The 1944 court action by a father Count Haugwitz-Reventlow against his famous ex-wife, Barbara Hutton, then temporarily married to Hollywood icon Cary Grant provides one of the most vivid examples of visual evidence revealing a calculating parent’s cold-blooded Parental Alienation campaign deployed against a divorced father and his 10-year-old son, Lance. The letters and drawings between morther and son were exchanged while the boy was in the momentary custody of the father who discovered them and had copies made of them which were presented in court.
But the phenomenon we now describe as Parental Alienation Syndrome has a long history, with documentation dating back at least to the early 1800s.
It is well-known nowadays that the phenomenon of PAS is closely related to types of conditioning practiced in cults. There exist chilling documents of the parental alienation practices of the American cult known as the Shakers (formally called the United society of Believers) dating back to the early 19th century. The Shakers were involved in numerous parental kidnapping cases and it was part of their doctrine to separate children from parents, parents from each other and to teach all parties to hate their relations.
Eunice Chapman’s 1819 book relating the story of the parental kidnapping of her children and the elaborate alienating tactics of the Shakers furnish a chilling early description of premeditated and systematic Parental Alienation. (LINK)
One boy who had been temporarily exposed to the Shakers’ fiercely anti-family pedagogy left a written account of how a schoolmaster went about indoctrinating Shaker children to reject their parents. (LINK)
A mother named Mary Crain whose child was exposed to these practices wrote down in an 1818 letter the lyrics of a song which was used to help children internalize the doctrine of familial hatred. The letter was published in 1823 by Mary Marshall Dyer, the first person ever to devote herself to public activism against Parental Kidnapping (and Parental Alienation). (LINK)
Most of the Shaker Parental Kidnapping / Parental Alienation cases involved a father as perpetrator and always involving the oversight of the Shaker cult leaders in the process of alienating a child from its mother.
In an 1823 London court case, Ball vs. Ball, we see a father asserting that a mother had “endeavored to allienate the affections of the child from him.”
In a 1904 custody case over a 9-year-old boy the mother “alleges that he [her ex-husband] has stolen the child and prejudiced him against her. … To illustrate how Carter had poisoned her child’s mind against her, she told of one instance when the boy threatened to shoot her, and was only prevented by some one standing near.” (LINK) In the 1920 Clough and the 2004 Lohstroh cases (both discussed below), there was no one to intervene, in each case a boy shot his father to death allegedly at the instigation of an alienating mother.
In 1920 a 14-year-old boy was already on very poor terms with his father — who had physically punished him for a theft he had recently committed — was manipulated by his mother into murdering his dad. At the trial the remorseful boy was found innocent. The mother had been declared “insane.”
A 1950 news report on the Schneider/Martin/Williams case is particularly important because it supplies us with the earliest known (so far) description of intergenerational PAS. Here a maternal grandmother has alienated her granddaughter from her own 10-year-old daughter. The experience of becoming a target parent triggers the realization that she was during her own childhood alienated from her own father by the same viciously manipulative family member.
The 1952 Matchan / Zautner / McBride case provides a rare photo documentation of a case of Parental Alienation and its successful resolution due to the firmness of a judge who recognized the alienation dynamic as it unfolded in the courtroom and remained firm in his ruling that 9-year-old Marlene needed to be placed in the custody of the divorced mother despite the programming of the girl by the pathologically possesive maternal grandmother, Mrs. Zautner.
“You have brutally poisoned this child’s mind against your own daughter!” the judge warned Mrs. Zautner. “If you do not desist from further interference I will see that the proper authorities investigate your activities.”
Three articles ran in the Los Angeles Times on the case, all with striking photographs: August 26 (LINK), August 28 (LINK) and September 9 (LINK). The photo shown above was syndicated and appeared in newspapers all across the United States, sometimes appearing on the front page. Another syndicated piece juxtaposes the child’s hysterical clinging to her alienating grandmother with a snapshot of her leaving the courthouse hand in hand with mother and step-father. The headline reads “Child Tortuted in Custody Case.” (LINK)
The phrase “poisoning the child’s mind” had been since the early 20th century the most common expression used in both published case law and news reports on court cases involving allegations of premeditated Parental Alienation. A syndicated column sponsored by the American Bar Association titled “Poisoning Child’s Mind” appeared in countless newspapers across the United States over a period of two years beginning in 1972.
The 1980 Memmer case is unusual in that a civil suit for damages for intentional influction of emotional suffering — caused by what is clearly a Parental Alienation Syndrome scenario involving three children — was decided by a jury of peers. No expert witness was necessary in such a clear-cut case. PAS is by no means an esoteric difficult-to-grasp idea. That such a thing as what is now labeled PAS, but which had no technical label in 1980, can — and does — occur is really a matter of common sense.
Somewhere Child, by Bonnie Lee Black, a 1980 personal account of an international parental kidnapping written by the left-behind mother, is not only the finest of the many personal accounts of PK that have been published (since the early 1800s), but it is also a harrowing story of severe Parental Alienation Syndrome. Appearing seven years before Dr. Richard Gardner gave the phenomen the name it is widely known by today, the book is the most eloquent possible proof that several widely disseminated falsehoods — holding that the claims of the existence of the PAS pheomenon (regardless what label is favored) are “anti-mother,” a “creation” of Dr. Gardner, and a tool of fathers’ rights activists to oppress and abuse women — are unfounded. Indeed, in Black’s riveting autobiographical narrative, it is a woman who is the target of an alienating ex-husband, who in this case is certainly grossly abusive of both ex-wife and child, but the target parent here is a woman.
It is not possible to recommend this brilliantly written, nuanced, book too highly. It is long out of print, but very easy to come by second-hand. The paperback version includes an afterword about how the book’s publication led to Black finding her kidnapped — but still severly alienated — daughter.
This tactic — teaching the child to call the target parent by a first name rather than “Mommy” or Daddy” — is documented in a 2007 film devoted to the subject of Parental Alienation.
And this tactic was caught on videotape during a case in which the mother’s alienating behavior caused her to lose primary custody prompting her to create videotape “proof” of the child’s fear of her father.
The tape was made just days before a hit man hired by the mother murdered the father in a public playground in front of the child. The alienating mother is currently serving life in prison without parole.
PK Paper No. 21 — The Malakov Cocktail — is devoted to this case. (LINK)
The most influentional opponents to the use of the psycholgical diagosis PAS are a group of professionals, mostly pychologists and lawyers, called The Leadership council. Several members have been involved in cases involving the types of cases involving theories of widespead cults of Satanic Ritual Abuse involving child sacrifice and many members of the Council are adherents to the theory of Multiple Personality Disorder, and recovered memories. These ideas are favored by marxist-feminists who see the theory that fathers are to blame for all of society’s ills — and all daughters’ ills in particular. Council member Joan Meier exemplifies this radical anti-father ideology in the views she expressed in the controversial 2005 film which attempted to discredit the diagnosis — and reality — of Parental Alienation Syndrome.
