On the face of it, Joshua Gonze is a successful man.
A wealthy, fit and handsome
47-year-old executive at Thornburg Investment Management, Gonze has
shared his financial expertise with CNBC, Bloomberg and USA Today. A
vocal Libertarian, he campaigned for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign
and organized “tea party” protests. A prominent member of Temple Beth
Shalom, Gonze has described himself as “a happily married father in
Santa Fe.”
Those words may have been true
two years ago when they were published. But there is another side to
this powerful man’s life, one that casts a troubling light on the views
he has espoused.
Publicly, Gonze supports a
controversial cause known as “fathers’ rights.” Less known is that for
years, Gonze has been able to suppress and counter domestic abuse
claims made by two former spouses. His latest ex-wife claims that on
Aug. 18, Gonze threatened her with a 10-inch kitchen knife and
“waterboarded” their 2-year-old daughter during a dispute over custody.
On Dec. 1, in an open courtroom in Santa Fe, Gonze withdrew his own
petition, in which he claimed his wife had lied about the incident, and
that she was the “abusive” one prone to “hysterical rage.”
Gonze also has been the subject
of numerous 911 calls. And a former court officer claims Gonze stalked
her after a series of rulings didn’t go his way.
Gonze appears to have avoided the
usual consequences of such actions. Although his second wife worked in
a local newsroom, the multiple allegations against Gonze never so much
as made its police blotter. In fact, Gonze may have influenced the
system in his favor by spearheading a law that limits wealthy men’s
child support liability.
Gonze was helped in that effort
by Albuquerque lawyer David Standridge, who stood beside him in a court
at the beginning of the month. Standridge is a theological men’s
advocate: He has written in praise of the “warrior life,” defined as
“violent men” who rule their households.
Indeed, the men’s movement that
Gonze and Standridge belong to is about much more than fathers’ rights.
And like many of its members, the movement has a dark side.
The “fathers’ rights” narrative goes something like this:
Family courts, cowed by decades of feminist activism, are biased
against anyone with a Y chromosome. A few brave men, undaunted by the
forces of feminist oppression, are fighting for their rights as
fathers—and for the rights of all male-kind.
Courtesy Coordinated Community Response Council
The Santa Fe Coordinated Community Response Council created this ad for placement on city buses.
David River, a divorce mediator and co-facilitator of the Santa Fe
Coordinated Community Response Council, an umbrella group for efforts
against domestic violence, says the view has some merit. There are men
with legitimate grievances, he says—particularly those who wind up in
the system following a false accusation, or are punished
inappropriately based on outdated laws that fail to consider the
context of any given case.
“But then,” River says, the fathers’ rights groups “tend to
minimize everything, and fail to see how many women get killed in
domestic violence situations. They refuse to give [domestic violence]
any legitimacy.”
Most child custody cases, like most lawsuits, settle out of court.
Those that don’t can get nasty. Soon-to-be-published research shows
that approximately 90 percent of contested cases involve domestic
violence or abuse. In these cases, the child becomes a tool through
which the abuser, usually the father, continues to exert control over
his ex.
How many women get killed? According to the latest Department of
Justice figures, 1,640 women were killed by “intimate partners”
nationwide in 2007. That’s compared to 700 men. In Santa Fe, 2009
brought a terrible
wave of violence against women, including the murder of a pregnant 17-year-old by her angry boyfriend, police say.
Within fathers’ rights circles, such stories are little more than
spin by a “party line” feminist press. That charge was made against SFR
by one local man, Kenneth Kast, who founded a shelter for men like
himself, who were made temporarily homeless and jobless by restraining
orders.
To date, Kast’s shelter has served no clients, he says. Starting it was “more of a political statement,” he tells SFR.
“The party line is the woman can say and do anything. If the man
reacts physically, he needs to be punished. And she does not need to
understand that she played a role in that,” Kast, a retired licensed
social worker, says.
Like many in the movement, Kast has been the subject of a
restraining order; Kast says his ex-wife’s attorney admitted on appeal
that he had not been violent.
While it’s true that every story has at least two sides, for DV deniers, the woman’s side is always a lie.
“In [batterers’] minds, they’re falsely accused. So they take
every restraining order that’s ever dropped and say, ‘Look!’” Ben
Atherton-Zeman, a victims’ advocate and playwright in Massachusetts,
says. “The reality is, having been a court advocate, many judges won’t
grant restraining orders when they need to.”
Another movement tactic: countering allegations with their own.
It’s a tactic Joshua Gonze used in court against both his former wives.
In 2002, during their divorce and custody battle, Gonze’s first
wife—then an aspiring law student—claimed he had stalked her; she told
the court that when her neighbors called the police on Gonze after
finding him lurking, he claimed to be “just out jogging (in a big
storm). Then he ran off.”
Gonze filed counterpetitions. She was the stalker. She was the
liar. “There is no violence in me,” Gonze wrote. “I have the ability to
verbally express normal, healthy anger as occurs in virtually all
marriages.”
In 2006, Gonze, by then remarried and legally barred from
approaching his first wife, requested a protection order against his
first wife’s boyfriend. The two men had an argument while exchanging
custody of Gonze’s then-5-year-old son at Tesuque Village Market. Gonze
claimed the other man physically intimidated him, calling him “crazy”
and “sick.”
Gonze’s legal disputes with his second wife played out similarly.
In a 2009 filing he later withdrew and apologized for, Gonze called his
second wife “abusive and frightening” and a “disengaged mother.” He
claimed she had “made fake 911 DV calls on two previous occasions” and
would “try to neutralize me by filing her own [order of protection].”
These push-back tactics may not have been limited to the women Gonze married.
On July 14, 2008, Margaret Kegel, then the
domestic relations hearing officer for the 1st Judicial District Court,
filed a report with the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office alleging
stalking and harassment by Gonze.
In her statement to police, Kegel said Gonze resented his
treatment by the courts dating to his 2002 custody fight; she said
Gonze belonged to fathers’ rights groups “with a history of using
threats and intimidation.”
Twice in 2008, Kegel told police, Gonze “stared at her with a look
of hatred and scared her son” at a day camp their children both
attended. She claims he drove by her slowly as she ran errands. Most
significantly, she claimed, Gonze attacked her via an anonymous
advertisement in The Santa Fe New Mexican.
The May 15, 2007 ad specifically mentioned Kegel under the
headline: “Mistreated In Court? Speak Up Now!” It directed complaints
about Kegel’s performance to her supervisor, Family Court Judge Raymond
Ortiz.
Judge Ortiz personally asked the New Mexican about the 2007 ad,
Kegel says, because it could have been construed as having been placed
by the court. Ortiz did not return SFR’s messages.
Meanwhile, in 2006 and 2007, the New Mexican ran approximately two
dozen letters criticizing the 1st District family court, along with the
legal system’s treatment of domestic violence and child support cases.
Around that time, Gonze noted in court filings, Kegel’s court granted
his first wife a protection order against him. (The order may have been
expunged, as district court does not have the file.)
SFR checked the letters and guest columns from the New Mexican
from this time period regarding family and domestic violence court.
There is strong evidence some of the authors are not real people.
Former Domestic Relations Hearing Officer Margaret
Kegel believes Joshua Gonze was behind this ad in The Santa Fe New
Mexican as part of a covert campaign against her. The ad was echoed by
letters, some of which seem to have pseudonymous authors.
One May 6, 2007 letter almost precisely echoes the anti-Kegel ad.
The letter is signed “David Huntington,” Santa Fe. Huntington seems to
be a non-person. The Nexis database—a trove of public and commercial
data used by debt collectors, private investigators, law firms and
newspapers—returns no results for that name within 50 miles of Santa
Fe. Google also turns up nothing. There is no such name in a 2006 Santa
Fe phone book. No such person ever entered the New Mexico court system.
Gonze’s second ex, Leticia López, tells SFR she suspects Gonze
used a number of false names to attack his opponents on the opinion
pages of the New Mexican.
While López—who over the years worked at the New Mexican as an
assistant news editor and copy editor, among other positions—never
personally witnessed her ex writing pseudonymous letters, she tells SFR
he implied having done so several times. “I asked him about [the
letters] and said, ‘You have to stop; I work at the New Mexican,’ she
tells SFR. Gonze promised to stop, she says.
But the letters continued; the questionable ones weren’t
retracted, even though several sources tell SFR some New Mexican
editors had been made aware that some of them might have been fishy.
SFR’s call to Managing Editor Rob Dean was returned by Public Editor Camille Flores, who oversees letters to the editor.
“During the time these things were being submitted and appeared in
the paper, it was not brought to my attention [that some names might be
false],” Flores tells SFR. “I never felt there was a campaign going
on…I can say we received many letters with much more specific
information that we chose not to run.”
Kegel says the letters prompted her District Court supervisors to
evaluate her performance. The evaluation, she says, came out fine. But
“over the long run,” Kegel says, the chorus of jeers contributed to her
forced resignation this year.
“There was a lingering perception by judges and court staff that
there was this group of people who were very unhappy with my work, when
in fact it was probably one person who took the time to try to cause a
problem because he was unhappy with my decision,” Kegel, who is highly
regarded by local victims’ advocates, tells SFR.
Kegel also suspects Gonze wrote some of the letters:
“They weren’t signed by anyone who ever appeared before me, and
most of them were people who don’t exist at all. The few that were
left, it would be hard to tell, because they were names a lot of people
might’ve had,” she says.
One such letter, titled “Curb Kegel,” appeared April 8, 2007 under
the name “Ron Burman,” Santa Fe. No person by that name turns up in
searches of public and court records, including in the domestic
violence court. This is the clincher, because “Burman” claimed personal
experience with Kegel’s “reign of terror” in the 1st Judicial District.
“I saw Kegel ignore proof of abuse by my wife. When I strongly
complained about the abuse, Kegel found me guilty of ‘domestic
violence’ merely for complaining,” Burman wrote.
On at least two occasions, SFR may also have been duped, despite
requiring would-be correspondents to include an address and phone
number with their letters. “Your
cover story on domestic violence is wrong where it states ‘the vast majority of violent abusers are men,’” one letter began.
The letter, which cited several DV-denier websites mentioned in
the New Mexican letters, was signed “Florence Vigil,” for whom there
also are no public records.
While SFR cannot verify Kegel or López’ suspicion that Gonze was
involved with the bogus letters, Gonze made it known fathers’ rights
was an issue to which he was dedicated.
Not long after Gonze publicly inveighed against the plight of wealthy divorced dads, the law was changed in his favor.
In 2007, Gonze and David Standridge formed a nonprofit lobbying
group, Families Against Confiscatory Child Support, to oppose
“excessive awards.” The same year, Gonze signed a letter to the New
Mexican attacking the state’s “insane child support guidelines.” Months
prior, he and Standridge had published an op-ed in that paper calling
on state lawmakers to fix child support “inequities.” The piece argued
that wealthy men were treated unfairly by a system that set no limit to
child support for those earning more than $8,300 a month—forcing
fathers to pay more than the cost of child rearing. “The excess money
could then be used by the mother on luxuries for herself,” Gonze and
Standridge wrote.
In 2008, state Rep. Al Park, D-Bernalillo, sponsored and passed a
bill that did just as Gonze and Standridge requested: It placed, for
the first time, a ceiling on child support payments. (Park did not
return messages asking why he sponsored the change.)
Under the new guidelines, the lowest-earning parents (those whose
combined income totals $800 a month) must pay 12.5 percent to support
one child. The highest earners pay only 9.9 percent on $30,000 a month
in income.
In the 2006 petition Gonze filed against his first wife’s
boyfriend, he gave his side of a dispute regarding a portion of his
$2,054 monthly child support payment. “As the evidence shows,” he
wrote, “I am not at all angry about paying child support.”
But by his second wife’s account, Gonze continued to hold a grudge.
“He collects news articles from wire services that report on
specific cases of men on the verge of divorce who hurt or killed their
children or soon-to-be-exes because they were furious at the prospect
of paying child support,” she wrote in her
Aug. 19 protection order petition. “[H]e believes that the men in
the news stories were justified…He has told me many times, ‘That’s what
happens when you divorce a man and demand too much child support.’”
Before joining Thornburg Investment Management,
Joshua Gonze rated oil and gas bonds for Standard & Poor’s in New
York, where he was born.
Being part of a movement, Gonze has his supporters. The loudest
may be Glenn Sacks, a radio talker turned web publisher and executive
director of Fathers & Families, who in 2001 published an article
called, “Why I Didn’t Marry a Jewish Woman.”
Why, indeed?
“The reason I lost interest in many Jewish women was the generally
contemptuous, belittling, and bigoted attitude that so many of them
have towards men,” Sacks explains.
On Sacks’ site, the same attitudes are attributed toward women of
all creeds. In 2007, in the midst of Joshua Gonze’s alleged campaign to
have Margaret Kegel fired, Sacks called Gonze “one of my most
articulate readers.”
Gonze’s short published letter to Sacks prompted a reader to argue
for “mandatory Paternal custody…such as what prevailed in most of
Christendom until the twentieth century, (when so much else went
wrong!!).”
Indeed, there is a throwback religious current running through the movement.
It is exemplified by Gonze’s attorney, David Standridge.
Standridge explains his philosophy of “warrior life” in a magazine
published by New Mexico’s Body of Christ in Albuquerque. “Many men
today are abdicating their responsibility to be the Godly leader of
their families,” Standridge begins. “As a result, many women have taken
over the role as the Godly leader of their homes, churches and society
as a whole.”
The attorney goes on to praise the virtues of violent men.
“Warrior Life is not some touchy feely click [sic], club or
organization,” Standridge writes. “Warrior Life is best defined by
violent men who take the kingdom of God by force…It is about men who
are tired of the perversion, rudeness and slothfulness of [sic] as
dictated by today’s culture.”
Standridge did not return a message.
Kathryn Joyce, author of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement,
says such rhetoric fits right in with male-dominated Evangelical sects
she has studied. This movement’s leaders “make suggestions that women
should probably limit how much they speak in mixed company. Most of
them emphasize…that wives need to learn how not to push their husband’s
buttons,” Joyce tells SFR.
“They won’t come out and defend domestic violence—they’ll say it’s a sin—but they’ll also put equal blame on the wife.”
The fathers’ rights movement doesn’t come out and defend domestic
violence either. But its members push back at anyone who calls
attention to violence against women and has the statistics to back it
up.
Ben Atherton-Zeman, the 43-year-old Massachusetts advocate, joined
the feminist movement after learning of a college girlfriend’s history
with “a controlling ex.” He later began running into the “abusers’
lobby” at conferences and while lobbying at various statehouses.
Ever since, he has compiled a list of pejoratives the DV deniers
have thrown his way, including: hypocrite, liar, bigot, eunuch-type
male, man-whore, lemming and “Atherton-Semen.”
Who are these DV deniers?
“I wouldn’t say they are all wife-beaters, but I would guess
they’re at least 75 percent of the membership,” Molly Dragiewicz, a
Canadian criminologist who studies violence, gender and anti-feminist
groups, says. She bases the figure on a Rutgers University professor’s
book-length study of the fathers’ rights movement, in which
three-quarters of the members interviewed reported being “falsely
accused” of violence.
“The other 25 percent,” Dragiewicz says, “are making money off of the wife-beaters or are sympathetic to them.”
Atherton-Zeman once believed the best way to combat misogynist
groups was to ignore them. For a while, it seemed to work.
“Unfortunately, they’ve gotten better,” he says. “Now they have slick
bullet points that sound quite reasonable to your average legislator.”
Indeed, DV deniers share some rhetoric with well-intentioned
efforts to encourage non-violent masculinity. They can be hard to tell
apart.
Santa Fe “life coach” Ray Lopez runs small groups
for men in troubled relationships, in the hopes of introducing
“alternatives to violence.” Lopez breaks the ice with his own story,
starting with his “dysfunctional alcoholic family, blah blah blah.”
Lopez’ anger reached its peak approximately 18 years ago when he
slapped his 3-year-old son. His wife gave him an ultimatum, and he
began taking therapy seriously.
He’s familiar with abusers’ excuses, like she slapped me before I
punched her. “It’s blatantly not true that women are as violent as
men,” Lopez says, referring to a common refrain in the DV denier
movement. However—this is where lines blur, and Lopez jokes about
getting “into trouble”—he says “women can manipulate much better than
men.”
Though not always politically correct, Lopez’ frank approach has
likely improved a few lives. He acknowledges that some relationships
are unsalvageable because of both parties—a notion that raises a taboo
subject.
Some court reformers believe family violence won’t improve without
abandoning two cultural assumptions: that marriages should be
preserved, and that children benefit from contact with both biological
parents.
“One reason the fathers’ rights groups are so effective is they’re
tapping into these mainstream ideas that divorce is bad,” Dragiewicz
says.
Yet despite claims by fathers’ groups, courts are anything but a tool for female vengeance.
“If you look at patterns, [courts rule] very much in favor of
fathers and against mothers,” lawyer Barry Goldstein, co-editor of the
forthcoming research compendium “Domestic Violence, Abuse, and Child
Custody,” tells SFR. (Goldstein provided the earlier statistic about
domestic abuse in disputed custody cases.)
Family court codes and procedures do not reflect advances in the social sciences, he says.
“Thirty years ago, the focus was on physical abuse. What we
understand now is that domestic violence is a tactic men use to
maintain control, to continue to make the major decisions in the
relationship. Most of the time it’s not physical,” Goldstein says. “It
can be a raised eyebrow. It can be economic.”
Most people would agree the legal system has overreached if a
raised eyebrow constitutes a crime. But that is not Goldstein’s
argument. Rather, he says, courts misunderstand the role of violence
and, just as importantly, the implied threat of violence in abusive
relationships. As a result, police, prosecutors and judges don’t know
how to distinguish a one-time mistake from an escalating situation.
“In most [dangerous] cases, there’s something physical, but he
doesn’t need to keep doing it, because she knows what he’s capable of.
The courts don’t see that,” Goldstein says.
“Fathers’ rights” advocate Glenn Sacks is a fan of
Joshua Gonze, and vice versa. Sacks is the listed contact for an
anti-child-support site founded by Gonze.
Santa Fe may have a bigger problem. The courts never see what the police don’t report.
When Leticia López called 911 on Aug. 18, two Santa Fe Police
Department officers came to her home. It was the fourth time SFPD had
responded to an incident involving her and Gonze. The Aug. 18 report,
by Officer David Webb Jr., describes a “domestic disturbance” in which
“not battery, nor assault took place.”
Webb’s description doesn’t jibe with the petition López filed the
next day, in which she described being threatened with a knife and
witnessing potential abuse of a child.
“They didn’t believe anything I said,” López tells SFR. She claims
Gonze ran down the block from their home to meet and speak with police
before they interviewed her—by which point, they’d been convinced her
story was unreliable.
López calls the officers’ conduct “extremely inappropriate,” for
instance: “They said I shouldn’t be fighting over 50-50 custody,” she
says. (It wasn’t Webb who criticized her parenting decisions, she says,
but another officer whose identity remains unknown.)
Officer Webb did not return a message.
A few months later, inside a courtroom on a cold December morning,
López sits only feet away from Gonze, but never meets his eye.
He has agreed to a four-year restraining order, which bars him
from coming within 50 yards of her in public, or from buying a firearm.
Gonze also agreed to an apology.
“I recognize that my domestic violence petition harmed Leticia and
[our daughter],” Gonze says, reading the prepared statement. “I
acknowledge Leticia is a good mother and loves [our daughter].”
The hearing officer asks if the statement was coerced.
Gonze hesitates. “No,” he says finally.
“Are you sure?” she asks.
“Yes,” Gonze says. “I owe Leticia an apology for everything that happened.”
López tells SFR she hopes Gonze will change his ways. “I know this
marriage has been a nightmare,” she says. “Josh has begun the process
of self-examination. He’s begun to apologize and make amends. He has a
lot of work to do.”
Approached by SFR after the hearing, Gonze says he settled the
dispute for the sake of his daughter. He declines to elaborate but
says, “Since you didn’t identify yourself as a reporter, I don’t think
you should say anything in the paper about my case.”
SFR’s reporter did identify himself. Gonze did not return
subsequent email and phone messages seeking comment on the events
described in this article. SFR
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