The Law Doesn’t Care That You’re Human
- Trudy Giordano
- 10 hours ago
- 6 min read
And it would be nice if you could please remain calm while someone systematically destroys your life.
June 21st, 2026. By J. Harlan Briggs*
After watching the entertaining Netflix documentary Untold: The Shooting at Hawthorne Hill, and following the Michael Barisone and Lauren Kanarek case closely, I felt something interesting was revealed.
Michael Barisone loved horses. Olympic dressage alternate. Winner of over a hundred Grand Prix events. By all accounts, he was at the top until a tenant moved onto his New Jersey property. Over about a year, she allegedly used social media, covert recordings, false accusations, and a timely call to child protective services to unravel him.
In August 2019, Barisone shot his tenant, Lauren Kanarek, twice in the chest.
In April 2022, a jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity.
Between those two facts lies an essential question the law is unequipped to answer: What happens when destruction occurs in forms the legal system cannot detect?
Here’s how the law works, in theory. You have a dispute. You call the police, who check for a crime. If there isn’t one, they leave. You hire a lawyer, who sends letters. They’re ignored. You file a civil complaint; a hearing is set for eight months later. Meanwhile, your opponent posts about you daily, records your conversations, contacts agencies with allegations, and launches a one-person psychological demolition against what you’ve built.
And the law looks at all of this and says: technically fine.
And then there was this. One of Kanarek’s Facebook posts, entered into evidence at trial, read: “Everyone should be worried. I’m not responsible for anything my other personalities do when they’re threatened.” In a courtroom context, that is not a throwaway phrase. That is a document.
Now, I'm not in the business of diagnosing people I've never met. But I will say this: if you opened a textbook on Narcissistic Personality Disorder and flipped to the chapter on covert tactics—the public narrative control, the reputation destruction, the institutional weaponization, the calculated victim positioning—you would find what looks suspiciously like a detailed account of Lauren Kanarek's year at Hawthorne Hill. The sustained social media campaign. The covert recordings, including those of attorney-client conversations. The false accusations filed with public agencies. The methodical dismantling of a person's professional standing in a small, tight-knit world where reputation is everything. I'm not saying she has NPD. I'm saying the playbook was followed with remarkable precision. NPD 101. Full marks.
Barisone called 911 four times and told police he feared for his life. He hired a private investigator. He reached out to SafeSport. He did everything the system prescribed. And the system, efficiently, did nothing.
Here’s the thing about the law: it measures acts with precision but is blind to accumulation. It cannot weigh the effects of months of psychological warfare. It has no instrument for that. It was not built for that. It was meant to judge discrete events: did you do the specific thing, or not? Everything leading up to it is just background noise.
Before anyone argues: yes, Barisone shot someone. That’s not minor. Lauren Kanarek was in a coma for four days and on a ventilator for three weeks. Whatever she did, she didn’t deserve to be shot. That’s not the argument here.
Here’s the argument: The law holds everyone to the same standard of self-control, regardless of their experience. It demands rationality from people pushed utterly past rationality. Only when the breaking point produces something visible does the law act with full force. For readers unfamiliar with Barisone, he is an Olympic dressage rider who faced a severe psychological ordeal before the crime occurred. Though, in my view, she crossed ethical lines and arguably even legal ones that were hard to enforce, before he crossed the legal boundary that could be prosecuted.
It’s like a referee who watches one team foul the other for forty-five minutes, calls none of it, and then red-cards the player who finally swings back. Technically correct. Completely absurd. This analogy helps describe the invisible accumulation of harm the legal system often misses.
This is not just about one man and one farm in New Jersey. Barisone’s story is a lens to examine how the law fails to address psychological abuse in many contexts, not just his.
Think about every case you have ever heard where someone finally snapped after years of workplace harassment that HR kept finding “insufficient to act on.” Every domestic situation where one person waged a quiet war of control, leaving no visible bruises. Every online campaign that destroyed someone’s reputation one post at a time, each one defensible in isolation, catastrophic in aggregate.
The law intervenes only at the visible breaking point. It claims no jurisdiction over the slow, psychological toll that precedes it, highlighting a significant gap in legal protection for those subjected to prolonged emotional harm.
Some countries have started quietly admitting this. The Dutch show Zeeman Confronteert, now in its tenth season on RTL 5, exists for exactly this reason. Host Thijs Zeeman mediates stalking, harassment, and psychological conflict cases that law enforcement admits it cannot resolve. The police, whose job is to intervene where people are harmed, sometimes look at a harassment case, shrug, and say: "We can’t do anything yet. Go talk to the TV guy." Not because they don’t care, but because the law has no tools for what is happening. The threat must become visible and prosecutable before anyone with a badge can act. Until then, you're on your own or on Dutch reality television, which is essentially the same thing.
People who understand this legal gap, who operate up to the legal line knowing they’re unlikely to face consequences, will always have the advantage. Certain personalities use systems as weapons, hiding behind the same protections those systems offer. You can terrorize someone, procedurally and legally, with receipts.
Until you can’t. Until the person on the other end stops calculating and starts feeling. And then the law finally notices, but only the feeling, not the calculation that produced it.
The jury in the Barisone case saw something that the law, on its own, could not process. They looked at 19,000 pages of social media posts. They heard about the bugged office. They heard about the child welfare call. They watched a disheveled, broken man who had once stood in Olympic arenas, and they made a human judgment that the system was not designed to make.
Now, was Barisone performing? Possibly. The prosecution thought so. His prosecutor noted on the record that Barisone looked dramatically different in court than he had at any prior time. Lauren Kanarek’s father called it: “They had him ready for the insanity defense.” (Well, shouldn’t they, if that’s the plea? Duh.) Still, the transformation was remarkable. Olympic champion to courtroom wraith in three years: composed, decorated, regal to tearful, unwashed, barely together. If that was acting, get him an Emmy. A Daytime Emmy, specifically, since the whole thing aired on Court TV and the production values were outstanding. He rode horses at the Olympics. He did not come to play.
"If that was acting, get him an Emmy. A Daytime Emmy, specifically, since the whole thing aired on Court TV and the production values were outstanding."
They also heard from the defense psychiatrist, Dr. Steven Simring, who testified that Kanarek had been gaslighting Barisone, that she had placed him “under direct and personal threat” until “he came to feel delusional, that Lauren Kanarek was capable of anything; poisoning the horses, doing some kind of harm to the tenants and students.” (Horse Sport, September 2022.) The word gaslighting had made it into a courtroom. Under oath. From an expert witness. And the jury went back to replay that testimony on the third day of deliberations, which tells you everything about where their questions were anchored.
They decided that what happened to Michael Barisone mattered. That the months of invisible destruction had to count for something in the accounting.
The law didn’t provide adequate tools for this situation. The only available option was a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. This verdict indicates that something happened to this man that the law cannot define, yet it was recognized by those present.
We keep building systems that are very good at punishing the visible and very bad at accounting for the invisible. And then we act surprised when people stop trusting those systems to protect them. When people start wondering whether the rules are actually neutral or just favor whoever is most comfortable operating in the gray.
Michael Barisone found out the hard way that the law is not about what you can handle as a human being. It is not about what pushes you to the edge. It is about what you do when you get there.
Which is a fine legal principle.
It just has absolutely nothing to do with being human. The law’s definition of justice is not aligned with the lived experience of those it is supposed to protect. Readers should reflect on whether our legal systems need reform to recognize psychological harm.
That disconnect—between what it means to be human and what the law can see—is the underlying problem.
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