All Episodes
Previous Next
July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:02
Divorce: What They Aren't Telling You!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi, everybody. My name is Stefan Mullen.
I'm the host of Free Domain Radio. I have Joseph Sorge on the line, I guess, on the pipe.
And Joseph has produced, directed and produced a documentary that I strongly urge you to get and to watch.
It is an investment in future sanity and fiscal solvency.
And your capacity to retain the ability to love another carbon-based life form.
I'm not actually sure where it should be classified.
I think documentary horror would probably be the closest.
It's called Divorce Corp, C-O-R-P, and it goes in truly gruesome detail into the family court system and the $50 billion a year divorce industry in the United States.
Joseph, thank you so much for taking the time today.
You're very welcome. I appreciate you having me on your show.
So, you know, it's funny because I've received, I've been doing my show for six or seven years, and I've received notes over those years saying, man, you've got to look into divorce court.
I'm a state skeptic, I guess you could say, about the validity of state power, particularly in sensitive matters like charity and, in this case, of course, family structure and divorce.
And I've just never quite got round to it because it seemed a tad conspiratorial to me.
I humbly confess to being entirely wrong and seeing the lid blown off this horrifying system in your documentary was a real education.
Can you talk a little bit about the background, how you, I mean, you have a background in science and you're an entrepreneur and you have an MD degree from Harvard.
And what got you on this road to producing this kind of work?
Well, first of all, I made a career change from biotechnology into the entertainment business, and we produced a television show, and I was interested in doing a documentary on something.
I personally went through a divorce.
It was not as devastating as what some of the victims experienced in our movie, but it opened my eyes to the system.
When you sit in family court The judge doesn't just hear your case, the judge may be hearing 10 or 15 cases that day, and so you get to experience what other people are going through.
And what I saw was shocking.
I saw what I perceived to be collusion between the lawyers and the judge on occasion.
I thought the judge was very hostile to the general public in the courtroom, was not treating them politely at all, despised the fact that they didn't have a lawyer and didn't know what they were doing in some cases.
And so it really looked like an area that would deserve some investigation.
And when we did our research, we were shocked at some of the stories we came up with.
And so we thought this would be a good topic for, I call it an expose as opposed to a documentary.
Well, and there's two key things, I think, that are discussed in the documentary, at least in the first half.
The first, of course, is that you need the government's permission.
You need a family court judge's permission to get divorced.
And in that process, there is no trial by jury.
As you point out, it's called an equity court rather than a justice or law court.
Therefore, there's no trial by jury, which was, of course, originally designed to keep judges approximately honest.
No trial by jury, and you do not have the right to an attorney if you cannot afford one, which opens you up to, I think, all kinds of financial exploitation.
How did it come about that in perhaps the area, well, the area that people most commonly use, I mean, how many people sue or get sued versus get divorced, how did it end up with this kind of Stalin-esque system in America?
Because as you point out, in other countries around the world, it's not at all the case.
Yeah. Well, it's historical reasons.
In England, back in the days of Henry VIII, they had courts of law and courts of equity, and the courts of equity were run by the clergy, and they handled matters that could not be easily quantified because there were so many variables in it.
And over the years, divorce evolved into something that was heard in courts of equity in England, and then in the United States, when we set up our constitution, We didn't create separate courts of equity, but the Constitution allows the judiciary to hear matters that are involving either law or equity.
And frankly, divorce and child custody involve both matters of law and equity, but for some reason the judiciary has unilaterally decided that all family law matters are to be heard under the rules of equity, which basically means they don't have to follow the Constitution.
So as you say, there's no jury.
You're not entitled to a lawyer if you can't afford one.
You're not entitled to a transcript of your case unless you pay for it, and only if the state provides a transcriptionist.
Otherwise, you have to bring in your own.
You're not entitled to a speedy trial.
There's no presumption of innocence until proven guilty.
All of those things that we consider fundamental to a fair hearing in your day in court are not applied when it comes to family court.
And it seems that the connection...
You have a great quote from Dickens where he says that the business of law is to make business for itself, to ever escalate complexity, particularly when combined with necessity, as is the case in wanting a divorce and needing the permission of the family court judge.
So with no-fault divorce, as you pointed out, I was actually quite surprised to find out that it was the arch-conservative Ronald Reagan who first signed this into practice.
I think he was a divorcee himself.
With no-fault divorce, it seems that you have, of course, a huge rise in the number of divorces.
And the lawyer that you pointed out early on in the film, who said, you know, here is the family...
Court Law, when I sort of graduated in 1947, it was like two or three pages of big text, and then he takes out this big phone book of tiny print of where it is now.
Again, there's no conspiracy like there's a bunch of people in smoke-filled rooms planning this, but it seems inevitable that this kind of complication, when it's so profitable to the lawyers and to the judges, is going to occur, where a human being, where ignorance of the law is no excuse, you're not given a lawyer, but the law is frankly impossible I think?
Well, Stefan, I think you really nailed it.
It wasn't a backroom conspiracy planning to develop a system to make a lot of money for people, but it turned out that way.
And there were several factors that contributed to it.
One was, you know, evolutionist society where we did have the passage of no-fault divorce laws, which really only went part of the way.
Essentially what they said is you could file for divorce without having to prove fault.
But you can't finish a divorce without the aid of the court, a judge, and the government system, which I think was...
They didn't finish the job, frankly.
The other thing about it is that as housing prices increased in value in the 1950s, 60s, 70s in the United States, more money was available for divorce lawyers, because what they do is they frequently liquidate the family home in a divorce, and that's how the lawyers get paid.
And so there was more money introduced, more money available for lawyers to get into this business, and so more of them did entertain family laws as an occupation.
And then finally, the women's movement in the 60s and 70s.
I think I fully support what they did.
I think they had very good motives.
I believe in gender equality.
However, like most things, there's the law of unexpected consequences.
And what happened is a lot of laws were passed to protect women, particularly to provide for the homemaker or the dependent spouse, that no longer apply to the majority of society.
Today, 80% of households are two wage-earner households.
The salaries between men and women ages 25 to 35 are almost in parity, especially if you consider same job description and same education.
And so modern society doesn't reflect the traditional values that were common in the 1950s and 1960s, and yet the laws that we have were set up to protect that dependent spouse, which I believe creates the fodder for the lawyers to dig deeply into all of the information, the financial information, the information about parenting, and try to come up with a solution that would have been appropriate in 1960, but is no longer appropriate in this era.
Yeah, I mean, during a case or during a time when divorce required a judgment, right?
In other words, you had to show, I think the two categories were infidelity or abuse, basically.
So these had to be established in order to...
To adjudicate a divorce.
So a court kind of makes sense or some sort of adjudication process.
But with no-fault divorce, I have no idea why you need a court at all.
I mean, no fault is no fault.
You can break the contract at any time.
I mean, it's like having a cancelable contract voluntarily at any time you can cancel a contract and then say, well, we need to get lawyers involved for a voluntarily cancelable contract.
Do you have any idea, because you point out how in Scandinavia, You basically just, it's the price of a postage stamp.
You wait six months and you're done.
How did it maintain itself?
I mean, there's so much fight for gender equality here and you have this kind of archaic middle age, sorry, middle ages, I guess, kind of system.
Do you know how other countries dealt with it?
Did they go from fault to no fault and get rid of the family courts or did they never happen to begin with or how did that work?
Well, a lot of countries did have faults.
It comes from the Judeo-Christian tradition that marriage is for life, and there was a time where that was very appropriate.
With sexually transmittable diseases without cures, people had a covenant that they would be together for life and wouldn't break that covenant, and if they did, then someone had to provide for the dependent spouse.
But that has changed dramatically, and in Scandinavia they generally lead the liberalization of social laws, and so in Scandinavia they introduced no fault, I think, in the 1950s, and because of their tradition of gender equality, they really viewed the man and the woman as on equal footing.
And what we have in Scandinavia, as you say, is that you do not require, they don't use courts to get divorced in Scandinavia.
They don't use lawyers. They simply fill out a form.
They have to wait six months if the other spouse doesn't want to get divorced, in case there's a reconciliation.
Or if children are involved, they have to wait six months.
But after that six-month waiting period, they are divorced.
And it's really that simple and inexpensive.
If they divide their assets, they do it much like the community property laws do it in the United States, where joint property is divided 50-50 and separate property is retained by the individual.
If they came into the marriage with property or they inherited something, they leave with that property.
But any marital property is divided 50-50.
You know, they've basically taken the money out of the battle.
I thought when I first went to Scandinavia, I thought it was a cultural thing, a cultural difference between the United States and Scandinavians, and in part it is.
But for the most part, they've taken the money reward out of going to war in family court.
And so, for example, Scandinavians have alimony until the day the divorce is finalized.
Alimony only lasts six months and then after that there's no alimony unless the couple has agreed by contract some sort of prenuptial agreement or postnuptial agreement that they've decided to live the more traditional provider-dependent relationship and therefore there'd be a need for alimony.
And they specify that in the contract.
But in a typical Scandinavian couple, you have both people earning money, they're both working, and so there's no real need for alimony post-divorce.
In the United States, that only applies to 20% of households these days, because 80% of households have two wage earners.
Yet, every time a couple files for divorce in the United States, the lawyers not only have the opportunity, but they have the obligation to go through both sides' finances to try to figure out whether dependent support is appropriate or not.
And so we're taking 80% of marriages in the United States where it's inappropriate, and yet we're spending all this money doing the discovery, the investigation, that could possibly lead to a dependent support stream, and that doesn't.
So the other thing the Scandinavians have done is they've set child support at a fixed amount per child, what is required to raise a child in Scandinavia.
In the United States, it's a percentage of income.
It's like an income tax.
And again, it's I call it pseudo-alimony in the United States.
It's really meant for the other spouse, not for the child.
Whereas in Scandinavia, they say, hey, if it's child support, it's for the child.
And so they limit it to $200 a month.
It's not worth going to court to fight over who's going to get that $200 a month, because it'll cost you more in legal fees.
So the Scandinavians don't fight over child support.
And therefore, since the amount of custody time you have in Scandinavia doesn't alter the amount of child support you collect, there's no fight over custody time.
Whereas in the United States, we have this perverse law that says that the more custody time you have with a child, if you're the recipient spouse, you either collect more money, or if you're the payor spouse, you pay less money.
And so we've set up this incentive to battle over the children and put them in the middle of a tug of war in the United States.
I think the Scandinavians have it right.
I think we should modify our laws in that direction.
It may take a little time, but I think eventually, because of the social changes in the United States, that really is the model that we should follow.
Now, you point out, and these are all terrifying numbers, that the average cost of divorce in the United States is $50,000 and can stretch on For years.
And that is, I mean, that is brutal.
Emotionally, it's so brutal for people.
I mean, I think it's just taking their heart and trying to rub it up against a cheese grater until it dissolves into its profitable and component monetary atoms.
But do you know if there are any studies that have been done?
One question that popped into my mind when I'm watching the film, studies that have been done that say, what proportion of assets at the end of a divorce have gone to the couple versus the lawyers and the court system?
That's a great question because, you know, most American couples these days do not have a lot of savings and they no longer have a huge amount of equity in their house.
And so I think the vast majority of assets go to the lawyers in a divorce process these days.
Divorce is the number four cause of bankruptcy in the United States.
Oftentimes it'll either wipe out completely the assets of a couple or it will severely deplete them.
Even 20-30 years ago, divorce would cost 30-40% of a couple's assets.
You know, you think about any other transaction in life.
Even if you're selling a home, okay, you might pay 5% to the real estate agent and another percentage to the bank.
That's 6%. But you're not paying 40% or 50%.
There's no government tax on selling a home or selling a car or entering into other major transactions.
But divorce, The government has created a tax, essentially a pseudo-tax, that gets paid to private individuals.
If the government were trying to set up a disincentive to divorce, well then maybe it would institute a divorce tax that gets paid to the general coffers.
But this money doesn't go to the government, it doesn't go for the benefit of society.
It goes into the pockets of wealthy private attorneys, custody evaluators, forensic accountants and judges, and it's a cottage industry where they benefit and the public loses.
Let's talk a little bit about the children.
This is, you know, everybody else is an adult.
And however terrible the system is, they had the capacity to walk in with their eyes open.
But the children, it's unbelievably heartbreaking.
I mean, I had to have a box of Kleenex when watching the film because what goes on in the lives of the children is so horrendous.
And we've all heard the phrase, you know, the court attempts to act.
In the best interests of the child, which I'd never really thought about before, but watching the movie, I wonder if you can help people unpack why that has become such a dangerous notion and so harmful for children.
Well, because there's no meaning to the phrase.
The best interest of the child, there's no way to define it.
What one person might consider joining a soccer team is in the best interest of the child.
The other person might decide that piano lessons are in the best interest of the child.
If one person decides that the child should study a lot, the other person may decide that the child has to have friends.
So, you know, there's no real way to define best interests of the child, and the problem is the decision comes down to what that judge wants it to mean.
And so that judge, you don't know what kind of religious background they have, what kind of prejudice they have, biases they have, what kind of financial incentives they have.
To providing, for example, a judge can hire an attorney for your children when you're going through a custody battle, and that attorney can be a friend of the judge.
The judge can approve the billings of that attorney at whatever hourly rate the judge wants to, and however many hours the judge wants to, and then that attorney can make campaign contributions to the judge.
Where is the checks and balances there?
Is that attorney really in the best interest of the child, or is it in the best interest of the judge or the attorney?
So there's no meaning to this definition of best interest of the child.
I mean, we all have our idea of what's in the best interest of children, but we have different ideas about what that is.
And so there's no way to really apply it.
And unfortunately, it gets abused.
What it does is it gives the judge unlimited power to do whatever that judge wants with respect to the children, and unfortunately some judges abuse that power and they hold the children out like carrots and sticks to motivate the parents to pay money, to go through custody evaluations, to take parenting classes, all with people who are friends and associates of the judges.
It's really just a terrible system that doesn't have the proper checks and balances.
Well, and I mean, I, for instance, one scenario that popped into my head was I run pretty strenuous campaigns against spanking, and I consider spanking to be deeply wrong.
If a judge was pro-spanking and I was involved in a divorce, the judge might penalize me or even restrict my access to see my children Because I don't spank.
Now, of course, no policeman is ever, no child protective services is ever going to say, well, you can't be a good parent because you don't spank.
But in a family court, that could become a make or break issue.
I mean, am I right in understanding that?
That's a great point. You know, the Scandinavians, again, I look to them, and I'm not Scandinavian, I just like what they do.
They outlawed spanking 20 or 30 years ago, and so if a parent does spank a child, even if it's, you know, relatively harmless, it's something that's reportable, and, you know, they don't put you in jail for it unless it's terrible, but they do come and talk to you.
uh... whereas we have a tradition in the united states there's a saying spare the rod and spoil the child and so there are some people that believe that you know uh...
spanking is something that is appropriate for for child rearing you don't know what judge you're gonna get are you gonna get the scandinavian type of liberal judge are you gonna get the conservative you know spare the rod spoil the child judge that's only one example of what uh...
a judge might deem appropriate or not appropriate and the problem is that Why should any individual or couple or child be at the whim of a single individual?
Our country wasn't set up that way.
You know, when the Supreme Court justices are appointed by the president, they go through a vetting process in Congress.
Why do they go through a vetting process?
Because we know that human beings have biases, and so Congress wants to know what those biases are.
We don't just have one Supreme Court justice, we have nine of them.
Why is that? Well, because the biases will tend to cancel out if you have nine people from different backgrounds.
But in family court you only have one person and unfortunately that one person and those people are not particularly trained with respect to psychology or child rearing or even the family laws, believe it or not.
A lot of times the family court judge gets into that job because nobody else wants to take it.
They're the newest judge in the group and so they get assigned family court and they have no idea what's going on.
So we have untrained Overworked, overburdened, angry, cranky people making decisions that affect our lives.
Well, and I would also argue that there's one judge that you say, you know, hey, I'm basically judge, jury, and executioner, and I like it that way.
I think that you could argue that the personality types that would be drawn to that kind of level of power and control would be the least healthy personality types.
I mean, I can't imagine trying to do that job.
I think I would go throw up every day at lunchtime.
And I think it takes a particular kind of personality structure to even want that kind of power over families.
So I think it's almost self-selecting for the worst among us.
You're absolutely right.
Almost all of the incentives are upside down in family law.
If we had to do it over again and had the experience of what we know now and seen how off track the system has become, we would do it completely differently.
But unfortunately, it's very difficult to change politics and change the laws.
We're trying now. We're filmmakers.
We're not politicians.
I don't have any political aspirations, but I would like to see some reform after all of the tragedies that I've seen.
And I'm just starting to scratch the surface on what it would take to get some of these laws reformed, and it's an extremely uphill battle.
The political process in the United States is extremely difficult, and to make any change at all is difficult, never mind change that can affect Well, especially when you're going up against deeply entrenched, legally expert financial interests, they will almost always be able to outspend based upon their financial incentives.
I mean, these guys who are getting $700, $800, $900 an hour Are almost always going to be able to outspend those who would have the most interest in reform, which is people whose financial and emotional lives have been shattered by a multi-year process.
So it is a very unbalanced kind of situation to try and achieve change in.
Yeah, I mean, they've created an oligopoly.
They made the law so complex, as you said earlier, that people can't handle them on their own.
And because they made them so complex, you need a lawyer.
And since you need a lawyer, the lawyers can charge increasing amounts of money to help you interpret this incredibly complex law.
They put you in this situation where you're pitted against You know, the other parent or spouse, and they encourage you to fight, and then they charge you money for the battle.
And so, yeah, they make extra money, and they can use that money to make campaign contributions to politicians, to influence the laws, make them even more complex.
And so it's an uphill battle.
I think there are 40 million divorced Americans in the United States, and if they would all speak out at once and say, we want these laws changed, we would have a chance for reform.
But unfortunately, most people that have been through divorce just don't even want to think about it anymore.
Sorry, but especially if they have children, right?
Because it's a never-ending, as you point out, it's a revolving door, a never-ending shakedown.
And people who have children are forever under the purview, I guess, until their kids turn 18.
They're forever under the control and purview of these courts.
And as you point out, people who try to raise awareness of the corruption within the system.
I won't go into any details because people should just watch the movie for this time.
Jaw-dropping stuff that goes on.
But they are faced with, you know, choose between your First Amendment rights of free speech or being able to see your children.
And children will literally get ripped away.
I mean, it's like the Gulag Apicalago on the West Coast.
They get their children ripped away from them for trying to expose rampant and pervasive judicial abuses.
So I think a lot of people are like, okay...
We kind of got an even keel here.
I really don't want to rock the boat, because if the judge turns vengeful on me, I mean, it's a nuclear hole where my family used to be.
Absolutely. And unfortunately, more often than not, the judges become vengeful.
They're political beasts, and they want to get reelected.
They want to stay in their jobs, not necessarily in family court, but as a judge.
And so people that speak out against them are punished by the judges.
And we've seen many cases where people have started blogs to talk about their divorce case and talk about how the judge and the lawyers are acting, and the judge will tell them to shut down the blog.
Even though they have First Amendment rights to continue that blog, the judge will often use the children as an excuse to shut down the blog.
They'll say, well, you know, it's not in the best interest of your children for you to be criticizing me, the judge, therefore shut down your blog.
And if they don't shut down the blog, we have cases in the movie where the judge puts them in jail.
Yeah, it is a completely different planet.
Now, there is something that was interesting to me in the film, which was, there's not lots of things that are interesting to me in the film, but one in particular was, there were lots of women in the film talking about their experiences in divorce court.
My parents got divorced and it seemed to me to be a lot harder on the men in aggregate and statistically than for the women.
Now, that could just be my sort of historical bias and my understanding of how things work.
Do you think that it is because of the provider and dependent historical aspect of the system?
Do you think that it's harder on men statistically and generally or about equal?
I don't imagine it's harder on women.
I mean, I know it's emotionally hard on everyone, but given the bias towards providing more resources to women and charging men more, do you think that it is tougher on men or is it about the same?
I could go on for an hour on this very subject.
First of all, we tried to make the movie gender neutral, and that's why we used examples of men and women victims in the system, and we tried to be as balanced as possible.
You know, I really believe that if we're going to get true reform in the United States, we need the support of both men and women, and so I wanted to make sure that women Who saw the movie would not be offended by it, and I think we succeeded in that.
There's actually, there are a group of women, I will call them the anti-domestic violence lobby, and they have been victims of domestic violence, and they have, in some cases, fought hard to get sole custody of their children because they believe that if the children go with their father, the father is going to be abusive and that will be harmful to the children.
And I really believe many of these women have good intentions.
However, it has created a situation where sometimes they are too vociferous in court about how bad the mail is.
And the judge will award custody to the mail because the mail seems to be a nice guy.
He's cooperating. He's saying, yeah, I'll let the kids see their mom at any time.
And the mom's saying, I'll never let the children see that abuser.
And so the judge says, well, it's not in the best interest of the children to go with the mom because they'll never see their father, so they award custody to the father.
And so there are a lot of women out there right now that are terribly upset with the family courts because of this reverse polarity situation.
But if you look at the statistics, and if you look at the financial statistics, 90% of child support is paid to women by men, and 95% of alimony is paid to women by men.
And I think that just comes from our historical roots.
However, the family courts, you know, they've been ordered to try to be as gender neutral as they can be.
And what's really very interesting is that they've gone from being gender biased to, let's call it, provider biased.
And they like when there's a provider and a dependent, because when there's a provider and a dependent, they can order child support awards and they can order alimony awards.
And that's the business they're in, of computing alimony and computing child support for the most part.
And so you take away the provider-dependent relationship and bring in equal parents, those that are both making money and both on equal economic footings.
Family courts don't like that because there's no business for them in those cases.
You can do that on a spreadsheet.
You could do that on a spreadsheet.
So they perpetuate the provider-dependent relationship even when it's not appropriate.
And the lawyers will do this very expensive investigation called discovery to determine how much money each parent makes and what their earnings capability is and what their pension plans are like, etc., even in cases where there's never going to be any alimony paid because both are working Working spouses, and yet the lawyers still have an excuse to spend all this time and bill their clients for all that expense.
There's one other thing I'm not sure you're aware of.
It's called Title IV D funding.
It's part of the Social Security program in the United States.
In the Clinton administration, they recognized that not all child support was being paid.
In fact, only about 50 or 60 percent of child support that was awarded was actually being collected.
And so they gave federal money to the states to incentivize the states to collect child support.
And there are matching dollars, there are federal matching dollars for every dollar of child support and sometimes alimony that's collected.
Well, this has incentivized the states to keep the child support bandwagon going.
Even though women age 25 to 35 now make 94% of what men make, and if you control for same job description and same education, it's 100%.
And if you look at all women, it's about 85%.
Women's income is greater than it's ever been historically in the United States, yet the amount of alimony and child support keeps going up every year.
And it's now 30 percent higher, controlled for inflation, than it was 20 years ago in the United States.
And I believe it's because of these perverse incentives for the states to collect more money from the federal government for every dollar of child support that they award and then collect.
And for the lawyers to make more money to do all the discovery and investigation that goes along with determining what the amount of alimony and child support should be.
So the incentives are all in favor of supporting the old provider-dependent model because everybody makes more money that way, yet society is changing rapidly away from that model.
And so you get a very, very dysfunctional system.
Yeah, I thought that popped into my head, Joseph, as well, was that, as far as I understand it, child support is not paid primarily by fathers who don't have access to their children.
In other words, if the father is active and involved and an equal part of the relationship...
With his children, then he genuinely and generally tends to pay.
And so in a way, there's a weird incentive to marginalize the husband, therefore to reduce his likelihood of paying child support, and therefore to get more of this money from the federal government.
Absolutely. Again, completely upside down incentives.
Completely upside down incentives.
I mean, it's ridiculous some of the things that go on with...
There's a situation with domestic violence in inner cities where you just have to have a neighbor report a loud argument and the police come and they have to arrest someone.
So they'll typically arrest, not always, but they'll typically arrest the male.
They'll put the male in jail. He can't afford to make bail because he's penniless.
And so he has to sit in jail unless he agrees to sign a document that says that he won't see his wife and children for seven years and not make phone contact, email contact, nothing for seven years.
That's how he gets out of jail. Otherwise, he has to wait in jail for three months to have a court hearing.
Well, what are you doing? You're creating fatherless homes this way.
I mean, they're just...
So many results of good intentions that have gone wrong in the family law system.
The whole thing needs a reboot from the very beginning, and I advocate that we look at the Scandinavian model and try to use that for guidance this time around.
All right, let me just... I've got one last question now.
I know we've got a hard start, but one last question.
Injustices around the world regularly bubble up to the media.
I mean, obviously there are exposés, there's 20-20 and 60 Minutes and all that kind of stuff.
But I think even more powerfully they tend to be portrayed in movies, television movies and movies and so on.
And they tend to be plots in shows.
This one doesn't really seem to be present.
If you think of something like spousal abuse, think of the number of women in peril TV movies and movies that have come about making the case that men can be bastards and women need saving and so on.
And this lends itself so perfectly to – I mean it's a courtroom drama which people love.
It's got good guys.
It's got bad guys.
It's got a judicial review committee that, as you pointed out, gets a thousand complaints and penalizes no judge, no judge whatsoever.
So it's got all of the ingredients of a fantastic drama, and yet it seems that there's nothing written about this.
Nothing is discussed. It's a common experience for people.
It would be a huge market.
Why is it so absent from our artistic life?
Yeah, great question.
And I thought the same thing, and I thought, wow, this is going to be not only an interesting documentary expose, but it's going to be a financially successful film because so many people are going to want to see it.
And I've come across a number of things.
One is, people don't like to dredge up the whole divorce experience if they've had it.
It's been a period of their life that they just don't want to repeat again, and they'd rather stay away from it.
Another thing is, until recently, it's politically unpopular, especially with women.
You know, in the classical homemaker breadwinner Model family of the 1960s, these laws protected women.
And so if you point out the dysfunction of the family court, in many ways the traditional women are feeling like, well, you're speaking out against their interests.
That's changing. But up until recently, that has been the case.
Another thing is that most television networks and media outlets have attorneys Who oversee what they are broadcasting to the general public and they don't want to offend the judges.
Networks are always being sued for libel and they want favorable outcomes in court.
So when they go to court, they want a friendly judge.
If they have been speaking out against the courts and talking about how dysfunctional they are, that might prejudice the courts against them in future libel actions.
I've heard from some media outlets that the lawyers have sometimes killed stories because they criticize the courts.
Finally, the other thing that I couldn't believe was that some of the movie critics didn't believe that we were telling the truth in the movie.
And they thought that we needed more documentation of our facts, that we needed more quotes from the judges and the lawyers talking about the other side.
And frankly, we thought that was all boring material that no one would want to watch, and so we didn't put a lot of it in.
It's in the book. I'm coming out with a book called Divorce Corp.
It's in the book, but it's not in the movie.
And so I think some people that watch the movie, unless you're predisposed to it or been exposed to it in the past, you're going to say, oh my god, is this real or are these guys exaggerating?
So part of it is, I don't think society's caught up to the realities of what family court is like.
I think that it's changing, and I think you will see a wave of media attention and in movies and novels coming in the future where this will be played out.
But it's only because of the social revolution of gender equality that it's now become an acceptable story to tell.
Right. Well, you know, I can't strongly urge people enough.
You know, it's 20 bucks and change maybe with tax on iTunes.
You know, if you're a young man or a young woman who's not married yet, you could not spend $20 more importantly, more essentially, more for your future happiness than understanding the system.
You know, I've heard it being told, and I believe it to be true, just about the most important decision you're going to make in life is who you get married to.
And if you don't understand the horrifying, viciously expensive, predatory, Kafkaesque nightmare that you can be entering into with a marriage that fails, which, of course, is a 40% to 50% rate these days, you need to know what's going on on the other side.
You know, you would never enter into a business partnership with I think?
But boy, you know, you really got to understand.
I knew how bad it would be seeing my own parents, so I didn't get married until I found the right person.
A lot of people rush in based on heady expectations and lust and all the feel-good, happy, joy, joy hormones that float around for the first six to eight months of any kind of relationship.
And so watch this movie.
It is, you know, if you're a smoker, go to some cancer ward.
And if you're thinking of getting married...
Watch this movie.
It's 20 bucks. It's two hours of your life.
And it really could save your heart.
It could save you $50,000 on average.
I would argue there's very little better investment you could make with your time and money.
So that's my big, big pitch for people to go out and watch this.
Well, thank you so much, Stephan.
I really appreciate it.
I appreciate your support.
People can come to our website, divorcecorp.com, to learn about the movie.
They can go to YouTube, Divorce Corp, to see the trailers, or to our Facebook site to see that we have 10,000 likes on our Facebook site in just two months of people who have experienced the system and can verify that the stories we've told in the movie happened to many, many more people than just the people in the movie.
So I appreciate all that support and for letting me be on your show.
My pleasure, Joseph. Thanks again for all your work.
▲
Export Selection