6 Tactics From Domestic Abusers’ Litigation Playbook

This piece is co-authored by Lisa Aronson Fontes, Ph.D., and Jenny Wiggs, Ed.D.

When they leave an abusive relationship, domestic violence survivors believe the hardest part is over. They expect family court will protect them and their children. It can be a shock to discover that the abuse dynamics have morphed but not ceased. Domineering tactics now unfold through pleadings, motions, custody evaluations, discovery, and courtroom proceedings.

Across jurisdictions, survivors report similar litigation narratives that undermine their credibility, cast doubt on their parenting, diminish their finances, and distort the past. Recognizing these patterns can help survivors and those who work with them respond strategically instead of reactively.

1. Pathologizing the Survivor: “Crazy and Addicted”

Abusers and their attorneys try to pathologize the survivor as mentally ill, substance-abusing, or both. Abusers often describe survivors as anxious, unstable, depressed, paranoid, dysregulated, irrational, and incapable of making sound decisions. Courts focus on the victim’s alleged shortcomings and away from true abuse.

Abusers, their attorneys, and the mental health professionals they hire often apply serious psychiatric labels to victims. Favorites include bipolar, borderline, paranoid, or histrionic personality disorders and even psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia or delusional disorders. Abusers often weaponize normative experiences such as postpartum depression or maternal anxiety to portray the survivor as permanently unfit for parenting.

This litigation strategy is effective because it exploits a survivor’s abuse-induced trauma. After prolonged abuse, many survivors experience post-traumatic stress symptoms (Fernandez-Fillol, 2021). These merit compassion; they should not be weaponized in custody litigation. Seeking treatment for trauma is evidence of resilience—not parental unfitness.

The psychological tests used by custody evaluators often obscure more than they illuminate. Instruments such as the MMPI were not designed as stand-alone measures of parenting capacity. Likewise, diagnosing complex psychiatric conditions requires careful clinical evaluation over time, incorporating several sources of information. No single test score, isolated interview, or litigation narrative should be mistaken for a comprehensive psychiatric diagnosis or a definitive assessment of a person’s ability to parent.

When the “crazy” label fails to stick, domestic abusers often allege that the victim abuses drugs or alcohol. Survivors sometimes undergo years of substance abuse testing, at great expense and inconvenience. And even if their tests never come up positive for a substance, the testing period may be extended if they are early or late for a test. This is ironic because often the domestic abuser has a true problem with alcohol or drug abuse. Whoever flings the first allegation catches the judge’s attention.

2. Alleging Alienation: “Turned the Kids Against Me”

Abusers often allege that the protective parent—usually the mother—is “alienating” the children. Domestic abuse survivors are accused of manipulating children’s perceptions, exaggerating abuse concerns, or intentionally damaging children’s relationship with the other parent. Alienation allegations are a litigation strategy that has no basis in science (Birchall & Choudhry, 2022).

Children become estranged from parents for many reasons (Mercer, 2025). Children fear parents who have acted abusively toward them or their other parent. They dislike parents who lack warmth. Abuse allegations shouldn’t be dismissed simply because the alleged perpetrator has waved the flag of parental alienation.

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3. Claiming Mutual Abuse: “Both Hot-Headed”

When domestic abusers cannot disprove abuse, they claim the relationship was characterized by mutual abuse or “two-way domestic violence.” This reframing shifts the conversation away from power and control patterns toward isolated conflicts. Rather than examining who exercised coercive control, the focus narrows to moments when the survivor resisted domination. Abusers claim, “We both yelled and cursed” or “We had a lot of conflict.”

This is a form of DARVO—Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender (Platt et al., 2009). Rather than acknowledging abusive conduct, the abuser deflects responsibility and blames the victim. Survivors’ emotional responses and efforts to protect themselves or their children, establish boundaries, or document abuse are presented as “evidence” that the victim was equally abusive. Domestic abusers provoke and record their victims, then use edited recordings to portray the victim as “the problem” or claim “mutual abuse.”

We must distinguish reactive behavior from abuse. Victims don’t always respond ideally. They may yell, curse, send angry messages, or respond emotionally after prolonged intimidation, surveillance, or violence. These reactions must be viewed within their broader context rather than in isolation. The legal question is not whether a survivor ever became angry. Rather, the question is whether one party engaged in a sustained pattern of domination that reduced the other person’s autonomy and made them afraid.

The courts should be helped to reject false equivalencies so coercive control is understood for what it is: one partner’s campaign to dominate the other.

4. Confusing High Conflict and Litigation Abuse

Abusers and their legal teams often rely on “high-conflict” narratives to deflect from holding the abuser accountable. As a result, judges and evaluators may struggle to understand the true power and control dynamics and the associated risk for adult and child survivors. Conflict and coercive control are not synonymous. Conflict generally involves two people who both escalate a dispute. Coercive control, in contrast, involves one individual systematically dominating the other. Failing to distinguish between the two results in erroneous decisions.

Domestic abuse survivors usually try mightily to pacify their abusive partners and de-escalate abuse. Nevertheless, courts may label them as “high conflict” along with the abuser. The designation often follows predictable events: the survivor reports abuse, requests financial disclosures, objects to inappropriate parenting, rejects unsafe arrangements, or seeks enforcement of court orders. Actions that are intended to establish accountability are reframed as evidence that the survivor is unable to co-parent or unwilling to compromise.

5. Attacking Maternal Identity: “Bad Mom”

After separation, many domestic abusers try to cast their victims as inadequate or abusive parents. They often call child protective services with false allegations and sometimes are able to fulfill their threat to “take away the kids” or limit the survivor to supervised or video visits only.

Many women endure unfathomable abuse “for the sake of the children.” Abused mothers often protect their children, shield them from violence, manage the home, attend medical appointments, help with homework, comfort crying children, and carry the emotional labor of parenting. Eventually, they may leave the relationship to protect the children. It is psychologically devastating to have those years of devotion recast as evidence of neglect, failure to protect, or enmeshment.

6. Abusing Through Endless Litigation

Perhaps the most damaging family court litigation strategy involves wearing down the survivor. Cases drag on for years. The survivor runs out of funds for legal support. The process itself becomes the mechanism through which coercive control continues.

The cumulative effects are profound. Survivors sometimes endure more than a decade of financial impoverishment and extreme stress as the other parent files motion after baseless motion while refusing to follow court orders. Every motion requires a response. Every expert requires payment. Every delay prolongs uncertainty.

Abusers’ twin goals are to maintain contact with the survivor through litigation and to increase legal costs until the survivor gives up. Survivors may accept inequitable property divisions because they cannot afford more litigation. They may agree to unsafe parenting arrangements because they lack the emotional capacity to keep fighting.

Abusers’ Litigation Narratives Are Dangerous

Abusers’ litigation narratives disparaging the survivor confuse the court and obscure real risks. We give the final words here to Leah Moses, a nurse-midwife who tried to protect her children in court for 12 years after separating from her psychologist husband.

Court evaluators catalogued my protective parenting behaviors as “high conflict,” “custodial interference,” and “alienating.” My warnings of escalating risk were dismissed or drowned out by combative court hearings and mediations, invasive evaluations, and conflicting court orders.

Family court became my ex-husband’s instrument of control…. One of the biggest mistakes we make is assuming that dangerous people look dangerous.”

Moses’s ex-husband shot and killed their teenage son and then himself. Utah’s amended bill on child safety in custody proceedings is named after Moses’s son, Om.