Am I wrong for letting a group of bikers walk my seven-year-old into the courthouse when my ex-husband’s family says I “traumatized” him even more?
My son Cody has been through hell this past year. I can’t go into details because there’s an active case, but what I can say is that Cody has to testify, and the person he’s testifying against is someone he used to trust. Someone my ex-husband’s family still protects.
My ex, Derek (33M), and I split when Cody was three. We had shared custody until everything came out last fall. Derek didn’t do anything himself, but his brother did, and Derek knew. He KNEW and said nothing for over a year.
Cody’s therapist told me the hardest part for kids isn’t the testimony itself. It’s the walk in. It’s seeing the other family in the parking lot. It’s feeling small. She recommended I reach out to a group called Riders Against Child Abuse – volunteers, mostly bikers, who escort kids into court so they don’t feel alone.
I looked them up. I called the local chapter. A woman named Patti talked to me for almost an hour. She explained that they’d meet us in the parking lot, walk on either side of Cody, and stay in the courtroom the whole time. They wouldn’t say a word to anyone. They’d just be there.
The morning of the hearing, we pulled into the courthouse lot and there were nine of them. Leather vests, bikes lined up along the curb. Cody grabbed my hand so hard in the backseat I thought he’d break my fingers.
Then Patti walked up to the car, crouched down to his window, and said, “Hey buddy. We’re your team today. Nobody gets past us.”
Cody got out of that car standing straight for the first time in months.
We walked through that parking lot with nine bikers around us like a wall. Derek’s mother Gayle was standing by the entrance with Derek’s aunt and two cousins. Gayle’s face went white. She started recording on her phone and yelling that I was “putting on a show” and “using my son as a prop.”
One of the bikers – a guy probably six-five, gray beard, didn’t even look at her – just shifted slightly so his back was between Gayle and Cody. Didn’t say a word. Cody didn’t even see her.
We got inside. Cody sat between me and Patti. He held Patti’s hand during the worst part. He got through it.
That night my phone exploded. Derek called me screaming that I’d “sicced a gang” on his mother. Gayle posted the video on Facebook saying I was “weaponizing” Cody and turning him into a “spectacle.” Derek’s cousin Megan texted me seventeen times calling me an unfit mother. Even my own sister said she thought the bikers were “a little much” and that it probably scared Cody more than it helped.
My friends and family are split. Half of them say I did exactly what any mother would do. The other half say I made a scene and that Cody didn’t need all that, that I was performing for the cameras.
But here’s what none of them know. What Cody said to me in the car on the way home. He was buckled in the backseat, still wearing the little button-down I’d ironed that morning, and he looked at me in the rearview mirror and said –
What He Said
“Mom. Did you see how big that guy was?”
That was it. That was the whole sentence. He said it the way seven-year-olds say things, with this little exhale of leftover awe, like he was still processing it. Like the biggest thing about that day wasn’t what happened inside the courtroom. It was the gray-bearded giant who stood between him and everything else without being asked.
I almost had to pull over.
I said, “Yeah, buddy. Pretty big.”
And Cody nodded, very seriously, and said, “He was on my team.”
Then he fell asleep before we hit the highway.
I’ve been turning that over for weeks now. He was on my team. Not “he was scary” or “he was a lot” or any of the things my sister predicted. Just: he was on my team. That’s the whole of it, from a seven-year-old who spent the last eight months being told, in ways too ugly to write down, that adults couldn’t be trusted.
How We Got Here
I need to back up, because I think people who are calling this a “performance” don’t understand what the months before that parking lot looked like.
When everything came out last October, Cody stopped sleeping in his own room. He’d come pad down the hallway at two, three in the morning and just stand in my doorway until I woke up and moved over. He didn’t want to talk. He just wanted to be in a room where someone could see him.
His school called me in November because he’d stopped raising his hand in class. His teacher, Mrs. Donahue, a woman who has been teaching second grade for twenty-two years and has seen everything, pulled me aside and said, “Something’s wrong. He’s here but he’s not here.” She said it quietly, standing next to the cubbies with everyone’s coats and backpacks hanging around us, and I just nodded because if I opened my mouth I was going to fall apart in front of her.
The therapist, Dr. Renee Marsh, started seeing Cody twice a week in December. She told me the goal wasn’t to get him talking about what happened. Not yet. The goal was just to help him feel like his body was his again. Like he was allowed to take up space.
That’s what she said. Allowed to take up space.
So when she mentioned Riders Against Child Abuse, she wasn’t suggesting a publicity stunt. She was doing what she always does, which is thinking about the specific mechanics of what breaks a kid and what doesn’t. The walk into the courthouse. The moment when Cody would have to move through open air with Derek’s family watching. She’d seen it go wrong before. She’d seen kids freeze in parking lots. Kids who made it through therapy and prep sessions and everything else, but fell apart in those forty feet from the car to the door.
She said, “He needs to feel like the biggest thing in that parking lot is on his side.”
The Call with Patti
I want to be honest: I was nervous calling. I didn’t know what to expect. I’d looked at the RACA website and it seemed legitimate, but I still had this image in my head of showing up and having it be chaotic, or Cody getting overwhelmed, or it turning into exactly what Gayle ended up calling it.
Patti put all of that to rest in about ten minutes.
She’s been with the chapter for eleven years. Before that she was a pediatric nurse, which I did not expect. She walked me through exactly how the morning would go: they’d be in the lot before us, they wouldn’t approach until Cody was ready, they’d follow his lead on touch and proximity, and if at any point he wanted them to back off, they’d back off. No questions.
She asked me what Cody liked. I said dinosaurs and a specific YouTube channel about people building things out of wood. She laughed and said her husband watched the same channel.
She asked me what scared him most right now. I told her crowds, and men he didn’t know, and anyone who raised their voice.
She said, “We’ll keep it calm. Calm and big. That’s what we do.”
I asked her how many times she’d done this.
She said, “Enough times that I stopped counting, because counting made me too sad. So now I just show up.”
I cried after I hung up. Just for a minute, standing in my kitchen with my phone face-down on the counter. Then I went and checked on Cody, who was on the couch watching his woodworking channel, and I sat down next to him and didn’t say anything, and he leaned against my arm without looking up from the screen.
The Morning
I’d laid out his clothes the night before. The button-down was his idea, actually. He’d asked if he could “dress like it was important,” which is something he’d heard me say once about a job interview and apparently filed away.
We left the house at seven forty-five. The courthouse was forty minutes out. I had a bag with his water bottle, a granola bar he probably wouldn’t eat, a small stuffed thing he’d had since he was two that he’d asked me not to tell anyone he still carried.
He was quiet the whole drive. Not scared-quiet. Just inside-himself quiet. He watched the highway.
When we turned into the lot and he saw the bikes lined up along the curb, he went very still.
I watched him in the rearview. Trying to read it.
Then Patti came to the window.
She was maybe fifty-five, short hair going silver, reading glasses pushed up on her forehead. She had a vest on like the others but she looked like someone’s aunt, which I think was the point. She crouched down to Cody’s window and she didn’t perform anything. She just talked to him like he was a person.
“Hey buddy. We’re your team today. Nobody gets past us.”
Cody looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked past her at the others, standing loose and easy by their bikes, not staring, just present. The big guy with the gray beard was looking at his phone. Another one was retying a bootlace. They weren’t a formation. They were just people who happened to be there.
Cody opened the car door.
What Gayle Saw vs. What Was Actually Happening
Here’s my best guess at what Gayle’s video shows: a woman and a small boy walking across a parking lot surrounded by large people in leather vests. It probably looks theatrical. It probably looks like I planned it for maximum effect.
What it doesn’t show is Cody’s face.
It doesn’t show him with his chin up, actually looking around, actually present in his body in a way he hadn’t been since October. It doesn’t show the moment the big guy, whose name I later found out was Gary, shifted to block Gayle’s sight line without breaking stride, without looking at her, without acknowledging her existence even slightly. It doesn’t show Cody not even registering that she was there.
That was the whole point. That was the thing Dr. Marsh had been trying to get Cody back to for months. The ability to just not be available to the people who hurt him. To move through space and not be reachable.
Gayle screaming about being weaponized is almost funny, if you think about it from that angle. She wanted to be seen by Cody. She wanted him to see her standing there, to feel that familiar twist of confusion and obligation that kids feel toward family, even family that failed them. Gary’s back took that away from her.
She’s mad about a back.
What I Know Now
Derek filed something with his lawyer the following week, claiming the bikers constituted an “intimidation tactic” and should be considered in the custody evaluation. I’ve since been told by my attorney, a woman named Sandra Pruitt who I would die for, that this is going nowhere. RACA is a nationally recognized nonprofit. They’ve testified in courts about their work. There is a paper trail of child advocates, therapists, and judges who have endorsed exactly what happened in that parking lot.
Sandra said, “The only person who looked bad that morning was the grandmother recording a child abuse victim on her phone outside a courthouse.”
I’ve also talked to Dr. Marsh since. She said Cody’s sessions since the hearing have been different. He’s talking more. Not about the case, not yet, but about other things. He drew a picture of the parking lot in their last session. Nine figures around a smaller one. He labeled the small one “me” and then, after a second, went back and wrote “brave” underneath it.
He labeled Gary “Big Gary” even though I’m pretty sure nobody told him the name.
My sister called two weeks after the hearing and apologized. She said she’d looked up RACA after I didn’t respond to her texts for a while and felt terrible. I told her it was fine. It mostly is.
Derek hasn’t called since the filing. I don’t expect he will.
Cody slept in his own room last Thursday. Didn’t come to my doorway. Didn’t wake up until his alarm.
I lay there in my own bed listening to the silence from down the hall, the specific kind of silence that’s different from the other kind, and I thought about a gray-bearded man named Gary who moved his body between a little boy and something ugly and never said a single word.
He was on my team.
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If this one got to you, share it. Someone out there needs to know RACA exists.
For more stories of standing up for kids, read about blocking a truck in a school parking lot or when a stranger in a leather vest saved the day. If you’re pondering whether a “reckless” act was truly the only option you had, you’ll find a kindred spirit there too.
