A Moffat County district court judge barred William Montgomery from having any contact with his children or his wife, Stephanie, after the wife sought a protection order, stating in one court filing that William, in his most recent attack, had attempted to head butt her three times, grabbed a handgun from a dresser and threatened to kill her in front of his oldest son and his stepson, then aged 14 and 13.

She said in her filing that she and the children were afraid of the Iraq war veteran, an honorably discharged former Army soldier who struggled with suicidal thoughts from the carnage he witnessed during the war. Records show he once confided to a therapist that in 2015 he shoved a gun in his mouth that a guy at his motorcycle club gave him and pulled the trigger, only to discover there were no bullets.

So, the mother later testified in March that she was shocked to learn that Stephanie Norris, the parental responsibility evaluator (PRE) their divorce judge appointed to issue child custody recommendations, didn’t understand the gravity of the two protection orders barring her ex from having any contact with her and the children.

“A PRE trumps a court order,” the mother recalled Norris telling her, in later testimony.

Norris is the latest parental evaluator generating controversy in the Colorado family court system. Licensed behavioral health professionals, such evaluators can have tremendous influence in custody court cases, often at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars to divorcing parents.

As their influence has grown, parental evaluators and the heavy reliance of judges on their custody recommendations have come under scrutiny, following investigations into the evaluation industry by The Gazette that highlighted instances of bias, incompetence and shoddy work that at times put children in peril. Complaints from parents prompted state lawmakers in the last three years to enact new training requirements and new regulations for the parental evaluation industry.

By the time a judge had appointed Norris to make custody recommendations in the divorce in Moffat County, William Montgomery had pleaded guilty to a criminal charge of felony domestic violence menacing with a weapon, prompting another judge to sentence him to three years of probation. That conviction triggered a second mandatory protection order during the term of his probation. The two protection orders made it illegal for Montgomery to have any contact with his estranged wife, their two children, his stepson and his son from another marriage.

Stephanie Montgomery, the mother, recently testified that in December she pushed back against Norris’ plan for an in-home visit between her ex and their two children, pointing out that the protection orders two judges issued barred any such contact. Norris said she would review the protection orders and contact the lawyers, according to the mother’s testimony.

Instead, nearly a month later, Norris emailed the mother and told her she should bring the two children over to Montgomery’s house for the in-home visit Norris already had scheduled, according to the mother’s testimony and an email submitted as evidence.

“It felt threatening that the protection order that was in place could be, in essence, disregarded,” the mother later testified.

The divorce judge has since terminated Norris’ court appointment as an evaluator after the father did not oppose a motion from the mother’s lawyer to remove Norris from the case. The mother now is pressing complaints against Norris with state regulators, stressing that Norris, in effect, ordered the parents to violate state law when her e-mail told them to ignore the protection orders. She also plans to file a complaint with court administrative officials, hoping they will bar Norris from accepting any other court appointments to custody disputes.

If the mother succeeds in convincing state court administrators that Norris is unfit, Norris will become the fourth evaluator barred from accepting court appointments in the past two years. One former evaluator on Friday pleaded guilty to two felonies and misdemeanor perjury for lying that she had earned a PhD from the University of Hertfordshire in England and then retaliating against a father who reported her lies to state regulators. Prosecutors said she falsely told the father’s employer that the father was cyber-stalking her and also retaliated by making false allegations about the father to the then-chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court Brian Boatright.

Multiple parents have challenged Norris’ custody recommendations and complained that she is failing to adhere to a directive from the chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court spelling out the standards of professional conduct for evaluators.

Norris, through a lawyer, Kari Hershey declined comment, stating she would wait for the appropriate forum to defend herself. “Because it is not appropriate to publicly comment on confidential matters involving children, nor to arbitrate misinformation about contentious custody disputes involving children, Dr. Norris declines your request for an interview,” Hershey said.

Norris maintained during court testimony in March that she is not biased and defended her parental evaluation work as competent and diligent. “My focus is on the children, and what’s in the best interest of the children,” she testified, adding that she believes complaints against her are inevitable given the contentious, high-conflict custody cases she takes on. In a court filing, she defended her actions in the Moffat County custody case, stating that she “has conducted many home visits with protection orders and never leaves the children alone with the other party.” She added that the mother in that case could have called her to express her concerns instead of having her lawyers ask the judge to terminate her appointment.

The Colorado State Court Administrator’s Office approved Norris for court appointments as a parental evaluator in December 2023. The state of Colorado has licensed Norris, who has an office in Centennial with about 15 employees, as an addiction counselor, a professional counselor and as a candidate to become a psychologist.

By Norris’ own testimony, she’s been appointed to make custody recommendations in at least 15 cases since her placement on the state roster of parental evaluators. In at least five cases, parents have filed motions with the court asking for the termination of her court appointment.

‘I became very ill, very quickly’ 

In one of those cases Norris charged divorcing parents more than $80,000 in just over three months for parenting evaluations, while the mother, Jennifer Wiggs, claimed Norris did not properly weigh previously sustained judicial findings of domestic violence by her ex, to instead find that the mother was emotionally abusing her children and had engaged in mutual domestic violence with her estranged husband.

That mother testified that Norris also divulged her address to her ex’s lawyers even though she had warned Norris she was in an address confidentiality program for domestic violence victims.

Wiggs further testified that her ex gave Norris explicit nude photos taken during the marriage. She claims Norris then placed the photos on thumb drives and delivered them to the lawyers on the case, an act that she said so traumatized her that she had to go to the emergency room.

“I became very ill, very quickly, as anyone would in my situation, viewing those explicit photos of me,” the woman testified. “I ended up in the emergency room the next day. I had extremely high blood pressure and blurry vision and heart arryhythmia. I’m now being treated by a cardiologist for what appears to be pretty serious heart damage.”

Her ex-husband said critics “have massively and unfairly” portrayed Norris, noting that the privately retained judge overseeing their custody dispute had found Norris’ parental evaluation report fair and balanced and had rejected his ex’s efforts to relocate the children out of state with her.

Others have accused Norris of being unfit to conduct the psychological testing she does during her parental evaluations considering that she’s not a licensed psychologist and has failed the exam to become a psychologist at least twice.

In addition, they question her credentials as a licensed addiction counselor, pointing out that Norris herself in 2020 was arrested on suspicion of driving while under the influence, a charge that eventually was downgraded to a guilty plea of careless driving. A Denver police officer arrested her after she refused to submit to a blood test for sobriety after the officer pulled her over for driving without her car’s headlights illuminated. The officer reported that he found her swaying during field sobriety tests.

Her doctorate from Walden University has also come under fire because the online school isn’t accredited by the American Psychological Association. “While Dr. Norris may have a legitimate degree, there are questions about the quality of her education, the sufficiency of her supervision, and her competence based on her conduct,” one lawyer unsuccessfully argued in a filing seeking to terminate Norris’ appointment as an evaluator for a custody dispute.

In that same legal filing, the lawyer highlighted statements Norris made during a presentation she gave in October 2024 for the American Lung Association on depression and anxiety and the impact on lung patient health. The person who introduced Norris to the crowd stated Norris was a Ph.D.-trained psychologist when Norris actually was only a candidate for licensure since she had not yet passed the required exam.

“I can have a client walk into my office and within five to ten minutes I know what’s wrong,” said Norris during a question-and-answer session after her presentation. “They don’t even have to say anything because that’s my training.”

The lawyer unsuccessfully tried to get Norris kicked off a custody dispute, arguing that statement was “nothing more than self-aggrandizement and hubris,” and that Norris “has employed this same methodology in her PRE evaluations where she conducts all interviews and forms an opinion without reviewing any external data.”

In the Moffat County custody dispute, Stephanie, the mother, testified in March that she also had found out that her confidential health information and that of her children and her ex had been mixed up and mistakenly provided by Norris to another woman in another custody dispute Norris was assessing.

“I don’t like using the word traumatizing, because the trauma that I’ve experienced from a number of situations with the respondent is vastly different,” she testified. “However, it triggers those emotions, and it draws significant concern for me, my children, Williams’ children and other names that are in that document and their protection. It makes me feel like they’re not being protected, nor that their best interest is being served.”

In an interview, William Montgomery, the father, admitted he’s made mistakes, including once holding a gun he thought was loaded to his own head in front of his stepson and oldest son and pulling the trigger. Still, he said those mistakes shouldn’t restrain him from being able to be a parent. “All I want is my children back in my life,” he said, adding that he had no problems with Norris’ evaluation work.

Stephanie Montgomery’s lawyers have filed court documents stating that Norris put the children in danger by ignoring the court’s protection orders, and that Norris’ actions show she is not familiar with the laws governing protection orders.

“While there was no directive from the court to violate the protective orders, Ms. Norris has taken it upon herself to assert she has the authority and ability to do so,” according to their motion.

Mother threatened with child removal

It’s not the only time that a protection order has become an issue for Norris. Protection orders also became contentious issues when Norris was court-appointed to work as a reunification therapist who was supposed to repair the relationship between a father and his two children.

The mother of the children said she told Norris she would only attend therapy through online virtual video and would stop going in person due to a permanent protection order a judge had issued restraining her ex-husband — the father of her children — from having contact with her new husband.

She claims that Norris kept urging her to get the protection order dropped and kept including her ex-husband and current husband in group e-mails, which the mother said risked violating the protection order.

After the mother said her husband wouldn’t drop the protection order, Norris in February 2024 threatened during two separate therapy sessions that she would recommend that the children be removed from the mother and placed in foster care, according to the mother.

A judge issued another protection order in July of last year barring the ex-husband from contacting his ex-wife.

Two Arapahoe County District Court judges in 2021 had initially restricted that ex-husband’s parenting time of his then 11-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son to just online virtual visits with supervision because they found he posed a threat to their safety and had a proclivity to fits of rage and excessive drinking.

The Colorado Court of Appeals upheld the restriction, noting that the judges found credible testimony alleging the father had twice reached out to the maternal grandfather and asked for assistance in murdering his ex-wife, one of three domestic violence criminal cases the father faced that eventually were dismissed and that the father contends were unjust.

The divorced couple mutually agreed in 2023 to have Norris appointed by the judge to provide reunification services to repair the father’s relationship with the children. By that time, a judge had restored that father’s parenting time, with no requirement for supervision.

The mother of the children, Paula Slaughter, a former Glendale city councilmember, said she found the reunification therapy with Norris a nightmare. She said Norris continually let her ex-husband hurl verbal, demeaning epithets at her in therapy, while her ex promised to unleash “World War III” in the form of legal filings on her and her new husband.

Emails provided by the mother show Norris chastised the mother and her new husband for walking out on the therapy, something the mother contends she had warned Norris they planned to do if her ex crossed her boundaries. “It is better to say you are triggered than to engage in coercive control, such as stonewalling, which is a form of domestic violence,” Norris wrote in the email.

“Since she’s been involved the conflict has turned up to a 20 out of 10,” said Slaughter, a lawyer.

Her ex-husband, Todd Bovo, said Norris had helped him moderate his behavior while his ex-wife has continued to escalate the conflict unnecessarily. Bovo, a lawyer, said he’s faced up to 27 criminal charges, mostly related to violations of the protective orders, which he maintains were frivolous. Only one criminal case remains pending.

“I can say with all my heart that Dr. Norris is phenomenal,” he said.

‘It’s a tricky exam,’ Norris testified

State regulators in 2019 admonished Norris as part of a settlement and required her to take continuing legal education on high conflict divorce and ethics following another parent’s complaint. To resolve that complaint, Norris admitted she filed custody recommendations in a custody dispute for children undergoing therapy with her when another therapist was the one court-appointed to make custody recommendations, according to a stipulation Norris signed.

Despite twice failing the exam to become a psychologist, Norris still has testified that she is qualified to work as a parental evaluator. “It’s a tricky exam,” she testified about her failure in one court hearing in March.

Norris also, in court filings, has pushed back against efforts to remove her from court-appointed evaluation work, highlighting the dissertation she wrote. She claims her research for the dissertation found that 96% of parents engaged in high-conflict custody disputes who file a grievance or complaint against a court-appointed psychologist have a personality disorder.

Last year, Norris snagged a prominent venue that raised her profile for the family law bar. Emails show that Jamie Paine, then a shareholder at the Griffiths law firm, which specializes in family law, invited Norris to host a forum with her and a domestic violence consultant in Vail as part of the Colorado Bar Association’s Continuing Legal Education Family Law Institute program.

Paine announced Norris’ involvement in the “Trauma or Drama” domestic violence presentation in an email to a Colorado Bar Association official. Paine copied and sent the email to those in charge of approving panelists: another family law attorney and another lawyer who once was senior counsel at Griffiths law firm who now works for a private divorce mediation firm.

“I wanted to let you all know that I recently spoke with Dr. Stephanie Norris who was recently appointed as a PRE and a treatment provider that many of us use to implement appropriate reunification treatment/family therapy for families in DR (domestic relations),” Paine wrote in the email.

Paine added: “I amended our proposal to include her and highlight that she brings the therapeutic treatment lens to this topic.” The Colorado Bar Association-Continuing Legal Education reimbursed Norris for her $356.29 stay at the Hythe Vail, a Marriott resort property, records show

Holiday discount on massages

Evan Brown, the director of marketing and technology for the Colorado Bar Association-Continuing Legal Education, was included in emails setting up a Zoom meeting to go over the “Trauma or Drama” presentation by Norris and the other speakers.

Norris later was appointed as a parental evaluator in Brown’s own Jefferson County child custody case with his ex-wife, Anita Springsteen. Springsteen, a lawyer, has objected to Norris’ court appointment, contending Norris has a prior “business relationship” with her ex, Brown, which he denied in court filings.

“It’s really disconcerting to know that it was a complete setup,” Springsteen said, noting that she requested the judge to appoint a parental evaluator on Aug. 1, which was the same day that her ex-husband received emails seeking his assistance for Norris’ presentation in Vail. Norris was one of two evaluators Brown’s lawyer suggested the judge appoint.

That attorney, John Haas, said he opted to suggest Norris as the parental evaluator, not his client. He said the contact between his client and Norris was so minimal that it poses no conflict of interest, adding that his client doesn’t even remember Norris’ involvement in the conference. Haas said Springsteen has “made wildly reckless allegations to the contrary.”

Springsteen said that as part of a holiday promotion, a massage therapist at Norris’ therapy business offered 20% discounts off the cost of massages at Norris’ Centennial office Healing Pathways Collective. “It should be obvious to her that promoting other services to parties could be taken as giving preference to one party over another if they buy extra services,” Springsteen said.

Haas said he “jokingly wrote” to Springsteen that he was booking a massage, and she should, too, “because she was being so ridiculous.” He said Springsteen had inadvertently been placed on a marketing list for Norris’ office, and that he and his client never received the promotional discount offer.

Wiggs’ divorce is among the most contentious disputes of Norris’ parental evaluation work. Norris was appointed as a parental evaluator for Wiggs’ custody dispute — the second evaluator appointed in the case — at the request of her ex-husband’s lawyers at the Griffiths law firm. That’s the same law firm that employed Jamie Paine, the lawyer who worked to include Norris on the Colorado Bar Association Family Law Institute panel presentation in Vail. Paine has since switched law firms.

Norris became an impediment to Wiggs’ efforts to move herself and her children to Grand Rapids, Mich., to be near her parents.

Wiggs testified she thought such a move would allow the children to escape all the conflict they’d witnessed and provide a safer environment. It was a contentious custody dispute between Wiggs and her ex-husband — a man described in the final oral orders as “a confident and accomplished but also a ruthless businessman” who “will do what it takes to win, and things go his way or the highway in many regards.”

One month after Wiggs filed for divorce from her husband, she filed for a permanent protection order against him, which Arapahoe County District Court Judge Cajardo Lindsey granted after finding the husband had engaged in at least two instances of domestic violence in eight months.

The judge found that her ex in August 2022 had thrown her against a wall of a hotel room in Vail in front of their three children and then lied about it to police to make it seem as if she had assaulted him.

The judge further found that an April 2023 video from the Wiggs’ home security system showed that her husband had continually berated her in the driveway of their Cherry Hills Village home in one incident when he had been drinking alcohol.

The video showed her ex following her around the driveway and repeatedly grabbing her and their 16-month-old daughter, who was in her arms, and yelling at her in front of their two other children, a son aged 10 and a daughter aged 8, telling her that even her children don’t like her, as the children pleaded with him to stop.

Police arrested him after they responded and found a red mark in the shape of a finger on the mother’s arm and reviewed the home security video. The domestic violence charges later were dismissed.

Norris: Mother ‘intentionally manipulated’ children

The Colorado Court of Appeals upheld the permanent protection order barring contact between the couple, finding there was sufficient evidence of domestic abuse from the ex-husband. Still, court testimony shows that Norris’ evaluation during the custody case made an alternative finding of “mutual domestic violence” by both divorcing parties and further found that the mother had engaged in psychological and emotional abuse of two of the children.

“I have extensive audio and video of abuse, and many police reports of abuse,” Jennifer Wiggs testified in March.

Despite that evidence, Norris testified that it was the mother who should only be allowed to see her children in the presence of a parenting supervisor, not the father. Norris said she hinged her finding of psychological and mental child abuse by the mother in part on an email from the by-then 10-year-old daughter pleading with Norris that she, “please don’t take Mom away. I pray please don’t.”

Norris testified that email helped her conclude the mother had “intentionally manipulated” her children.

Randall Arp, who retired from Jefferson County’s 1st Judicial District in 2023 and was retained by the divorcing parties to hear the case as a privately retained judge, expressed confusion during one hearing in January at Norris’ findings that the mother had engaged in child abuse, while the father had not.

Arp interrupted the evaluators’ testimony to note that during the hearing he had viewed the home surveillance video that showed the father of the children committing domestic violence against his wife with the children present — just one of the repeated acts of aggression the judge said Wiggs’ ex-husband had been filmed engaging in during the volatile marriage.

“Isn’t verbal, mental and emotional abuse of another parent in the presence of the children by definition child abuse?” he asked Norris.

Norris testified that she had found that the husband’s behavior changed after the parties separated while the mother had “continued to engage in those behaviors.”

Arp in his parenting time ruling found that the mother had been subjected to domestic violence and was a victim of a “history of and pattern of coercive control and intimidation.” Still, he found that he had concerns with the mother’s “overall credibility” and found Norris’ report “to be balanced and fair.” He ruled that the actions of her ex, “in regards to domestic violence do not endanger the children while in his care.”

Arp denied the mother’s request that the children relocate with her to Michigan, finding that her effort to move the children was a “self-centered determination and not a child-centered determination.” He ruled that if the mother remained in Colorado, she and the father would split their parenting time equally, with neither parent needing supervision when they had custody.

Arp also ruled that despite the father binge drinking and consuming alcohol to excess during the marriage “to deal with the stresses of his relationship,” he would not bar the father from drinking any alcohol while the children were in his care. In making that ruling, Arp noted Norris’ evaluation report found that the father did not have an ongoing problem with alcohol — a finding heavily disputed by another parental evaluator and a domestic violence expert on the case.

The mother has decided to remain in Colorado. She has filed complaints with both the Colorado Court Administrator’s Office and the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies against Norris.

Editor’s note: The criminal charge of Stephanie Norris referenced in this article has been dismissed following publication of this article, and her criminal arrest record has been sealed.