An Open Letter to The Free Press on “A Wife’s Revenge from Beyond the Grave”
WeSpoke responds to The Free Press article in an Open Letter
July 8, 2024
WeSpoke first heard that The Free Press was working on an article about Catherine Kassenoff’s tragic case in April 2024. Grieving her loss, the WeSpoke community was eager to speak to any national media organization willing to cover the abuses in the U.S. family court system, which has been largely ignored by mainstream media.
The divorce industry is a $50 billion dollar a year business that remains largely unregulated and unscrutinized by the public, with proceedings and processes that are closed to public view, ostensibly ‘for the protection of children and families’ but which far too often seem to act as a cover for delay, dysfunction and profiteering off the backs of vulnerable families. WeSpoke has seen the abuses in the system play out repeatedly, and has spent years and countless hours attending to its victims and pleading with legislators, government agencies, civil rights organizations and the mainstream media to address what is happening to families who naively step into our family and matrimonial courts seeking help, many who seek to escape troubled and abusive marriages, only to find themselves trapped in litigation for years, and decimated, both financially and emotionally.
The article’s author, journalist Francesca Block, approached us (and others who knew Catherine personally) under the pretense of writing about "Catherine Kassenoff's divorce and the battles she faced in the New York Court System." WeSpoke agreed to be interviewed not only for the article, but also for The Free Press’ new podcast in production on these issues. After all, Catherine helped to found WeSpoke in 2022, and many members knew Catherine well and followed her case contemporaneously. We witnessed her heartbreak on a daily basis, as the children she raised were taken from her. We knew Catherine as a remarkably intelligent lawyer who practiced at the highest levels of her profession as a former federal prosecutor and special counsel to two New York State governors. We knew her as a mother who fought valiantly to regain custody of her daughters and to reform a system that she found appalling as an attorney.
Yet The Free Press has sought to re-write Catherine's career and life, presenting her as an unwell and unfit mother, and vindictive spouse, and they largely ignore the issues with the matrimonial system that helped compound her family’s pain. Whilst we recognize there are multiple sides to every contentious divorce story, nothing prepared us for this one-sided piece presenting Catherine’s estranged husband Allan as the ‘true’ victim of abuse and an allegedly baseless social media driven smear campaign.
“A Wife’s Revenge from Beyond the Grave” was released on a Saturday morning in July with the initial tagline “the juiciest read you could have at the beach this weekend.” We are disappointed that The Free Press considered the preventable and premature death of a mother and lawyer, as well as three young girls’ lives irrevocably upheaved, as a “juicy” and “wild” read. They have since revised their tag line at the time of this printing.
The Free Press chose to publish their article the day after a $150 million dollar defamation lawsuit filed by Allan against a blogger (Kassenoff v. Harvey) was settled on July 5, 2024 on confidential terms. The next day, the defendant in that lawsuit, Robbie Harvey, posted a public retraction of his earlier criticism of Allan to his 2 million followers, a remarkably broad mea culpa that presents like a coerced hostage video as he reads from a script, and then goes on to suggest Catherine was the primary perpetrator. Notably, all comments were turned off on Harvey’s posts on TikTok and Instagram.
Although Francesca Block’s theme points to the dangers of one-sided social media vigilantism, ironically her article omits key facts and contains limited details about the role Allan may have shared in driving the intense and expensive conflict with Catherine, and of course Catherine is no longer here to defend herself. Although we can’t know the ins and outs of their combative relationship, we do know that Catherine’s ex, a seasoned lawyer himself, reportedly spent over $3 million dollars on various family court professional fees as their divorce dragged on for over four years, and that Allan and Catherine were in fact still married when she passed away. We also know that the well-paid family court professionals in the Kassenoff case helped the court determine that Catherine, who everyone concedes was the former primary caretaker of the family’s children with no criminal or substance abuse in her past, should no longer play a role in her young children’s lives, and that any future interactions with her own children would be at the court’s behest. The author does not pause to consider how confusing, devastating, painful and humiliating this outcome might have been for Catherine, as it would be for almost any parent. The author also skims past any curiosity over why such eye-popping fees were required to arrive on a custody determination in one single family’s lives, breezily implying the expensive acrimony was simply due to Catherine’s ‘vindictiveness.’
Perhaps most disappointingly, Block brushes aside the outsized role that ‘neutral’ psychological evaluators and their confidential reports played in this case, as they have been in many other acrimonious custody cases in U.S. courts. In 2021, after a 2-year study, NY’s Blue Ribbon Commission suggested a moratorium on the use of these evaluations in New York courts, finding that they were rife with bias and with no proven benefit to children or families. We had hoped this author might highlight the disturbing use of these questionable evaluations in our courts, including letting The Free Press readers know that a select group of mental health professionals are routinely assigned by judges in contested custody cases and paid shocking sums of money by litigants (reports for a single family may garner $50,000 or more in fees, and a family has almost no choice but to pay), and that they make potentially life changing determinations for children based on largely unknown, vague and oblique standards that have been challenged as lacking in scientific validity and based on ‘hearsay upon hearsay.’ We know that some of these court appointed evaluators have come to tragically flawed conclusions, where a child is murdered during a contested custody case, like Kyra Franchetti was. Anecdotally, we have repeatedly found that women’s parenting imperfections are focused on and pathologized in these evaluation reports, while men’s faults are more often whitewashed and forgiven.
Coincidently, Mary Richardson Kennedy, first wife of presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr., died by suicide in 2012 during her divorce in the same Westchester County courts, where custody was switched from Mary to the father. The Kassenoffs had the same court-appointed forensic evaluator as the Kennedys, who determined in both cases that the father should have full custody, even though the mothers were the children’s primary attachment figure.
Despite the concerns about psychological reports used in custody cases like the Kassenoffs, the author quickly pivots to unblinking support of the forensic psychologists’ findings in Catherine’s case, assuring the reader that the confidential reports that determined that the mother of three should not be in her children’s lives were ‘neutral’ and ‘thorough.’
Block omits evidence and facts showing that what occurred in the Kassenoff divorce is far from uncommon; in fact, it is emblematic of a systemic problem, not just about one couple’s “brutal divorce.” What happened to Catherine by the courts during her divorce is happening every day to mothers and children around the country. Family Court is riddled with incompetence and failure to protect, all under the cloak of “in the best interest of the children.” Many women don’t make it out alive (see Mothers Lost.) For the District Attorneys, State Attorney General and the FBI to turn a blind eye to all the complaints and calls for investigations into the operations of these courts is unconscionable. We even called for New York legislators to step in and exert their power to investigate the courts by launching a Moreland Commission, when we testified in the Public State Senate Public Hearing in 2023.
The Free Press claims that their journalist spent 8 months researching this piece. To us, this represents a deeply disappointing missed opportunity. The press is very much needed to assist the public in understanding a basic function of its courts—divorce—and just how poorly that function is performed and how unaccountable the courts are for their abysmal service. The press could do a tremendous service to the public by sunlighting these issues, how our current legal system incites and incentivizes conflict, often rewarding it, and its devastating effect on families.
Our community knew Catherine, and her goal was not revenge as this reporter claims. Her goal was above all - not to lose the children whom she loved deeply. At her death, Catherine stated her hope for the future: to spur investigation and reform of the family courts across the country. Let’s not fail her in death, as she was failed in life.
In closing, we want to speak to all of the women who may be trapped in the family courts who are reading this: The Free Press article does not accurately express the situation in the courts for women. We hear you, we see you. Don’t let their article dishearten you or provoke any sense of hopelessness. Women are gathering, women are speaking, and we will overturn this beast of a system together.
The WeSpoke Community
Click here for a PDF printable version of our Open Letter
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