By Michael Phillips | Father & Co.
Nobody counted them. That’s the first thing worth saying plainly. There is no federal database, no state registry, no court tracking code for “parenting time lost because a co-parent invoked COVID.” When historians and policy researchers eventually try to tally the domestic cost of the pandemic response, they will find death counts, unemployment figures, learning-loss data — and a custody-and-family-court hole where the numbers should be. The absence of a count is not proof the damage was small. It’s proof that nobody in a position to count it thought parents were worth counting.
The absence of a count is not proof the damage was small. It’s proof that nobody in a position to count it thought parents were worth counting.
What we do have is a diary, newly public, and a pile of court and research data that’s been sitting largely unassembled for five years.
What the Diary Actually Shows
Sen. Rand Paul released more than 1,000 pages of what he says are Anthony Fauci’s near-daily personal diary entries, spanning December 2019 through December 2022. The portrait that’s emerged this week is not primarily one of a man wrestling with uncertainty — it’s one preoccupied with his own celebrity while the machinery of shutdown ran. In May 2020, as the death toll climbed, Fauci wrote that his fame had become “explosive and really unimaginable,” noting he might be the most recognized person in the country. He tracked his own press coverage day to day, and cataloged the merchandise piling up in his name — bottle openers, magnets, mugs, “St. Fauci” prayer candles, a replica of his old high school basketball jersey, and an official Fauci bobblehead that raised $100,000 for healthcare-worker charities. Diary pages later published alongside Paul’s release show him listing the attention with a kind of running disbelief: “Petition to name me ‘Sexiest Man Alive’; video games named after me; Fauci Bobblehead,” he wrote, “and on and on.” He groused good-naturedly about being asked onto Dancing with the Stars. None of that alone indicts a public health response. Vanity under a spotlight is a very human failure, not a policy crime.
What matters more for this publication’s purposes is a specific contradiction the diary exposes. In a 2022 television interview, Fauci said publicly that he’d played no role in school closures. His own March 2020 diary entry says otherwise: he describes personally working New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and California Governor Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff toward closing schools, bars, and restaurants, based on his television appearances and direct calls. Whatever the merits of those closures at the time, the gap between the public disclaimer and the private account is a receipts-driven story in its own right — a senior official shaping the single decision that did more than any other to strand parents in custody limbo, then later denying he’d had a hand in it.
That distinction — between setting policy and setting the informational climate that judges, school boards, and manipulative co-parents leaned on — is the thread this piece needs to pull, because it’s the one that actually explains what happened to families.
What Happened to Custody Cases
Family courts didn’t stay open. In New York City, the Family Court spent roughly nine months — March through December 2020 — treating custody, visitation, guardianship, and support matters as “nonessential,” freezing them regardless of whether they’d been filed before the pandemic began; a joint report from the city bar association and the Fund for Modern Courts later concluded most families had “virtually no access” to the court system during that stretch. Connecticut’s pending child-custody caseload grew from roughly 1,400 to 1,900 cases over less than a year, while pending divorce cases climbed from about 4,300 to 6,500. A national survey of state and local courts found the average case backlog rose to over 1,270 cases, with a third of responding courts reporting backlog growth above 5%.
Behind those numbers were individual judges making individual calls, often with no real precedent to guide them and no consistent standard across counties, let alone states. In Geauga County, Ohio, juvenile court judge Timothy Grendell said openly that fifteen mothers in his courtroom alone had used the virus as a pretext to interfere with the other parent’s court-ordered time — his word for it was that they were trying to “mess with” their exes. That same judge, according to ProPublica’s reporting, threatened a mother with contempt for getting her own child a COVID test, convinced the pandemic itself was overblown. Two judges, two entirely different failure modes, both enabled by the same vacuum: no binding federal or state standard for what counted as a legitimate COVID-based objection to a custody exchange, and no consequence for judges who filled that vacuum with their own priors.
Attorneys elsewhere described the same dynamic from the other side of the bench. Family law practitioners reported cases of COVID being used by a “gatekeeping parent” specifically to deny timesharing — a tactic distinct from a genuine safety disagreement, aimed at leverage rather than protection. Multiple state courts had to issue standing orders stating plainly that COVID-19 alone was not grounds to withhold a child, which would not have been necessary if the underlying behavior weren’t common enough to require a blanket rule.
The Violence That Rode Alongside It
The custody fallout didn’t happen in isolation from a second, uglier trend: shutdown orders coincided with a documented rise in domestic violence. A meta-analysis by the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice, reviewing roughly a dozen U.S. studies drawing on police call logs, crime reports, emergency hotline registries, and health records, found domestic violence incidents rose 8.1% nationally after stay-at-home orders took effect. In the UK, the domestic violence charity Refuge reported hotline calls jumped 200% in the spring of 2020 compared with pre-lockdown volume.
The honest caveat belongs here too: the research isn’t unanimous. Findings varied by city and by data source — some jurisdictions saw domestic violence calls fall even as others saw sharp spikes, and researchers still can’t fully explain the variation. What’s consistent across nearly every study is the mechanism, even where the topline number moves: confinement with an abuser, economic stress, and the collapse of normal escape routes — a coworker who’d notice a bruise, a school that would flag a bruise on a child — removed the informal safety net that normally surfaces abuse before it reaches a hotline or a police log. For a parent already in a coercive relationship, “safer at home” was, for many, the opposite of true — and the same court backlog that stalled ordinary custody disputes also stalled the restraining orders and emergency custody petitions that were supposed to be the escape valve.
The Feedback Loop Nobody Names
There’s a mechanism in family law that rarely gets discussed outside custody attorneys’ offices, and it matters here because the pandemic made it far more common: unemployment doesn’t just hurt a parent financially. It can be used against them in court. Family law guidance is explicit that judges weigh whether a parent’s job loss is temporary or long-term, expect an actively documented job search, and can impute income to a parent they believe isn’t looking hard enough — meaning the parent’s own hardship becomes evidence against their fitness or stability, litigated on someone else’s timeline. A parent who loses work fighting a custody battle enters the next hearing structurally weaker than the one who didn’t, regardless of why the job was lost.
That’s a closed loop, not a bad stretch: a shutdown-era claim or a manufactured conflict drains a parent’s time, money, and legal standing; the resulting unemployment or underemployment is then read by the court as a separate strike against them; the weaker position invites further pressure from a co-parent or family members who sense the leverage; the stress compounds. Long-term unemployment on its own is independently linked to increased rates of anxiety, depression, and family strain — the mechanism doesn’t need bad faith on anyone’s part to do damage, though bad faith accelerates it considerably when it’s present.
The psychological toll — including PTSD, which shows up repeatedly in accounts from parents who lived through prolonged high-conflict custody litigation layered onto pandemic isolation — belongs in the same accounting as the missed parenting time. It’s harder to put a number on than a backlog statistic, and that’s exactly why it tends to disappear from the record: there’s no docket entry for a parent’s mental health, only for the case.
Who Actually Pulled the Levers
The mechanism of harm to parents ran mostly through state and local actors.
This is where the piece has to hold itself to the same standard it applies to everyone it covers.
Fauci did not write custody law, and no family court judge was operating under his direct orders. The people who actually froze courthouses, postponed hearings, and left families in procedural limbo for the better part of a year were governors, state court administrators, and local judges — some of whom, as Grendell’s docket shows, brought their own political convictions about the pandemic into custody rulings in both directions. But the diary now on the record shows Fauci had more direct influence over the triggering event — the school and business closures — than he later admitted, and used that influence through informal channels rather than formal ones, which is precisely the kind of arrangement that makes accountability difficult to pin down after the fact. Both things are true at once: the mechanism of harm to parents ran mostly through state and local actors, and the man now facing a Senate hearing this week helped set the climate that got them there, while publicly denying he had.
Tracking coercive misuse of public health guidance in family court would have required family courts to treat parental alienation and gatekeeping as a category worth watching in the first place.
The Fractures That Outlasted the Virus
The custody courtroom wasn’t the only place families broke. It’s just the place where the breaking got documented.
The custody courtroom wasn’t the only place families broke. It’s just the place where the breaking got documented. Family therapists and researchers have been tracking a broader phenomenon since 2020: relatives, previously close, who stopped speaking over disagreements about masking, vaccination, or how seriously to take the virus in the first place — and who, five years later, still aren’t speaking. Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer’s 2020 national survey of roughly 1,300 American adults — the basis for his book Fault Lines — found 27% estranged from a close family member. The trend has moved in one direction since: a 2025 YouGov re-survey of about 4,400 adults found the figure had climbed to 38%, a jump of more than ten percentage points in five years covering exactly the pandemic-and-aftermath window this piece is about. One U.K. clinical psychologist described the underlying dynamic bluntly: lockdown stripped away the ordinary social contact — a coworker, a friend, a night out — that would normally let people air a disagreement and have it gently challenged before it hardened into a grudge. Confined instead to the same house, or cut off from everyone except one increasingly rigid position, opinions calcified with no outside pressure to soften them.
A parent fighting for time with a child rarely fights alone or in isolation from the rest of the family.
That matters here because it’s the same mechanism operating one level up from the custody fights this piece has focused on. A co-parent’s family taking sides, a sibling turning violent, relatives who go silent rather than sit across a table from someone whose pandemic politics they can’t forgive — none of that shows up in a court docket, but it’s very often the surrounding weather that makes an individual custody dispute so much harder to survive. A parent fighting for time with a child rarely fights alone or in isolation from the rest of the family; when the extended family itself has split along the same fault line as the custody case, the parent loses the support system that would normally help them absorb the fight. The estrangement isn’t a footnote to the custody story. For a lot of families, it’s the same story, just measured on a longer table than a judge’s docket.
The Cost That Wasn’t Measured
There is no make-up weekend for a missed first day of kindergarten.
None of that makes the damage to individual families less real. Parents lost months, sometimes years, of parenting time that courts later had no mechanism to fully restore — there is no make-up weekend for a missed first day of kindergarten. Careers were disrupted by parents fighting procedural battles in courts running at a fraction of capacity, with mediators unavailable and hearings pushed indefinitely. Coercive control that already existed in high-conflict separations found a new, official-sounding vocabulary to hide behind. And parents who did everything right — who took every precaution and could prove it — still lost time to a system with no fast lane for “this claim is pretextual” and no way to reverse the harm once the window had closed.
The people this happened to will never be a clean statistic, because no one built the instrument to measure them.
The people this happened to will never be a clean statistic, because no one built the instrument to measure them. That’s not a bureaucratic oversight. Tracking coercive misuse of public health guidance in family court would have required family courts to treat parental alienation and gatekeeping as a category worth watching in the first place — the same institutional blind spot this publication has documented all year in custody cases that have nothing to do with COVID.
The pandemic didn’t create that blind spot. It just proved how much it could cost.
Sources: Diary material and Sen. Rand Paul’s release are drawn from reporting by Forbes (“Fauci’s Diary: What He Said About Trump, His Own Fame And COVID Restrictions,” July 27, 2026) and from diary excerpts published by the Rational Ground newsletter (“Anthony Fauci’s Attention Ledger”), with additional confirmation from NPR, KPBS, GPB, and The Washington Post’s coverage of the same release. The Geauga County, Ohio custody case is drawn from ProPublica’s investigation into Judge Timothy Grendell. New York City Family Court data comes from the joint report by the New York City Bar Association and the Fund for Modern Courts, “The Impact of COVID-19 on the New York City Family Court,” with additional confirmation from NBC New York’s coverage. Connecticut caseload figures are from NBC Connecticut’s reporting on the state’s family court backlog. National court backlog data is from Thomson Reuters’ 2021 State & Local Courts survey. Domestic violence figures are from the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice’s meta-analysis (Council on Criminal Justice, “New Analysis Shows 8% Increase in U.S. Domestic Violence Incidents Following Pandemic Stay-At-Home Orders”), with UK hotline data from Refuge via TIME magazine, and city-level variation from a peer-reviewed study on domestic violence and firearm-involved incidents in five U.S. cities. Family-court treatment of unemployment is drawn from family law practice guidance (Bean, Kinney & Korman; The Geller Family Law Firm) and general research on the effects of long-term unemployment (CNBC, EBSCO Research Starters). Family estrangement figures are from Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer’s 2020 national survey (published in Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them) and a 2025 YouGov re-survey reported by Seoul Economic Daily. All figures should be independently verified against primary sources before publication.
Have a COVID-era custody story — parenting time denied, a claim you couldn’t get a court to weigh, a case that never resolved? Father & Co. is tracking these patterns. Reach out.
Keep Father & Co. Free
Father & Co. exists to support parents navigating separation, custody, and systems that are often confusing, isolating, or overwhelming. This work is grounded in lived experience, careful research, and respect for the real stakes families face.
If this article helped you feel less alone, better informed, or more grounded, reader support helps keep these resources free and available to others who need them.
Need help reviewing or organizing court or formal documents?
Father & Co. offers non-legal document review and organization for people representing themselves. This includes clarity, structure, neutral tone, and timeline organization — not legal advice or representation.
Have a story, experience, or resource to share?
Submissions are reviewed with care and discretion. We respect privacy and handle sensitive information responsibly.
Discover more from Fatherand.Co
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
