In October 2021, Jill Montes sat in a California family courtroom and listened to a judge call her toxic. Poisonous. An alienator. Her two young daughters were placed in their father's custody that day, cut off from Jill entirely. Her teenage son was not taken immediately — he wasn't told why his sisters had disappeared, and the following morning Jill was ordered to bring him to his attorney's office so the judge could decide his placement. The judge expressed concern that returning him directly to his father risked further "false" abuse disclosures, and ordered a third-party placement instead, to give him time away from what she called Jill's "toxic home environment." On November 17, 2021, he was sent to live with his football coach, under a no-contact order barring Jill from speaking to him at all. The family court had decided, without a trial, that Jill was the danger in her children's lives.
She was not. A second court would ultimately, dramatically, prove it.
A marriage, and a warning
Jill married in 2011. She brought a life she'd built herself — a decade as a professional actress, a career as a child behavioral therapist, a home, a family. Her husband was abusive from the honeymoon on. Within six months, police were called for the first time. Jill tried to leave. Religious conviction, and a caseworker's warning that resisting divorce could cost her custody, both weighed on her — she stayed, negotiated a fragile peace, and became pregnant for the first time in the marriage within weeks. He told her that if she ever fled with the children again, he would hurt her. The abuse continued for years — shoving, threats, her car keys or phone taken, being blocked from leaving rooms or her own house. She describes going to bed each night feeling like she was suffocating.
In 2015, she filed for her first restraining order, alone, with a newborn and a toddler in tow. Three weeks later, her husband's attorney approached her in a courthouse hallway, tried to talk her out of it, and warned it would hurt his career and his ability to provide for the family. Around the same time, Jill's toddler daughter began disclosing sexual abuse for the first time — vivid, specific disclosures that had not been part of the original filing. The judge who heard the case didn't examine Jill's evidence. She lost. That single loss, she says, emboldened her husband — and it set the pattern for everything that followed: deny the abuse, attack the victim, reverse victim and offender.
The claim that changed everything
By 2018, Jill filed for divorce. Her husband responded by demanding full custody and, after her son disclosed severe abuse in September 2020, by accusing Jill of "parental alienation" — the discredited theory that a mother's efforts to protect her children are really an attempt to poison them against their father.
Her son's disclosure — that his father had sexually abused him for years — was investigated by county child welfare services and substantiated as credible in 2020, independent of anything that followed. Law enforcement opened its own inquiry. None of it altered the course of the family court case. Opposing counsel began describing Jill as mentally ill, an alienator, delusional. A court-appointed evaluator — paid over $90,000 — concluded instead that Jill showed signs of "hyper-vigilance" and "persecutory fears," reasoning that her own history as a survivor of sexual assault made her prone to perceiving danger that wasn't there. Her husband's results were reported as normal. The children's own court-appointed minor's counsel rejected the alienation claims outright, having listened to the children directly — and opposing counsel responded by trying to have minor's counsel removed, accusing them of being "aligned with mom."
In 2020, Jill's son was ordered into conjoint reunification therapy with his father. He began self-harming on the first day.
On October 28, 2021, the family court ruled. Her two young daughters were placed in their father's custody immediately, cut off from Jill, from their older sister, from their grandmother, from anyone who might, in the court's words, "interfere" with their recovery. Her son followed on November 17.
Ninety days
In January 2022, the family court ordered all three children into a four-day program with their father at Family Bridges, formally called the "Workshop for Troubled and Alienated Parent-Child Relationships." They were told their father had always been safe and their mother was the one who had hurt them. They were shown videos about Nazi Germany and taught that they could not trust their own memories. They were warned that any resistance would reset their ninety-day separation from their mother back to day zero.
In their own words, spoken later at a public conference on reunification programs:
Her son, then 14, said the ordeal left him unable to trust any adult with power over him: "I never thought so many people would be that horrible, controlling, and manipulative towards little kids... The only thing that stopped me from throwing myself off the balcony was the 24/7 surveillance."
Her oldest daughter, 9 at the time, remembers being told her own evidence didn't count: "I'd bring something up and they'd say, 'That's just your mom manipulating you.'" When her father told her the camp's harm was "your mom's parental alienation," she told him simply: "No. I just hate you." She later told Jill she'd started forgetting her mother's face and voice, and that she'd made peace with the idea of one day visiting what she believed would be her mother's grave.
Her youngest daughter, 6 at the time, described being physically restrained and told that any kindness shown toward her mother would be punished as manipulation.
A second court, a different standard
Weeks after the children returned from the workshop, Jill discovered a shared digital account containing more than 100,000 photographs and videos her husband had taken of the children over several years. Detectives came to her home to collect the evidence and secure access to the cloud account, reopening an investigation into her son's abuse allegations that had never fully closed.
Her husband was arrested in a raid on his home. Police took the children to Polinsky Children's Center, where they stayed for a week while the juvenile court moved to take jurisdiction away from the family court — which, the court found, had failed to protect the children "despite mother's best efforts." A county child welfare agency filed a separate case, in dependency court, alleging the children had been sexually abused. Over a seven-day jurisdiction trial in early 2023, a juvenile court judge reviewed the evidence, found that the photographs constituted sexual exploitation, and ruled that all three children came under the court's protection. The judge found that the way the children's "bodies were treated in these photos completely dehumanized them," and later observed that their father "cannot fathom that they may not want to see him because they were sexually abused by him."
Following a second weeklong trial in May 2023, the dependency court terminated jurisdiction and granted Jill sole legal and physical custody of all three children. Her husband's request for visitation was denied. He appealed; in 2024, the Court of Appeal affirmed the judgment in full.
Her children had been telling the truth all along.
What healing looks like, and what it costs
Jill's children are home. They are safe. They are also still healing from an ordeal most adults could not withstand: all three have been diagnosed with complex PTSD. Just three weeks after coming home, her son survived a suicide attempt. For months afterward, her daughters slept in Jill's bedroom at night, too afraid to be anywhere else in the house.
Jill's ex-husband faces 19 felony counts, including child sexual abuse and possession of child pornography. He was released on bail set, by Jill's account, far below what the severity of the charges warranted — and a later request to increase it was denied. He has now been free on bail for four years. His trial has been postponed repeatedly — so many times that the prosecuting attorney's office has said they have never seen a case delayed so strategically, or for so long. Jill has attended every hearing she has been permitted to attend.
A story now being told
Jill's story is the subject of a forthcoming documentary, with a global release ahead. It was hearing Jill's story firsthand that inspired Ron Comerchero, Shield's co-founder, to help build an organization, together with Jill, dedicated to what she and her children endured — and to making sure fewer families face it alone.
Why Shield exists
What happened to Jill's family was not an aberration. It was the predictable result of a system that treats a discredited theory as science, disbelieves children who disclose abuse, and hands unaccountable programs the power to separate a parent from her children with no oversight and no appeal. It took a second court, applying a different legal standard, to do what the family court would not. Jill's case ended, against enormous odds, with her children coming home. Most do not get that chance.
Shield Project exists because Jill refused to let what happened to her family happen quietly, to someone else, unnoticed. This is her story. It is also the story of the system that made it possible — and the reason we are fighting to change it.