CONNECT WITH:

Florida Bulldog

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

justice renatha
Florida Supreme Court Justice Renatha Francis, left, and Angela Bentrim

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.

Palm Beach Circuit Judge Karen Miller

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. 

justice renatha
Palm Beach Circuit Judge Darren Shull

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.

Fourth District Court of Appeal Judge Martha Warner

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.”

Support Florida Bulldog

If you believe in the value of watchdog journalism please make your tax-deductible contribution today.

We are a 501(c)(3) organization. All donations are tax deductible.

Join Our Email List

Email
*

First Name

Last Name

Florida Bulldog delivers fact-based watchdog reporting as a public service that’s essential to a free and democratic society. We are nonprofit, independent, nonpartisan, experienced. No fake news here.


Comments

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

  1. VOTE OUT judges who trash Justice! Avatar
    VOTE OUT judges who trash Justice!

    Another great article Ms. Marcus! How is it possible for this woman, Ms. Bentrim to be forced in to Court after a final divorce 15-16 years ago?? Like New York, this woman’s case is evidence of another State Justice System with a “double standard” this time, applied by Republicans, Governor DeSantis and his appointees! Since when is a 3 year judge, Ms. Frances, elevated to “Justice” in the highest Florida Court? POLITICS trashing the Principle that experience and Merit earns promotion. WOW! Your story is revealing … BOTH Political Parties poison the Legal System! Thank you for exposing a cabal of un-just Judges, tyrants who are supposed to be public servants. The LESSON beware … once in power, power corrupts. What’s the remedy? TERM LIMIT all these entitled Judges!

  2. I made a list of those bad judges to make sure not to vote for them as their term comes up. During or before Early Voting if you would make a list of those unqualified or bad candidates it will help to vote them out. Please continue to report on bad choice candidates or highlight those who deserve our votes. Please post on Threads too.

  3. I’ve read of this before, a couple of years ago, and it is an absolutely despicable tale of corruption from top to bottom, end to end. Many things corrupt besides money: ambition, ego, narcissism, cowardice, hatreds and prejudice, the list goes on. And you know many judges will stick their necks out and cross lines to advance their own extralegal agendas, while cowering from correcting the same from another of their number on an upward trajectory. The idea of a lawyer with less than ten years in practice being made a judge is madness. The idea that such a lawyer is boosted to the state supreme court with less than ten years in the profession, only for the sake of her bronze age and utterly controversial, ignorant, un-American, sexist and anti-freedom views on abortion, to “stack the deck” at the supreme court on that one issue, should be criminal, both on the nominating end and on the accepting end. It’s just a total disgrace, and utterly demolishes public confidence in the judiciary. We’re seeing a tsunami of that now at the federal and state levels, and it’s all coming from one party – ALL OF IT. Utterly machiavellian.

  4. Edward Crespo Avatar
    Edward Crespo

    Welcome to Florida, the JUDICIAL CORRUPTION capital of the United States! Here in South Florida, we proudly manufacture a full line of PREJUDICED, SELF-SERVING, CORRUPT state court judges which includes our very popular 17th Judicial Circuit Court series in Broward County as well as our 15th Judicial Circuit and our 4th DCA series in Palm Beach County! Our goal is to place at least one of our prejudiced, corrupt judges into EVERY Florida jurisdiction!

    On a personal note, I have always been a staunch Republican, (GOD BLESS DONALD TRUMP), but Ron DeSantis gives me pause! WHAT THE HELL IS HE THINKING?!?! I can’t believe some of the SHIT he’s pulled, ESPECIALLY when it comes to his choice of judges…as well as other choices he’s made!

    Having done my due diligence in the area of judicial conduct…or should I say MISCONDUCT, by studying the Florida Code of Judicial Conduct and the Rules of Judicial Administration, as a pro se litigant with NO money to retain counsel, I have disqualified TEN prejudiced, self-serving, corrupt state court judges from my on-going SIXTEEN YEAR “war” with Bank of America! (Emphasis added).

    When a judge responds to a Motion for Disqualification with an Order of Recusal, it means the Motion was “legally sufficient” and the errant judge leaves the case. But some judges don’t play by the Rules! What a SWEET arrangement they have! Prejudiced, corrupt judges get to decide by themselves whether or not they are prejudiced! There’s NOTHING to stop a corrupt, self-serving judge from illegally DENYING a legally sufficient Motion for Disqualification! IT’S TOTAL BULLSHIT!

    KNOW YOUR CIVIL RIGHTS AND RECOGNIZE WHEN THEY ARE BEING VIOLATED BY A BAD JUDGE!
    STUDY AND LEARN THE CODE OF JUDICIAL CONDUCT AND RULES OF JUDICIAL ADMINISTRATION!
    LEARN THE CORRECT WAY TO FILE A JQC COMPLAINT, (for all the good it will do), THE JQC IS JUST AS DISHONEST, UNETHICAL, AND CORRUPT AS THE JUDGES ARE! FILE THE COMPLAINT ANYWAY!

    There’s an unlimited number of good, honest, decent people out there who have been VICTIMIZED in court by prejudiced, corrupt, bought-and-paid-for Judges and crooked, LYING lawyers! I have SO MUCH record evidence of judicial misconduct and corruption in Broward County, Florida!

  5. Alicia/what a double standard! Avatar
    Alicia/what a double standard!

    What a DOUBLE STANDARD!
    So Judge Francis fights for “the unborn’s competing right to life “ but chooses not to protect a mom’s custody rights to protect her MINOR CHILD…??!! How about doing YOUR JOB, as we the people and taxpayers PAY YOU TO DO …Protect families from being torn apart in divorce! Judge’s have a moral duty to protect family relationships. I agree–let’s enact a law for judge’s Term limits.

  6. Sad and tragic abuse of power and miscarriage of justice (if there ever is any in FL). Consolation – current guv gone Jan 2027. Yes seems like forever but new judges can and will be appointed if FL voters actually vote, and vote wisely Nov 2026. Maybe some lessons learned by this, recent $1BB or so of vetoes in state budget (our tax dollars). Thank you Noreen Marcus and Florida Bulldog.

  7. There is only one way to get rid of a corrupt judge for good – VOTE THEM OUT! What a happy day it would be to finally see a judge NOT retained. It never happens, but what a message it would send. Mired in my own legal battles in PA for nothing more than being an outspoken critic of public corruption that I saw nearly destroy my ex-husband’s life in Florida and now mine in PA, I have watched quietly while the latest corrupt POS to handle my highly politicized case pay off my fully paid private lawyer to withdraw her representation while knowing I do not qualify for a public defender and refuse to shell out any more money for lawyers. I look forward to telling him at a hearing on Monday, where he continues to insist the case will not move forward until I hire another lawyer, that I am saving up my hard-earned retirement income to pay for a billboard on the PA Turnpike to insure he is not retained in his next retention election in 3 years before I will waste one more dime paying his cronies to screw me over again. If he throws me in prison for contempt, I plan to tell him it is appropriate, as I have nothing BUT contempt for him, the D.A. and PA’s corrupt court system.

  8. TERM LIMIT THE JUDGES! Avatar
    TERM LIMIT THE JUDGES!

    Thanks for sharing a story on how corrupt our “justice” system is being run. This woman is one unfortunate victim of Politics. It’s hard to believe that this pretty Lady is still dragged thru court by her EX. Of course, she wants the lawsuit “STOPPED”! Any normal person expects Justice and not this game of movable chairs. It’s 2024 people! Something is very wrong when a person’s 2007 divorce is still in divorce court. Hmm…Who benefits from dragging this Case through a murky court system? My WISE father always told me that in any controversy “FOLLOW THE MONEY”. Folks, good suggestions to ‘VOTE THEM OUT” and institute “TERM LIMITS” for Florida Judges! Let’s all get aboard this MOVEMENT!!

  9. Edward Crespo Avatar
    Edward Crespo

    Our so-called “system of Justice” in Florida is a BULLSHIT FARCE! I speak from a great deal of experience dealing with the PREJUDICED, SELF-SERVING, CORRUPT JUDGES in the 17th Judicial Circuit Court in Broward County. In fact, after doing my due diligence as a socioeconomically disadvantaged pro se litigant, I’ve disqualified TEN prejudiced, corrupt judges from my on-going case against Bank of America! It’s been a long, hard FIGHT and it’s still not over! (Emphasis added). Bank of America has some of the BEST judges money can buy! A sizable campaign or re-election contribution goes a LONG WAY towards getting a favorable ruling in civil litigation! A pre-existing business relationship between the judge and the Bank is FAR MORE PREVALENT than most people realize! Think about it.

  10. Kudos to Ms. Bentrim for taking a Stand! Avatar
    Kudos to Ms. Bentrim for taking a Stand!

    BRAVO Ms. Bentrim!! YOU are a brave woman to STAND UP to unbridaled arrogance and champion women’s rights. When they hurt the mother, they hurt the children!! Can Judges be this ignorant? If this new judge tyranizes you further to protect her “friends, I hope you’ll let the BULLDOG know so the NEWS can expose their cruelty! It’s a sin when family court judges, the ELITE, target the POOR! So sorry to hear this travesty. Disgusting! Good luck dear.

  11. It is certainly a sad state of affairs. Justice will never be served as long as unethical types like Francis are allowed to stay in positions of power. I’d suggest someone needs to: ” Follow the money”…There is at least one who has benefitted from placing these inept judges in place. In the meantime, those who object to Judge Francis and others should make sure they vote.

  12. Always Follow the money, the last place you find Justice is in the Justice system. It is a leviathan much like the Industrial War complex….it feeds off of other people’s money and misery. Keep the focus on judges as much as possible they are as corrupt as most of our Bureaucratic system

  13. Judge Francis is a firm believer in the right to life. Yet she has kept Ms. Bertram from ‘living’ , I can’t believe there is anyone who would want to be in Mrs Beltrans shoes all these years, especially when it is so unnecessary. I hope Ms. Beltran can keep an open heart when it comes to Judges. There are many judges with integrity , I pray the new judge assigned to her case is one of them. I wish Mrs. Beltran peace and I hope the court allows her to start living and put this behind her.

  14. FOLLOW THE MONEY Avatar
    FOLLOW THE MONEY

    I agree with the Ladies comment: “FOLLOW THE MONEY”. We all know money is the root of all evil. But I’m not sure State salaries rise to this level unless there are gifts or $$$ brides?

  15. This case is as much outrageous as it is ridiculous, I mean how many years has this been dragged out so far?
    And all the while using tax payer money to foot the bill and fill the courts with this nonsense?
    someone seriously needs to step in and put a stop this injustice and complete waste of time!
    Not to mention, absolutely trying to destroying this strong and beautiful woman’s lively hood and spirit…
    Complete injustice and a mockery of the justice system!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *