**LUTHMANN NOTE: Family court is a town without police. Judges control the courtroom, court-appointed professionals feed at the case, and the supposed watchdogs mail back form letters. Meanwhile, parents lose their children, their savings, and sometimes their sanity. Cheryl Kelmar calls her program **
Investigative reporter Richard Luthmann joined Cheryl Kelmar on * The Judge’s Oath* for a sweeping examination of courts that, in his view, have abandoned due process while insulating their own decision-makers from scrutiny. The former lawyer explained that his work now concentrates on “weaponized justice”—the collision of law, politics, money and institutional self-protection.
Family court occupies the center of that work because, Luthmann said, no other American court system is as “crooked.” He regularly hears from parents who say they would rather face criminal charges, where constitutional protections are clearer, than remain trapped for years in ruinously expensive custody litigation.
Luthmann’s first target was not a judge but Robert H. Tembeckjian, administrator and counsel of the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct. The Commission is supposed to police judicial misconduct. Luthmann contends that it frequently functions as a “courthouse shield,” dismissing heavily documented complaints with form-letter responses. He also revisited questions raised in his prior reporting about Tembeckjian’s outside advisory activities, including work connected to an investment concern operating in Armenia and Russia. Those circumstances, Luthmann argued, create an appearance of conflict for the official charged with assuring New Yorkers that their judiciary possesses unimpeachable integrity.
The discussion then followed the money through family court. Luthmann described a system populated by lawyers, guardians, evaluators, therapists**,** and case managers whose appointments can keep families under court supervision indefinitely. He placed federal child-welfare funding within that structure. Title IV-E does finance foster-care and adoption-assistance programs, as the federal Administration for Children and Families confirms. Luthmann’s broader contention is that these funding streams can produce institutional incentives that conflict with family preservation. Children cease to be treated as people, he said, and instead become “inventory” moving through a publicly financed system.
Luthmann next adopted reform advocate Dave Weigel’s phrase “designer child trafficking” while discussing foster children who disappear from official supervision. He cited concerns raised by former Illinois political candidate Bailey Templeton about children reportedly unaccounted for in that state’s foster system. Luthmann argued that family courts can become pipelines delivering vulnerable children to predators. The interview did not present a judicial finding connecting missing foster children to organized trafficking rings; these were Luthmann’s and advocates’ conclusions drawn from failures they say demand investigation.
The most personal portion concerned Christopher Ambrose and Karen Riordan. Luthmann sharply criticized Ambrose’s conduct and litigation tactics, arguing that his legal education helped him overpower a schoolteacher inside Connecticut’s family-court system. He recounted an interview with Ambrose’s adult daughter Mia, who has publicly accused her father of sexual abuse, and questioned Connecticut DCF’s response to reports made while she was a minor.
Ambrose denies the abuse accusations. The 2022 custody judgment awarded him sole custody and rejected the abuse narrative presented at trial; Riordan and the children have continued to dispute that outcome. Luthmann’s ongoing Ambrose–Riordan coverage challenges both the official record and the institutions that produced it.
Luthmann’s proposed remedy is exposure: independent reporters, disciplined documentary records, court watchers, forensic experts and advocacy organizations willing to confront the system publicly. Courts behave differently, he maintained, when journalists start reading files and asking questions. His “best weapon” is truth.
The interview nevertheless ended with hope. Luthmann argued that the Constitution and governing laws remain sound; the failure lies with administrators who bend or ignore them. Every family extracted from prolonged litigation—and every instance in which common sense defeats institutional self-interest—demonstrates that public scrutiny can still move the machinery of justice.
