Imagine you are a financial advisor specializing in female clientele who are navigating the family courts during a divorce. It’s a niche market for sure, but it makes sense. There are a lot of divorces and women file the majority of them.
You also know these women are looking to maximize their take. Another plus for you is that many of these women have an all-time low opinion of their husbands, and more than a few are looking for revenge. Feelings can and do go autonomic at times like these, which also works for you.
Now imagine you just need a hook to get more women in the door. And imagine you don’t have pesky scruples that interfere with how you get there. That leaves a lot of doors open, including selling women the idea that family courts actually have an anti-woman bias; that men are trending toward abusing family law against women with false accusations and restraining orders and that it is becoming a problem for which women, as a group, need specialized protection.
I know what even a lot of feminists are thinking. I’ve heard many diehard believers acknowledge the bias against men in courts. They make excuses for it, but they know it is there. Everyone does.
But you can sell anything to the crazy obsessed, to the angry, to the hurt and to the frantically driven to win. Up will be down if it serves their agenda.
Can you imagine it? Good. Now imagine your name is Jeff Landers and you write for Forbes Magazine.
The title of a recent article he wrote says it all. “How Some Men Are Upending Domestic Violence Laws to Scam an Advantage in Divorce.”
In Landers’ wildly misleading and disingenuous article sales pitch for his business, he blows past forgivably biased statements found in most advertising and goes straight to the snake oil like it was a cancer cure.
The star of Landers’ piece advertisement is a biographical book that centers on a woman, Janie McQueen, who was allegedly the victim of a false allegation as a part of a divorce. Apparently the experience was so disturbing that it prompted her to write the book as a warning to all women about men in family court. Or maybe it was just to make a few bucks. If she saw the worst of family courts she no doubt needs the money.
All this, however, is one woman’s story. Instead of checking his facts, Landers uses someone else’s anecdote to infer applicability to the general population, or rather the part of the population that is female and divorcing…and solvent enough to need a financial planner.
Presto-change-o, false allegations of abuse in family court now fall into the “women’s issues” arena, courtesy of a financial advisor.
Nice to see the Wall Street types haven’t gone changing on us.
S.A.V.E. has issued an action e-lert, asking concerned individuals to contact Forbes Magazine and let them know what you think about the Landers article and the willful misrepresentation of reality for commercial purposes that it contains.
Of course I support this action and urge other MRA’s to follow suit.
S.A.V.E. has posted about this on their website, including the results of their own professional research on false allegations.
But I also wanted to address one other point that needs some attention in this story. These situations have a way of teaching a larger lesson.
As I said earlier, I have no idea if Janie McQueen was a victim of being abused by her husband through the courts. I certainly know it is possible. I have read of a few other cases where women ended up on the short end of the stick.
It’s a bad system. They can’t expect it to not backfire from time to time.
But if McQueen really was the victim of a false accusation, and she ended up in jail unfairly, then it happened because no one has been listening to what men’s activists have been telling them for years. And they were not listening because it was only happening to men.
Restraining orders are supposed to require probable cause determined under reasonable standards. They are designed to keep people safe from threats. But the prevailing anti-male bias has reduced them to a flimsy hoax issued by every family court in the west in order to favor women during the marital dissolution. Some of them are legitimate, but it is impossible to tell which ones are good or bad because they do not require any substantiation. They are issued when one of the marital partners claims something happened, or claims they are afraid something will happen. This almost always results in a man being forced from his home and children while a woman retains possession of everything.
Blowback was unavoidable. Bigoted systems, like bigotry itself, hurt everyone, not just the people targeted for discrimination. Allowing hollow accusations to pass for credible evidence in a matter so serious that children are taken from parents is an abomination of the courts that has been openly practiced as long as men and children were the only ones getting shafted by it.
Well, those that swim with sharks, eventually get bit. If Ms. McQueen wants to fix the system, male bashing and feeble distortions of the truth are not going to help much.
If your gig is to sell books or get new clients by spreading lies that create fear, then stay the course.
The publishers of Forbes should get a message. Please join me in doing that. Disguising advertising as informed journalism is bad enough. Fear-mongering on the backs of men to make a buck off women during periods of extreme emotion and turmoil is a fall to rock bottom.
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False allegation survey results from S.A.V.E.
2011 Nationwide False Allegations Phone Survey Results:
- Three-quarters of the falsely accused persons were male.
- Nearly seven in 10 of the accusers were female.
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To contact Jeff Landers
Landers@BedrockDivorce.com
To contact Forbes Magazine
readers@forbes.com
(800) 295-0893
