Millions of Americans love tuning into Yellowstone on Paramount, a drama starring Kevin Costner that not only highlights the natural beauty of Montana but also exposes a seedy underbelly of corruption, murder, and intrigue that stretches from the ranchers to the politicians and even into the courts. But fiction may not be so far from reality when it comes to the family court system in Montana. One name continues to come up in my inbox repeatedly: Standing Master Magdelena Bowen.
In Montana, standing masters (SM) are appointed by district judges to lighten their caseloads by foisting complicated family court matters onto the SM instead of the elected judges. SMs are not elected by the people. As such, they are virtually impossible to fire. Such is the case with SM Bowen.
Not all counties in Montana retain a standing master, but all standing masters are supposed to be overseen by the district court judges who appointed them. But in Gallatin County, Mont., according to almost 10 years of court records, SM Bowen appears to have virtually zero oversight from the elected judges to her actions or decisions in family court matters. Many litigants report that Bowen has been allowed to run Gallatin County families through a rogue, dictatorial-like gauntlet of financial and emotional abuse. One letter to the editor printed in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle said Bowen “destroyed families, damaged reputations, derailed careers, financial hardship and traumatized children.”
Families in Gallatin County report being held hostage in Standing Master Bowen’s courtroom. Unlike a District Court judge, there is no opportunity to “bounce” the standing master and have her replaced by a legitimate judge. Families find themselves at the mercy of an unelected judge with unchecked power to make radical court orders including separating children from parents under the guise of “reunification” therapy and sending them to hotels around the country that function as isolation camps called Family Bridges where they are forced to reunify with the parent they say abused them.
The Washington Post and other outlets have run very disturbing investigations into Family Bridges, which is run by Randy Rand, a California psychologist who lost his license to practice. Family Bridges is part of the “teen behavioral industry” that has been accused of widespread child abuse, including kidnapping children in the middle of the night to take them to the facility.
The night of Dec. 14, Laura and David recalled, they were abruptly awakened by Raphael, accompanied by four burly adults. The grown-ups, from Bill Lane & Associates, a youth transport service based in San Diego, shuttled the disoriented children into cars. With little understanding of what was happening, the frightened children were separated and sent off: Laura recalled that she went with a man and a woman, while the three boys went with the other two men. After spending the rest of that night at a motel, Laura was taken to Dulles International Airport while her brothers went to Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport; and in the dawn of Dec. 15 they boarded flights to California.
CBS also did an investigation into Family Bridges three years ago and found that the program had no oversight and was rife with abuse allegations. Despite this extensive expose by multiple news organizations, judges all over the country, including Bowen, order children to be taken by Family Bridges and held away from one legal parent.
Former Major League Baseball player David Segui’s children were stolen from him and placed in Family Bridges after they accused their mother’s boyfriend of abuse, which was captured on film. Despite the evidence that the boyfriend was abusive, a judge sent Segui’s children to Family Bridges and separated them from the father they loved and wanted to live with. One of the children managed to communicate with the media while he was incarcerated and told them that he and his brother were being mistreated there, and their complaints about abuse by their mother and her boyfriend were ignored and disbelieved.
They Didn’t listen to a single thing I said [Family Bridges director] Dr. Rand said that I’m a liar and none of the abuse happened and got pissed off any time I brought it up. I went outside and was talking with the Therapeutic Interventionist and I told her how are you going to send me and my [sibling] back to her when she abused us and she told me that I need both parents in my life … and … I’ve been doing perfectly fine with my dad staying out of trouble unlike when I was living with her.
SM Bowen has a very cozy relationship with Family Bridges, whose agents often work in Montana courts as guardians ad litem or custody evaluators and charge huge amounts of money that is court-ordered by Bowen. They often double dip by recommending Family Bridges as the solution, where they are paid again for carrying out the therapy, which can be billed at $30,000 to $80,000 per case.
Jennifer Bjelland, Kathleen Rock, and Kelly Voyich are three of the court actors who play both roles. Bowen acts in concert with them to sentence children whose parents come before her to long stays in the pseudo-scientific organization that attempts to convince the children they are being abused by the parent they want to live with through “parental alienation.” Bowen and Family Bridges believe the answer to so-called parental alienation is alienating the children from the preferred parent for months and sometimes years at a time. PJ Media reached out to Bjelland, Rock, and Voyich, but they refused to respond.
As children age out of the system, they begin speaking out, like Ally, who reports she was taken forcibly and trafficked from her home in Kansas to a hotel in Montana by Family Bridges, where she was forced to undress and go to the bathroom in front of Family Bridges staff and her father, who she says abused her and her sister.
Pahl Johnson, another victim of the family court crime system, told Montana officials about the corruption he experienced. He says his sisters are still stuck in this system and are alienated from him and his mother, and it was done at the hands of Bowen and her favorite “particular guardian ad litem who had a friendship with the Standing Master.”
“For the last ten years, my three sisters and myself have had the horrible experience of being subject to the dangerous parenting plans ordered by the Standing Master [Bowen] in Gallatin County.” Johnson exposed the money trail connected to Family Bridges and Bowen. “For a fee of only ten thousand dollars he could buy his children back in court. It worked. Over three years ago my two little sisters got on the school bus and never got off. Without a hearing, the court ordered that my sisters be taken from school and have no contact with my mother, me, or my oldest sister except for the occasional supervised visit where we had to pay a dollar a minute to see them.”
In her nearly ten years of case history, family court records show that Bowen delegated substantial judicial authority to Family Bridges and contractors, allowing them full discretion and authority in custody matters based on the pseudo diagnosis of parental alienation. Despite specific training for all professionals warning against the use of parental alienation, Bowen chose to align with the radical, abuser-friendly, and dangerous ideology of Family Bridges. Bowen‘s decision to support the scientifically debunked theory of parental alienation, caused the cottage industry to flourish in Gallatin County and bleed into the rest of the state.
It’s all about the money, said Johnson. “I needed help and was punished telling the truth to my GAL because she makes money funneling kids into parental alienation programs.” He concluded his remarks by asking the officials to eliminate parental alienation theory from family courts. “Put measures in place to prevent greedy mental health professionals from capitalizing on vulnerable children.”
PJ Media’s extensive investigation that lasted over a year into the family court corruption in Missouri showed a similar pattern of protecting abusers and alienating safe parents for hundreds of thousands of dollars per family. Missouri legislators did nothing about it despite hundreds of victims repeatedly asking them to just launch an investigation.
Over the last year, several dozen families in Gallatin County have come together in an organized fashion to expose Bowen’s continued corruption and unapologetic discrimination of their constitutional rights. The children who have now aged out of the system have provided startling testimony to legislative bodies in Helena regarding the abuse they were forced to endure at the hands of Bowen.
A recently discovered Montana Supreme Court document from January 2020 showed Bowen applying to be reinstated with the Montana State Bar. Bowen fell out of compliance with state-ordered regulations in March 2019 until she finally compiled and was reinstated in January 2020.
But examining Bowen’s case history shows that she never paused in making judicial orders on family law cases during the 10 months she was practicing law out of statutory compliance. The foundational requirement to be a standing master is to have an active license in good standing with the Montana State Bar. This begs the question as to how and why this standing master was allowed to hold court and make decisions while unlicensed without any accountability to the district court judges who are supposed to oversee her work.
A lawsuit against Gallatin County from a parent who was issued a parenting plan during Bowen‘s unlicensed practice of law was immediately denied by a district court judge less than 24 hours after it was filed. However, the same judge has had cases on his desk for over six months that he hasn’t found time to issue rulings on.
Montana State Rep. Caleb Hinkle (R-68th district) is sponsoring a bill regarding standing master reform because of the lack of judicial accountability in Gallatin County, where he resides. “Judicial accountability has long been a known problem for the state of Montana,” Hinkle told PJ Media. “We are supposed to be a nation of checks and balances in all branches of government. Ensuring that our judges and Standing Masters are held to the same laws and accountability as they hold the citizens who stand before them in court, does not seem like an unreasonable request.”
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