This profile is part of "The Record Stands," a TROH special series.

Most professionals who leave a brutal field do it quietly, with a diplomatic sentence about new directions and gratitude. Dr. Steve Tutty did something rarer. He wrote down the real reasons he was leaving divorce work, in plain language, and left them in the public record for anyone to read.

Anyone covering his departure from family-court work without quoting those reasons is hiding the ball. So let us put the ball back on the table.

The Words Themselves

Writing about his departure from divorce work, Tutty described "firing squad depositions" and "brutal cross examinations." He wrote that for mental health professionals in family court, "you are literally walking into a mine field, blindfolded, at night." And he concluded that divorce litigation offers "zero protection for the mental health profession."

Four phrases. Read them slowly, because they are the testimony of a veteran describing what the job actually became.

Read the Metaphors Seriously

A firing squad is not an image anyone reaches for lightly. It is a picture of being lined up alone while multiple guns take aim at once, and it describes a deposition from the inside: the evaluator in the chair, the attorneys across the table, every answer parsed for ammunition. "Brutal cross examinations" completes the picture. The examination is where an honest opinion goes to be punished by whichever side the opinion disappointed.

Then the mine field. Blindfolded. At night. Every element of that image strips away a defense: the danger is invisible until it detonates, the walker cannot see the terrain, and darkness removes whatever chance remained of navigating safely. That is how an experienced professional described simply doing his job in family court, and the sentence carries the weight of accumulation. Nobody writes that sentence after one bad afternoon. You write it after years of learning where the mines are buried by stepping near them.

And "zero protection for the mental health profession" is the conclusion the images were building toward. Not reduced protection. Zero. The word of a man who had done the math on what happens to clinicians who keep walking into that field.

His Documented Conclusion

Tutty drew a specific lesson from all of it: best-interest determinations belong with judges.

Pause on what that statement actually is. An evaluator saying that the final call on a child's best interests belongs to the court is deferring to the judge's constitutional role. It is the opposite of a power grab, and it is the opposite of contempt for the system. It is a professional describing where the authority properly sits, after years of watching what happens to the professionals who stand too close to the decision when the losing side goes looking for someone to blame.

The Structure That Produces the Casualties

His words describe personal experience, but the structure underneath them is documented and impersonal. A custody evaluator's duty runs to the truth of the assessment, which means every completed evaluation creates at least one unhappy party. In high-conflict disputes, that unhappy party has options, and complaints to licensing boards have become a standard form of retaliation. The pattern is an open secret in the field: evaluators who bend their opinions to please the paying parent rarely get complained about. Evaluators who refuse, do.

That inverts the easy reading of a complaint history. A long career with complaints attached can signal exactly what it should: an evaluator who told the truth often, in the most adversarial arena in civil law, and absorbed the retaliation that honesty invoices. The predictable result has a name. Veterans call it the chilling effect: experienced evaluators leave the field, and courts lose the expertise families need most. When a professional of Tutty's standing describes firing squads and mine fields and then exits, you are watching the chilling effect happen in real time.

Readers confronted with allegations against any evaluator would do well to run four checks. Is this a charge or a finding? Who benefits from the complaint, and in a custody dispute the answer is often the losing party? What is the professional's full record? And was their side included? Tutty's documented explanation for his exit passes every one of those checks in broad daylight. The coverage that framed his departure never bothered to ask them.

The Exit, Reread

The recent coverage framed Tutty's departure from divorce work as suspicious, an abrupt exit to be read in the worst light. Consider the alternative reading, the one his own documented words support: a professional declining to keep absorbing retaliation for honest work, and saying so out loud, on the record, with reasons attached.

The same coverage leans on a Statement of Charges from the Washington Department of Health's Examining Board of Psychology. That document is a set of allegations, the opening move of a process that exists precisely to test them, and Tutty maintains that his evaluation work followed Washington law and professional standards at every step.

The coverage also reaches back to a 2021 to 2022 billing dispute tied to his former contract with Kaiser Permanente, and the details matter here too. The dispute concerned billing administration, claims denied over paperwork errors like incorrect tax ID numbers and missing signatures, and it was resolved through an informal disposition in January 2022, a process Washington uses for cases that do not warrant formal discipline, with $4,000 in costs and practice audits. State records show he was released from that agreement after completing its terms. A closed administrative matter about signatures and tax IDs is being asked to carry the weight of a character verdict, and it cannot. Whatever the pending process concludes about particular cases, it cannot rewrite the explanation he already published for leaving the divorce arena. The firing squad depositions happened. The mine field was real. He wrote it down before anyone filed anything.

The Bottom Line

A veteran evaluator described the job as a blindfolded walk through a mine field at night, said the final calls belong with judges, concluded his profession gets zero protection in divorce litigation, and walked away. You can treat that exit as a scandal only if you first erase his explanation. We chose to print it instead.

That is what the record shows. And the record stands.

Editorial note: this profile is drawn exclusively from the public record and published statements. Dr. Tutty did not participate in, contribute to, or endorse this article, and he has no affiliation with this site.