Update: Elizabeth Sider’s lawyer has just revealed what he witnessed behind closed doors, and new facts have come to light.

Update: Elizabeth Sider’s lawyer has just revealed what he witnessed behind closed doors, and new facts have come to light.

Something in Elizabeth’s Sider’s competency filing jumped out at me almost immediately. Not because of what her attorney was asking the court to do, but because of the words he used to explain why he was asking. And once I put that filing next to Gary Sider’s Jr.’s, I went back and read it again.  Elizabeth does not consider herself a victim.

 That’s what her own attorney said. Not a headline, not a guess, his words. And I need you to sit with that for a second because something about it doesn’t add up. Not right away at least. We all knew there was more to this story. You already suspected it, too, didn’t you? The moment you saw 16 children pulled into one case, something in your gut said this wasn’t as simple as the news wanted it to look.

 Here’s the thing, though. This isn’t about excusing anyone. 16 kids lived through something that court documents call extremely serious. Nothing about what I’m going to say erases that. Not one ounce of it. But justice only works when we’re willing to look at every piece of evidence, even the uncomfortable ones, especially those.

 And before we get into this, I want to say something very clearly. There are 16 children at the center of this case, and the allegations surrounding the conditions in which those children lived are extremely serious. Whatever we learn about Elizabeth, her mental condition, her history, whether she herself may have been abused, isolated, or controlled, does not take one ounce of suffering away from those children.

It doesn’t excuse neglect if neglect occurred, and it certainly doesn’t erase harm. But these things are not mutually exclusive. A person can participate in harm and also have been harmed herself. A perpetrator can also be a victim. And if we are genuinely trying to understand what happened inside this family, I think we have to be willing to hold both possibilities in our heads at the same time.

 So, let’s go back to the filing, the actual words, because words matter more than people think. Gary Siders Jr.’s attorney filed a motion. Standard language boilerplate, honestly. The kind of thing lawyers fill in like a template.  I want to start with Gary Siders Jr. I’m actually going to read this filing to you rather than summarize it, because I want you to hear the language for yourself.

 And this is only the motion to seal the medical psychological records, but listen to this language. It begins with, “Now comes defendant Gary Siders Jr. by and through counsel and respectful and respectfully moves this court for leave to file under seal defendant’s motion for competency evaluation and the proposed entry relating thereto.

” Defendant’s competency to stand trial has been raised, and the documents at issue concern defendant’s present mental condition and request for psychiatric evaluation. Just a bit, and really indeed.  Nothing personal in it. Nothing that reaches out and grabs you. Elizabeth’s filing, different animal completely.

 And that’s basically where I want to leave Gary for the moment. Because now, listen to Elizabeth’s filing for her competency hearing. It says, “Motion for an evaluation to determine whether the defendant is not guilty by reason of insanity and whether the defendant is competent to stand trial.” It says, “Now comes counsel for the defendant who hereby respectfully moves the court for an order that a formal evaluation be conducted in order to determine whether the defendant is competent at this time to stand trial to

the offenses as charged herein. Alternatively, if the defendant is found to be competent, counsel hereby simultaneously requests that the defendant undergo an evaluation to determine if she is not guilty by reason of insanity because she was suffering from a condition which would produce legal insanity at the time of the alleged offense.

That’s pretty boilerplate. Now, listen to the memorandum in support. Listen closely to this.  Her attorney didn’t just check a box. He wrote that he met with her repeatedly, extended sessions. He personally observed her demeanor, her conduct, her comprehension, and what he saw led him, not her, him, to raise the competency question himself.

 As of the filing of this motion, the defendant has not been indicted and therefore counsel does not have all of the facts, evidence, or circumstances of this case or the defendant’s subsequent arrest. However, in the interim, counsel has met with the defendant on numerous occasions and for extended periods.

During these interactions, counsel has been able to observe the defendant’s demeanor, conduct, and comprehension. These interactions led counsel to believe that the defendant may be suffering from significant mental health issues and that competency may be an issue and a clear impediment to the defendant’s ability to assist in her own defense.

Counsel is prepared to provide a more detailed accounting of his concerns and the specific conduct giving rise to those concerns directly to the court and eventually to the evaluating medical professionals. At this time, counsel believes that the defendant’s significant mental health issues would not only affect whether she is competent to stand trial, but would also have affected her ability to understand the wrongfulness of her conduct at the time of the alleged offenses.

Such that the defendant would not have fully understood the consequences of her actions at the time of the alleged offenses. Should such actions have actually constituted criminal conduct.  Read that again. Her Her lawyer raised it, not a probation officer, not a prosecutor looking for an angle. The one person who spent hours in a room with her, watching her, listening to her, decided something wasn’t right.

 What her attorney is saying is totally different. It’s more personal. He is saying he has met with Elizabeth numerous times. He has observed her for extended periods, and during those meetings he has personally observed her demeanor, conduct, and comprehension. And those interactions led him to believe competency may be an issue.

Ohio law allows the defense to raise competency. It does not require the defendant herself to be the person who first raises the concern. Because the way this is worded, it makes me believe that her defense attorney raised this concern himself. It does not sound to me like Elizabeth and her attorney worked together to say, “Hey, let’s say I’m incompetent to stand trial. Let’s Let’s do that.

” I want to be very precise here. I do not know whether Elizabeth and her attorney discussed filing this beforehand. I don’t know whether she agreed with him, and I don’t know whether she disagreed with him. Really, I don’t know. We’re kept in the dark about a lot. And of course, this is attorney-client privilege.

So, those conversations are private. But what I can read is a document in front of me. And the document says that his observations of his client are or caused him concern. To me, that is very different from merely checking a procedural box. And frankly, it tells us though something about those interactions bothered him enough that he believed this needed professional attention.

Not that he has determined that she is incompetent, he hasn’t of course. And not that she is legally insane, we don’t know that either. But enough that he is saying  And here’s where it gets interesting. Ohio law separates two things almost nobody outside a courtroom understands. Competency is about right now.

 Can she understand the trial? Help her own defense. Insanity is about back then. Did she understand right from wrong at the time everything happened? Two different questions. Two different windows into the same woman. Her attorney asked for both. Which means whatever he saw in that room wasn’t small. It wasn’t performative.

 It bothered him enough to open two separate doors at once.  Someone qualified needs to look at this. And then he goes one step further. If Elizabeth is found competent, he also wants her evaluated regarding her mental condition at the time of the alleged offenses. Ohio treats those as separate inquiries. Competency concerns whether she could understand the proceedings and assist in her defense now, while an insanity evaluation looks at whether because of a severe mental disease or defect, she understood the wrongfulness of her alleged acts then,

at the time.  Now here’s where I want you to slow down with me for a second because there’s a detail buried in all this that most people are going to scroll right past. Elizabeth was 15. 15 when this life started.  Elizabeth was only 15 when this family life began. She became pregnant very She married very young.

 And then, year after year after year, pregnancy, childbirth, caring for children, another pregnancy, another postpartum period. I’m not saying pregnancy made Elizabeth incompetent. Absolutely not. I’m not saying repeated pregnancies caused whatever Stahli believes he is observing. But medically, the period between pregnancies is supposed to allow for recovery.

And the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, or ACOG, advises avoiding intervals shorter than 6 months and counseling about the risks of becoming pregnant again sooner than 18 months. Postpartum care also specifically includes attention to emotional and mental health. So, when you’re looking at a woman who appears to have spent much of her adult life pregnant, postpartum, nursing, or caring for a very large number of children, I don’t think we simply shrug that off as irrelevant background.

 Pregnant young, married young, and then year after year after year, pregnancy, birth, another pregnancy, barely any space to breathe in between. Doctors will tell you the body needs time to recover between pregnancies. Real medical guidance says don’t go shorter than 6 months. Ideally, wait longer. Postpartum care exists specifically because the mind needs healing, too, not just the body.

 So, when you’re looking at a woman who spent what sounds like most of her adult life pregnant, nursing, or caring for an enormous number of children back-to-back-to-back, that’s not nothing. That’s not a detail we just shrug off. And look, I want to be honest with you here, because this is the part that actually gets to me a little.

 I keep thinking about the 15-year-old version of her, before any of this, because people who knew her back then described someone completely different. A cheerleader, friends with everyone.  And then we add something else. Possible coercive control. Not proven coercive control. Possible. But let’s listen to what people who knew Elizabeth before and during this relationship are saying.

During Joey Russell’s Tiff Talk Live, Stacy, someone Joey recognizes as having known Elizabeth from school, describes the Elizabeth she remembers. Listen to this for a second.  And she wasn’t like that as a teenager, a young teenager before she was with him. Do you was friends with everybody. She was a cheerleader.

 She was the one that was When somebody was new and came to school and didn’t have no friends, she was the one that would go and sit next to that kid. Everybody that knows Elizabeth growing up can attest to that.  That’s interesting. Back then, when she knew Elizabeth, she said Elizabeth was friends with everybody. She was a cheerleader.

 The girl who would go sit with the new kid who didn’t know anyone. That’s one person’s recollection. It isn’t a clinical record. But then Stacy looks at later images of Elizabeth and says this.  And she like it’s like  Okay.  The best thing that I could like come up with to when I looked at her before picture when she was blonde, when she was younger, to like now, it looks like he sucked the [ __ ] light out of her.

That’s what it looks  Now, of course, that is her interpretation and we should treat it as that. But she’s describing a change that she believes she sees in someone she actually knew before this marriage.  Uh the girl who’d walk over and sit with the new kid nobody else would talk to. That’s the same person we’re talking about now.

 Someone who knew her before this marriage looked at old photos next to newer ones, and said it looked like the light had been sucked right out of her. Her own brother said their family wasn’t even allowed around her anymore.  Then Joey, Elizabeth’s brother, says something even more specific. Listen to this.  Wouldn’t let us around let her and brothers and dad and all of her uh  Quote.

Wouldn’t even let us around her and brothers and dad around her. That too is Joey’s allegation. We can’t independently prove from that statement alone who restricted the contact, how much contact there was, or exactly why. But isolation from family is one of the things we pay attention to when we talk about coercive control.

And coercive control doesn’t always look like somebody physically locking another person in a room. It can involve gradually shrinking another person’s world, limiting relationships, increasing dependency, controlling access to people or information, making the controlling environment feel normal. Again, I am not saying that that has been proven here.

I’m asking whether it belongs on the list of possibilities professionals may need to examine.  That’s isolation. And isolation is one of the first things investigators look for when they’re asking whether someone was controlled. Not proven here. I want to be clear about that. Possible.

 But possible is exactly the kind of thing that deserves real scrutiny, not a shrug in a headline. So, here’s the question nobody’s asking out loud. If you enter a relationship at 15, if that relationship becomes your entire world, if your family fades out of the picture, if your 20s and 30s disappear into an endless cycle of pregnancy and child care, if the only normal you’ve ever known is the one cell around you uh would you even recognize it as abnormal?  Because if you enter a relationship at 15, if that relationship becomes essentially

your entire adult world, if your contact with your original family diminishes, if pregnancy and child-rearing dominate your adult life, and if whatever conditions exist around you become the only normal you’ve known, then when somebody later asks, “Why doesn’t she see herself as a victim?” I’m not sure the answer is necessarily because she wasn’t one.

It could also be because she doesn’t know anything else. And that is where the her attorney’s later filing becomes so interesting to me. We don’t know yet what happened exactly, but I think there’s a larger question here that is worth asking even before we get those answers.  That might be exactly why she doesn’t call herself a victim, not because she wasn’t one, because she never had anything to compare it to.

 And that Actually, let me rephrase that because I don’t want to overstate it. That’s not an answer. It’s a possibility, one her own attorney seems to be taking seriously enough to put in writing under oath in front of a judge. We still don’t have the full picture. Nobody does yet, not the court, not the evaluators, not us.

 But somebody spent hours in a room with Elizabeth Siders. Somebody watched her closely enough to raise red flags most people wouldn’t even notice.  And that makes something her attorney said earlier much more interesting to me. Shortly right after he he became Elizabeth’s defense attorney. He said Elizabeth does not consider herself a victim.

And I’ve been thinking about that ever since he said it, because if someone has lived inside a particular reality since she was practically a child, would she necessarily recognize it as abnormal?  And that somebody decided the system needed to take a harder look before this goes any further. A perpetrator can also be a victim.

Both things can be true at the same time. That’s not a comfortable thought. It was never supposed to be comfortable. So, I’ll leave you with this. What do you think really happened to Elizabeth Seiders between the girl everyone remembers and the woman sitting in that courtroom now? What changed her? Who let it happen? And why does it feel like the system is only now starting to ask? Say it in the comments, because somebody needs to.

 What happened to Elizabeth Seiders between the teenager people remember and the woman her own attorney is now asking professionals to evaluate? And can we consider the possibility that she may have participated in harming her children while also considering whether something happened to her along the way? Those aren’t comfortable questions, but comfortable questions aren’t necessarily the useful ones.

So, what do you think about the motion for possible insanity if they find her competent to stand trial? What do you think is going on in the case? What do you think about Elizabeth herself? And please remember keep the comments respectful. And if this topic or my videos resonate with you, please like, subscribe,