dave_botting

To Dave Botting:

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You have to stop your bullying, aggressive, threatening behaviour and wild accusations - they have all become too much. You have a history of violent behaviour and have already received at least one police caution for it. You are verbally abusive and have harassed 'Katie' for many years. This webpage is a last resort in an attempt to get you to stop.

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I wrote a half dozen extremely careful and diplomatic emails to you, trying to find a way for you and Katie to reach a workable level of resolution so that Ben’s care (names changed) could be improved and conflicts minimised. In your responses, you were relentlessly critical of Katie and refused to consider resolution of any kind. I continued to encourage you to consider negotiation or mediation. You refused and finally you invited:

“If you were able to read back through all the emails I've sent to Katie over the last 2 years, you'd start to see how hard I have tried to make things work smoothly for us. It makes me want to weep” ,

I do genuinely understand that separation and divorce can be very traumatic for both sides and recollections can be selective in an attempt to minimise personal pain. People are only human and I was always careful not to take sides as much as I could and tried hard to reserve judgment. I was also genuinely concerned that, given I would have no choice but to be dealing with you over Ben's care, I wanted to make sure that I was in no way interfering with your relationship with him and so I should be as fair to you as I could be. I thought given the strength of feeling that seemed to be behind your claims, and your plea for me to understand things, I decided that it was important enough for me to spend a full week reading hundreds of emails between you both. Katie gave me full and complete access to everything. I then wrote you a long and detailed response. However, you did not give me the fair option of being listened to in my reply, stating that you no longer accept emails from myself. You also said verbally to me recently:

“I don’t read your emails, why should I be f****ing bothered to read anything you write”

I left it at that and all necessary communications have been restricted to mobile phone texts since then. On our side, on the comparatively few occasions you have ever picked up Ben from Newcastle, we arranged many months ago for his grandparent's to always deal with the handover in order to prevent the stress that has come from previous face to face situations. However, beyond our control is your refusal to let a family member complete handovers in Leicester, despite the fact that all your family live there and one family member nearly always accompanies you. You have used these opportunities to make verbal threats to me about 'falling down stairs' or just coming physically too close to Katie when there is no need. On at least one occassion, by your own admission, you were intoxicated. Previously, Katie had made many complaints to both yourself and her solicitors that you had used handovers as opportunities to intimidate and threaten and there are a number of incidents recorded such as the time you and shouted at her in a busy station car park, calling her a “f*cking wh*re”. Or the handover during which you called her a "f*cking b*tch and a c*nt" outside her parent's house, with her sister witnessing. On both these occasions, Ben was present and was exposed to your outbursts. It would be easy for you to arrange for a family member to come and meet us, but you genuinely seem to enjoy trying to intimidate Katie and myself. Instead, we have insisted on meeting in a hotel foyer/car park, because there are video cameras there.

However, you have made fabricated accusations against me to the police. Each and every one of them has been totally and thoroughly disproved and the police have it on record that multiple witnesses named you as the antagonist and all video evidence also failed to support your claims. They have told me that if unfounded complaints continue, I have every right to report your incessant false accusations as harassment. My understanding is that you have been warned by them not to make false accusations. My concern is that you will ignore any such warnings and attempt to up the ante. Already you are testing things again... only in the last few weeks, you made another bizarre accusation, this time to Katie's solicitors, that we have stolen goods of yours. This is completely fictitious and you know it is. If you want to make such ridiculous accusations, you should be doing so the police so the matter can be properly investigated, though I suspect that given your warnings, you are reticent to do so. Wanting to pre-empt further fictitious accusations is part of the motive for this posting, as is my belief that I do have the right to reply to your invitation and the earlier accusations you made against Katie, as well as those against myself. Given you have expressed that you will not read any written materials from me and continue to bully and harass, I see this as my last option.

It is important to point out, as you know yourself, I have driven Ben down to see you on every single visit for a year and a half, even on occasion by myself when his Mother has been unable to come. I have no court order that makes me do this, I am in no way forced to bring Ben down to see you, I have always done it of my own volition and at my own expense (in excess of £1800 so far), because I believe he should see you. I have also, as you know, made multiple email offers to help you organise a schedule of things to do with him should you chose to come and visit him here as well as making many offers to try and help you and Katie resolve your disputes.

You will also recall that I always went out of my way to say a big and bright 'hello' to you whenever we met, with or without Ben and every single time Ben was handed over or picked up, I instigated a clear and obvious handshake with you to reassure both Ben and yourself that I was not there to hinder your relationship. I am very careful never to place myself in any way in opposition to you in Ben’s mind and cause him any kind of emotional conflicts of loyalty. I always do nothing but encourage Ben to think for himself. Despite all this, it seems that by merit of my mere existence in Katie’s and Ben's lives, you have decided I am a threat and therefore should be threatened in return. I am making it abundantly clear to you that I have never made any attempt to undermine you or your role as a father, to try and step into your role or to exclude you from Ben’s life.

Notwithstanding my determination to act correctly, your behaviour towards me and my family is now intolerable given your latest falsified accusations and extremely erratic behaviour and attitude. Most recently, we were thoroughly accommodating over the Christmas period, dropped Ben off to you (not ordered to by the court) sent you heartfelt Christmas good wishes and then agreed to delay your next visit for an additional week at your request so that you didn't have to be alone with Ben for the weekend as his cousin would be there too. We tried very hard to show goodwill and good intentions, but then we said on the last visit that we would have to alter the date by one week, you flipped. In the ranting text that followed, three times you threatened to take Katie to court (without any basis for doing so) and then threatened to make her pay the costs. This is all after we changed dates to suit your needs on the previous visit, but when we wanted to change one visit to suit Ben’s needs, you lost it. When are you going to give up this aggression? Why do you suddenly flip out like that? I feel I have no option but to express my frustrations to you on any available forum, seeing that you have openly refused to read any personal email messages from me and relentlessly continue to try and bully and intimidate.

It is very clear now that I am aware you already have a police caution for assault (against a woman). I also am aware that you have, in writing, admitted to aggressive behaviour in the past in your marriage and also that myself and others have witnessed very aggressive behaviour from you. Katie’s solicitor also noted your admission to her that one of your most aggressively threatening outbursts was down to stress caused by an upcoming court case. It is very relevant for me to point out that I have no history of aggression, any arrests or police cautions whatsoever.

Given the circumstances, I cannot think I have any other recourse but to peacefully and lawfully, publically express my frustration in the hope that you might reconsider the effect that your threatening behaviour has. I have every right to express my frustration and speak the truth. This post will be removed once I am confident that you have read it properly and your attempts to intimidate, make false accusations and ceaseless threats have stopped and you show you are able to communicate reasonably. That does not mean I am trying to stop you from expressing your frustrations, it does mean that I am trying to stop you from being threatening and I hope this posting will show you that which I think either you simply deny, or are unable to see. Let me make it perfectly clear that the offer for negotiation is still there and always has remained open, despite your repeated refusals. I would rather we were able to sit down and talk through these problems then have to resort to these measures.

Much of what is following is an edited synopsis of my original email, updated with comments on recent incidents. You have the full version of the original, which has the exact dates of your emails that I quote, so you can verify each and every one of them and there can be no doubt that they are real…

 

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David,

Following your claim that:

“If you were able to read back through all the emails I've sent to Katie over that last 2 years, you'd start to see how hard I have tried to make things work smoothly for us. It makes me want to weep.”

I am letting you know that Katie religiously kept all communications with you since your separation, some of which were forwarded to her solicitors. With Katie’s permission and seemingly at your invitation, I went through all the emails between you and her from the last two years. I have also looked at the ones from before then too, not only because I wondered why you wanted me to view just the last two years, but also because I thought it important to get an idea of how communications between you two progressed to where they are at now. I have looked through nearly 200 emails in total, so you can see that I have been very thorough in my research. Following your claim, I’m sure that you would agree it is only fair that I comment on my findings.

From all the emails I have read and my own experience of you directly, together with knowledge of your history of problems of self-control, there can be no doubt that you find it difficult to regulate your feelings. While I sympathize with the awful experience you (and Katie) must have gone through in your separation and divorce, you are nevertheless still responsible for your own behaviour, regardless of your pain. You will likely find it too difficult to accept, but the truth is that in your emails over the past two years (and beyond), you come across very much as a bully and an abusive individual. I also know from personal experience that at times you have used physical intimidation to get your way and periodically throw loud and aggressive temper tantrums with no fear of doing so in front of your son.

With a good general overview of two years worth of communications, it has not been difficult to see that you have virtually run a campaign of intimidation and tried to dominate Katie and her family, using some simple and very recognisable techniques familiar to those who work with abusive individuals. Like the relentless dripping of a leaking pipe, you have been trying to break Katie down with ceaseless accusations and threatening behaviour. Here’s why I have come to this conclusion:

 

Manipulation & Control

The courts ruled that you should pay towards your son’s upbringing, yet there are emails between Katie and yourself within the last two years, showing that you were repeatedly withholding child support payments. You consistently refused and withheld money that was due to be used for Ben's care. You have a professional job and are not short of money. I think it clear from the emails that you were withholding money as a form of control. This became apparent enough for the Child Support Agency to now have to forcibly take the money out of your wages before you are paid. I am already confused how continually and strategically withholding child support reflects your claim: "how hard I have tried to make things work smoothly for us", but let's move on.

I cannot pretend in any way to be an expert in these things, but I have had some relevant experience and in my limited understanding, I believe you use an ordinary form of ‘gaslighting’ which is a technique of disorientating others by nit picking at facts and denying things happened that obviously did in the judgement of any normal person. Its aim is to try and make people doubt themselves and their recollection of events. By undermining their confidence in their ability to recall what has actually happened, the subject begins to lose confidence in their own judgement and ends up exhausted, giving into the idea that the domineering party must be right. The technique appears again and again in the two hundred or so emails. However, as you implied that only the last 2 years of your communications with Katie should be considered, let’s start with a very recent one.

During an email exchange with Katie, in which you became very upset because you were unhappy with the arrangements made for an estate agent to value the property, without any apparent prompting you suddenly burst forth with…

“You are sick of mind. I am sick of you. I suggest for the sake of our son, you drop him off quickly and quietly. I don't want you in my house tomorrow either.”

Reading through the emails that led up to this outburst, there appears to be no provocation to justify this. Katie said nothing rude or derisive. She said that the estate agent would be coming around and she would be staying in the house overnight to be able to deal with them in the morning (you yourself had pushed her to get this done in an email a few weeks before). Katie owns the house, you do not and 24 hours notice of a Saturday appointment is legal and arguably reasonable (especially given that you had been pressurising her to proceed and she was going to deal with them). Either way, your response was far from proportional. You protested in the most aggressive way, refusing to allow entry for the estate agent and then refusing to allow katie entry into her home too, openly threatening a confrontation unless she complied. She had pointed out that it was only an evaluation, not photographs and appointments were difficult to arrange. By anyone’s standards, your response is inflammatory. You clearly had feelings of outrage. From her own email to you, it is clear that Katie felt threatened and given your history of violence and aggression, plus the regularity of you using handovers as opportunities to accost her with your complaints and gripes, her fear was understandable by any measure.

When she confronted you with this and said she was afraid to bring Ben down after your statement:

“You are sick of mind. I am sick of you. I suggest for the sake of our son, you drop him off quickly and quietly. I don't want you in my house tomorrow either.”

you then tried to make her doubt her reaction. In your response you wrote...

 “You are an exceptional peice[sic] of work. You use our son as a tool to bully me over and over agin[sic]. It's disgusting. Read my suggestion again Katie. The statement clearly is of my wish to avoid a confrontation in front if Ben. There is very clearly nothing threatening about it.”

I think the average person would agree that the statement “You are sick of mind. I am sick of you. I suggest for the sake of our son, you drop him off quickly and quietly” sounds threatening. To call her behaviour disgusting is a statement of complete contempt for Katie. Your response implies that you are so enraged, you will not be able to avoid confronting her if she comes into the house, is too slow for your liking or even speaks (“…drop him off quickly and quietly”). These are the words of someone who is trying to control another person.

I have learnt from my own encounters with you that confrontation follows the path of you screaming and shouting while aggressively poking your fingers in your victim’s face, giving the impression you are about to strike. Katie has, over so many years of it, became used to expecting this response whenever you do not get your own way.  From your language, you are saying that you are so enraged by her, you do not trust yourself. You are threatening loss of self-control. You are threatening to ‘confront’ her. Again, already I am having a hard time seeing how this confirms your claim of “how hard I have tried to make things work smoothly for us. It makes me want to weep”.

Your denial escalated about the written phrase…

“I don't want you in my house tomorrow either.”

(In fairness, the courts ruled that it’s Katie’s house, although you are entitled to a minor portion of its value by dint of marriage). When challenged by Katie that you were refusing her entry, you responded:

“I have not denied you access to the house. I merely stated that I didn't 'want' you in the house”.

Gaslighting involves trying to make obvious meanings magically disappear. This time it’s grammatically a declarative “I don’t want you in my house”, semantically, it’s a directive speech act (a command) ‘do not come into the house’. Here’s an obvious example of that in action: If you said to Ben, “I don’t want you going outside",  you are not merely informing him of your emotional stance on the idea, you are clearly ordering him not to – there is no doubt to the meaning of your statement and I am quite certain that any reasonable person would agree.

You even tried this technique on me in Leicester when Katie and I picked Ben up from a weekend. On the Friday when I dropped him off, I told you Katie was asleep in the car. On the Sunday you said:

“I don’t like being lied to, I know Katie is not in Leicester”.

You were accusing me of lying to you and while I was offended, this was my first experience of your attempts to intimidate, so I decided that perhaps this was just a one off, a bad day for you maybe. I wanted to keep the peace, so I offered to go and get Katie to reassure you that there was no deception going on. While I went to get her from around the corner, you telephoned her family and made very abusive accusations, as you know. When Katie then came to the house herself to prove she was there in Leicester, you were embarrassed and tried to cover up the fact that you had behaved in such a way. When I suggested that an apology would not go amiss, you flared up in a matter of seconds and rigorously claimed that you did not call me a liar. You made the claim that “I don’t like being lied to” was just a general statement, not directed at anyone in particular. This is gaslighting. Your statement was a direct accusation by implication and your denial was a barefaced attempt to deceive. I was the one who told you where Katie was and you implied I was lying to you and then tried pettifogging with linguistic sleight of hand, in the hope of causing me confusion and doubt. Being accused of lying is not that big a deal to me in the scale of things, which is why I walked away, but it was the fact that you followed me to the car and the aggressive and threatening behaviour that happened in the road that caused me concern and is dealt with later in this statement.

Her is another example of gaslighting, this one a little more semantically ambiguous. Surprisingly, in one email (after allegedly telling Ben that his ‘Granda’ was evil), you denied you thought that badly of him, but then effectively confirmed you did in the next sentence.

“I don't even think for a minute that your Dad is evil. That must be coming from someone elses[sic] mind - certainly not mine. Your Dad gave some calous[sic], thoughtless, money grubbing[sic] advice to you that seriously damaged your marriage”

(then you strangely try to cover up with “but he was doing the best he could”). It’s like saying “I never said he was a bad man, I just pointed out all the truly cruel and terrible things he has done”. You did not use the word 'evil' in that statement, but you pretty much damned him as a ruthless and soulless man. I would say you are arguing semantics.

I mentioned the above specifically because you seem to have a deep seated hatred of and anger towards Katie’s Dad that was evident in the emails I read. You claimed the house was half yours and yet I have seen the mortgage records myself and Katie had put down the whole £40,000 on the house originally and it was in her name. You had put nothing down at all. Throughout the years that you lived there, you paid for the mortgage for only a short period, the rest of the time Katie paid for it and completely supported you for the many years you were a student and more years still of unemployment. It is clear that as your relationship was falling apart you panicked and tried to persuade her to put the house in your name. Katie’s dad is a very peaceful and thoughtful man and had done nothing more than advise she wait until things had settled down between you before doing such a drastic thing. No more than that. But it was this alone that led you to resent him so much and claim in your emails that it was his advice that caused your marriage to fail. I implore you to consider that rather than blaming someone outside of the marriage for its failure, you consider that your own behaviour, your mistreatment of Katie, that your aggression and threats had something to do with it. I suggest that owning the house would have given you the symbolic and economic control over Katie you needed to bolster up your identity, making you feel stronger and in control. It is clear you openly admit in your emails to loathing her father for advising her not to sign over the house to you and blame the failure of your marriage on that event.

Finally, a less known and premeditated method of gaslighting is to confuse and disorientate the victim with weird and surreal behaviour at times, including especially nowadays, sending disorientating emails and texts. When I first met Katie, after a while she told me that she had been receiving odd and disjointed text messages from her ex. She showed me one at the time, but I will admit that I cannot recall what this first one said, though I do recall it seemed to make no sense. Then a few weeks later when I was actually with her one day, one arrived from you just saying “still”. I wondered at the time if you were trying to disorientate her. “Still” what? Still determined to not let her ‘get away with it’? Still determined to drag her through the courts? Still loved her?  Still angry with her? The purpose of the technique is that by making the victim do the work of trying to make sense of the statement, they are naturally inclined to give it a meaning that they will be most vulnerable to, one that plays on their fears and natural feelings of guilt. Interestingly, the texts stopped the moment you found out that I was seeing Katie, but not before I had already witnessed it directly myself.

Again, I am not sure how this is confirming the claim of “how hard I have tried to make things work smoothly for us. It makes me want to weep.”

 

You're the Real Victim

Throughout your emails you frequently portray yourself as the victim, claiming that Katie conspired against you. You refuse to take any responsibility for your conduct at all, to the point whereby to protect yourself, you claim that she was literally engineering situations so you would become enraged and threatening, or just to ‘get’ at you. Blaming the victim, claiming that they “made them do it”, is one of the most recognized and frequent behaviours of abusive partners.

To Katie’s solicitor you wrote:

“Within weeks Katie started silly games, making up stuff about her being afraid to come to my door, and the ensuing drama that that caused (indeed, was engineered in my opinion)”.

You said the same thing in an email to Katie. Once again, it cannot and should not be dismissed that you admitted to aggressive behaviour in your divorce papers, you have publically humiliated Katie on many occasions and have assaulted her. You also have a police record for assault which you yourself, in a moment of guilt, confessed to Katie. Given these things, no reasonable person would think it irrational of Katie to be afraid to meet you face to face, especially given the aggressive emails and your history of using handovers to have a go at her.

You might, from the inside out, convince yourself that everyone else is being unreasonable because you know what your real intentions are, but I don’t believe you have no insight into how intimidating it is to have a 6ft 7inch man screaming in your face. I don’t see that any woman would not be afraid to come to your door when you had written “You are sick of mind. I am sick of you. I suggest for the sake of our son, you drop him off quickly and quietly. I don't want you in my house tomorrow either.” 

The ‘ensuing drama’ you euphemistically referred to in your email to Katie and her solicitor, was your aggressive and very threatening outburst following the discovery that Katie was indeed in Leicester after claiming I was lying to you and then making an abusive and intimidating phone call to her family.

When you found out you were wrong and realized you had acted very inappropriately already, rather than taking a breath and calming down, you made things worse by firstly refusing to return a toy I had given to Ben, then following me to my car (with Ben inside) and screaming at Katie and myself, shouting:

"You're a c*nt and a tw*t, just like she is"

If you recall, you were leaning down over me and spitting at me while swearing and poking your finger in my face. People stopped in the street to watch your outburst.

I think the small tsunami of cognitive dissonance that followed, led you to panic and concoct the desperate claim that we made you lose self-control in the middle of the street, ranting and spitting with uncontrolled fury. In your mind, it "was engineered in my opinion" and therefore our fault because we provoked you to behave that way. You were claiming I deliberately pretended Katie was asleep in the car so you would make the accusation that she wasn’t even in Leicester and then I would be able to humiliate you by producing her and this would all justify your subsequent outburst.  In fact it was precisely because you had so many outbursts like this in the past that Katie wanted to stay in the car, and in the event, by her actually not coming to the door, you proved her fears to be true.

The only indication you gave that you had at least some realization of how badly you had overreacted was when Katie’s solicitor questioned you about the incident at a court hearing and you claimed that your behaviour was "down to stress" caused by the upcoming court case. Unfortunately now you have reverted to claiming the situation was ‘engineered’ to make you lose it.

I already have my own experiences of you and your temper, but through reading so many of your emails, it has become clear that threats, harassment, denial and attempting to confuse are normal behaviours for you. Only this week, you sent another text in which you 'threaten' Katie with court three times and claim she will have to pay your costs and insist on your rights to take Ben for four weeks over the summer holiday when the court order in no way stipulates any such thing. In short, you are a bully. There is no medium switch for you, there is either on or off, bullying or nothing - never any attempts at a middle ground of civil communications. In my original email to you I gave you many more direct examples of bullying in your communications. 

Frequently people who bully and abuse can also be deceptively charming, usually in situations where they have to be, such as work environments, with friends and in court. Charm is a behaviour skilfully learnt to hide the real inner fury that, if unrestrained, would destroy any chance some bullies (I cannot talk for you here) may have of friendship, a normal life and much needed companionship. They can be very convincing liars who consistently deny wrongdoing, making themselves out to be the victim (I think at least to some degree, this is how you are with your friends and to Cafcass and the courts when you want to be). It is also very easy to see how you try hard to cover your tracks with charm and misdirection. I was astounded how, following your aggressive outburst towards me and Katie in Leicester, the following visit you acted as if nothing of any concern had happened.

 

Paranoia & Unreasonable Expectations

In my original email, I listed many of the occasions you claimed Katie deliberately lied about Ben being ill or that she lied about having a job interview to attend in order, according to you, to withhold contact. You have made these accusations repeatedly, despite the fact that you are fully aware that Katie voluntarily bought Ben to see you regularly after you split, without any court ordering her to. She did this of her own volition, without any pressure or being forced to do so. On each of the instances I addressed, I sent you evidence of Ben’s illness in his medical records and told you of available evidence from Katie’s employers to show that she had indeed been ill, including a letter from a head member of staff as well as proof of an interview. I even pointed you towards video evidence of one occasion of Ben’s illness at the time of a due visit, but you never even bothered to view it (it was loaded onto a secure private page online, with an invite only status – the site records how many times the video is viewed, it was never viewed). Small children get ill regularly, it’s part of the process of building an immune system, but to you, it’s a conspiracy. Even when presented with evidence, you refuse to acknowledge any of it.

But of all the emails regarding such things, this one is the most disturbing. Following this email from Katie (last year):

“… my auntie Maggie was rushed into hospital for major surgery while we were away, my nana xxx’s condition has declined dramatically and my Nana xxx has fully blown Alzheimer’s, my family need me here as much as possible at the moment, so I will not be coming down this week and next”

But most importantly, she went on to make it clear that Ben was made available for you to come and visit him in Newcastle instead, despite the pressures she was under. Your response is incredibly callous and self-centred

“I'm really gutted by this. I can't really come up, since there is an MWD40 on Saturday (a dance club night), and it's pretty ridiculous to do a 400 mile round trip just to see him for couple of hours in poor circumstances”. 

After she tells you of very serious illness with three members of her family, your first words are about you and how you are gutted? Then to top it off, your excuse for not coming to visit your son is that you have a club night? You would rather go clubbing then see your son.

“If you were able to read back through all the emails I've sent to Katie over the last 2 years, you'd start to see how hard I have tried to make things work smoothly for us. It makes me want to weep.”

Forgive any apparent sarcasm in my tone, but this needs to be said… were you ‘weeping’ all night while you danced at the club? Were you thinking of how much you miss your son while you were getting drinks at the bar? Indeed, I have read your emails from the last 2 years and I have come to a very different conclusion to the one you try to convince me and others to take.

If there can be any doubt that this lack of empathy extends to Ben too, let me remind you that you have been happy to let him do all the travelling for years now. Happy to let him sit bored and strapped in a child seat for up to 6 hours on occasion, in a rumbling metal box, frequently suffering from car sickness while you sit in front of the telly, warm and snug, drinking too much beer while waiting for him to be delivered to you, only for him to then have to make the same journey back home a day and a half later. And then when you have been confronted by him asking why you don’t visit him, you tell him that his mother is keeping him away from you. You cannot claim how much you miss Ben while you have refused so many times to come and see him when Katie has made it clear that she will make him available and offered even to help arrange a schedule of things to do with him, as indeed I have. It should not be forgotten that you rigorously fought against Katie's successful court application to make you share the travelling with Ben, so that he did not have to do all the work.

I have read the emails that show clearly that Katie offered to bring Ben down originally every two weeks so he could have a relationship with you and she did that for a couple of years.

As for me, I must have driven around 8,000 miles bringing him to you. I have bought him down to see you every single visit for over a year and a half. Have you ever said even a single "thanks" when I have dropped him off? What about the times I have bought him down alone with your agreement? I have no obligation to bring him down, I have no court order.  On one of those occasions, I texted you to see if you would accept an offer of me bringing him alone. You did, and then mumbled some half baked attempt at a threat about falling down some stairs when I arrived. Why should I have to put up with your anger and hatred when I bring your own son to see you? You do understand that I have no obligation to do so whatsoever should Katie be ill or have an interview?

Katie points out in her emails many times that you never once even telephoned Ben or Skyped him and not one of the emails I have seen ever indicates otherwise. You made one feigned gesture in the two years I have known you and that was when Cafcass were investigating you and even then you called well over an hour and a forty five minutes (8.45pm) after what you know to be his regular bedtime. Katie even let you know that she had bought a webcam for you to speak with him if you wanted. Your response?  “I don’t do Skype”. To Katie's solicitor you conceded that you could, but refused to. In so many emails, you have been adamant in you claims of how wrong it is to ‘make’ you come to Newcastle and you have previously refused to come up and visit him many times, citing club nights, not being able to afford the petrol (you’re an engineer in a full time job) and you most favoured excuse - lack of family member’s availability to accompany you. You even stated in court that regardless of the magistrate’s decision to reduce travelling for Ben from once every two weeks to once every four, you would not be travelling up to see him and you would just have to see him once every four weeks instead. It even appears clear that you then misinterpreted the court’s ruling, thinking that they had ordered you to come and see Ben every four weeks. As soon as I informed you that in fact the order stated only that Katie must make him available at those times, you quickly texted saying you would not be coming up, using the extraordinary excuse that you could not find anyone to housesit for you in case we came down and stole your property.

Despite all this, I still think it is fair to try and put the tone of many of your earlier emails down to the distress of a separation and divorce. But the trouble is that all these are recent communications, within the last 2 years. To continue with these attacks is not acceptable and shows that your original fear and panic following the breakup has not waned, but rather has turned into contempt, suspicion and hatred. You seem to have become more and more paranoid and then lie again and again to cover your tracks. You protest that you have ‘given up’ and have no ‘hate’ left, yet you continue to lie and deceive. I am truly sorry David, but this is the correct assessment of you, not your own version of “how hard I have tried to make things work smoothly for us” and “I have tried to make my words and actions in return reasonably balanced and restrained…”. The evidence shows otherwise. Your protestations and suggestions that everything is Katie’s fault are designed to distract from the deeper reality of the problematic parts of your own personality and past. You are an aggressive man who finds it very difficult to contain his feelings. You are, in short again, a bully and I implore you to consider that this is how you behave.

 

Myth of Being Reasonable

In your penultimate email to me, with a sense of great pride, you say of yourself:

“I am, most often, plain spoken, and do not keep my feelings to myself ”.

I don't think this archaic attitude is anything to be proud of, it is extremely inappropriate. As an adult, self-control is the very thing you need. You have to control your feelings in order to get on with other people. Is that how you really survive at work, by letting everyone know how you feel about everything? You have to control your feelings and not expose the young and vulnerable to them especially. I am unwilling to raise some of the specific instances of occurrences involving Ben as this is not the forum to do that, but I will say that if you believe in this type of ‘honesty’ so much, then you are indeed ‘honest’ to him and continue, after all this time, to expose him to your negative feelings and tell him about things he should not hear about (plus a very biased version), to the point that these events have previously caused him real and serious confusion and very tangible distress. It would seem the process is selective and you only share information that casts you in a positive light and those who get in your way in a negative one. Let me reassure you again… we do not and never have talked about you to Ben in a negative way. The truth is that we hardly talk about you at all and if we do, we are careful to reassure Ben that you love him.

The only time we ever have to speak to him about you in a guarded light is when you have said something to him that has caused him distress and we have to try and undo the damage. When you told him that his Granda is evil, Kate had to reassure him that was not true and that you were just upset and sometimes said things only because you were angry. When you told him that his mother was making you homeless, she had to reassure him that this was not true and that you were once again just upset that the house had to be sold and you would have plenty of places to stay with the money you would get from the sale and everything would be alright. On the last occasion, when seemingly he was told that his mother told lies, was not to be trusted and I was evil, he was extremely upset and distressed. He cried and cried that night, was incontinent and had nightmares. This is your son we are talking about, this is distress you caused. He had to be repeatedly reassured that everything was ok and his mama would never do such a thing and that we both loved him very much. It took him days to get over that. In the last court case, it was stated / agreed by the court that Ben was distressed following visits with you – it is a difficult but necessary task to have to help him develop coping strategies for the time he spends alone with you, thank god that recently he has been able to benefit from the presence of your brother (and his son), who seems to leave a much more positive impression on him. I cannot stress this enough… despite your claims, we never bad mouth you and do nothing but talk to him about you in the most careful and diplomatic way, if anything we are generous in our accounts of you.

I will not openly discuss further the effects of your behaviour on Ben, but I did so considerably more in my original email. As I said at the start of this, I have no intention of trying to undermine your relationship with him, but I believe that Ben will grow up being able to think for himself and if he continues to find that what you tell him is unreliable, he will come to his own conclusions. I am telling you now that unless you review how you behave, you will alienate him irrevocably and he will grow up resenting you.

There is one more thing however, that should to be said to you about Ben in any forum available: You must not act in such a manner that makes him feel guilty that somehow things are his fault, crying in front of him also has this effect (you admitted you do openly to Cafcass). Don’t cry in front of him, pleading how cruel his mother is to you and don’t tell him that the people he loves are evil and should not be trusted. Ben is only five years old and you don’t seem to understand that it’s a structural inevitability of a child’s psyche that they feel powerless and guilty when they cannot make things happen like the adults appear to be able to do. If you tell him certain things he will say to himself “When I get home, I will tell my Mama and things will change and that will make Dada feel better and he will stop crying” But it doesn’t make it better, it makes it much worse for him because then he feels guilty that it is his fault because he can’t make the adults do what his Dada says they should. This is why we do not say detrimental things to him about you, despite your claims, because we can see clearly how this would compromise him. You don’t see this side of his mind because your ego and your inability to contain your own emotions do a good job in blocking most chances of empathy you may have for others. In your paranoid tendency to believe that we badmouth you to Ben, you are simply mistakenly assuming that others inevitably do what you do.


You’re the Victim

In all your emails to me (and without fail in nearly all of those to Katie, going back two years and more), she is relentlessly painted as bad and you as good. Show me where you have shown any humility? Show me where you have not stood looking down at Katie on a high moral alter and pointed down at her beneath? Let me remind you again of the volume and intensity of your emailed comments just to me about her…

“emotional game playing”, ”calculating”, “likes to get exactly what she wants”, “silly games”, “making up stuff”, "engineering’ situations", “she'll break all promises as it suits her and to hurt me”, “pure folly, aimed at hurting me,”, “divisive”, “attack on me and my relationship with Ben”

These are all only recently. How is this trying to smooth things over?

You screamed at me once in the street:

“You only listen to what that fucking bitch says about me”.

There were three witnesses to this incident, this time in Newcastle. You were highly agitated and very distressed at the time. But given that you were screaming it at the top of your voice down the street while our neighbours came out to listen, do you really think I needed to rely on Katie's account of your past behaviour to come to my own conclusions? What opinion about you am I supposed to form when I have witnessed your aggression first hand and I know that:

How am I supposed to react to all this information after my own experiences of you? How do you want me to think of you when I have read these things about you or Katie has relayed them to me, sometimes in tears?

These are things you actually did, not someone else's behaviour and not made up. You have to accept that your behaviour influences how people will think and respond to you. When you shouted “You only listen to what that fucking bitch says about me”, it became apparent that you have your own forgiving perspective on your behaviour and you know your reasons, but you fail to see that other people are not going to see things that way and so you blame Katie for it. Again, I implore you to try and see things from other's perspective, if you are able to, you will find it easy to understand why I stand up to you and why, on every single occasion you threaten and intimidate, even if it’s ‘just’ sending relentless texts threatening to take Katie to court after you have been drinking too much, or saying outrageous and damaging things to Ben or making angry and abusive phone calls to Katie’s family, I will always respond and let you know that your behaviour is unacceptable. If that causes you a headache, then stop it.

A recent example of this is when we brought Ben down and you texted saying you had:

“frunk[sic] too much to drive, please bring him to my front door”

You did this despite the fact that the police had advised you to accept a neutral meeting point. Consequently we refused to meet you at your home because of your history of aggressive behaviour and your text saying you had been drinking. You then refused to meet us at the hotel foyer and so we told you that we would bring Ben round first thing in the morning, when you had sobered up. A barrage of threatening texts about court actions and outrage followed from you and this is what I responded to on the Sunday when we picked Ben up and you came over from the car to talk to me. It was that verbal reprimand from me that enraged you and led to your ridiculous accusations to the police that were completely and totally uncorroborated by the video evidence. David, you know full well that effectively all you received from me was no more than a verbal reprimand, a dressing down, but you, in your hysterical denial of your culpability could not handle it, making ridiculous and childish accusations of assault and damage to your car (for which you failed to produce any evidence because there was none, because it never happened). You knew that you should not have been drinking on the Friday and that your texts were unreasonable and simply could not handle a telling off.

The best way to deal with a bully is to stand up to him, like I have always done with you in the past and as I am doing right now. If you look back carefully at our communications, every attempt you have made to threaten or intimidate has been followed by a response from me. If you want to stop hearing from me, then stop sending abusive messages, stop threatening, stop saying damaging things to Ben that causes emotional damage that Katie then has to clear up.

Believe me when I tell you that I would rather take a background role in any dealings with you, but given that Katie has previously found handovers extremely stressful events as you have a history of using them to be abusive, threaten and humiliate her, I am obliged to deal with you directly myself. I recall the very first time I met you, while Ben was in Katie's arms, you started talking to her about court matters. I was surprised you would do this in front of Ben, never mind in front of me, a complete stranger to you at the time. It is not my role to try and understand you and I genuinely would rather not become involved in your problems and aggressive behaviour, but I choose to support and protect Katie (and Ben where appropriate) from your rages and your attempts to intimidate and now I will protect myself from the same.  

 

The Truth Of The Matter

I have tried hard in this posting to stay as reasonable as I can, but the truth pushes me to say that your manipulative persona blots out all the feigned sincerity and artificial magnanimity you try so hard to occasionally muster in your emails. For the most part, yours is a passive–aggressive relationship with Katie, her family and now myself. Your communications show you to be a most hateful and resentful man, who pretends that he is merely adhering to his noble beliefs but is, in reality, (and I am sorry to be so blunt) just acting like a shallow bigot and a bully. If people disagree with you, you feel contempt but pretend you feel sorry for them instead and use clichés to account for why they refuse to see the world the way you do. You grasp cheap truisms out of thin air and think they will sound like terse and pithy sayings to support your bigotry, but in fact you just reveal the transparency of your self-deception. You have no sense of calm or self-awareness and absolutely no capacity for self-control in expressing your opinions of others when they don’t fulfil your needs or agree with your paranoid version of reality.

Truth be told, you have narcissistic personality traits. Your massive ego and sense of entitlement enters the room before you do. You find it difficult to accept that other people have needs and desires separate to your own. In your head, in your world, you are the beginning and the end and everything that happens in your localised life relates back to you in some form (hence the paranoia that Katie conspires against you and the belief that situations are deliberately engineered purely to make you become aggressive and to 'get you’).

 

In a Nutshell

These have been only parts of the original email I sent you and that email contained more examples of how caustic and threatening your communications and behaviours have been. Read back the original emails I sent to you and try and see how hard I worked to be diplomatic and not to blame, then try and see how in your emails to me you are seething with passive-aggressive phrases and nasty insulting put downs of Katie. You are unable to control yourself because you are unable to talk without attacking relentlessly. The rest of your communications are either outright threats or filled with snide little comments designed to make you feel superior by belittling others. And in most of the emails to Katie herself, far from trying to “make things work smoothly” your tone is harsh and full of ruthless accusations. For the greater part, when the emails are not simple administration (even that you find difficult), your occasional pretence at graciousness and magnanimity are weakly disguised theatrics designed to make you look exceptionally reasonable to the imagined critical reader (Cafcass officer or Magistrate) that sits over your shoulder. 

Like most people who are so abusive, you pride yourself on the ability to present a ‘convincing’ fictional self to others that is taken at face value (though in your case, not too difficult to penetrate). On rare occasions, the pretence of civility and charm, like your manipulation, can be subtle, but usually you blunder through like a 16 stone ballerina: This recent email to Katie is an outstanding and disturbing example of your unnerving duplicity:

“As I've said, and have tried to make happen on many occasions, I'd love to welcome you into our home and talk about Ben, but you seem to prefer us to be at war (about what, I've still got no idea). there are many things I do not know about Ben's life, and I'd love to know more. Unfortunately I cannot make a simple telephone call to you without it being construed as some sort of harassment, so until you decide that we can get on better, I am left in the dark and only have the things Ben says to go on. I always hold out my olive branch to you Katie, because you are Ben's mum, and as such I value your happiness second only to Ben's, and continue to seek mutual cooperation if not friendship”.

This facade of 'graciousness' is in fact a serious matter – a rapid change in personality that is frightening. Your ability to switch seems almost sociopathic -  only weeks before you were screaming at her and myself in the street calling us both “C*nts” right in front of Ben, and only weeks after you were calling her “disgusting”, “calculating” and “divisive” in emails to me. 

Much of your language comes across as very affected. It is as if you have difficulty connecting with your real feelings and so instead pick out little phrases you have read somewhere or heard on a television drama. Phrases like “I always hold out my olive branch to you”,  “I value your happiness second only to Ben's” and the earlier “I have tried to make things work smoothly for us. It makes me want to weep” sound artificial, as if you are compensating for a lack of emotional depth by readily imitating any dramatic poetic affectations you can recall.

I feel sorry for you for that, for being unable to find out how you really feel about things, for not being able to acknowledge your pain and frustration properly, I feel sorry for the level of denial you live with. But despite this, you still are responsible for your behaviour and have to be accountable for what you say and do. I suggest you ask some of those closest to you if any of what I say is true. Perhaps try asking some friends or family who are not afraid of you.

 

________________________________________________

 

Finally, I had some harsher words for you in the original email which I think now someone needs to say to you openly in the (naïve) hope you might actually listen to some of them:

Stop pretending you understand things you don’t, especially other people’s motives. Not everyone works the same way as you do, which means not everyone conspires to ‘engineer’ situations. I am genuinely sorry for your pain, but I cannot help you with it and nor can Katie and I will defend my family and myself against it’s unacceptable manifestation. You need to get a grip on yourself and take charge of your feelings. You have to stop being so immature, moaning all the time about everything. Stop trying to control things out of your reach. Stop bullying people and let Katie do her job as a mother, you have very little choice in the matter anyway,  so suck it up and be a man about it. Be grateful that Katie has made such a huge effort to bring Ben to you so far – ask around and see how many mothers just simply refuse any contact with the biological father whatsoever. The more you trust her to know what is best for Ben and stop turning on her directly or through Ben, the better chance you have that she might begin to trust you again, one day.

Give up making yourself the centre of your world, try making Ben it (that’s never going to happen, even I can see that). You claim he is at the moment, but it is blatantly obvious to everyman and his dog that he is not. The centre of your world is yourself and your endless scrambling for little vindictive morsels of power. However, whether you like it or not, the courts decided that Katie is in charge of how to look after Ben and you should be grateful that she actually does want you to have a relationship with him (as I do). But we are not going to do all the work for you, while you sit at home, sipping on your beer, waiting for him to be conveniently delivered to your front door, only to arrange for other family members and children to babysit him as you find being alone with him too frustrating.

You have been completely out of order and Katie is rightfully alarmed by what has happened with Ben and I am rightfully alarmed by your whole demeanour. Stop saying inappropriate things to him (directly or to others in his presence, he picks up on everything), and do not let others you know do it either (women that come and go in your life specifically). Contrary to what you think, he should not hear about certain things nor should he be made to carry your pain and guilt. Finally, trying to intimidate me is a waste of time, I will always stand up against bullying. Being unable to keep your feelings to yourself is NOT something to be proud of. If you want to convince anyone you are a fit father, for Christ’s sake, man up, because if you don’t, by the time Ben is a teenager, he will be more of a man than you will ever have been.

 

Michael Spencer

 

 

 

 

 

 

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