Intimate Deception Outside of Romantic, Sexual, or Marital Relationships

Abstract

This chapter explores deceit between family members who are not connected to each other as spouses, sexual partners, or romantic interests. The premise that the law should protect intimate deceivers still appears here, but is almost exclusively confined to cases considering parents who have deceived their children—including their adult children. Judges are often unwilling to penalize deceptive parents and quick to blame children for having been duped. When the parties are reversed, however, courts are frequently eager to grant remedies to parents suing deceitful adult children and willing to empower parents to inflict their own penalties on deceptive children below the age of majority. Moreover, when courts move beyond marital and parental relationships to consider deception by other relatives, they routinely presume that the judiciary should treat these family members—deceitful siblings, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and the like—as if they were unrelated to the people they deceived.