Prosecution Of 'Non-Affirming' Dad Ends In Exoneration By Human Services Judge

An update on Brent Bowlby of Minnesota

Minnesota Human Services Judge William B. Madsen has recommended Sherburne County CPS reverse its finding that Brent Bowlby maltreated a minor by mental injury. Madsen’s findings are an absolute embarassment to CPS officials at the County Government Center.

In an extensive podcast last October, The Distance reported how Minnesota Child Protective Services officials enabled Mr. Bowlby’s ex-partner to alienate his children from him for five years, even in defiance of family court-ordered reunification.

Issued in June, Madsen’s decision finds that “other than being a party to the custody dispute and attempting to obtain parenting time, I find it more likely than not, that the Appellant did not inflict a mental injury” on his daughter, the second of three children from the relationship.

Judge Madsen 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 the Agency was unable to provide clarification” about the missing entries.

This is a potential ‘Brady violation’ of Mr. Bowlby’s Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment rights, as the missing entries were clearly material to the trial. “Notes from the July 7, 2021 session would have been extremely relevant to the matter at hand, as the testimony provided at the hearing was conflicting regarding the events that occurred during the two week period of unsupervised parenting time,” Judge Madsen wrote.

Based on the full evidence, “it is clear that [the child’s] escalated reports of physical and mental symptoms, which included suicidal ideations, involving unsupervised parenting time with Appellant did not occur until July 20, 2021, more than one week following the return of [the child] to [the ex-partner]’s home.”

Because CPS officials already face professional investigation for the Brent Bowlby case, Madsen’s findings are explosive. “The Agency admittedly knew of the parenting consultant and reunification therapist's concerns and allegations of parental alienation and other potential causes of [the child’s] anxiety and … the Agency made the choice to not investigate them” (emphasis added).

As we reported in our podcast, Mr. Bowlby provided CPS officials with extensive exculpatory evidence, including various audio recordings we used in the podcast production.

One of those clips features LeAnne Boetel of CPS admitting that no one in the office has bothered to examine any of the material Bowlby had provided them. They chose not to investigate it.

During the Human Services trial, Mr. Bowlby asked Ms. Boetel under cross-examination whether she had spoken to anyone who knew him. She admitted that she still has not talked to anyone other than the family court-appointed parental consultant and the reunification therapist. It has been years. She has had years.

She chose not to investigate. Perhaps LeAnne Boetel of Sherburne County CPS could not bother interviewing anyone else because she was too busy railroading Brent Bowlby.

Absurdly, CPS officials had also testified to Madsen that Mr. Bowlby’s ex-partner “was supportive of [the child’s] unsupervised parenting time with” Bowlby, a claim the judge found not credible “in light of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” CPS officials simply chose to ignore the parental alienation.

Sherburne County officials, who all work in the same building, clearly formed a vendetta against Brent Bowlby some years ago on behalf of his ex-partner. This appears to be a pattern with Sherburne CPS.

Unfortunately, Judge Madsen does not also preside over the Sherburne County family court, where the persecution of Mr. Bowlby continues.

Hours after we published our podcast last year, sheriff’s deputies fabricated a criminal charge against Mr. Bowlby and arrested him for “indirect harassment” of his ex-partner.

In recent proceedings related to that case, the story his ex-partner tells about their child — the reason why she and the three children are afraid, and need ‘protection’ from Brent Bowlby — completely changed.

Suddenly, the oldest daughter is not transgender, anymore. In fact, she was never transgender.

Which is weird, because The Distance has obtained documents that say she is. Or was. And that this is the very exact reason why the kids had to be protected from their dad the whole time. Just what is going on here?

Documents obtained by The Distance corroborate our reporting that the persecution of Brent Bowlby by Sherburne County, Minnesota CPS centered on his non-acceptance of his then-13 year-old elder daughter’s ‘gender identity’.

The Bowlby files are a typical example of the extreme ideological bias that invariably surrounds any ‘transgender’ identification in youth. Contrary to what the reader might expect, this phenomenon is as common in red states as blue states.

In a dramatic twist, prosecutors in the Human Services court accidentally revealed further evidence of systematic bias by the specific CPS official behind the charges against Bowlby.

“The judge even caught it,” Bowlby says, referring to Judge Madsen. He says that Madsen “tried to be very fair,” which was a new experience for Mr. Bowlby in Sherburne County.

Morrison-Weseloh, MA, LPCC, ATR, of the Parasol Wellness Collaborative in Otsego, a town in neighboring Wayne County, Minnesota, wrote in her 2021 notes that Mr. Bowlby’s second daughter “stated Brent doesn't accept [her] oldest sibling and has said ‘bad words’ and slurs about ‘Max’,” the new name adopted by the older daughter.

The second daughter “also indicated a conversation with Brent” in which he did not accept the older sibling’s gender change and complained that her father “says bad words” about her sister.

It was on this basis that CPS charged Mr. Bowlby: his refusal to accept the first daughter’s ‘gender identity’ was supposedly making the second daughter have suicidal thoughts.

Yet at that point, Mr. Bowlby had still not even received official notification of his elder daughter’s transgender identity. “I was in the dark the whole time,” Mr. Bowlby tells The Distance. “No one cared to tell me. They knew I would have stopped them.”

He says he got his first inkling when his older daughter’s social studies teacher used his daughter’s new name in a parent-teacher video conference in November 2020. At the time, Bowlby had no understanding of what was happening.

“I didn't make a big deal out of it with this teacher,” Mr. Bowlby says, though he “thought it was very odd.”

Truth emerged during a therapy session with his two younger children in April 2021, they “relentlessly corrected me when the few times I mentioned [the oldest daughter], by telling me her name is Max and that she is a boy,” as Mr. Bowlby wrote in an email to the parental consultant immediately afterwards.

He asked that parental consultant, Eva-Cheney Hatcher, whether the daughter had been medicalized. “I have been kept from all medical records on all our children and I am very concerned about [her],” he wrote. Yet Mr. Bowlby received no response.

The Distance has obtained a copy of the neuropsychological evaluation report by Christina L Franklin, Ph.D., L.P., a Pediatric Neuropsychologist at the Great Lakes Neurobehavioral Center.

According to the evaluator, the last appointment with “Maxie” took place two days after LeAnne Boetel called Mr. Bowlby in August 2021 to suspend visitation.

Bowlby did not receive a copy of the evaluation, his formal notification of the daughter’s ‘transgender status’, until the end of September, 45 days after that last appointment.

The report makes for depressing reading because all the red flags of comorbidity and diagnostic overshadowing in ‘trans’ identification are present.

As Bowlby told us in our podcast, his eldest daughter has inherited his autism. The report notes several signs of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and consequent emotional issues in the daughter that require attention.

Yet the evaluation report is “affirming,” refers to “Maxie” as “a thirteen-year, three-month old transgendered individual,” and uses he/him pronouns thoughout.

When we published our podcast with Mr. Bowlby, he was already charged with violating a harassment restraining order (HRO) by emailing his ex-partner “in response to Respondent's disapproval with and Petitioner’s support of the parties’ oldest joint minor child identifying as transgender,” as acknowledged in family court documents obtained by The Distance.

In other words, Mr. Bowlby faces criminal jeopardy for complaining that he had been kept out of the loop about the daughter’s transgender identification, then bullied and gaslit.

Still gaslighting, the ex-partner announced in family court during April that the child is not transgender, after all.

She did not say that the child has detransitioned, but that she was never transgender at all. A retconning of history.

“On cross examination, I brought up the fact that the email in question had to do with the transitioning of our daughter without my knowledge or consent and that violated my parental rights to have a say in the upbringing of our children, including input into their medical decisions,” Mr. Bowlby explains.

“We don't have a trans child,” Bowlby’s ex-partner replied.

“I stopped and looked back at the judge and said, ‘Well, if she is telling the truth that my child had detransitioned, then I guess I will take that as a major win, regardless of anything else.’”

In our podcast, we included an audio recording of Ms. Boetel promising the child’s mother to do whatever she had to do to ‘protect’ the daughter from her father. “LeAnne was just making good on her earlier promise” when she stopped the reunification, Mr. Bowlby says. “Gender idology and having views opposite of mine absolutely played a part.”

What troubles him most about Boetel’s involvement, he says, “is not just her apparent bias, but her blatant disregard for evidence and professional standards. She openly admitted she hadn’t reviewed my documentation, nor was she familiar with the concept of parental alienation, a critical issue at the heart of my family’s situation.”

Instead, Ms. Boetel “appeared to align with a network of enablers willing to extract vulnerable, neurodivergent children from their familiar environments, isolating them under the guise of protection.” Mr. Bowlby says his children were “left confused, alienated, and deeply alone in a system that was supposed to support them.”

Ms. Boetel’s own history seems a fair warning. A married lesbian, she took the surname of her wife, Alyssa Ann Boetel. Alyssa attacked LeAnne in Stearns County, Minnesota in January 2021 and was charged with misdemeanor assault by strangulation. LeAnne is the unnamed “woman” in this police blotter item:

A woman told officers Boetel had been drinking throughout the evening and, at about 1 a.m., Boetel tackled her, straddled her and strangled her for about 30 seconds.

Officers observed the woman had scratches on her neck.

After arresting Boetel, she lunged toward the woman and spit at her, the complaint states.

Alyssa Ann Boetel, a resident of St. Joseph, was sentenced that September to 90 days in jail, suspended for two years, on one felony count of domestic assault, with credit for three days served. Judge Sarah Hennesy dismissed the two counts of domestic assault as part of the plea bargain.

“I asked her in court if she had ever experienced” intimate partner violence, Mr. Bowlby tells The Distance. “The judge, DA, and LeAnne collectively sh*t their pants.” The objection was upheld and Ms. Boetel never answered the question for the record.

Ms. Boetel is reportedly still married to Alyssa Ann. This reported fact pattern raises serious questions about her ability to remain objective in cases involving families in crisis. Her interference in Mr. Bowlby’s court-ordered reunification smacks of bias.

Sherburne County should be careful. They have a terrible track record in similar cases of institutional bias at the County Government Center. Lethal cases.

Autumn Hallow, eight years old, died of abuse and neglect in 2022 following a long, contentious custody case with eerie similarities to Mr. Bowlby’s experience.

Brett and Sarah Hallow, Autumn’s father and step-mother, pleaded guilty to the murder and were both sentenced to forty years in prison.

Kelsey Kruse, Autumn’s mother, had tried to use the family court to save her child. Judge Mary Yunker, who oversaw Mr. Bowlby’s case as well, declined to take action, as she had in Mr. Bowlby’s case.

“Yunker denied the motion because Kruse did not properly serve the Hallows, ‘failed to demonstrate that the current circumstances constitute an emergency’ and stated that a hearing would be scheduled ‘when the COVID-19 pandemic orders permit.’”

Ms. Kruse filed a $30 million lawsuit against Sherburne County after her child’s death. Yunker’s forced retirement was part of the settlement agreement to that lawsuit. As told in our podcast, the changeover on the bench further delayed and denied justice for Mr. Bowlby.

What Ms. Kruse experienced in Judge Yunker’s court sounds disturbingly similar to Mr. Bowlby’s trial-by-ordeal there.

“I was constantly accused by Sarah of harassing them.” In court, Sarah spoke for Brett. Tenth Judicial Court Judge Mary Yunker ordered that Kelsey could only contact Sarah because Brett had disabilities “and I caused him to have seizures frequently,” recalled Kelsey. “I’ve never seen a seizure. She didn’t show any proof.”

Brett blocked Kelsey’s number so he didn’t get the messages she sent about the kids’ education and medical care. “They said I never told him,” said Kelsey. “It was very manipulative. They tried to make it seem like everything was my fault all the time. There was a lot of blaming. If something went wrong, it was always my fault or the kids’ fault.”

Sherburne County government had clearly formed a drama triangle against Ms. Kruse — just as it had with Mr. Bowlby.

“The police never laid eyes on Autumn despite repeated visits and a chilling recording of Autumn screaming, nor did they document whether they shared that recording with child protection,” reads a report from Safe Passage for Children of Minnesota, a child welfare advocacy nonprofit. (Reader warning: the details of the Autumn Hallow case may be disturbing.)

“This [case] demonstrates the need for statewide protocols on how law enforcement should perform child welfare checks and cross-reporting to child protection.” In fact, Sherburne County CPS bears special mention in the Safe Passage analysis:

The obvious question is whether child protection could have done more. Her brother, who was six, had been reported four times previously for child abuse or neglect. We are not using his name at the request of the KSTP reporter. Two of these reports were screened out, one was screened in and then redirected to Family Assessment, which if you have read any blogs before or are familiar with child welfare is a sort of “child protection light” program. One report was closed after two months despite detailed documentation including photos from a medical clinic of bruises from head to toe. Added to that was that there were 31 calls that the Elk River Police Department responded to about Autumn when she was in the custody of her father and stepfather. At this point child protection had determined that her younger brother should stay with the mother. It’s not clear legally how this happened since the case never went to Family Court.

Then there is this bit, which would still work if the reference to “alternative response programs” was transposed with the pediatric gender ‘affirmation’ pipeline. Emphases added:

As we have talked about in other podcasts and blogs, we believe the answer to this is partly that child welfare is in thrall to alternative response programs, which are based on what is essentially an ideology that is not backed up by any empirical evidence. This is compounded by the fact that there is little practical means to hold child welfare programs accountable for poor practice. This is partly because court decisions have raised the bar so high for demonstrating malpractice that in practical terms counties and caseworkers can never be sued successfully. It is also because child welfare does not have a tradition of having practices be driven by research, but instead has a history of moving from one untested theory to another.

Get that? In terms of institutional scientific credibility, CPS is just like WPATH. No wonder gender identity ideology has become so prevalent in American child protection agencies. They are a natural home for magical thinking, beehives waiting on bees.

Why did LeAnne Boetel turn so hard against Mr. Bowlby? “Perhaps it was because I was a white CEO,” he tells The Distance, “or maybe it had something to do with [my] being the son of a minister, whatever the reason, it felt like she had made up her mind long before hearing my side.”

As we originally suggested in our reporting, and as new documentation seems to substantiate, Ms. Boetel likely believed she was ‘saving’ a ‘transgender child’ from her ‘non-affirming’ dad.

Except that isn’t the case, and never was, all of a sudden, according to the ex-partner, on the record, in family court, where Mr. Bowlby faces prison for complaining that he has been kept out of the loop the whole time.

What explains the change of story from the ex-partner? Without knowing the details, we can only offer informed speculation. It is common in the literature and accounts of desistance that youth simply give up the ‘trans’ identity and wish to forget it, embarrassed that they ever adopted it in the first place, after trying it on during adolescent individuation. They would rather no one brought up the time they were a weird kid.

The Distance is unable to contact Mr. Bowlby’s ex-partner, or to name her, without risking another arrest of Mr. Bowlby for alleged “indirect harassment.” However, this unconstitutional prior restraint on our reporting does not preclude us from contacting Matthew Fitzgerald, the current boyfriend of the ex-partner.

Mr. Fitzgerald claimed in a June email to Mr. Bowlby that all three children “have NOT been transitioning!” We have asked him for clarification and will update if he replies.

We have reached out to Ms. LeAnne Boetel for comment in the meantime and will update if she replies.

Brent Bowlby has a hearing Monday in the same kangaroo family court that has put him through a mangler for six years to bleed him dry. The Distance will have more to report on that sordid story soon.

Sherburne County is eager to silence Mr. Bowlby, to put him in prison for an email asking about his daughter’s transgender identification. This question is supposed to threaten the well-being of the recipient.

Subsequent to our podcast, after the November election, a ‘trans identity’ ceased to be advantageous in alienating the children from their father, and then suddenly, the child was never transgender in the first place.

But the trial is still on, presumably because violations of the Constitution have led to a sunk cost fallacy at the Sherburne County Government Center. They have to silence Brent Bowlby, or else there will be hell to pay for what they have done.