LUTHMANN NOTE: After covering courts for years, a moment comes when the pattern snaps into focus. Family court isn’t chaotic by accident. It is engineered. The confusion, the endless motions, the fake experts, the padded bills—those are features, not bugs. Once you follow the money, everything makes sense. Lawyers aren’t advocates. They’re revenue managers. Marketed “syndromes” aren’t psychology. They’re billing accelerants. And evidence isn’t excluded because it’s weak, but because it’s dangerous—to the racket. What Jill Jones Soderman and Theo Chino make clear is this: families aren’t losing because they’re wrong. They’re losing because the system is paid for them to lose. This piece is Follow the Money, first published on TheFamilyCourtCircus.com.
By Rick LaRivière and Richard Luthmann
Investigative reporter Richard Luthmann sat down for a no-nonsense interview that ripped the mask off America’s family court racket. His guests were Jill Jones Soderman, executive director of the Foundation for Child Victims of the Family Courts (FCVFC.org), and Theo Chino, a forensic billing analyst who follows one rule: numbers don’t lie.
The purpose was simple and explosive. Explain how family courts really work. Explain why protective parents keep losing. Explain how lawyers, court experts, and judges profit while children pay the price. And most importantly, explain how to fight back and win.
Over nearly an hour, the trio dissected the machinery of family court corruption. They exposed attorney billing fraud as the system’s financial engine. They discussed whether “parental alienation” is a junk-science marketing hoax. They explained how biased experts and cooperative judges turn abuse allegations into revenue streams. And they laid out a roadmap for results: preserve real evidence, follow the money, and force accountability into the open.
This was not therapy talk. It was not an academic debate. It was a field manual. From forensic financial audits to brain-scan evidence, from shyster billing practices to psychological grifts, the interview mapped the problem — and the solution.
Follow the Money: Exposing the Billing Racket
Family court reformers have found a simple truth: if you want to catch the culprits, follow the money. Legal management expert Theo Chino focuses on exactly that. He combs through divorce lawyers’ bills like a detective hunting for clues. And he finds plenty.
Lawyers routinely pad their hours, double-bill, and charge for nonsense – because they assume distraught parents will never scrutinize the fine print. Chino proves them wrong. He helped develop an algorithm that flags questionable charges in legal invoices. All it does is ask questions – but those questions terrify shady attorneys.
In one case, a single mother was being hounded to pay a $6,000 legal bill she couldn’t afford. Chino’s audit found that a whopping 80% of the bill “needed to be explained” – i.e. it looked fishy. Confronted with the report, the lawyer immediately offered an 80% discount, dropping the demand to $1,200. That tells you everything.
Most of the time, the mere act of asking for billing explanations sends these legal predators scurrying. As Chino notes, not one of these family lawyers ever volunteers to show up and justify their invoices – they’d rather drop the claim than have to reveal their scam.
By poring over billing records and comparing them to actual case activity, financial sleuths like Chino give families what Jill Jones Soderman calls a “financial brain scan” of their case. The numbers don’t lie. Overbilling can be proven in black and white – impossible to spin.
This new tool arms parents with hard evidence to demand refunds, sanctions, even criminal investigations. It’s turning the tide on a once-untouchable billing racket.
Follow the Money: Junk Science for Profit?
If you haven’t heard of “parental alienation,” the family court cartel will make sure you do. They use this debunked psychological theory as a weapon against protective parents. The concept was cooked up by psychiatrist Richard Gardner in the 1980s as a marketing ploy to help accused child molesters.
Gardner absurdly claimed children seduce adults – a “bizarre psychotic concept,” as one Soderman put it. Modern psychology “rejects it entirely,” she said. Soderman maintains parental alienation propaganda is “beyond junk science” – a money-making “criminal enterprise” that destroys families.
Yet the hoax thrives, she says, because there’s cash to be made. Bar associations embraced Gardner’s gimmick and “weaponized” it in court. The playbook: accuse the parent who reports abuse of “alienating” the child, and flip custody to the alleged abuser. This scam creates endless work (and billable hours) for lawyers and court-appointed “experts.”
Therapists like Linda Gottlieb – the self-procalimed “queen of reunification therapy” – gladly cash in. Gottlieb runs pricey camps to “deprogram” kids who resist a parent, often the very parent the kids fear. Critics compare these court-ordered reunification programs to child abuse in themselves.
Gottlieb, tellingly, won’t answer any questions about the multiple lawsuits pending against her “therapy” outfit.
In short, Soderman says “parental alienation” is a fraud. She says it’s snake-oil psychology that court insiders monetize, while children’s real trauma gets ignored. But now the jig is up: more voices are calling out this con for what it is, Soderman maintains.
Follow the Money: Shyster Ed Nusbaum and the $64,000 Heist
Attorney Edward Nusbaum of Westport, Connecticut is the poster boy for family court billing fraud. His former client, Karen Riordan, says he billed her about $100,000 for four months of work and achieved nothing. In fact, Nusbaum maneuvered to sell her house, grabbed $64,000 from the sale into his escrow account, then demanded she pony up another $100k or he wouldn’t continue her case.
When Riordan balked, Nusbaum switched sides – he literally sat with her ex-husband’s team in court (and later billed her $1,875 for the pleasure). He still tried to keep that $64k chunk of her home equity for himself, dragging her into a fight over it.
This isn’t incompetence – it’s a shakedown. In an exposé first published by Frank Parlato at FrankReport.com, documents show Nusbaum’s invoices were stuffed with phantom charges. For example, he billed Riordan for 36 phone calls with the children’s guardian ad litem, while the GAL’s records showed only 12 calls – meaning 24 calls were pure fiction.
He was charging for conversations that never happened. Is it fraud? You bet it smells like it. Nusbaum’s routine is clear: massive retainer, minimal work, inflated bills, then lock the client into arbitration to dodge public scrutiny.
As Luthmann quipped, the question was whether this “shyster” could get away with “stealing” $64,000 from his own client. Thanks to growing exposure, the answer may finally be no.
Follow the Money: Hard Evidence vs. the Old Guard
If corrupt attorneys hate financial forensics, the quacks in family court hate real science even more. The Foundation for Child Victims of the Family Courts has begun introducing actual medical evidence – like brain scans – to prove the harm done to children.
High-tech SPECT imaging can show trauma or injury in a child’s brain, similar to how an X-ray shows a broken bone. In any normal civil case (say, a car accident), such brain-scan proof would be a no-brainer for the court. But in family court, the old guard doesn’t want objective proof. Some judges literally refuse to admit these scans, questioning whether a picture of brain damage is “actual evidence.”
Why?
Because hard evidence threatens to upend their cozy world of dueling he-said/she-said “experts.”
Jill Jones Soderman and her team are fighting this backward attitude. They partner with top neuroscientists to interpret brain scans and translate the findings into legal terms a judge can understand. They meticulously preserve this evidence for the record.
A scan showing patterns of abuse-induced PTSD in a child is powerful and hard to ignore. It forces the court to confront facts rather than rely on hired-gun psychologists peddling theories. Family courts that reject such evidence look willfully blind – or worse, complicit.
Slowly but surely, though, the tide is turning. As more courts face scientific proof of harm, the standard of proof in custody cases is shifting. The message is simple: you can’t hide the truth when it’s lit up on a brain scan.
The Dam is Breaking
What came through loudest in the Luthmann interview is this: the family court revolt is no longer a sideshow. It is becoming a movement. What once sounded like scattered complaints from “bitter litigants” is now a coordinated, evidence-driven challenge to an industry that has survived on darkness, discretion, and silence.
Lawmakers and regulators are starting to hear from parents who have nothing left to lose, notably in Arizona and Idaho. These are not deadbeats or malcontents. They are professionals, veterans, nurses, teachers, and small business owners who watched their life savings vanish into legal fees while their children were handed to abusers or coerced through junk science.
They describe a system that treats families like inventory and conflict like fuel. A feeding trough where the longer the fight lasts, the more everyone gets paid—except the parents and children trapped inside it.
What has changed is leverage. Financial forensics exposes billing fraud that cannot be explained away. Medical imaging documents trauma that cannot be hand-waved by court “experts.” Public reporting names names and follows paper trails. And once sunlight hits these cases, judges and lawyers lose their favorite weapon: plausible deniability.
Independent family court journalists are now doing the work institutions refuse to do. Reporters like Michael Volpe, Frank Parlato, Julie M. Anderson Holburn, and Michael “Thunder” Phillips are leading the charge by naming names, publishing documents, and exposing corrupt lawyers, judges, and court experts who operate in the shadows. Their reporting has turned isolated horror stories into undeniable patterns, forcing sunlight onto a system that depends on silence, confusion, and fear to survive.
Protective parents are no longer begging for mercy. They are filing grievances. They are demanding audits. They are publishing records. They are bypassing compromised attorneys and learning to control evidence themselves. They are taking their stories to journalists, watchdog groups, and legislators who can no longer pretend this is rare or accidental.
The message is unmistakable. This system survives only if people stay quiet and confused. That era is ending. Protective parents are organized. They are informed. They are relentless. And they are not surrendering their children to a racket.
This fight is not driven by ideology. It is driven by facts, documents, and love. That combination is lethal to corruption. And that is why, this time, the system—not the families—is on borrowed time.
