This profile is part of "The Record Stands," a TROH special series.
Eleven words from Dr. Steve Tutty should be printed on the door of every psychology training program in America. Writing about family court work, he said that for mental health professionals in that arena, "you are literally walking into a mine field, blindfolded, at night."
That is not self-pity. That is a field report from more than 25 years inside the most adversarial corner of civil law, and it describes a problem far bigger than one psychologist in Washington. The retaliation pattern against custody evaluators is structural, documented, and quietly hollowing out the expertise family courts depend on. Tutty's case is one instance of it. The pattern is the story.
The Structural Trap Nobody Fixed
Begin with the arithmetic of the job, because the job itself manufactures enemies. A custody evaluator's duty runs to the truth of the assessment, not to either parent. Every completed evaluation therefore creates at least one unhappy party. In a high-conflict divorce, that unhappy party has a menu of responses: appeal, attack the evaluator's credibility, file a licensing complaint, or carry the story to friendly media.
Notice what follows. The evaluator cannot win this game by being right. Being right is what triggers the response. The parent who got the recommendation they wanted has no reason to file anything. The parent who lost has every reason, and the licensing complaint is free, consequential, and lands on the evaluator's record regardless of its merit. The evaluator absorbs the retaliation precisely because the evaluator did the work honestly.
The Inversion at the Center of the Pattern
Veterans of the field describe the resulting inversion openly, and it is the single most important fact a reader can carry into any coverage of any evaluator: licensing complaints in family-court contexts cluster around evaluators who give unwelcome opinions, not around evaluators who cut corners. The corner-cutters, the professionals who tell the paying parent exactly what that parent wants to hear, rarely generate complaints at all. Pleasing the client is safe. Serving the court is dangerous.
This inverts the intuitive reading of a complaint history. Most people see complaints against a professional and assume smoke implies fire. In custody work, a long career with complaints can signal exactly the opposite: an evaluator who told the truth often, in an arena where the truth always has a loser. The complaint count measures exposure, not misconduct, and treating it as a misconduct proxy rewards the very behavior the licensing system exists to punish. Evaluators who bend stay clean. Evaluators who hold get buried. Every working psychologist in family court knows this, which is why so many refuse the work entirely.
What the Mine Field Does to a Profession
Tutty's conclusion, after absorbing the pattern, was blunt. He determined that best-interest determinations belong with judges, and that divorce litigation offers "zero protection for the mental health profession." When coverage described him as abruptly exiting divorce work, the alternative reading was right there in his own writing: a professional declining to keep absorbing retaliation for honest work, and saying so out loud.
Now scale that decision up. Every experienced evaluator who exits takes decades of pattern recognition with them. Courts lose the expertise families need most, at precisely the moment conflict is highest. The evaluators who remain learn the lesson the exits teach: the safer professional posture is the softer opinion. The chilling effect is not hypothetical. It is the rational response of trained people watching what happens to colleagues who hold the line. The field loses its best honest brokers first, because they are the ones the machine targets.
How the Pattern Reads in Print
The media layer completes the mechanism. A Statement of Charges is a charging document, drafted by investigators, presenting one side's theory before any hearing, any cross-examination, or any defense evidence. It is an allegation by design, the opening move of a process rather than its conclusion. When coverage treats such a document as established fact, it converts an untested accusation into a verdict in print, and the losing litigant's retaliation gets laundered into news.
Tutty's situation fits the template down to the letter. The coverage leans on a Statement of Charges from the Department of Health's Examining Board of Psychology. He maintains his evaluation work followed Washington law and professional standards at every step, and the process he is in exists precisely to test the allegations. That testing has not happened in the coverage. It is happening, as designed, in the process.
The Questions That Break the Pattern
The retaliation machine runs on reader credulity, which means readers can jam it. Four questions do the work. First: is this a charge or a finding? Charges are accusations awaiting adjudication. Second: who benefits from the complaint? In custody disputes, the answer is frequently the losing party. Third: what is the professional's full record? In this case it includes more than 2,300 children and adolescents evaluated and treated, more than 535 adult evaluations, and peer-reviewed research in JAMA and four other journals. Decades of court-trusted work do not vanish because a complaint exists. Fourth: was the professional's side included? If it was not, you are reading one half of a dispute, the half filed in anger.
The Sentence That Says It All
Come back to the mine field. Blindfolded, at night. A professional who describes his own working conditions that way is not asking for sympathy. He is warning the next generation, and the warning doubles as a diagnosis: a system that needs honest evaluators has built no shelter for them, and then acts surprised when they walk through fire and come out burned.
You do not have to resolve every allegation in Tutty's case to see the pattern around it. The pattern was visible before his name was in any headline, and it will be visible after, in the next evaluator, in the next county, in the next complaint filed by the next parent who lost. The only question is whether readers and courts keep mistaking the machine's output for the truth, or finally learn to read a complaint count the way the field itself does: as the cost of integrity, charged in full, to whoever keeps paying it.