Judge says mom lied, so she'll lose custody

Judge says mom lied, so she'll lose custody



By BOB PORT
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER




Why would a judge take two thriving, giggly 4-year-old twin girls away from their loving, doting mother and the happy Manhattan home they have known since birth?
Manhattan Family Court Judge Arlene Goldberg decided to do it because she believes the mother falsely accused the father of sexually fondling their children to prevent him from gaining custody. The father, the judge believes, is innocent.

Now, mom so hates dad, Goldberg decided, that the twins are better off with their father, a busy, traveling casino executive who years ago slept with their mother while he cheated, as he frequently has, on his loyal wife.

That, in a nutshell, is the case of John Aylsworth vs. Bridget Marks. It's a bitter custody fight involving a millionaire CEO and a former Playboy model that is about to test the changing boundaries of state family law.

Marks carried her twins through pregnancy despite pressure from Aylsworth and his wife to get an abortion, according to court testimony. "He didn't take me to court," Marks said, "until I refused to have sex with him anymore."

The Daily News first reported the story in late March.

On Tuesday, lawyers for Marks plan to go to federal court for a restraining order and to challenge the constitutionality of New York's custody process. Marks will bare her outrage on Court TV's Catherine Crier talk show that night.

Reports are being prepared by "Dateline NBC" and ABC's "2-0/20." Dozens of people phoned The News Friday enraged by Goldberg's ruling, wanting to protest, write letters and raise hell.

"This is one tough decision," said Hal Mayerson, co-chairman of the state bar association's custody law committee. "This is such a rare decision, but this judge had to make a decision."

For more than a decade, New York's higher courts have been embracing as gospel a concept psychologists still debate - that when one parent wrongly bad-mouths the other by alleging sexual abuse, children are better served if custody goes to the accused.

The accused, the reasoning goes, can then counteract an accuser's damaging behavior.

First termed "parental alienation" in 1985 by the late Columbia University psychiatrist Richard Gardner, who tried to define the behavior as a mental illness, the theory quickly became standard offense or defense in custody cases.

Many New York judges bought it. Meanwhile, some researchers dismissed Gardner's theories as junk science while others moderated his ideas and refined them.

Today, parental alienation has new names and more subtle definitions. Some states treat it as "generally accepted" science while some judges reject it as quackery.

But in New York, many parents are stunned to learn parental alienation, as Gardner conceived it, is the law. The official remedy in one New York appeals ruling after another: Hand over the kids to the parent wrongly accused of perversion.

Goldberg cited this line of cases in ruling against Marks.

Abuse accusations are, as Mayerson puts it, "the atom bomb in custody cases."

But Marks sees her punishment as a hydrogen bomb for her children and says the judge has overreacted. Goldberg found that Marks had coached her children "to say their father had 'touched their peepee,'" but Marks vehemently denies this. Her concerns, she said, are rooted in a pattern of her former lover's crude language and overbearing physical touching.

Aylsworth refuses to speak to the press.

A review of records and videotapes from the case backs up Marks. The judge had no hard evidence to support her finding - only opinions from a court-appointed psychiatrist, two social workers and a children's lawyer.

The judge ignored three contradictory opinions from experts hired by Marks and testimony about how Aylsworth "made inappropriate comments about the beauty of the children's genitalia."

Carol Bruch, professor of family law at the University of California at Davis, is a frequent critic of alienation becoming a ruling principal in custody. "Parental alienation is a crock," she said. "It's snake oil."