Op-ed | How to Become a Parent by Motion in Colorado: A Legal Comedy of Errors

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

Colorado Family Court or Kafka Fanfiction? You Decide.

When a Colorado parent wakes up to find their name—and an eviction notice—dissected in a courtroom they weren’t even invited to, you might think, surely, this is a clerical error. But no. This is Colorado family court, where evidentiary rules come second to what we now refer to as “email-based psychic evaluations.”

Let’s rewind.

In this case, the evaluator, Dr. Edward Budd, was appointed to evaluate two people. Not three. Not four. Not your neighbor’s cousin’s girlfriend. Two. And yet, somewhere between reviewing PNGs [Portable Network Graphics] and pouring his morning coffee, Dr. Budd decided he had enough screenshots and vibes to offer a formal diagnosis on someone he had never met, evaluated, or legally had authority to assess.  Even more charming? There was no JDF 1338 disclosure. That’s the Colorado version of a mandatory “Hey, I’m actually supposed to be doing this” form. But Dr. Budd skipped that—and the court just let it slide. You know, like when you forget your ID at the airport and TSA says, “Eh, you look trustworthy.”

Let’s pause for a moment and reflect. Colorado law is clear: C.R.S. § 14-10-123 governs joinder. A third party cannot just be yanked into a custody case because someone forwards an email or vaguely remembers a phone call from a private number.

But why bother with legal prerequisites when you have Defendant Iskra Ivanova, whose evidence folder might as well have been labeled “Shaky Memories & Late Night Theories.” A schoolteacher by trade, Ivanova apparently moonlights as a forensic audiologist—asserting she could recognize someone’s voice from years ago, over a call never answered, from a private number, possibly during a Mercury retrograde.

And it doesn’t stop there. Defendant Clara Wilbrandt, an attorney with enough years in practice to know better, skipped every necessary procedural step for joining a third party—because, well, sometimes the law is just a suggestion, right? She didn’t file a subpoena. This lawyer manages to secure a party without the birthday girl attending. She simply declared, through pleadings and proposals, that the Colorado parent should be treated as a litigant without any of the rights of one.

You might say, “Well, maybe they meant well.” Sure. And maybe a GPS means well when it sends you into a lake.

The parent at the center of this debacle wasn’t just sidelined. They were restricted from their own home—the same home where a medically fragile child resided, depending on them for care. That child, who lives with a confirmed neurodevelopmental disability, was caught in a legal ping-pong match between gossip-as-evidence and evaluators filing reports with zero compliance with statutory requirements.

Let’s revisit that statute one more time: C.R.S. § 14-10-127 requires PREs [Parental Responsibility Evaluators] to receive a court order, file disclosures, and refrain from evaluating non-parties without process. That didn’t happen here. And despite this, the report—filed with no notice, no service, and no testing—was weaponized to restrict housing to a child with special needs.

If this isn’t judicial overreach, I don’t know what is. It’s Kafkaesque with a side of mock trial theater. It’s like if Judge Judy handed out diagnoses instead of verdicts—“You seem off. No housing. Next!”

The result? A Colorado parent, not even partied to the case, suddenly needed to undergo a psychological evaluation or risk losing a place to live with a child who struggles. This wasn’t about safety. It wasn’t about child welfare. It was about control. Plain and simple.

And just when you think, maybe someone will fix this, you find out that the magistrate involved is now a top-rated private attorney.

God bless her.

Because in Colorado, nothing says “judicial excellence” like being able to remove parents from homes without a hearing and then pivot to the private sector with a five-star Avvo rating. 

How far must a parent go to ask for empathy—to simply plead for the right to feel safe in their own home? That’s the question hanging in the air as this case, after years of chaos and unchecked overreach in Colorado’s family court system, finally lands before someone not steeped in its dysfunction. Enter U.S. Magistrate Timothy P. O’Hara.

And God bless him. He didn’t rise through the ranks of a courthouse where “due process” is whispered like an inconvenience and neutrality is handed out like candy at a settlement conference. No—Magistrate O’Hara may be the first truly impartial figure to look at this procedural dumpster fire and say, plainly: “This isn’t how courts are supposed to work.”

And maybe—just maybe—he’ll be the one to say: Enough.

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