A lawyer’s nearly three-year fight for a restraining order against her former husband, also a legal practitioner, is one step closer to finally concluding following an appeal heard in the WA Supreme Court earlier this month.
What should have been a relatively straightforward process of separation has blown out into nine years of litigation that has taken the parties on a grand tour of the judicial system, with matters heard in the Magistrates Court, WA Supreme Court, Divisions 1 and 2 of the FCFCOA, a trip to the High Court, and now the WACA.
Each of these appeals has been initiated by the former husband, given the pseudonym “Mr Lietzau”.
The latest is an appeal against an earlier decision of Justice Paul Tottle in the WA Supreme Court who, in turn, was tasked with judicial review of the decisions of Justice Berry of the WA Family Court and of Magistrate Catherine Crawford of the Magistrates Court (see further Courts – A Province of Family Violence).
Mr Lietzau represented himself in both of these proceedings.
The respondents in the appeal include Berry J and Magistrate Crawford, Ms Lietzau herself, her legal representatives, the former and current WA Attorney General, who at one point intervened in the matter, the Legal Aid Commission of WA, and the Independent Children’s Lawyer (ICL).
The context for litigation begins with parenting proceedings originating in March 2017 and which concluded eight years later in January 2024.
Mr Lietzau unsuccessfully appealed this decision to Division 1 of the FCFCOA, and subsequently unsuccessfully applied for special leave to the High Court.
Whilst parenting proceedings were ongoing, in May 2023, Ms Lieitzau applied for a Family Violence Restraining Order (FVRO) against Mr Lietzau, after she discovered that her former husband had made over 50 complaints about her and lawyers connected to her case to the Legal Practice Board and Legal Services Complaints Committee.
Concerned that her reputation would be damaged, she argued that this was a form of psychological and emotional abuse and coercive control perpetrated through a third party.
An interim FVRO was granted.
Before the final FVRO could be heard, Mr Lietzau applied to the Federal Court for an anti-suit injunction to restrain Ms Lietzau from proceeding with the FVRO application. This was dismissed in November 2023.
On November 27, 2023, the day that the final hearing had been set for the FVRO, Mr Lietzau then applied to the Magistrates’ Court for a stay of proceedings.
Although unsuccessful, he was effective in postponing the substantive application for FVRO until February 2024.
Before the final hearing could take place, Mr Lietzau in January 2024 further delayed determination of the FVRO by applying to the Supreme Court of WA, seeking judicial review of the decision of Berry J in the WA Family Court to dismiss the application for the anti-suit injunction, and the decision of Magistrate Catherine Crawford in the Magistrates Court dismissing the application to stay the FVRO application.
A year later, in February 2025, Tottle J put a temporary end to the charade by dismissing Mr Lietzau’s application, describing him as having “lost all professional objectivity”.
However, any sense of finality was short-lived, as the matter was then appealed to the Court of Appeal.
It took another 14 months for the case to finally be determined, when in March 2026, Peter Quinlan CJ, Joshua Thomson P, and Fiona Seaward JA unanimously upheld Tottle and dismissed the appeal.
The appeal bench was highly critical of Mr Lietzau’s conduct, Thompson P noting that this fell “well short of the standards of conduct expected by this court of enrolled practitioners”.
The court’s strongest criticism was reserved for some of Mr Lietzau’s submissions against the various judges who had heard his applications, which he raised and subsequently withdrew.
He claimed that they should “show cause as to why they should not be disciplined” if he was previously correct that an anti-suit injunction should have been issued.
Thompson P described this as “scandalous and vexatious in the extreme”. Quinlan CJ added that such arguments “wholly misunderstand the jurisdiction and powers of this Court”.
Curiously, the bench refrained from discussing how elements of the appellant’s conduct may be described more generally as “systems abuse”, as defined in the National Domestic and Family Violence Bench Book s 3.1.11.
Mr Lietzau may have lost the appeal, yet he was successful in achieving what he set out to do – effectively delaying by three years Ms Lietzau’s application for an FVRO.
In this instance, the courts themselves became a weapon of family violence as Ms Lietzau was dragged through nearly a decade of appeals.
Given that her former husband was largely self-represented, Ms Lietzau was left to bear a disproportionate financial and emotional burden.
It’s been a clear failing of the courts that this litigious aggression was allowed to drag on for so long.