עורך דין ג'רמי שטרן Jeremy Stern Attorney at law

19/08/2026

Somewhere in the last few years, my clients stopped thinking of me as someone with office hours.

I have been practicing law in Israel since 2009, and the change did not arrive on a particular day. It crept in. A message sent at midnight now carries the same expectation of urgency as one sent at noon.

I do not resent it. These are people in crisis, and they want to know what is happening in real time, not at the next scheduled call.

Then there is a local wrinkle that clients abroad never see coming.

Israeli Courts are on recess for most of the summer and again around the spring and fall holidays. Add the 60-day stay that comes with the mandatory dispute resolution process, and a client who decides in June to get divorced may not see the inside of a courtroom until well into the fall.

Meanwhile, the client is checking their phone.
Nothing is moving on the docket, and silence gets read as neglect. So I explain the calendar at the first meeting now, before the client fills the empty weeks with their own theory about what my office is doing.

The second shift is harder.

Everyone arrives already informed, and sometimes that is wonderful. A client who understands the basic structure of Israeli divorce law walks in ready to have a real conversation, and we skip the first hour and get to strategy.

But plenty of what people read online is wrong, outdated, or written for a different country entirely. Part of my job now is unwinding what someone has already decided is the law. That takes trust. Nobody enjoys hearing that the research they did at 2 a.m. while their marriage was ending was worthless.

And the client is rarely neutral about it. By the time they walk in, the thing they read has usually become the thing they are hoping for. Correcting the law and disappointing the person are the same conversation.

The most common version of this has an American shape. There is no civil divorce for Jewish couples in Israel; whatever else happens in the Family Court, the marriage ends in the Rabbinical Court, with a get. And which court hears the property and support claims can turn on who filed first, a race with no American equivalent that clients tend to discover right after they have lost it.

Child support is the one I see most. Plenty of English pages still describe the rule as it stood before 2017, when the Supreme Court held in Case 919/15 that in shared parenting arrangements support is calculated by reference to both parents' relative incomes and time with the children. A client quoting the old rule is not inventing anything; he is quoting a page that nobody ever bothered to update.

Outdated is more dangerous than wrong. Obviously wrong information gets corrected in five minutes. Information that was accurate ten years ago sounds right, reads right, and survives the conversation.

One more practical cost, because it is worth stating plainly. A client firing off messages to me at midnight is usually also firing off messages to their spouse at midnight. For me it is a nuisance. Those messages to their spouse are poison in Court.

Assume everything you write will one day be read aloud in Court by someone who wants you to lose.

So no, I am not telling clients to stay off the internet. That advice was useless when the search engine was the problem, and it is worse than useless now that a chatbot will produce a confident, fluent, well-organised answer about Israeli family law in four seconds. Confident and fluent is exactly the danger. The old bad information looked like a stranger on a forum. The new bad information looks like advice.

Here is what I tell clients instead. Bring it in. Print it, forward it, read it to me.

Before you do, make the thing work harder. Ask it which Israeli statute or which Court it is relying on, and treat an answer that cannot name one as worthless. Ask it to argue the other side of your case, because the version that flatters you is the version you will remember. Ask it what it does not know about your file.

Used that way, it does not hand you answers. It hands you better questions, and better questions are what make a first meeting worth what it costs.

The longer version, including what I think none of this technology will be doing any time soon, is here: https://jeremystern.law/when-the-algorithm-meets-the-courtroom-thoughts-on-technology-and-family-law/

12/08/2026

Eight years in the rabbinical court. Thousands of pages of orders, appeals and petitions.

Erased in one afternoon.

A husband filed for divorce in Tel Aviv in 2018 and joined custody, property and support to the claim. The family lived in Germany. The children were born there and never lived anywhere else.

Last month the Supreme Court ruled the rabbinical court never had jurisdiction, which means every decision in the file is void. Everything except the get itself.

The lesson for Israelis abroad: a passport, a chuppah in Jerusalem and a plan to come back someday won't keep your case in an Israeli rabbinical court.

Full breakdown here:

03/08/2026

Roger Federer played 1,526 singles matches in his career and won just under 80 percent of them. What share of the individual points do you think he won? The answer will be the key to succeeding in any litigation, especially divorce litigation.

Federer gave the commencement address at Dartmouth College, in which he revealed that he only won 54% of points, yet he won 80% of the matches. So slightly less than half of everything he ever did on a tennis court was a failure, and he converted that margin into winning four matches out of every five.

The distance between 54 and 80 is not a distance of talent but endurance.

Now to to divofce cases: If your expectations come from American courtroom drama, adjust them now. An Israeli case opens with a mandatory dispute resolution period before anyone can file. Hearings are then set months apart, and the Courts sit in recess for much of the summer and around the spring and autumn holidays. Bring in a social worker's report, an expert, and in many cases a Rabbinical Court running in parallel on the divorce itself, and two or three years is an unremarkable timetable rather than evidence that something has gone wrong.

The person who comes out of a long case in good shape is very rarely the one who was most impressive in month one but the one with the endurance to last to month 20. Don't give up in the second set because you didn't realize this from the start.

https://jeremystern.law/from-the-tennis-court-to-the-family-court/

31/07/2026

A Jewish mother brought her two Jewish sons to Israel, argued Russian antisemitism, and an Israeli Family Court sent them back to Moscow.

That's the ruling Judge Tomer Shalem handed down on July 28, 2026 in V.Sh. v. N.Sh. (case 46580-06-26). The boys are 11 and 9, and they've held Israeli citizenship since 2019. They go back within 10 days. Their mother pays 50,000 NIS in costs.

Here's how it happened.

The parents divorced in Moscow in 2024. The mother told the court there was nothing to fight about, and attached the father's written declaration to prove it. That declaration said the boys would live with her until adulthood, in the father's Moscow apartment, at an address it spelled out.

That address decided the case.

On May 2, 2026 she messaged him that she and the boys had gone on a trip with friends. The next day he asked whether they were still at the summer house. Her answer: "Privet. We are with the children in Israel." She added that she meant to stay.

Her defense was that she was the custodial parent, so what rights could she possibly have breached? Wrong question. Under Article 3, what counts is whether the father held the right to refuse permission for the boys to leave the country. He did. Nobody had ever taken it away from him.

The rest collapsed just as quickly. The boys were born in Moscow and had never lived anywhere else. School, football, reading club, pediatrician, all Moscow. The school year ended on May 26 and she pulled them out on May 2. If the move was planned and agreed, why not wait three weeks?

The war and the antisemitism came up in summations. She had lived in Moscow through four and a half years of that war without once acting afraid. The judge said the fear was born after she landed here.

What she actually needed was his written consent to relocate, back in 2024, while he wanted the property point closed and still had something to trade. She took custody instead. She already had custody.

Expect more of these as the aliyah wave out of Russia continues. If the other parent hasn't agreed in writing, get advice before you book anything.

See my full article at https://jeremystern.law/from-russia-with-love/

27/07/2026

Your AI Doesn’t Know Your Judge.
Don’t Let It Run Your Case.

Clients are walking into first meetings with polished documents. Color-coded, confident, full of strategy. They didn’t get them from a lawyer. They got them from a chatbot at 11 p.m. after three sleepless nights.
A lot of what they bring is genuinely useful. The most confident parts are almost always the worst.
What AI is actually good at
Divorce is an administrative mess. Bank statements, messages across four apps, receipts nobody saved, a pension nobody understands.

A chatbot can:

Sort years of statements into a spending summary
Build a clean chronology from messy threads
Soften an angry midnight message into four neutral sentences

That last one alone can save a case. A client who arrives with organized documents is not paying me to create them. I’m not sorry about that.

Where it comes apart

Litigation is not rules applied to facts. It is rules applied to facts in a particular room, in front of a particular judge, against a particular opponent, on a particular day.
A lawyer with real local experience knows things no model has ever read:

This judge reads the last page of an affidavit first

That lawyer settles on the steps every time — or never settles at all

What the other side is actually afraid of (not what they’re demanding)

Which expert the court still respects and which one it has stopped believing

None of this is written down. It is acquired by standing in the same rooms for years. No amount of prompting creates it.

The confidence problem

The machine does not say “I don’t know your judge.”
It answers the pension question and the “should I reject the offer” question in the exact same fluent, authoritative tone. An exhausted, frightened person has no way to tell the difference.
These systems are also agreeable by design. Tell it you’re being treated unfairly and it will agree. The result is predictable: clients arrive anchored to a number and a plan that software spent hours validating. The first hour of our relationship is spent unwinding it — at my hourly rate.
What I recommend

Use AI for the past, not the future. Chronologies, summaries, document indexes — yes. Strategy — no.
Bring the output to your lawyer. Say you used AI so it can be checked.
Notice when the tone shifts from organizing facts to validating anger. Close it.
Never send anything it drafted to the other side without your lawyer seeing it first.
Verify every legal claim and every citation. These systems invent authority that sounds real.

The distinction that matters:

AI is excellent at telling you what happened.
It is poor at telling you what to do about it — because that depends almost entirely on people it has never met, in a room it has never been in.
Let it organize.
Do not let it advise.

19/03/2024

The battery of psychodiagnostics tests enable a trained psychologist to pe*****te the mind and soul of the person being tested and reveal a treasure trove of information about that person. The tests are thorough and can be taxing and usually require at least two sessions over two days. Beyond these tools, the psychologist will note other aspects of the meeting with the patient: did they arrive on time? How were they dressed and was it seasonally-appropriate? Is their tone and volume of voice appropriate?

Once the psychologist has the data from the tests, they will sit and process the scores and come up with a personality and intelligence profile based upon the results. In my experience, psychodiagnostic report are extremely accurate; I have had clients tell me that they were shocked how someone could understand them with minimal personal interaction. In other cases, the psychologist unearthed buried secrets that the person being test had forgotten or not known about.

05/03/2024

It has been quite a while since I last wrote for Facebook. In my last post, I ended with a teaser
for my next post, saying I would discuss that tests that are commonly used and the gender
issues in psychological evaluations. Since I practice in Israel, I’ll stick to the kinds of tests
commonly used here.

A report will include psychodiagnostic evaluations of both parents and of the children,
meetings with the parents separately and possibly together, and meetings with each parent
and child to see how they interact. The psychologist might also make a home visit to see the
children and parents in a natural setting. A psychodiagnostic evaluation is a report based
upon a series of interviews (structured, clinical interviews) and tests, including TAT, MMPI-
2, Rorschach (still used in Israel), Wais-III, and HTP.

08/09/2022

עו״ד גרמי שטרן
In my last post I promised a discussion of the dos and don’ts of using psychological evaluations. As I wrote psychological evaluations are very useful and possibly indispensable in custody cases. It’s important to know how they work so that they are used properly and not abused.
The first thing – it might seem obvious, but it isn’t – is the identity and training of the psychologist doing the testing. Testing should be done by a clinical psychologist (in some case a psychologist with other specialties might be able to administer the test but those are rare). A clinical psychologist has undergone training in administering, scoring, and evaluating psychological testing. A regular psychologist might be intuitive, might be a good therapist, might have a good understanding of human nature, but won’t know how to properly administer score, and evaluate the tests.
Second thing to look for is clinical psychologist who has many years of training. While the tests are objective, the proper interpretation of the results depends a lot on the experience of the evaluator. For example, clinical psychologists fresh out of school and having just received their license might have limited experience with certain cultural groups and misunderstand the result of the testing. An example from my law practice was a case where an evaluation was done on children from an ultra-Orthodox Jewish background, the evaluator understood that the children’s limited vocabulary was not a sign of low intelligence issue or any kind of neglect on the parents’ part, but due to the fact that these children simply grew up in a different cultural framework then children not raised in a religious background. A clinical psychologist once discussed this issue with me, in particular regarding communities that live “off the grid” – specifically, the Beduin Arab community in Israel. She said that she had to administer the test to an individual with zero literacy, which is a challenge on its own as much of the testing requires reading and writing. But she had enough training to know how to handle such a case and, in fact, the person being evaluated turned out to be a genius (as indicated by the scoring).
In another instance the psychologist noted that the children used certain words to describe sexual behavior. In an non-Orthodox family, these words would not have been remarkable, (due to exposure of internet and social media), but in this context it was surprising due to these children’s sheltered background. These types of observations can easily be lost on a younger and less experienced psychologist. By contract, an experienced psychologist, even if they haven’t had experience with the community from which the person undergoing the evaluation comes from, will know to be on the lookout for cultural issues. The psychologist will know consult others who have such experience.
Another quality to look for is an evaluator without a political agenda. A psychologist who claims to be a victims’ rights advocate might not be as objective in evaluating someone who claims to be a victim, as opposed to a psychologist who doesn’t have political or social agendas.
Beyond the identity of the evaluator themselves and their qualifications, an important issue to be aware of is what tests are actually being administered. In a complex custody case I was involved with, we received the final report, and the psychologist wrote which tests he administered to the parents of the children.For some reason the mother was not given some of the tests. In my view the report was imbalanced and didn’t give any objective indication of the mother, which took away from the report’s validity.
It should be noted that psychological reports do not include the raw data and scoring, but one can ask the evaluator to send the scoring and tests to another psychologist so that they can evaluate the reports. This is often leads to discovering instances where the evaluator’s report did not jive with the actually results from the testing.
Reports should be read critically, paying attention what is said and what is not said. Often, a careful reading will uncover defects in the tests or results. So the psychologist who didn’t use the usual battery of tests – that is an easy one to spot. But that’s a simple error. How do you figure out where there are more nuanced? One thing to look for is a psychologist writing that a test was indeed administered, yet the report does not elaborate or describe anything about the results of that test. I saw a report where, regarding the father, the psychologist elaborated on the MMPI-II results, whereas for the mother, all he wrote was that the test results were valid. Presumably that the means the psychologist was glossing over something unflattering in the results or something he didn’t want to be revealed. In fact, when I sent the testing scores to another psychologist, they found serious personality issues in the mother. I once examined a report where the psychologist wrote the IQ scores for one parent but not for the other – even though both parents were given the test.

When it comes to custody evaluations, the question is what do the reports tell us? I once had a long conversation with a clinical psychologist who felt that the testing in custody cases wasn’t necessary, since anyways we need to get the parents to come to an agreement.
From my experience he was off the mark. If both parents were healthy, by definition, they would come to an agreement with need for the dispute to be adjudicated. The fact they cannot make a custody plan (and often mutual allegations of psychological issues) means we need some objectivity and that can only be achieved through the evaluations. This is especially the case when there are accusations of sexual abuse. For example, if one parent accuses the other of sexual abuse but the results show the accused has no sexual pathology, but the accuser has anxiety issues the psych reports can help the fact finder decide for the children. Alternatively, if the accusing parent’s testing comes out all clean and the other parent shows signs of a pathology the judge has a way out of the “he said she said” merry-go-round. Especially In high conflict cases, the evaluations give us some level of objectivity and get us out of the never-ending mudslinging accusations typical in such cases.
I’d like to draw a distinction between two types of high conflict cases. In some cases, one parent creates a high conflict situation for some kind of personal gain – usually financial. In those cases, the threat of sending the parties to evaluations can get that party to calm down and settle the case. In some cases, however, the parent believes their own delusion, and of course no report from a psychologist will dissuade them, but at least the fact finder will have the relevant information to make decisions. Much like depositions in regular civil cases, psychodiagnostics evaluations can help parties to come to an agreement and if not, at least clear the path for the court to make the right decision.
In my next post I will get into some of the specifics of the testing that is done and issues that come up with the testing and the differences between men and women.

עורך דין ג'רמי שטרן, עורך דין. תחומי עיסוק: ענייני משפחה ומשפט בין לאומי פרטי.
Jeremy Stern, Attorney at Law. Practice areas: Family and International Private Law

14/06/2022

The verdict has been in for a few weeks, and it looks like the jury on the Depp v Heard trial came to a compromise. While the jury did feel that Heard unfairly defamed Johnny Depp and caused him significant losses, they also felt that Depp’s lawyer was not 100 percent kosher and Depp had to pay the price. Watching the interviews of the attorneys on both sides and the various legal pundits who covered the trail - before, during and after - it seems that the expert witness testimony that Depp brought had a significant impact on the outcome of the trial. The diagnosis given by Depp’s expert witness was that Amber Heard has borderline and histrionic personality disorders and did not suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder due to Depp’s abuse, but simply pretended that she did.
Interestingly, the expert witness, Dr. Shannon Curry, was brought solely to answer the question whether Amber Heard had suffered PTSD from Depp’s behavior but in reality, the testimony had a much larger and powerful impact on the case.
There could be no doubt that the jurors viewed Heard’s testimony and numerous allegations and stories of abuse through the perspective of that diagnosis’s. Namely that these are exaggerations and machinations of a disturbed person and not what actually happened. If we had not had the expert testimony, the juror would have had to form its opinions of the varicosity of Heard’s claims based solely on the impressions of her testimony and the factual contradictions of the testimony of other witnesses.
However once there was a diagnosis of histrionic personality disorder on the table, the jury had a solid basis to believe that Heard was literally making up “stories”. After all inherent in histrionic personality disorder is the tendency to exaggerate and sometimes invent events that have no little or no bearing on reality.
In most court cases the fact finder (jurors or judge) does not have this privilege. Parties are not forced to undergo phycological evaluations and therefore evaluations are not used as a tool to get to the truth.
This is a huge loss. In most instances where I’ve seen deception or dishonesty, especially in the context of family law, the root of the deceptive or dishonest behavior was in a personality disorder. If courts were to allow the introduction of psychological assessments, the fact finder would have a lot easier time understanding the parties in front of them and would be less likely to be deceived by a convincing or charming disordered person.
While I don’t see psychological testing becoming the norm any time soon in conventional lawsuits, they are currently used in custody cases and in my view should be used to a greater extent. Generally, in contentious custody battles in the US, the court orders a forensic psychologal report to be submitted by a neutral psychologist. These reports - similar to the ones submitted by Depp’s attorney - rely on psychological tests and clinical interviews and includes a personality profile of both parents. In many instances the children themselves undergo a clinical examination and the report includes those results as well.
In Israel, custody is largely determined on a written recommendation of a government-appointed social worker in the form of a “Taskir” (report). The report is a summary of the facts with some recommendations and impressions, and often includes standard language about the parents. that appears to be copied from report to report. The problem is that social workers do not have the necessary training or ability to create a psychological profile of the parents or the children. They are obviously going to have a hard time determining if one or the other parent has a personality disorder or even a personality profile and they are absolutely not qualified to make that determination.
Without that training, an evaluator can be fooled especially if they present themselves as being a victim. Let’s imagine a social worker meets a mother with the personality characteristics of Amber Heard. The mother makes all kinds of allegations against the father of abuse and r**e and the social worker might easily find her performance convincing. A psychologist, however, is trained to dig beneath the surface and, if they don’t catch the personality disorder in the clinical interview, the disorder will show up in the testing. This issue comes up in many of my cases where there are allegations of sexual abuse, where it is clear that the party presenting the abuse (usually the mother but not always) has a personality disorder. To the non-trained observer, the story might sound very convincing but when the mother is evaluated by a clinical psychologist it is clear the real issue is in the parent alleging the abuse and not the other. In other instances, the untrained eye will miss the abusive behavior of a parent whereas a psychologist will uncover abusive traits in the assessment.
For all the above reason, I believe that, in every case where abuse allegations are made, both parents should be sent for a full assessment. Unfortunately, the court doesn’t follow this model and cases drag on for years because there is no clear way for the fact finder to uncover the truth.
Of course, a psychologist cannot say if something happened or not, but they can say if this parent appears to be an abuse or making up allegations. this is the closest we can ever get to a fact-finding mechanism in abuse allegations
In my next post I will go over the dos and don’ts of psychological testing.

עורך דין ג'רמי שטרן, עורך דין. תחומי עיסוק: ענייני משפחה ומשפט בין לאומי פרטי.
Jeremy Stern, Attorney at Law. Practice areas: Family and International Private Law

01/06/2022

עו״ד גרמי שטרן
In 2017, the movement was a watershed for the public discourse on abuse, with the mantra “believe all women.”

Now, in 2022, the pendulum has swung the other way and people have started to call into question the entire notion of a person who claims is a victim to be believed.
For anyone who has been living under a rock for the past 6 week the impetus for this change is the Depp v Heard trial. For those rock dwellers, here’s the story:

Amber Heard publicly accused Jonny Depp of abuse and even went to the court for a protection order in 2016. Two years later, she became the ambassador for domestic abuse for the ACLU and posted an op-ed for the Washington post introducing herself in the capacity of a domestic victim, and alleging she herself had experienced abuse.

Jonny Depp sued Heard in a court in Virginia for defamation for 50 million dollars claiming his career was wiped out as a result of her allegations of abuse. Amber Heard countersued claiming Depp’s lawyer defamed her in an article and called her abuse claims a hoax.

The crux of the trial (which lasted 6 weeks) focused on one essential question: who is the abuser? Did Depp abuse Heard through various acts of physical violence, emotional control, and possible sexual violence? Or was Depp the victim of a manipulative, lying, disordered spouse.
Because of the public nature of a trial livestreamed on numerous YouTube channels, the parties’ dirty laundry has been hung out for all to see – and the public can make their own decision about who the real abuser was. Text messages, testimony of friend’s, video recordings, audio recording – all these forms of evidence played out in front of the jury and, more importantly, in front of the world.

Simply by following the mainstream media, one would not get a clear picture of the kind of evidence that was brought forward in the case, a point made by numerous Youtubers and Twitter users, who have compulsively followed the case.

As an attorney who deals largely with domestic relations this case is particularly interesting as it raises an issue I have on an almost daily basis in my law practice: who is to be believed?

When a client comes in accuses their partner of being abusive, how am I to know if that is an accurate depiction of facts or, perhaps, they are actually the abuser and are projecting their actions on to their partner (as abusers commonly do)?

Being an attorney who wants to find out the facts is a difficult job, since the information is only coming from one side and I am not going to get the full picture.

To complicate matters even more, even if I do hear both sides pf the story, it’s still difficult to get to the bottom of things: true abusers they are notoriously good at distorting facts, gaining sympathy and making the other side come out as the abuser. What I can say is that there are a few rules of thumb that are useful for sorting through the morass of mutual claims of abuse.
First of all, does it make sense on its own? Is the person telling me the story in a zig zag fashion, or do they have a consistent narrative? To be sure, sometimes people have been so victimized they can’t express what happened to them, but at the end of day, if they can give facts and narratives that is consistent that gives credibility and the inability to provide a clear, coherent, and consistent narrative raises serious questions about whether the client is accurately telling the story.

Number two, do the allegations of abuse make sense objectively outside the context of their case? A very common claim that comes up consistently in divorce cases, is the claim that the father sexually abused the children. Statistics and common experience show that the percentage of people with pedophilic tendencies is very low, and that number gets lower when it comes to their own children.

An example from my practice: a mother claims a father abused their 1.5 years old child. Even among the subset of pedophiles who are capable of sexual abusing their own child, the percentage of those that would abuse a baby or toddler are extremely rare. So, while I’m not going to say it didn’t happen, it will have to be investigated thoroughly and I will be more suspicious than a more believable claim.

On the other hand, if a spouse claims that their partner is very controlling, doesn’t let them visit relatives, guilt trips them into overspending on them, or underspending on themselves ,or blaming their partner for everything, all of these are quite common and definitely deserve more presumption of believability.

Number three, does the story seem exaggerated? Maybe something did happen but does the “victim” seem to be making a mountain of a molehill? Naturally there are so many factors and variables to determine if a reaction is an overreaction, but in the end it comes down to common sense. If a husband says his wife is berating him and makes him feel worthless, I want to know is she actually berating him, or she was encouraging him to find a job instead of staying unemployed.

How do I get to the truth and figure out if a client is exaggerating or inconsistent or projecting?
The most important thing is a timeline. Someone who does not have a clear story and know when things happened often is not telling the truth or has distorted the truth.

The flip side is that abusers will not have clear answers to allegations of abuse. If when I ask, “is it true you hit your wife,” I don’t get a clear no and the client starts skirting the issue and talking about other topics rather than dealing with the specific allegations, then I know something happened and the allegation is likely true.

The timeline is also useful to check the veracity of the claims. A case I had from my law practice: my client’s ex claimed that he sexually abused 10 yr. old son. Once I had the timeline, I was able to show that she made the allegations during a time when she consistently left the kid with him alone despite her admission she knew about the abuse. In addition, she installed cameras ”to make sure: there was no abuse happening. If she had the guts to install a camera to see if abuse was happening, then surely, she had the presence of mind not to leave the child with the abuser.

Once a case comes to trial, a very useful tool to get to the bottom of things is appointing clinical psychologists to do psycho-diagnostic evaluations of the couple. It is extremely difficult to fool a clinical psychologist when testing is done properly. The MMPI-2 test specifically looks out for a tester who is trying to come off better than they are and to put on a façade.

The Depp v Heard case gave us a unique look at the use of testing, since both sides brought clinical psychologists as expert witnesses. It’s interesting to note that Depp did not go under evaluation largely because that was not an issue in the lawsuit. It would surely be interesting to see the results. The expert witness bought by Depp testified that in her professional opinion, Heard has Borderline Personality Disorder and Histrionic Personality Disorder.

In her testimony the psychologist was able to explain how she arrived at her conclusions, demonstrating that Heard exaggerated her claims of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the testing. As the court psychologist herself admitted she’s not a fact finder and couldn’t say what happened on a given day but she can say if Heard presents events as they happened or a disported version of what happened. Heard brought a psychologist to testify that she had PTSD from the marriage to Depp. During cross examination she admitted she came to the diagnosis after two years of treatment, and only gave the diagnostic testing after forming an opinion on the matter.
I did not read the written reports of the psychologists and I did not see the scoring (under Israeli law, psychologists can’t show score to non-psychologists and I would not be surprised if the same holds for the US). From the oral testimony, the overall impression of Heard’s psychologist is that she is driven by agendas and her desire to label Heard as victim.

I prefer to send cases to clinical psychologists and I specifically look for non-political and non-dogmatic experts. If a psychologist writes on their website that they champion victim rights or that they are “pro fathers rights”, I know this is not going to be an expert who can give an unbiased report.
When it comes to psycho-diagnostic testing, the results should be replicable, meaning that if the person administering the test has experience and competence their results should not be too different from another psychologist. Once you through a political agenda into the mix, anything can happen. In Heard’s case, her expert witness admitted to not properly scoring the test sheets. When a person has an agenda, they’ll play fast and loose with the rules even if their intentions are good.
The jury is out – literally – on the question of who the abuser is, Heard or Depp. From the many divorce cases I have done, rarely is the question of abuse a zero sum game where all the blame is on one partner. So yes, a wife might be borderline and abuse her husband, but perhaps the husband is an alcoholic with unresolved trauma from his youth which contributed to the volatility of the marriage. It is precisely for that reason that I personally try to avoid using the term “abuse” and prefer to describe the behaviors and patterns of both sides.

With most Western countries recognizing unilateral no-fault divorce, there is seldom a need to apportion blame for the breakdown of the relationship, so the the question of who is the abuser comes up more often in child custody and allegations of levelled against the other parent. I am strong believer that, in such cases, a custody determination must be done by a clinical psychologist after full and complete psycho-diagnostic testing has been administered – this is the only way to get to the bottom of the high conflict cases. In my next post I will discuss the use of expert’s with more depth and nuance and hopefully by then we will have an answer of who won - if anyone won - in the Depp Heard case .

עורך דין ג'רמי שטרן, עורך דין. תחומי עיסוק: ענייני משפחה ומשפט בין לאומי פרטי.
Jeremy Stern, Attorney at Law. Practice areas: Family and International Private Law