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Her experience in family court has put Marie* in the hospital twice for mental health treatment.
But the special master, a judge that her parents were ordered to pay for, didn’t stop pushing for reunification between the teenager and her dad. Jennifer Joseph is part of a controversial system within family court in Minnesota that families are saying doesn’t work, is dangerous, and leaves them bankrupt.
“They don’t care what the children say,” remarked Marie, age 16. “They seem to think we do not understand our own emotions.
“It’s like, oh, you can’t talk to the courts at 14. I’m taking high school math in seventh grade, can write a college-level essay, and qualified for a state-level history competition. I think I can explain my own feelings.”
Marie, who has been chronically ill since she was in eighth grade, has had periods during which she couldn’t get out of bed. She has been diagnosed with POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome), an illness often triggered by trauma, and is qualified as disabled due to the severity and resulting mobility issues. She has a high IQ, and has been diagnosed with ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, anxiety and dysgraphia. Her Twice Exceptional status qualifies her for a school for gifted children.
SYSTEMIC TORTURE
Marie remembers realizing at around four or five that her dad wasn’t like other dads, and other kids experienced life differently. “These children weren’t walking on eggshells 24/7,” recalled Marie. “Other children actually like their fathers.”
She pushes back against the idea that her mom’s opinions about her dad shaped hers. “I never knew she didn’t like him until I was older,” Marie said.
Instead, her mom always told her, “Let’s just try to make the best of this.
At around seven, Marie asked if she could get a restraining order against her father. “You want to know where I learned that word? A Disney Channel show that made a joke about a stalker getting one.”
She learned the term ‘gaslighting’ when her father used it against her, telling her that she was gaslighting him.
“I learned the term narcissism because I was a reader,” Marie explained. “He claimed the things he was doing to me, I was doing to him."
When she stumbled upon the term, “intrafamilial childhood torture,“ she felt like she’d found a good definition for what she’s gone through. The days her dad refused to talk to her, feed her or keep her clean. How he restrained her and left bruises so frequently. How she was terrified all the time.
ICT, according to the The Child Maltreatment Policy Resource Center of the Institute for Human Services, is torture directed against children by their primary caregivers. (See sidebar.) It is characterized by isolation, threats, occasional indulgences, demonstrating omnipotence, degradation, and enforcing trivial demands.
“Torture is more systemic than child abuse,” Marie said.
Her dad wasn’t a hitter, and the abuse she went through is of a sort most don’t understand, Marie said. ”He’d push me to the breaking point, and then become comforting, and then push me to the breaking point and then become comforting.”
She believes that her dad liked her when she was little and was easy to control. She was a “cute little accessory to show off. As soon as I stopped being that, he hated me.”
Her mom, Emily*, recalls Marie returning after weekends with her dad completely exhausted, with terrible, bloody diaper rashes from not being changed.
REAL LOUD OR REAL QUIET
Her father was both extremely neglectful and extremely controlling, two things that a person wouldn’t necessarily think go together, Marie said. “How can you be so horrible at paying any attention to me to the point where I get frequent injuries, but also so controlling that you know everything I’m doing?”
When she was four, Marie was locked in her bedroom, and tried to climbed out of a window. She kicked through a glass pane in the front door while being restrained by her dad. On other occasions, she ran away and was found by neighbors down the street. Emily can’t remember when she was not concerned.
“I knew more than enough to be fearful for her safety, but I didn’t know a lot of this until she was older. I didn’t know it was as bad as it was,” Emily said.
Child protection was involved multiple times over the years, but cases didn’t progress.
The first time Marie called 911 from her dad’s house was when she was six years old.
“I learned the hard way - they don’t do anything,” Marie said. “The cops are horrible.”
She recalls that they didn’t show up for two hours and she had gone to bed. When they arrived, woke her up and asked if she was ok, she said she was fine. “The argument had ended and I didn’t want to trigger another one,” Marie explained.
She said after that she only called the police when another child was involved and she was worried about them.
When she was 10, Marie remembers showing a social worker a giant bruise on her leg that was caused when her dad pulled her out of a car. “Nothing happened,” Marie said. “I remember being super young and thinking he could beat me half to death – and they would still send me to him.”
She switched her approach. “You learn to be either real loud or real quiet and no in between,” Marie said. “The real quiet works if you don’t want to get yelled at. The real loud works if you need to get yelled at loud enough that someone helps you.”
One day in third grade, she refused to get in the car with her dad at school, and the police got involved to try to get her to go. She ran away.
“It became a fight to get her to school,” Emily recalled. “She was a tiny kid but she was a mess.” She hid in her locker, in the library and under playground equipment to avoid leaving with her dad.
On the transition days when Marie was going to her dad’s house after school, Emily began taking her out for donuts before school to entice her out of the house and to class.
Emily helped Marie create a list of fun things she could do with her dad to help her look forward to the time she spent over there. A trained educator with a PhD who has worked her entire career in schools,
Emily studied how to help children with anxiety and tried everything she came across that she thought might help Marie feel better about seeing her dad. Meanwhile she continued to fight in family court to limit Marie’s time there in the hope that shorter times might go better.
Emily went through the Bridging Parental Conflict class families in Hennepin County are ordered to do, and she worked with several well-known parenting coaches in the Twin Cities including Peggy Cottrell and Kristen Lynsie of Moxie as well as Deb Link. One of the parenting coaches told Emily that they were learning strategies from her.
When Marie was 10, she clung to her mom and refused to let go and leave with her dad. The nurses at the hospital stepped in to allow Marie to go home with her mother after ER visits.
Marie’s dad showed up at her mom’s house when Marie was home alone at age 13. He banged on the door for an hour. Marie remembers hiding in a laundry basket behind two locked doors.
Emily recalls her ex telling her that Marie was afraid of him because Emily told her to be. He accused Emily of being “crazy.” Court-affiliated professionals told Emily that it must be her anxiety that was affecting Marie, even though she did not have a generalized anxiety diagnosis. The items they wrote to the court cited a “history of mother’s non-compliance” and said that “father remains engaged and receives feedback.”
“It’s so illogical,” Emily said. “Non-compliance in my case meant that I didn’t readily agree to increased time when the current parenting time was going so poorly. It was abundantly clear to me that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. My ex was abusive of me and every sign was there that things were not going well for Marie.”
“If a kid is fighting tooth and nail to get away from someone, maybe we don’t force them to go,” Marie said. “Maybe that six-year-old has a reason to hit, kick, scream and bite to get away from that person. There is a difference between a child tantrum and an animalistic desperation.”
She started recording when her dad yelled at her for hours, thinking that if professionals heard the things he said and how he said it that it would change things for her. It didn’t. She found that family court professionals didn’t care that he yelled at her for hours. She was told that parents yell at children.
“A parent yelling at their child can look anywhere from them not doing their chores to downright torture. The courts can’t tell the difference,” Marie observed.
Instead, she said they told her that her dad cares about her after he cried during sessions. “I think the court system isn’t necessarily designed to believe the child,” Marie said. “There is no one to actually listen to the child. They like to act like they have all these people – a guardian ad litem, a parenting time evaluator. That evaluator saw my dad scream at me for an hour straight in a public place and did nothing.”
TRAMATIC 'FAMILY THERAPY'
Marie was ordered by special master Jennifer Joseph to do “family therapy” with Carol Hornbeck when she was in seventh grade. The goal of the sessions was reunification between Marie and her father, and sessions began there, versus stepping back to consider what the issues were. Her mom wasn’t allowed in the building during the sessions.
Hornbeck and Joseph share an office suite at 821 Raymond Ave. in St. Paul. Emily observed that Hornbeck and Joseph are very much enmeshed, and input from highly qualified therapists was completely dismissed as it contradicted their approach.
When Marie tells people that she ended up in in-patient treatment twice after sessions with Hornbeck, she says they’re shocked.
"They’re like a therapist shouldn’t be able to re-traumatize someone that bad. They should have more training than that,” Marie said.
After the sessions started, Marie began suffering severe panic attacks and couldn’t go to school. After five days at Prairie Care, she was doing well enough that they released her. Hornbeck immediately scheduled another reunification session. This time, Marie experienced stress-induced hallucinations and was readmitted to the hospital.
“What I never understood was why dad’s needs for parenting time superseded Marie’s needs,” Emily said.
“You put us through a system designed to break us,” observed Marie.
In January 2026, after Marie’s father requested that a previous special master order be reinstated, a judge did so, ordering that Marie return to the same family therapy that resulted in two hospital stays. This is despite the fact that as a 16-year-old, Marie is entitled under state law to refuse mental health treatment and select her own providers.
The order also required that Emily stop seeing her personal therapist, a reinstatement of an order from special master Jennifer Joseph who ordered it even though it was not within the scope of services she was contracted to perform.
Sue Abderholden spent her career leading NAMI Minnesota, a non-profit dedicated to improving the lives of children and adults with mental illnesses, and is recently retired. “I think the courts should have more information or training on trauma, mental illnesses, and therapeutic approaches,” she observed.
She questions therapists being selected without regard to insurance coverage and who is in network.
Abderholden pointed out how important it is for children and adults to connect with their therapist in order to make progress. “If the young person isn’t connecting with the therapist, you should find someone else,” she said.
TWO WOMEN, SAME EXPERIENCE WITH JENNIFER JOSEPH
Emily is 15 years into the family court system and has spent over $400,000.
“No process should drag out for 15 years and keep going. That’s completely dysfunctional,” said Emily.
She explained that judges avoid making rulings and instead shuffle families to court professionals that include therapists, parenting consultants, guardians ad litem, evaluators, and special masters.
“It’s a huge business scheme,” Emily said. “You’re required to work with these people and they can charge you whatever they want. The industry has grown and grown. Hennepin County pays for family court judges to make decisions for families. It is not ethical to continue to push the decision to others.” She says that the system is broken.
Joseph never met with Marie herself. She did talk to Marie’s longtime personal therapist.
While Joseph was the special master on their case, Marie gained 60 pounds in six months while on a high dose of medication for hallucinations. She required inpatient mental health care multiple times. Joseph had access to Marie’s medical records, and Emily doesn’t understand why her orders didn’t seem to factor in the medical issues Marie was experiencing.
“Now I have a kid with such severe trauma that it has contributed to significant physical and mental health issues,” Emily said. “It was Jennifer Joseph’s doing. The moment I questioned the bills, her orders immediately became selectively uninformed and directly harmful to Marie.”
NO REGULATION FOR SPECIAL MASTERS
Although the special master system in Minnesota has been touted as a way to reduce the amount of time families are in court, families like Emily’s and Lexi’s* often find themselves juggling more special master hearings than if they were going to court.
“My case never ends,” Lexi said She isn’t the one asking for modifications. Her ex partner is. They have had over 64 hearings and 80 court orders over the last 13 years. (See previous articles about Lexi’s family here and here and here.)
Lexi has in forma pauperis (IFP) status with the court in recognition of her low wages and need for state assistance programs, including state health insurance. Her attorney argued before the court that it was against state law to order a special master in this case given her poverty status.
Special masters charge $400-500 an hour – that’s on top of attorney’s fees. Their meetings aren’t public – despite sometimes putting a client under oath and allowing opposing counsel to interrogate them without advance notification – and there are no court transcriptions made.
“If I need to pay for a judge then the county needs to pay for it. They shouldn’t be able to order something that requires private pay. The special masters should not be able to force you to pay them or punish you for it,” Emily said.
There is little oversight or training for Minnesota special masters. There are no certifications or licensees necessary to begin working as a special master, no governing body, no entity managing complaints, and no code of ethics.
The professionals involved in creating these systems, doing the training, referring out to each other, and charging high fees (which typically are paid out-of-pocket) aren’t talking to those outside the family court system about their work.
Former Ramsey County Judge James Street has not returned emails or phone calls over the last year requesting comments on the special master system he helped create in Minnesota while serving as a referee. He retired, and then starting working as a special master with Tuft, Lach, Jerabek & O’Connell, PLLC in Plymouth.
Joseph has not responded to multiple requests for comment on the special master system.
Information for a January 2026 special master training that Street taught with retired referee Mary Madden at Tuft, Lach, Jerabek & O’Connell pointed out that special masters are not governed by the Alternative Dispute Resolution Ethics Rules, although they recommend that registrants have completed the 40-hour family mediation training and have 10 years of professional family law experience.
They are not required to have training in child sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, coercive control, implicit and explicit bias, trauma, long and short-term impacts of domestic violence and abuse on children, or victim and perpetrator behaviors. They are not mandated reporters of child maltreatment.
Many of the people working as special masters in Minnesota also work as parenting consultants (PCs). These court-ordered “qualified neutrals” have the authority to change custody and parenting time, make medical and school decisions, and more – and are paid out-of-pocket. (Learn more about PC work in the article titled, “Caught between” that highlighted a case involving Susan Lach of Tuft, Lach, Jerabek & O’Connell.)
“How many more generations of kids will get their lives taken away from them?” asked Marie. “When are we going to stop this?”
*Editor’s note: In writing the articles in this series, I have reviewed dozens of court documents, and reports by professionals. In recognition of the sensitive nature of these articles, we have opted to refer to people by their first names or aliases, and have not used details that can be used to identify the families.
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