Shooting the Messenger: The Character Assassination of Dr. Richard Gardner

As the science behind parental alienation grows increasingly irrefutable, bad actor activists resort to attacking the reputations of the researchers shining light on the darkness

Photo by Thomas Kinto on Unsplash

We all know the old maxim “don’t shoot the messenger.” Sadly, when it comes to many critics of the concept of parental alienation, it’s as if they got the memo, then set it ablaze.

Bereft of good arguments against the concept itself, they resort to loathsome character assassination—or, reputation savagery, as Greg Ellis puts it in his book, The Respondent. They engage in this behavior precisely because parental alienation is such a powerfully helpful and accurate concept for understanding the difficult psychology that can descend when so many parents and children struggle with the loss of some or all of their time together.

Parental alienation critics’ latest target is none other than the person they see as one of the originators of the concept, Dr. Richard Gardner. Their shocking ad hominem attacks are beyond the pale for many reasons, not least of which is Dr. Gardner passed on 20 years ago.

Dr. Gardner was a child psychiatrist who published more than 41 books and more than 200 professional journal articles and book chapters. He was a world-renowned expert on parental alienation and published over a dozen articles on the topic in peer-reviewed journals. While he was the first person to coin the term “parental alienation syndrome,” what we refer to today as parental alienation has been documented in case law for hundreds of years, and it has been discussed in professional mental health literature for more than 70 years.

Recently, critics have disingenuously evaluated his work and concluded he was a pedophile, perhaps the worst accusation one can level against another human being. What are these accusations based on? Was Gardner ever arrested or charged with pedophilia? Is there any evidence that he harbored such ideas? No.

Several critics of parental alienation (e.g., Jennifer Hoult and Joan Meier) have written opinions claiming Dr. Gardner was of the opinion that pedophilia and incest are not child abuse. This contention is patently untrue. In reality, as a custody evaluator for high-conflict custody cases, Dr. Gardner wrote frequently about the insidious issue of false allegations of sexual abuse and about those whose lives were destroyed after being convicted of sex crimes they did not commit. One only needs to consult with registries of criminal exonerations to understand the issue Dr. Gardner was working to fix.

So, lacking any real evidence, critics have taken assertions and opinions from Gardner’s work completely out of context and distorted them beyond recognition, then colored them with their own nefarious impressions. It’s a dirty trick, and hard to uncover without referring back to Gardner’s original work. Even more concerning is how Dr. Gardner’s writings have been translated into other languages and then used to affect law and policy. The Global Action for Research Integrity in Parental Alienation has identified several clear examples of how Dr. Gardner’s words have not only been translated poorly, but reworded entirely to communicate something completely different than the source material.

To illustrate, here’s a quotation from a 2014 book published by Castañer and colleagues for the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation of Mexico, contrasted with what was originally written by Gardner.

What Castañer et al. (2014) claimed Gardner wrote:

“The child must be helped to understand that in our society we have an exaggeratedly punitive and moralistic attitude towards sexual abuse of children.”

What Gardner actually wrote:

“Some pedophiles are psychopathic and have little if any guilt over their molestation of children…such fathers may rationalize that pedophilia is an ancient tradition, a worldwide practice, and that there is nothing at all to be guilty about. Such fathers have to be helped to appreciate that while what they say on this point is true, this does not justify the practice in our society.”

As you can see, the Castañer et al.  quote is a far cry from the original. Not only is it not at all what Gardner wrote, it is phrased in a way to make it appear Gardner condoned pedophilia, which he clearly did not.  

The treatment of Dr. Gardner is just one egregious example of many. In a related bit of bad behavior, the Wikipedia entry for parental alienation is also guilty of citing over eight bibliographic references that are misquoted or plagiarized. Despite efforts to correct this misinformation by parental alienation scientists and practitioners, activists constantly change the text back to the misinformation. Given that some judges rely on Wikipedia when writing their legal decisions, and that the misinformation is published in books intended to inform law and policy, this problem is most disturbing.

As an expert on parental alienation, I am constantly amazed at this gross misinformation and science denial communicated by critics of the problem. My colleagues and I have been publishing research the last few years soundly refuting claims that it’s “psuedoscience” that should be “inadmissible” in court.

Even so, I must watch scholars and professionals working with families affected by parental alienation forced to deal with disingenuous critics mischaracterizing parental alienation as nothing more than a crafty legal defense used by “abusive” fathers, even as claims by mothers of domestic violence are discredited by the court or custody evaluators. And even as their counter-arguments remain unsupported and are increasingly refuted with scientific evidence that proves, among other things, that mothers are more likely to get sole custody of children when they claim to be victims of domestic violence, and so have clear incentive to stretch the truth or outright lie in court.

It’s one thing for desperate parents to stoop to this level when being squeezed emotionally in the family law pressure cooker. It’s quite another for activists and professionals in the system (often one and the same) to promote or engage in this abhorrent behavior. Unfortunately, they do it because it works. Ad hominem attacks against scientists are just as effective at undermining people’s confidence in their ideas than through direct attacks of the empirical merits of the work itself. If you can’t beat them with facts, try shameful distortion.

Dr. Gardner is no longer alive to defend himself against the constant attacks against him. And so it falls to us to clearly identify this blatant denial of science, and focus attention back on education, prevention, intervention, and treatment for this devastating public health problem.