Punished for Protection: The Hidden Cost of Shielding Children from Abusive Fathers

Key Takeaways:

1. Protective parents can be punished by the legal system. Survivors of domestic abuse are often accused of “parental alienation” when they try to shield their children, leading to devastating custody losses even in the face of credible abuse disclosures.

2. The “parental alienation” narrative is a weapon for abusers. Despite being widely discredited, courts frequently use this concept to discredit mothers, override abuse evidence and prioritize forced reunification with alleged abusers.

3. Systemic failures can put children back in harm’s way. Survivor Jill Montes ultimately regained custody only after uncovering explicit evidence of abuse, but continues to face relentless legal battles, highlighting deep flaws in how family courts handle abuse cases.

When Jill Montes fled her abusive partner with her son and three daughters in tow, she thought she was doing what every mother knows she must: protect her children. But instead of finding safety, she found herself in a courtroom—accused not of surviving, but of sabotaging. Her abuser claimed she was alienating their son from him. Suddenly, the very efforts she had made to shield her child were reframed as manipulation, and her credibility as a mother was on trial.

Montes’ story is not unique. Across courtrooms in the U.S. and beyond, survivors of domestic violence are increasingly facing accusations of “parental alienation”—a term weaponized by abusers and discredited by advocates and experts alike, to regain control and cast doubt on protective parents. Despite decades of research on the impact of abuse on children, the legal system often prioritizes perceived co-parenting fairness over safety, retraumatizing survivors and their children and throwing them back into the most dangerous waters there are. Soon, they realize that the only place they can turn for help is the very system that got them to this place. 

In 2020, Montes’ 12-year-old son, whom we’ll call Robert, told a therapist that his stepfather had sexually abused him as a younger child. According to reporting by Olivia Gentile for TypeInvestigations, he said he was forced to do “disgusting” things while Thomas Winenger recited bible verses and told Robert the devil lived inside him. And he had been enduring this in silence since the age of 7. 

Montes was heartbroken, but her son’s story had a familiar ring to it. Ever since Montes had met Winenger in 2009, there were red flags of abuse, incidents he’d explain away by saying he was “turning to God to repent.” His favorite excuse, says Montes, was that him getting “better” was a matter of “progressive sanctification.” Using religious abuse tactics, he’d make sure Montes knew her faith was only as strong as her forgiveness for him. 

“I knew nothing about domestic violence to know to run fast,” she says. “At one point a pastor actually told me to ‘bail’ on Tom prior to our engagement but I thought he was just not being very kind.”

Montes was divorced from Winenger, though he was legally Robert’s father after Montes says he pushed her for a parentage trial in 2019 and won it. Montes, heartbroken upon hearing her son’s confession, was sure her children would be protected by the family court system. Unfortunately, the justice system doesn’t always live up to its name. 

The case remained in family court where it had been since the couple’s divorce proceedings had begun two years earlier, and that’s where Winenger flipped the script. He claimed it was Montes who was the true predator, not him. Robert, he told the judge, was coached by his mother to say he’d been abused, a conniving tactic to alienate him from his son whom he loved very much and who, in turn, was terrified of him. 

It’s an all-too-common abuser ploy to call out a protective parent as alienating. Some go so far as to accuse the parent of having a debunked psychological disorder called “parental alienation syndrome,” or PAS. The so-called diagnosis was concocted by psychologist Ricard Gardner in the 1980s, a man who it should be noted, also sympathized with pedophiles. It claims that one parent is brainwashing a child to refuse to see the other parent, a convenient way to excuse a child’s obvious fear of an abuser. 

“Gardner made this up based on his own clinical observations with no science behind it,” says Mo Therese Hannah, Ph.D, founder of the Battered Mother’s Custody Conference and New York professor of psychology at Sienna College. “It’s a way to divert attention away from the attacker and onto the victim. It’s like a joke that was taken very seriously.”  

Fighting Against a Family Court Judge

There was no good reason to think Robert was coerced into his claims, especially after child welfare services (CWS) interviewed him.

“He was a very smart, articulate 12-year-old,” says Montes. “He gave detailed accounts in his forensic interview, to his attorney and to social workers about years of abuse. I assumed he would, of course, be protected, and so would our daughters.” Montes and Winenger shared two daughters. 

“I knew nothing of the Meier Study,” she adds.

Joan Meier, clinical law professor at George Washington University Law School and a well-respected researcher in the field of domestic violence and custody disputes involving abusers, published research in 2017 that demonstrates courts are strongly influenced by Gardner’s theory and that in custody disputes, mothers were given less credibility, a higher standard of proof and were blamed for the actions of their abusers, writes Barry Goldstein in “An Untrue Comparison.”

Despite CWS substantiating Robert’s account, a family court judge, Commissioner Patti Ratekin, said the child would first need to be evaluated by a therapist which Ratekin would assign, according to Gentile’s story. Mitra Sarkhosh would counsel both Robert and his abusive father in joint sessions. Not shockingly to practically anyone, the therapist reported back that Robert was angry with his father. Sarkhosh determined his anger didn’t come from being assaulted, however. It came from Montes’ supposed brainwashing. 

After further evaluations ordered by Ratekin through a psychiatrist she assigned—a psychiatrist, Gentile writes, who coauthored a handbook in 2009 laying out, step-by-step, how parents can prove an alienation claim, she decided Montes was not fit to care for her son, or her two other children. Robert was given over to his football coach while the couple’s two other shared children, daughters of only 6 and 8 years old at the time, were given to Winenger. Robert, writes Gentile, would need to be “detoxified” before going to live with his father or he might make more “false” claims of abuse. 

“It was absolutely jarring,” says Montes, saying it felt like an episode of The Twilight Zone. “My attorney was beside himself, calling his law firm. I texted my prior attorney, ‘I feel like I'm going to die.’ It was the most shocking, terrifying moment of my life.”

The way Ratekin proposed to fix Robert’s obvious brainwashing was to send him, along with his sisters, to a reunification program called Family Bridges with their father, the same one Ally Toyos and her sister were trafficked to as teenagers with their abusive father whom they said was sexually and physically abusing them. 

Montes wouldn’t be allowed to see her children for the next three months, a separation that didn’t even allow her to say goodbye to her children, including her 6- and 8-year-old daughters. 

“I'd just been on the news months prior as Resource [foster] Parent of the Year in San Diego,” she says. Montes had always wanted to be a foster mom and help as many kids as she could. When she got Robert as an infant, he was the eighth of his siblings to enter into foster care. Montes knew she couldn’t send him back into the system, so she went down the adoption route. 

“Everything that was important to me as a mama—since before I even became a mom and was a nanny for many years—was about loving and protecting children,” says Montes. 

“By the time that Ratekin told me in court that I was an alienating, psychologically abusive, toxic, poisonous liar of a mom and that she didn't believe Robert, that was the very hearing that she took my daughters from me.”

Montes is certain that Commissioner Ratekin, who was once quoted as saying she wanted to “protect these children who are the world’s future” as one of her career goals, had a personal vendetta against her. 

“She kept comparing me to some other woman she'd had in court, and I always wondered who it was,” says Montes. “It was like she thought she knew me personally. Every time we'd leave the courtroom my attorney would say, ‘She f*cking hates you. Why does she f*cking hate you?’ It was strange.”

Montes says she later found out who the woman was that Ratekin had compared her to, another mom who Montes says hasn’t seen her children in four years since Ratekin allegedly removed them from her custody and gave them to a man who sexually abused his wife, a far-too-similar story to Montes’. 

Justice in an Unexpected Way

Then, a miracle, if you will, even though it sounds like anything but that. Months after her children were taken from her, Montes stumbled onto a cloud storage account she’d never knew existed. At some point, says Montes, Winenger had connected his cloud account to another of Montes’ accounts.  Contained inside were over 100,000 photos and videos she’d never seen before, many of which appeared to be child pornography. She felt sick, but she also knew it was the proof she needed that she, her daughter and her son weren’t lying. 

“We were saved,” says Montes. Though it took her weeks, she was able to put all of the photos on a thumb drive and immediately handed them over to a detective. The next morning, she got a call from CWS: We have your children in protective custody, and we want to get them home to you. 

“It’s just everything. It’s the only thing that still makes me cry,” Montes says, remembering the flood of relief that coursed through her. “They took my kids around 11 p.m. that night and raided my ex-husband’s house.” 

The Abuse Never Really Stops

It’s been just over three years now of having her children safe at home with her, but Montes says her nightmare is far from over. 

“I’m still in court now, more than ever,” she says, a tactic of abuse often referred to as legal abuse or post-separation control. Despite her ex-husband being under investigation for 19 felony counts of child sexual abuse, the family court system is still, unbelievably, allowing him to challenge Montes time and time again for custody of their children. 

While her children are now safe, they are struggling to heal. There have been challenges that have tested her every step of the way, but she says it’s her faith that keeps her going, and it’s something she shares with other women in similar positions. She knows at least three dozen other women who are going through the same thing in San Diego alone—fighting to keep their children away from an abusive parent despite certain family court judges doing anything they can to put them back in danger. 

In 2023, a production company approached Montes about doing a documentary on her story, as well as other mothers whose children have been taken from them by family courts. Soon, the documentary will be released, and she hopes others will begin to learn the truth behind the court system that isn’t always protecting kids. 

“The general public needs to be informed that the family court is not structured as a safe haven for women escaping abuse,” says Montes. “As long as the ‘best interest’ standard prioritizes fathers’ rights over a child’s right to safety, family court will continue to result in tragic outcomes.”