Justice Renatha Francis’s former trial court colleagues still punishing litigant who called her out for trampling women’s rights

By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org

A Loxahatchee woman remains trapped in Palm Beach County family court years after she defied Renatha Francis, who abruptly dropped the woman’s case before her promotion to the Florida Supreme Court.

Justice Francis left behind a pile of punitive orders targeting Angela Bentrim. Her deferential former colleagues seem determined to execute those orders blindly.

Filed in 2007, Bentrim v. Bentrim has visited the dockets of more than a dozen judges. Angela and Jeffrey Bentrim’s two children are adults now. The Bentrims’ family court litigation has gone on much longer than their 12-year marriage and outlasted the court’s mission: to referee disputes between divorced parents about their minor children.

The case still complicates the life of Angela Bentrim, 59, who boards and walks dogs for a living. She’s been declared legally indigent; she represents herself with the help of a consultant, lawyer Margherita Downey of Delray Beach.

Angela Bentrim says her ex-husband, Jeffrey Bentrim, 57, the owner of an ornamental fountain company, owes her about $90,000 in unpaid court-ordered alimony. He’s trying to convince the court to decrease his $1,750-a-month alimony payment.

This month, presiding Palm Beach Circuit Court Judge Karen Miller – the fourth jurist to catch the case since Francis left the family court two years ago – refused to reconsider Francis’s leftover orders.

They include sanctions against Angela Bentrim for things like failing to attend a hearing she couldn’t have known about because Francis’s office “notified” her of the date and time through a defunct email address.

‘IT JUST DOESN’T END’

Angela Bentrim and Margherita Downey face a total of about $5,000 in sanctions and fees levied by Francis and her first successor on the case, Palm Beach Circuit Court Judge Darren Shull. He oversees the family division.

Like Francis, former criminal defense lawyer Shull was tapped for judicial office by Gov. Ron DeSantis. The two have another connection: Francis’s late husband, Phillip Fender, was a member of the Judicial Nominating Commission that put Shull’s name forward for appointment.

Shull gave up the Bentrim (AKA Hot Potato) case without explanation, after which it was randomly reassigned to new Judge Caryn Siperstein. Two puzzling recusals/disqualifications and random reassignments later, it ended up with Miller. 

Now Jeffrey Bentrim wants an undetermined additional sum from his ex-wife to pay his lawyer, Robert M. Lewis of Jupiter, for pursuing sanctions against her. Lewis did not respond to an email from Florida Bulldog seeking comment.

“It just doesn’t end,” Angela Bentrim said this week. She’s concerned “we’ll get a bum rap again, that the judge will not go by the law and rule properly and there will be bias and no due process with simple black-letter law.”

“I would just like to have this stopped and justice be served and these orders that are false be corrected,” Bentrim said.

Several judges who handled the case before Francis took over issued contempt rulings against Jeffrey Bentrim for violating the couple’s settlement agreement. In 2020 General Magistrate Damary Stokes found that threatening him with jail for failing to pay alimony had proven to be “a motivating factor.”

OTHER COMPLAINTS NAMED FRANCIS

In contrast, Angela Bentrim noted, the judges who followed Francis “won’t stand up to her, they don’t use their own judgment like a judge should. They’re just going by what she did.”

Bentrim has formed a low opinion of judges generally. “They definitely stand up for each other,” she said, “even if it’s not right.”

The Bentrim case is emblematic of Francis’s stint in Palm Beach Circuit Court. She spent less than three years there during her rapid rise, guided by influential Federalist Society lawyers and judges, to Florida’s highest court.

Florida Bulldog has reported that at least five litigants and lawyers filed ethics complaints against Francis with the Judicial Qualifications Commission (JQC). No charges resulted. Francis falsely denied on her Supreme Court application that she’d been the subject of any complaints.

The complainants described Francis as arrogant and dismissive of the arguments and situations of women and self-representing litigants, both women and men.

When George Wade appeared in her court to resolve a dispute with his neighbor in Lantana, Francis “got impatient, became increasingly aggressive, as if I should be punished for not paying for a lawyer to appear,” his JQC complaint says.

At a Feb. 1, 2022 hearing, Francis’s bailiff threatened Wade with arrest for insisting the judge hear his evidence, “leaving me petrified and sick to my stomach,” he wrote.

FRANCIS SHEDS BENTRIM CASE

Angela Bentrim was an especially irksome problem for Francis because Bentrim  persevered in fighting her all the way to the Florida Supreme Court. She didn’t give up when the JQC rejected her complaint or the Fourth District Court of Appeal refused to remove Francis from the Bentrim case because she’d shown bias.

Finally Francis dropped the case on her own initiative. She wrote that she was acting on an “emergency” basis but didn’t elaborate. If there was an emergency, no one else knew anything about it.

“Judge Francis never e-filed an emergency order protecting the Bentrims’ minor child despite the mom’s emergency motions,” Downey said at the time. “So much for protecting children versus protecting herself.”

The timing looked strategic. Francis ended her involvement with Bentrim v. Bentrim in July 2022, just before her widely expected second Supreme Court nomination. DeSantis chose Francis for her anti-abortion fervor, court insiders told Florida Bulldog.

The first time he nominated her, in 2020, she was ineligible for a seat on the high court because she hadn’t been a licensed attorney for a full 10 years. Following the governor’s second nomination, Francis joined the court on Sept. 1, 2022.

She arrived in time to reinforce a supermajority of justices who approved one of the nation’s toughest abortion bans this year.

CRITICISM FROM HIGHER COURT

Judges of the Fourth District Court of Appeal (DCA) have criticized Francis for showing bias against women litigants in two of her family court rulings. Angela Bentrim suffered collateral damage from one of them.

Former Chief Judge Martha Warner dissented from a ruling that Jeffrey Bentrim could change the terms of the couple’s divorce settlement without first going through mediation. Judges Jonathan Gerber and Spencer Levine agreed with the ex-husband.

So did Francis, who overstepped in her zeal to rule for Jeffrey Bentrim and thereby harmed his ex-wife, according to Warner’s July 2021 dissent. Francis “departed from the essential requirements of law by making findings of fact without any evidence to support them,” Warner wrote.

More recently in a different case, a Fourth DCA panel unanimously found that Francis signed a father’s proposed order complete with spelling, grammar and logic errors — it wasn’t even proofread. And the mother wasn’t allowed to comment on the order before Francis signed it.

“The circumstances create the appearance that the trial court [Francis] did not independently consider the merits of the parties’ arguments, thus warranting reversal,”

Chief Judge Mark Klingensmith and Judges Robert Gross and Cory Ciklin wrote in their June 21, 2023 opinion in King v. King.

Usually the judge who commits an error fixes it on remand, but by June 2023 Francis was long gone from family court. So the King case went back down to some unlucky trial judge who had to clear away the mess the justice left behind.

FRANCIS SHOWS ANTI-ABORTION BIAS

Francis is up for retention in the Nov. 5 election. Given the fact that Florida Supreme Court justices have never been voted out of office, her family court record probably doesn’t matter.

Still, voters who are focusing on abortion this campaign season may not appreciate Francis’s disdain for women’s rights. She expressed this hostility in her dissent from a Supreme Court ruling that will let voters decide if the Florida Constitution should be amended to guarantee reproductive healthcare choice.

Francis had quietly signaled her opposition to abortion. At her public interview for the Supreme Court position, she expressed admiration for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a staunch abortion opponent who has publicly looked forward to outlawing contraception.

On April 1, Francis voted with a 6-1 Supreme Court majority to authorize a six-week abortion ban.

Dissenting in the separate amendment case, she glorified the radical concept of fetal personhood, which holds that human rights attach to a fertilized egg.

“The exercise of a ‘right’ to an abortion literally results in a devastating infringement on the right of another person: the right to live,” Francis wrote. She added that “One must recognize the unborn’s competing right to life and the State’s moral duty to protect that life.”