This profile is part of "The Record Stands," a TROH special series.
One sentence in the documented record of Dr. Steve Tutty's career explains nearly everything about the trouble that followed. Here it is, in his own words:
"When the court orders a mental health evaluation, our client is actually the judge and/or commissioner, and the balance between objectivity and client compassion can be difficult."
Read it twice, because it inverts what most people assume. The parent who hires an evaluator is not the client. The parent who pays the bill is not the client. The client is the court. The work belongs to the truth of the assessment, and everyone else in the room, including the person writing the check, is a party whose wishes the evaluator is not there to serve.
That is a doctrine. It has a logic, a cost, and a body count of professional reputations. It deserves a full column.
What the Doctrine Actually Says
Start with what the sentence rules out. It rules out advocacy. An evaluator operating under this doctrine cannot shade a finding toward the parent who engaged him, cannot soften a conclusion because the softer version would please the referrer, and cannot harden one because the other side seems unsympathetic. The judge asked a question. The evaluator's job is to answer the question asked, with the evidence available, in language a court can rely on.
Then notice what the sentence keeps. "Client compassion" stays in the frame. The doctrine does not turn the evaluator into a machine. Families in these cases are often in the worst season of their lives, and a clinician who forgets that produces worse data, because frightened people close up. The sentence holds both duties at once and admits openly that the balance "can be difficult."
That admission is the sound of a professional describing real work rather than reciting an ethics code. Anyone can say be objective. Saying the balance is difficult, in public, on the record, is what 25 years of actually trying to hold it sounds like.
It is also worth naming what the doctrine is not. It is not indifference to families, and it is not a posture an evaluator adopts on hard days and drops on easy ones. The sentence assigns the allegiance permanently, before any particular case walks in the door. The judge is the client on the first evaluation and on the thousandth. That consistency is what allows a court to trust an evaluator's signature over decades, and it is what makes the signature worth attacking when a case goes sideways.
Where the Doctrine Comes From
A doctrine like this does not appear from nowhere, and the record shows the formation. Tutty is a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in child, forensic, and neuropsychology, with a National Health Scholar background that spanned hospitals, schools, wilderness programs, universities, and research institutions. He published peer-reviewed research in JAMA, the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Behavioral Therapy, General Hospital Psychiatry, and the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, work that trained him in the discipline of letting data outrank preference.
He has also described his method for protecting objectivity: begin before the conflict. His instruction is to review the client's developmental history from birth forward, before the crisis in question, to understand the person whole rather than through the lens of the current fight. An evaluator who starts with the crisis inherits the parties' framing. An evaluator who starts at the beginning builds an independent picture, and independence is the entire product.
Why the Doctrine Produces Enemies
Here is the part the critics never engage. If your client is the judge, then every evaluation ends with at least one parent who did not get what they came for. Not sometimes. Every time. A custody recommendation lands, and one household reads it as vindication while the other reads it as theft.
The parent who feels robbed cannot sue the judge. They cannot complain to a licensing board about the commissioner. The evaluator, though, is licensed, named, and reachable. The complaint form is right there.
Family-court insiders describe the resulting pattern openly: licensing complaints cluster around evaluators who deliver unwelcome opinions, and the evaluators who bend toward the paying parent rarely attract complaints at all. A complaint count, in this arena, is evidence of exposure. It tells you the professional kept serving the court while standing between two people with lawyers.
The alternative is worth naming, because it clarifies the doctrine by contrast. An evaluator could treat the paying parent as the client. Plenty of expert-witness markets work exactly that way, and everyone in family court can point to professionals whose opinions seem to follow the fee. Such an evaluator would be popular, busy, and largely complaint-free. He would also be useless to a judge, because a court cannot rely on work product whose allegiance runs to whoever purchased it. The doctrine exists to keep the second kind of evaluator out of custody cases, and its enforcers are not regulators. They are the outcomes themselves, accumulating over years of referrals.
Tutty has described the environment that produces in blunt terms, concluding that best-interest determinations belong with judges and that divorce litigation offers "zero protection for the mental health profession."
Notice the through line. The man who says the client is the judge is the same man saying judges, not evaluators, should carry the final weight of best-interest calls. That is a coherent worldview: the evaluator serves the court, the court decides, and the professional who tells the court the truth should not be personally destroyed for it. You can disagree with that worldview. You cannot call it careless.
The Sentence in Context
The irony should not escape anyone. The coverage of Tutty has centered on a Statement of Charges from the Department of Health's Examining Board of Psychology, an accusation that opens a process and has not been tested by cross-examination. He maintains his evaluation work followed Washington law and professional standards at every step, and he is contesting the allegations.
And the man at the center of it is on record, for years, describing a professional ethic that subordinates his own comfort, his own client relationships, and ultimately his own safety to the court's need for an honest answer. "Our client is actually the judge." That is either a credo or an indictment of how we treat people who hold it. Given what the record shows happened next, it reads as both.
Before you accept any account of this career, ask whether the account includes the doctrine the career was built on. If it does not, you are reading a caricature. The sentence is right there. It always was.