Pirates of the Caribbean actor Greg Ellis wrote a book about corruption in the family courts called The Respondent: Exposing the Cartel of Family Law, detailing not only his experience but the experiences of people all over the country who say they’ve been railroaded by a money-making criminal organization dressed up as justice. Ellis sat down with me on “The Fringe” to discuss his harrowing experience.

Ellis told PJ Media:

It’s a complex web of intrigue, the family courts… It’s the Wild West of family law. It’s a $60 billion-a-year annual American divorce machine and industry that is racking up billable hours and sacrificing children and parents, and really just looking at estates of families and seeing how much money they can make.

This system is well-known by everyone who has been ground through it, but when will the legislatures, which have the power to check judges and clean up this mess, do their jobs? Instead of taking responsibility for the family courts, the state legislatures have abandoned their power to “oversight boards” that are tasked with hearing complaints from litigants. These boards rarely discipline anyone. Reuters just did an incredible investigation into judicial corruption and found that thousands of judges accused of misconduct remain on the bench.

Judges have made racist statements, lied to state officials and forced defendants to languish in jail without a lawyer – and then returned to the bench, sometimes with little more than a rebuke from the state agencies overseeing their conduct.

Recent media reports have documented failures in judicial oversight in South Carolina, Louisiana and Illinois. Reuters went further.

In the first comprehensive accounting of judicial misconduct nationally, Reuters identified and reviewed 1,509 cases from the last dozen years – 2008 through 2019 – in which judges resigned, retired or were publicly disciplined following accusations of misconduct. In addition, reporters identified another 3,613 cases from 2008 through 2018 in which states disciplined wayward judges but kept hidden from the public key details of their offenses – including the identities of the judges themselves.