I don’t have all the facts about this. None of us do at this point. And what facts we have may not even be fully “factual,” but we’ve seen this enough before to have good idea of why this tragedy occurred and how it could have been prevented.
A Utah father spent six years trying to see his four children. He had a court order. He retained attorneys. He filed enforcement motions. In the meantime, he made do with fifteen-minute FaceTime calls, supervised by the parent who was blocking his access. He was days away from a court-ordered visit when his children died in a New York apartment.
Whatever else happened in that case, this much is not unusual: a parent (far too often a father (not always the father, sure, but there’s no point in sugarcoating it) with a valid court order, and a system that could not or would not enforce it.
That failure has a name. When a parent systematically cuts children off from the other parent, over months and years, in deliberate defiance of court orders, that is not a co-parenting communication problem. It is not a scheduling dispute. It is emotional and psychological abuse of the children. Courts have been reluctant to call it that, to punish it, and to remedy it. Shame on them.
The Harm Is Already Done Before the Court Acts
The conventional judicial response to parental access denial follows a familiar pattern: order makeup parent-time, recommend co-parenting counseling (regardless of whether there is any evidence showing counseling would do any good), warn of consequences, issue another warning, order more makeup time/counseling, maybe throw in a fine. Repeat.
The argument for staying in this pattern, rather than escalating to real consequences? It usually sounds like this: removing children from the custodial parent’s home would “traumatize” them. The disruption itself causes harm. The cure is worse than the disease.
That argument deserves honest engagement. Uprooting children is not painless. But here is what that argument gets badly wrong: the trauma is not the court’s doing. The alienating parent created the conditions (the dependency, the isolation, the severed relationship) that now make enforcement feel cruel. Allowing that manufactured dependency to immunize a parent from consequences means letting the abusers define the terms of their own accountability.
A doctor who must reset a badly healed fracture causes pain. That pain is real but necessary to treat the injury and promote healing and normal functioning. Leaving the injury untreated “to reduce harm” is moronic. Courts that decline to act decisively because enforcement is “disruptive” are leaving the fracture untreated and perversely calling it mercy.
What Message the Courts Are Actually Conveying
Every time a court issues another makeup-time order instead of modifying custody, every time it accepts another assurance to do better, every time it treats a third enforcement motion like the first one, it sends a message to both parents and to the children: this conduct has no real cost to the perpetrator.
A parent who spends years methodically destroying a child’s relationship with the other parent is harming that child. The research on parental alienation is not ambiguous (I’ve provided a few citations at the end of this post). The psychological damage—anxiety, depression, identity disruption, distorted attachment patterns carried into adulthood—is well documented. The alienating parent is not protecting the children from loss. The alienating parent is the source of it.
Courts that treat this as a civil compliance problem are misidentifying the injury. And by misidentifying it, they keep prescribing remedies that don’t fit.
Utah Courts Have the Authority. The Question Is Will.
The Utah Code (§ 81-9-204) and Utah caselaw require courts to weigh the best interest of the child. A parent who systematically destroys the child’s relationship with the other parent is not serving that interest. The authority to modify custody when a parent’s conduct warrants it already exists. No new law(s) is/are required.
By the time a noncustodial parent has filed a third or fourth enforcement motion over the same pattern of conduct, the court has more than enough information to act decisively. And when it doesn’t, it is no wonder when Brady Harmon’s situation results. What is often missing is not evidence. It is the institutional will to impose consequences proportionate to the harm.
Sustained, willful, documented denial of court-ordered parent-time is not a close case. It is abuse. Courts that decline to treat it as such, out of seeming solicitude for the disruption that real consequences would cause, are not protecting children. They are protecting the parent who is hurting them. That needs to change.
Utah Family Law, LC | divorceutah.com | 801-466-9277
Miralles, Godoy & Hidalgo (2023), Current Psychology (Springer)
A systematic review — the gold standard format. Documents anxiety, depression, psychopathology risk, insecure attachment, lower self-esteem, higher substance use, and repetition of alienation behaviors in adulthood. Direct URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02537-2
Verhaar et al. (2022), published on PubMed Central (NIH)
Qualitative study of adults alienated in childhood. Documents shame, guilt, grief, trust issues, abandonment, helplessness, and what researchers call a “cascade of losses.” Strong because it’s on PubMed — hard to dismiss as advocacy. URL: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9026878/
Harman et al. (2024), Journal of Divorce & Remarriage (Taylor & Francis)
Directly argues — against published objectors — that parental alienation constitutes family violence and child abuse, grounded in 100+ peer-reviewed studies. URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01926187.2024.2396279
Note:
The American Psychological Association (APA) has not formally recognized parental alienation as a clinical syndrome, and it’s absent from the DSM-5-TR. Opposing counsel will use this. The counter (and it’s a good one) is that the behaviors are documented regardless of what we call the syndrome, and the harm those behaviors cause is well-established in peer-reviewed literature even among researchers who dispute the diagnostic label. The Harman 2024 piece addresses this objection head-on and is worth reading for that reason alone.