Victim Impact Statement

Your Honor,
I stand before you today not because I want to, but because I have to. Because silence — the silence that’s been forced on us, threatened into us, and expected of us — has been a second punishment. And second punishments have become a theme for us. Over and over, we are punished again for surviving. For being victims.
I’m speaking today because my wife, the victim, is gagged from speaking publicly about Mr. Cohen.
This case — and what brings us all here today — is bigger than a forged signature. It is the story of a mother who was repeatedly assaulted while she slept, who fled for her life, who went to the police as her attacker filed for custody, and who was failed at every possible turn by the people who were supposed to protect her. It is the story of a child — three years old when he was taken from his mother because she was a legal medical cannabis patient and worked in the cannabis industry — who is now almost ten. Six years of a mother’s life, six years of a child’s childhood, gone forever. Her child was taken and given to her rapist because the police had not yet taken action.
At the time we hired Mr. Cohen, my wife had just had her son taken from her, and her parents had filed in Blair County for custody of her daughter on those very same grounds. Mr. Cohen handled that Blair County case successfully, so we trusted him completely. We believed he was fighting for our family.
Michael Cohen was to help us appeal a custody decision that never should have happened — a decision that gave a rapist custody of a child because his victim used state-legal medicine and lived on a farm that grows federally legal hemp.
From the start, Mr. Cohen lied about everything. He told us about sealed grand juries, fabricated hearings, fake arrests, and phony court orders. He pretended to be in contact with judges, police, the Attorney General’s Office, and child protective services. He staged fake child extractions. He sent us driving through icy roads on Christmas Eve, convinced we were moments away from being reunited with a child — when none of it was real. And he did it for over two years.
That is not a mistake. That is fraud, deceit, dishonesty, and moral turpitude.
He told my wife to buy school supplies for a child he said was “moving to the moon” — meaning our farm, Lazy Moon Ranch. He made her wait by the window for hours, believing the police were bringing her son home. He orchestrated false police calls to our business, terrified our employees, and destroyed our reputation. He fabricated a reality so convincing that my wife stopped contacting police and even stopped speaking to her rapist, because Mr. Cohen told her she shouldn’t have to — all while he was handing that man the one thing he wanted most: time.
He caused a contempt notice without our knowledge and nearly got my wife arrested. When we realized something might be wrong, I went to the Attorney General’s Office in State College. I told the agent there that Mr. Cohen had said they were involved with us and that we needed help. When I left the office, that agent called Mr. Cohen to say I had just been there and asked him who he was working with in the office so he didn’t duplicate anything.
That afternoon, Mr. Cohen filed his disbarment by consent, protecting his law license, which I understand he can seek to get back in two more years. The following week, he faxed a confession to a judge in Fayette County during the contempt hearing we knew nothing about. And what happened then? Was there accountability? Was there justice?
No. The court responded by gagging my wife upon learning what Mr. Cohen had done — forbidding her from ever speaking publicly about it. The punishment for violating that order is severe: a minimum of six months in prison, heavy fines, and the loss of even the forty-eight hours a month she is allowed to spend with her son.
Imagine that: the victim silenced, punished, and threatened — while the perpetrator sits here today asking for probation.
Your Honor, it wasn’t just Mr. Cohen’s lies. It was the system’s complicity. We went to every law enforcement agency we could when we sensed something was wrong — the state police, local police, the Attorney General, the FBI — and nobody would act. We are here today because we filed our own criminal charges against Mr. Cohen and fought to have them taken seriously.
When we caught him, we still needed representation. We called 138 law firms and couldn’t get representation because no one wanted to touch a case where the criminal was an attorney. And while we fought this, a five-year-old rape case we thought was moving forward, languished. Evidence — including 42,000 pages of text messages — was ignored. The rapist’s attorney became a judge. The District Attorney tried to dismiss the case when we asked for that judge’s recusal. Even with a mountain of evidence, the very people sworn to pursue justice tried to bury it. And again, the Attorney General had to step in — just as they did with Mr. Cohen. A criminal case that dragged on for over five years was handled entirely in about three weeks by the Attorney General’s Office, ending in a guilty plea. 
This is not an isolated lapse. It is a pattern of fraud, deceit, dishonesty, and moral turpitude, amplified by a system that protects its own.
We’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars digging out of what Mr. Cohen created. We’ve lost time, business, stability, and peace. Green Bridge Society — a company known across this state and beyond for our ethics, professionalism, and unwavering adherence to the law — has been dragged through the mud simply because we sought justice.
We have been criminalized at every turn: for being victims, for using medical cannabis, for living on a hemp farm, for telling the truth. In my world, I watch medical marijuana patients and hemp farmers treated like criminals. I have seen people face harsher consequences for non-violent cannabis issues than what is being considered here for an attorney who lied to a rape survivor for years. It sends a terrifying message about whose lives and whose pain matter in this system.
And while we’ve been punished over and over, Michael Cohen has never had to face the full weight of what he’s done.
Make no mistake: this is not just about a forged document. This is about a man who kept a mother from her child for years. A man who gaslit a victim into silence. A man who weaponized the legal system to terrorize a family. A man who lied so convincingly that he made us question our own sanity — and whose first instinct, when he knew he was finally caught, was to protect his law license.
Again: fraud, deceit, dishonesty, moral turpitude.
And what now? Probation? A slap on the wrist? This is not a case about misallocated funds or a falsified lawsuit between corporations. This is about a mother and her child. He will go home to his wife and kids and try to put this behind him. He will sit down to dinner in his big house and start planning his next chapter. He will be able, as I understand it, to apply for his license back in just two more years, and none of this will prevent him from trying to resume his career. He will be back in business.
Meanwhile, my wife is still gagged. She is still threatened with six months in jail if she speaks. She is still shamed, silenced, and retraumatized. She still distrusts men. She still lives with panic attacks, sleepless nights, and anxiety so severe that focusing on daily life is nearly impossible. She still feels like she’s screaming underwater for help. She is still living in the nightmare that Michael Cohen built, still looking for justice, still fighting for her child — now almost ten years old and in the hands of the convicted rapist.
Your Honor, I could stand here and talk about how this has impacted our lives — the humiliation, the grief, the financial ruin, the strain on our marriage, the loss of faith in justice. But I know none of that will undo what’s been done.
What I am asking — what I am begging — is for this Court to recognize that this is not a case that can be resolved with simple probation. Anything less than incarceration would be an insult to justice. It would signal to every victim that the system protects its own before it protects them. Probation is not punishment in a case like this. It is permission. And when the person breaking the law is someone who swore to uphold it, the standard should be higher, not lower. Those entrusted with the power of the courts and the title of “officer of the court” should face more severe consequences than the people they prosecute when they betray that trust — not a softer landing.
We had no say in this plea and would never have agreed to it. Trial, and facing what he’s done to us in open court, is what we wanted. Even with our civil suit, he has simply ignored it and will no doubt rely on his experience in this system to try to escape accountability there as well. His strategy has been planned, calculated, and — so far — painfully effective for him.
That is the reward for fraud, deceit, dishonesty, and moral turpitude if this ends in a light sentence.
Michael Cohen robbed a mother of six years with her son. He robbed two children of a family. He robbed us of hope. He robbed an entire community of trust in the legal system. And he did it all while pretending to be a savior.
If the law is to mean anything — if justice is to mean anything — then the consequences must reflect the enormity of the harm he caused. Anything less tells victims everywhere that their suffering does not matter; that lawyers can lie, cheat, forge, impersonate, and traumatize — and still walk free.
My wife has been punished more for speaking the truth than this man is likely to be for destroying our lives. That cannot stand. And if it does, then we have to ask ourselves: when will victims be afforded the same rights as the criminals?
We are not asking for vengeance. We are asking that justice finally mean something — not just for us, but for every survivor who will stand where we stand one day.
Thank you, Your Honor.