Parent Trap

Are false abuse charges a common tactic in child custody battles?

Cathy Young from the December 2006 issue

(Page 3 of 7)

/span> /p> p> span class="c2">The Newsweek story has an equally problematic poster girl in Genia Schockome, a New York woman whose ex-husband, Timothy, received sole custody of their children after a six-year battle. While giving virtually full credence to her allegations of physical abuse by her former husband, the article doesn’t mention that after the divorce the father initially had custody of the children nearly half the time and was never accused of abusing them, or that Schockome defied numerous court orders and quit a high-paying job in an apparent attempt to avoid child support payments. As Newsweek went to press, an appellate court rejected Schockome’s claim of bias against the judge in her case. o:p> /o:p> /span> /p> p> span class="c2">Similar issues have dogged Amy Neustein, a leading activist on behalf of mothers penalized for abuse accusations. Neustein lost custody of her own daughter, Sherry, in 1986 after accusing her former husband, Ozzie Orbach, of sexual abuse—charges repeatedly rejected by the courts and by family service agencies. Her crusade has attracted support not only from feminist groups but from politicians from both major parties; in May 2006, she appeared at a press conference in New York with Jeanine Pirro, Republican candidate for state attorney general, and Democratic congressional candidate Chris Owens. Yet a year earlier, Sherry Orbach, then 24 and a student at Columbia Law School, had published an article in The Jewish Press