Anthony Morelli, a 42-year-old divorced father in Pennsylvania embroiled in a bitter custody battle with his former wife, insists that he didn’t create a blog to badmouth the mother of his children. That explanation is roundly at odds with his now-famous URL: thepsychoexwife.com.
Morelli comes across as a brute on the blog, referring to his ex-wife as “Jabba The Hut, with less personality,” while intimately – albeit anonymously – disclosing bitter details of her alcoholism and their fight to co-parent their two sons. You’d think few people would cue up for this theatre, for an inside look at someone else’s rancorous child custody case. But, at its peak, Morelli claimed the site was getting about 200,000 visitors a month, many of them fellow divorcés looking for a community to vent.
All of that was, anyway, before a family court judge told Morelli to take down the four-year-old site this summer. That decision has pleased Morelli’s critics (and his ex-wife), and a lot of media commentators have wondered why Morelli needed a court order in the first place to tell him to do something that seems fairly obviously in the best interests of his children.
The problem, though, is that requiring him to shutter thepsychoexwife.com is likely unconstitutional, violating Morelli’s First Amendment right to free speech. And regardless of what anyone personally thinks of the guy, to borrow from the assessment of one local lawyer, “there is no doubt that his right to be an unmitigated ass has been infringed upon.”
Morelli now has two legal disputes on his hands: one over the custody of his children, and the other over a free-speech question that is now attracting the attention of First Amendment scholars and national media. Does a divorced dad have the night to publicly plaster invective about his ex-wife all over the Internet (where, among other people, his 10- and 12-year-old children might see it)?
“That strikes me as a pretty clear First Amendment violation,” blogged First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh, in posting the judge’s ruling on his own popular website. “Whatever the scope of family courts’ authority to protect children’s best interests might be, it can’t extend to criminalizing one adult’s public speech about another adult.
Diane E Gibbons, the judge in the case, obviously disagreed.
“This is about children,” she said in court. “You may say anything that you would like to say. You may publish it. You may put it on a billboard. But you will not have your children, because that is abusive.”
Morelli is now appealing the decision, and while thepsychoexwife.com has gone dormant, he’s now directing people to a new site: savethepsychoexwife.com, where he doubles down by now writing about both the ex-wife and the judge. Morelli is collecting donations on the site to pay legal fees that he says have reached $116,000 in seven years. And the next round of court rulings, he argues, could effect just about everyone.
“We are asking for help in this defense because it is an issue that faces any parent that is divorced. Imagine a judge telling you that you cannot talk about your children on “any public media” – which would include things like Facebook updates, Twitter, or your personal blog – or you will lose custody. Imagine the far-reaching consequences for bloggers everywhere if orders such as this one are left unchallenged? There goes your online support group. There goes your Facebook and Twitter updates. Your website, personal OR commercial – ordered gone under threat of incarceration and having your beloved children removed from your custody. This order flies in the face of our civil rights, and your civil rights, too!”
It’s hard to escape the impression that Morelli has forgotten about his children as his court case has reoriented itself to a free speech fight (under the headline “What I’m Really Fighting For,” Morelli explains that it’s to “prevent our support group – and every other one out there – from being silenced”). He also seems like a particularly unlikely leader for the 21st century cause of free speech on the Internet (he expresses fundamental naïvté about the medium when he writes that his original blog “has no affect on his children. It would forever remain so, provided both parents monitor the children’s computer usage as any good parent should.”)
But, like the military funeral protesters and the violent video game venders before him this year, Morelli reminds us that free speech is so valuable in the US because the courts usually wind up extending it even to unmitigated asses.
