Family breakdown is the single greatest threat to American society, argues Greg Ellis in his new book, “The Respondent: Exposing the Cartel of Family Law.”
Ellis says that every day, 4,000 children are separated from one of their parents in the family court system, which is biased against men and does not afford them due process in the face of hearsay allegations.
Ellis is an Emmy Award-nominated actor and voice actor.
Below is a rush transcript of this American Thought Leaders episode from June 22, 2021. This transcript may not be in its final form and may be updated.
Jan Jekielek: Greg Ellis, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Greg Ellis: Thank you for having me Jan. It’s great to be here.
Mr. Jekielek: Greg, I just finished reading your book, The Respondent, with of course you as the respondent, the key character. Incredibly profound piece of work, I have to say that. It caused me to think a lot about my own relationships I have with all sorts of different people in my life. And this whole thing was a profound… The journey that you discussed in the book is a journey not just of yourself, but also discovering some of the fascinating and disturbing systems we have in America. Tell me, what did you find?
Mr. Ellis: Before I enter the American justice system, I believed in justice, the legal system, and I learned very quickly. When I first walked into court, my first court appearance, and I’ve never been… I had a clean criminal record, never been in trouble with the police, haven’t been arrested, still haven’t been arrested. We can talk about that. I believed in the system.
I remember sitting in court and looking up the crack of the crest of Sacramento in California, and thinking, “At last, at last, there’s going to be a judge. There’s going to be someone who will be reasonable and make sense of the insensible. And see that this is nonsense, ridiculous, these falsehoods, these litany of lies presented in court, well, it’s transparent.”
And I quickly learned, to my shock and horror that I left America, and then to star chamber of family law, where there is no presumption of innocence, where the legal system or the cartel of family law is not answerable to the Supreme Court. And many times, men and fathers, sometimes mothers and women, but most often or more often than not, men and fathers are found guilty until proven more guilty.
Mr. Jekielek: So you say, it’s guilty until proven innocent in family law court. It’s probably very difficult for many to believe that I could possibly get a case in the US court, how does that work?
Mr. Ellis: Well, I’m not a legal scholar but I have experienced the experience of going through the family law system. Family law is not neutral. It doesn’t afford due process. Someone can make an allegation against you, and you don’t have Miranda rights, you don’t have access to an attorney, your human rights are trampled on, law enforcement can enter your home, they can remove you from your home.
Many of the constitutional rights that we think are in place, aren’t in place. Hearsay evidence, which wouldn’t be admissible in criminal court, is not only admissible in family law, but it’s many times the basis and the grounds for the allegation and accusation to be taken seriously. And what you have is, law enforcement comes out to “disturbance”, and they don’t have the discretion anymore.
They used to have discretion but it’s mandated now that someone, one of the parties, the targeted party, usually a manner of father, is removed from the home and can’t be arrested because no crime is being committed, many times. Sometimes, there’s clear evidence of a crime, obviously. And that’s not to say that this is always the case but jurisprudence in Western civilization was introduced for a reason. So that the burden of proof would be on the accuser, not the accused.
And unless we have that in family law like we have for criminals, terrorists, murderers, pedophiles, we see a system that is propagating guilty until proven innocent or more guilty. I can’t prove that which I have not committed a crime, you have to prove that I committed the crime, right? Yeah, and you’re a thief. You stole that woman’s ring. Well, prove that you didn’t. How can you prove that you didn’t? It’s very difficult.
We can’t have a system, a legal system that behaves that way, and yet we do in 2021. If you’d have told me my story six years ago, I’d have found it preposterous. Hard to believe. But if it could happen to me and it has, and it’s happened to many others like Johnny Depp, kindly wrote the foreword for my book, and Alec Baldwin wrote the introductions in my book, and Alec Baldwin wrote the foreword for my book. Brad Pitt’s been going through this recently, Jeremy Renner.
There are hundreds of thousands of parents, fathers, and mothers, by de facto their children, if they have children, that have entered the star chamber and experienced the same. So this in effect, completely appends jurisprudence-
Mr. Jekielek: It sounds like it would be unconstitutional. I mean just off, I’m not a constitutional scholar but-
Mr. Ellis: Speak to constitutional scholars and they will tell you, it is unconstitutional. What’s going on is not constitutional. I spoke with Steven Baskerville recently and he’s a constitutional scholar and social policy expert, and he’s been talking about this for decades. I’ve come across many people, many experts, way more proficient than I, who’ve been talking about this with organizations and movements for many, many decades. And it’s not constitutional. And that’s the crocks here. If you have a branch of the legal system…
I’ll give you an example. There’s the executive director of my new charity, CPU, which is Children and Parents United, Mike McCormick. He’s been working in this particular area for decades now. I think it was 20 something years ago, he was in court, falsely accused of domestic violence.
And he held his wrists up to the judge and he said, “Your Honor, arrest me.” And the judge said, “What are you, crazy?” He said, “No, Your Honor. Instruct the bailiff to arrest me.” And judge said, “Well, what are you talking about? Why?” He said, “Because violence, particularly domestic violence is a serious offense. And it needs to be treated as such. It’s a criminal offense, so arrest me.” And what he was saying was, the irony of what he was saying was, “Arrest me because I’ll get more rights as a criminal than I will as a father, or a parent, or a husband.”
And that’s the tragedy. That’s what we’re living with right now. And many legal scholars know it. So many know it. And they don’t talk about it, because they’ll lose their livelihoods, because it’s too risky, because there are people in positions of power who want to protect the $60 billion a year in industry, the American divorce machine. Because they’re afraid to speak out, because there’s too much money, it’s incentivized to break down the family. And that’s wrong. I think we shouldn’t be incentivizing the legal system to family breakdown. We should be encouraging family unity and our familial bonds.
Mr. Jekielek: There’s something that comes out, of course the book is again titled The Respondent. There’s something really, I guess, powerful in initiating a divorce process in this system that you’re describe. So becoming the petitioner has opposed to being the respondent was good. When I was reading it, I almost started wondering to myself, is there some kind of perverse incentive for this system to invite people to become petitioners, so to speak, in such proceedings?
Mr. Ellis: Yeah, I think there is. And I think it’s being used as a strategy or a playbook if you will, that’s being written by that the state bar associations run themselves. They write the family law code book. 15, 20 years ago, it used to be a quarter of an inch thick, if you look at it now, it’s six, seven inches thick. And it’s this tangled mess of legal codes that really is just used to incentivize acrimony.
And attorneys are trained to make arguments, I get it. But when two people fall into disillusionment within a relationship, I think we have to continually strive to improve the system, and the system of family law has been the same since the 60s in no-fault divorce. Laws were introduced in California first, and then it spread like wildfire. And the good intentions of that were over the years lost and have been used up, and now we have a system that judge is guilty to approve more guilty, rarely guilty to approve more innocent.
We have law enforcement now who are called, I have a very difficult job that called on these domestic violence allegations to a home, and the charge entasked with working through what in effect is just a hearsay allegation. And they have to make a determination. It used to be they had discretion. Now, there’s no discretion. It’s mandatory for them to remove one person from the home. And the moment that happens, it sets off what I refer to in the book, the six silver bullets of high conflict divorce and the magic ballistics of family law, or family war even.
And bullet one is the incarcerating incident. That’s usually a hearsay, allegation called in. And at that moment, the respondent is targeted. And silver bullet two is the order of restraint. And they are easy to get these days, so easy to get. They hand them out like hot dinners. So that hearsay allegation, many times a false allegation, in fact the majority of domestic violence, abuse allegations are false.
But they’re so successful because you couple that with family law, and an attorney, and a filing by a petitioner to insert the petitioner and the respondent, the partner, into the system. There is no way out. There is no trapdoor from the divorce trap once the respondent is in. And particularly, the petitioner is a mother and has a war chest of more money. Because the attorneys look at the estate, how much money do we have here, how long can we keep this acrimony going, and just churning the billable hours to keep the acrimony going.
Mr. Jekielek: I want to look at at a bit from the other side here for a moment, right? Presumably, I’m trying to imagine how you say that no-fault divorce was the… It kind of created this, we could describe to be this monster of a system. Presumably, this was created to protect children, to protect mothers, to protect wives, or protect everybody in theory. Are you saying that the system just doesn’t work for anybody, or doesn’t work for select people, or how?
Mr. Ellis: I think it’s working out for a lot of people with bad intentions. What happened to me in 2015, I started looking for books and information on this subject, so that I could educate and then at least convince myself that I wasn’t going insane because my whole world had turned upside down in an instant. From what I found was there is very little information out there and what information there is, is the books that I found just are books alone.
They were all books written by women for women on how to ruin your husband, and how to get rid of your spouse, and how to win the house, and get custody of the kids, and there were books talking about the silver bullet. And the silver bullet… A silver bullet is defined as a simple, seemingly, magical solution to a difficult problem. In this case, marriage disillusionment. And so, I was astonished that there was whole industry behind the divorce industry profiting from this.
Profiting from promulgating the breakdown of the family, and the evisceration of man, and manhood, males, and fathers, and masculinity in general, and laying the blame for all of society’s ills of defeat of the male. And we may be a lot of flawed as men, I don’t think we’re 100% responsible for all the world’s ills. Even if it’s certain people, we are. But I don’t believe that, I didn’t believe that.
So I started to look deeper into it and trying to understand where this was coming from. And part of the reason why we’re at the respondent was to actually provide some hope that similar people going through what I went through, and who are going through, or will go through will realize they’re not alone. They’re not going insane. Their existential angst and terror, and their fear, and the worry that they will lose everything, at least they will feel less alone.
I can’t guarantee they won’t lose everything because the system is prying for that. That’s what the system does. When you have any system of justice and the burden of proof is on the accused, the attorney that represented my ex-wife, one day showed up in court and accused me, in front of the judge, of burglarizing her home. Of breaking and entering and that she had to get security. I sat there in disbelief. Voiceless because you can’t speak. Listening to this wild, baseless accusation.
Mr. Jekielek: Also, and in this case, there was never any charges filed for those burglary?
Mr. Ellis: No. I doubt there was a burglary. And if there was, then shouldn’t it there was police report filed? Wouldn’t the Beverly Hills police have called me, interrogated me, a detective would’ve contacted me? I would’ve been just as incredulous then as I am now. Nothing to hide. But no, that didn’t happen because it didn’t happen.
Mr. Jekielek: So you described this whole…where, I mean, I think you provide some very interesting evidence to this as a kind of a big business operation, so to speak. How does that work?
Mr. Ellis: Well, I mean, if you look at the petitioner, or let’s say for example an individual wants to file for divorce, okay? It’s almost like the art of war, it’s the surprise, stealth attack while engaging in reflective diplomacy on the surface. Sign with an attorney, and the attorney will serve papers, and then declarations are written. Usually, the worst aspects of each partner.
But because the petitioner gets to strike, always gets to speak first in court, they are leading the charge. They’ll present their evidence. There isn’t due process. The most wild, ridiculous accusations are often made. And if you couple out with celebrity, then the press gets hold of it and fiction becomes fact, or at least there’s a gray area about what’s fact or fiction, it gets sensationalized.
And then two people find themselves in court with two attorneys speaking on their behalf about their entire estate, their family, their children. And then you have these cottage industry of Guardians ad Litems, of mediators, of child psychologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, who are all earning and churning from the system. What happens in family law is two parents enter a courtroom and one leaves as a parent, the other leaves as a visitor. And we shouldn’t be sacrificing our children’s upbringing at the alter of attorney’s billable hours. It’s wrong. It’s just wrong.
Mr. Jekielek: And one of the things that I found in here, which kind of blew my mind, was that you said that there’s 4,000 children being pulled from their parents in American courtrooms every single day. That seems like an astounding number.
Mr. Ellis: It’s astonishing, isn’t it, when you actually sit and think about that number. 4,000 children a day lose a parent for the eight hours that the family law courtroom is open. And what happens to those children? They are denied their basic human rights. Now many of them or some of them, people might argue, need to be removed from parents who aren’t behaving responsibly. But a great deal of them are being removed from their families, and their parents, and their loved ones, and their siblings, and their extended families, unnecessarily.
Mr. Jekielek: So this is one of the things that you described in the book as kind of the ultimate cancellation, I think, if I recall the term. Basically, and you represent a whole number of men that have been kind of deprived of the ability of spending time with their children. And then there’s a societal cause to that. And you have actually explored that, quite a bit in the book, of the importance of a father role.
Mr. Ellis: Yeah. I think we have a fatherless crisis in Western civilization, and particularly America. I think children who are dad deprived, particularly boys in our younger generations of boys and young men, I think it’s safe to say that… I talked with Caitlin Flanagan recently, and she said it takes a mother to raise a boy, it takes a father to raise a man. We need to start honoring the patriarch as much as we do the matriarch. I think a balanced home life of children is a good thing.
And of course, there are times when two parents can’t always be present, two biological parents. There are many reasons for that. But if there are two biological parents who are good, and loving, and have always been present, we shouldn’t have the state and a legal branch come in and basically, dadnap. I mean, that’s what happens a lot.
Fathers are removed from homes. Not having committed a crime, with clean criminal records, and a good man, and the system just whisks them away. And before they know it, they are either incarcerated or they have child support payments they can’t pay. And that’s not to say that there aren’t men out there that obfuscate their responsibilities. I know there are some of those. But there are so many that don’t, that find themselves in the child support trap.
Where the state charges them a certain amount of money, they have to pay child support. They don’t pay, they go to prison. There’s interest, and then $3,000 becomes $30,000. Lose a job, they can’t keep a job because they’re in prison. And it’s just a spiral down, and so many men give up, are hopeless, who tragically end their lives. I’ve read too many suicide notes from good men, fathers, who were present in their children’s lives, who were summarily removed for no other reason than an accusation or allegation made against them.
Mr. Jekielek: I think you mentioned the statistic in the book that it was, see if I got it right, eight times that divorced men commit suicide than divorced women. I thought that, could this be true?
Mr. Ellis: Yeah. In fact, another statistic as well is that every day in America, 10 divorced men take their own lives, and that’s not accounting for the men and fathers who are trapped in the system, and the mothers as well. Because I want to make it clear, this happens to mothers and women too. It’s rarer but it does happen.
I spoke with a mother recently who was a nurse, two kids, false allegations made against her, children were removed, put into care, she lost her job as a nurse, she was thrown in prison, had a heart attack. She had no recourse because the system doesn’t provide the same rights, family law does not provide the same rights that criminals get. Think about that. Terrorists, rapists, murderers, pedophiles, get more rights than parents. How is this right?
Mr. Jekielek: So you alluded to this a little bit earlier and it’s certainly, you talked about it in the respondent. You make a connection between how this system of family law has developed, and what you described and others have described as a kind of war on masculinity. Tell me about that.
Mr. Ellis: Yeah. Well really, it was through my odyssey of what happened to me, and then entering the court system, learning about family law, leaning about the institutions of the legal system, and many of which are now psychologically conditioned to think that men and masculinity are bad and toxic. And then the correlation between the public messaging. The signaling through our media mainstream and social or antisocial meters, I sometimes call it, of all men bad, toxic masculinity, smash the patriarch.
And I think one fellow has mentioned this before, we need a #MeToo dialogue, not a #MeToo monologue. And while some of the bad men was swept up in a way, rightfully served by the #MeToo movement, there were some good men who was swept up in that maelstrom, not femalestrom. And we have to start having that conversation, looking at the statistics. And really striving to understand more why this situation of demonizing men has been further. What’s the agenda behind it? Who’s behind it? Why are they behind it? And through my journey, I mean there’s been a few telling moments.
I talked with Erin Pizzey, she started the world’s first domestic violence abused shelter 52 years ago, and she informed me about a meeting of the feminist movement, I think it was back in 1969, where there was a split in the feminist movements. So the more factual equality feminists, the true equality feminists like Christina Hoff Sommers, and Camille Paglia, and others who won the argument but lost the professorships in the academy to the more toxic, radical third and fourth wave feminists, who wanted to change the messaging, didn’t believe that women should be stay-at-home moms, and homemakers, and giving birth, and starting families.
They wanted to institute two words into the branding of the feminist movement, and that was toxic masculinity. And that was decades ago and here we are through the great awokening of the 2010s, the age of unreason, dealing with the very idea with men or the male being bad. Every man, bad. Every man under suspicion.
And I didn’t see many people talking about it, I don’t see many people talking about… I don’t understand why, because immediately one can be perceived as misogynistic or that’s the quick go-to target message. You’re a misogynist. You’re a woman-hater. I’m like, “No, I’m not.” I believe in feminism, equality feminism. I love women but I just don’t think demonizing masculinity is the solution. I think that’s the problem. And if we’re championing fatherhood, doesn’t mean we have to devalue motherhood. Can’t we have both again? Please. What we all children wants.
Mr. Jekielek: You told me that US is the number one country for single parent-
Mr. Ellis: It’s the world leader. Yeah, the US is the world leader for children living in single parent families.
Mr. Jekielek: Yeah. I mean that’s, and from multiple guests that have been on this show, I’m acutely aware of the fact that a father being present in a family is a huge indicator of success in life, I guess.
Mr. Ellis: That’s right. Children who grow up without father are behind in every measurable metric. They’re more likely to dropout of school, take drugs, not graduate high school, teen pregnancy, addictions to online porn, video games. And it’s that lack of balanced parenting, fathering and mothering. And you can’t substitute the biological father and the biological mother. You can have surrogates, you can have foster parents, you can have great people who are stepping in as major caregivers, foster parents, wonderful.
But when we’re actually taking children with state-sanctioned kidnapping, really, is what it is. There’s no other way to say it. I know it sounds like some kind of, it’s hyperbole, but that’s what’s going on here. And then of course that leads to the questions of what’s happening to those 4,000 children who lose a parent every day the family courts are open. Where do they end up? Some of them, I’m sure in good homes but not their family of origin. And many more end up in even worse places.
Mr. Jekielek: There’s a moment in the book where you reflect on this, essentially what you say is, as you say that after five years, you’ve been left in a position where you truly have to say goodbye to your children. It’s kind of a crushing moment in the book, frankly.
Mr. Ellis: The unrelenting and escapability of the family law system and how the system doesn’t provide relief for parents, particularly fathers, and especially children. My sons, I never wanted my sons, ever, to be in a courtroom or enter a courthouse. A couple of days before my fit 2015, my eldest boy Charlie was 10 years old, on the top bunk as I hugged him good night after reading him a bedtime story said, “Dad, so-and-so at schools, parents just got divorced. You’ll never get divorced, will you?” I said, “No. Promise you son…” It was the furthest thing for my mind.
And yet then, he’s being dragged into court with my youngest son. And after five years, that living grief, the ambivalent grief, there is a finality when somebody dies that you can go through a grieving process, and as difficult as it is, you can move on and time hopefully will heal somewhat.
When your children is still alive and you’re removed from seeing them by a legal artifice, it’s almost indescribable, that living grief, that pain, that pull, particularly and this is the achilles heel, particularly if you were a present father, and you did and do love your children, and they were the meaning of your life, and are the meaning of your life.
Father was stolen from their childhood, their childhood was stolen from me. So I had to have finality so I am… In the book I talked about fatherhood and funerals. I had a ritual funeral that I had to, at least, laid their childhoods to rest so that I could have some finality. Psychologically, kind of try and end the living grief of being separated from them, and them from me.
Mr. Jekielek: So it’s interesting, you do say in there that you went through this process but you’re also kind of encouraging other men in a similar situation to fight on.
Mr. Ellis: Yeah. When I say fight on, I’m talking about life. This is a life and death struggle for many parents, and many men, and many fathers. Like I said earlier on, I’ve read too many suicide notes of good men, and loving, and present fathers who were really committed, and engaged with their children before family law cartel steps in and wants to pound a flesh.
So in that sense, yeah, I want people to, I want men and fathers to know that they’re not alone. They should fight on the ways of existential terror and existential angst that hit the unbearable, sometimes never ending bouts of depression, and pain, and suffering. You can ride those waves. You can get through them. I want that message for my book to be a message of hope.
In terms of the system, there’s little justice in the system. We need to keep parents out of court. We need to keep families out of family law. That’s until we can improve this system and reform it. So when I talk about fight on, it has to do with life, and how to stay alive, and move from a traumatized place because every parent who went to family law in America had PTSD. You’re going to get it.
You went to family law, particularly the admin in the courtroom before being in trouble with the law, before it’s just part and parcel of the system, and the ugliness of it. You get the worst parts of humanity revealing itself in this kind of purgatory, this funerial atmosphere, if you will. This kind of clouded in the courthouses.
But in terms of people fighting on through family law, my message will be don’t get out. How do you get out? Well, there’s some answers in the book. And there’s also some remedies in terms of improvements to the system. I think obviously, in introduction of the presumption of innocence, is vital. I don’t know if that’ll happen in my lifetime, but if people in positions of power actually had integrity, if experts and institutions actually talked what they knew to be the truth in public, rather than protecting their livelihoods and their nice shiny cars, and wonderful houses, and great lives of luxury.
I think equal shared parenting is something, it’s beginning to be introduced in certain states. When there’s marriage disillusion and two people decide that they no longer wish to stay married, the default play should be 50-50 shared parenting time. It’s not.
So introducing these equal shared parenting bills into the different state legislatures, there have been wonderful people trying this for many years. Molly Olson who started the Center for Parental Responsibility 21 years ago, has been tenaciously fighting as well as others like William Fabricius, Dr. William Fabricius. And Kentucky is the only state, up until recently Arkansas become the second state, but Kentucky was the only state to introduce an equal shared parenting bill, and sign it into their law.
And when I looked into that and discovered why Kentucky had actually passed that, and the main reason for that is because it’s illegal in Kentucky for a family law firm or an attorney to lobby a state legislation. So the money, again we go back to the money, the money is kept out of the politics, and the politicians can make a decision that’s in the best interest of families, and parents, and children. Not to keep the money machine, the American divorce machine happy. So Kentucky passed that equal shared parenting bill. We’ve seen another one recently in Arkansas, and hopefully others will follow.
Mr. Jekielek: What is the default now, in most places?
Mr. Ellis: Well, there isn’t a default. There isn’t. There simply isn’t a default. So without that, it can be, for example what happened with Brad Pitt recently, we saw him fighting, and fighting, and fighting to get to a position of 50-50. It’s taken him months. Him and Angie have a retired judge who’s overseeing their case so they’re not in a courtroom, but they have a retired family law court judge and he found the custodial time should be 50-50.
Well, he shouldn’t have had to fight for that. But why did he have to fight for it? Because he was the respondent. Because allegations were made against him, which I believe was spurious, and then he had to atone, and he had to do these public apologies, and then say the right thing, and do the right thing, and come back from the wastelands of being the bad man, and prove that he’s a worthwhile worthy parent. And he’s someone that, my son used to play with his kids every Sunday in the park, he’s a great dad. But he’s a dad.
Mr. Jekielek: So Greg, you’re continuing to actually work on this broader issue nonetheless, through this nonprofit that you started, Children and Parents United. So what work is this doing? Presumably, people can come to your nonprofit to look for help. Tell me a little bit about that as we finish up.
Mr. Ellis: Sure. I’d be happy to. CPU, which is Children and Parents United, is a nonprofit I started. It’s the charitable extension of The Respondent where there’s information at therespondent.com, for all things respondent but CPU is there. And our mission is to improve the well-being of families, parents, and children through information and resources, to policy makers, politicians, to bring about social change, and to advocate for families and parents who are stuck in this horrific legal system, without any way out.
We have three programs that we’ve been developing. One is CPU communication, to improve our interpersonal communication skills because of course, once a marriage breaks down, and trust breaks down, communication becomes an issue. And communicating through a third party or two third parties, to law firms or to attorneys, makes it even harder. Particularly if those attorneys as they are, are skilled and trained in arguments. CPU communication is the first step.
The second step is CPU mediation. So we have some skilled mediators who’ve worked within the family law system, give seen just how horrific the system is, and they’re working outside to help keep families outside court, out of court, and help mediate through differences, low conflict to get some resolution.
And then CPU law is the third program, which is a group of lawyers and attorneys who have experience within the legal system, and some of them in family law, to assist parents and partners to actually work through their differences, mediate through their differences, and draw up their own legal disillusionment, their own divorce papers, if that’s what they want. We don’t encourage that but the agency of an individual is up to the two.
And really just be that safe harbor, three steps to the safe harbor before people enter family law and meet the cartel. Because once you meet the cartel and family law, you’re playing by a different set of rules, and they’re not your rules, and they’re not integrity, and they’re not ethics, and there is no moral compass.
Mr. Jekielek: So Greg, one of the things that I’ve found quite interesting in the book is you do have lot of self-reflection into some of your own life challenges, and the places where you might’ve failed, and you kind of laid that out. Not necessarily something you would expect in a book of this sort. Why did you do that?
Mr. Ellis: My book isn’t about demeaning one side or the other and being extreme or excessive. It’s really just my true story. And laying out the fact is my legacy petition if you will, of what happened. And I learned a tremendous amount through my family law odyssey. I’m not going to go through life angry, and bitter, and full of outrage, and contempt, because why carry that with you for the rest of your life? I’d rather turn, and as I’ve tried to, turn this into something good and positive to have impact.
I can’t and couldn’t save my sons. Maybe I can help other families, other boys, other sons, other fathers, other mothers, other daughters, other families in general, and parents navigate through this horrible system of family law. And provide some relief, and strategies, and tips.
I have a free ebook that’s available at therespondent.com for people who buy The Respondent. They can use the code in that book to get the free downloadable ebook, it’s called The Code. And that has some of the tips and strategies that I was able to use to provide myself with some relief through the 82 plus court appearances. And the vicissitudes and challenges of family law. And to tend to that quiet desperation.
Everyone’s struggling with something. And I forgive my ex-wife, 100%. Where I’m at in my life, we’re all response-able. We all have the ability to be responsible. So I’m 100% responsible for where I am, right now in my life. No one’s to blame. No one’s at fault. We’re all responsible for the big community collective. But for me as the individual, I forgive others because necessarily they deserve forgiveness but because I deserve peace, and forgiveness is not a line that you take as a road that you cross.
Mr. Jekielek: Well Greg Ellis, it’s such a pleasure to have you on.
Mr. Ellis: Thank you Jan. It’s been a pleasure talking with you. Thank you for having me.
