On Parental Alienation Awareness Day, Rhonda Reyna’s story reveals how the “alienation” label gets used against the parents it was meant to protect.
By Michael Phillips | Riptide Investigations
Parental alienation, as a concept, was designed to describe something real and harmful: a parent deliberately poisoning a child’s relationship with their other parent, using the child as a weapon in a custody war.
But in courtrooms across California, the label has been flipped. It is increasingly deployed not against manipulative parents, but against protective ones — mothers and fathers who raised legitimate safety concerns, only to find those concerns recast as hostility, interference, or “alienating behavior.”
Rhonda Reyna knows this story from the inside.
Rhonda is a former criminalist for the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s crime lab. She is trained to read evidence. She is also a mother who has spent years separated from her daughter, Brooke — not because she harmed her, but because the institutions that were supposed to protect them both failed, systematically and catastrophically.
What Brooke Said
There are recordings. Professionally certified transcripts exist of conversations in which Brooke, as a young child, described what life in her father’s home looked like: the stepmother becoming violent when drunk, throwing objects, bleeding from a finger injury, screaming. A door barricaded. Brooke hiding on the top bunk. Her own words: “I hate when she gets drunk because she becomes violent. It’s not normal.”
These are not the words of a child coached to resist a parent. They are the words of a frightened child describing a specific, detailed, emotionally coherent account of domestic violence.
And yet: these disclosures were never reported to Child Protective Services. They were never shared with the District Attorney. They were never presented to the family court judge. They were never meaningfully acted on by Brooke’s own court-appointed defense attorney.
Instead, Brooke’s fear was relabeled. Her refusal to go with her father — she once ran from campus to the church across the street in a panic — was characterized not as a trauma response, but as evidence that her mother was interfering with the custody arrangement.
The school principal told her, “Be brave, baby. Be brave.” A minister present told Brooke that if her mother kept her home, she could lose custody entirely. The message delivered to a terrified child was: your fear doesn’t matter. The court order does.
When Protective Behavior Becomes a Criminal Charge
Rhonda had been doing what protective parents do. She documented. She reported to the sheriff, to County Counsel, to the State Department, to CORA, the domestic violence outreach organization. She warned that Brooke’s father posed a flight risk — that he might take her daughter to New Zealand and not return. She filed, she called, she wrote letters.
Deputy Jim Christman of the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office investigated one of the incidents and cleared her. His report concluded that no crime had occurred, that Brooke was safe and calm, that Rhonda was appropriate and capable, and that Brooke went home with her mother. It is the only law enforcement report based on real-time, in-person observation.
It was ignored.
What followed was a criminal charge, a coerced plea, and a family court proceeding that absorbed the criminal record as fact — never stopping to ask how it was created or what evidence had been omitted. The exonerating reports, the domestic violence disclosures, the pattern of documented warnings: none of it made it into the record in any meaningful way.
Rhonda accepted a plea without being informed of the exculpatory evidence her own attorney had failed to obtain. San Mateo County’s Private Defender Program, a contracted public defense system, did not investigate the case, did not interview witnesses, and did not challenge the DA’s narrative. What it did do was pass that narrative forward — into family court, into the custody determination, into years of separation.
“I Haven’t Seen Her”
On Mother’s Day 2025, Rhonda addressed the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors. Her words were measured, but the grief underneath them was not.
“I had to celebrate my birthday last weekend without her, and this weekend is Mother’s Day, and I haven’t seen her.”
She was not asking for sympathy. She was asking three elected women — mothers themselves — to explain how the county planned to reunite her with her daughter. She got no answer.
That is the part the “parental alienation” framing tends to obscure: the question of who is actually being separated from whom, and why. In Rhonda’s case, a child who ran toward her mother was forcibly removed. A mother who documented danger was criminally charged. A system that ignored every warning now claims it acted in the child’s best interest.
What This Day Is Actually For
Parental Alienation Awareness Day exists, in its best form, to protect children from being used as instruments in adult disputes — to ensure that manufactured conflict doesn’t sever bonds that matter.
Rhonda Reyna’s story is not an exception to that mission. It is its most urgent test case.
Because when the “alienation” label can be applied to the parent who was right about the danger — when it becomes a tool to silence the protective parent and reward the one the child was afraid of — it stops serving children entirely. It becomes a mechanism of harm.
Brooke told adults she was scared. She ran. She hid. She cried. She said, “BYE MOMMY” as she was dragged to a car, and she prayed silently to God.
The system called her mother the problem.
Rhonda Reyna’s case is the subject of an ongoing investigative series in Riptide examining failures in California’s indigent defense system and family court. The federal civil rights lawsuit 23-cv-03121-SI contains the full case record.
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