A Letter Every Lawyer Should Read

Recently, someone sent this in.  Thankfully, this was not from our community, but we can take a lesson or two from it as well:

I am a lawyer. I take money to tear families apart. I specialize in divorce, which is a polite way of saying I weaponize the law for whoever pays me. My current client has what I used to call “control issues” before I stopped using clinical terms to describe what I enable. She doesn’t want her ex-husband to see their daughter. She doesn’t want his parents—people who once rocked that child to sleep, who celebrated her first steps, who love her—to see her either. I help her do this.

I draft the motions. I coach her testimony. I know exactly which phrases make a judge hesitate, which insinuations plant doubt without proof. I am very good at what I do. Do I enjoy this? I used to tell myself no. Now I’m not sure I’m capable of honest self-reflection anymore. I rationalize it the way every lawyer learns to rationalize: if I don’t take this case, someone else will. Someone less skilled, perhaps, who won’t win as decisively. At least I’m competent. At least I’m professional. At least I return phone calls promptly. R

ecently, I read about Rachiel Moore in Navarre, Florida. In March 2023, she convinced her former stepfather to murder her ex-boyfriend, Colby Vinson, over a custody dispute. He shot Vinson in front of the man’s young daughter—the child they were fighting over. Curtis got life in prison. Rachiel got life without parole.

When I read the details, my hands went cold. Rachiel Moore is my client, twenty steps further down the same path. The same rage. The same need to control. The same willingness to sacrifice a child’s wholeness to win.

This case has paid for an addition to my house. An indoor swimming pool. Last week, someone I know attended a celebration—a First Communion, for the family I’m helping to destroy. He mentioned, casually, that he noticed the missing granddaughter. “Strange,” he said, “not to have her there for something so important.”

I said nothing. What could I say? Here’s what makes it worse, what keeps me awake some nights before the sleeping pills kick in: the child isn’t crying for her grandparents. She doesn’t miss them. She has been taught not to miss them.

My client has done her work well. Too well. The girl believes every word. She believes her father is dangerous. She believes her grandparents are toxic, manipulative, part of a conspiracy to hurt her mother. She has learned to recite these things with the practiced ease of a child who has heard them a thousand times, who has absorbed them the way she once absorbed fairy tales and nursery rhymes.

This is what successful parental alienation looks like. It’s not a child torn between two loves. It’s a child who no longer recognizes one love as love at all. It’s surgical, precise, complete. And I helped make it complete. I know the techniques because I’ve deployed them dozens of times. Y

ou start small. You document every minor infraction by the other parent—five minutes late for pickup, a forgotten permission slip, a missed call. You build a narrative. You never accuse directly; judges see through that. Instead, you express “concerns.” You’re “worried.” You’ve “noticed patterns that trouble you.” You coach your client on the language.

Never say “I hate him.” Say “I’m concerned about his judgment.” Never say “I want to punish him.” Say “I need to protect our daughter.” The law rewards mothers who appear reasonable, measured, frightened rather than furious. Then you isolate. You request supervised visitation for invented reasons. You object to holidays with extended family, citing vague “anxiety” the child experiences. You know the child’s anxiety is manufactured, that it’s the mother’s anxiety projected and internalized, but you never say this. You present it as fact. “The child becomes distressed before visits with paternal grandparents.”

You don’t mention that the distress was planted, watered, cultivated like a poisonous garden. I’ve watched it happen in real time. I’ve sat in my office while my client repeats her talking points to her daughter over speakerphone. “Remember, you don’t have to see Daddy if you don’t want to. Remember, if you feel scared, you can tell the judge.” The girl’s voice, small and compliant: “I remember, Mommy.”

The father’s lawyer is competent but outmatched. He’s working with the truth, which is always a handicap in family court. The truth is boring: he’s a decent father, his parents are loving grandparents, no one has done anything wrong except get divorced and have the misfortune of being divorced by someone vindictive. But decency doesn’t make for compelling motions. Love doesn’t photograph well in evidence packets. I bury him in paperwork. I request evaluations, depositions, expert witnesses.

I know his resources are limited, that each motion costs him money he doesn’t have. I know I’m bleeding him dry while my client’s family money flows endlessly. This is part of the strategy. Exhaust him. Make him choose between fighting for his daughter and paying his mortgage.

It’s working. I used to practice differently. Not better, perhaps, but differently. I used to believe that family law meant helping people navigate the worst moments of their lives with dignity intact. I used to think my role was to minimize damage, protect children, find solutions that let everyone heal. I’m not sure when that changed. It wasn’t sudden. There was no moment when I woke up and decided to become this. It was incremental, case by case, compromise by compromise. A client who needed a more aggressive approach. A case where playing hardball got results. A partnership track that rewarded billable hours over outcomes. A mortgage on a house I couldn’t quite afford. Then a bigger house. Then the addition. Then the pool.

The pool is beautiful, by the way. Heated. Saltwater. LED lighting that cycles through colors at night. I swim in it most evenings. The rhythm is meditative, mindless. Stroke, breathe, turn. Stroke, breathe, turn. I can swim away almost anything. I’ve tried to tell myself that my client’s ex-husband isn’t Colby Vinson. That we’re nowhere near murder, that the comparison is hysterical, that I’m being dramatic.

But I wonder about degrees. I wonder about trajectories. Rachiel Moore didn’t start with murder. She started with exactly what my client is doing: erasing a father, rewriting a child’s history, teaching her daughter that love from certain people is actually harm. What happens to that little girl in ten years? In twenty? When she’s old enough to realize what was done to her, what she was made complicit in? When she understands that she had grandparents who loved her, a father who fought for her, and she was trained to reject them all?

I know what the research says. I’ve read it, even though I wish I hadn’t. Children who are successfully alienated suffer depression, anxiety, difficulty forming relationships. They struggle with trust. They often repeat the pattern, becoming alienators themselves or choosing partners who alienate them from their own families. The damage metastasizes across generations. I know this. I help cause this. I bill for causing this.

There’s a particular moment that replays in my mind. It was a deposition six months ago. The paternal grandmother was being questioned. She’s in her seventies, a retired teacher, the kind of woman who still sends handwritten birthday cards and holy cards on feast days and bakes too many cookies.

She was asked about her relationship with her granddaughter. “We used to be very close,” she said, and her voice broke. “We had tea parties. I braided her hair. Then one day—it just stopped. My son said his ex-wife told our granddaughter that we were trying to turn her against her mother, which was never true. Never. We just loved her.” She cried during the deposition. Quietly, the way people cry when they’re trying very hard not to. She kept apologizing. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I just miss her so much.”

I objected to the emotional display. I suggested we take a break. I made it clear to the court reporter that this behavior was manipulative, performative. I was doing my job. Later, I went home and added another lap to my evening swim. The man who mentioned seeing them at the didn’t know he was talking to me—to the architect of their grief.

We were at a different affair, actually, standing near the buffet table, making the small talk people make at these events. He’s a good man, kind, the type who notices when people are suffering. “They looked so sad,” he said, piling food on his plate. “The whole family did. You could tell someone was missing. I asked someone about it—apparently there’s some custody situation, the mother won’t let them see the little girl. Can you imagine? Your own grandchild, just erased from your life?” I made a sympathetic noise. I said something about how terrible custody battles can be. I didn’t mention that I know exactly how terrible they can be because I make them terrible, because that’s what I’m paid to do.

I excused myself. I went to the bathroom and stared at my reflection for a long time. The man in the mirror looked successful, well-fed, professionally groomed. He looked like someone who had made it. He looked like someone who could afford an addition and an indoor pool. He looked like someone I used to know, before I killed him.

That night, I swam four laps instead of two. I tell myself I’m going to withdraw from the case. I draft the letter in my head: “Dear [Client], Due to an irreconcilable conflict of interest, I can no longer represent you.” But I know I won’t send it. Someone else will take the case—probably someone in my firm, someone I trained. And I’ll lose the revenue. And I’ve already drawn up plans for a home theater in the basement.

The truth is simpler and more horrible: I’ve become someone who values a swimming pool more than a child’s relationship with her grandparents. I’ve become someone who can watch a grandmother cry and see only a tactical advantage. I’ve become someone who helps erase people from a little girl’s life and then goes home to swim laps in water paid for by that erasure. If I don’t take this case, someone else will. This is my absolution, my mantra, my excuse. But Rachiel Moore probably told herself something similar. That if she didn’t find a way to eliminate Colby Vinson, he would keep pursuing custody. That someone had to take action. That she was protecting her child. The distance between us isn’t as far as I want it to be.

And the worst part, the part that haunts me when the sleeping pills don’t work and the pool is too cold for swimming: I know I’ll wake up tomorrow and do it all again. Because I’m good at what I do. Because someone will pay me. Because I have a pool to maintain and an addition to furnish and a lifestyle to uphold. Because somewhere along the way, I learned to swim away my humanity, two laps at a time. And the water is always warm enough to make me forget.