another state that has very strong presumptions of equal and shared parenting time and rights as best for the child.

Jordan Harbinger: And what's on the other end of the spectrum?

Nick Pell: Alabama, Tennessee, and New York are the places, yeah, not the collection of states you were expecting.

Jordan Harbinger: No.

Nick Pell: No. Don't usually hear those three states mentioned together. These are the places where you're most likely to find judges who want to give custody to moms, but again, their laws are gender neutral.

So this is a judge discretion thing like you talked about earlier. This all comes from the Jackman Law Firm and it seems kind of semi-anecdotal, but it squares with what I've heard in my experience. There's a deference in some states to more traditional parenting arrangements, which could mean that judges are going to tend to put younger kids with the moms.

Jordan Harbinger: Which is where the whole best interest of the child part can mean just about anything. Are there any factors which are used to determine what that actually means, though, or is it just like, hey, this judge is in a good mood today, everybody's getting custody?

Nick Pell: It needs to be kind of repeated constantly that different jurisdictions, even maybe within the same state, are going to have different criteria and that they weigh differently. So of the stuff I'm going to talk about, some of these mattered in Arizona. Most of them didn't, though.

Arizona is like, if your child is fed, clothed, bathed, and not abused in some way, you're getting your kid if you want them. But in any event, factors such as emotional ties and relationships, that's going to refer to the nature and strength of the child's emotional ties with each parent, siblings, or any other significant individuals who may affect the child's best interests.

Jordan Harbinger: So like step-parents or, I don't know, a live-in girlfriend or something like that?

Nick Pell: Sure. Maybe grandparents, aunts and uncles if they're close, you know, stuff like that. Then there's your actual ability and willingness to feed, clothe, and care for the child and provide them with a stable, loving home.

Stability is very important to family court judges, and they want the kids living in the same place, going to the same school, engaged in the same community. The more established the child is, the less likely the courts are going to be to disrupt that routine.

Jordan Harbinger: That makes sense. You've told me that courts generally hate changing anything about a parenting agreement, at least as it pertains to the kids.

Nick Pell: Yeah. So in Arizona, where I, again, got divorced, courts just don't make changes. And that's a common theme in many states.

If something's working, the courts don't want to change it because what they change it to might not work.

Jordan Harbinger: That makes sense. So what about what the child wants? What age are they kind of like, hey, the kid can say something or, you know, because I know if a kid's little, it's like, we don't ask which parent they like most because they don't know what they're talking about.

It's whoever was nice to them that morning or whatever. And they can't really make a mature decision and they were getting pressured. But at some age, right, they're like, hey, where do you feel most comfortable?

You're almost an adult.

Nick Pell: It's unfair to a child to ask them to pick between their parents, you know? I agree with you. I mean, my lawyer was like, your worst case scenario is that the judge takes your kid into chambers and says, hey, what do you think of your parents?

And he says, I like my dad, you know, not I dislike my mom, but like, yeah, I like my dad. You know, like, what are they going to do? It depends on the age and the child's maturity, again, it varies from state to state.

I think in Arizona, it's like 12 is when they start having some kind of say. But anecdotally, because I'm on a lot of forums where people gripe and moan about their family court judge, that's in theory, in practice, at least my judge and the judges in my county, they do not give a shit what your kid wants. They don't care at all.

It's too easy to manipulate one of them. My kid was five. So they certainly weren't going to ask them.

Kids that young can be very easily manipulated. A 14-year-old's like, oh, yeah, dad gives me no bedtime and lets me drink beer and, you know, with my friends on the weekend. I want to go live with him.

And judges aren't stupid. Right, right. They know that asking a 16-year-old who they want to live with could very well result in like dad lets me do donuts on the front lawn, so I want to go live with him, you know.

So if you go to your state's website and you're thinking like, oh, man, when my kid's 14, they get to say where they want to live, no, in theory, they have some kind of input. But in practice, I think you're going to be hard-pressed to find a judge who's going to care much what your teenager thinks about where they're living, unless it's like dad doesn't get me to school.

Jordan Harbinger: Right, or mom's new boyfriend's always trying to get into my room at night, some stuff like that.

Nick Pell: Yeah, or mom's new boyfriend's an asshole, you know, who's smoking pot all the time, which is legal here. But like, you know, I'm trying to study and he's blasting his REO Speedwagon at two in the morning. Like, you know what I mean?

Stuff like that. But just like, oh, yeah, I want to go live with mom. They don't care.

They don't give this a lot of weight because kids are too easy to manipulate and like kind of the whole thing with children is that they don't know what's best for them. Yeah. So you'll probably be familiar with this turn of judgees.

I'll give that due consideration. Yeah, right, right. It's kind of like noted.

Be quiet now. Yeah. I'll put this in the pay no mind file.

Yeah. So the big thing is courts want to see if the parents are cooperating. If one parent isn't, that's a big deal.

That's a way bigger deal than what the kids want. If one parent is just constantly stonewalling or being a problem or communicating with foul language or being sarcastic all the time, they're not going to like that. This is all relative.

And the courts understand that the parents in the middle of a custody battle may not be on their best behavior. Surprise, surprise. Right.

No, this is not like, again, your divorce is not special. Right. You know, you're maybe on your third.

You're probably just on your first. They see 50 a week. So it's just they're not, it takes a lot to impress them positively or negatively.

Mental and physical health matters.

Jordan Harbinger: When you say mental and physical health. So is that that's like of the parents. Right.

So if somebody is. I don't know.

Nick Pell: Could also be the kid. If the kid has mental health. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: The reason I want to stop you is because I meant what. So it's like if you obviously look, if you suffer from a little bit of depression or something or you have bipolar, they're not going to take your kid away, I suppose. But if it's like, yeah, dad goes in his room and doesn't come out for weeks at a time and I have to clean the house, feed myself, get to school on time and basically parent myself until he goes back on his medication, like that's going to be a problem.

And not that this was you, but I know that your mental health was a thing in your case or your ex tried to make it like a really big deal. Is that accurate? Yeah, she did.

She did.

Nick Pell: It was a whole. It was a whole thing. Arizona courts anyway.

And I suspect a lot of other states, they do not care about, you know, mom spent half a day in bed because she's depressed. They don't care unless you're at the level of like, I have ninjas living in my attic and they steal my thoughts and you can't see them because they hide every time you come by. You know, there was a guy that I found via a forum who was like, do not be afraid of your custody evaluation because my ex wife is schizophrenic and she passed one of them.

And then I had to have one of my older children smuggle an iPhone into her house and be like, look, this is a pile of garbage so high in the house that if it falls over, it's going to injure one of the children. That was when the court said, oh, we're going to take a closer look here. You know, I mean, there's literal human feces on the wall at this guy's ex wife's house.

That's really sad. That's horrible. It is horrible.

But that's what it took to get them to take a look. And I think people aren't really going to like this when I first say it, but they'll maybe understand when I explain a little. This is kind of as it should be, because you should have to document actual dangers to a child's safety or welfare to remove someone's parental rights.

It should not be, oh, mom gets kind of bummed out sometimes or, you know, sometimes mom gets a little agitated or something or dad or whatever.

Jordan Harbinger: Divorce court is messy, emotional and wildly expensive. But at least when this next thing drains your bank account, you actually get something useful out of it. We'll be right back.

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Don't forget about our newsletter, Wee Bit Wiser. It is a two-minute read, highly practical, something you could apply right away. JordanHarbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Now, back to Skeptical Sunday. What we don't want is, mom's got a prescription for Prozac, so that must mean she's an unfit mother, so don't let her see her kids anymore. That's what we don't want.

We don't want, this person's been in therapy for five years, so where there's smoke, there's fire. Take his kids away. That's what we don't want.

Nick Pell: Yes. In the case of the schizophrenic woman with poop on the wall, it's like, no.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Supervised visitation, and the kids shouldn't live there. Yeah.

Nick Pell: Yeah. That's all I'm saying, is like, it should not be easy to take people's kids away.

Jordan Harbinger: What about things like drug abuse or just abuse in general? I mean, certainly we don't want kids in a house where people are doing meth or beating the kids up, right?

Nick Pell: Well, physical abuse is always going to be, you're getting supervised visitation. There was a, you know, I talked to a lawyer who had seen some fairly extreme child abuse with one of her clients, and she got the guy supervised visitation. I don't know.

Is that good or bad? I don't know. I don't think, that's going to be a deal breaker.

Yeah. Drug abuse, maybe. The court needs evidence that you're an active addiction, and that it's, and this is kind of the more important part of the sentence, and that it's interfering with your ability to parent.

Is the judge going to let you have your kids if you're like, I only do heroin when the kids aren't here? Okay. Maybe not.

I don't know. They might, is all I'm saying. I'm not saying they will, I'm saying they might.

My judge gave a woman her kids back after she completed a treatment program, and she was on heroin. So judges, again, at least in Arizona where I live, they want to see kids with their parents.

Which gets to this whole idea of like, family court judges just hate families, and all they want to do is this and that, and it's like, my experience in family court is that judges really, really, really want to keep kids and parents together.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So they need receipts. They need receipts for all this stuff.

Nick Pell: Right. I mean, I talked about how every man I've ever spoken to has been through family court. They've experienced some accusation or another, some kind of accusations of abuse, you know, but they do, they need the receipts.

Jordan Harbinger: Judges generally don't care if the first time it's ever come up is during a custody battle. I mean, abuse allegations, right? If it's, yeah, we got divorced, and oh, he was abusive, it's like, okay, well, you were married for 15 years and there's nothing, there's no police calls, there's no statements, there's nothing.

I mean, this is understandable that judges will discard stuff like that because the timing is just very suspect, which is unfortunate for people who have just been enabling their partner because if they are abusive and they never said anything, now it's going to bite you in the butt. But is there anything else on the list of what makes for the best interest of the child?

Nick Pell: The last thing is your prior caregiving roles. If one parent is basically not a parent, that can be an issue. That's super hard to document though.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, yeah. You'd have to prove that they were gone 25 days a month or something working on an oil rig.

Nick Pell: That's exactly, you have to prove they're gone. I've seen examples or have been told of examples where it's like, guys are getting divorced and mom wants to get into what percentage of diaper changing they were doing. It's like, no, no, no.

We're talking about, did dad take off for three months? That's what they're talking about.

Jordan Harbinger: That makes sense. These all sound like reasonable criteria, at least in theory, and I'm curious about how they get enforced in practice from one jurisdiction to another.

Nick Pell: In the Western US courts, and I'm speaking in very broad terms here, in the Western US courts tend to be more inclined towards 50-50 without serious compelling evidence to the contrary. And further east, they tend to assume this less. But every court is different, every judge is different, every case is different.

There are, I can say definitively, with the exception of the thing we talked about in Florida with single moms, there are no states where women have a legal upper hand in court. I know we're going to get a zillion comments about how I got screwed and it's like, okay, well, did you fight your case? Did you have a good lawyer?

Did you just roll over because you bought into these horror stories about how you weren't going to get anything in court? Did you just roll over because you wanted to run off to Vegas and chase tail? And this made for a very convenient, ready-made excuse for you to do that.

And I am sure that that happens, by the way.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm sure it happens too. Here's what I predict. We're going to get a few of those comments, but we're going to get even more comments from divorced women who are like, oh yeah, no, my ex-husband says he got raked over the coals in court, but here's what really happened.

I offered him custody of the kids and he didn't respond to any of this and he didn't respond to any of that. And he did all of these other things that were horrible. And then when we finally got divorced, he turned around after not fighting any of this and not doing any of the parenting stuff that the judge wanted us to do.

And then turns around and says, oh, she took my kids away and half my income. I've seen a lot of that online too, where a guy will rant like on a Reddit forum and someone's like, you sound like my dad who did all of these other horrible things and now says these exact same things. And it's like no reply from the original poster.

And it's like, yeah, we nailed it, didn't we? Because I think it would be it's convenient for guys to go, oh, yeah, I kind of want to have my freedom. This isn't really a house that I paid for.

She had it before we got married. So I'm going to go on record as saying, oh, she screwed me and she took the house and she took the kids. I just have to go move to Florida and, you know, go date girls that are 20 years younger than me.

It's like there's going to be a lot of those comments, too, I think we're going to hear a lot of that.

Nick Pell: Yeah. And ladies, I'm aware that this guy exists. OK, I don't want to make it sound like I'm just like, oh, guys, guys just get accused of everything.

And now these innocent saints like, no, there's there's definitely like guys who are like, oh, cool. I get to see my kids three times a year and and date 19 year old girls in Florida.

Jordan Harbinger: A hundred percent. Yes.

Nick Pell: There's a lot of guys like that.

Jordan Harbinger: So so I'm expecting to actually see more of that than guys saying they actually got screwed. Well, I don't know. Maybe it'll be 50, 50.

Nick Pell: We'll see. Well, 50, 50. We'll see.

There's some statistics about how many dads get custody versus how many dads fight for them. But it's junk. OK, I'm not even going to get into it.

Why? Because what we just talked about, tons of dads give up because they think it's pointless or they can't handle the heat. I think that that motivates a lot of it.

They believe these myths or the second that they start getting accused of stuff, they're just like, well, now I'm toast. I'm out. Or I don't want to deal with being cross-examined in court or whatever it is.

It's like you're almost certainly not going to go to court anyway. But this is going to get settled. Almost all of them get settled.

Judges do not want to hold a trial. There was a quote from Frederick Nietzsche that helped me through my trial, not trials, like in the sense of difficulties.

Jordan Harbinger: I didn't actually trials and tribulations more like. Yes.

Nick Pell: OK. And the quote is, he who has a why to live for can bear almost anyhow. Yeah.

And there was like nothing I wasn't going to do to be a parent to my son.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. You said that a lot of why men think the cards are stacked against them is based on, like you said, bad or outdated information. Back in the 80s, when parents got divorced, I know from my friends who got divorced in the 80s, it was just everyone was like, oh, OK, so when are you going to see your dad?

It wasn't, oh, who's going to live with their dad? It was I don't even remember any dads in my I knew a lot of divorced kids. Right.

It was the 80s and 90s. They all lived with their mom and they all saw their dad on weekends. And it was just a thing. It was every Friday.

It was like, what are you going to do? I'm going to my dad's. Oh, cool. Yeah.

Because their dad lived near the other person's dad. So it was like, we can hang out. You go to your dad's because it was like, yeah, he lives across town where your dad lives.

It was just there was that whole Friday, like who's going to their dad's. And a bunch of my friends did that. And it would be like, OK, who's going to still be in the neighborhood on Friday night?

This half of the neighborhood's gone. So I've got to hang out with Andy today. That's just how it was. And it seems like that's my whole childhood.

Nick Pell: You know, it's interesting that we were talking about earlier about dads just not wanting to parent their kids post-divorce because all the divorce house kids in my neighborhood growing up, there was never I'm going to dad's. Oh, really? At all?

Never. Yikes. Yeah.

I mean, there was like there was like a crew of like five of us and two of them had divorced parents and the two with divorced parents, one of them, I don't think I ever saw their dad. Oh, yeah. Well, there was some of that.

And the other one, I think, saw him like a couple of times a year. And it was not because they, you know, and I know enough about the situation, it was 100 percent the like, cool, I'm a divorced dad now.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: I don't have to parent anymore. So very real phenomenon.

Jordan Harbinger: There were kids that had stepdads and it was like, I never see your dad at any of these games and stuff. And it was like, oh, he lives in Florida. And it was like, oh, OK.

Like there was a few of those, too. I remember those in the 80s.

Nick Pell: Yeah. I mean, it was the standard in the 80s that mom got the kids, you know, was the change that wasn't men. Yeah.

It was women because I think partly because they were like, my kid needs his dad in his life somehow, even if it's just a couple of weekends a month, my kid needs to see his dad. And I think that, yeah, they were tired of their ex-husbands buying their way out of parenting their children. Yeah.

And they have to take on all this additional responsibility. And you get to write a check and party with girls half your age. I can see how they didn't like that.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. There was a whole doctrine, right? It was like the tender years doctrine.

Yeah. And dual income households, it's obsolete. OK.

Nick Pell: There's no stay at home moms anymore. I mean, there are. But like, how many are there now as compared to when we were kids?

Jordan Harbinger: Sure. Yeah, fewer for sure.

Nick Pell: When we were kids, that's when that started to change. Family courts also got way more professional. So in the 80s and 90s, you start seeing guardians ad litem, evaluators, standardized custody guidelines.

It's not like this vibes based thing where mom usually wins anymore. And then from 2008 to 2020, most family court systems get totally overhauled to the point where, as we're talking about 50-50, it's effectively the law of the land nationwide. Even if we don't call it that, even if there's some pockets where the old ways may still prevail.

Jordan Harbinger: I'd imagine technology also plays a role in this. We're kind of past the days of he said, she said. There's all kinds of ways to document everything.

And those methods just didn't exist prior to the mass adoption of the smartphone. Like now you can get videos of this. You can get a recorded conversation of that.

There's parenting apps where people can do things more easily with one another, where before it was like, OK, we're going to make you meet up with the guy who terrorized your whole family and just hope that everything goes well. It's like, no, no, no. It's all scheduled in the app.

It's filmed in the app. You and I were talking about this offline a couple of days ago. There were some custody cases.

This ended tragically. This was recent. But when they had the drop off, they had to park five parking spaces away or something, and they weren't allowed to talk to each other during the drop off.

I mean, there's this was all arranged by the court, I think. So that couldn't have worked before, because how are you going to document that somebody said something to you in the parking lot? It would have been impossible.

Bring a microcassette recorder. Yeah, exactly.

Nick Pell: Like, you know, maybe something like that. I mean, there was tons of text messages thrown both ways in my divorce. And here's a bit of free legal advice.

If you're going to go to court and talk about what a bad parent your ex-husband is, don't send him text messages saying that he's your kid's hero.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, yeah. It's he he loves you. You're you're his hero.

Oh, yeah. During the and then during the trial, he's terrible. He's an absentee.

Now the judge knows you're lying, which can't be good. I also think that any time a man loses or a woman, for that matter, they're just going to see it as court's bias. I mean, and it might be a mistake, but I assume that any time you get handed something in court that you don't like, it's you're going to default to I got screwed or this is biased.

Nick Pell: My wife is in the woman that I'm currently married to is in a Facebook group where women just gripe about divorce court. OK, and she's in it, you know, for the shit show of it all. Yeah.

Women are no less guilty than the men of thinking that any ruling they don't like is evidence of bias. But divorce court, family court is a really super emotionally raw area, to say the least. I'm sure everyone feels justified.

So when the court says something you don't like, you know, it's not that you didn't understand the law or the law wasn't on your side. You've been cheated in some way. And that's why a lot of these myths still persist, because there's these horror stories about guys usually getting royally screwed in family court, and they have way more staying power than stories like mine.

My divorce was very tough. It was very contentious. It dragged on forever.

It was so emotionally draining. But at the end of the day, I got 50-50 joint custody, 50-50, it's called effective 50-50 parenting, because it's like, OK, well, maybe maybe the calendar works out that somebody gets a day or two more holidays and stuff. But like, yeah, it's called effective 50-50.

And I get child support.

Jordan Harbinger: I know you get child support, but I also know that a lot of listeners are going to be shocked by this, right? Like a man's getting child support. I never heard of that.

Honestly, that sounds antiquated. But when you told me that, I was also kind of surprised.

Nick Pell: She makes way more money than I do. It's a simple mathematical formula. The courts are not there to lecture me on how I need to man up and earn more money.

They run a formula. Everyone gets what's coming to them.

Jordan Harbinger: So let me get this straight. Me not paying you more resulted in you getting a check every month from your ex-wife. You're welcome, Nick.

You're welcome.

Nick Pell: Ah, maybe the craziest thing is, is if me and my current wife have kids, my child support goes up. Wait, how does that work? The child tax credit because my taxable income goes down.

Jordan Harbinger: Is that an Arizona thing? I don't pay any attention to this kind of stuff. I don't do my own finances.

I probably shouldn't admit that. But here we are.

Nick Pell: Every state in the union has a gender neutral formula for calculating child support. OK, wow. Gender neutral laws.

It's coast to coast. So this is another like, oh, I had to pay her child support. Sure.

And it's like, yeah, man, your ex-wife was a stay at home mom for 12 years. And it sucks that you've got to pay her money because she wants a divorce. But if she hasn't worked in 12 years and she has no outside income and you've been busy plugging it away at your career, you just have more earning potential.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: And that's fair. I mean, come on. Yeah, that's fair.

That's not manhating courts. That's a totally reasonable way of doing child support. Parents who have had to put their career on hold should not be expected to have the same earning potential as a mid-career spouse who spent the same period of time focusing on their career.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, exactly. That sounds reasonable, especially given that a stay at home dad is going to have the same expectations. I mean, there's so many more stay at home dads now.

I know a few of them myself. And it's like they were doing some sort of, I don't know, a job that either they had a small company that they stopped working or a job that didn't quite their trajectories change. And their wife is like a partner at a law firm.

Yeah. Okay. Nobody would say that's unfair, right?

The guy has to go back to work. Okay. Well, you've been shelved for 12 years, but yeah, guys will never stop complaining about this.

Nick Pell: No, but it's totally fair. I mean, everybody's working and everybody's focusing on their career, which that happens a lot in marriages too. Like, you know, then it's like, you're just going on people's income.

When the stay at home mom or dad goes back to work, the judge doesn't just go, well, you made $0 for the last 12 years. Uh, guess that's your income. You know, you owe blah, blah, blah.

No, they're going to impute your income. They're going to say, what are you going to do? I'm going to go be a teacher.

Okay. Teachers make in this County. I don't know what a teacher makes, but 50 grand a year. I really don't know.

Yeah. I don't know. I was going to say 50 grand a year, but like in today's dollars, isn't that like what you make from working at McDonald's?

Jordan Harbinger: That's a skeptical Sunday right there too.

Nick Pell: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: I think there's plenty of people that are teachers that probably make a slightly more than somebody working minimum wage, uh, disgustingly.

Nick Pell: Yeah. So they get like, uh, you know, they're going to impute your income to something and then that's like, okay, well you better start making that at least they imputed my income. It was like, it was totally reasonable.

But yeah, I mean, men should just stop rolling over and letting courts take their kids away because they read some story on the internet now for something that won't ruin your life.

Jordan Harbinger: We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Zenni. Jen wore the same glasses for five years.

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Now back to Skeptical Sunday. Social media also has a tendency to amplify the most horrifying anecdotes or concepts in any story. I mean, you see people complain a lot on social media and I personally kind of go, well, what's the rest of this? Where's the rest of the, where's the real details of this story?

Nick Pell: The other thing is, you know, if you're convinced that the system hates men, you're going to constantly find information that confirms this. I was convinced of this. And then I talked to a lawyer who was like, why are you rolling over for your wife? You have PTSD and you use steroids. Like this is not a reason for you to let your wife take your kid from you.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I'm glad someone was able to talk sense to you because yeah, I remember the early days when you were just convinced you were never going to see your kid. And it was really sad and you were super stressed out about it.

And I didn't have any way to sort of assuage your concerns because what do I know? I mean, I'm like a former real estate lawyer from New York, finance guy. Like, I don't know anything about this.

And it just seems like if you're going to buy into that, a lot of people, maybe they never get that wake up call. Okay. So you mentioned that there are some pockets where there might still be a bias against men.

Where are those places and what's the evidence for that?

Nick Pell: Some people say the Bay Area in California, parts of Massachusetts and Cook County, Illinois, which is where Chicago is, parts of downstate New York. But this is all totally anecdotal. I couldn't find any like evidence for it, but it would be it would be hard to gather data about that.

But that's kind of like people who concede that there are places where men may be getting a raw deal still who aren't lunatics are like, oh yeah, these are the places.

Jordan Harbinger: Surprised the Bay Area, this place is pretty woke. Yeah, I'm pretty surprised that it's anti-father as far as the courtroom is concerned, I guess. But again, data, citations needed.

Nick Pell: Yeah, citations are definitely needed on that. Massachusetts has some like dad unfriendly laws, but I like couldn't find out what specifically they were supposed to be. It could be court rules or I don't know.

I couldn't find anything. But that's I see. That's what I read on lawyers' websites, basically.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Or it's scare propaganda to get people to hire an attorney that wrote the copy on that website because, yeah, if the stats don't bear that out, that's different. So you had to get a custody evaluation.

But I remember you were you were also surprisingly unworried about that. What would you say to somebody who has to deal with a custody evaluation? First of all, what is a custody evaluation?

Nick Pell: Custody evaluation is when a custody evaluator evaluates whether or not you can have custody.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So this is like a social worker that comes over and says your house is dangerous. There's holes in the floor and dirty needles everywhere.

You can't have your kids.

Nick Pell: Oh, no, no, no, no. This is a forensic psychiatrist who's going to conduct all kinds of interviews. OK, they're talking to you.

There may be talking to witnesses and some of them, I think, probably will say whatever the person cutting the check wants them to say. They're not cheap. Twenty grand to get started.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Twenty grand. That's got to be an insanely involved process.

Either that or those people make a truckload of money doing this. And I don't really believe that that's possible. I don't think so.

Nick Pell: The forensic psychs, which in at least in Arizona, that's the only type of psychiatrist who can testify in court as an expert witness. So it's like kind of a red flag when my ex wanted my kid to see a forensic psychiatrist for alleged mental health problems. That was two hours away.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So what exactly is a forensic psychiatrist? What are they doing?

Nick Pell: Forensics. They do tons of interviews, psychological evaluations. Their home visits are part of it.

And they just kind of see how all the pieces fit together. So if there are inconsistencies, that's generally going to be a much bigger deal than just being honest about, yeah, you know, I did and said some things at the end of my marriage that I wasn't very proud of, you know?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I thought this was just a social worker who showed up to the house to make sure, yeah, again, it's not full of cockroaches with loaded guns on the table or something.

Nick Pell: The first person my ex-wife wanted to evaluate did have the reputation of being a hatchet man for hire.

Jordan Harbinger: Whoa. So how did you get out of having a hostile evaluator? We told them to pick somebody else.

Oh, really? So it's that simple?

Nick Pell: Yeah. You have to agree on the evaluator. And, you know, if it's not obvious, you can't just say no to everybody that they suggest.

Sure. Yeah. On the other hand, your opposing counsel doesn't just get to pull whoever they want out of their behind and force you to be evaluated by them.

I do think her attorneys thought that the evaluator we ended up using was going to be on her side. But you know what? She wasn't.

She was super fair at absolutely no point that I feel like she was out to get me. I didn't feel like there was any gotcha stuff, anything like that. The sense I got was that she had seen kids in actually dangerous situations and recognized pretty quickly that my kid was not in a dangerous situation and then went through the process of verifying that for the courts, which is her job.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes, exactly. So how did your evaluation turn out?

Nick Pell: It was kind of one of several examples of my ex-wife backing out when she realized that I wasn't scared. But I think that's also a tactic that gets used a lot in family court. Oh, you're going to have an evaluator.

And then the people, probably more often the guy, panics and just goes, well, I'll agree to whatever. I can't deal with that. And it's like I had nothing to worry about.

It was a bluff anyway, but I went along with it because I kind of didn't have a choice. My lawyer was just like, you have nothing to worry about.

Jordan Harbinger: You were stressed, though. I remember you texting me and being like, this is happening. Is that coming over?

And I was like, oh, OK. So and I was worried for you because I don't know. I don't know anything about this.

Like, oh, he lives in a trailer. She's going to say that the kids can't live here.

Nick Pell: The trailer, I did. I lived in an RV, like on a five acres desert.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Not on the side of a road near a park or like a houseless person. Yeah, no, I know. But still, like, I'd be nervous about something like that. My lawyer wasn't. Well, she knows what's going on.

Nick Pell: Right. We don't know. And definitely at first I was a little spooked by it.

But the more like the more I got into reading about it and people's experiences with it. And again, like I didn't live in a mobile meth lab. I lived in a tiny house.

Basically, I had so much solar. I had air conditioning, running water and septic. Yeah.

Well, didn't you have an illegal septic?

Jordan Harbinger: I guess that doesn't preclude you from having kids.

Nick Pell: I did have an illegal septic and it does not. Yeah. Like it's like this is Arizona.

Do you know how many people in the in the county I live in have unpermitted septic tanks and all kinds of like bizarre, jerry rigged electrical systems going on in their house? Like like this was not going to be like an issue. Or maybe, but I would be like I would have been shocked.

Tons of people in Arizona live in in RVs and off grid houses. And, you know, there's definitely like sticks and bricks homes, traditional homes that are worse environments for children than my RV was. Yeah.

But the home visit was going to be in my house that I live in now, which is I see a normal house.

Jordan Harbinger: So your ex-wife, she just dropped the evaluation. Why? Because she did she run out of money?

I know this is super expensive. The whole thing was expensive.

Nick Pell: She kind of routinely would make these big and expensive moves and just expect me to fold. And and then she would back down when I didn't, because you didn't want to actually spend the money on it.

By the time the home visit came, she was actually pretty eager to settle. And me and my attorney initially insisted that the evaluation continue because we felt it was going fine. And we wanted the evaluators report to use later on. And also we just kind of wanted to bleed her.

Jordan Harbinger: Your attorney sounds clever and maybe a little nasty, which is a compliment, I suppose.

Nick Pell: Yeah, man, I had a soulless ginger homework kid as a lawyer. She was definitely the girl in like fifth grade with multicolored highlighters, you know?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: She had an insane evaluator come back in a case she was working on where they asked for the evaluation. And she was like, she kind of told the lady, like, this is stupid. This evaluator is not going to do anything.

And then the evaluator came back and was like, this guy can only have supervised visitation. We're going to throw cameras in his house. Oh, my God.

She was just like, just settle this and get on with your life.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Don't risk having somebody kooky who's having a bad day install cameras in your RV. So I'm shocked that that's even a thing, by the way.

Is that real? Yes. Wow.

Nick Pell: That's what they did to that guy. So I thought there was about a zero percent chance of a negative evaluation coming back. Yeah.

But about zero and zero are not the same. Not the same thing. No, that's true.

And I love the idea of having to continue having to pay for this far. So it is like the woman's going to get paid to drive like four hours one way to come through the evaluation and all kinds of other stuff. But anyway, yeah, like to me, it was it was like, OK, I kind of want to get on with my life and I hate having strangers in my home.

So my attorney was her biggest concern was that I was going to get small town. What's that? Like my wife was going to hire a lawyer who plays golf with the judge.

And I see. I don't even think that would have mattered. But she's practices down in Phoenix.

And if she's seen it before, then it happens. So sure. But this guy, I doubt it.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm sure there's places where there's a good old boys network or a legal culture of old school judges who stick to the old ways. But there's there's no it sounds like there's no systematic nationwide effort to screw dads out of their kids.

Nick Pell: There's no evidence for it anyway. I mean, the people out there making life hell for other people in family court. It's not the system.

It's lawyers. There's tons of people out there who get a straight talking lawyer who gives them the lay of the land. And it's not what they want to hear.

So they go attorney shopping and the new attorneys like, oh, yeah, you got this. We just got to fight it really hard. It's going to be a lot of money, but you're definitely going to get it at the end.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. There's always a lawyer. I mean, I speak from experience, unfortunately, here from the inside and the outside.

There's always a lawyer willing to bill you for work that does not necessarily need to be done at all. I know. In fact, I'm going through this right now.

I can't say the matter. It's not important. It's nothing juicy or interesting.

But there is a lawyer who's like, look, I'll flat fee this for you for twelve grand and I'll give you a payment plan. In fact, I'm feeling generous. Let me cut it down to this and give you a better payment plan.

And then I called another lawyer who I know. And I was like, hey, let me sanity check this. And he goes, oh, you don't even need to hire a lawyer for this.

Here's what's going to happen. Here's your worst case scenario. It's going to be less than my retainer.

And I was like, oh, no wonder that guy was so keen on giving me a nice sweetheart deal on a payment plan. He doesn't have to do anything. Right.

And so I look, I know a guy who spent two years in court over custody. He was the petitioner. The respondent fired their lawyer early on because they didn't like what the lawyer was telling them.

And the respondent then hired a lawyer who basically said, look, you need two lawyers. Also, you need a ten thousand dollar deposition. Also, you need the most invasive financial disclosure his accountants ever seen in 20 years of practice.

And this case ended up being settled for an almost identical settlement that was proposed by the original attorney. All of this sound and fury. It was basically just an excuse to bill an insane amount of money.

And the case could have been settled in a couple of months for a few grand. Instead, it was a six figure divorce dragged out over two years, which is actually not only unethical, but like psychopathic because you're putting someone through hell and you're draining their money for an extended period of time. Just find more clients, bro.

Like, that's how I think as an intern. Anyway, do we know how much money is wrapped up in the divorce industry as a whole?

Nick Pell: About 50 billion dollars a year.

Jordan Harbinger: That's way more than I thought. Holy smokes.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Some people are making a lot of money off of divorces, dragging on for as long as they possibly can. And it ate the judges.

Jordan Harbinger: No. Oh, my God. Well, I would look, I would imagine any motivated lawyer who's a little bit crooked.

And those are so hard to find. Yeah. They could turn they could turn a 10 hour case into a 150 hour case pretty easily.

Right. Emotions are running high. It's really easy to stoke and inflame that you find some irrelevant irritation.

You turn it into a cause for being unreasonable. You fight for some maximal case lost cause. You know, we should be able to do this and then they're really going to hurt.

And it's only going to be 10 grand. Oh, sorry. I'm at 60 grand.

Oh, sorry. But that doesn't include my fees. Right.

It's just one thing after another sunk cost fallacy. And soon your client is broke. It's it's icky.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Tons of cases get dragged way past their sell by date because some shady lawyer gets the ear of one of the litigants and milks them for everything they're worth. Exactly.

And they don't deliver anything of value. And there's no way around that. You know, it sucks, but people are allowed to pursue legal remedies in court to their own satisfaction.

And I'm sure lawyers know how to stay just on the right side of that line legally. Yes. Where they're not, you know, like between you and me, I can't offer you a big cash settlement, but I'm offering you a big cash settlement.

Sure. Courts have a responsibility to hear those people out. It's your right to pursue this in court.

That's the flip side of it. Even if you're arguing past the law. And it's not always selfishness that drives that.

It could be fear. You think, you know, if I don't fight for something huge, you're going to lose everything. Or you walk in with an inflated sense of expectations and the lawyer tells the person you're just not going to get that.

Jordan Harbinger: But the client doesn't care. Client management is a bit that's an art unto itself. Right.

You've got to figure out, am I dealing with a reasonable person or am I dealing with somebody who's never heard the word no and is willing to just pay for the privilege until the judge tells them? A good lawyer will be like, how do we settle this super quickly so that both parties are just slightly unhappy? Because you're not going to get both parties being happy.

That's a that's that happens once in your career or something. But you're going to you're going to have it where both parties are only slightly unhappy and one side doesn't get actively roasted or both sides are totally screwed. The best case scenario for a divorce like this is both sides are only slightly unhappy.

Nick Pell: I was super happy with my final settlement. Like the process itself was a nightmare. Yes.

But the settlement, I was like, hell yeah. My lawyer told me one of the reasons things turned out so well for me is because I always listened to her. There was one time where I overruled her and it was it was the right move.

And she told me, well, this is a gamble, but it could work. But if she'd said absolutely not, this is the stupidest idea you've ever had. I wouldn't have told her to do it.

Jordan Harbinger: She gave you an honest evaluation of whether or not this dice roll was likely to end up neutral or positive. Right. As opposed to saying, yeah, so that's fair.

Look, if there's a if there's a villain in family court, it's not anti father bias. It's billable hours. So, OK, who wants to actively roll things back to the days before equal parenting rights?

You kind of touched on this on the top of the show. I mean, the equal parenting rights thing, it just seems like a no brainer to me, especially in an era where men and women both have jobs outside the home a lot of the time. Both share, at least in theory, something resembling equal parenting responsibility.

I know a lot of women are like, ha, a lot of men are probably like that, too. I think a lot of guys are, too. Yeah, I think.

But back compared to back in the day where guys would be like, I never changed a single diaper, puffs on cigar. It's not really like that anymore. I don't know any guys like that anymore that are under the age of 60.

Nick Pell: So the main driver behind this movement is a woman named Tina Swithin. She runs a website called One Mom's Battle. The short version is that this movement wants to begin treating all allegations as true and valid until proven otherwise.

They want to limit custody for men and I suppose women, too. But it mostly seems it seems very, very focused on men who are accused of abuse, you know, of course, for the safety of the children.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, well, that's not how any of this works. There's a million problems with that. By the way, does anyone do you find it weird that there are divorce influencers?

Because that's essentially what this person is, right? She's like an influencer of the divorce category. That's bizarre to me, but I guess it makes sense.

Nick Pell: I find it weird because she's trying to change the law to something I find retrograde. But the idea of there being somebody on TikTok that you can turn to who's just going to be like, it's OK, your life's not over. This is what divorce court actually looks like.

The woman, the advocate, like she does some kind of stuff from the other side. Is she an attorney? No, she's not.

Oh, OK. But yeah, if they're an attorney, that makes a lot more sense. Kind of yes, kind of no.

Influencers in general are just weird to me.

Jordan Harbinger: I know it's bizarre, but I get it. If a guy loves Legos and he's a Lego influencer, but a divorce influencer, this is not something I would want to make my entire personality. You know, like once mine is over, I'd be like, OK, I've got 18 months where I'm willing to talk about this and then I want to freaking move on.

Maybe not even 18, maybe six.

Nick Pell: Anyway, the problem with Tina Swithin and this kind of like family court reform stuff is this is turning a thousand years of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence on its head. You are innocent until proven guilty. Accusations are not evidence.

And you know what? The evidentiary bar in family court is already on the ground. It is not a criminal court.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, yeah. You can invoke those rules of evidence, but most people don't.

Nick Pell: You know, it's just a you don't have to prove things necessarily beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt in family court. You don't need chain of evidence, any of this stuff. But our system is built on the principle that it's genuinely better for a hundred guilty men to go free than it is for one innocent man to serve a day in prison.

And I think that that's correct.

Jordan Harbinger: Even a part-time Coke dealer can afford to support our sponsors. We'll be right back. Thank you so much for listening to and supporting the show.

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Now, for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. Here, we're not talking about putting people in prison. We're talking about protecting kids from potentially dangerous adults.

But then again, we're also talking about depriving those adults of their parenting rights and the rights to see their kids.

Nick Pell: So there's this one case in Utah, which is an absolute tragedy, but it was the engine for kind of the one big victory, this euphemistically named movement, family court reform. A 16 year old was murdered by her abusive father. Yeah, that's terrible.

Yes, it is. But the thing is, I'm not really sure what the law they passed is trying to accomplish or does accomplish. A couple of months ago, you brought this up earlier because we talked about it in private conversation.

There was a maybe a month ago, a mom murdered her child, which after the law was enacted, this was the one where they had to park five spots apart.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes.

Nick Pell: You know, so I don't know what it's doing or is supposed to do that isn't already in place.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it's insane to me that people do this. I just cannot put myself into the headspace where killing yourself or your kid is the reasonable choice to deprive the other parent of custody. I mean, holy cow.

Nick Pell: Yeah. And like the new law, you know, I don't want to use this one tragic incident is like, well, see, it did nothing.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. Of course.

Nick Pell: Do anything.

Jordan Harbinger: Right.

Nick Pell: But the new law, when you look at it, it doesn't do much. It says that the child safety has to be the first priority. And it already is.

Yes. It raised evidentiary standards, which does not help the where there's smoke, there's fire crowd, which is what a lot of this is based on. It limited court ordered reunification, which they're opposed to that.

I don't know what limited means. I'm not a lawyer, but yeah, well, that could mean anything. Yes.

Could mean anything, everything and nothing all at the same time. And it defunded reunification camps.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Why does that sound terrible? I mean, anything with camps in the names sounds really sus.

That is bizarre.

Nick Pell: Yeah. They make kids go to these camps where people force them to reunify with their parents. And I can see situations where like court mandated family therapy is maybe appropriate to heal breaches between parents and kids.

I don't think taxpayers should be paying for it. And I really don't think that we should be sending kids to camps for it.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that is weird. OK, but in some cases, the kids are hostile toward the parents with good reason, not because mom or dad poisoned them against the other one.

Nick Pell: No, absolutely. Sometimes kids hate their parents for good reasons. I hate my parents.

I'm sympathetic to kids with shitty parents, very, very sympathetic to kids who have shitty parents and don't want to be around them. And I think that, yeah, around 12, 13, 14, they should have some kind of influence over where they're going to spend most of their time. But the law, you know, it also includes like obligatory training and education, which the judges probably take about as seriously as I would take diversity training at work like fire up those angry emails, folks.

Jordan Harbinger: OK, so all of this sounds totally reasonable to me. Do you have any issue with it? I mean, aside from the camps?

Nick Pell: No. Yeah, the camps seem a little yucky, but no. And I'm like opposed to this movement.

And I read the law. I didn't get like deep into the weeds on it because I'm not a lawyer, but it sounds so benign. Sounds like it throws a bone to really loud activists.

Does precisely nothing of substance other than defunding these camps. And I'm absolutely for doing that. And there's a federal version called Caden's Law.

Jordan Harbinger: OK, so what is the issue then with these activists, Tina Swithin and others and family court reform? Because it can't be, oh, they passed one law and it doesn't matter.

Nick Pell: Well, there's a lot to get into here. First of all, Swithin completely denies the concept of parental alienation. This is you talked earlier about one parent poisoning a kid against the other parent.

And they use this to usurp parental rights, such as involving enrolling your kid in therapy without informing the other parent. That is a usurpation of parental rights. If you're using the therapy as a cudgel against the other parent, that's another layer to that.

But if you're communicating with teachers or other caregivers in a way that's hostile and disparaging to the other parent. Yeah, that is parental alienation. All of this is totally real, totally happens and totally is not good for the kids.

Yes. Yeah, of course. Which is who we're supposed to care about.

Are there abusive men who weaponize accusations of parental alienation to deflect from their behavior? Yes, I'm absolutely sure that's a thing. Absolutely sure that happens.

But that does not mean that parental alienation does not exist. It absolutely does.

Jordan Harbinger: What else?

Nick Pell: There's a kind of persistent narrative with the swiveling crowd where my ex-husband is an abusive narcissist, which here's another bit of free legal advice. Absolutely do not accuse your ex of this in court because your judge hears this 50 times a day. This is like the go to, you know, attempt to slander somebody in family court.

They just sure they do not want to hear you use these words at all. Even if you have a serious case, they're going to take you much less seriously if that's how you frame it. So you need to document specifics if that's the reality.

The Swithin thing kind of creates this frame where women and it's almost always women, at least in this milieu, they're the hapless victims and men are evil monsters.

Jordan Harbinger: It couldn't possibly be that people who are in failing marriages that are disintegrating behave badly.

Nick Pell: Well, that's pretty much it. I mean, I think almost everyone whose marriage is falling apart says and does things they regret. People who are about to get divorced treat each other like shit for the most part.

And you know what? That's not OK. No, it's the reality of it.

And the judges generally, as I said, you know, he's not going to be shocked by your divorce. There's a movement that wants to expand the meaning of abuse to something called coercive control, which we don't have the time to fully explain. This is a highly controversial concept. It's not some kind of settled science thing. But the family court reform does want to enshrine it into law.

Jordan Harbinger: I think maybe something that needs to be said is that the purpose of family court is to find a solution that is good for the kids. It's not supposed to be a place where two people who hate each other get to drag each other through the mud for kicks or because they're high on righteous indignation.

Nick Pell: Yes, Swithin has also inserted herself into custody paddles, defending parents who defy court orders in ways that are really problematic. She's being sued for defamation by a father. There's a really good deep dive into her from a woman named Christina Short, who goes by Weaponized Stepmom. It's in the show notes. It's a good read if you really want to get deep into the weeds on the Swithin thing. We just don't have the time.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I mean, also, there's a lot going on with this whole topic. That link will be in the show.

Anyway, with all this said, why do you think more people don't enter into mediation? Because if you really just want out of the marriage and you want to bypass this crazy adversarial nature, family court system, it just seems like that's a good way to do this.

Nick Pell: I tried this. I tried this at first with the Orritt Center for Divorce Mediation. It was a nightmare.

This particular place has some kind of cachet is like the place you go to mediate your divorce, which it absolutely is not. Do not go there. It was a nightmare.

Two different attorneys advised me that the mediator, Michael Orritt, was clearly biased against me. And they both used that exact phrase. And that's when I pulled out.

Second, what I told me was the lawyer that I hired. I went out of my way to not poison the well with my lawyers. The lawyers I spoke to about this, they were just like, get out of there.

We did end up using a mediator at the end to settle our divorce. And she was great. She did not have good things to say about this place.

And I mentioned it specifically because if you Google, you know, mediated divorce, a lot of times they're going to be the first thing that comes up.

Jordan Harbinger: But is mediation itself bad? Because it seems like, you know, you had a bad experience, but not everyone's going to have that.

Nick Pell: Well, again, I would caution people against this particular mediator. But my divorce ultimately ended in mediation. Oh, wow.

Jordan Harbinger: After all that. Oh, my God.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Yeah. No, I know. I know.

If you want to mediate a divorce, you call a lawyer, you tell them you want to mediate a divorce. If they seem hesitant to do it, you go find another lawyer who isn't.

There's no special process for mediated divorce. A mediated divorce is when two lawyers hash out the details so everyone can get over this quickly and get on with their lives with minimal damage. The lawyers look at things amicably.

They try to get a resolution everyone can live with quickly. And then final details get hammered out by a mediator. Or it was kind of like overpriced therapy with paperwork.

When we saw the real mediator at the end, we were never even in the same room together.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. Wow. Because you don't you don't need to be.

So do you have any advice for people who are going through a divorce or might do so later?

Nick Pell: You need a lawyer up fast. Do not assume that your your spouse is going to be reasonable. My biggest mistake was I was very naive about how easy the process would be if you want to have a cooperative divorce, which is kind of the better term for mediated divorce.

That's fine. Get a lawyer and tell your lawyer that if they don't want to do it, go find one who does. You need to document everything you can.

You never know what might be helpful later. Be involved in your kid's life. Do not get emotional when communicating.

I know that that can be super hard, but you need to be BIF, which means brief. Informative, factual and firm.

Jordan Harbinger: Fathers regularly get 50-50 custody of their kids, even when it's not what mom wants. You've got to show up and oftentimes jump through a lot of flaming hoops to make it happen. But that's just the nature of getting divorced.

Every court in America is, at least in theory, gender neutral. With that said, there can be variations from state to state and county to county. The best thing to do is consult with an attorney who can give you the lay of the land.

There are some people who want to turn back the clock, and these efforts should be scrutinized heavily. Remember, nearly everyone thinks their ex is a total jerk at the time of divorce. That's not evidence of anything.

And all things being equal, it's better for kids to have involved and invested parents. Some people are bad spouses, but excellent parents, mediocre parents, and even the occasional Coke dealer deserve to see their kids too. The problem today isn't that dads have no rights.

It's that it's all too easy for stubborn clients or greedy lawyers to drag out what should be a relatively simple divorce. The main thing for everyone is just to stay calm and pretend to be the adults that the courts want you to be. Thanks again to Nick Pell for helping us achieve full legal custody of the nuances here.

And thank you all for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me, Jordan at jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals.

I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show is created in association with PodcastOne.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Tadas Sidlauskas, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own. And I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer.

Also, and I was a real estate lawyer. Don't listen to me about anything. Also, we try to get these as right as we can.

Not everything is gospel, even if it's fact checked. Consult a qualified professional before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and well-being. Remember, we rise by lifting others.

Share the show with those you love. If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism. And knowledge we doled out today.

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time. You may think you don't have an accent, which is exactly what your accent wants you to think.

Every voice carries clues about class, identity, and belonging, and why what sounds intelligent, trustworthy, or normal often has more to do with power and familiarity than language itself.

Guest: Every person has an accent. But what really is driving our attitudes towards what's a beautiful language and what's not is our familiarity with that language. So the more familiar a language is or an accent is, the more we tend to like it, but also our beliefs about the speakers of those languages.

And that is like 50% of what drives our attitudes towards language. When we're talking about someone speaking a different dialect, what we're talking about is that they're using differences at many levels of linguistics, not just sound. So they're saying syntactic or sentence structure differences.

They might be adding different endings or deleting endings. That's morphology. They might be using different vocabularies, but an accent refers to only differences at the level of sound.

So when we're attending to accents, we're attending to sound differences. And with that general description of the difference, it shows you there are so many different things you have to learn when you're learning a new language. There is more cognitive processing power when you hear a foreign accent.

You have to recruit more neurons to unpack what you're hearing because it's less familiar. So you are exerting more processing effort. A lot of people actually experience that as something more difficult and unpleasant.

But in other contexts where paying attention is important, it probably actually does help you. But you are actually using more processing power. Here's a great piece of evidence as to how much our speech says about us without us being aware of it.

Jordan Harbinger: Listen to linguist Valerie Friedland on episode 1349, and you may never hear anyone, including yourself, the same way ever again.