Day 812 since my two youngest children were kidnapped: Did Minnesota export a domestic-violence blind spot to the world?
I sent the following letter individually to every member of the Minnesota Legislature. I believe this is one of the most important pieces I have published on family-court reform. It examines false allegations, domestic violence against both women and men, mental health, constitutional due process, and whether Minnesota exported not only the Duluth Model, but also its gender-based blind spots throughout the United States and around the world.
The letter is supported by two attached Minnesota trial transcripts containing Scott Miller’s sworn testimony about DAIP, the Duluth Model, its worldwide influence, its rejection of mental health as an explanation for battering, and its unequal application to female perpetrators and male victims. It also explains that, as recently as 2019, a Minnesota Assistant Federal Defender—now a judge on the Minnesota Court of Appeals—directly challenged Miller’s qualifications and questioned whether the Duluth Model was scientifically reliable or trustworthy.
The primary records are provided so readers can examine the testimony and decide for themselves whether a framework created in Minnesota has contributed to failures in family court, domestic-violence investigations, the handling of false allegations, and the protection of children and families worldwide.
Dear Senator / Representative (Name),
For transparency, I am sending this message individually to every member of the Minnesota Senate and House of Representatives.
Today is Day 812 since my two youngest children were kidnapped.
Minnesota did more than create a local domestic-violence program.
Minnesota created a framework, embedded it into public institutions, financed its expansion, and helped export it throughout the United States and around the world.
That framework is the Duluth Model.
Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs, or DAIP, says its work is now found in every state and that it has projects and collaborations around the world. Scott Miller, DAIP’s longtime program leader and international trainer, testified that the Duluth Model was the most replicated domestic-violence intervention system in the world, was being used on the other side of the globe, and that its Power and Control Wheel had been translated into more than 25 languages. DAIP’s own historical materials describe the model’s influence throughout the United States and in countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Romania, and Australia.
If the model’s foundational assumptions are sound, that worldwide reach is an accomplishment.
But if its assumptions are incomplete, gender-biased, clinically inadequate, or incapable of recognizing evidence that contradicts its original narrative, then Minnesota did not keep those blind spots in Duluth.
Minnesota exported them.
That possibility has been ignored for too long.
What the Duluth Model is
The Duluth Model is not merely the familiar Power and Control Wheel.
It is a coordinated community response designed to align 911 operators, law enforcement, prosecutors, courts, probation, corrections, advocacy organizations, human-service workers, therapists, and offender programs around a common understanding of domestic violence.
DAIP describes the model as an interagency system intended to create consistent responses from law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, and probation officers. Its training materials say the system develops shared policies and protocols and monitors whether agencies comply with them.
Miller testified that DAIP’s training reaches “every agency within the criminal justice response,” including:
911 personnel;
law enforcement;
prosecutors;
judges;
human-service workers;
psychologists;
therapists;
counselors; and
social workers.
Coordination itself is not the problem. Agencies should communicate. Evidence should move efficiently from law enforcement to prosecutors and courts. Victims should not be abandoned between disconnected institutions.
The concern is that coordination multiplies whatever assumptions are built into the system.
When the initial framework is accurate, coordination can improve safety.
When it is wrong, the same classification can follow a family from the 911 call through the police report, advocacy services, prosecution, court proceedings, psychological treatment, child protection, and family court.
One early conclusion can become the accepted narrative everywhere else—not because every later participant independently verified it, but because each institution relied on the one before it.
The model’s starting point
The Power and Control Wheel was developed from focus groups involving women who described abuse by male partners. Miller testified that approximately 200 women were asked what it was like to live with a man who, in his words, “beats them into submission,” and how those men established power and control. Their responses became the wheel.
DAIP’s own website says the wheel was developed by battered women in Duluth who had been abused by male partners.
Those women’s experiences mattered. Their accounts should not be dismissed.
But their experiences were not:
a representative, gender-neutral population study;
a clinical study of mental illness;
an equal examination of female and male perpetrators;
a study of male victims;
a study of same-sex relationships;
a controlled examination of bidirectional violence;
or a comparison of competing causes of violent behavior.
That does not make their experiences false.
It means the model’s baseline was not neutral.
A framework developed to identify one pattern—men using violence and control against women—may be useful when a case actually presents that pattern. The problem begins when one pattern becomes the default explanation for every family, every allegation, and every act of violence.
What DAIP’s longtime trainer said under oath
Scott Miller testified:
“Battering is not a mental health issue. It’s a learned behavior like racism, like sexism.”
He explained that DAIP’s work with men was intended to teach them about what the program considered their bias against women. He also confirmed that the State was paying him to testify.
Miller acknowledged that female batterers exist.
He was then asked whether the Power and Control Wheel applies equally to female batterers and male victims.
His answer was:
“No, it does not.”
When asked why, Miller focused on physical strength. He testified that there were so few women capable of beating a man into submission that there had not been enough research to determine what female battering looked like.
But the Power and Control Wheel is not limited to physical strength. It includes:
intimidation;
emotional abuse;
isolation;
economic abuse;
using children;
coercion and threats;
minimizing, denying, and blaming;
and “male privilege.”
Women can threaten men.
Women can isolate partners.
Women can control money.
Women can monitor communications and movements.
Women can damage property.
Women can use children as leverage.
Women can make manipulative reports.
Women can minimize their own conduct, deny what happened, and blame someone else.
Under cross-examination, Miller acknowledged that women can use calls—or threats of calls—to law enforcement to manipulate a partner. He also acknowledged that female perpetrators can threaten, monitor, destroy property, shift responsibility, and establish power and control over men.That leaves a direct contradiction:
The behavior can be the same, but the model does not interpret it the same when the perpetrator is a woman and the victim is a man.
For transparency, I have provided a link to the two court transcripts at the end of this letter containing Scott Miller’s sworn testimony in State v. Ezeobi and State v. Bockwitz. Do not rely solely on my characterization—read the testimony and decide for yourself whether this is the foundation Minnesota should continue using to shape domestic-violence policy, court proceedings, and family outcomes.
The model does not explain all domestic violence
The evidence from same-sex relationships alone demonstrates why male power over women cannot be the universal explanation for intimate-partner violence.
A CDC national survey found that 43.8% of lesbian women reported lifetime rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner. Approximately two-thirds of lesbian women who experienced intimate-partner violence reported having only female perpetrators.
There is no male partner in those relationships.
There is no male privilege between the partners.
Yet physical violence, intimidation, isolation, financial control, threats, coercion, stalking, emotional abuse, and manipulation can still occur.
A peer-reviewed review of 119 studies likewise found that intimate-partner violence in lesbian and gay relationships occurred at rates comparable to—or in some studies higher than—those reported in heterosexual relationships. The authors described how stereotypes portraying women’s relationships as inherently peaceful can cause female-female violence to be minimized or overlooked.
That does not mean men and women experience identical rates, injuries, fear, sexual violence, or homicide risk in every category.
It means one gender theory cannot explain every case.
A neutral system must be able to recognize all configurations supported by the evidence:
A man can abuse a woman.
A woman can abuse a man.
A man can abuse a man.
A woman can abuse a woman.
Violence can be one-directional or bidirectional.
Mental health may be relevant in one case and not another.
The facts—not the sex of the people involved—must determine the classification.
The person presented as an expert
Miller’s education identified in the court record consisted of a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and an associate degree in electrical technology—not psychology, psychiatry, medicine, counseling, social work, criminology, or domestic-violence research.An expert can legally qualify through practical experience. A specialized clinical degree is not always required.
But the way Miller’s expertise became established raises a serious circularity problem.
In a 2018 Minnesota trial, defense counsel objected that Miller’s education, experience, and background were insufficient for the expert opinions he was giving. The court admitted him partly because he had worked at DAIP for 18 years, had interacted with hundreds of people, and had already been accepted as an expert in 29 prior cases.
The sequence is difficult to ignore:
DAIP develops the framework.
A DAIP representative spends years teaching that framework.
Those years become the basis for calling him an expert.
Courts accept him as an expert.
Each prior court appearance is then used to justify the next one.
Miller also testified that every prior case in which he had appeared as an expert had called him on behalf of the prosecution.
In a separate Minnesota case, Miller acknowledged that he had never met either party, had not reviewed the police reports, and knew almost nothing about the particular case beyond the fact that it involved a heterosexual couple and domestic violence. By the end of his testimony, he admitted that he did not know whether there had been a pattern of coercion or violence and was not even sure what the criminal charge was.He was nevertheless allowed to explain how batterers behave, how victims respond, why alleged victims may return or recant, and why conduct that appears inconsistent with abuse may actually support the prosecution’s theory.
That was not a case-specific clinical assessment.
It was a generalized advocacy framework being placed over the individual evidence.
More than $42 million in identified federal funding
This institutional influence was not built solely through private donations.
The federal Department of Health and Human Services’ TAGGS database reports $23,841,530 in award actions to DAIP and its former legal name, Minnesota Program Development, Inc. Many of those awards were specifically designated for family-violence resource centers, information, and technical assistance.
My review of the Department of Justice’s archived Office on Violence Against Women award pages identifies another $18,784,498 in publicly displayed awards from 2006 through 2014. Those records include multiple years in which DAIP received several separate technical-assistance awards totaling millions of dollars.The identified minimum exceeds $42.6 million, approximately:
1990s: at least $5.2 million
2000s: at least $19.5 million
2010s: at least $17.9 million
That total is incomplete. It does not include several identified federal awards whose archived pages no longer display dollar amounts, including additional 2005 awards. It also does not include every state or local grant, government contract, pass-through award, or private grant.
Not every dollar can be described as payment for one wheel, one curriculum, or one statement made by Scott Miller. Much of the funding supported resource centers, training, technical assistance, and institutional infrastructure.
That is precisely the point.
Government funded the organization.
The organization trained government institutions.
Its representative then appeared in court as the government’s expert.
That level of public funding and institutional influence requires independent scrutiny.
These scientific concerns were raised inside Minnesota’s legal system
These questions did not originate with me.
As recently as 2019, Keala C. Ede—then an Assistant Federal Defender and now a judge on the Minnesota Court of Appeals—was directly involved in challenging the government’s proposed use of Scott Miller as an expert.
Records in my possession show that Ede sought to establish that Miller was not qualified to testify about the common behaviors of people who batter or are battered and that the Duluth Model was not reliable or trustworthy because it:
had not been validated through scientific testing;
had not been adequately peer reviewed and published;
lacked a known error rate;
was not generally accepted as science;
was not subject to established standards and controls;
did not adequately rule out alternative explanations;
and was not linked to the facts of the individual case.
Judge Ede served as an Assistant Federal Defender from 2016 through 2022 and now sits on the Minnesota Court of Appeals.
He was representing a client, so I am not attributing any current personal position to him.
The significance is that, not that long ago, a lawyer working inside Minnesota’s federal justice system—who now serves on our Court of Appeals—was raising the same fundamental questions about Miller’s qualifications and the Duluth Model’s scientific reliability.
Those questions were never answered for Minnesota families.
What the public cases reveal
The Depp–Heard trial made one cultural assumption explicit. In a recording played in court, Amber Heard challenged Johnny Depp to tell the world that he—a man—was a victim of domestic violence and then “see how many people believe or side with you.”
That statement captured the problem: a man may report abuse, possess evidence, and still expect to be disbelieved because he does not fit society’s preferred image of a victim.
The Lindsay Clancy case shows a related problem, but it should not consume this discussion. Her defense did not dispute that she killed her three children; the dispute concerned her mental condition and legal responsibility. Hundreds of supporters—most of them women—rallied in support of Clancy and emphasized failures in postpartum mental-health care. Separately, online conspiracy theories attempted to redirect suspicion toward Patrick Clancy, even though Lindsay’s own defense did not claim that Patrick killed the children.
Not every person calling for better postpartum care was excusing the deaths or blaming Patrick. Mental-health treatment failures deserve serious examination.
But it is fair to ask a broader question:
After decades of institutional and cultural messaging centered on female victimization and male perpetration, has part of society become conditioned to search for a man to blame even when the known conduct points in the opposite direction?
I cannot prove that the Duluth Model caused every public reaction in the Clancy case.
I am saying that the parallel is serious enough to investigate.
Mental health may explain conduct and may affect legal responsibility. It does not change the identity of the victims, erase the act, or justify inventing responsibility for another person.
A horrifying act alone also does not establish legal insanity. If the nature of a murder automatically proved insanity, nearly every person charged with murder could make the same claim.
Justice must begin by identifying what happened, preserving the evidence, recognizing the victims, and applying the law through due process.
Accountability and treatment are not opposites.
Minnesota has its own warnings
Minnesota does not need to rely on celebrity trials or cases from other states.
I previously sent legislators information involving Minnesota children including Eli Hart, De’Ali Blia Delgado, Jose Lazarus Zamora, a two-year-old in St. Paul, a three-year-old in Pelican Rapids, a five-year-old in Woodbury, two children in Blackduck, and an infant in Bloomington. The cases differ factually and procedurally, but each involved a mother accused or convicted of killing a child or children.
These cases do not establish how frequently women commit family violence.
They establish that it happens.
They establish that maternal violence and severe mental-health crises are not theoretical exceptions that a child-safety system can afford to disregard.
Every headline eventually fades.
The children do not come back.
The question is whether Minnesota will take documented warning signs seriously before another family becomes a headline.
Why I finally said enough
This issue became personal to me when the mother of my children lost control of herself over our two-year-old daughter refusing to take a nap.
She threw herself onto the floor, cried, and could not settle herself (the forty-one-year-old mother, not the two-year-old child). The situation escalated until she struck me in the face. My teeth went through my lip, causing my mouth to bleed.
She later admitted to law enforcement and in court that she struck me.
She admitted that I did not strike her.
My injury was photographed.
That was when I finally said enough.
I told her she needed help—not only for herself, but for our children. I called law enforcement because I was trying to protect my family, require accountability, and obtain help before the behavior became worse.
After eight years, it was clear that things were not getting better and that trying to get her help on my own was not working. I needed help.
Look where that got me
Instead of beginning with the admitted conduct and examining my concerns neutrally, the system redirected its scrutiny toward me.
I became the problem.
I lost my children.
I am not claiming that every parent who loses emotional control will kill a child. I am not publicly assigning the mother of my children a diagnosis, and I am not disclosing confidential psychological information.
I am saying that admitted violence, a documented injury, serious loss of emotional regulation, and conduct occurring around a two-year-old child should trigger prompt, neutral investigation and qualified mental-health assessment.
A father should not have to wait until his children become another headline before his concerns are treated seriously.
What happens when the facts do not fit the model?
A system trained to expect a male perpetrator and a female victim may struggle when the evidence points in the opposite direction.
A woman’s violence can be reclassified as resistance.
A man’s defensive reaction can become the primary aggression.
His anger at being assaulted or falsely accused can be presented as proof that he is dangerous.
His request that officials examine contradictory evidence can be labeled manipulation or control.
His request for a psychological evaluation can be characterized as an attack on the mother rather than a request to investigate safety.
The original classification survives even when later evidence contradicts it.
That can also distort the data used to defend the system.
If a framework influences who police arrest, who prosecutors charge, who courts order into programming, and who government-funded services count as victims and offenders, those administrative records cannot independently prove that the framework was correct.
The model classifies the case.
The classification becomes the data.
The data are then cited to validate the model.
Once institutions have spent decades funding, teaching, applying, and defending one framework, contrary evidence threatens more than the outcome of one case. It raises questions about the training, the experts, the agency protocols, and past decisions built upon them.
That creates a powerful risk of institutional confirmation bias. It does not require a coordinated conspiracy. People can sincerely apply a framework and still interpret every new fact through assumptions they were trained to accept.
There is an unavoidable irony:
A system created to identify minimizing, denying, blaming, power, and control must be willing to examine whether it is minimizing female violence, denying contradictory evidence, blaming male victims, and using institutional power to preserve its own narrative.
Mental health cannot be declared irrelevant
The CDC does not describe intimate-partner violence as having one universal cause. It identifies a combination of individual, relationship, community, and societal risk factors. Those include heavy alcohol or drug use, depression and suicide attempts, anger and hostility, poor behavioral control, impulsiveness, antisocial personality traits, traits associated with borderline personality disorder, prior abusive conduct, emotional dependence, relationship conflict, and a desire for power and control. The CDC cautions that risk factors are not necessarily direct causes and do not prove that a particular person will become violent.
That is a more responsible starting point than declaring categorically that battering is not a mental-health issue.
Mental illness does not excuse violence.
A diagnosis does not prove that someone committed abuse.
Most people experiencing mental-health conditions are not violent.
But psychosis, severe emotional dysregulation, personality pathology, trauma, suicidal behavior, substance abuse, impaired impulse control, and distorted perceptions cannot responsibly be ruled irrelevant before anyone conducts an evaluation.
Ignoring mental health harms everyone.
A violent or unstable man may receive only ideological education while a significant clinical condition remains untreated.
A violent or unstable woman may be presumed to be acting in resistance and never receive the treatment she needs.
Children may remain exposed to unresolved behavior while the system protects the classification it made at the beginning.
Diagnosis guides treatment.
Evidence establishes what happened.
Risk assessment determines what protection is necessary.
The government should not require a perfect diagnostic label before responding to documented dangerous conduct.
Constitutional rights cannot depend on wealth
The United States Supreme Court has described a parent’s interest in the care, custody, and management of a child as a fundamental liberty interest protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. In the parental-rights-termination context, the Court held that when the State moves to destroy weakened family bonds, it must provide fundamentally fair procedures.
Family court should not be a constitutional exception.
It also cannot remain a pay-to-play system in which the parent who can afford the better attorney, more experts, more transcripts, more depositions, and more years of litigation has the greater opportunity to maintain a relationship with a child.
Parents should not have to purchase due process.
When government action restricts or destroys a parent-child relationship, Minnesota must provide:
A prompt evidentiary hearing before an emergency allegation is allowed to become a months- or years-long status quo.
Decisions based on evidence and established facts, not merely allegations, hearsay, advocacy labels, generalized theories, or one court actor repeating what another court actor said.
Access to the evidence being used, together with a meaningful opportunity to question witnesses, challenge experts, expose incomplete investigations, and present contrary evidence.
Neutral, case-specific investigation, applying the same standards to mothers and fathers and obtaining qualified psychological or risk evaluations when credible concerns are supported by evidence.
Specific, child-related written findings identifying the conduct, evidence, risk, and legal basis for restricting custody or parenting time.
Meaningful access to legal assistance and neutral experts regardless of income, so constitutional protection does not depend on personal wealth.
Immediate and effective review when those safeguards are denied, because an appeal years later cannot return a child’s lost childhood.
Emergency intervention may sometimes be necessary before every fact is known.
But an emergency allegation cannot become a permanent family arrangement merely because the system delays testing it.
Why DAIP is also named in my federal case
These concerns are among the reasons my pending federal civil-rights action names 27 defendants, including the State of Minnesota and Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs.
My complaint alleges that government entities, court actors, private organizations, and other participants violated my constitutional rights during Minnesota’s response to my family. DAIP is not included as a rhetorical target. It is included because I allege that its framework, institutional influence, and participation are part of the system that denied my family neutral treatment and constitutional protections. The public federal docket identifies both the State and DAIP among the defendants.
Those allegations remain subject to adjudication. Filing a lawsuit does not prove them.
But no parent should need a federal civil-rights lawsuit against 27 defendants simply to ask whether public institutions followed the evidence, applied the law equally, provided due process, and took documented family-safety concerns seriously.
What I am asking from the Legislature
I spent every day of the 2026 legislative session at the Minnesota State Capitol. Altogether, I was there for 87 days, including every one of the 60 days on which committee hearings, floor sessions, or both were held.
The subject I heard discussed more than any other in committees and during House and Senate floor sessions was mental health.
If Minnesota is serious about mental health, it cannot exclude domestic violence, family court, child protection, and children’s safety from that commitment.
This coming session, I am asking you to take family-court reform seriously.
Author the bills.
Co-author them.
Allow them to be heard, examined, and amended in committee.
Permit parents, researchers, survivors, and professionals to testify.
Vote on them.
Move them to the House and Senate floors.
Then pass enforceable reforms.
The Legislature should begin with a bipartisan oversight hearing and an independent review of the Duluth Model’s foundation, scientific reliability, government funding, international reach, use in expert testimony, treatment of mental health, and application to female perpetrators, male victims, same-sex relationships, and bidirectional violence.
That hearing should include DAIP, independent researchers, qualified mental-health professionals, law enforcement, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges or appropriate Judicial Branch representatives, female and male survivors, parents, and adults who experienced these systems as children.
The Legislature should also determine whether Judge Ede—or another appropriate Judicial Branch representative—can address the general evidentiary standards that should apply when an advocacy-based framework is introduced as expert evidence. That request should not involve my litigation or require comment on any pending case.
Minnesota has a responsibility to lead the correction
This letter does not claim that Minnesota or the Duluth Model caused every domestic-violence failure in the United States or around the world.
It makes a narrower and more serious point:
When a state exports a framework, it exports the framework’s assumptions.
If those assumptions cause male victims to be disbelieved, female violence to be minimized, mental-health factors to be ignored, contradictory evidence to be reinterpreted, or families to be classified before they are investigated, the consequences will not remain in the place where the model began.
They will be repeated wherever the model travels.
Minnesota created the Duluth Model.
Minnesota helped finance it.
Minnesota integrated it into public institutions.
Minnesota helped export it around the world.
Minnesota therefore has a responsibility to examine it honestly and correct what it got wrong.
Nothing in this letter asks Minnesota to stop protecting women.
It asks Minnesota to stop deciding who deserves protection before examining the evidence.
The proper order is clear:
The act is the starting point.
The evidence determines what happened.
Due process determines legal responsibility.
Mental-health science guides treatment and prevention.
Accountability protects the victims and the public.
Ideology should determine none of it.
Attachments:
State v. Ezeobi—Scott Miller DAIP Testimony (2014)
State v. Bockwitz—Scott Miller DAIP Expert Testimony (2018)
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Please consider joining the Minnesota Family Rights Coalition at www.mn-frc.com.
Then please consider signing these petitions:
Reform Minnesota’s Family Court System at https://c.org/vpDZs57Hmb.
Urge DOJ to investigate family-court violations at https://c.org/4S5yBSCzY7.
Respectfully,
Ryan Alvar
Family Court Reform Advocate
310 4th Avenue South Suite 5010-94188
Minneapolis, MN 55415
Cell: (651) 707-6812
Email: ryanalvar@ryanalvar.com
Website: www.ryanalvar.com
Coalition: www.mn-frc.com
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I have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit challenging systemic misconduct by judges, attorneys, and state agencies that has stripped parents of their rights and traumatized countless children.
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If what you’ve read here troubles you, don’t stop at signing the petition—call and email your state legislators. Tell them that what has happened in this case—and in so many others—proves we need oversight for judges and guardians ad litem, uniform due-process protections, and full transparency in family courts.
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Across the country, I’ve heard from parents who’ve lost everything—many haven’t seen their children in years. When the system designed to protect families becomes the weapon that destroys them, it’s time for change. We must fix this broken family court system. Until that day, I’ll keep fighting—for our children, for truth, and for justice.
"812 days since my children were kidnapped. This isn't over."
Ryan William Alvar
Parent and Plaintiff
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