Judge Morgenstern needs to be held accountable for gross misconduct, fraud and willful infliction of emotional harm on multiple children!

As the powerful head of Brooklyn's "Integrated Domestic Violence" court, Morgenstern has become New York City’s most poisonous  jurist. She's a blight on tens of thousands of families. She abhors the concept of shared parenting. A zealous advocate for maximizing Title IV-D funding, she always assigns a winner and loser. She is terrified of public scrutiny, employing a cohort of armed officers to patrol the gallery. On February 10, 2020, she had the FCLU’s executive director arrested on a false charge of recording proceedings. A decision she made on that same day is a good example of why she has good reason to fear scrutiny. The father of two children had asked Morgenstern to enforce an order she had made a year before to clear up mold in the mother’s apartment, which was endangering the children’s health. When the mother ignored the order, Morgenstern refused to enforce, and instead ordered the father to pay the mother child support. The father responded that he had just made a $4000 payment, and again asked her to protect the children. Morgenstern replied: “Write her a check, and she will have the mold inspection. Adjourned.” Another order which she signed on December 13, 2017, is another good example of her arrogant disregard for the Law. It stated that “the father shall pay $2,000 in child support arrears by Jan 2, 2018. If not, visits are suspended.”  This order was an attempt to extort a parent of money, using the threat of ending his parenting time. And Morgenstern carried through on the threat: the children have hardly seen their father since. Morgenstern’s support/visitation linkage is illegal. Under New York law, visitation may not be denied solely for reasons unrelated to the best interest and welfare of the child. As such, the failure of the non-custodial parent to make payments of support is an insufficient basis for a court to deny parenting time.  Stewart v. Soda, 226 A.D.2d 1102, 1102 (4th Dept. 1996); Resignato v. Resignato, 213 A.D. 2d 616, 617 (2d Dept. 1995); Farhi v. Farhi, 64 A.D.2d 840, 841 (4th Dept. 1982); Engrassia v. Di Lullo, 89 A.D.2d 957, 958 (2d Dept. 1982).  But Morgenstern, working in collusion with the corrupt Children's Law Center (CLC) – a publicly funded firm that she appoints as ‘Attorney for the Child’ in her cases -- believes she can operate above the law. The effect of these orders is to alienate children from one parent, usually the father. When that alienated parent requests remedial action, including reunification therapy, Morgenstern retorts, “don’t you understand that, if you force your child to be with you, you’ll ruin your relationship with him?”
Known as ‘Mickey’ to her family-court friends, Morgenstern is a former law clerk, who came to the bench in 1996 and now receives $262,000 in salary and benefits from the NY taxpayer. She lives in a massive house on Long Island with her second husband. Believing her powers to be limitless, she has taken on a huge case-load with the criminal court, divorce, and family courts. 

One attorney states: “Morgenstern was hand-picked by Sheldon Silver’s cronies to eviscerate Brooklyn’s families for federal money from the Title IV-D program... She is a loyal mutt for a corrupt master.”  She takes the bench at a leisurely 11am – two hours after the 9am start time that Governor Cuomo demanded as a condition for agreeing to the judiciary’s request for pay hikes. She speeds through cases, removing children from homes, jailing fathers and imposing impossible conditions as part of her orders of protection.

Morgenstern’s conduct in court is shocking. She interrupts and derides attorneys, scolding one public defender to “grow a pair” when he asked to be relieved from the case. Morgenstern, an Orthodox Jew, has issued orders barring parents from taking their children to Catholic Mass, in blatant breach of their constitutional rights. She has also completely “suspended” the parenting time of parents who do not follow her order to go to “parenting classes” with “experts” she has a relationship with. She gives pro se litigants very short thrift – and discriminates viciously against fathers, regularly issuing orders for them to pay all of the mother’s counsel fees. She took away custody from one father, and went into a furious tirade, after that father had called the opposing attorney “a femi-Nazi lowlife.” Her catch-phrases are: “Once in IDV, always in IDV”, “Enough is enough!”, “What’s the issue?”, and “You’re gonna pay her lawyer’s fees.” Cases drag on years before they come to trial. Those trials are a travesty: defense experts are precluded; the targeted parent’s motions get conveniently lost; court favorites are included; targeted parents are given the incorrect dates for court hearings or ordered to submit their health records and be interrogated by her hand-picked ‘investigators’. Final decisions after trial actually take place can take more than six months. Meantime, the children have no contact with one of their parents – almost always their father – and end up deeply disturbed. In the matter of Snyder v Walker, for example, she made a custody order on default, when a hearing on custody was actually being conducted already in Judge Alan Beckoff’s courtroom.

She has her favored court experts, especially forensic examiner Dr Amal Madani, to whom she gives an estimated $400,000 a year in court-ordered appointments. Madani’s reports are slapdash, and her notes are so illegible that one attorney asked if she had submitted them in Arabic. One parent commented: “Madani is amazingly sloppy. The easiest facts, like rent amounts, number of events etc, are already wrong in her reports - so you can imagine how precise the rest of the report. For instance, she claimed I said that I have alcohol twice a week in bars which I never said. I did say I watch a hockey or a baseball game once or twice a month, drinking 2-3 beers during a 3+ hours long game. She then immediately extrapolated that I am abusing alcohol and so on - then restated it in court, only to admit, in our cross-exam, she has no training, no experience in alcohol or any substance abuse field, that being 6'2" and over 230 lbs it's not much, that I had never had been arrested, cited or any way connected to alcohol - in fact I never had a ticket in my life for anything... absolute lowlife, she literally created a single "fact" out of nothing and that was used for a damning "finding." Morgenstern allows Madani to charge parents $1,500 for a single court appearance.
                Morgenstern uses her armed court officers like a personal Gestapo. In February 2020, she assigned Officer Shaun O’Malley (badge 8172) to invent allegations that the FCLU’s director Sebastian Doggart was recording proceedings, and had O’Malley convene nine other brutish officers – including Sergeant Cooney and Captain John Parrotto -- to remove him from the courtroom, handcuff him and illegally coerce him into showing them the contents of his cellphone. Until May 2018, Morgenstern had a brutish court attorney, Brian Kieran, a character straight out of The Sopranos, who intimidated litigants by pressing his face right into theirs, so that his anger and halitosis caused nightmares for weeks to come. Following complaints to the Chief Judge and Commission on Judicial Conduct by the FCLU, Kieran was replaced by a more pompous operator, Matthew Schwartz, who came from Judge Sunshine’s chambers. As an example of how incestuous NY family court is, Schwartz is married to Stephanie Paige Schneider, whose mother, Harriet R Weinberger, is the Director of the Office of Attorneys for Children. A further instance of cronyism, Schwartz used his influence to persuade the Brooklyn Eagle to publish this puff-piece on Morgenstern for “leading the way in helping domestic violence victims”. To ensure the hagiography had maximum impact, the piece does not include a disclaimer that Schwartz was already working for Morgenstern at the time of publication.   

Judge Morgenstern’s actions bring into disrepute the court both inside the courthouse and outside.  She is regularly featured in media reports about fraud, waste, and abuse in the NY family court system, including this exposé in the NY Post. Morgenstern is also the main villain in the book A little lynched: A Judge-ordered kidnapping by Aleah Holland RN. In the book, Holland details the ex parte hearings held by Morgenstern, and charts how Morgenstern alienated her children from her after she refused to accede to her requests to make false allegations of abuse against the child’s father.  Judge Morgenstern and her court attorneys have conducted unethical, ex parte communications about the case with Children’s Law Center attorneys like Patty Hurtado, Laura Deewald, Helen Singh, Hilarie Chacker, Genevieve Tahang-Behan, Lauren McSwain and Cynthia Lee. These ex parte communications are a violation of the judicial canon to which Morgenstern is bound, specifically Section 100.3(B)(6) A judge shall not initiate, permit, or consider ex parte communications, or consider other communications made to the judge outside the presence of the parties or their lawyers concerning a pending or impending proceeding.”): So cozy is Morgenstern’s relationship to the CLC that she even kept a mailbox openly on view in her courtroom for her correspondence with the CLC. (She took this away after the FCLU published a story on this in April 2020). Morgenstern allows the CLC to testify in cases before her, in violation of the attorney-witness rule. She also has an improper relationship with Safe Horizon, an organization to which she sends many families for “supervised visitation”. In return, Safe Horizon gives her regular “honors” such as the “Annual Award by the New York State Chapter of the Supervised Visitation Network.” Morgenstern’s inappropriate relationships with the CLC and Safe Horizon place her in violation of judicial canon, Section 100.2 (A): “A judge shall act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.” She also has a track record of changing (aka falsifying) court records. According to one parent, Cynthia Walker, she responded to a complaint to the CJC that she had failed to rule on a motion in a timely manner by filing an “update” on December 24, 2018 that she had made the ruling on August 2, 2018, when records showed that no hearing had been held on that day. Morgenstern’s conduct is a fraud upon the Kings County Supreme Court, the Unified Court System, the children whom the CLC and the court purport to represent, and every New York taxpayer. She was elected to the Queens County Integrated Domestic Violence Court in 2003 and to the Supreme Court of Kings County in 2006. She was ‘re-elected’ on November 5, 2019, after both the Democratic and Republican party machines nominated her, and no other candidate stood against her. Even with this institutional backing, she only secured a risible 15% of the vote.