So I really did everything I could without jeopardizing their safety to confirm what happened.

I read transcripts of the phone calls that the kids had with him. He had threatened - the father had threatened to hurt anyone, kill anyone who took his kids away. So we had a dilemma here because this was a little bit - kind of a case of domestic - potential domestic violence. KELLY: For the record, were you able, in your reporting, to verify whether any of the things that the dad was saying about the mom were true? Was there any basis in fact to any of this? And this went on for six years until, you know, things got really, really, really bad. So they could really only be on one side, and he forced them to choose him. And what he did, which is very typical, is he really forced them to choose between the mom and the dad. He'd talk about the legal case, how he was being bankrupted.Īnd whenever they defended their mother, he would say, oh, so that's how you feel. He'd talk about how terrible their mother was. And he would talk to them for one to two hours a night. And they would have to drop - the kids would drop everything they were doing - dinner, homework, even their own birthday parties - to talk to their dad. Wage what you quote a family court judge who says - who concluded that the dad was waging, he called it, 'an all-out campaign to alienate them from their mother.' Even as the children were back at their mother's, at Meredith's house, the dad would call every night and continue to. And he'd say, see, this is what your mom does. And then at night, he would play info videos till 1 or 2 or 3 in the morning about things like narcissism or depression or bipolar disorder or parental alienation. How she had even befriended a serial killer and knew where one of the bodies was buried.

And over the summer, Benjamin and Olivia, who were then 9 and 7 respectively, stayed with him for the summer.Īnd they play during the day, but at night, what would happen is he would sit them down, and he would talk to them about their mother - how she suffered from depression. The father moved north of Toronto about 300 miles. And in the summer of 2008, the parents were getting a divorce. HAGERTY: There is Meredith, the mom, Benjamin, the son, and Olivia, the daughter. KELLY: You interviewed a lot of people for this story, I know, but you chose to tell it mainly through one family. Barbara Bradley Hagerty writes about it for The Atlantic in an article titled 'Can Children Be Persuaded To Love A Parent They Hate?' Hey there, Barb.īARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY: Hi, Mary Louise. It is common, more common than many realize during divorce. It's a phenomenon known as parental alienation. This next story is about what can happen when one parent in a family is so angry at the other that they deploy the kids as weapons.

Morning Man by Barbara Kellyn