Joey thinks it was around 1991 that we made our last assigned documentary for HBO. Sheila Nevins had given us the assignment on divorce. We called it Love to Hate. We headed to Houston, where we stumbled into Family Court to explore bias against women. The film became Women on Trial.
Houston, Texas, was where we found America’s worst domestic court system. Virginia Cotts was with me in Houston. I needed a strong partner for what we were uncovering there. I filmed four cases of women who’d had their children taken away from them and given to the fathers, in one case a father who hadn’t even asked for custody. In another case, a judge removed a five-year-old boy from his schoolteacher mother’s custody, would not permit her to see him for three years, and then for only a half-hour visit in the offices of a court-appointed psychologist. By the time the child was eight, his habits and manners reflected those of his rather violent cop father.
I interviewed two teenagers, brother and sister, who were given in custody, when they were small, to a father who hadn’t asked for custody. The judge ruled no visitation, no contact, between the mother and her son and daughter. The mother erected a large billboard on the side of the road that her children passed on their way to school, telling them she, their grandma, and their grandpa loved them. The boy wrote to the judge many times, begging him to return him and his sister to his mother.
I interviewed this judge. He was pleasant, open, cooperative.
Me: “Why did you give custody to the father?”
Judge: “Any layperson could see she had mental problems.”
Me: “How?”
Judge: “She had severe mental problems.”
Me: “What about her son? He wrote you many letters asking you to return him and his sister to his mom.”
Judge: “Ah—he should be put in a mental institution.”
The power of life and death, which I think is what is involved in removing a child from its parent/mother, was in the hands of this judge.
I was appalled at the real lives of the women and children, whose lives were in free fall. There were villains; there were heroes. Rusty Hardin, the famous Texas lawyer, then an assistant district attorney, was helping me on the side. My hero. The fact that we’d caught the Family Court judges on film, that they would be exposed, filled me with a sense of triumph and hope.
The documentary revealing those crimes ran for a few nights on HBO before we were slapped with the first of five lawsuits. We were charged in Texas. The judge and the other people we exposed in the film sued HBO and our company, Joey’s and mine, for eighty million dollars. The judge had signed a release before and after we filmed, but that didn’t stop him.
Luckily, our personal lawyer, Arthur Jacobs, had persuaded HBO to indemnify me and Joe, our production company, and our crew without a dollar limit, against claims that might be brought in any lawsuits. “Insurance, Arthur, talking about insurance is so boring,” I’d tell him. Thank God we had insurance. One case went on for ten years. It was a foregone conclusion that we would lose. HBO decided to never again show the film, and as it was their film, I could never show it again. Yes. That hurts. To have tried to convey the reality of what these women and children suffered, and then to have their one channel to the world outside denied them.
I was to learn from my attorney, Arthur Jacobs, who’d returned to Houston for the case, that the women had banded together for a vigil outside the Family Court building. The women had set up cots and slept on them all night, taking turns from one night to the next for fourteen months, in protest of the Family Court rulings.
• • •
Not long after the trial began in one of the lawsuits, the phone rang. It was the wife of one of the court-appointed psychologists. He was divorcing her, she said, and suing for custody of their eight-year-old daughter. Could I help? My heart sank. “I have no more tools, no more weapons, no more power,” I told her. “The bad guys won. And my best advice is, don’t let anyone know you contacted me.”
I kept in touch to give her moral if not active support. She called one evening, crying. Her daughter had gone to her husband, the psychologist. She lost in the same shameful system.
It took me back to when Dinah was two and a half and I left her with her father, with Arnie, while I did a play. I had no money, none. I had no choice but to take this job. My next new life depended on it. But the fear that he wouldn’t give her back to me was always there. The fear of losing her washed over me, sickened me, made me dizzy every day and night. Fear of Arnie’s power. One of the unwanted thoughts I had when I heard of his death was that he could never take Dinah. So all these years later, when we told the stories of women having their children taken away from them, I found my old fears were still alive in me, and my old pain flared to connect with these utterly powerless mothers from Houston, Texas.