EXPERT WITNESS: Silence is deadly

By Michael G. Brock

This is the introduction to a new book I just finished writing called, “False Accusations of Abuse: Fighting Back!” It is available in hard copy or PDF by contacting me @ michaelgbrock@comcast.net.

Alan Bloom stated in his 1987 landmark book, “The Closing of the American Mind,” “It may well be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself.”1 At some point in the future—if there is a future, and I’m not entirely sure there is one—Americans will look back on this period of mass incarceration, name it and shame it, #me too, fire a professor for asking to get out of the elevator in ladies lingerie, prosecute and incarcerate any man accused of sexual abuse no matter how clear the motive to lie or coach, or how improbable or impossible the allegation, and see it for this madness that it is.

After the wrongful prosecution and incarceration of many innocent people on wildly fantastic allegations coerced from children by zealous mothers, therapists, and prosecutors who were totally lacking in understanding during the daycare “Child Terrors”2 of the late 1980s, it looked for a while like we were going to get through this little blip in our history and move on. Thirty years and thousands of ruined lives later it is clear that we are not finished—the daycare hysteria was only the beginning.
What made me hopeful was that science had given us a way to discern the truth—the forensic interview. But what is completely baffling to me is that the same evidence is being produced by same improper therapeutic techniques, and that judges, prosecutors and family court lawyers are still offering and accepting this completely-devoid-of-due-process nonsense as evidence in a court of law. I was told once by Debra Poole, author of Michigan’s Forensic Interviewing Protocol, that “Nobody gets this stuff.”

In fact, nobody wants to get this stuff because it doesn’t suit their short term interests and to hell with the lives it destroys as long as it serves their purpose of punishing the child molesters lurking behind every bush, and getting the public’s vote for being tough on crime. Forget the fact that in most cases there is no crime and the only victims are the victims of the Prison Industrial Complex. Forget the fact that America is dying a slow death by a thousand cuts, and that even though there is a scientific way to interview a child, nobody is using it because it is not expedient. Forget the fact that those who determine what constitutes good evidence are biased parties with a dog in the fight—namely prosecutors, who make points by racking up as many convictions as possible.

Why doesn’t America see this? Why has it been going on for over thirty years, (probably longer, since the passing of the Mondale act made it profitable in 1974) without the public seeing it for what it is? The answers are many: 24/7 propaganda, the political correctness that makes it a fireable offense to speak out, and the fact that this is murder by court, one person—husband, son, father, brother—at a time, done in an orderly manner and no one has to see it, much like the Germans didn’t have to see their neighbors being shipped off to the concentration camps during World War II. Besides, the Roman Circus of professional sports and reality TV is more interesting—until it hits you, and then it is too late. It is usually after there has been a trial and conviction that someone writes to tell me they read an obscure article of mine in an online publication and that I was absolutely right about everything I said. Then they want to know what they can do to help their loved one. But then it is usually too late.

It is hard enough to win a false allegation case if you have a fair judge, a good lawyer who is informed on the issue of proper interviewing techniques, and a competent expert who can explain it to the judge and jury. To win on appeal is a far longer shot and rarely successful. The time to find out about this issue is before you need the information. Every male going off to college needs to understand that Obama took away his due process rights with the “Dear Colleague Letter of 2011.”3 Never heard of it? Too bad, ignorance of presidential decree is no excuse. And the colleges are too concerned about keeping their funding to worry about giving you a fair trial by ordeal without benefit of counsel, reasonable standard of proof, or presumption of innocence. The last one is the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public. Presumed innocent? How many defendants do you think are actually acquitted, even in criminal court, where the standard is supposed to be beyond a reasonable doubt? Guess again.

Any lawyer who doesn’t know these things doesn’t deserve to be in practice. Any judge who doesn’t know it doesn’t deserve to be on the bench. That puts many lawyers and judges out of work. But what do they care? They are the ones who get to decide what constitutes good science, and do you know how they do it? They decide based on politics and what they see on television. Seriously. I recently sent an email to a chief judge about a presentation he gave. I was concerned about a statement he made that he was instituting a program of trauma assessment, a therapeutic technique, for forensic purposes. I explained to him that forensic procedures aimed at providing evidence in a court of law need to follow principles of due process, and that there were no safeguards that such procedures would be followed with therapeutic techniques. Therefore, any therapeutic technique used for evidentiary purposes is fundamentally junk science.

He wrote back, “We use trauma screening in our neglect and abuse cases to provide therapy that is needed. This is not junk science but is based on the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACES). It is widely recognized as a valid basis for identifying trauma experienced by children. Last Sunday evening this was a topic covered by 60 Minutes where the ACES program was used to identify and treat children suffering from trauma in Milwaukee.”

The ACES4 is a survey that has nothing to do with forensic investigation and has no place in a court of law. Why should I have to explain this stuff to a chief judge? I understand having to explain it to a jury of laypeople, but the idea that lawyers and judges still don’t know the scientific basis for the evidence in court baffles me. Children are vulnerable and suggestible, amenable to coaching, and not only do they lie about important matters, but often for trivial reasons. Moreover, therapy process goes against fundamental rules of due process and the constitutional right to a fair trial, and this should be obvious to legal professionals if they gave it any thought.

I want to ask legal professionals who think therapy is a good vehicle for obtaining evidence how they would feel about me counseling their child for months without their knowledge or consent, based on a presumption that they had molested the child, and then going into court to recommend that parenting time be discontinued until we had finished getting the necessary information from the child and their ex-spouse who hates them and wants to see them dead, so we can then violate all mental health ethics codes and give testimony in a court of law based on this forensically invalid and inevitably biased information, which we shall then call evidence. Somehow, I don’t think many of them would go for it.

What’s more, these people pull numbers out of the air and call it a study: “A first step in preventing violence is better understanding its magnitude, nature, and consequences. Violence against Children Surveys, led by CDC as part of the Together for Girls partnership, measure physical, emotional, and sexual violence against girls and boys. We work with countries around the world to do these surveys to help them guide programs and policies to prevent violence before it starts. An estimated 1 billion children—half of all the children in the world—are victims of violence every year. Violence is connected to many public health problems and makes people vulnerable to other health problems. Findings from VACS provide reliable evidence to enable countries to make better decisions about allocating limited resources to develop, launch and evaluate violence prevention programs and child protection systems5.”

So, as the name suggests, they’re mostly interested in protecting and propagandizing for girls, but they don’t want to sound sexist so they’ll say boys too, as long as they aren’t men because we know men are the ones responsible for abusing half the children of the world every year! The CDC said so. Would they lie? And the other half next year. No one escapes! This a thinly disguised venue for demonizing men, and all the boys of the world will grow up to become men if the other men let them, so they can’t be trusted after the age of 18 either.

We are raising a generation of self-hating men. How can that be good for the country or the world? When I attended a Claudia Schmidt concert many years ago and heard her go from espousing Christian values to espousing the state sponsored religion of feminism, promoting End Violence Against Women And Children Week, I wanted to ask her if violence against men was OK, or if it was just assumed that all the victims in the world were women and children and all the perpetrators were men, but I didn’t want to embarrass my date.

I think men’s silence has been the problem. We are not all trash and women and children are not all saints. I have seen them kill without conscience, and I’ve seen illegal female immigrants rewarded with asylum for making allegations of abuse. It is Federal policy to do so under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA)6. Is this not an obvious incentive to fabricate?7 I served as an expert on a case in Texas where a woman who had alleged abuse against her husband—then recanted—was encouraged to reconsider with the enticement that she would be granted asylum. It was in the police report! The twin evils of appeasement and keeping a low profile and hoping not to be hit by flying shrapnel have never worked as a long-term solution for social madness and they will not work now. Eventually, a divided house will not stand and it is better to go down with a fight than to grovel the way the extreme feminists would like us to. Moreover, they are not satisfied with groveling, though that undeniably gratifies them. Theirs is a politics of personal destruction and their goal is absolute power with no responsibility. What they want is not even good for them or their constituents, but they are too blinded by arrogance and hatred to see it.

As a person grows older and has therefore had time to digest experiences and hopefully make sense of them, there are certain central truths that stamp themselves indelibly on one’s mind. One of these truths for me has been that anyone can deliberately and knowingly do evil for his own personal gain, or to settle a score, but that such evil doings have a relatively small impact on human societies as such. The great atrocities that have such a profound impact on human history and leave us asking dumbfounded “how this could have happened” are never committed in the name of evil—they are always done in the name of noble and sacred causes.

The list of these atrocities undertaken for the good of the world is endless: The Bible talks about the God-ordained annihilation of the Canaanites; perhaps the first recorded instance of genocide. Religion, race and utopian politics have provided the philosophical basis for most of the atrocities to follow. Early Christian heretics were persecuted by Constantine, and later burned at the stake, Jesus’ admonition to “love your enemies”8 notwithstanding. Witches (as many as 200,000) were executed by men who believed in an all-powerful and loving God, but apparently put more stock in irrational fear. Jews have been persecuted, exiled and exterminated by both the Christians and Muslims, for whose religions Judaism is the foundation.

Americans from my generation grew up on stories of the conquest of the North America and learned that the genocide of its inhabitants was right, just and necessary. The American continent was our “Manifest Destiny,”9 and besides, the savages weren’t doing anything useful with it, so why should they be entitled to occupy it? Hitler apparently agreed, for he wrote, “We ought to remember that during the first period of American colonization numerous Aryans earned their daily livelihood as trappers and hunters, etc., frequently wandering about in large groups with their women and children, their mode of existence very much resembling that of ordinary nomads. The moment, however, that they grew more numerous and were able to accumulate larger resources, they cleared the land and drove out the aborigines, at the same time establishing settlements which rapidly increased all over the country.”10

We also grew up on stories of American heroism and Nazi barbarism during WW II. We were moral and just, they were not. But whenever I expressed these sentiments to my father, Nigel Brock, who had experienced some of the worst fighting of that war, his stock response was, “I didn’t like everything they did, but I didn’t like everything we did either.” Years after his death, I would see a portrayal of a fellow noncommissioned officer in his company (D co, 2nd Battalion, 506 PIR, 101st Airborne Division) murdering unarmed prisoners of war in the TV series, Band of Brothers. My father never called out Ronald Speirs by name, but I then understood some of what he had been talking about. And I was later assured by 101st historian George Koskimaki that Speirs did indeed routinely kill unarmed prisoners, and even one of his own men. Virtue is never owned by a group or an individual, it is the inherent quality of a single act—the virtuous life, the product of millions of acts.

Hitler killed six million Jews and around 20 million Russians, Poles and other Slavs, justified by his vision of a master race, ordained by God, “And so, internally armed with faith in the goodness of God and the impenetrable stupidity of the electorate11, the struggle for what is called ‘the reconstruction of the REICH’ can now begin,”12 and, “Everybody who has the right kind of feeling for his country is solemnly bound, each within his own denomination, to see to it that he is not constantly talking about the Will of God merely from the lips but that in actual fact he fulfils the Will of God and does not allow God’s handiwork to be debased.”13

The present era (the past hundred years) has been called the “Age of Genocide,”14 and it would be hard to argue it is not. The list is substantial: The killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks, six million Jews and 20 million Slavs by the Germans, and another 20 million Russians by Stalin, The Rape of Nanking in China by the Japanese (official Chinese figures, 300,000 murdered), the murder of a quarter of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge (1.5-3 million people), the Cultural Revolution in China (An estimate of around 400,000 deaths is a widely accepted minimum figure.), ten thousand Muslims killed by Serbs in Kosovo, the slaughter of 500,000-1 million Tutsi by the Hutu in Rwanda, and the recent uncounted killing of civilians of different faiths by the Islamic State.

People of vision have seen and written about this phenomena for as long as mankind has put his thoughts in writing. In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare said that, “The Devil can quote scripture when it suits his purpose.”15 Millennia before Shakespeare, the writer of Proverbs said, “...zeal is not good without knowledge...”16 And this sentiment was echoed by Justice Louis Brandis in his famous and prophetic dissenting opinion regarding unrestrained government surveillance of private citizens in Olmstead, when he said that “”Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent...The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”17

The Taoist symbol of the yin and yang, two opposites that comprise the whole, contains in the center of each half a small dot, to symbolize that everything contains the core of its opposite, and folk poet Bob Dylan once sang, “In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand / At the mongrel dogs who teach / Fearing not that I’d become my enemy / In the instant that I preach.”18 So it should not surprise me that those who once championed free speech, due process, a voice for the oppressed, equality under the law, and universities as the marketplace of ideas, and who still congratulate themselves on their bravery and achievements in the name of these ideals, have come to be the enemies of everything they once stood for.

How has this happened? It has happened because truth cannot be possessed, but only glimpsed for a moment. The quest is eternal, and one is never further from the truth than when one thinks he owns it. It is no accident that civilizations, like the protagonists of Greek Tragedy tend to self-destruct at the zenith of their evolution, and for much the same reason; they believe themselves to be indestructible and worse—infallible. As Oedipus insisted on bragging to the fortune teller about how he had cheated fate even as he fulfilled it, so did Athens believe it had outgrown its savior Themistocles and exiled him, then went on to bankrupt itself with self-aggrandizing expenditures, and ultimately destroy itself with an ill-advised and protracted war with Sparta.

Does this sound familiar? It should; it is a story that has repeated itself throughout the ages, as mankind turned its back on its visionaries, and with the Hubris that comes from a belief in one’s own invincibility, or the invincibility of one’s nation, proceeded to show the world that a belief in one’s invincibility is the inevitable precursor to personal and collective destruction. Pride goes before a fall because pride tells us that we embody our ideals, not the truth that our ideals, like Plato’s “Ideal,”19 can never fully materialize, but require a constant striving after. Pride is the loose thread from which the whole tapestry unravels, thence to become a part of someone else’s tapestry.

As I write these words, our entire democracy is threatened with destruction by the power of one non-elected prosecutor and his team of 19 well educated and extremely well paid lawyers, whose sole task in life is to find or create a crime sufficient to unseat a democratically elected leader of the free world. He is aided by a press that has surrendered its role of keeping the public informed in favor of providing propaganda for this non-elected official and his supportive secret police. The secret police, in turn, tell us that their secrecy is required to maintain our free society (that has more people, and a larger percentage of its population, in prison than any country in the world), but that does not prevent them from leaking the information necessary to overthrow democracy to the propagandists, who are more than happy to do their bidding by disseminating it.

The ideologues behind this madness are the strange bedfellows of the extreme Right and the extreme Left, both of which have contempt for the unwashed masses, and are convinced that the erosion of our personal liberties is necessary for our own protection, and so that their vision of utopia and the politics that passes for religion in a Godless age can be brought into existence. But what does this vision consist of? Can anyone articulate it? It seems to me that the vision is one in which selected sacred cows are entitled to seek revenge for real or imagined wrongs on those whom they blame for these wrongs until they have satisfactorily extracted their million pounds of flesh. It is a lust for power by those who demand that power while at the same time demanding that others take responsibility.

Such a system cannot endure. Whether we can return to a democratic system of government and experience a rebirth as other nations have before us remains to be seen.

Right now, we are dangling from the precipice, and few are the voices of sanity—those who recognize that the excesses of the Left, like those of the Right, can only lead to further polarization and an erosion of the rule of law.20

I remember being alarmed by the 70 million dollars spent by the Kenneth Starr witch hunt that was also a groundless investigation conducted for the sole purpose of unlawfully impeaching a democratically elected president with evidence of sexual misconduct. It is a great irony that the sexually liberated West, and especially America, has seized on sexual misconduct as the tried and true way to bring down any opponent, and that the presumption will always be that one is guilty as charged, no longer requiring even the semblance of a trial to bring about a conviction.

If these are the tactics to be used—as increasingly there are in all spheres of life—it will not take long before everyone is aware that our lip service to democracy and due process of law are only that, and at that point each person becomes a law unto himself. I have seen this coming, but had hoped I would pass before it did. I had also hoped that my daughter would have no offspring who would have to live through it, but that is also not the case. Regardless, we all have a stake in what remains when we are gone, though the philosophical reasons for this are beyond the scope of this work. Suffice it to say that “No man is an island.”21

I am old and people have been asking me for years when I am going to retire. My answer is that I won’t retire as long as I can do something useful. The purpose of writing this book, and appearing in court on behalf of the wrongfully accused in sex abuse cases, is to be useful. The hope is that we can come to our senses, pull back from the abyss, and return to our roots as a democratic republic under the rule of law; to recover what we have lost, and come closer to the ideal of a free and just society, with fairness to those who have been treated unfairly in the past, but not with the objective of extracting revenge. For, as Louis Fischer once said, “The shreds of individuality cannot be sewed together with a bayonet; nor can democracy be restored according to the Biblical injunction of an ‘eye for an eye’ which, in the end, would make everybody blind.”22
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1 The Closing of the American Mind, Alan Bloom, (1987) P. 75

2 FRONTLINE, The Child Terror, PBS WGBH, Oct 1998, “In ‘The Child Terror,’ FRONTLINE correspondent Peter J. Boyer travels to Dade County, Florida to explore the impassioned roots and controversial consequences of the nation’s 15-year legal battle against child sexual abuse. During the 1980s, Miami became ground zero in the crusade to prosecute child molesters. Many high-profile cases were prosecuted by the office of then-chief prosecutor Janet Reno who pioneered a national effort to bring child molesters to justice. Now, however, some of these cases are unraveling. In this report, FRONTLINE deconstructs two of them, probing what went wrong.” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/terror/

3 U.S. Department of Education, April 4, 2011, “Dear Colleague: Education has long been recognized as the great equalizer in America. The U.S. Department of Education and its Office for Civil Rights (OCR) believe that providing all students with an educational environment free from discrimination is extremely important. The sexual harassment of students, including sexual violence, interferes with students’ right to receive an education free from discrimination and, in the case of sexual violence, is a crime...” https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-201104.html

4 Center for Disease Prevention and Control, Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/acestudy/index.html

5 CDC, ACES, https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/childabuseandneglect/vacs/index.html

6 SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE. This Act may be cited as the ‘’Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013’’. [VAWA] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-113s47enr/pdf/BILLS-113s47enr.pdf

7 False Allegations of Domestic Violence and Immigration Fraud, Colorado Criminal Domestic Violence Defense Lawyer H. Michael Steinberg: “...This Article addresses a loophole in the immigration laws that permits undocumented persons who allege acts of domestic violence to obtain asylum—that is to remain legally in the United States.
This technicality has led to many individuals being falsely accused of acts of domestic violence...The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) clearly encourages immigration fraud...” Needless to say (and it has been my experience), an unsupported allegation of sexual abuse also provides grounds for asylum, as it falls under the heading of sexual violence. Moreover, while to be prosecuted evidence is—at least theoretically—required, it is not required to obtain asylum.

8 Matthew 5:43-45, New International Version (NIV), “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”

9 Manifest Destiny, a phrase coined in 1845 [by John O’Sullivan], expressed the philosophy that drove 19th-century U.S. territorial expansion. Manifest Destiny held that the United States was destined—by God, its advocates believed—to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent. History.com, https://www.history.com/topics/manifest-destiny

10 Mein Kampf, Adolph Hitler, (P. 252) Translated into English by James Murphy

11 It is worth noting here his contempt for democratic elections as being rule by the “impenetrably stupid.” It is sad that in the past he has been proven right, and may yet in this country.

12 Mein Kampf, Adolph Hitler, (P. 310)

13 Mein Kampf, Adolph Hitler, (P. 458)

14 “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide is a book by Samantha Power, at that time Professor of Human Rights Practice at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, which explores America’s understanding of, response to, and inaction on genocides in the 20th century from the Armenian genocide to the “ethnic cleansings” of the Kosovo War. It won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2003.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Problem_from_Hell

15 “Mark you this, Bassanio, the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. An evil soul producing holy witness is like a villain with a smiling cheek, a goodly apple rotten at the heart. Oh, what a goodly outside falsehood hath! --Antonio, The Merchant of Venice, Act I, Scene iii, (William Shakespeare)

16 Even zeal is not good without knowledge, and the one who acts hastily sins. Proverbs 19:2 (Christian Standard Bible)

17 --Louis D. Brandeis, Olmstead v. U.S., 277 U.S. 438 (1928) (dissenting)

18 My Back Pages, Bob Dylan, © 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1992 by Special Rider Music

19 Essence as a Platonic ideal—”...Plato thought what we see in the physical world is a dim reflection of the true ideal thing. For example circular objects are crude approximations to the ideal perfect circle.” Mountain Math Software, http://www.mtnmath.com/whatth/node7.html

20 Professor Alan Dershowitz may be the only person currently making the argument that the seed of the current madness was the equally unfounded politically motivated prosecution of Bill Clinton.

21 “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main”...a poem by John Donne

22 Gandhi and Stalin by Louis Fischer, 1947, Page 61, Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York. This quote is often misattributed to Gandhi, but Fischer does not do so. Rather, he is attempting to characterize Gandhi’s political philosophy of non-violent resistance and contrast it with the totalitarian views represented by Stalin.
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Michael G. Brock, MA, LMSW, is a forensic mental health professional in private practice at Counseling and Evaluation Services in Wyandotte, Michigan. He has worked in the mental health field since 1974, and has been in full-time private practice since 1985. Much of his practice in recent years relates to driver license restoration and substance abuse evaluation, but he also consults and serves as an expert witness regarding forensic interviewing and the use of forensic interviewing protocols in cases of child sexual abuse allegations. He may be contacted at Michael G. Brock, Counseling and Evaluation Services, 2514 Biddle, Wyandotte, 48192; 313-802-0863, fax/phone 734-692-1082; e-mail: michaelgbrock@comcast.net, website, michaelgbrock.com.