The Psycho Ex-Wife

» see thepsychoexwife.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

On 6 June 2011, at a custody hearing in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Judge Diane Gibbons told Anthony Morelli to take down that website. She also ordered him not to refer to his ex-wife on any public media, and not to write anything about his children online beyond happy birthday and significant school events. The website was ThePsychoExWife.com, its logo carried the tagline Read It and Weep, and he had been writing it for three and a half years.

It opened on 21 December 2007 with a post by Misty Weaver-Ostinato, Morelli's partner, beginning with the line that over the past four years she had been involved with a man who has a psycho ex wife. Her first post counted out the ledger behind that sentence: three custody evaluations, six contempt petitions she called false, four years of what she described as parental alienation and $80,000. Morelli posted his own introduction the same day, setting out what he meant to write about, which was family court and what he called the divorce industry.

What it grew into was more than a grievance log. Within four years it was drawing over 200,000 followers a month, and a good share of that traffic came for the advice and the comment threads, where people stuck in long custody fights and abusive relationships talked to each other. A post a few days after the launch had already clarified that despite the name the site was meant for divorced men and women both. Morelli also used it to publish redacted emails and voicemails he said documented harassment, material he was separately entering as evidence in court.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the order ~

The judge's reasoning, as reported at the time, was that the site subjected the children's mother to outright cruelty and that it could harm the couple's sons, who were old enough to find it. Morelli's own ledger was that figure of $80,000 in legal costs since the 2004 divorce, run up contesting what he described as false abuse allegations.

An order to take down a published website, delivered orally from a family court bench with no hearing on the speech question, is a prior restraint. That is what his appeal rested on, and it is why a county custody docket became a national story inside six weeks.

~ two days of defiance ~

Two new posts appeared within two days of the order. The second called Allison Morelli a f- psycho and stated that the judge has no say over what I write here. The site was shut down after a further hearing on 14 June. That is the date on this stone: 6 June is when he was told, and 14 June is when it actually went dark.

~ after it came down ~

Morelli put up SaveThePsychoExWife.com to collect money for the appeal and had about $4,000 by the end of July 2011. He hired Kevin Handy, who took the case to the Pennsylvania Superior Court on both the First Amendment and the Fourteenth, the second because the blog had been ordered down without a chance to present evidence or object. Handy called the order an overly broad and unenforceable prior restraint on free speech.

Time, UPI, the Philadelphia Inquirer and a long row of blogs covered the fight through August 2011. The ending is the part that is hard to find: no widely reported Superior Court ruling closes the story, and thepsychoexwife.com has been unanswered ever since. A blog with 200,000 readers a month went quiet because a judge said so, and what the appeals court made of that is not sitting anywhere the public can read it.

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