"I Don't Represent Your Daughter"

Not having ever been involved in the legal system beyond a couple of traffic tickets, my expectations were based to a degree on what I had seen on TV courtroom dramas.

For a parent dealing with the sexual abuse of their child, the reality of the legal system is quite sobering.

Even though my daughter had been abused for years, since she was 12, because discovery happened after her 16th birthday, state prosecutors limited their contact with us and spoke directly to our daughter. She was responsible for relaying information, which made the whole process very difficult. My wife’s and my involvement were basically limited to what my daughter included us in.

I understand the intent behind it. There are reasons to protect a child’s account from a parent’s influence. But in practice it meant that the two people who would walk through fire for her were pushed to the edge of the room. We became spectators in the fight for our own daughter.

That was the first surprise. It would not be the last.

The next one came when I heard the actual charges. I had to read them twice. Years of grooming. Years of manipulation, threats, and coercion. Dozens of separate acts across two states. All of it reduced to three counts.

When I asked how that was possible, the prosecutor told me the state “doesn’t like to pile on first-time offenders,” and that three charges “represent the bulk of the offenses.” I asked whether I could assault someone five times in one evening and have it count as a single crime. He didn’t really answer. What he said instead, I will never forget: “I’m not your lawyer. I don’t represent you. I don’t represent your daughter. I represent the state.”

That one sentence is the whole thing in miniature. The person prosecuting the crime against your child does not work for your child — they don’t represent your child — they represent the state.

Then came the delays. We would book flights and a hotel for a hearing, and a day or two before we flew, it would be postponed. A continuance. Then another. Sometimes at the request of the state, more often the defense — always well-timed to land after we had already spent the money and braced ourselves. Because our daughter was a minor, that kind of case was heard only one day a week, so a single postponement didn’t cost us days. It cost us months.

Delay is not an accident. It is a strategy. A drawn-out case exhausts the victim, and an exhausted victim drops the charges. Many do. Of the girls in my daughter’s therapy group — all survivors of abuse and incest — only a fraction would ever see anything resembling justice. My daughter was the only one who made it all the way to the point of taking the stand. Not because the others weren’t brave. Because the system is built to wear you down, and most families don’t have the resources or the support to outlast it.

And the resources are not equal. On one side, a downtown firm — five or six lawyers at every hearing, paid psychiatric experts, paid medical experts, every possible defense tried.

On our side, us — and a rotating cast of state prosecutors. By the time the trial was over we were on our fourth.

Overworked prosecutors, so buried in cases they sometimes couldn’t keep them straight. The people fighting for the victim are underfunded, stretched thin, and they are slaves to the politics of the day.

The people defending the accused are limited only by how much money they are willing to pay for “justice.”

In our case against my father, we were up against someone willing to pay a fortune and with the resources to do it.

I had pictured my father being arrested — handcuffed — walked out of his 8,000-square-foot home by armed police in uniform. I pictured his neighbors standing outside shooting video as he hid his face in shame. I fantasized about his arrest, the fingerprints, the mug shots, the shame of a strip search.

But none of that happened.

Instead, the district attorney’s office called his lawyers, and they walked him into the courthouse to turn himself in. He was released on his own recognizance within hours. He didn’t even spend the night in jail.

Afterward, we looked for his mugshot for weeks and never found one — then our advocate told us why. I never realized that if you had access to an expensive lawyer, you could keep your mugshot from the public.

While my daughter was having panic attacks and nightmares — sleeping with the lights on — the man who caused them, my father, was mildly inconvenienced by a twenty-minute drive downtown.

For sentencing, I wrote a nearly 4,000-word victim impact statement — everything I knew he had done, not only the three charges. Every single thing. To my surprise, the judge listened, and handed down more time than anyone expected. Then the defense appealed, arguing the sentence had been built on conduct he was never convicted of — on my words rather than the three charges on paper. The appeal worked, to a degree. The time he would actually serve was shortened, but his sentence was lengthened — if that makes any sense.

I am not writing this to say the people inside the system don’t care. Some of them carried us. I felt for our victim advocate; she had to apologize daily for things she couldn’t control. The officer who took the first report followed our case all the way to the end — he showed up for us even after he had retired. There are good people inside a broken machine.

But the machine is still broken.

It is designed around protecting the accused. It is slow, it is underfunded, and at nearly every turn it asks the victim to carry the weight while the accused, if he has money, is barely touched. If you are a parent walking into this, I want you to know what I didn’t: it will not look like anything you have seen on television. Prepare to have your expectations of justice reset, again and again.

We still showed up.

We still fought.

I would do it all over again — for one single reason: my willingness to fight my father for our daughter’s justice mattered more to my daughter than the outcome.