Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Litigation Abuse: The Assault That Comes With a Docket Number

Researchers can measure what years of false reports in courtrooms, police files, and DCYF records do to a person, male abuse survivors included. New Hampshire just vetoed its first small answer.

On July 15, Governor Kelly Ayotte vetoed House Bill 1565, the Legislature’s latest attempt to attach a penalty to knowingly false reports of child abuse. By the Union Leader’s count, the New Hampshire House has now passed some version of that idea five times and watched it die every time. The people with the most reason to notice are the ones living inside the pattern the veto leaves untouched: a protective-order petition that collapses at the hearing, a police report that goes nowhere, a DCYF call timed to a custody date, then another, and another, across years.

The pattern has a name, and it has a research literature. Sociologists Susan Miller and Nicole Smolter called it “paper abuse” in a 2011 study in Violence Against Women: frivolous filings, false child-abuse reports, and procedural maneuvers used to force contact, drain money, and keep a target tethered to an ex-partner through the courts. Psychologists Denise Hines, Emily Douglas, and Joshua Berger built a validated measure of the same conduct in 2015 and gave it a clinical label, legal and administrative aggression, in which one partner “manipulates the legal and other administrative systems” against the other, from false accusations of violence and child abuse to threats to take the children away.

Washington State wrote the phenomenon into law in 2020. Its Legislature found that court proceedings let an abuser reassert power long after a relationship ends, and that “the legal system unwittingly becomes another avenue that abusers exploit.” New Hampshire has no such finding on its books. What it has, after July 15, is the same set of open doors it had before.

Why every filing is bulletproof

Start with the courthouse. Under McGranahan v. Dahar, decided by the New Hampshire Supreme Court in 1979, statements made in the course of judicial proceedings are “absolutely privileged from liability in civil actions” so long as they are pertinent to the case. Pickering v. Frink added in 1983 that the privilege does not depend on the speaker’s good faith. The court applied the doctrine again as recently as 2025. McGranahan itself extended the shield to statements made to police and prosecutors during a criminal investigation. Translation: what someone writes about you in a petition, swears in an affidavit, or tells a detective in an active case cannot support a defamation suit in this state, even if it was a lie told on purpose.

Now the child-protection channel. RSA 169-C:31 grants anyone who reports suspected abuse in good faith immunity from civil and criminal liability, and New Hampshire law lets reporters stay anonymous. Both rules exist for a sound reason: the state wants people to call about children without fear. But the combination means a knowingly false report carries no dedicated penalty, arrives from a caller who may never be named, and lands in a confidential file the target cannot easily open. House Bill 1565 would have changed exactly that, creating a misdemeanor for knowingly false reports to DCYF and a civil claim for anyone harmed by one. That is the bill Ayotte vetoed.

What remains is scattered and expensive. Harkeem v. Adams, from 1977, lets a judge shift attorney’s fees onto a party who litigates in bad faith, and New Hampshire courts hold inherent power to rein in vexatious litigants. Those remedies arrive at the end of a case, for targets who can fund the fight that long. Washington’s abusive-litigation statute, RCW 26.51, goes further and lets a judge screen future filings, but only where a court has already found the filer committed domestic violence against the target. A survivor who never obtained that finding, or who was mislabeled as the aggressor, cannot reach the tool at all.

The men the system reads backward

Anyone can be the target. The federal numbers say men are targets far more often than the public conversation admits: in the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey for 2016–2017, 1 in 4 U.S. men, 26.3 percent, reported contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime. The CDC lists post-traumatic stress symptoms among the impacts male victims most commonly report.

What happens when those men ask for help is where the litigation-abuse story turns male-specific. In Douglas and Hines’s 2011 national study of 302 men who sought help after partner violence, published in the Journal of Family Violence, roughly two-thirds of the men who called domestic-violence hotlines said they were told the hotline served only women, and about a third said hotline staff treated them as the batterer. Some were referred to batterer-intervention programs as the price of getting any service. In an earlier help-seeking sample by the same team, 67.2 percent of the men said their partner had falsely accused them of hitting or beating her. The legal-and-administrative-aggression scale was built from those men’s accounts. The items read like a case file: she called the police and said I hit her, she reported me to child protection, she threatened to make sure I never saw the kids.

Honesty requires the other half of the data. In the largest study of intentionally false maltreatment reports, Canadian researchers Nico Trocmé and Nicholas Bala examined 7,672 child-welfare investigations and found only about 4 percent were judged intentionally fabricated; the rate tripled to 12 percent inside custody and access disputes, and the most frequent intentional false reporters in that data were anonymous callers and noncustodial parents, usually fathers. Most reports are made in good faith. Most petitions describe real fear. False reporting is nobody’s gender; it is a weapon that goes to whoever holds the upper hand. What is not neutral is the reception. When the weapon points at a man, the filing lands on a system that research shows is already primed to read him as the aggressor, and every screening decision after that tilts the same way.

What years of it does to a person

The damage is measurable. In a companion study, the Hines and Douglas research team found that legal and administrative aggression predicted higher levels of post-traumatic stress and depression symptoms in male victims even after controlling for the physical violence itself, and that threatened and actual legal aggression were both associated with worse outcomes for the men’s children. Psychologists Carly Smith and Jennifer Freyd gave a name to the second layer of that injury in a 2014 American Psychologist paper: institutional betrayal, the distinct harm done when the institutions a person depends on fail him or become the instrument used against him. Being hurt by a partner is one wound. Watching a courthouse, a police file, and a child-protection agency repeat the accusation in official ink, year after year, is a second wound, and the research finds it compounds the first.

Then there is the paper itself. Dismissed petitions, unfounded assessments, and closed police reports do not vanish. They sit in court indexes and agency case files, and every new judge, officer, guardian ad litem, or caseworker reads the pile before meeting the man. The legal system offers dismissal; it offers no form for reputational exoneration. Washington’s Legislature named the financial half of the harm plainly: even a meritless action forces the target to burn time and money answering it, which is the point. Retainers first, then a guardian ad litem’s bill on top. Ruin is a feature of the tactic, and the tactic is legal.

One line for anyone reading this from inside it: the National Domestic Violence Hotline, 1-800-799-7233, serves victims of every gender, around the clock, and by 2017 was already fielding roughly 12,000 calls a year from men.

Five tries, one veto

House Bill 1565 came from Representative James Spillane, a Deerfield Republican who has told legislators he has been a target of false reports himself and who told the New Hampshire Bulletin that “we’ve got a problem with people weaponizing the system.” The House passed it 181–141 in March. The Senate passed it on May 14 after bolting on unrelated Medicaid and school-building provisions. House Children and Family Law Chairman Debra DeSimone put the case bluntly: “There is a vengeful, revengeful false reporting climate out there.” Mothers who described being falsely reported testified for the bill too. This was never a men-only grievance.

The opposition deserves its full weight. Representative Alicia Gregg, a Nashua Democrat, pointed at the bill’s structural hole: reporters can stay anonymous, so “every bad actor can simply stay anonymous” and the statute would punish nobody it was written for. The state social workers’ chapter and New Hampshire Legal Assistance registered opposition. A Concord Monitor op-ed from a childhood sexual abuse survivor argued the bill risked chilling real reports and noted that research finds intentionally false child-sex-abuse allegations rare. On the rarity point, the Canadian data above says she is right.

Ayotte’s veto message split the difference: she agrees with the goal of holding false reporters accountable, but after consulting Attorney General John Formella concluded “this bill has technical flaws and could have unintended consequences.” The override vote comes this fall, and at 181–141 the House sits well short of the two-thirds it would need. So the practical scoreboard reads: 2025’s House Bill 243 passed both chambers and died in conference; 2026’s House Bill 1565 passed both chambers and died by pen. Five passes. Zero laws.

What would fix it without chilling a single real report

Three moves, none of which touches a good-faith caller. First, redraft the false-report penalty to the Attorney General’s stated objections and refile it in January; the Governor put her agreement with the goal in writing, and she should be held to it. Second, close the anonymity hole the way earlier bills proposed, by keeping reporter identity confidential with the state rather than nonexistent, unsealable only on a finding of bad faith. Third, give New Hampshire judges a pattern tool modeled on Washington’s abusive-litigation docket, drafted gender-neutral and reachable by targets who never won a prior finding, so a court can finally look at fifteen filings as one campaign instead of fifteen coincidences. And the state should count: DHHS publishes no accessible aggregate on how many reports it screens out, deems unfounded, or refers for review. Granite State Report has prepared a Right-to-Know request to DHHS for those numbers.

A man who survives abuse in this state and then survives years of it retold under oath learns something the statute books confirm. The first assault had a name and a penalty. The second one has a docket number and a privilege. Until New Hampshire writes the second one down, the courthouse stays open for business it was never built to do.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was checked against the listed sources before publication; see the fact-check table. The General Court website blocks automated retrieval, so RSA and bill-text links were confirmed through the state site’s search index and the New Hampshire Bulletin’s direct citations. Rows marked ATTRIBUTED rest on named outlets or peer-reviewed summaries rather than a primary document opened for this piece. This article describes a documented pattern; it makes no claim about any specific New Hampshire case or person beyond the sourced legislative record. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.