New details from the McCann/Wooten divorce suggest that Sarah Palin is an abusive scumbag

September 9, 2008 by twitterpaters

by twit

Back when I was a family law attorney, I sometimes taught a “pro se education” class at the court, which was mandatory in the state I practiced in for people going through a divorce without an attorney. One of the issues that I covered in the class was the standard interim order that is issued in every divorce that involves children in that state. This order includes the requirement that neither parent disparage the other parent in front of the children.

The explanation I gave about why this part of the order is so important is that children automatically understand that they are created by both of their parents, 50% one parent and 50% the other. To disparage the other parent disparages that child. If you call your soon-to-be ex-wife a scumbag, you are calling your child a scumbag. It is confusing and hurtful for children, and it often backfires. It backfires because a child typically becomes defensive of the disparaged parent – and of course they would, they are essentially defending themselves.

Which brings us to Sarah Palin and the concern that she and/or her family members engaged in “emotional child abuse,” to such a stunning degree that the judge presiding over the McCann/Wooten divorce threatened to give residential custody to Michael Wooten if the disparagement continued.

Via Newsweek on September 9, 2008, by way of TPM:

In an order signed Jan. 31, 2006, which granted Palin’s sister and Wooten a final divorce decree, Judge Suddock continued to express concern about attacks by Palin’s family on Wooten. The judge even threatened to curb Palin’s sister’s child custody rights if family criticism of Wooten continued.

Based on what Newsweek reports later on in the article, the judge didn’t just threaten to “curb” those custody rights, the judge threatened to order the children into Michael Wooten’s residential custody if the “emotional child abuse” continued. The exact role played by Sarah Palin isn’t clear from what Newsweek reports, but it does sound like the Court determined that there was a concerted effort by her family to disparage Mike Wooten in front of the children.

In monitoring how a joint-custody arrangement worked out, the judge said in his order that he would pay particular attention to problems noted by a “custody investigator,” specifically “the disparagement of the father [Wooten] by the mother [Molly Hackett, Sarah Palin’s sister] and her family members.” “It is the mother’s [Hackett’s] responsibility to set boundaries for her relatives and insure [sic] they respect them, and the disparagement by either parent, or their surrogates is emotional child abuse,” Judge Suddock wrote. He added that: “If the court finds it is necessary due to disparagement in the Mat-Su Valley [the area north of Anchorage where Palin and her extended family live], for the children’s best interests, it [the court] will not hesitate to order custody to the father and a move into Anchorage.”

One serious quibble with the Newsweek article is this line:

A court filing by Wooten’s lawyer indicates that within months of being issued, the violence protection order was dismissed.

Because the online court records are clear that the protection order was voluntarily dismissed by Molly McCann before it was ever finalized, and the temporary protection order that was granted (based only on McCann’s affidavit and without a hearing) was in effect from April 11, 2005 through April 27, 2005.

On April 11, 2005, Palin’s sister, Molly J. McCann, filed for a domestic violence restraining order against her then-husband Michael Wooten. The hearing was vacated, and the venue of the case changed to Anchorage, Alaska. On April 27, 2005, there was a brief hearing on the restraining order, and the domestic violence case was dismissed, and a “no contact order” was instead entered in the divorce. The hearing was a status conference, not a trial, and the case was settled by an agreement to the entry of a civil “no contact order” in the divorce. This means that no findings of domestic violence were made on the record in this case and no domestic violence protection was granted by the court beyond the temporary order.

A detailed chronology of the Troopergate scandal and the McCann/Wooten divorce case can be seen here.