Bias and collusion have marred child custody cases in Arapahoe County, including one in which a judge terminated a mother’s right to parent her three daughters and jailed her for more than 10 months for violating a gag order barring her from publicly protesting, a federal lawsuit contends.

The lawsuit asks a federal judge to appoint for a full year a neutral monitor to oversee dependency and child removal hearings in Arapahoe County to rectify alleged prejudice and discredited practices.

And it seeks to bar the use of a controversial theory in Colorado custody cases that mothers say has been widely used to target them and put them on the defense when they raise what they say are valid allegations of child abuse.

The lawsuit argues former Arapahoe County District Court Judge Natalie Chase — later forced off the bench for

alleged violations in other actions — steered custody decisions in private meetings with the county’s child-protective staffers.

A federal judge dismissed an earlier version of the lawsuit in January. The mother’s lawyer is seeking permission from the federal judge to revise the original claim and refile it, pointing to new information provided by a former child-protective worker with the county.

Anders Nelson, a spokesperson for Arapahoe County, denied any wrongdoing by the county’s child-protective staff and predicted “the attempt to resurrect these meritless claims will be dismissed again.”

Chase, in an interview, disputed the allegations in the lawsuit and said she was improperly forced to resign from the bench and accept a censure by the Colorado Judicial Discipline Commission for allegedly using a racial slur before court staff and making insensitive comments.

“I stand by what I did 100% of the time,” she said. “I know that I also followed all ethical rules completely.”

According to the federal lawsuit, Chase in her rulings further violated the First Amendment constitutional right to free speech of the mother she jailed, which resulted in the mother not having a chance to show up in court to defend herself from the father’s successful $1.76 million defamation lawsuit against the mother.

Court documents filed in the case contend the judge unconstitutionally restricted the mother to only speaking about the case with her doctor, therapist and lawyer and barred her from continuing to publicly air the daughters’ allegations that their father was sexually abusing them.

Chase said the jailing was necessary to prevent the mother from continuing to use the internet to make false accusations, which the father has steadfastly denied.

The mother in her lawsuit continues to stand by her accusations that the father sexually abused the children. In another twist, the mother’s lawsuit includes a recently filed tell-all affidavit of support for the mother from a former child-protective caseworker, who herself was fired, charged criminally and convicted.

• The county caseworker claimed in the affidavit that she saw the judge coordinating cases privately — against court rules — with caseworkers and said the mother was subjected to extreme bias from the caseworker handling her case.

The lawsuit, if successful, potentially could bring an end in Colorado custody cases to the use of the theory of parental alienation, which figured prominently in the case in which the judge terminated the mother’s parental rights in 2020 and jailed her.

Supporters of the theory say some parents deliberately turn their children against their other parents, especially in contentious custody situations. Adherents of the theory argue drastic measures, including separation of children from parents engaged in alienating behaviors, are necessary to protect children from psychological damage.

But the theory increasingly has come under fire, with detractors arguing it has been used in a discriminatory fashion to cover up valid issues of child abuse.

The Human Rights Council of the United Nations in April issued a report calling parental alienation a “discredited and unscientific pseudo-concept” that is “used in family court proceedings by abusers as a tool to continue their abuse.”

Last year, Colorado lawmakers moved to curb the use of parental alienation. The new law they passed barred courts from restricting the custody of a parent who is competent, protective and not abusive solely to improve a relationship with the other parent. It prohibits reunification treatment that is predicated on cutting off the relationship between a child and a protective parent with whom the child has a bond.

A memorandum filed in connection with the lawsuit by Suzanne Taheri, the lawyer representing the mother, states parental alienation still is widely used in Colorado child custody cases. Her filing claims the legal theory is “retributive and discriminatory” and is “unconstitutional and inequitable and should end.”

“Too often, parental alienation results in the complete termination of parental rights,” Taheri states in her memorandum. “The parent loses all contact with the children who currently love and count on them and the children are thrown into the lap of a parent who they feel estranged from and, in many cases, has abused them physically or sexually. Colorado’s application of parental alienation is very severe and results in permanent termination.”

Back in 2020, two years before Colorado lawmakers revised state laws, the mother who was jailed ended up being scrutinized for alleged parental alienation, according to court documents filed in the lawsuit.

Chase, the former judge who initially jailed the mother, has gone on to work as a lawyer on custody and dependency and neglect cases following her resignation from the bench. She defended the use of parental alienation theory in custody disputes, saying she regularly sees parents turning children against other fit parents.

“There’s a lot of parental alienation that I see in the everyday process, whether when I was on the bench or now in my work as a lawyer, where one parent is trying to take advantage of another parent,” Chase said, adding that she believes the legislature’s overhaul of state law that barred restrictions on parenting time for parental alienation was “terrible.”

The federal lawsuit challenging Chase’s actions in the custody case was filed on behalf of a mother who is identified in the filing only by the initials K.A. The lawsuit names as defendants Arapahoe County’s Department of Human Services; Michelle Barnes, executive director of Colorado Department of Human Services and Michelle Dossey, manager of Arapahoe County’s child-protection services.

In 2017, a year before the woman’s divorce became final, the Arapahoe County Department of Human Services filed a dependency and neglect petition against the father, alleging he was sexually abusing the two younger children. A jury sided with the father, who denied the allegations.

The judge on that case appointed a parental evaluator, Julie Van Heyningen, a licensed psychologist, to make custody recommendations. Van Heyningen never interviewed the children about the sexual abuse allegations and instead issued a Rorschach inkblot test, which prompted her to conclude the mother misinterpreted her daughter’s outcries, according to the federal lawsuit. Van Heyningen recommended 5050 custody along with reintegration therapy.

Two years later, the county human services department filed a second petition, this time against the mother, alleging she had coached the oldest daughter into falsely reporting sexual abuse by the father. A jury found that all three were dependent and neglected by K.A., and the mother was ordered to comply with a treatment plan to give her insight into how her “behaviors alienated and emotionally harmed her children.”

The mother then began protesting the court’s order giving the father continued custody rights. In April 2020, she posted on the website Change.org a video of her interviewing the youngest daughter, making an outcry of alleged sexual abuse. She also posted a video of the oldest daughter’s journal entries purporting

to disclose sexual abuse by the father.

In May 2020, the Arapahoe County Department of Human Services obtained a judicial order that ordered the mother to take down her postings on the website and barred her from making additional postings.

K.A. refused to take down her postings and continued posting her allegations on other social media websites as well as her own website.

In August 2020, Chase, then still a judge, at the request of the county’s child-protective workers, terminated K.A.’s parental rights, and sealed the court case. The mother at the time was hospitalized and not present the day that Chase terminated her parental rights.

K.A. received four contempt-of-court findings for violating Chase’s gag order and was sentenced to 23 months in jail. She was incarcerated at the Arapahoe County jail from Aug. 31, 2020 until July 2, 2021, when she was released after posting a cash appeal bond of $20,000.

While the mother was jailed, her ex-husband filed a defamation lawsuit against her. A default judgment was entered against K.A. when she and her lawyer at the time didn’t show up for the Nov. 7, 2020, trial on the defamation claim during her incarceration. A stay-at-home mother during the marriage, she was now ordered to pay $1.76 million to her ex-husband for the defamation claim.

K.A. appealed her jailing on contempt-of-court citations and the defamation ruling, but the Colorado Court of Appeals upheld both the contempt and the $1.76 million defamation judgment. The state’s court of appeals held that although the judge’s gag order might have been unconstitutional, the mother lost her right to challenge the contempt citations that landed her in jail, because she failed to make a timely appeal.

“A party must obey a court order — even an unconstitutional order — unless and until that order is stayed, set aside or reversed on appeal,” the threejudge panel of the state appeals court found. “With rare exceptions, a party cannot challenge a court order by violating it.”

U.S. District Court Judge Nina Y, Wang dismissed an earlier version of the mother’s lawsuit challenging the termination of her parental rights because Wang found past court precedents have held federal courts cannot “reopen, reissue, correct or modify” an order in a domestic relations case. Wang also found K.A.’s original lawsuit, filed last June, exceeded the two-year statute of limitations, and that county departments have immunity protections from liability.

On Feb. 2, an affidavit of support for the mother was filed in the case from former county child-protective worker Robin Niceta. Now, the lawyer who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the mother is arguing the affidavit should prompt Wang to reconsider her dismissal of the lawsuit. The affidavit blasts the handling of K.A.’s case and alleges widespread problems in child-protective practices in Arapahoe County.

In November, an Arapahoe County jury convicted Niceta, of a felony and misdemeanor for filing a false child sexual abuse complaint against Aurora Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky in a failed attempt to smear Jurinsky.

Taheri, the lawyer who filed the federal lawsuit on K.A.’s behalf, points to text messages obtained from Niceta’s phone and says those texts back up some of the allegations in Niceta’s affidavit. And she adds that a corroborating witness who also filed an affidavit further supports Niceta’s claims.

Among the allegations in Niceta’s affidavit: County child-protective caseworkers used private cellphones to evade the state’s records laws, and county workers regularly falsified official records to justify the direction a case had taken.

Niceta faces additional felony charges for allegedly filing false medical records showing she had brain cancer in a failed ruse to avoid prosecution.

Court filings says Niceta contacted Taheri by email to provide information about the lawsuit filed on behalf of K.A.

Niceta provided a sworn affidavit on Nov. 27 and turned over her cellphone to Taheri to obtain text messages supporting some of her contentions, those filings state.

Niceta’s former girlfriend, Kristin Nichols, also provided an affidavit, filed with the court on Friday, stating that Niceta told her when they were together “of meetings in chambers with judges ahead of hearings to decide how cases would be decided.”

“Robin was dirty, but you can’t take down a bad organization without someone who was on the inside,” Taheri said in an interview.