Why the Institute Was Started
Control inside a traditional marriage does not end with divorce. It moves to Family Court.
Bridget Neal founded the Institute following her experience in Orleans Family Court. Her advocacy is informed by the years of forced separation from her children and by the level of cruelty, the indifference to the law, and the refusal to require evidence and enforce candor inside the court.
Those difficult years led to the creation of the Institute for Child Custody Advocacy. The story begins in 2017, a year after her divorce was finalized, when her former husband, Amith Nagarajan, got engaged and confidently gave her an ultimatum: accept the role of "fun aunt" while his new "trad wife" became Mom, or face the loss of her children and the financial resources needed to survive. Since Family Court became involved, she has not enjoyed normal parenting time, free from a permission structure that requires her former husband to agree and allows him to unilaterally withhold the children based on a perceived or actual grievance with her. What follows is her account, as presented in her court filings.
According to Neal's petition (¶8), Nagarajan began withholding the children unilaterally in 2018, using privately paid, court adjacent professionals, including parenting coordinator Tim Kemery and custody evaluator Kristen Luscher, to provide post hoc excuses for the withholding, and paying his attorney, Suzanne Bayle, to push whatever false narrative he created into the court record. Orleans Family Court permitted that withholding to continue despite an existing equal custody judgment.
Since evidentiary standards are not enforced inside Orleans Family Court, and it works on an honor system of attorney candor, one parent can simply pay these court associated people to repeat whatever they were told. How this differs from paid false testimony has never been clear to Neal, yet the practice continues inside Orleans Family Court. Per Neal's petition (¶34), immediately before Luscher's 2019 testimony, Nagarajan also hired her to act as the control and abuse enforcer named in the 2019 stipulation. Neal's account is that neither could remember the amount while on the stand. That stipulation would govern Neal's entire life, attempt to institutionalize her, and officially name her former husband, who had documented domestic abuse claims against him, as the sole gatekeeper to her children.
The rulings of the previous Family Court judge, Judge Barial, and the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal gave judicial force to the purchased control over Neal, leveraging child access for submission. In effect, within the Family Court construct, control over the other parent could be bought. To be clear, the 2019 stipulation controlled what city Neal could live in (not New Orleans), whether she could have a future home with her children in New Orleans, and whether she could work, and it granted him the power to unilaterally decide what "objective measurable gains" he considered enough for her to exit this control structure and possibly have "supervised visitations" with her children (petition ¶7, ¶229). The 2019 stipulation was not created as a coparenting document but as a prison that was not survivable, with her former husband as warden and these paid Family Court actors as prison guards. If there was any doubt about the purpose of the 2019 stipulation, the 2022 Bayle Luscher therapeutic architecture, documented in the official transcripts, answers it. Neal's conclusion, pled in her civil petition, is that these "recommendations" had one purpose: to be both impossible and not survivable. That architecture runs 27 pages of requirements, including the 2019 stipulation. Neal's petition pleads that it inflicted irreparable harm and created a foreseeable danger: it left no path she could survive.
The divorce settlement supplied the financial leverage. Neal's share of the marital property was structured mostly as child support payments from Nagarajan, at his strong suggestion, because child support is not taxed, along with a smaller fifteen year note structured to align with her home with the children after the divorce. Those payments were her only income. Her many petitions draw the causal connection: the structure of the divorce settlement made her housing and financial survival dependent on the continuing cooperation of the same person she had divorced to escape his control. "When you want out of a marriage," Neal says, "the terms at the time seem less important than just getting out!"
Neal describes the 2019 stipulation as a transfer of control over her daily life, financial survival, and parental access to Nagarajan and the Family Court profiteers he paid handsomely. She contends that her subsequent efforts to have it voided were blocked.
Her petition identifies the people and conduct through which that control acquired judicial force: Nagarajan manufactured a false psychiatric narrative; his attorney, Suzanne Bayle, injected it into the proceedings; and Kristen Luscher repeated and ratified it under professional authority while also serving as the privately paid stipulation enforcer. Neal maintains that the psychiatric claims were contradicted by her medical records and treating psychiatrist's testimony, yet Orleans Family Court continued enforcing the restrictions built upon them.
More directly, her filing describes a false purchased narrative, purchased judicial consequences with a guarantee of judicial enforcement independent of any future facts, and an upper court process that sustains Family Court actions not as aligned with the law but under the expansive "best interest of the child" standard.
In 2022, by the time of the five day trial, Neal had not seen her children for fifteen consecutive months. She says the court had refused to hear fourteen filings seeking relief, including habeas corpus, constitutional challenges, contempt motions, and other requests to enforce her rights. The separation was already in place. At that trial, Bayle and Luscher recommended further requirements governing even possible supervised visitation.
Per Neal's petition (¶7, ¶228, ¶229), those requirements, the Bayle Luscher architecture, ran 27 pages: fourteen pages from the 2019 stipulation and thirteen additional pages from the 2022 proceedings. They demanded 100 percent compliance with 176 enumerated conditions and included more than eighty compliance gates, numerous automatic termination triggers, and approvals required from at least five people selected and previously compensated by Nagarajan.
Per her petition (¶7, ¶228), Neal was required to complete a minimum of twelve months of intensive therapy, five sessions per week, at a single facility in Washington, D.C., approved by Nagarajan. Quarterly treatment reports from her therapists were to go directly to the court, with distribution to the parties, including Nagarajan, at the court's discretion (petition ¶250), and she had to demonstrate "objective measurable gains," without a defined measuring instrument, threshold, or completion standard (petition ¶228, ¶234 to ¶236). The requirements included proof of compliance to unnamed authorities, coordination among providers who had not been identified or funded, telephone contact controlled by a therapist, and suspension of visits for undefined "harmful" behavior. Noncompliance carried a permanent sole custody default in Nagarajan's favor (petition ¶231).
The 2022 recommendations were not adopted. The 2019 stipulation, which had itself required 100 percent compliance, remained binding (2019 judgment, p. 13). Nagarajan retained approval and veto powers, while no neutral decisionmaker was designated to certify that Neal had completed the requirements or to override his refusal (petition ¶246). Even this entire process offered only the possibility of supervised visitation. No pathway to unsupervised access was defined (petition ¶228).
Per her petition (¶229), the demand was 100 percent compliance with conditions whose successful completion had no defined standard, while the same parent withholding the children retained the power to decide whether she had done enough.
Neal contends that once Nagarajan understood that the practical consequence of unilateral withholding might be only a financial penalty, the cost ceased to deter him. Over ten years, Neal's timeline records more than 175 documented interactions inside Orleans Family Court, where she has never received one favorable finding. Yet across thousands of pages of submissions, the Court cannot point to one piece of competent evidence, only judicial consequences compounded with judicial errors. Since 2017, she estimates that her time with her son has totaled approximately six months and her time with her daughter approximately one year, only because her daughter lived with her for six months.
The Institute addresses the mechanisms that allowed a control and abuse dynamic to move from the marriage into Family Court: financial dependence embedded in a divorce settlement, unilateral child withholding left uncorrected, privately paid professionals controlling parental access, unadjudicated allegations acquiring judicial force, and efforts to obtain relief repeatedly failing.
Neal continues to advocate for consistent enforcement of the protections in Louisiana's Act 552 of 2024, reduced reliance on custody evaluators, and stronger safeguards against opinions based on hearsay about disputed facts, which the final legislation did not fully address. She also seeks an end to treating unsworn, unsubstantiated statements supplied to the court by the paying party's attorney as evidence, and constitutional protections to preserve the bond between parent and child.
After ten years, Neal does not believe that Orleans Family Court is a forum of justice. It is a commodities marketplace where parental rights are purchased under the language of the "best interest of the child," control over the other parent comes with a judicial enforcement guarantee, and any attempts to correct the legal and moral errors are met with a wall of judicial protection practices that makes the mafia look like the Mickey Mouse Club.
Sources: Neal's petition filed April 3, 2026, cited by its own paragraph numbers (¶), and the 2019 consent judgment in its Exhibit H, cited by page.
