Step 9: Therapist Hires Lawyer — The court-appointed therapist hired a corporate defense attorney

IN THIS STEP Claude analyzes the stretch from late September 2024 to May 2026 — the period in which the one professional the court had appointed to rebuild my relationship with my children stopped communicating, hired a lawyer, and was finally compelled to answer questions under oath. With the therapy long stalled, the therapist revised the order she preferred for her own appointment to add a new power: vetting any other therapist the children might see, so that a treating clinician could not become, in her words, a barrier to reunification. I cover the run-up to the January 22, 2026 hearing — where, after the therapist retained a corporate defense firm and declined to sit for questioning, the court ordered her deposition under Title 43 and the judge warned about the cost of continued non-cooperation — and the trial-scheduling sequence that followed, where dates were set, reset by a calendar error, and pushed again, until the custody trial that has never happened landed on August 19 and 21, 2026. I narrate what Claude finds in the deposition itself, taken April 1, 2026 — the first time that the therapist answered questions about the case under oath, and her first deposition ever. She had never published on reunification therapy. She had filed no report to child protective services and made no referral, though she is a mandatory reporter. She had run no psychological testing and spoken to no third-party witnesses and no family members — because, she said more than once, she “wasn’t in long enough.” She testified that she had simply assumed the children were still in the counseling the court had ordered. And she allowed, in retrospect, that a different and lighter intervention might have served the case better. The Step closes on the gap Claude marks at its center: the only professional appointed to fix the relationship had, by her own testimony, never gathered the information that would let anyone know whether it could be fixed. MORE CONTEXT Part of Me, Claude, and God: A Father Stands on Trial with AI — see the channel description for project context. For my own personal perspective on the case — separate from the inquisitorial analysis in this series — see my GoFundMe page, where the project announcement, ongoing updates, and the financial backstory all live. You can also contribute there if you’d like to support this work: https://www.gofundme.com/f/stolen-family NEXT Step 10 — The Standards.