The tragic end of a vicious divorce
Jennifer Kagan and Robin Brown spent three years embroiled in a toxic custody battle over their young daughter. Then, last winter, after dozens of court appearances and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent, the case ended in tragedy The untold story of how the family court system failed Keira Brown
Keira Margaret McLean Brown was four years old when she died. She had twinkly, perpetually smizing blue eyes framed by purple glasses, an unruly mop of caramelcoloured curls and an infectious giggle. Hyper-articulate for a junior kindergartener, she was known in her family as an old soul who had no problem standing up for herself. Her favourite T-shirt read, “I can change the world,” and those who knew her believed she would. She was obsessed with Disney princesses, purses, rainbows and her baby brother, Joseph. Typical fouryear-old stuff.
On February 9, 2020, Keira was with her father, Robin Brown, as she had been most weekends since her parents’ divorce in 2018. He bundled his daughter and drove to Rattlesnake Point Conservation Area, a vast swath of parkland in Milton, where, in warmer months, hikers trek among the 1,000-year-old cedars and rock climbers scale the limestone escarpment. That day, snow had been blowing steadily, turning heavy and wet as temperatures hovered above zero. Robin and his daughter walked for about three minutes from the parking lot before veering from the trail to a precipice craggy with boulders and exposed tree roots. That’s where they went over the edge.
By 11 p.m., a search team had discovered their bodies among the rocks at the bottom of a sheer cliff. Soon after, officers knocked on the door of Keira’s mother, Jennifer Kagan, to deliver the terrible news that Keira and Robin had died. Jennifer was shattered, but not surprised. She and Robin had been in and out of court for most of Keira’s life, fighting for custody of their daughter. Judge after judge had lamented the toxic nature of their relationship. Gripped by an awful sense of inevitability, Jennifer told the officers that Keira’s death was no accident. “Robin knew he was going to lose access to her,” she said, “and if he couldn’t have her, nobody would.”
The police, in collaboration with the chief coroner, have been investigating the incident for the past eight months, and have yet to conclude whether the deaths were an accident or murdersuicide. Jennifer spent three years and hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to convince a sequence of judges that Keira would not be safe in Robin’s care, and he retaliated by launching accusations back at her. By the end, the courts didn’t seem to believe either of them, and so were unable to save the one person they were supposed to protect.
Before Keira’s parents became Brown vs. Brown, they were Rob and Jen, two 20-somethings looking for love on eHarmony. It was September 2012, and Jennifer had landed her first job as a palliative care physician at Toronto General Hospital. She travelled, ran marathons and walked her goldendoodle, Oodle, with whom she shared a Little Italy apartment. As she neared 30, she was ready to find her person and start a family.
Robin was a similarly ambitious young professional. He was the son of two Newfoundland transplants who ran a cabinet manufacturing business near Guelph. By his late 20s, he told Jennifer, he’d earned a PhD from MIT and was working as an engineer at a large environmental consulting firm. He loved skydiving, travelled the world for work and already owned his own home in Burlington, along with two income properties. He was successful, handsome and interested in the same things as Jennifer. And so they met for dinner at Scaramouche.
Jennifer was impressed. He listened—like, really listened—and he was appealingly Old World in his chivalry. She found his trajectory from small-town boy to globe-trotting engineer fascinating. Robin, meanwhile, was smitten by Jennifer’s beauty and intellect. He liked that they both took pride in their careers and had strong family values. The only thing missing in their lives, he said, was a child.
By June 2013, just nine months after they met, Robin was on one knee at Gairloch Gardens in Oakville. The wedding took place that November at the Design Exchange. About a dozen of Robin’s family and colleagues attended, outdone by Jennifer’s 130-odd guests. Jennifer’s parents found Robin to be charming, an elaborate storyteller who spoiled their daughter. They were thrilled that she’d found an accomplished man who treated her so well.
What went wrong in the marriage depends on who you ask—or which affidavit you read. The only thing Jennifer and Robin agreed on is that everything changed after the honeymoon. Jennifer’s account alleges that Robin became abusive. The kind man who used to listen to her so patiently became increasingly short-tempered and insulting, once calling her stupid and throwing a sandwich against the dashboard of the car because she’d ordered the wrong toppings. His chivalry mutated into controlling behaviour. He discouraged her from going to her book club because he thought it would turn her into a lesbian, criticized her housekeeping and cooking skills, and refused to let her open bills or help pay for the mortgage. Once, she says, she was delighted to discover a burrow of baby bunnies in the backyard and called Robin to come see. Less delighted, he stuck a hose in the hole to drown the animals and forced Jennifer to watch, saying she was too sensitive. Another time, the dog dragged a dead mouse into the house. When Jennifer asked Robin to take care of it, he flew into a rage and shoved the rodent in her mouth. Other than Jennifer’s sister, who witnessed the mouse incident, no one else was aware of Robin’s behaviour. Jennifer says she endured it all without telling anyone because she was ashamed.
When Keira was born in May 2015, the new parents were elated, but those first bleary-eyed newborn months soon became a hothouse for conflict. The baby cried constantly due to acid reflux, and Jennifer says Robin often found the sound intolerable. Sometimes he’d pass her back to Jennifer and yell at her to make it stop. Other times he insisted that Keira needed to learn resilience and would physically block Jennifer from comforting her. In one instance, he locked Jennifer out of the house, spurring her to call the police. When officers arrived, she apologized for bothering them and said Robin had merely puffed his chest out at her. She feared he might retaliate when
they left. She says he’d threatened to tell people she was mentally ill if she ever crossed him.
Her breaking point came in February 2016, when she logged on to their shared laptop and found it open to Adult Friend-Finder. Scrolling through Robin’s profile, she saw messages he had sent to potential hookups, including one that read: “I’m the master, get that straight. I will not tolerate anything less than strict obedience.” Instead of confronting him, she called a private investigator, who tailed Robin to Langdon Hall and took a photo of him meeting a woman in her early 20s. Together, Robin and the woman reviewed an 11-page form he’d created where she rated her comfort level with 165 or so BDSM activities.
Shocked, Jennifer quietly prepared to leave with Keira. They’d already been staying with her parents for long stretches that winter, so she told Robin she was going back for a visit. In the last week of February, she asked him to meet her at a mall, intending to end the marriage in a public place. He refused to come, so she sent word through her lawyer.
Robin isn’t alive to present his side of the story, and my requests to interview his father, brother and most recent partner all went unanswered. However, in affidavits and related court documents, he denied nearly every aspect of Jennifer’s account. Instead, he painted a picture of her as volatile and paranoid. He said he was unable to soothe her anxiety or placate her anger, which would erupt and last for days. For example, he described a silly argument over whether a dessert was frozen yogurt or ice cream—Robin claimed the former; Jennifer thought it tasted like the latter—that ended with her stabbing him in the arm with a fork. He said she was the one who disapproved of his cooking, called him names and kept him on edge with petty cruelties. He admitted he locked her out of the house, but said she’d shoved him beforehand, and he only locked the door to give her a moment to cool down. Her call to the police was an example of her tendency to overreact impulsively when a situation was beyond her control. She denies all of these accusations. “What he would do is deflect and say the opposite,” she says. “If he did something, he would say I did it.”
Robin said he was blindsided that February afternoon when he went into Keira’s room and saw many of her things gone. Soon after, when he got the call to meet Jennifer at a mall, someone claiming to be a private investigator jumped on the line and accused him of extramarital affairs, which he denied before hanging up. Within hours, her lawyer’s letter arrived: the marriage was over.
These clashing versions of the marriage entered the family justice system in the spring of 2016, sparking a custody dispute so vicious and complicated that it would come to fill 20 banker’s boxes, yield 53 court orders and end with the death of a child. Though the outcome of Keira’s case is extreme, the machinations of how it spun out of control are increasingly common. Most divorcing couples settle without ever going to court, but roughly 10 per cent of acrimonious divorces end up in litigation. These so-called high-conflict cases are on the rise, due in part to more involved fathers and a greater expectation of shared custody, which creates far thornier negotiations than back in the days when Don Draper would ship Sally, Bobby and Gene off to the suburbs with Betty. Technology also complicates custody cases, allowing exes to record each other at all hours and submit selective footage to the courts.
Jennifer and Robin’s first serious encounter with the courts happened in May 2016, just after Keira turned one. They were awaiting a trial to decide on a custody plan and, in the meantime, Robin was following a visitation schedule laid out by Jennifer, who was staying with her parents. Keira was still breastfeeding at the time, and Jennifer was concerned about Robin’s anger when Keira cried, so she allowed him three-hour visits, three times a week, a sum Robin’s lawyer called “meagre scraps.” She said this schedule flagrantly disregarded the “maximum-contact principle” in the federal Divorce Act, which says children should spend as much time with each parent as is consistent with their best interests. Pickups and drop-offs had grown hostile. According to Jennifer, Robin slammed doors, yelled and claimed to be recording the exchanges. Before long, she insisted that all communications go through her lawyer.
Robin believed Jennifer used breastfeeding, Keira’s acid reflux and a dairy intolerance as excuses to keep him from having overnight visits. He sent threatening letters to three of Keira’s health care providers who had diagnosed her with digestive issues. Finally, to end the argument, he booked her to see an allergist. That day, he and his father met Jennifer and her mother at a Burlington medical building. The results showed a dairy allergy was highly unlikely. Robin took that as evidence that Jennifer had been fabricating the condition, which she denies. In her version of events, Robin bolted across the parking lot with Keira in his arms and shouted that Jennifer would be hearing from his lawyer. In Robin’s version, he calmly strode to his car with Keira and drove to his parents’ place in Milton so he could observe her digestion. Within hours, Jennifer received a contract from Robin’s lawyer, outlining an equal parenting plan and stipulating that she could have unsupervised access to her daughter again if she signed it.
Jennifer was beside herself and filed an emergency motion in the Superior Court of Justice in Milton asking for Keira’s immediate return. The presiding judge that day deemed the issue non-urgent without explanation and scheduled the matter to be heard eight days later. Desperate, Jennifer went to the Children’s Aid Society, which checked on Keira and found her to be fed, clothed and fine. Next she went to the Halton Regional Police, where the officer on duty asked if there was any reason
Jennifer and Robin’s clashing version of events sparked a custody dispute so vicious and complicated that it would come to fill 20 banker’s boxes, yield 53 court orders and end with the death of a child
to fear for Keira’s safety. This was the first time Jennifer revealed the extent of Robin’s erratic behaviour, and officers soon arrived at his parents’ house to arrest him on assault charges. (The charges were later dropped because Jennifer’s allegations couldn’t be corroborated.) On day eight, the matter finally came before Justice Bradley Miller, who adjourned it until later that summer but ordered that Robin immediately return the oneyear-old to her mother. At the end of July, Justice Miller finally heard the matter. He determined that by leaving Robin, Jennifer had extracted herself from an “intolerable situation,” which, under the Children’s Law Reform Act, is grounds for a parent to remove a child from his or her home. He ordered Robin to pay $35,000 to cover costs of motions associated with the abduction.
By this point, both parties had alleged serious abuse by the other, and the judge noted that it was impossible to make factual findings with any confidence based on their diametrically opposed affidavits. As a result, he expedited a Section 30 assessment, which is typical when a judge needs expert evidence to decide the fitness of each parent.
Parenting assessments have proliferated in lockstep with high-conflict cases over the last decade, and assessors are controversial in the world of family law because they aren’t necessarily experts in custody issues or family abuse and they have no central regulating body. An assessor simply needs to be a mental health professional—a social worker, psychologist or psychiatrist—who will visit the family, interview relatives and draw on psychological testing of the parents. Together, they comprise a cottage industry of professionals who can charge up to $400 an hour. Assessors are hotly debated in online forums by aggrieved parents who have strong opinions about their opinions: many of them gain a reputation for favouring fathers over mothers and vice versa, and lawyers advise their clients to choose accordingly. The College of Psychologists of Ontario has reported that 25 per cent of formal complaints made against its members relate to custody and child protection.
Jennifer and Robin couldn’t agree on an assessor, so a court appointed Robin’s choice, Peter Sutton, who served as head of the infant psychiatry program at SickKids from 1986 to 1995. Sutton declined to be interviewed for this piece, but his report shows that over the next few months, he visited each home and interviewed family members. The assessment process was the longest of his career due to a tangle of conflicting information that filled five binders. It took almost double the usual time and cost approximately $80,000, to be split by the parents. In the resulting 226-page report, he declared the home visits to be some of the most pleasurable of his career, with each parent engaging with Keira appropriately and safely. Sutton acknowledged that Robin seemed to have a habit of lying when backed into a corner, but, aside from the mouse incident witnessed by Jennifer’s sister, the cross-allegations of abuse were unsubstantiated. He concluded that there was no reason to believe Keira was at risk with either parent and recommended gradually increasing overnight visits with Robin.
In Ontario’s multi-tiered family law system, the best option for litigating couples is Family Court, where judges usually have specialized backgrounds in family law. However, there are only 25 of these courts throughout the province, none of which are in Toronto. Instead Jennifer and Robin landed in the Superior Court of Justice, where judges are appointed federally and have a wide range of backgrounds. There are 200-plus Superior Court judges in Ontario, and which one a couple gets depends on geography and availability. Specialized training in domestic abuse is not required for judges, which means they might miss patterns of behaviour that could pose a risk to children. And litigants who are in and out of court multiple times often see a revolving door of judges, some of whom only have a couple of hours to read all the complicated case files. Consequently, parents find themselves surrendering the most important decisions about their child— where they’ll live and go to school, with whom they’ll spend their time— to a set of strangers who are trained in the law, not childhood development or family psychology.
There is almost universal agreement among those who work in family justice, including judges, that litigation is damaging to children because it pits parents against one another in an inherently adversarial court structure. Justice Harvey Brownstone, a long-time Toronto family judge, is the author of Tug of War, a manual for separating parents on how to avoid the court system. He writes, “Most judges have to make numerous decisions every day on the basis of incomplete, subjective and highly emotional written evidence... with virtually no time to get to know the parents and no opportunity to meet the child whose life is being so profoundly affected. What person in their right mind would advocate for this method of resolving parental conflicts?”
By the time of Keira’s custody trial in November 2017, she had grown into a chatty two-and-a-half-year-old who did shtick with her zayde, loved all things fancy and wore outsized bows in her hair. Jennifer, meanwhile, had started a relationship with Philip Viater, a quick-witted family lawyer. Justice Douglas Gray presided over the trial. He was months away from retirement and had spent the bulk of his career in labour law. During the trial, Gray—who, according to counsel for the Superior Court of Justice, was unable to comment on this case—repeatedly cut off both parties and advised the parents that whatever they did to each other was entirely irrelevant to Keira’s welfare. Jennifer’s father, Marty Kagan, who attended several days of the proceedings, told me Justice Gray seemed
Litigating parents must surrender the most important decisions about their child to a revolving door of judges who are trained in the law, not childhood development or family psychology
almost performatively uninterested, picking his nails during closing arguments.
The trial opened with all the drama of an episode of The Good Fight. Robin represented himself, claiming to be broke after already spending $300,000 on legal fees. Among parents, the decision to self-represent is shockingly common: Canadian judges report that in around 35 per cent of their family cases, only one party has a lawyer, and in 24 per cent, neither party has one. For many people, it’s a matter of money—family lawyers can require multi-thousand-dollar retainers and charge up to $500 an hour. In extreme cases, embittered spouses self-represent so they can turn the system against their exes, drowning them in paperwork, hauling them back into court and racking up their legal fees. The result is fewer settlements and slower resolutions as untrained parents fumble through an intricate system.
Acting on his own behalf, Robin opened the trial by calling Jennifer as a surprise witness. Her lawyer, Lawrence Liquornik, objected to the move as highly unorthodox—it was a first in his career—and Gray cautioned against it but allowed it nonetheless. Jennifer, who hadn’t expected to be called for a couple of days, was shaken as she took the stand. A couple of hours into questioning, Robin asked her why she wouldn’t allow him to take care of Keira on Thursdays, while she was working. Jennifer outlined the bind she felt she was in: “I recognize that Keira [should] have a loving relationship with you...but I also have tremendous concerns about your abuse of me and your treatment toward women.” The judge eventually cut her off: “I do not see how any of this is relevant at all...I am going to ignore it.”
Over the next 11 days, Robin told a story of a devoted father and a vindictive mother set on cutting him out of his daughter’s life. In his version, he was Keira’s primary caregiver. He was the one to wake with her in the night, make her breakfast while Jennifer slept in, bathe her and put her to bed. He said he quit his high-paying job, giving up $285,000 in salary and equity, plus over $400,000 in stock options, to start his own consulting firm so he could be a stay-at-home dad. He claimed he had no salary, because his business was in start-up mode, so he was asking for nearly $7,000 in monthly spousal and child support. Jennifer, he claimed, was the one who was into BDSM, and he’d only met that woman at Langdon Hall to learn more about it and please his demanding wife. And finally, to prove he could provide Keira with a wholesome family, he submitted a photo of her with his new girlfriend and her eight-year-old daughter. When I interviewed the woman, she was surprised to learn Robin had used her as evidence. Their relationship had been so casual that they’d never even called each other boyfriend and girlfriend.
Liquornik, meanwhile, retaliated that none of Robin’s testimony could be believed because he was a pathological liar. In an act of impressive legal theatre, he spent the next several days debunking Robin’s increasingly elaborate deceptions. He argued that Robin had never been a stay-at-home dad and continued working long hours after Keira was born. He also proved Robin had let the couple’s life insurance policy lapse, and withdrew $18,000 from their joint account, allegedly to pay off his Lexus. Most alarming, perhaps, was the revelation that Robin had fabricated his academic career. In addition to his MIT PhD, he’d claimed to hold one from the University of Southampton in the U.K. But Jennifer had discovered that neither MIT nor Southampton had ever heard of him. His PhDs didn’t exist.
Justice Gray delivered his decision in January 2018. Before laying out his parenting plan, he registered concerns about both parties. He acknowledged that Robin was a bully and a prolific liar, dismissing both his support claim and his abuse allegations against Jennifer. As for Jennifer, Justice Gray criticized her unwillingness to communicate with Robin and her ongoing efforts to minimize Robin’s involvement in Keira’s life. He also didn’t find her allegations of abuse compelling. Even if they were true, he argued, Robin posed no risk to Keira. He cited case law from 2015, in which a trial judge ordered overnight visits with an alcoholic father who had strangled the mother during sex, dragged her down stairs and hit her in the face. The judge found that none of these actions had any bearing on the father’s ability to parent the child overnight. By that logic, neither did Robin’s. In the end, he determined the relationship to be so toxic that any kind of shared parenting plan would be “doomed to failure.” And so he gave Jennifer decision-making power in Keira’s medical care and education, and ordered Keira to spend Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, three out of four weekends and the majority of what the judge called “fun time” with Robin.
At the abduction hearing a year earlier, Justice Miller had described Jennifer’s situation with Robin as intolerable. Justice
Gray’s view was much less sympathetic: “This situation arises because of the respondent’s [Jennifer’s] decision to move .... Thus...it is a situation largely of [Jennifer’s] making.” Three months later, in March 2018, Jennifer and Robin finally got their divorce.
Justice Gray’s decision did nothing to ease the strife between the exes. The next two years unfolded in a nightmare of paperwork and court appearances. Robin was pushing for 50-50 shared parenting, while Jennifer asked the courts at least twice to reduce his weekends, concerned that Keira was distressed after visits with him. She was denied each time. She also repeatedly requested a new parenting assessment. She’d never been happy with Sutton’s report, feeling it vastly underestimated Robin’s duplicity. But the first Section 30 assessment was deemed thorough, so judges declined to order a new one. Jennifer could get one done independently, but Robin refused to participate. He was happy with the first one.
When Keira was three, she started spending three weekends a month with Robin. Soon after, he stopped facilitating Skype calls between her and Jennifer during his parenting time. He said Keira didn’t want to talk to her mother, though a judge found that claim unbelievable and mandated the calls. In September 2018, Jennifer took Keira to a therapist, who submitted a report to the court saying she had concerns for Keira’s well-being and included clinical notes from her sessions that paint a heartbreaking portrait of a kid torn between her parents: “I always miss someone. I miss my mom when I’m with my dad, and I miss my dad when I’m with my mom.” “When I cry, Daddy tells me to stop crying. When I miss Mommy, Daddy tells me, ‘No you don’t.’ ”
As the legal battle continued, holidays, vacations and summer camp all became the stuff of what one judge called “judicial micromanagement.” When Jennifer wanted Keira to attend her stepgrandmother’s 90th birthday party on Robin’s time, he agreed, then reneged, prompting Jennifer to file a motion to let Keira attend. The incident turned into a $10,000 ordeal because Robin failed to show up in court, saying he didn’t get the papers, even though condo surveillance cameras recorded him opening them. Another disagreement over whether or not Robin had faxed a settlement offer to Jennifer’s lawyer sparked a hearing complete with expert testimony from opposing fax machine technicians. And when Jennifer enrolled Keira in Bialik, a Hebrew day school, Robin brought a motion to deregister her, claiming for the first time since Jennifer had met him that he was of Mi’kmaq heritage and he didn’t want his daughter attending a school that focused on Jewish education without also celebrating his Indigenous roots. To prove his lineage, he attached an illegible document and a photo of a woman in a Victorian-era dress that the court deemed suspicious. At one point, a judge declared, “The courts do not anticipate this level of duplicity,” and forbade him from relying on his own evidence and bringing any further motions without judicial permission.
In the summer of 2019, Jennifer and Philip had a baby named Joseph. A judge granted Keira every other weekend with them so she could bond with her brother, and Robin went into overdrive. He soon began targeting Philip as well as Jennifer. In mid-January 2020, they received an unexpected knock on their condo door from two social workers, one from Jewish Family and Child Service and one from Dnaagdawenmag Binnoojiiyag Child and Family Services (the latter was present owing to Robin’s claim to Mi’kmaq heritage). They were there to investigate allegations that Philip had hit and yelled at both Joseph and Keira—which Philip categorically denied. At the time, Robin was in a relationship with an elementary school teacher, and she had filed the concern, along with audio of Keira in the back of the car describing the incidents. The DBCFS withdrew its involvement after learning about Robin’s questionable claim of Indigenous heritage, but the JFCS opened an investigation.
Jennifer and Philip rushed to court, where they argued that Robin was manipulating Keira and asked that his access to his daughter be suspended while the investigation was under way. The judge that day was Justice George MacPherson, who’d spent his career in family and child protection law and had taught child protection law at the University of Ottawa. Partial case files, three banker’s boxes full, landed in his chambers, and he reviewed them over his 90-minute lunch, later admitting there was no way he could have read all materials thoroughly. Jennifer’s lawyer pleaded with the judge to consider the latest incident as it related to the years-long pattern of lying and manipulation, and insisted Keira had been coached. MacPherson found the argument compelling but had to weigh the urgency of this case against his queue of other, possibly more pressing ones. He also noted a boy-who-cried-wolf effect at play: “It is staggering the number of urgent motions since August alone,” he said.
When Robin took his turn, he told the court that Keira’s accusations were unprompted. At this point, the judge interrupted him—he’d listened to the audio, and Robin could clearly be heard asking Keira if she was afraid of Philip. MacPherson then scolded both parents for wasting time, energy and money on having courts negotiate “every minute detail,” when that money could go toward bettering Keira’s future. He projected a bleak future for the girl, calling it “not even a little bit pretty” unless one of the parents put a stop to the insanity. In the end, MacPherson declined to suspend Robin’s time with Keira while the JFCS completed its investigation, which could take up to 45 days. He ordered them back in court on February 20.
On February 7, Jennifer braided Keira’s hair, packed her backpack and sent her off to school. Her father would pick her up later for the weekend. Jennifer didn’t want to let her go, but she’d be violating a court order if she didn’t. She wishes she’d broken the rules. She wishes, too, that she could remember more about that morning—the last hug and kiss. Later that day, she got a call from the JFCS. Their investigation was not complete yet, but the social worker had interviewed Robin and found him to be challenging and aggressive. She believed he’d displayed behaviours consistent with people who harm their children to get back at a spouse. She’d spoken to her supervisor about filing a protection application against him, and they were scheduled to talk about it again on Monday.
On Sunday, Jennifer filled the fridge with Keira’s favourite foods and looked forward to picking her up from school the next day. Then, at 9:45 p.m., Philip got a call from police saying Keira and Robin had gone missing. He woke Jennifer, who called her parents and paced while they waited for more information. The news finally came after 11 p.m.: Keira and Robin were dead.
During the last two years of Keira’s life, Bill C-78, an amendment to modernize the federal Divorce Act, was a work in progress, with changes scheduled to take effect in March 2021. The revised legislation will explicitly require judges to factor subtle patterns of abuse into their decisions. These include coercive and controlling behaviour; whether or not a parent poses a risk of emotional or psychological, not just physical, harm; and even whether or not a parent has hurt an animal, because research shows spousal, child and animal abuse tend to come in a bundle. Had the new legislation been in effect during Keira’s trial, Justice Gray’s decision may well have been different, and subsequent judges may also have been on high alert: Robin’s behaviours—bullying, lying, absconding with Keira, using her as a bargaining chip, and assault involving animals—are all red-flagged under the new law.
But legislation is only as effective as the people who implement it. There’s a growing movement toward a paradigm shift, one in which the system helps families in conflict instead of pitting parents against each other. In this model, a triage system could be implemented when a potentially high-conflict case, like Jennifer and Robin’s, enters the court system. A case manager would screen for signs of abuse, and the high-risk cases would be expedited, assigned appropriate resources and, ideally, come before a single judge with the expertise and sensitivity to handle the case over time, instead of leaving exes to their own devices in front of a rotating cast of judges.
Jennifer has called for an inquiry into the court’s role in Keira’s death and channelled her grief into upending the system she believes failed her daughter. She’s written to the National Judicial Institute, the attorney general and the ministers of justice and women and gender equality, asking for mandatory domestic violence training for judges. She also started a Canadian arm of the online campaign The Court Said, which advocates for family law reform that will better protect domestic violence survivors and their children. When she tweeted a photo of Keira’s braids, the last shot she took before saying goodbye to her, it was viewed 11 million times.
Six months after Keira’s death, on a humid and hazy August day, 30 or so masked loved ones gathered in front of Keira’s school to belatedly mourn and celebrate the girl who would run at her teachers for hugs and sing a little louder than the rest of the kids during morning anthems. After the remembrances, Jennifer and Philip hung a rainbow mezuzah above her old classroom door, which had been empty for nearly as long as Keira had been gone, due to Covid-19. The children passing under it this fall returned to school amid a maelstrom of concern for their well-being. Their parents dropped them off and put their faith in their classmates, their teachers, their fellow parents and the institutions that determine policy. It will take everyone working together to keep them safe. ∫
A staffer with Jewish Family and Child Service interviewed Robin and found him to be aggressive. His behaviour, she said, was consistent with people who harm their children to get back at a spouse