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25kg of files is too much to handle on my own now - how can end this nightmare?
I need help. I mean, a PROPER two-day discussion with a paralegal or something. Or advice on crowdfunding or something.
I now have 2 large storage boxes totalling around 25kg of files related to my case - much of it SAR responses.
I had been wrongly denied legal aid - by the time LA realised their error and agreed I was eligible, I'd been arrested for the first time in my life and spent 11 nights in prison because of extremely poor legal representation (he fell asleep in the interview). The subsequent bail conditions before trial left me banned entirely from my own country of Wales for 4 months, sleeping on a friend's floor, which meant my business of a decade collapsed, and I am now, for the first time in my life, on the dole. But too late - I can't appeal because I was forced to admit guilty, even though I wasn't. (Bribe was: plead guilty and we won't put you back inside, force a trial and we'll pretty much block your evidence and find you guilty anyway).
The representation in court by the £360/hour barrister was appalling, The final result is that I am left with a totally unworkable 5 year restraining order, listed under the wrong case number, to include a bizarre prohibition on being on any of a 30 mile stretch of main road totally unrelated to the original event, at weekday peak travel times, when the event itself happened in a town centre on a Saturday afternoon. This was requested by the complainant and bizarrely accepted by the barrister without consulting me, and effectively not only makes work impossible due to the road location, but effectively prevents me from seeing my son for 5 more year. The solicitor's response is "well, we got you out of prison didn't we? Just suck it up for 5 years or move". I also owe £15k to friends and family who clubbed together and hired the solicitor to get me out of prison. Incidentally, I was held illegally for an extra night after the court lost the bail paperwork.
The thing that I was arrested for was alleged breach of a non-mol against my son (11), an order which was instigated and paid for by CAFCASS on behalf of the mother, without any evidence of harm at all. CAFCASS had pushed the hearing through knowing full well that social services were working on S16 and S47 reports. I appealed for a delay for the reports to be finished, but CAFCASS persuaded the judge to go ahead. Of course, when published, the S16a found "no evidence" of the mother's claims, and the followup S47 found that "this was not the first time she had changed her story", and that their concerns lay not with me, but with the fact that the damage being done to my child was "to satisfy a need in the mother".
But by then, the non-mol was in place, and the icing on the cake was a S91 to stop me appealing. During that hearing, I had no representation, while on the other side, there were 2 barristers for CAFCASS, plus the CAFCASS worker and head of CAFCASS, and my ex's barrister was allowed by the judge to read, live in court and verbatim, what she wanted in the non-mol. This was pushback from CAFCASS because I'd submitted a complaint after the case worker found that I had been diagnosed (and treated for) ADHD a few years back. I had not told anyone, but she revealed this to my son without checking with me, against the strict order of the court that they should ask my permission first. Of course, it was then all round the school. Nice.
While I had those 4 months to think since last November, I fired off a number of subject access requests, including to the CPS, police, social services, and education services. The result of some of those responses turned into complaints to the public ombudsman and ICO. The result of those are now bearing fruit, and it is getting incredible messy, very fast.
In the right hands, the info could make things extremely uncomfortable for the local education authority and the police, would prove beyond doubt she (and an officer) lied in statements, and most importantly totally put an end to this nonsense.
This is where it is getting very frightening - and I'm not using that word lightly. I met a bloke who had ten years of his life ruined by a nutter who accused him of rape after she didn't get what she wanted. He lost everything, had to go into hiding. In the end he was cleared, and while the woman was eventually charged, she didn't even go to prison for it. (Insane, but that's a whole other issue, not for now - he ended up writing a book about the whole experience).
I know my ex well enough to know she'd do that, and I now know the way she treated previous partners. She's already shown she has no problem ruining our son's childhood to get at me, so a rape allegation if things stopped going her way wouldn't be a stretch for her at all. I've had a couple of friends who are doing law degrees helping me as best they can legally so far, but they've never come across anything like this before.
Of course, at the bottom of all this is a dispute over property - there was never any issue with my son in the first place. But she is not even letting me sell the property to pay her off - we agreed an amount, and every time I get close to selling, she frustrates it. She doesn't even want or need the money - new rich bloke has bought her an entire house. This is all about extreme and intense control, which has been going on since 2019 when I met someone else (my ex having left in 2016).
If you think this all sounds a bit tin-foil-hat and conspiratorial, you're not alone. Reading it back, it sounds nuts, right? I mean, nowadays, no police officer so blatantly files a different report to the CPS than the one provided in a subject access request, do they? Surely I must be hiding something, right? A few slaps when I got drunk, maybe? I've said it before in previous posts so I'll repeat it here again:
Prior to the non-mol arrest a few months back, I had never been arrested nor charged with anything related to domestic violence or abuse, nor child neglect, drugs, alcohol, violence, theft, driving - NOTHING.
In fact, the people who put their names on letters of support to the court included: 2 serving mayors, 3 teachers, 2 doctors, a retired psychiatrists, 3 retired police officers and 1 retired custody sergeant.
Of the two witnesses my ex provided, one had their own written evidence contradicted by what they told the officer, and the other contradicted my ex's own evidence (she said I gone to "fight with" him, he said I'd not threatened anything at all). In fact, the police's own CCTV footage contradicted her, and yet none of it seemed to matter in court.
Oh, and the reason my ex invoked the non-mol in the first place? It's because, that same week, she'd attempted to illegally change my son's surname at the school, in breach of the same order on which I was arrested (which says "no person shall cause a child to be known by a different name"), but when I pointed that out, the police did nothing! So the pushback from her was to then report me and get me arrested.
So, that's where we are: 16 family court hearings, an S7, an S16, and S47 and an S91. 25kg of paperwork across multiple folders - and that's just what was sent to me in print. Then there's another 4.6Gb across 1,864 files in 107 folders, all since May 2019.
At least a dozen previous reports by her to the police all NFA'd as "not a police matter", 12 subject access requests from me to various bodies, 5 public ombudsman reports, 2 complaints still in progress with the ICO (5 months and counting, actively being worked on), missing money from my son's trust fund account. Oh, and did I mention that when I spotted something redacted from the council that suggested he may have had some harm while in her care, when I wrote to the doctor (when my son was 10), they asked her before they replied to me. And when they did (once the local health board got involved) the explanation was that it would "cause mental harm" for me to see his records, even though I have full PR and am well known to the practice (in a good way). They refused to explain further.
And when I asked about his work at school, apparently she'd been in touch with them and again, this bizarre "mental harm" excuse was wheeled out, followed by some guff about "Gillick competency" - we are talking about a child of 10 and access to school records which is totally my right in Wales as a parent with full PR. Gillick Competency has nothing to do with it. The education dept went into lockdown mode and refused to respond even to a request by my representative MS in Wales agreed the LEA may be wrong and upheld my request and intervened for me. The LEA said a meeting would "not be helpful". No, it certainly wouldn't be, to them!
The net outcome of all of this will mean I will have had no contact with my only child from between the age of 9 to 17. That surely cannot be right.
I could also mention that this all stepped up a gear when I noticed that £3,500 was missing from my son's child trust fund account, and then somehow my ex, as a private citizen, got a recording of my call to the bank, trying to tell the court that my call to the bank to check about our son's trust fund account was a form of stalking her. WTF!
Perhaps it might be noteworthy that the judge twice took over 200 days to deliver his written judgment, that the applicant "made him blush", and was the one that slapped the S91 "no appeal" order on me, even though I was a first-time respondent litigant in person in a non-DV case and even himself noted that I had not invoked any of the court hearings?
I collect long lists of solicitors by recommendation, and work my way through them, and all I hear is that it's "too complex" for their firm or that they could do it but they'd need a downpayment of £30,000 to read in the papers, or that they recommend I speak to a human rights barrister. Right, anyone know of any UNDER £8k per day?! Sometimes I try breaking it down, focusing on, say, education law. And then once I start speaking to the solicitor and it becomes clear there's a whole load of other stuff, then I'd have to be talking to multiple partners and everyone is busy until September 2023 and here we go again.
I've been ripped off four times now - one got immediately sacked by his firm and I got my money back, one has taken the money but not done what they said, one is still being dealt with by SRA (2 years now) and when I caught the one dealing with the property lying about things they said they'd done, at least they didn't dare ask for the remaining bill and provided my enormous file, in print, and presumably great expense to them. But what makes solicitors think they can say they sent a doc to the other party, and not think I might actually check with the other party to see if they did? Do most people just get away with it?
If that was stressful reading that, this is all my life is now, from dawn to dusk, and I need my life back.
Who can I turn to? Because I need PROPER protection and advice now: Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum
I now have 2 large storage boxes totalling around 25kg of files related to my case - much of it SAR responses.
I had been wrongly denied legal aid - by the time LA realised their error and agreed I was eligible, I'd been arrested for the first time in my life and spent 11 nights in prison because of extremely poor legal representation (he fell asleep in the interview). The subsequent bail conditions before trial left me banned entirely from my own country of Wales for 4 months, sleeping on a friend's floor, which meant my business of a decade collapsed, and I am now, for the first time in my life, on the dole. But too late - I can't appeal because I was forced to admit guilty, even though I wasn't. (Bribe was: plead guilty and we won't put you back inside, force a trial and we'll pretty much block your evidence and find you guilty anyway).
The representation in court by the £360/hour barrister was appalling, The final result is that I am left with a totally unworkable 5 year restraining order, listed under the wrong case number, to include a bizarre prohibition on being on any of a 30 mile stretch of main road totally unrelated to the original event, at weekday peak travel times, when the event itself happened in a town centre on a Saturday afternoon. This was requested by the complainant and bizarrely accepted by the barrister without consulting me, and effectively not only makes work impossible due to the road location, but effectively prevents me from seeing my son for 5 more year. The solicitor's response is "well, we got you out of prison didn't we? Just suck it up for 5 years or move". I also owe £15k to friends and family who clubbed together and hired the solicitor to get me out of prison. Incidentally, I was held illegally for an extra night after the court lost the bail paperwork.
The thing that I was arrested for was alleged breach of a non-mol against my son (11), an order which was instigated and paid for by CAFCASS on behalf of the mother, without any evidence of harm at all. CAFCASS had pushed the hearing through knowing full well that social services were working on S16 and S47 reports. I appealed for a delay for the reports to be finished, but CAFCASS persuaded the judge to go ahead. Of course, when published, the S16a found "no evidence" of the mother's claims, and the followup S47 found that "this was not the first time she had changed her story", and that their concerns lay not with me, but with the fact that the damage being done to my child was "to satisfy a need in the mother".
But by then, the non-mol was in place, and the icing on the cake was a S91 to stop me appealing. During that hearing, I had no representation, while on the other side, there were 2 barristers for CAFCASS, plus the CAFCASS worker and head of CAFCASS, and my ex's barrister was allowed by the judge to read, live in court and verbatim, what she wanted in the non-mol. This was pushback from CAFCASS because I'd submitted a complaint after the case worker found that I had been diagnosed (and treated for) ADHD a few years back. I had not told anyone, but she revealed this to my son without checking with me, against the strict order of the court that they should ask my permission first. Of course, it was then all round the school. Nice.
While I had those 4 months to think since last November, I fired off a number of subject access requests, including to the CPS, police, social services, and education services. The result of some of those responses turned into complaints to the public ombudsman and ICO. The result of those are now bearing fruit, and it is getting incredible messy, very fast.
In the right hands, the info could make things extremely uncomfortable for the local education authority and the police, would prove beyond doubt she (and an officer) lied in statements, and most importantly totally put an end to this nonsense.
This is where it is getting very frightening - and I'm not using that word lightly. I met a bloke who had ten years of his life ruined by a nutter who accused him of rape after she didn't get what she wanted. He lost everything, had to go into hiding. In the end he was cleared, and while the woman was eventually charged, she didn't even go to prison for it. (Insane, but that's a whole other issue, not for now - he ended up writing a book about the whole experience).
I know my ex well enough to know she'd do that, and I now know the way she treated previous partners. She's already shown she has no problem ruining our son's childhood to get at me, so a rape allegation if things stopped going her way wouldn't be a stretch for her at all. I've had a couple of friends who are doing law degrees helping me as best they can legally so far, but they've never come across anything like this before.
Of course, at the bottom of all this is a dispute over property - there was never any issue with my son in the first place. But she is not even letting me sell the property to pay her off - we agreed an amount, and every time I get close to selling, she frustrates it. She doesn't even want or need the money - new rich bloke has bought her an entire house. This is all about extreme and intense control, which has been going on since 2019 when I met someone else (my ex having left in 2016).
If you think this all sounds a bit tin-foil-hat and conspiratorial, you're not alone. Reading it back, it sounds nuts, right? I mean, nowadays, no police officer so blatantly files a different report to the CPS than the one provided in a subject access request, do they? Surely I must be hiding something, right? A few slaps when I got drunk, maybe? I've said it before in previous posts so I'll repeat it here again:
Prior to the non-mol arrest a few months back, I had never been arrested nor charged with anything related to domestic violence or abuse, nor child neglect, drugs, alcohol, violence, theft, driving - NOTHING.
In fact, the people who put their names on letters of support to the court included: 2 serving mayors, 3 teachers, 2 doctors, a retired psychiatrists, 3 retired police officers and 1 retired custody sergeant.
Of the two witnesses my ex provided, one had their own written evidence contradicted by what they told the officer, and the other contradicted my ex's own evidence (she said I gone to "fight with" him, he said I'd not threatened anything at all). In fact, the police's own CCTV footage contradicted her, and yet none of it seemed to matter in court.
Oh, and the reason my ex invoked the non-mol in the first place? It's because, that same week, she'd attempted to illegally change my son's surname at the school, in breach of the same order on which I was arrested (which says "no person shall cause a child to be known by a different name"), but when I pointed that out, the police did nothing! So the pushback from her was to then report me and get me arrested.
So, that's where we are: 16 family court hearings, an S7, an S16, and S47 and an S91. 25kg of paperwork across multiple folders - and that's just what was sent to me in print. Then there's another 4.6Gb across 1,864 files in 107 folders, all since May 2019.
At least a dozen previous reports by her to the police all NFA'd as "not a police matter", 12 subject access requests from me to various bodies, 5 public ombudsman reports, 2 complaints still in progress with the ICO (5 months and counting, actively being worked on), missing money from my son's trust fund account. Oh, and did I mention that when I spotted something redacted from the council that suggested he may have had some harm while in her care, when I wrote to the doctor (when my son was 10), they asked her before they replied to me. And when they did (once the local health board got involved) the explanation was that it would "cause mental harm" for me to see his records, even though I have full PR and am well known to the practice (in a good way). They refused to explain further.
And when I asked about his work at school, apparently she'd been in touch with them and again, this bizarre "mental harm" excuse was wheeled out, followed by some guff about "Gillick competency" - we are talking about a child of 10 and access to school records which is totally my right in Wales as a parent with full PR. Gillick Competency has nothing to do with it. The education dept went into lockdown mode and refused to respond even to a request by my representative MS in Wales agreed the LEA may be wrong and upheld my request and intervened for me. The LEA said a meeting would "not be helpful". No, it certainly wouldn't be, to them!
The net outcome of all of this will mean I will have had no contact with my only child from between the age of 9 to 17. That surely cannot be right.
I could also mention that this all stepped up a gear when I noticed that £3,500 was missing from my son's child trust fund account, and then somehow my ex, as a private citizen, got a recording of my call to the bank, trying to tell the court that my call to the bank to check about our son's trust fund account was a form of stalking her. WTF!
Perhaps it might be noteworthy that the judge twice took over 200 days to deliver his written judgment, that the applicant "made him blush", and was the one that slapped the S91 "no appeal" order on me, even though I was a first-time respondent litigant in person in a non-DV case and even himself noted that I had not invoked any of the court hearings?
I collect long lists of solicitors by recommendation, and work my way through them, and all I hear is that it's "too complex" for their firm or that they could do it but they'd need a downpayment of £30,000 to read in the papers, or that they recommend I speak to a human rights barrister. Right, anyone know of any UNDER £8k per day?! Sometimes I try breaking it down, focusing on, say, education law. And then once I start speaking to the solicitor and it becomes clear there's a whole load of other stuff, then I'd have to be talking to multiple partners and everyone is busy until September 2023 and here we go again.
I've been ripped off four times now - one got immediately sacked by his firm and I got my money back, one has taken the money but not done what they said, one is still being dealt with by SRA (2 years now) and when I caught the one dealing with the property lying about things they said they'd done, at least they didn't dare ask for the remaining bill and provided my enormous file, in print, and presumably great expense to them. But what makes solicitors think they can say they sent a doc to the other party, and not think I might actually check with the other party to see if they did? Do most people just get away with it?
If that was stressful reading that, this is all my life is now, from dawn to dusk, and I need my life back.
Who can I turn to? Because I need PROPER protection and advice now: Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum
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