Fate is fickle.
A simple, three-word cliché́ that describes the fragility of our lives and the speed with which everything we think is real can become an illusion. Before March 5, 2015, this simple truth was little more than a philosophical abstraction for me. I appreciated its implications. But I’d never experienced it, never endured a dramatic and unforeseen shift in fortune that I could not navigate—until that fateful day seven years ago…
I was, on March 4, 2015, a successful actor and producer living in an expansive Hollywood home with my wife of 20 years and two young sons I adored. But in the span of the ensuing 24 hours, I was ushered from my home in handcuffs, at the behest I later discovered of my ex-wife, incarcerated (the first of five incarcerations), subjected to a temporary restraining order in Divorce Court based on a false allegation, became instantly homeless and almost destitute overnight, and watched helplessly as my sons lost their father for half their childhoods.
In crossing the legal rubicon from citizen to respondent, I migrated from a world of presumed innocence and respected privacy to one of assumed guilt and immediate and ruthless judgment. A dystopian reality that, unbeknownst to me before my personal odyssey, hundreds of thousands of partners and parents, decent law-abiding citizens across America have been enduring for decades.
My experience in the family law system stoked not just anxiety and suffering—though plenty of that—but also deep curiosity. I wanted to understand the nature of this legal artifice, the one that rips 4,000 children from their parents every day, shattering families and rending the very fabric of American society. The United States of America is in the grips of a societal epidemic that rages in plain sight and yet remains invisible to so many.