CT Court Superior Judge Thomas J. O’Neill issued a restraining order yesterday against Karen Riordan on behalf of her three teenage children – against their wishes.
Following two days of hearings, Judge O’Neill barred Riordan from contacting her children, Mia, 16, Matthew, 16, and Sawyer, 13 – for one year.
The terms of the restraining order include that Riordan must:
Stay away from the home of the protected person [her three children] and wherever the protected person shall reside.
Do not contact the protected person in any manner, including by written, electronic or telephone contact,
and do not contact the protected person’s home, workplace, or others with whom the contact would be likely to cause annoyance or alarm to the protected person.
Stay 100 yards away from the protected person.
The action was brought against Riordan by the teens’ father, Christopher Ambrose, on their behalf.
They expressed a desire to live with their mother and have been living with her for the last few months.
All three have court-appointed attorneys and commenced legal actions in CT juvenile court seeking protection from their father.
Judge O’Neill ignored the juvenile court actions in favor of the father’s claims in his court.
Alexander Cuda represented Ambrose. Cuda is the past chairman of the CT bar association’s family law section.
Attorney Alexander Cuda successfully persuaded Judge O’Neill to remove the mother of three teenagers from their lives for one year – against the wishes of the teenagers…
Because Ambrose took all their marital funds and Riordan’s inheritance, she could not afford an attorney and represented herself pro se.
All three children fled from their father’s home in the last few months, claiming he had abused them for years. Their mother allowed the teens to live in her home in Madison, CT.
It was the first time the teens lived with their mother in three years.
In April 2020, Judge Jane Grossman, citing parental alienation by Riordan, removed the children and awarded Ambrose custody of them, then ages 13, 13, and nine.
Judge Grossman based her decision on a custody evaluation report paid for by Ambrose, which alleged Riordan alienated the children from his loving desire to care for them.
Three psychiatrists and a psychologist contradicted the custody evaluator’s report, but they were ignored by Judge Grossman and later Judge Gerard Adelman.
Judge Grossman barred the mother from having contact with her children and on a dark day in April 2020, three children found themselves suddenly removed from their mother’s care and the home they lived in, and forced into the home of their father – without notice and against their wishes – and unable to contact their mother.
The children’s grief was not unexpected. They were bitterly traumatized. Riordan had raised them since each was adopted at less than six months of age.
Riordan was a stay-at-home mother. Ambrose worked away from home – an absentee father – in Hollywood and New York City – as a successful TV network screenwriter and producer until allegations of plagiarism in 2018 sent him, unemployed, back to CT.
Soon afterward, he changed the passwords of the joint accounts, locked Riordan out of her own funds, including her inheritance, hired experts to support his preplanned parental alienation narrative, then filed for divorce.
Away from their mother, the children rapidly declined and plunged into depression.
Mia began cutting after she was taken from her mother. She was well-adjusted and happy before she was removed from her lifelong home to be placed with her father against her wishes in 2020.
Matthew began using drugs, and Sawyer repeatedly alleged sexual abuse by his father.
https://frankreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/August-28-2020-257am-sawyer.m4a
Several months ago, after three years isolated from their mother and the extended family they grew up with, the teens determined they could no longer withstand the abuse of their father, and left.
For a few months, they lived happily again with their mother.
Yesterday, that all changed.
Judge O’Neill determined the mother, Karen Riordan, coercively controlled the teenagers to falsely allege abuse against the father. In making his decision, Judge O’Neill declined to hear testimony from the three teenagers, now 16, 16, and 13, choosing instead to give credence solely to their father.
Judge O’Neill also chose to ignore the mother’s testimony, excluded evidence she tried to present to the court of Ambrose’s purported abuse, and ignored a letter to him from psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee, a noted expert in child abuse and psychopathy who interviewed the eldest child, Mia, and Riordan at length.
Dr. Lee refers to Ambrose as the children’s violent abuser and claims there is ample evidence that he is a psychopath.
Chris Ambrose used the CT Family Court to take his three children from their happy home in 2020. When they fled his home in 2023, he used the court again to remove their mother from their lives and is now in the process of trying to force them back with him…
As of press time, FR is unable to determine the whereabouts of the three teenage children, but it is believed Ambrose is attempting to arrest them and force them to return to his home.
Here is Dr. Lee’s letter to Judge O’Neill.
Dr. Bandy Lee
Dear Judge O’Neil:
As one mandated reporter to another (judges are mandated reporters as well), I must warn against your sending Ms. Karen Riordan’s children to Mr. Christopher Ambrose. He is no ordinary violent man.
I am sending this exceptional letter to Your Honor because I cannot in good conscience (and by my professional ethics) stand by. I have heard recordings of Mr. Ambrose’s threatening the daughter with vaginal penetration as punishment for minor misbehavior. All three children have reliably reported sexual abuse, and no one has believed them, frankly, because the father is so threatening, he has intimidated all witnesses (he has already been threatening to me, which I had to report to local police). The 12 (now 13)-year-old recently reported anal penetration. Even if none of this occurred, their lives seem to have been living “hell” from his coercive control, verbal, emotional, and psychological abuse, and isolation from the mother who raised them (the father did not raise them) for over three years, which is abundantly and clearly recorded. His aggression is such that, immediately after the first child ran away, he found out their address from the Connecticut Address Confidentiality Program, hunted her down, and stalked her everywhere in his car, almost causing her to have an accident.
As expected from his coercion, these children exhibit objective signs of severe trauma: resorting to substances, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts while living with him, as well as going from normal weight to morbid obesity, as you have heard.
In the original family court proceeding, Mr. Ambrose’s hearsay was given far more weight than any actual evidence. A court-appointed “expert”, whose qualifications are questionable to me, made extremely faulty conclusions that contradicted at least three psychiatrists and one peer psychologist; in other words, no other professional agreed with her. Child protective services investigations were noted, but as a violence expert of twenty-five years’ experience, I can tell you that I have found them to be too frequently wrong to be solely relied upon. Individuals of the most dangerous personality disorders go undetected (even in criminal courts, they are 2.5 times more likely to receive reduced sentences than those of the same crime who are not so dangerous). I told this to one of the supervisors at the Department of Children and Families, as Mr. Ambrose is just such an individual, but they have not followed up, which shows that they are not only ineffective, they are also insincere: these are children who have reported being severely punished if they ever gave a true report of Mr. Ambrose’s abuse against them, and DCF should know that this threatening behavior is common among the most dangerous individuals.
Finally, this Court seems to have an erroneous view of me. When I appeared yesterday as a potential witness, I was not trying to provide a “witness testimony by ambush,” but had dropped everything at my own work to travel almost two hours to appear, because I was told on Friday that, unlike most courts in my experience, this Court was not accepting a phone or a Zoom testimony. I could have more than served as a fact or a rebuttal witness, but by the time you gave Ms. Riordan a chance, she was so intimidated and tearful from the rebuke she received for attempting to have me as an expert witness—“in violation of court order,” as Mr. Ambrose’s attorney repeatedly emphasized—that she did not think to call on me, even when she had the opportunity and I was there.
Do you see nothing wrong, may I ask respectfully, of three men shouting down a loving mother—with no trace of personality disorder, I might add—trying to protect her suffering children? One is Your Honor, a judge, another her violent abuser, and the third her abuser’s high-power attorney, whom he was able to hire only because he embezzled her inheritance and stole everything she had, and even her placement at a desk behind her ex-husband and powerful attorney, further away from Your Honor, was visually simply unfair. Please forgive me for saying so, but what I witnessed in the courtroom had clear elements of psychological abuse, exploiting the fact that this poor woman could not afford a lawyer. It came out during the proceeding that this violent man, who lost his law license and was fired multiple times apparently for plagiarism and fraud, did not stop even when he rendered his ex-wife homeless.
Ms. Riordan asked me for a full psychiatric report, which I could not provide on Saturday, but had it been clarified that what was needed was my full psychiatric file on this case, then I certainly could have provided it. These are the distinctions that are difficult for someone who is pro se without much legal experience.
I therefore beg you not to rule on this matter without sufficient evidence. Ms. Riordan is a woman of high intelligence, great empathy, and a history of excellent parenting, who is persevering to protect her children, but no one can function properly under these circumstances of intimidation and legal abuse. The evidence will be there for any who look for it. I had a chance to interview the daughter, and she is highly intelligent, reliable, and able to speak for herself at age 16. Children should be listened to, as they are able to articulate what they want and need better than we as adults sometimes assume.
Respectfully yours,
Bandy Lee, M.D., M.Div.
