by A Mother
Once you live it, you never forget. The words. The chills. The trauma. The numbness. The haunting, unshakable feeling of your children being ripped from your arms—without reason and without a path to undo the harm. Their empty bedrooms became ghosts I visited every day, just as much as the calls from my attorney blaming me for losing custody of my own children. I tried to get out of bed, to face the day, my neighbors, my community—yet I was left trying to understand why it happened at all.
I remember when my daughter was still only an embryo. Even then, I became a protective parent. I remember the vicious words from her father, echoing the blame the lawyers would later throw at me for “losing” his first child. On the outside, he seemed educated and respectable. But inside our home he was anything but safe. When he learned our daughter was not “perfect,” the mask fell away. Pregnant and terrified, I spent countless nights leaving, sleeping in parking lots—because an empty parking lot felt safer than my own home.
I learned survival in small ways. I kept my hope and faith hidden under a $20 bill beneath my mattress, knowing that if I ever had to escape for good, at least I could feed my baby for ten days. That tiny act—clutching onto a small reserve of safety—was how I protected her, even when the world felt determined to tear us apart.
After my daughter was born, he seemed content to turn his cruelty toward me—belittling, humiliating, and tearing me down to satisfy his own selfish needs. About fifteen months later, my second daughter was born. I poured everything into shielding them, doing all I could to insulate them from the abuse. For a while, I believed they were safe. But then it happened. My “less than perfect” daughter suffered a medical emergency, and in that moment the monster emerged in full view of our children. I knew then they would never be safe alone with him. I stayed only until I could. I stayed until I was certain I would never return.
But the danger didn’t end when I left. When my daughters were only four and five, Dr. Mark Kilmer took them from me. In just thirty minutes—without medical evidence, without a treating therapist, without any foundation—he branded me with Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome and parental alienation. With nothing more than his baseless words, our lives were destroyed. My children were not returned for eight years. Eight years of lost birthdays, empty beds, and stolen moments. My family lost everything fighting to bring them home.
It wasn’t only me who suffered. My children lost their mother, their sense of security, and the bonds we had shared. Their very identities were fractured by the words of a single therapist who told the court I was a horrible mother, who said I belonged in prison—echoing and legitimizing Kilmer’s false accusations.
When they finally came home, it wasn’t the same. They returned carrying invisible scars—riddled with anxiety, fears, and nightmares. They no longer trusted me, and they were terrified to bring anyone into our home. It was painfully clear they had been torn apart inside, caught between the false image their father needed to portray and the mother they had truly known. Watching them wrestle with that conflict was heart-wrenching—as if the eight stolen years apart had not already been cruel enough.
Now the truth has begun to emerge, but the pain remains. Dr. Mark Kilmer has since been removed as a PRE (parental responsibility evaluator) in the State of Colorado. Even the State has admitted it has a “PRE problem,” a crisis of evaluators who wield enormous power over families with little oversight. Yet nothing has been done to undo the harm. The judicial system remains protected by the very Constitution of Colorado—its layers of immunity, secrecy, and self-policing shielding those inside from accountability.
But for my children and me, there is no shield. We live every day with the hole left in our hearts, the years we lost, the trauma we continue to carry, and the hypervigilance we cannot switch off. We know what their father has done, and we fear what he may do again.
In December of last year, one of my daughters chose to spend the holidays with me. The day she was supposed to return to her father, she played a recording for me. What I heard horrified me. For years, she had been reporting her abuse to the authorities in Colorado. For years, the people who were supposed to protect her looked the other way.
This is the pattern. Colorado protects itself from accountability. Its courts and agencies align with abusive parents rather than safeguarding vulnerable children. My family is living proof of that. The PRE system, the attorneys who misuse it, and the courts that rubber-stamp their findings have left a trail of destroyed families. My daughters and I are still trying to rebuild our lives from what was taken from us by the words of one evaluator, the complacency of an entire system, and the silence of those who knew better. I live in several Domestic Violence Shelters, and most will tell you not to mention Domestic Violence. I was coerced and set up by Dr Mark Kilmer to expose my abuse to talk about it he said “you can trust me” he exploited my trauma explaining the Judge would remove my children if I didn’t tell him everything and it was clearly a set up. Its one thing to be emotionally abused by someone you once looked up too but when the Government becomes a source of coercion and abuse it leaves you flatlined. If you’re wondering, why victims stay in an abusive relationship its because Family Courts attract so called professionals like Dr Mark Kilmer. November is Domestic Awareness Month
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