On July 14, 2008, Margaret Kegel, then the domestic relations hearing officer for the 1st Judicial District Court, filed a report with the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office alleging stalking and harassment by Gonze.
In her statement to police, Kegel said Gonze resented his treatment by the courts dating to his 2002 custody fight; she said Gonze belonged to fathers’ rights groups “with a history of using threats and intimidation.”
Twice in 2008, Kegel told police, Gonze “stared at her with a look of hatred and scared her son” at a day camp their children both attended. She claims he drove by her slowly as she ran errands. Most significantly, she claimed, Gonze attacked her via an anonymous advertisement in The Santa Fe New Mexican.
The May 15, 2007 ad specifically mentioned Kegel under the headline: “Mistreated In Court? Speak Up Now!” It directed complaints about Kegel’s performance to her supervisor, Family Court Judge Raymond Ortiz.
Judge Ortiz personally asked the New Mexican about the 2007 ad, Kegel says, because it could have been construed as having been placed by the court. Ortiz did not return SFR’s messages.
Meanwhile, in 2006 and 2007, the New Mexican ran approximately two dozen letters criticizing the 1st District family court, along with the legal system’s treatment of domestic violence and child support cases. Around that time, Gonze noted in court filings, Kegel’s court granted his first wife a protection order against him. (The order may have been expunged, as district court does not have the file.)
SFR checked the letters and guest columns from the New Mexican from this time period regarding family and domestic violence court. There is strong evidence some of the authors are not real people.
Former Domestic Relations Hearing Officer Margaret Kegel believes Joshua Gonze was behind this ad in The Santa Fe New Mexican as part of a covert campaign against her. The ad was echoed by letters, some of which seem to have pseudonymous authors.
One May 6, 2007 letter almost precisely echoes the anti-Kegel ad. The letter is signed “David Huntington,” Santa Fe. Huntington seems to be a non-person. The Nexis database—a trove of public and commercial data used by debt collectors, private investigators, law firms and newspapers—returns no results for that name within 50 miles of Santa Fe. Google also turns up nothing. There is no such name in a 2006 Santa Fe phone book. No such person ever entered the New Mexico court system.
Gonze’s second ex, Leticia López, tells SFR she suspects Gonze used a number of false names to attack his opponents on the opinion pages of the New Mexican.
While López—who over the years worked at the New Mexican as an assistant news editor and copy editor, among other positions—never personally witnessed her ex writing pseudonymous letters, she tells SFR he implied having done so several times. “I asked him about [the letters] and said, ‘You have to stop; I work at the New Mexican,’ she tells SFR. Gonze promised to stop, she says.
But the letters continued; the questionable ones weren’t retracted, even though several sources tell SFR some New Mexican editors had been made aware that some of them might have been fishy.
SFR’s call to Managing Editor Rob Dean was returned by Public Editor Camille Flores, who oversees letters to the editor.
“During the time these things were being submitted and appeared in the paper, it was not brought to my attention [that some names might be false],” Flores tells SFR. “I never felt there was a campaign going on…I can say we received many letters with much more specific information that we chose not to run.”
Kegel says the letters prompted her District Court supervisors to evaluate her performance. The evaluation, she says, came out fine. But “over the long run,” Kegel says, the chorus of jeers contributed to her forced resignation this year.
“There was a lingering perception by judges and court staff that there was this group of people who were very unhappy with my work, when in fact it was probably one person who took the time to try to cause a problem because he was unhappy with my decision,” Kegel, who is highly regarded by local victims’ advocates, tells SFR.
Kegel also suspects Gonze wrote some of the letters:
“They weren’t signed by anyone who ever appeared before me, and most of them were people who don’t exist at all. The few that were left, it would be hard to tell, because they were names a lot of people might’ve had,” she says.
One such letter, titled “Curb Kegel,” appeared April 8, 2007 under the name “Ron Burman,” Santa Fe. No person by that name turns up in searches of public and court records, including in the domestic violence court. This is the clincher, because “Burman” claimed personal experience with Kegel’s “reign of terror” in the 1st Judicial District. “I saw Kegel ignore proof of abuse by my wife. When I strongly complained about the abuse, Kegel found me guilty of ‘domestic violence’ merely for complaining,” Burman wrote.
On at least two occasions, SFR may also have been duped, despite requiring would-be correspondents to include an address and phone number with their letters. “Your cover story on domestic violence is wrong where it states ‘the vast majority of violent abusers are men,’” one letter began.
The letter, which cited several DV-denier websites mentioned in the New Mexican letters, was signed “Florence Vigil,” for whom there also are no public records.
While SFR cannot verify Kegel or López’ suspicion that Gonze was involved with the bogus letters, Gonze made it known fathers’ rights was an issue to which he was dedicated.
In the past 2 1/2 years, I have seen how the Judicial System treats father's based on "heresay, false accusations, outright lies, and the polluted verbage given by the mother. I personally witnessed the Judge and "his" employees tell the father that he did not need to file a counter motion. The father's motion presented compelling evidence of physical, emotional, and verbal abuseand attempted murder of the mother against her infant child. The mother got drunk at a party where she "happened" to have forceably taken the infant. An eye-witness stated that the child had an accident or was somehow injured. The mother knew she was responsible for injury to the child on night of the party and at other times in the family home. Under the careful direction of the mother's contacts at CYFD, the lies continued and subsequently parental rights were taken away from the father, after the mother and her contacts made several attempts to have the father incarderated under false allegations. The mother is the one who is the abuser who suffers from very low self-esteem, has had bouts of depression, rape, abortion, suicide attempts, has made threats of killing all family members, history of abuse by both her parents, I could fill books about this family. I know about this family because it is my family. People have told me, well what does that say about you? It says I am aware what "mental illness" can do to families; I've studied mental health and lifed it for close to fifty years. When you see your own family members falling into this category, you make excuses, look the other way, pray, anthing to make the ugly truth go away, but it doesn't. What has kept me sane is my close spiritual faith, my friends, my therapists, my doctors, help groups, and medication. In short, you do everything possible to life a decent life. In vast contrast to this, family members who exhibit their illness in fits of rage, controlling and manipulative behavior, refuse to believe that there might be a need for "mental therapy," stating that there is NOTHING wrong with them, it's other person who has problems; they refuse to see doctors claiming that their knowledge far surpasses that of any doctor, refuse medication claiming that the doctors and pharmacies want to make money off of prescribed medication. There is no reasoning with people who are incapable of being reasonable, they will pretend to be reasonable in front of the courts, law enforcement, and witnesses, then they go and do what they please because they lack a moral conscience, like the people at CYFD, and those people who believed a cunning, manipulative, spoiled child, rather than the honest words of a father. It was in mandated therapy where I learned that the child's father was the one who was being abused by the mother. I could hear the mother tell the father "I told everybody all about you, they know everything, you're in trouble and they are not going to believe you." She said all this after drinking alcohol all day at one of her drug & alcoholic friends home, then returns being physically and verballly abusive. Now who do you think the abusive parent really is. Someday the lies will surface and those who contributed to the physical, emotional, mental, and sexual abuse of these innocent children, will surely feel the karma coming back at you one way or another. As long as there is one candle the light of truth will never be extinguished. CYFD went above and beyond to cause mental, physical, and emotional anguish to the child's father, who loves his child and was a major caretaker and focal point in his child's life. Because people lie - children die.
To be published at a later time, a book on how an abused child grew up mentally aware but morally bankrupt. How she lied to the world to avoid a life of incarceration or being institutionalized, and how she got everyone to do her bidding. Mentally Ill or Demonized.