After the result, Jack got his visits again. Mia was little scared to see him, but soon enough she was back to her regular self. A few months later, Lisa decided to stop letting Jack have visits again. So he filed against her again, and the judge told Lisa if didn't give him his visits, he would put her in jail, and so she did.

This left the Child Protective Report to deal with. We had a separate hearing on that. The caseworker for some reason held to her belief that the child was credible, but the evidence did all point the other way, and the Child Protective Report was sealed.

It's probably clear from my attitude that I don't believe that Jack did anything to his daughter. I think if he had, the police probably would have gotten it out of him in two hours of questioning. He's not a bright guy. If he had, he wouldn't have insisted on going to trial. He would have just taken the deal, happy to be able to walk away without having admitted to anything.

Why was Mia saying those things? Well, there are two possibilities. The first is that Lisa actually coached her child. She obviously didn't like Jack, and had prevented him from seeing his daughter in the past. In our business, we call that nuking the other party. I've never represented a parent who admitted to coaching their child. I've had my suspicions about a couple of parents, but that's usually not what's going on. Usually these allegations involve children younger than five and parents who are hostile to each other. In those cases, the child says something or another about a visit and it gets misinterpreteed, and then amplified. Let me give an example. My niece at the age of four came home from daycare with a small mark on her. Her mother asked her about it, and she said that the daycare person had burned with a cigarette. It was a remarkable allegation, and completely untrue. Her mother freaked out though and called the police and child protective. The mark wasn't a burn mark though. It was a scrape, and the doctor my sister took my niece to confirmed it. Just the typical kind of thing that happens to children of that age. It turned out though that the kids had seen someone smoke, and they had been pretending to smoke.

After a story like that gets told, it gets repeated, and then repeated, and a child that age doesn't really know what happened and eventually they believe it themselves. Back in the late 80s, a lot of daycare workers went to jail because of situations exactly like the one I'm describing, and only after years did they get free. Jack was lucky that he was at his mothers, and that she was watching pretty much most of the time.

So anyway, that's Jack's story. I see him every now and then and we say hi.