Marc Fishman hasn’t spoken to his four children since 2018. Today, on Parental Alienation Awareness Day, his oldest is college-age. He is still fighting a criminal order of protection that was built on withheld evidence and a disgraced officer’s word — and he is running out of time.
By Michael Phillips | Riptide Investigations
Every year on April 25, advocates light up social media with orange ribbons, share statistics about children kept from loving parents, and call on courts to take parental alienation seriously. The stories that anchor those campaigns tend to follow a recognizable shape: a parent fighting a custody battle, a young child caught in the middle, a family court ignoring the warning signs.
Marc Fishman’s story no longer fits that shape — and hasn’t for years.
His four children — Joanna, Jonah, Aidan, and Skye — are no longer young children. They are adults, or nearly so. College-age. Yet Marc remains under an active criminal order of protection, issued out of Westchester County Court in case 6293-2018, that he describes as a “lifetime order.” He has been fighting to vacate it for years. It has not been vacated. He has not spoken to his children since December 2018.
That is not a custody story anymore. That is the story of what successful parental alienation looks like when it has been cemented into the legal record — when the children have aged past the custody framework, but the machinery of separation keeps running anyway.
The Arrest That Built the Wall
On December 15, 2018, Marc Fishman arrived for a prepaid supervised visitation with his autistic son in New Rochelle, New York. He carried a 22-page court visitation order. He had paid $500 for an approved supervisor. His court-appointed disability aide was present. The supervisor had confirmed the visit in writing that morning.
He was arrested anyway.
The arresting officer, New Rochelle Police Officer Lane Schlesinger, claimed Marc had violated an order of protection. But a precinct video — obtained years later only through Marc’s federal lawsuit (19-cv-00265-NSR) — told a different story. At 12:05 p.m., Schlesinger was recorded telling Marc’s disability aide that Marc “had no malicious intent to commit a crime.” Two minutes later, at 12:07 p.m., he stated plainly: “I do not think Marc Fishman committed a crime.”
That video was never given to the defense. It was never shown to the jury. Marc was convicted.
In May 2024, the New York State Attorney General officially designated Schlesinger a “pattern misconduct” officer — the only Westchester officer to receive that designation — citing more than 40 civilian complaints and a documented record of falsifying evidence. Schlesinger was subsequently fired.
His conviction stands anyway. In July 2025, a motion to dismiss was denied despite all of it. As of November 2025, Marc’s case was before New York’s Court of Appeals (CLA 2025-1072), his application for a criminal leave to appeal assigned to a judge of that court. A 45-day jail sentence, ordered in September 2025, looms over all of it.
Meanwhile, the criminal order of protection — the one Marc has been fighting to vacate since at least February 2025 — remains in place.
The Order That Wasn’t Supposed to Last This Long
What most coverage of Marc’s case gets wrong — and what matters enormously on Parental Alienation Awareness Day — is the relationship between his criminal case and his family court case.
The criminal order of protection was tied to an arrest that occurred, on the record of the arresting officer’s own words, without a crime. It has been renewed and extended through years of prosecution that should have collapsed when the exculpatory video surfaced. Because the criminal case has never been resolved in Marc’s favor, the order has never been vacated. And because the order remains active, the wall between Marc and his children remains legally enforced.
This is the mechanism of court-assisted parental alienation that nobody draws on awareness day posters: a protective order, built on false premises and withheld evidence, that outlasts the custody framework, outlasts the children’s childhoods, and pursues a disabled father into his children’s adulthood.
Marc has said it plainly in his own filings: “The DA has criminalized disabled parenting.”
He is not wrong to say so. He was following a court-authorized visitation schedule when he was arrested. The officer who arrested him admitted he committed no crime. That evidence was buried. He has now been separated from his four children for over 2,700 days.
The DA has criminalized disabled parenting.
The System on Top of the System
Marc Fishman lives with a traumatic brain injury, tinnitus-related hearing impairment, cognitive occipital neuralgia, and post-concussion memory loss. He has two neurostimulators implanted in his chest. He has been fighting this case largely pro se.
A federal appeals court ruled in 2021 that he was entitled to real-time captioning as an ADA accommodation during his trial. The ruling came after he was already convicted — after years during which he could not hear witness testimony or fully participate in his own defense. The court that convicted him has never granted a retrial on that basis. Judge David Zuckerman has acknowledged the ADA ruling and proceeded anyway.
There is an additional conflict of interest that has never been publicly addressed: the Westchester court official who repeatedly denied Marc’s federally mandated ADA accommodations — Nancy Barry — now serves as Chief of Staff to the Westchester District Attorney, the same office still prosecuting him. The prosecutor’s office is overseen, in part, by someone whose prior decisions are directly implicated in Marc’s case.
Complaints filed with the Commission on Judicial Conduct have gone unanswered. LEMIO — the state’s law enforcement misconduct watchdog — initially omitted Marc’s case from its public database. The DA’s office has never acknowledged the Brady violations at the core of the conviction.
Still Fighting on Two Fronts
What makes Marc’s situation uniquely cruel is that he has been fighting on two separate legal tracks simultaneously — neither of which has given him what he is asking for.
On the criminal side: vacate the conviction, vacate the warrants, vacate the criminal order of protection, dismiss the charges. His February 2025 Order to Show Cause in the criminal case asked for exactly that. It has not been granted.
On the family court side: as recently as May 2025, a magistrate signed an Order to Show Cause in Solomon v. Fishman seeking to modify custody and reinstate visitation. Marc has alleged that his ex-wife engaged in judge shopping — having the case reassigned away from Judge Burke, who had signed an order acknowledging parental alienation concerns, to Judge Schauer, who had previously recused herself in 2018. That reassignment, Marc argues, was improper. The family court proceedings have continued without resolution.
He is also in poor health. In a May 2025 letter to the court, Marc wrote that he was “bleeding out of my front and rear with kidney stones and infection” and nursing a neurostimulator infection. He wrote: “I hope to be reunited with my 4 kids before I die.”
That sentence should stop anyone in their tracks. A father, disabled and sick, fighting two separate court systems simultaneously, has not seen his children since 2018 — and is writing, plainly, that he does not know how much time he has left.
“I hope to be reunited with my 4 kids before I die.”
What Parental Alienation Awareness Day Gets Wrong
The awareness campaign has done important work. But it tends to frame parental alienation as a family court problem — something that happens in custody disputes, to children who are young enough to be placed between two parents by a judge.
Marc’s case exposes a different infrastructure entirely: one where false criminal accusations, a compliant prosecution, denied disability accommodations, a disgraced officer’s uncontested testimony, and an order of protection built on withheld evidence combine to do something no custody order alone could accomplish. They create a legal wall that follows a parent and his children well past childhood. They ensure that by the time those children are adults, the story they have grown up inside — the story the legal record tells — is the one that was constructed for them in 2018.
That is what parental alienation looks like when the courts help build it.
What Needs to Happen
Marc Fishman’s legal team will argue — is arguing — that the suppressed audio and video exonerates him. They will argue that the ADA violations invalidate the conviction. They will argue that an officer the state itself called a ‘pattern liar’ cannot be the unchallenged foundation of a criminal prosecution.
They will argue the obvious. And the state, so far, has not listened.
The Protect New Yorkers Amendment that Marc has proposed — a narrow addition to the LEMIO statute requiring structured review of convictions built on the conduct of officers the AG has designated as pattern misconduct offenders — would close the specific gap his case has exposed. It would not mandate reversals. It would mandate a look. That is all.
Governor Hochul has been asked to intervene. She has not responded. The Commission on Judicial Conduct has been petitioned. It has not acted. The District Attorney’s office has been presented with the Brady violations at the center of this case. It has not corrected the record.
Today is Parental Alienation Awareness Day.
Joanna, Jonah, Aidan, and Skye Fishman are college-age. Their father has not spoken to them since 2018. He is sick. He is still fighting. The order of protection that was built on a false arrest is still in place.
Be aware of that.
Marc Fishman’s case is documented at NewRochellePoliceAbuse.com. Riptide and Father & Co. have reported on his case as part of ongoing coverage of institutional failures in New York’s family and criminal courts. To support Marc, visit his GoFundMe or sign the petition at NewRochellePoliceAbuse.com.
Sources: Case 6293-2018, Westchester County Court; Fishman v. City of New Rochelle, 19-cv-00265-NSR (S.D.N.Y.); People v. Fishman, CLA 2025-1072, N.Y. Court of Appeals; S
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