Minnesota Man Faces Trial For Our Podcast On The Trans Grooming Of His Daughter
Contrived harassment charge against Brent Bowlby will be heard next week
Minnesota man Brent Bowlby will face trial next week for allegedly harassing his ex-partner through a third party. The Distance is allegedly that third party and supposedly harassed Bowlby’s ex-partner through the mundane journalistic practice of contacting her for comment on the story.
Documents obtained by The Distance corroborate our reporting that Sherburne County, Minnesota Child Protective Services prosecuted Mr. Bowlby because he did not accept his then-13 year-old daughter’s ‘gender identity’. The focus of our communication to the alleged victim of harassment included questions about this topic.
In a two-hour podcast that we published in October 2024, Mr. Bowlby explained how CPS systematically intervened in the court-ordered reunification of his family for the purpose of alienating him from his minor children.
Sherburne County CPS finally pressed charges against Mr. Bowlby for alleged “Mental Injury” of his second daughter over a four-day hearing in CPS court during April 2025. It was “an appeal from over three years [before] that they decided to finally try me on,” Mr. Bowlby explains.
In a dramatic twist, prosecutors accidentally revealed evidence of systematic bias by LeAnne Boetel, the CPS official behind the charge. “The judge even caught it,” Bowlby says. In his decision, Minnesota Human Services Judge William B. Madsen told Sherburne CPS to reverse their finding that Mr. Bowlby had maltreated a minor by mental injury.
Madsen also criticized CPS for providing notes to the court from the daughter’s therapist, Ms. Rachelle Morrison-Weseloh, that “appear redacted and incomplete.” Furthermore, “when asked for clarification” about the missing entries, “the Agency was unable to provide” it, a potential ‘Brady violation’ of Mr. Bowlby’s Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
Care and concern for the Constitution seems systematically lacking in Sherburne County. The trial next week is clearly aimed at unconstitutional prior restraint of Mr. Bowlby for discussing the un-American things that Sherburne County CPS and the family court have already done to him. The cover-up is a continuation of the crime.
Hours after we published our podcast in 2024, Sherburne County sheriff’s deputies fabricated a criminal charge against Mr. Bowlby and arrested him for “indirect harassment” of his ex-partner. The family court has threatened to hold him responsible if we publish the name of his ex-partner or contact her for comment on these stories.
In January, we reached out to Sgt. Austin Turner of the Sherburne County Sheriff’s Department, as well as current Sherburne County prosecutor Leah Gale Emmans, with pointed questions about deputies’ obvious and incontrovertible fabrication of evidence in the arrest warrant, which Turner signed under penalty of perjury.
We never received a response. Mr. Bowlby faces trial in a district court for that patently false charge next Tuesday. If found guilty, he could be imprisoned for up to five years.
We expect that attorney Eric W.M. Bain will be aggressive in defending Mr. Bowlby next week. Editor Matt Osborne may potentially be called as a witness.
This is unlikely, however, because the Sherburne County Sheriff’s Department recorded their deputy trying to put words in Mr. Osborne’s mouth in order to fabricate their specious charge against Mr. Bowlby. Mr. Bain has subpoenaed the audio recording, which ought to be damning enough on its own.
The story also took a bizarre turn during 2025. Under cross-examination last April, Bowlby’s ex-partner suddenly announced that their oldest child had never been transgender. Matthew Fitzgerald, the current boyfriend of the ex-partner, also claimed in a June email to Mr. Bowlby that all three children “have NOT been transitioning!”
It is a mystery then just why Mr. Bowlby was prosecuted by CPS for supposedly harming his children by not ‘affirming’ one of them as transgender. What explains this sudden change of narrative?
Now that the trial is at hand, we are free at last to begin speculating on the true nature of the matter that Sherburne County, Minnesota is so desperate to cover up. Not that we are asking any questions, of course, because those are illegal in Sherburne County, Minnesota.
Hans Erik Larson, lead attorney for the prosecution of Brent Bowlby from 2017 to 2022, was simultaneously on the board of directors for Rivers of Hope, a nonprofit organization that Ms. Boetel implicated in the systematic denial of Mr. Bowlby’s parental rights in November 2019.
In a recording that we included in our podcast coverage of Mr. Bowlby’s story in 2024, CPS official LeAnne Boetel can be heard referring Bowlby’s ex-partner to an organization called Rivers of Hope — along with a vow to do whatever she could to prevent Bowlby from communicating with his daughter again.
Until he was forced to leave the prosecutor’s office in 2022, Mr. Larson repeatedly pressed criminal charges against Mr. Bowlby for alleged violations of ‘harassment restraining orders’ (HROs) through email communications with the ex-partner about his children.
To make this story even more disturbing, Larson resigned because of his role in the death of an eight-year-old girl. Autumn Hallow was systematically starved and beaten to death in 2021 under similar custodial circumstances to Mr. Bowlby’s case while Sherburne County law enforcement, Larson, and CPS all chose to ignore the mother’s desperate pleas for help.
Mr. Larson is now an assistant prosecutor for neighboring Wayne County. He is still on the board of Rivers of Hope, which serves both Sherburne and Wayne counties. His wife is also on the board.
Rivers of Hope seemingly exists to pry minor children away from their allegedly abusive parents in secret. Of course, no actual adjudication of abuse is necessary for a parent to be deemed an abuser by a nonprofit organization, which can then extend all manner of resources to the allegedly-abused.
After all, NGOs are not government agencies. The Constitution and those pesky laws meant to ensure accountability in government simply don’t apply to them. Nontransparent persecution is a feature of Sherburne County CPS in the Brent Bowlby case, not a bug.
It is also endemic nationwide. The national model of state intervention whenever parents fail to affirm their so-called ‘trans kids’ involves specious findings of abuse and emotional harm. One set of actors always involved in these stories are clinicians, especially therapists. Additionally, parent accounts and detransitioner stories are replete with examples of nonprofit red carpets being rolled out for runaway youth claiming a transgender identity.
The case of Forrest Smith, who observed nonprofits go out of their way to arrange vaginoplasties for young homeless men, is darkly instructive on this point. More recently, The Distance brought attention to the abuse of an immigrant family in Shasta County, California that, except for a contentious custody dispute, has all the same elements as the Bowlby case:
In our recording of Ms. Boetel’s meeting with Mr. Bowlby’s ex-partner in 2019, which Mr. Bowlby obtained through legal discovery and shared with The Distance, Ms. Boetel can be heard telling the ex-partner that Rivers of Hope advocates for women and children “that are victims of harassment, domestic violence, sex trafficking, any sort of violence, harassment, stalking, anything like that.”
According to Ms. Boetel, the publicly-funded nonprofit organization is completely unaccountable, with infinite access to minor children regardless of parental consent. Emphasis is added to the transcript here:
Even if we went to court, and the court says, “Rivers of Hope, I want your documentation,” Rivers of Hope can give them a big middle finger and move on. These people, they’re not a therapist, but they also really, really help kids understand what’s happening and how to protect themselves. Or also helping…ways so they would be advocating for her with, oh, you got that email from dad. You know what? I want you to remember how smart you are, how pretty you are, how intelligent, how many people you have. They’re just like these awesome case managers that are literally just focused on those malfunctioning relationships in people’s lives. They can meet with kids at school in private, they might meet at home in private, if she were to ever even do a visit with dad, not saying that would ever happen, but if she were, they could even come with her, these people I’ve never seen an agency go as far as they do to protect women no matter the age. Right now I’m working with a with a 15-year-old who has a Rivers of Hope advocate, she’s been working with her for over a year, and her mom and dad never even knew because that Rivers of Hope advocate was meeting with her at school, checking in on how things were going at home, helping her figure out ways to respond to things like at-home punishments, what she could do instead of, you know, feeling suicidal, depressed, anxious, that kind of thing. It’s an amazing service I usually offer to any families, any women that are having a struggle relationship with males, teachers, things like that.
According to LeAnne Boetel, Rivers of Hope has adults secretly contacting children to love-bomb them and form a drama triangle against their parents, engaging in amateur mental health interventions (“they’re not a therapist”) during family crises.
Yet if called to account in any courtroom, this publicly-funded nonprofit organization will “give [the judge] a big middle finger and move on,” according to Ms. Boetel. Public prosecutors sit on their board of directors. They enjoy effective full immunity from the law. What could possibly go wrong?
In our “harassing communications” with Mr. Bowlby’s ex-partner at the heart of the fabrication by the sheriff’s department, we asked her: “In 2018 you said under oath that your oldest daughter had no gender identity issues. At what point did [the child] become ‘Maxie’? Was it before or after CPS referred you to two area nonprofit organizations, Rivers of Hope and Timber Bay?”
Some time after that email, the child was retroactively never transgender. Which is amazing, because the psychological evaluation of Mr. Bowlby’s elder daughter used to prosecute Mr. Bowlby refers to “Maxie” as “a thirteen-year, three-month old transgendered individual,” and uses he/him pronouns throughout.
We can see why Mr. Bowlby’s ex-partner would want to lie in order to protect herself, and enlist others in lying. But then we look at Hans Erik Larson and ask just who else, and what else, is being protected by the sudden historical revisionism.
Did the child desist? Did the ‘gender identity’ become inconvenient to the child, the mom, or someone else? We want to ask those questions, but Mr. Bowlby gets arrested whenever we ask questions.
Though it works in secret, Rivers of Hope has a public presence. For example, Hans Larson is signed to a 27 February 2023 letter to the Public Safety Commission endorsing legislation related to at-risk teens.
That letter describes an organizational “Youth Program to support primarily middle school and high school aged students who have witnessed or experienced family violence or teen dating violence.”
“We offer support, education, and referrals to community resources. Through education and empowerment, the youth program helps youth move beyond violence to healthy relationships” (emphasis added).
Brent Bowlby has never been violent to anyone and did everything the family court told him to do in order to maintain a healthy relationship with his children. Nevertheless, LeAnne Boetel apparently regarded his relationship with his daughter as “unhealthy” or “malfunctioning” in some way that Rivers of Hope, an “LGBTQ+ Serving” organization that specializes in victims of domestic or dating violence, could manage.
“It was purely ideology-driven,” Mr. Bowlby says. “The county is the most corrupt in Minnesota, and they saw a way to run my kids through their system and make money off them while pushing their woke agenda.” Potential nonprofit corruption in Minnesota? Say it ain’t so!
It remains unclear what role the organization might have played in the development of the child’s ‘gender identity’ sometime after her mother’s interview with Ms. Boetel. We can get a sense of what is included in those “community resources” offered by the organization through this fundraising webpage.
As long as you consider ‘misgendering’ to be ‘actual violence,’ the sky is the limit. A minor “fleeing abuse” can receive a “safe phone” with a number that is unknown to their parent or legal guardian, “one night in a motel room” if they are “fleeing domestic violence,” and receive weekly support group meetings.
In 2019, LeAnne Boetel told Mr. Bowlby’s ex-partner that in her experience, Rivers of Hope could host a family for an entire week at a hotel. Ms. Boetel wanted the ex-partner to imagine “a magical world where now [the daughter] has a new phone, a new phone number, a new email, a new social media.” And no dad.
Mr. Bowlby’s elder daughter is almost 18. He has not seen her in over six years. “The grief is relentless,” he says. “It never fades and never lets go. She needed me to protect her, but while I was being forcibly kept away, she was exploited, and I was powerless to stop it,” Mr. Bowlby said.
He was clearly on the wrong corner of a drama triangle with Sherburne County from the beginning. On its own, the one prosecutorial connection might even seem coincidental, but Mr. Larson is not the only Rivers of Hope board member who was directly involved in Mr. Bowlby’s case. At least one person had a responsibility to investigate his counter-evidence against his ex-partner’s claims.
The Distance has obtained IRS 990 filings for Rivers of Hope from 2018 to 2023. Among the names we found on the board of the organization is former Chief Deputy Don Starry, now retired. We reached out to him for comment but received no reply.
In 2018, Mr. Bowlby provided Starry with substantial evidence that his ex-partner was filing false reports against him. Instead of investigating, Mr. Starry did the same thing that LeAnne Boetel and everyone else in Sherburne County have all done: presume that Brent Bowlby was the bad guy and choose not to investigate anything he said, no matter how much evidence he offered to corroborate his statements.
Had Chief Deputy Starry ever bothered to do his job, Mr. Bowlby might never have been in this predicament. “No one ever cared about my rights as a father of three minor children that were being illegally withheld,” Mr. Bowlby says. Now the county government has every incentive to destroy him for their own protection.
Since our 2024 podcast with Brent Bowlby, the world has found out what kind of government goes on in Minnesota. It is hardly unreasonable to suspect that one more fraudulent abuse of power has taken place in that state. It would certainly explain the eagerness of Sherburne County to overlook the United States Constitution in order to imprison Mr. Bowlby for the crime of being a father.
The Distance will continue to update this story as it develops.
Judgment: Kelly Malinda Magda vs Brent Dalton Bowlby, is PUBLIC INFORMATION.
Her name is Kelly Malinda Magda.
Her name is Kelly Malinda Magda.
Her name is Kelly Malinda Magda.