A girl caught in a custody battle said she was raped. The court-appointed investigator didn’t believe her.

When a 7-year-old girl, caught in the middle of a custody battle, said that her uncle raped her and that her dad didn’t protect her, Angela Rinaldo wasn’t convinced.

Rinaldo, a guardian ad litem appointed by the Thurston County Superior Court to represent the child’s best interests, believed that the girl had been coached to make the allegations. She thought that the child seemed too carefree while talking about the rape, her language too advanced, as if the girl were echoing information she’d heard from her mom.

She maintained that belief as prosecutors charged the uncle in December 2023 for molesting and repeatedly raping the girl, and as a jury later convicted him on two counts of child rape, emphasizing to the court in the custody case that the girl’s anger toward her dad and descriptions of abuse could be a result of the mother’s influence.

“Her testimony was clear that she had just decided she didn’t believe the mother, and for some reason, had aligned with the father,” said Thurston County Superior Court Judge Indu Thomas, who presided over the custody case. “The evidence at trial supported a different conclusion.” 

In fact, it wasn’t Rinaldo’s place to interview the girl about the allegations at all. She had learned in Washington’s state-mandated guardian ad litem training to never interview a child about allegations of sexual abuse, since this can interfere with criminal cases. Yet Rinaldo talked to the girl three times about it, once even interviewing her in the room where she said the abuse occurred, according to Rinaldo’s report and court testimony. 

It was just one of several ways that the guardian ad litem overstepped the authority of her court-appointed role, according to Judge Thomas. Throughout the course of her four-month investigation, Rinaldo told the parents to undergo expensive evaluations, referred the father to her own company and, according to the judge, gave a biased report and testimony — none of which is allowed under Washington State Court Rules.

The case in Thurston County, located on the southern end of the Puget Sound about 60 miles south of Seattle, represents a rare instance where a judge ultimately acknowledged that a guardian ad litem, also called a GAL, exceeded her scope and failed to do her job. But parents, attorneys, and domestic violence experts in Washington have described to InvestigateWest similar examples of guardians ad litem interfering in cases beyond the scope of their appointment that often go unchecked by judges. Though obligated to stick to a neutral and relatively narrow role, some guardians ad litem have weighed in on issues that they weren’t asked to look into, told parents to complete assessments that only the court is authorized to require, labeled parents with mental health issues that the parent isn’t diagnosed with, and blurred the lines between their guardian ad litem role and their private therapy practices, according to interviews and a review of court records in over a dozen family law cases across the state. 

Parents who do challenge guardians ad litem’s authority are rarely successful, and few guardians ad litem are ever disciplined, InvestigateWest reported. Additionally, because courts’ expectations for these court investigators vary by case and by county, it’s not always clear when they’ve gone out of bounds or how a parent can prove it. One dad in Whatcom County, for example, complained that a guardian ad litem brought him and his children to meet with horses at a private boarding stable, blurring the lines with her professional animal therapy work. A mom in Spokane County voiced concerns that a guardian ad litem communicated with her teenage son via Snapchat, a social media platform where messages are designed to disappear after opening them. Both complaints were dismissed after court officials found that the guardians ad litem hadn’t violated any rules.

While the judge ultimately gave the 7-year-old girl’s mother, Raven, custody in January 2026, by then, Raven felt that much damage had already been done. 

Raven had spent 2 ½ years and tens of thousands of dollars in family court. She couldn’t convince the court to strike Rinaldo’s report from the court record. Every weekend for nearly a year, she had to send her daughter back to the house where the child had been raped to live with family members who weren’t showing that they believed her.

Rinaldo faced no discipline from the court and remained involved in the case until the very end, testifying at the custody trial in December 2025. She avoided a court investigation into her conduct because she resigned before any investigation began.

Although Rinaldo is not currently serving as a guardian ad litem, there’s nothing barring her from doing so in the future. Rinaldo declined to speak to InvestigateWest, saying in an email that her comments about this case can be found in her report to the court.

“My daughter’s mental health has been at risk since the first time we went to court,” said Raven, 32. InvestigateWest is not using her last name to protect the child’s privacy. “I truly feel as though my daughter would have been better protected, potentially at the beginning of 2024, had the guardian ad litem left her own personal bias out of it.”

The investigation

Raven asked the Thurston County Superior Court for custody of her daughter in July 2023. She had one main goal: to get her child out of the father’s house.

The girl had recently opened up to her mental health counselor about how her uncle, who lived with her dad, was molesting her. The counselor called the police, and the uncle moved out. But Raven, concerned that the girl’s father, Justin, had been neglectful and was continuing to defend his brother’s innocence, wanted to protect her daughter from having to return to the scene of the crime, she said. Justin didn’t respond to InvestigateWest’s email and phone requests for comment.

Amid many safety concerns, including claims by both parents that the other had issues with drug use and domestic violence, the parents agreed that a neutral professional should investigate what would be best for their daughter. 

Angela Rinaldo, a mental health professional in her early 70s, seemed right for the job. 

Rinaldo had decades of experience working with sexual assault victims, including directing a women’s crisis center in Oregon, interviewing child victims in Alaska and investigating abuse allegations for Child Protective Services in Washington. The court commissioner who assigned Rinaldo to the case said during a hearing that Rinaldo probably had more qualifications than any guardian ad litem he’d ever seen in Thurston County, especially in dealing with child sexual abuse victims.

But when she began her investigation, Rinaldo started leaning on her qualifications to justify breaches of the court’s rules. 

Rinaldo said that due to the active criminal case, it was never her intention to interview the girl about the sexual assault. But each time she met with the child, the girl started talking about what happened, Rinaldo explained — and so Rinaldo decided to detail those conversations to the court, claiming she had the “required training to conduct such an interview.”

Although neither the detective nor the professional child abuse evaluators had seen evidence that the child was coached, Rinaldo was struck by the “level of disdain” that the child had for her dad, she wrote in her February 2024 guardian ad litem report. Rinaldo said it was “jolting”  to hear a 7-year-old use words like “rape.” She was “confused” that the girl seemed relatively comfortable in her dad’s house.  

“While I don’t know what happened, if anything, between (the child) and her uncle, it is clear (she) blames her father,” Rinaldo wrote in her report. “I can’t help but wonder if some of what is going on with (the child) is reflective of her mother’s feelings toward her father.”

Like Rinaldo, many guardians ad litem in Washington have backgrounds in counseling or social work. But while that expertise can be helpful for their investigations, they shouldn’t be providing therapy or diagnoses while serving in their court-appointed role, according to Tracee Parker, a psychologist and domestic violence expert in King County who provides training to family court professionals in the state.    

“When you’re in this role of a GAL, you are not in a clinical role, and so you should not be making clinical conclusions at all,” Parker said. “Too many people are wearing multiple hats when they should be wearing one at a time.”

Rinaldo also told Justin to complete a substance use evaluation, which violates state court rules, Judge Thomas later said, as only the court can require it.

Rinaldo then gave Justin a list of organizations that could provide the evaluation. He chose a for-profit company from her list called Supreme Living. But Rinaldo didn’t tell the court about her conflict of interest — she’s the company’s CEO.

Though Rinaldo maintained that she had “nothing to do with” Supreme Living’s outpatient services, as she testified in December, Judge Thomas said Rinaldo’s actions crossed several boundaries of her neutral role.

“It’s problematic that she included an entity where she gains financially,” Thomas said, citing a court rule that prohibits conflicts of interest and self-dealing.

Raven and her attorney asked the court to take Rinaldo off the case. In addition to the conflict of interest, they flagged over a dozen other alleged examples of the guardian ad litem violating Washington’s court rules, including how she failed to show up to a court hearing, hadn’t properly documented her billing, exceeded her allocated fees without court approval, discriminated against Raven, and misrepresented her qualifications.

“Even if everything Ms. Rinaldo says about her experience and training is true,” Raven’s attorney, April Thomas (no relation to Judge Indu Thomas), wrote in a court declaration, “licensed Washington forensic child interviewers in 2023 interviewed (the child) and believe her.”

Significant experience and significant fears

Over the last decade, judges, attorneys and domestic violence survivor advocates in Washington have teamed up to improve the work of guardians ad litem in family law cases. The state updated its mandatory training curriculum in 2018, and state legislators held a work session last year to discuss ongoing issues like biased reports and lack of oversight.      

Thurston County is at the forefront of these reform efforts. Spearheaded largely by Anne Hirsch, a former Thurston County Superior Court judge who retired in 2021 after nearly 15 years on the bench, the court has incorporated several nationally recognized best practices to ensure that guardians ad litem’s roles remain neutral and relatively narrow. Hirsch served on a workgroup that helped outline best practices in a model code on domestic and family violence, which was developed and released in 2022 by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, a nonprofit judicial membership organization that works to improve policies affecting families and abuse victims. 

“I felt that GALs have an inordinate amount of power, for good and for not good, to impact families,” said Hirsch, who added that she saw both sides of this during her family law career as an attorney, guardian ad litem and judicial officer. This experience spurred her to improve the guardian ad litem process and bring best practices to Washington courts, she said.

In contrast to most counties, judicial officers in Thurston County don’t ask guardians ad litem to make recommendations about parenting arrangements. This helps balance the weight that their reports hold in court. Judges also discharge guardians ad litem from the case after their report is filed, which makes clear that their work is finished and prevents them from continuing to investigate any additional concerns that crop up unless a parent requests their reappointment. The guardian ad litem then typically comes back at the end of the case to participate in the settlement conference or testify at trial.

But even in Thurston County, Rinaldo faced no consequences for her conduct. The court refused Raven’s requests to remove the guardian ad litem or her report from the case. After Rinaldo turned in her report, Court Commissioner Nathan Kortokrax discharged the guardian ad litem, as is customary in the county, and added a slight limitation to her trial testimony: Rinaldo would only be allowed to speak to the facts of her investigation rather than providing opinions.

Although Kortokrax acknowledged that Rinaldo’s referral to Supreme Living raised concerns, it was Justin who ended up shouldering the consequences. The father was ordered to get another evaluation, which costs hundreds of dollars, while Rinaldo was told that in the future, her company should not be on any lists that she gives parents.

But most importantly for Raven, following Rinaldo’s testimony and report, the court didn’t update the parenting plan to keep her daughter out of Justin’s house. It had been nearly a year since the child first spoke out about the abuse, and Raven was still required to send her daughter back to the house where it happened.

Kortokrax decided that there wasn’t enough information to change the parenting plan. On one hand, some evidence indicated that the child was expressing “significant fears” to Raven and her counselor, the commissioner said during a May 2024 hearing. But the guardian ad litem — who has “significant experience” — had observed the child directly in the father’s home.   

“The Court doesn’t have any reason to disbelieve what Ms. Rinaldo’s interactions were with this child,” Kortokrax said, citing Rinaldo’s concerns about where the child was getting her information from. 

The next month, in June 2024, Raven’s attorney, April Thomas, complained about Rinaldo to a court review board. While discipline by the review board sometimes involves requirements for additional training or mentorship, April Thomas argued that Rinaldo posed a risk to children and asked the court to fully ban her from serving as a guardian ad litem in the county — the most severe form of discipline, which would trigger a notification to other counties about her misconduct as well.

But just five days after the complaint was filed, Rinaldo emailed the court saying she was removing herself from Thurston County’s guardian ad litem list. She’d felt an “adversarial undertone when dealing with judicial officers” that was making her uncomfortable, she stated.

“I don’t like it and I don’t want to work in that environment.”

The judgment

After Rinaldo’s resignation, a jury convicted Justin’s brother in April 2025 of raping and molesting the child, putting the uncle among only about 3% of U.S. sexual assault perpetrators that receive felony convictions. 

Rinaldo also got caught up in lawsuits of her own. Two former female employees sued Supreme Living in November 2025, claiming that the company discriminated against them based on their gender — including accusations that Rinaldo’s management style was like a “domestic violence relationship” and that she retaliated against employees who tried to complain. Supreme Living denied the accusations in the lawsuits, which are ongoing.

When she took the stand at the custody trial in December 2025 — 2 ½ years after Raven first filed for custody — Rinaldo testified that she hadn’t kept up with the case since she was discharged the year before, and so she didn’t know that Justin’s brother had been convicted. But even after Raven’s attorney informed her of the conviction, Rinaldo said that she still believed the child had been coached, emphasizing again how angry the child was with her dad. 

Judge Thomas, who had watched the child’s forensic interview herself, pressed Rinaldo, asking her what a typical response would look like when a child discloses sexual abuse to a trusted parent.

“Well, one would hope that that parent would assure the child that they are safe and believed,” Rinaldo replied.

“And is it surprising if a child that didn’t receive that kind of ‘I believe you, you’re safe’ was angry? Is that typical?” the judge asked.

“Yes,” Rinaldo said.

The judge gave Raven custody of her daughter. Thomas found that Justin neglected his parental duties and did not act in an immediately protective way when the child disclosed that her uncle had molested her multiple times.

“For years, (the child) was molested in her father’s home, and when the information finally came out, he didn’t move,” Judge Thomas said in her oral ruling in January. Justin moved homes only after Thomas ordered that he couldn’t continue seeing his daughter in that house — a choice the judge said was driven “not primarily for (the child’s) mental health and well being, but only when the court said so.”

She ordered that Justin’s visits with his daughter be supervised until he completes certain services, including a mental health evaluation and training on reacting responsibly to child sexual abuse. 

Judge Thomas also apologized for the guardian ad litem’s behavior.

“An experienced and capable guardian ad litem, who should have been a very good choice for your case, instead exceeded the scope of her role, made some very biased and immediate conclusory decisions, and did not do her job,” Thomas said. “I did not find her report or her testimony helpful.”

While Raven was glad that the court ultimately recognized the guardian ad litem’s errors, she thinks that her daughter would have been safer if the court had acted much sooner. Judge Thomas, however, thinks it was necessary for the process to play out before she could arrive at such a conclusion. 

“It’s difficult because so much of the time, people see the same set of facts differently,” Thomas told InvestigateWest. “So to conclude that she had been biased prior to hearing her testimony at trial, I think, would have been improper on my part.”

But it wasn’t the first time the court had dealt with Rinaldo. Parents had voiced concerns with her dating back decades, court records show. Yet Rinaldo — like most other Washington guardians ad litem who parents have complained about — had never been disciplined, she stated in her most recent Thurston County guardian ad litem application. 

And when Raven’s attorney tried to get her removed, Rinaldo didn’t reply to the laundry list of accusations that she’d broken court rules. 

Instead, she highlighted once more her long history working with child sexual abuse victims. She told the court that she’d served on about 1,750 cases since becoming a guardian ad litem in the 1990s. She’d interviewed hundreds of children. Over 300 of those cases involved allegations of sexual abuse.