Connect the Dots: Family Court Killed Sinéad O’Connor

This Should be Shouted Out Everywhere

Sinéad O’Connor was a powerful truthteller and talent, a survivor of violence and injustice, and a woman. These characteristics incur the most aversion and fear for the authoritarian mindset, and no place is more authoritarian than the Family Courts. That she was a victim of Family Court also tells us that she was a good and loving mother.  Her sacrifice brings powerfully to the fore the fate especially of powerful and beautiful women, in the trail of dead bodies that Family Courts leave behind.

Family Courts defy common assumptions.  It is easy to believe that women would be favored in a court designed for families, but the reverse is true.  “Family Courts are a patriarchal institution,” a lawyer colleague once told me.  “If you have a woman judge, chances are it will be worse—she had to be more male than the men to get there.”  Before entering the arena myself, I had not imagined to what deadly degree.

It would also seem that Family Courts would wish to preserve existing parent-child bonds, and to keep children from abusers—but these are precisely the cases that go the furthest awry.  Systems in place to protect children are turned on their heads and used to harm them instead, while measures such as protective orders and supervised visitation are issued against the loving parent, to keep her from reporting the abuser!  This is because there is a lucrative business behind helping abusers: amounting to fifty billion dollars a year in the U.S. alone.

And this is only the beginning of my investigations for my upcoming book, The Dangerous Case of Family Courts.  Family Courts are not for “Family” (they destroy families) and are not “Courts” as we conceive them (it is the only one unbound by the law or even laws of human decency).  They are more aptly described as an abuse industry—and to cover this up, they will eliminate anyone who gets in their way, conscientious dissenters and objecters alike.  It may even be turned into a formula: the better a parent you are, and the more principled a person, the harder Family Courts will work to decimate you.

“Custody switches” are common Family Court practices that not only break the child victim but also the loving parent (overwhelmingly the mother).  Once the mother is psychologically “broken”, Family Courts can claim that the child was taken from her because the mother was “mentally ill”—but the sequence of events is usually exactly the reverse.

The separation of a growing child from a loving parent, as if they were dead to each other, is the worst possible trauma one could inflict—a common, unnecessary calamity created by Family Courts. This clearly played a role in O’Connor’s unspeakable suffering and untimely death.  This is evident in that, shortly before she was separated from her son, she was actually thriving.

What O’Connor lived through is a consistent, near-identical playbook across numerous U.S. states, and according to the United Nations, throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. I was not an expert in her particular case, but the Family Court pattern is more than recognizable: O’Connor has a history of childhood abuse, which is like wearing a target for the Family Courts.  Having fame and being a strong, outspoken woman, furthermore, actually works against you in Family Court—and who better fits this description than Sinéad O’Connor?  She was not only a renowned celebrity but an early whistleblower on the pedophilia scandal of the Catholic Church—a full decade before the Boston Globe’s groundbreaking revelation. There is nothing more menacing to a criminal organization than an uncompromising truthteller and influential activist.

There are other, identifiable fingerprints of Family Court: O’Connor lost total custody of her son at a tender age, in a sudden, inexplicable custody switch, which is applied routinely to fit mothers (there are fathers, on the other hand, who attain custody even after having murdered the child’s sibling!).  O’Connor had to fight hard for parenting time, which was only granted in limited, supervised visits, despite there being no history of abuse (child murder by father, on the other hand, is a frequent occurrence because of lack of supervision, even in instances of extensive histories of abuse).  Shane committed suicide while separated from his mother (which again happens far more commonly than while separated from the father).  Family Courts rely on the public assumption that, “There must have been something wrong with the mother,” when there was nothing—except for what is wrong with the Family Courts.

O’Connor’s love for her son was palpable:

“Been living as undead night creature since [his death]….  He was the love of my life, the lamp of my soul.”

Despite being a son who “loves his mommy since the day he was born,” Shane was not allowed to see his mother at all for years and later only under supervision.  O’Connor was Shane’s closest bond and had also been his primary caregiver, up until when he was suddenly taken.  There were no allegations of abuse but quite the contrary: she was noted to be a very loving mother, and Shane was extremely bonded to her.  Such separation from a loving mother at a young, developmentally-sensitive age is widely accepted as one of the most traumatic experiences children could ever experience—and undoubtedly contributed to, if not caused, his eventual suicide.

Previously, O’Connor let go of her daughter after a long, bitter Family Court battle, which disrupted her career at her height of success. Afterward, she said: “I am not a bad mother.  That’s not why I am giving up custody.  I’ve been a good mother to Róisín and John Waters accepts this.”  Yet, the father was allowed to prevail.  He tried to tell police and social workers that O’Connor had mistreated their daughter, but social services cleared her.  In the context of Family Courts, a mother’s clearance against a father’s accusation is exceedingly rare, compared to a father’s clearance in a converse situation—even though fathers, around the world, are overwhelmingly the ones making false accusations. O’Connor eventually reconnected and even performed with her daughter, Róisín.

Prior to researching the Family Courts, I believed that the deaths of women and children were due to the dangers inherent in family violence and the lack of competence and training in workers who investigate abuse.  Since my research, I have learned that giving the child to the wrong parent—to the abuser—or simply taking the child from the right parent—for foster care—brings Family Courts great private and public revenue.

Shane’s suicide in January 2022 compounded O’Connor’s suffering from having lost him custodially, which proved too much for a loving mother to bear.  O’Connor blamed the child and family agency, for “too many kids were dying on their watch”—and she was not wrong. Endangering children for profit leads to predictable results: essentially a massacre of the innocents.  However, so far, neither Family Courts nor Child Protective Services are being held accountable, mostly because they operate under secrecy and immunity, and the public is not connecting the dots.

O’Connor had publicly raged about how Shane was being kept from her, and she speaks for countless victims of Family Court:

“I reserve my right as a female animal, to fight (and have fought for the last 18 months) like an animal for my child.  I have been his mother AND his father all his life.  His rock.  We should never have been separated.”

A mother-child bond is the most natural and fundamental for human existence, and the first that corrupt, contrived undertakings would try to disrupt. During separation, O’Connor protested that her child’s head was being filled with lies about her, through judicially-enabled predatory alienation—the worst fate for mother and child short of death. And now both are dead.

For Family Court survivors, Court intervention is often by far the worst tragedy that has befallen them—worse than the original abuse—and one that isolates, torments, and pushes many over the edge.  Too many loving mothers experience this separation to be an ending of their life—whether or not their bodies continue to survive.  And too many children are not only separated from their beloved parent but sent to their physical and mental sacrifice.

The question is, how long will we as a society tolerate this gratuitous generation of mental health crises, human rights abuses, and slaughter of women and children?  How long will we squander humanity’s most precious gift: a mother’s love?

We must connect the dots for their sacrifices not to be in vain.