By Susan Bassi and Fred Johnson
Every Saturday morning, a father drives to a bustling shopping mall to visit with his 4-year-old son. A stranger sits nearby. The father is under surveillance. For three hours, the father reads, plays games, and answers his son’s questions. He tries to be a parent.
Then, when three hours have passed, he says goodbye to his son, writes a check, and hands it to the stranger.
He pays nearly $1,000 a week for these visits with his son. He has no criminal record. No history of domestic violence. No findings of abuse. Yet he is watched as if he were a danger to his own child.
For more than a year, the doting dad has seen his only child for just a few hours each week, a fraction of the boy’s life — under court orders issued by a family court judge.
After missing his son’s final days of summer, first day of kindergarten, winter holidays and family traditions for over six months, the father retained an attorney and took legal action.
His goal: to remove the judge from the case and undo her orders. He sought to restore the custody arrangement he had before the child’s mother hired a politically connected attorney with a long-standing relationship with the judge.
In early February 2025, controversial Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Cindy Hendrickson became the target of the father’s judicial disqualification motion. A motion that alleged Judge Hendrickson had shown favoritism toward his mother during a child custody dispute. Favoritism that stemmed from an undisclosed professional and political relationship with the mother’s attorney, Nicole Ford.
Judge Cindy Hendrickson email dated 2/11/2019 seeks reappointment to the Santa Clara County Domestic Violence Council (DVC).
The motion further claimed Hendrickson and Ford were affiliated through their respective appointments to the county’s Domestic Violence Council (DVC), and through association with WomenSV, a nonprofit domestic violence organization operating in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties.
Under California law, such a motion should have triggered a transparent and narrowly prescribed process. As expeditiously as possible, an out-of-county judge was supposed to rule on whether Hendrickson illegally remained in the case and whether her orders, stripping the father of legal and physical custody and placing him on court-ordered monitoring, were invalid.
The father had every reason to believe he would be spending Father’s Day this year reading handmade cards from his son, enjoying a quiet beach picnic and making memories that form the bedrock of parenthood.
But that didn’t happen.
Instead, records obtained by the Vanguard’s investigative team reveal a flagrant deviation from judicial procedure. Officials from California’s Judicial Council, along with court staff in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, quietly bypassed the legal process. They reassigned the case off the books, concealed judicial recusals, and, according to internal emails, hijacked the powers of the state’s Chief Justice, Patricia Guerrero.
The administrative debacle and court coverup left a father in legal limbo, facing staggering legal costs and struggling to explain to his 4-year-old why he can’t come home.
Professional supervised monitor report placed in a public court file by divorce attorney Nicole Ford days before Judge Cindy Hendrickson’s disqualification motion was filed.
Days before the father filed his motion to disqualify Judge Cindy Hendrickson, the mother’s divorce attorney, Nicole Ford, submitted a court filing that would soon take on a new significance.
The public filing included supervised visitation reports from the father’s court-ordered parenting time — monitored interactions that cost him nearly $1,000 a week. Without a legal basis, Ford urged Judge Hendrickson to continue the costly arrangement, which limited the father’s contact with his young son to just a few hours per week.
The reports, now part of a public record, contained no indication that the father posed any danger to his child. Instead, they appear to show compliant, consistent parenting efforts. For the father’s legal team, the filing was consistent with Ford’s coercive, bad-faith litigation tactics and overconfidence in securing favorable rulings from Judge Hendrickson, including potential increases in child support for her client.
Before Hendrickson could rule against the father again, his attorneys filed and served a formal disqualification motion, citing her undisclosed political and professional ties to Ford and association with nonprofit WomenSV, as a reason for Hendrickson to be removed from the case, and her orders invalidated.
Under California law — specifically Code of Civil Procedure sections 170.1 and 170.3 — a judge is duty bound to remove themselves from a case, or recuse, if they have a conflict or reason they are unlikely to be able to rule fairly. When a judge fails to recuse, an attorney or party in the case, may seek to remove the judge and have their orders vacated.
Upon receipt of such a motion, a judge has three options: accept the disqualification and withdraw from the case (leaving prior rulings intact), reject the motion on procedural grounds (which forces the moving party to file a writ in the court of appeal), or file a formal response, or answer, disputing the allegations and legally fighting to remain in the case.
Judge Hendrickson’s attorney, Sharon Nagle, filed an answer in the disqualification matter on February 11, 2025.
On February 11, Judge Hendrickson submitted her answer, denying all claims of bias and signaling her refusal to leave the case. However, her answer failed to address the allegation that she did not disclose her professional and political relationship with Nicole Ford through long-standing appointments on the county’s DVC, and less than accurately characterizing her association with nonprofit WomenSV and its founder, Ruth Patrick.
Hendrickson’s answer triggered a straightforward, well-established process. By law, the parties had five court days after they received her answer via U.S. Mail, to agree on a neutral judge to decide whether Hendrickson should be removed and her orders invalidated. If no agreement was reached by February 21, the duty to appoint an out-of-county judge fell to California Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero.
But internal communications obtained under public records law show that judicial officials circumvented this process.
First Email sent by Marita Desuasido to Superior Court of San Mateo County staff on February 18, 2025.
Timeline of Injustice
On February 18, three days before time expired for the parties to agree on a judge who could hear the Hendrickson disqualification, Judicial Council staffer Marita Desuasido contacted court administrators in San Mateo County and asked for assistance in identifying a judge to preside over the disqualification matter.
No other court was contacted, according to public records produced by the Judicial Council.
The following day, San Mateo County Superior Court Master Calendar Coordinator, Jennifer Arnott, emailed Desuasido, confirming that San Mateo County Presiding Judge Stephanie Garratt, not the chief justice, had appointed Judge Sean P. Dabel to decide the Hendrickson disqualification.
The father’s legal team, unaware that a judge had already been assigned outside the statutory process, filed a supplemental notice.
The notice revealed that, while Nicole Ford had failed to cooperate in selecting a mutually agreeable judge, father’s legal team named three judges they believed could decide the matter fairly: Judge Matthew P. Guasco of Ventura County, Judge David Cowan of Los Angeles County, and Judge Eric Wersching of Orange County.
Five days later, on February 26, Judge Hendrickson scheduled a status conference where Nicole Ford demanded the court address her client’s child support request. During the conference, the father’s legal team reminded Judge Hendrickson that the case was frozen, or stayed, until the disqualification motion filed earlier that month had been resolved.
At the conference, Judge Hendrickson stubbornly insisted she could continue to issue further opinions and rulings. Father’s attorneys objected.
Later that same day, Judge Hendrickson abruptly recused, removing herself from the case, pursuant to CCP170.1. Judge Hendrickson denied allegations set forth in the disqualification motion, but three weeks later, decided she was not qualified to remain on the case after all.
Judge Cindy Hendrickson’s recusal order dated February 26, 2025.
Hendrickson’s recusal from the case, however, did not terminate the disqualification proceeding. Because she had answered the allegations, her orders placing the father on monitored visitation remained in effect until, and unless, a judge assigned to the disqualification matter ruled her orders had been made improperly, making them invalid.
However, the day after Judge Hendrickson’s recusal, on February 27, Jennifer Arnott sent an email to several court and Judicial Council employees stating, “Unfortunately Judge Dabel is recusing himself from the case. Once he started reading the paperwork, he realized that he knows one of the attorneys and he is actually friends with her,” Arnott wrote.
Arnott further stated that the San Mateo Presiding Judge, not the chief justice, had reassigned Judge Renee C. Reyna to the Hendrickson disqualification.
Arnott added that, once provided with a new assignment order, signed by the chief justice, she would forward the disqualification documents to Judge Reyna. The email makes unclear what documents would be forwarded to the judge for review.
After obtaining an assignment order for Judge Reyna to hear the case on March 6, Arnott once again emailed the Judicial Council staff on March 10, proclaiming,
“Judge Reyna started to review the paperwork filed in this case, and she is now recusing herself since the same attorney that represents Judge Hendrickson, represented her in a recent CCP 170.1/170.3 challenge that was filed against Judge Reyna,” she wrote.
Arnott’s email went on to note that, once again, the San Mateo County presiding judge, not the chief justice, had reassigned the Hendrickson disqualification to Judge Jonathan E. Karesh.
“I’m sorry for the back- and forth, but I don’t expect Judge Karesh to recuse himself from this matter,” Arnott wrote.
Three assignment orders made in the Judge Hendrickson disqualification proceeding out of the public eye.
The records obtained by the Vanguard’s investigative reporting team include multiple assignment orders. These records are not contained in the public court files, indicating a shadowy administrative effort to assign a judge in San Mateo County, which sits immediately adjacent to Santa Clara County. The records make clear an administrative debacle significantly contributed to extraordinary delays in the Hendrickson disqualification proceedings.
Further, the administrative emails do not show communication between court staff and Judicial Council making any effort to inform the public, the parties, or their attorneys, of Judge Dabel’s, Judge Reyna’s or Judge Karesh’s assignments, and respective recusals.
In over 20 judicial disqualification proceedings viewed by the Vanguard’s investigative reporting team, records show notice of judicial assignment and a much more transparent process, suggesting the Hendrickson disqualification was highly politicized.
Record notifying the parties of a judicial assignment in the disqualification proceeding of Sacramento Superior Court Judge Matthew Gary.
Judge Karesh Order Reveals More Wrongdoing
According to email records, obtained exclusively by the Vanguard’s investigative team, Judge Karesh’s assignment order was valid from March 10 to Apil 10, 2025. However, it was not until April 28, 2025, eighteen days after the assignment order expired, that Judge Karesh issued his first order in the Hendrickson disqualification.
“On today’s date, this Court learned that the Presiding Judge of the San Mateo County Court had assigned it in the above-entitled challenge to Hon. Cindy Seeley Hendrickson,” Judge Karesh wrote.
The order went on to request further briefing about the nature and operation of the Santa Clara County Domestic Violence Council (DVC), where Cindy Hendrickson and Nicole Ford had served for almost a decade.
Judge Karesh’s order required more briefing by May 21, 2025, nearly four months after the disqualification was filed and should have been resolved.
San Mateo County Superior Court Judge Karesh’s first order filed April 28, 2025, in the Hendrickson disqualification.
Twelve separate records requests to Santa Clara County courts related to the Hendrickson disqualification were delayed, ignored and outright obstructed by both the court’s Public Information Officer (PIO), Jessica Kellogg and Lisa Herrick, the court’s general counsel.
A week before the Judicial Council produced the records, Kellogg sent an email, claiming the court was aware of the records request submitted to the Judicial Council, suggesting a coordinated cover up as the court continued to refuse records related to the Hendrickson disqualification.
“This appears to be forum shopping,” said a retired family court judge who reviewed the records at the Vanguard’s request. “The proper process wasn’t followed. The law requires clear lines of authority—and that clearly didn’t happen here.”
San Mateo County Superior Court Judge Jonathan Karesh. Photo Credit: YouTube
Politics Clogging Up Courthouses
Cindy Hendrickson was a prosecutor in the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office under District Attorney Jeff Rosen when county supervisors appointed her to the Domestic Violence Council, a quasi-public body that works with judges, police and nonprofits to shape policy and direct funding for domestic-violence and child-abuse programs.
By 2015, divorce lawyer Nicole Ford had joined the council as pro bono counsel for Bay Area Legal Aid. That same year Ford represented a high-profile domestic-violence survivor in a family-court fight with a San Francisco 49ers player—an athlete Hendrickson declined to charge in the related criminal case.
Also in 2015, the district attorney’s office began prosecuting former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner in a sexual-assault case presided over by Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky. Turner was convicted, but Persky’s six-month sentence triggered a recall campaign led by Stanford law professor Michele Dauber. Dauber’s goal: unseat Persky and elect Hendrickson to the bench.
During the campaign, public records show, Hendrickson improperly accessed the county’s criminal-justice database to aid Dauber and used her government email to solicit Dauber’s endorsement—violations of county policy and Rules of Professional Conduct that apply to attorneys.
Hendrickson was simultaneously an active member of the court-sponsored Bench-Bar-Media-Police Committee, or BBMP. As the Vanguard’s Tainted Trails, Tarnished Headlines, Stolen Justice series later revealed, the BBMP held off-the-record meetings and political forums funded by taxpayers but closed to the public, wielding quiet influence over prosecutions, elections and media coverage.
Public records confirm Hendrickson participated in the BBMP as a prosecutor, a judicial candidate and, after her 2018 election, as a judge, until the committee was shut down in early 2023, the same period in which she quietly stepped away from the Domestic Violence Council.
Throughout her time as prosecutor, candidate and judge, Hendrickson maintained close ties with Ruth Patrick, founder and CEO of WomenSV. Although barred from political activity, Patrick urged WomenSV supporters to back Hendrickson and Rosen in the 2018 election, according to former staff and women who had sought support from WomenSV during Hendrickson’s political campaign.
On May 7, 2021, Patrick gave a presentation to the Santa Clara County Domestic Violence Council on “coercive control”. Hendrickson and Ford were in attendance. Days later, the council persuaded county supervisors to award WomenSV a $250,000 grant. More than triple the amount given to comparable groups, even though WomenSV provides no shelter or therapy services, focusing instead on networking events that promote the district attorney’s initiatives and steer clients to favored divorce lawyers, including Ford, Jim Hoover and Jessica Dayton of ADZ Law.
Hoover and Dayton served on the WomenSV advisory board in 2021 when the Santa Clara County grant funding was obtained. Dayton also serves on political subcommittees for San Mateo courts and county DVC, demonstrating WomenSV influence that benefited Cindy Hendrickson’s political campaign in 2016- 2018, extends to San Mateo County, where Hendrickson’s disqualification was repeatedly reassigned.
A Vanguard review of more than 100 cases assigned to Judge Hendrickson since 2018 found no instance in which she disclosed on the record her Domestic Violence Council role, her relationship with WomenSV, or the financial and political support she has obtained throughout her judicial career.
In stark contrast, prosecutor Johnene Stebbins, who mounted a competitive 2023-24 political campaign against Rosen’s chief of staff, Jay Boyarsky, and Nicole Ford, has routinely disclosed her own financial and political ties in open court and in minute orders. Such on-record disclosures are consistent with the law and judicial ethics necessary to uphold public trust in the courts.
A Judge’s Duty to Step Aside
California’s Code of Judicial Ethics and the widely cited “Rothman’s Judicial Ethics Handbook” require judges to recuse themselves when personal, financial or political interests create even an appearance of bias. In seven years on the family-law bench, Hendrickson has repeatedly failed to meet that standard, according to court filings and transcript reviews, raising the prospect of dozens—perhaps hundreds—of tainted rulings.
The question now begs; How many parents, children and families were denied due process by Judge Hendrickson’s lack of disclosure? A flood of potential challenges now looms over Presiding Judge Julie Emede, herself a former Domestic Violence Council member alongside Hendrickson and Ford.
Families Separated in a Family Courtroom: “Why Can’t I Go Home With Daddy?”
The father’s story is no longer just a custody dispute. It’s a case study in how California’s judicial system, even in family law, the most intimate and human arena, can fail those it’s meant to protect.
For the boy at the center of the case, these administrate debacles and political power grabs mean one thing: no freedom to go home with his father.
For nearly a year, each monitored visit ends with the same questions. “Why can’t I stay longer? Why can’t I come home?”
There’s no answer that makes sense to a 4-year-old. And increasingly, there’s no answer that makes sense to legal observers or the child’s father. No evidence has been presented that the father poses a danger. No final custody decision has been made. But the court’s inaction on a simple disqualification motion has left an entire family suspended in legal purgatory.
As the late San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi once warned: “When the public loses faith in the fairness of the courts, the entire justice system breaks down.”
In Santa Clara County, for one father and his son, that breakdown isn’t theoretical. It’s lived — every Saturday, one visit at a time.
The facts in the case involving Judge Cindy Hendrickson are not just concerning—they are emblematic of a wider systemic breakdown across American family courts. What occurred in Santa Clara County is not an anomaly; it is part of a national trend wherein family courts are being co-opted as tools of legal harassment and political patronage, all under the pretense of protecting children.
In both the Santa Clara and Colorado cases, the same pattern emerges: procedural manipulation, judicial bias, attorney favoritism, and a near-total erasure of children’s voices and best interests. These are not isolated grievances—they are legal and ethical failures that demand judicial and legislative intervention.
In the case of Judge Hendrickson:
A father with no criminal history, no abuse findings, and clear documentation of safe, loving interactions with his child has been subjected to costly monitored visitation—$1,000 per week—despite a lack of legal justification.
His attempt to seek judicial disqualification under California CCP §§ 170.1 and 170.3 was illegally delayed, reassigned, and obscured from public view by a web of local court officials and politically entrenched attorneys.
Multiple judges either recused due to conflicts or were assigned without proper authority, all while the child continued to be separated from a fit parent.
Meanwhile, court insiders—lawyers and judges linked through political bodies like the Domestic Violence Council and WomenSV—created what appears to be a network of influence that undermined due process.
This is not just a story about judicial favoritism—it is a clear breach of due process, judicial ethics, and public trust. In a legal system built on impartiality, the failure to disclose professional and political affiliations with counsel who stand to benefit from rulings is inexcusable and disqualifying. This violates Canon 3(E) of the California Code of Judicial Ethics and the principles set forth in Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co., 556 U.S. 868 (2009), where the U.S. Supreme Court held that even the appearance of judicial bias can warrant disqualification to preserve the fairness of the proceedings.
The Parallels to Colorado and National Family Court Abuse
The misconduct by Judge Hendrickson mirrors what we are seeing in other jurisdictions, including Colorado. As argued in the accompanying brief, family court attorneys increasingly align with unethical strategies, weaponizing court-ordered evaluations, therapy, and supervised visitation to isolate children and discredit protective parents. This behavior violates Colorado Rules of Professional Conduct 3.3, 3.4, and 8.4, as well as C.R.S. § 13-17-102, which prohibits vexatious litigation.
It is not “advocacy” to use a therapist’s bias, a PRE’s report, or backdoor political ties to dismantle the life of a protective parent. It is abuse of process—and when it results in unnecessary trauma to a child, it borders on state-sanctioned psychological harm.
In both the California and Colorado cases:
Litigation is used to exhaust and silence a fit, loving parent.
Children are treated as collateral damage, with their needs subverted by political agendas.
Attorneys and judges disregard legal standards, creating a two-tiered system where outcomes are dictated not by law but by relationships, money, and influence.
These cases are not just tragic—they are precedents in the making, demonstrating how judicial systems can be co-opted when oversight fails. They affirm the late Jeff Adachi’s warning: “When the public loses faith in the fairness of the courts, the entire justice system breaks down.”
To restore public trust, several immediate reforms are needed:
Mandatory disclosure of political and professional affiliations in every family law case.
Independent review panels for judicial disqualification motions, especially where attorney-judge relationships are alleged.
Civil rights remedies for parents whose due process rights have been violated under color of law.
The story of the Santa Clara father—like countless others nationwide—is a constitutional crisis hidden in plain sight. When family courts stray from the best interests of children and instead protect power structures, the law becomes a tool of harm, not justice. The legal community must reckon with the damage being done—not just to individual families, but to the rule of law itself.