Sally was late dropping off her kids at their dad’s last week. There was an accident on the highway, and the traffic was backed up for an hour. While she was sitting in the traffic jam, she managed to shoot off a message to her ex, informing him about the delay.

So, imagine her shock when she got this email from him a few days later:

Can you see what’s going on here?

On the surface, it looks like a father expressing concern about co-parenting issues. But look deeper, because this message is more than that.

As a divorce coach, I recognized what he was doing immediately, because it’s exactly what I teach my own clients to do. It's documentation, pure and simple. Sally’s ex is building evidence to create a narrative for the court.

Now, Sally isn’t a real person, and I made up this email and the situation based on the kind of messages some of my clients have been getting from their exes lately. It was pretty easy to do because the pattern is clear.

Their exes twist something that happened to fit into a narrative implying that the other parent is acting against the child’s interests. They take something the child said out of context (in my imaginary Sally’s case, she went to visit a friend who has a teenage son called Oliver, and Oliver pushed her son on the swings in their garden).

They don’t send their “concerned” email right away. It’s carefully timed, usually with a gap of a few days between the incident and the email. It’s almost as if they’ve been going back and forth with ChatGPT or their lawyer about what to write and how to formulate it. And speaking of ChatGPT, I’m noticing that AI is used in a lot of these messages because they show all the telltale signs (I’ve got a prompt for dealing with those kinds of messages in my book).

Sometimes the timing serves a double purpose. The message doesn’t just come a few days later. It arrives with almost surgical precision, timed to spoil a special occasion or a period of peace. One of my clients got one of these accusatory, documenting messages as she was leaving to go on vacation with her children.

Often, the child’s words are presented without context. In this email example, it was “pushed" but it can be actual things the child said during a phone call that are twisted to make it seem like they’re coached by the parent, for instance. The accusations are sometimes implicit rather than direct, with an undertone of feigned concern for the child’s interest.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that there’s often a shift from a name to a category. I did it in this example email by turning “Oliver” into “an older child.” Sometimes, though, the shift can involve an action. The recipient parent’s actions are reframed to turn them into a certain category of person, the kind that family courts don’t approve of. A gatekeeping, alienating, or unstable parent.

The usual suggestions for dealing with a controlling ex are not to JADE—justify, argue, defend, or explain. That works great when it’s clear your ex is trying to get some kind of narcissistic supply from you, or when they repeat the same ludicrous explanations. Then silence, or short boiler-plate responses are your best option.

If you’re using AI, especially if you’re using it with my Yellow Rock response prompt, or something similar, it will probably spit out a response that meets this criteria, but totally misses the boat if your ex is actually using their messages to build a narrative against you.

In this case, an explanation that feels risky from a don’t feed the troll perspective might actually be useful from an establish the record perspective. When messages get submitted to court, they have to show the whole thread or they risk being dismissed by a judge, on the other lawyer’s objection, as self-serving evidence. So, getting your explanation into that thread makes it part of the record. It can also help you establish evidence of a pattern of false accusations by your ex.

If your ex keeps making the same accusation, over and over again, though, that’s where you switch over to don’t feed the troll. The broken record technique, with a response like “I’ve already addressed this matter in my response on x date,” keeps that record in place and also stops your ex from getting the attention they crave from you.

Let’s go back to Sally. What should she actually say?

Sally needs a response that’s complete enough to counter the narrative and clean enough that nothing in it can be turned against her.

A few things her response needs to do:

It needs to address the late returns briefly and factually, without over-explaining or volunteering information he doesn’t need. Just one sentence per delay will do.

It needs to explain Oliver in enough detail to make the innocent explanation stick, but no more. A four-year-old describing being pushed on the swings is not a safeguarding concern. That needs to be on the record. If she’s worried that her ex might harass Oliver and his family, she doesn’t need to give any personal information beyond the name he already knows.

It needs to avoid certain words entirely. Safe and unsafe carry legal weight. So do alone with, concerned about, and threatening. Even when those words are accurate, using them hands him a grievance to run with or, worse, introduces language into the record that a bad actor can lift out of context.

It needs to close without inviting further debate.

Here's what that might look like:

I’ve created a prompt for responding to this kind of “narrative-building” email. You can find it in the Resources section below.

If you’re struggling with your ex making accusations against you and aren’t sure how to counter this, or just need someone to think it through with, you can book a 30-minute call, free of charge, with me, and we’ll talk it through. You’ll leave our call with a bunch of free resources that I’ve created.

Want to know more about what I do?

Here’s the prompt to help you respond when it seems your ex is using their messages to create a documented narrative against you for court. It’s long but precise. The only thing you have to bother with is inserting your ex’s message and the context (plus your draft response if you already created one). The prompt is two-fold: Besides creating a response that will give your side of the story without being too explainy, it will also analyze your ex’s message and tell you whether your instincts are correct.