Personal Struggle — Part 8
I want to thank everyone who’s read my blog and reached out with support. I also want to thank everyone who shared their personal horror stories with me. It is very important for all of us to know that we are not alone. It’s life changing for us to be able to support each other. I’m sharing my story because I want you to know that it is possible to walk away, it is possible to heal, and it is possible to move on. You just have find support and you have to speak up. Never be silent.
Before I continue my personal story, I want to say a few things.
I know that my ex is a very well known and highly respected member of the Russian speaking community in San Francisco. I know that he has surrounded himself with a lot of good people, a lot of great colleagues, and a lot of loyal friends. He’s super social and extroverted. He knows how to make a lasting impression and to a lot of people, especially the ones whose relationships with him are limited to social interactions, he will come off as the most amazing person who has ever walked the face of the earth. I know that these people don’t believe me. It’s okay. I’m not expecting them to. Who cares what they think? I started writing this personal blog for myself. I’m doing this for myself.
It’s almost absurd how similar these malignant narcissists are. They all seem to follow exactly the same patterns. I was talking earlier today with someone, this amazing and strong woman, who had a very similar story with her ex. I was astonished to hear how she went through exactly the same experiences that I went through down to the littlest details. It was also crazy to realize how her ex (similarly to mine) had surrounded himself with numerous friends who wouldn’t even hear her side of the story. At most, their response was: “Oh, what did you have to do for him to be so mad at you?”
How could people be so blind, right? The problem is not with people being blind. The problem is with our society. The problem is with how our society doesn’t accept that if someone is very successful (i.e. professionally accomplished, financially flourishing, widely known and popular, etc.) they can be crazy and sadistic at the same time. How can he be such an asshole when he’s such a great professional or he’s so much fun to hang out with? Our society is unable to put these two together. Most of us still can’t comprehend and accept how big of a shit Steve Jobs was and how badly he destroyed his first wife and daughter Lisa (he denied her paternity for a really long time) because he’s such a legend and inspiration for so many people. This person that I talked to today told me how she met Chrisann Brennan years ago and what she had to say about her experience with Jobs. She wrote a whole book about it and people still don’t believe her. Our society continues to favor successful men.
And now back to my story…
My son and I photographed in December of 2006. He’s 4 in this picture.
Part 8:
The first couple of years after I filed for divorce were very dark for me. My first lawyer was a crook who was only trying to prolong the litigation, create more conflict, and thus extract more money from the situation. This is unfortunately a very common practice among the family lawyers, no offense to anyone.
After I burned through about $70K on litigation, I was under a lot of pressure from my family to be done with it and I was also burnt out. One day, my uncle flew in from NY to accompany me to court. There, he pressured me into stipulating with my ex on disastrous terms. I could never fully undo the damage that was done on that day. Looking back at it, I can’t believe that my parents actually sent that relative who himself went through multiple stupid divorces to “help out.” It was a big victory for my ex.
Among many other terrible things that I stipulated to on that day (more on that later), I agreed to appoint a special master whose “recommendations” regarding my child became binding. That bitch was supposed to be impartial, however she would completely disregard everything I had to say and sided with my ex on every single issue.
Since my son was considered autistic, he was forced into every kind of therapy and treatments that were out there in the mid 2000s. Every time we’d meet with her, my ex would bring up new “research.” “I just discovered this new study that says that all autistic kids have a leaky gut syndrome and should be put on these medications and this diet,” and she would sign off on it making it a binding order.
I would then find myself having to sneak in dozens of pills and powders into my son’s food and then watch him suffer through horrible bloating, abdominal pain, and diarrhea. One of the recommendations was also to share nannies so that my son had “constant” people in his life when going between households. If I was failing to administer prescribed medications or if I was canceling any of his appointments, the nannies would report me. During those years, I felt absolutely imprisoned. I felt that I had no control over my son’s and my own life.
Have you ever heard of ABA therapy? ABA stands for Applied Behavior Analysis. It’s also known as behavioral engineering. There are many fancy ways in which ABA is described and promoted to the unsuspecting parents. It is basically the worst thing that you can do to your child. I can tell you all about it because at some point my son was getting more than 40 hours of ABA therapy a week. The kids are trained and treated like dogs. Like Pavlov’s dog. Mostly for food. My son was working for Goldfish crackers.
Luckily for parents today, a lot more information has been published about it in recent years. Autistic children often report horror stories from ABA therapy when they gain access to communication tools. A 2020 study examined perspectives of autistic adults that received ABA as children and found that the overwhelming majority reported that “behaviorist methods create painful lived experiences.” In another study, respondents of all ages who were exposed to ABA were 86% more likely to meet the PTSD criteria than respondents who were not exposed to ABA.
To this day, there are still some foods that my son will not touch because they were used in ABA therapy 18 years ago. When I unilaterally pulled him out of it, I was on the verge of losing custody. I came very close to losing custody on numerous occasions because I had to go against court orders to protect my child. I had to litigate and I had to fight the medical board, the school board, and the social service agencies.
Every time, I was the crazy one, the one that was refusing to treat her sick son. The more I tried to argue that my son didn’t need any treatments and interventions, the more my ex proclaimed me to be a complete lunatic that was going against the establishment. I was a 20 something without a college degree and he was a Harvard graduate, a successful orthodontist, etc. The first thing he would always tell to all the therapists and professionals was that he went to Harvard med school and as soon as they heard it, they only listened to him. It didn’t even matter what I said.
He cultivated a whole fan base around himself. He made people feel sorry for him and manipulated them into doing dangerous things to help him. They all believed him to be a suffering single father who needed to be saved from a crazy ex wife who was preventing him from healing his sick son. A number of these people lost their jobs because of what he made them do.
I was only able to accomplish what I did for 2 reasons. Firstly, I had money to pay for all the experts and lawyers. My parents supported me and I also sold the house, which I got to keep after the divorce. Much more importantly though, I met someone who became the first person ever to give me support and to believe in what I was fighting for.
What this person did for me and my son is absolutely priceless and I will never be able to repay her for all her kindness. She prefers to stay anonymous and for the sake of this narrative I will call her Lisa. I’m also very grateful to Lisa’s husband and kids for putting up with all of my drama over the years. They welcomed me in and made me feel loved and accepted. Both my son and I consider them to be our family.
Lisa is an extraordinary person and her story is also extraordinary.
She was the first and maybe the only person from my ex’s circle to be disenchanted with my ex and see through his facade of an exemplary father and into the depths of his inhumane and murderous soul. She used to be his friend. His very close friend. She was the one who introduced him to his second wife, which he will now refuse to acknowledge. According to the official version he met his new wife on an airplane. Very romantic and believable indeed.
When Lisa first met my ex, like everyone else she was smitten. She never even thought to question the validity of what he was telling her. She just assumed all of it to be true. Because why would he lie about it? What was the point of that? She met him right after we separated. He was heartbroken. He told her how much he suffered during his marriage, what a shit person I was, how much he loved his son and wanted to help him, and how he was spending all of his free time searching for a cure to cure his son’s autism. She believed his every word.
My ex would spend a lot of time with Lisa. He used to bring my son to her house all the time. Lisa is a licensed acupuncturist, a Chinese medicine doctor, and an intuitive healer who is great with kids. She used to be a school teacher.
The first time when Lisa started sensing some red flags about my ex was when he was at her house with my son and Lisa’s rabbi friend came over with his youngest daughter who was about the same age as my son. My son really liked that girl and he started to communicate with her. This was an amazing moment to witness because it was the first time when he decided to come out of his shell and try to impress a girl. I wish I was there to see it. Lisa tells me that she will never forget that moment. It felt like a miracle to her. It brought tears to her eyes and she could see in the way my son was interacting with that little girl that he was not autistic.
She turned to my ex expecting him to be elated with joy. To her utter shock and disappointment, my ex looked grim. She asked him: “Didn’t you see? Do you see what your son is doing?” And my ex answered that it was not a big deal, that he didn’t really see anything, and that it didn’t matter because his son was still behind in his development because he didn’t have enough vocabulary. That’s when she thought that there was something off in what my ex was saying and in how he was reacting in this situation.
After that incident, she started noticing more and more inadequacies in how my ex was reacting to my son’s progress and achievements. He always tried to downplay it and would constantly sabotage any progress. After a while, she realized that my ex had absolutely no desire to “cure” my son, he only wanted to “treat” him all the time.
At the same time, my ex’s treatments got progressively more and more invasive and sadistic. One of the most shocking ones, were the rectal suppositories that my ex would administer to my son at night when the child would fall asleep. I want you to pause here for a minute to fully comprehend what I’m telling you here. What was happening to my son for an extended period in time. Can you imagine falling asleep and then being woken up in the middle of the night by someone sticking up a suppository up your little baby butt? My son was systematically abused by my ex and this abuse was left unpunished.
One has to be a real perv to do something like this to their kid. That perv was really enjoying it too and he even justified himself by presenting it as a medical treatment and heroic effort on his part to help the child beat autism. It actually worked on most people. My ex was so good twisting reality that people could not comprehend that he was sexually molesting a toddler.
Lisa was the only person who realized that my ex had issues. Serious issues. That’s when I met her.
To be continued ….