I was recently reminded of how personal an attack can be when a false allegation is made against you. The truly terrifying thing is that there is an air of being guilty until you prove you are innocent. While we grow up with the ideal that a person is innocent until proven guilty, family court is a civil court and has a completely different agenda from its criminal court cousin.

The 2 biggest problems you are faced with when being accused of a false allegation are:

1. The element of surprise – not being able to plan for it.
2. The problem of being unable to conclusively disprove a negative

So now that you understand what you are up against, let’s take a look at the 2 biggest tools you have to work with:

1. The lack of an historical track record of the allegation.
2. The motivation causing the false allegation.

The first things you must do when faced with a false allegation are to deny it to the authorities (be it CPS or another agency) and inform them that you are in a high conflict custody battle, and, then put together all the documentation that you can find that shows there is no concern by the other parent of any kind of problem of this nature.

You must realize that false allegations are the other parents way of letting you know you are doing far better at custody than they can deal with. They are typically controlling in nature and are attempting to gain control again and stuff all of that anger and pain back into the background where it belongs. After all, if you have control over your own life and part of your child's life, how can they possibly control what you do, where you go, or what you say? This is why historical documentation is so important.

You see a controlling person cannot help but leave a trail of everything they have controlled. Emails about minor things like food choices, bath times, clothes, money, the list goes on. But with all of that controlling behavior, there is no mention of the horrible allegation against you.

If this is such a horrible problem, why was it not mentioned before the food choices, bath times, or money. Simple, because until it appeared that they would lose control of you there was no immediate need to trigger this emergency response in them. This is a tactic of last resort. Now move beyond reacting personally and emotionally to acting with an intentional purpose. Show the history and that there is no mention of a problem until desperation set in for them.