The Mediator and the Judge: How Roberts Kengis Is Working Both Sides of Allegan County’s Family Court
Retired Allegan County Circuit Court Judge Roberts Kengis is contacting parties in active divorce cases on Judge Margaret Zuzich Bakker’s docket, offering his services as a mediator. What those parties are not being told: Kengis and Bakker spent years communicating ex parte about pending criminal cases, coordinating political careers, socializing as a unit with Prosecutor Myrene Koch, and treating the judge-prosecutor relationship in Allegan County as a shared management structure. That relationship is now in the public record, filed as exhibits in a Michigan Supreme Court brief. And it raises a question every party Kengis has approached deserves an answer to: what exactly is neutral about this?
The Outreach
Attorneys working cases before Judge Margaret Zuzich Bakker in Allegan County’s 48th Circuit Court have begun reporting contact from retired Judge Roberts Kengis. Kengis, who left the bench in June 2023 and now holds an of-counsel position at Lennon Miller PLC, is presenting himself as a neutral mediator available to resolve pending family court matters.
The outreach pattern is not random. In at least one documented instance, Kengis reached out to counsel after identifying the case on the docket prior to a scheduled hearing, months in advance. For parties unfamiliar with Allegan County’s institutional history, the approach may appear to be standard post-judicial professional practice. It is not.
Served as Allegan County Circuit Court judge from 2018 to June 2023, following his tenure as Chief Assistant Prosecuting Attorney. His docket included civil, criminal, and domestic cases. He has been found by the Michigan Court of Appeals to have wrongfully imprisoned an individual for constitutionally protected speech. He is now offering mediation services to parties in active cases before his former colleague Judge Margaret Zuzich Bakker.
Bakker is the sitting judge on the divorce and family court matters where Kengis is now soliciting mediation work. Court records establish she served as Kengis’s professional mentor during his time as Chief APA, maintained regular social contact with Kengis and Prosecutor Myrene Koch during active litigation, and was CC’d on ex parte judicial communications about pending criminal cases. Clutch Justice has covered her record extensively, including her removal of a defendant’s parenting time without a hearing, her attempt to prosecutor-shop a case to Berrien County, and her closed-door ruling releasing a murder co-defendant without family notification.
What the Court Record Actually Shows
The Watson Township amicus brief filed with the Michigan Supreme Court in People v. Loew (MSC No. 164133, COA No. 352056, Circuit Ct. No. 18-021709-FC) includes a documented series of communications obtained through FOIA requests submitted by the Watson Township Supervisor. What the brief describes as additional ex parte communication discovered in preparation for filing is the foundation of what Clutch Justice is reporting today.
The exhibits in that brief establish the following, in the parties’ own words on Allegan County email servers.
On February 20, 2020, then-Judge Kengis emailed Prosecutor Myrene Koch and Judith Kasson, CC’ing Judge Bakker, about People v. Eric Pierce (19-23192). The email described the morning’s motion hearing in detail: which motions defense had filed, that APA Emily Jipp had failed to file responses to any of them, that he had enforced the deadline over Baker’s objection, and that he would have been open to an extension if one had been properly requested. This is a sitting judge briefing the prosecution on what happened in court that morning, how he ruled, and how to avoid the same outcome next time, with the other judge in the courthouse on the CC line.
In March 2016, Judge Bakker emailed Kengis directly, subject line “APA Koch,” to report that Koch had successfully completed pretrial proceedings including three pleas. Bakker’s message closed: “I believe you should strive to meet her high standards.” Kengis’s reply to Bakker, CC’ing Koch: “She can have my job any time, and I can have yours. Good?” Bakker’s one-word response: “Chicken.” This is a sitting judge and a Chief APA conducting a succession conversation about which one takes which seat, with the subject of the evaluation copied on the thread.
In April 2016, Kengis forwarded Koch an invitation from the Allegan County Republican Women’s Club to attend an event with speaker Patty Birkholz, CC’ing Bakker. His message: “I’m telling you what a former Chief Assistant used to tell me: ‘you need to start going to these!'” That former Chief Assistant was Bakker. Kengis was laundering Bakker’s political mentorship through himself to the next generation of Allegan County leadership, using county email, with Bakker watching.
Shelley Kengis (Roberts Kengis’s wife) appears in the exhibit record as a participant in social email threads with Bakker and Koch about “Women Who Care” meetings. A separate October 2017 email chain shows Kengis proposing a UofM-MSU football wager to Koch and Bakker jointly, using county email, with both responding. These are not colleagues who occasionally cross paths. This is a social unit that operates across the professional and personal boundary on active government accounts.
In August 2019, Bakker and Koch exchanged a multi-message thread about an active trial, subject line “trial.” Bakker opened by critiquing an MSP trooper’s investigation: “This trooper didn’t do a very good investigation. Don’t they have detectives with MSP anymore?” The thread continued with Koch explaining why the victim had not been referred for a medical exam, Bakker responding that she assumed Safe Harbor would have caught it, and Koch confirming a new checklist would be created going forward. A sitting judge and the prosecuting attorney are reviewing case-specific investigative failures on the morning of trial, adjusting office protocol in response. This is coordination, not coincidence.
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See Consulting Tracks ?The Structural Problem with Kengis as Mediator
Retired judges entering mediation practice is not inherently problematic. Michigan has a well-developed mediator ecosystem and many former jurists practice ethically within it. The problem here is specific, structural, and layered, and each layer compounds the one beneath it.
The baseline ethics violation is a retired judge soliciting mediation business from parties in active cases before a judge he has a documented personal and professional relationship with, without disclosing that relationship. That alone implicates MCR 2.411 and the foundational premise of mediation ethics: that the facilitator is actually neutral. But that is the floor, not the ceiling.
The ex parte record elevates this from an appearance problem to a documented conduct problem. This is not simply two courthouse colleagues who know each other. The exhibits in the Watson Township brief show a judge who, while cases were pending before him, briefed the prosecution on courtroom events, accepted performance evaluations of APAs from the sitting Chief Judge, and treated Bakker as a supervisor to whom he reported case outcomes. That happened on government email servers. It is now in the Michigan Supreme Court record. And Kengis is presenting himself to divorce litigants as a neutral party.
The Succession Conversation Nobody Is Talking About
The March 2016 “APA Koch” email thread deserves specific attention, because it is not just evidence of a close relationship. It is a documented succession conversation between two people who controlled the most powerful seats in Allegan County’s justice system.
Bakker, writing as Chief Judge to her former Chief APA, tells Kengis that Koch’s pretrial performance meets a standard he should aspire to. Kengis replies directly to Bakker: “She can have my job any time, and I can have yours. Good?” Bakker’s response is a single word: “Chicken.”
That exchange is not banter. It is two institutional power holders, on county email, discussing the transfer of their positions to the next person in their network, with the subject of that discussion copied on the thread. The people whose cases, custody arrangements, and liberty depended on those seats holding independent judgment never got a voice in that conversation. They were not supposed to know it was happening.
Two years later, Kengis was appointed to the circuit court bench. Bakker remained Chief Judge. Koch became Prosecuting Attorney. The succession plan that was drafted in a casual email chain executed almost exactly as written.
This is not a courthouse where people happen to know each other. This is a courthouse that was treated as a managed institution, where the occupants of the most consequential seats coordinated their transitions, shared case information across professional lines, and socialized as a unit while holding power over the people who appeared before them. That institution is still operating. Only the names on two of the doors have changed.
The Mediation Pipeline Closes the Loop
The ethical architecture of what Kengis is now doing is worth naming precisely, because it is more sophisticated than simple cronyism.
When a retired judge mediates a case, parties are consenting to a private resolution process outside the formal court record. The sitting judge does not review the substance of what was agreed to. That is one of mediation’s stated advantages: it removes the outcome from judicial discretion and puts resolution in the hands of the parties with the assistance of a neutral facilitator.
But consider what that mechanism produces here. Parties who distrust Bakker’s impartiality, and given Clutch Justice’s documented record of her conduct, they have substantial reason to, may view Kengis as an off-ramp. Settle with a neutral, get out from under her docket, move on. What they do not know is that the neutral is her mentee. The person she coached politically, briefed on case outcomes, and corresponded with about which of them should hold which seat.
The outcome leaves Bakker’s formal docket. The network retains effective control of the outcome. No one can point to Bakker’s name on the settlement because it is not there. The circuit closes without leaving a visible seam.
The Judicial Tenure Commission should have scrutinized the documented ex parte communication pattern before Kengis walked out the door with a negotiated retirement in June 2023. As Clutch Justice reported in the JTC data analysis published in September 2025, negotiated exits by judges are coded differently in JTC metrics than formal removal proceedings, obscuring the accountability record and allowing judges to move into private practice without a public finding against them. Kengis’s departure fits that pattern precisely. He is now billing by the hour, working the same docket he spent years helping to shape, with no public disciplinary record attached to his name.
What Sources Confirm About Kengis on the Bench
The ex parte communications documented in the Watson Township brief are not the only conduct concerns in Kengis’s record. Sources with direct knowledge of proceedings before him, and of JTC activity related to his tenure, have provided Clutch Justice with a consistent picture of how he operated. This reporting confirms what multiple complainants and practitioners in Allegan County have described independently.
Sources with direct knowledge of cases before Kengis in Allegan County’s 48th Circuit Court describe a pattern of preferential treatment dispensed from the bench across multiple cases, with outcomes that tracked relationships rather than law. This pattern is reflected in the court record across Allegan County proceedings during his tenure. It is also consistent with the documented network dynamic: a judge who was socially integrated with the prosecutor’s office, coordinated with the Chief Judge on personnel matters, and treated the courthouse as a managed institution rather than a neutral forum does not apply rules evenhandedly. He applies them selectively. That selectivity has a paper trail.
Sources with direct knowledge of proceedings before Kengis report that he personally conducted interviews of children in custody and family court matters rather than utilizing trained forensic interviewers. That practice is a serious departure from established protocol. Forensic child interviews are conducted by trained professionals under controlled conditions precisely because the stakes of contaminating a child’s account are severe: it affects the child’s wellbeing, the integrity of the record, and the outcome of proceedings that determine where and with whom that child lives. A judge conducting those interviews personally, without forensic training, substitutes his own judgment and relational dynamic for a process specifically designed to protect children and produce reliable information. It also places the judge in a factual investigator role that is structurally incompatible with his adjudicative function. Clutch Justice is continuing to report on this practice. Families with knowledge of this conduct in their cases are encouraged to submit tips through the secure tip form at clutchjustice.com/start/.
Sources with direct knowledge of JTC proceedings confirm that Kengis’s departure from the bench in June 2023 was not a voluntary retirement. It was a compelled exit. At the time he left, he was among the youngest sitting chief judges in Michigan. Judges at that stage of a career do not walk away from the bench on their own initiative. The retirement announcement was the public face of a process that had already concluded behind closed doors, in the same forum that is supposed to hold Michigan judges publicly accountable, and that instead allowed him to exit without a formal public finding attached to his name. He went from the bench to Lennon Miller PLC. The families whose cases he touched went nowhere.
The Math: He Was Barely a Judge
The word “retired” does significant work in how Roberts Kengis presents himself publicly. It implies a completed career, a body of service, a professional arc that reached its natural conclusion. The timeline does not support that framing.
Kengis earned his law degree from Wayne State University in 1992. He spent the next 26 years as a prosecutor, primarily as Chief Assistant Prosecuting Attorney in Allegan County, before Governor Rick Snyder appointed him to the 48th Circuit Court in March 2018. Michigan circuit court judges serve six-year terms. His first full term would have run through 2024. A second term would have carried him to 2030.
He left in June 2023. Five years and three months on the bench. Not even through his first full term. Sources with direct knowledge of JTC proceedings confirm the exit was not his choice.
Roberts Kengis spent 26 years as a prosecutor in Allegan County and five years as its circuit judge. He was forced off the bench before completing a single full term. He is now presenting himself to the public, to divorce litigants, to the Michigan Bar Journal, and to the American Arbitration Association as a seasoned retired jurist with the credibility that label implies. The credibility was revoked. The label stayed.
The Talonen Case: What Kengis Started, Bakker Finished
To understand what the Bar Journal piece represents, you need to understand what was happening to Donald Talonen at the same time it was being published.
Talonen’s case is the origin point of much of what Clutch Justice has documented about Roberts Kengis. Kengis wrongfully incarcerated Talonen for five days after ruling that emails Talonen sent to his own attorney, Wayne Crowe, expressing frustration over Crowe’s subpar representation, constituted fighting words and a true threat. Kengis used former Allegan County Sheriff’s Deputy Chris Haverdink as his operational enforcement mechanism, CC’ing Haverdink on emails and dispatching him to carry out arrests. Haverdink was not acting on vague instructions. He was in the institutional email chain as a named participant in the process of detaining people Kengis had targeted.
On February 19, 2025, the Michigan Court of Appeals issued its opinion in In re DMT, finding Kengis had erred and that Talonen’s communications were constitutionally protected speech. The COA was explicit: the medium mattered, email is far removed from any potential for immediate violence, and the lower court had been not merely harsh but constitutionally wrong.
That ruling should have ended the case. It did not.
Judge Margaret Zuzich Bakker, Kengis’s former mentor and the recipient of his ex parte case briefings, ruled that proceedings against Talonen should go forward despite the COA’s First Amendment holding. Talonen was subsequently sent to prison. His appeal is currently pending. He is incarcerated today.
Donald Talonen is also a contributor to Clutch Justice, having written on judicial integrity and Michigan court accountability during the period between the COA ruling and his incarceration. He wrote about these systems from the inside of them. He is now inside a different institution, one Bakker put him in after Kengis built the road that led there.
In 2021, community members organized a pack the courthouse event to attend a public proceeding in Talonen’s case in a show of support. The event was peaceful and entirely lawful. Public court proceedings are open to the public by constitutional design. Kengis’s response, documented in Allegan County 48th Circuit Court records, was to tighten courthouse security and lock down the courtroom. A judge who was already using a Sheriff’s deputy as a personal enforcement mechanism responded to peaceful public observation of his proceedings by treating that observation as a security threat. The constitutional implications are direct: the right to a public trial exists precisely to prevent what Kengis was doing inside that courtroom from happening without witnesses. He removed the witnesses.
Talonen’s family reports that Kengis appeared to deliberately antagonize Talonen during proceedings before him. This account is not isolated. Multiple families who appeared before Kengis in Allegan County proceedings independently report the same pattern: a judge who seemed to go out of his way to provoke, belittle, or escalate interactions with litigants and their supporters in ways that went beyond ordinary judicial conduct. That pattern is significant because deliberate judicial antagonism is not just a demeanor problem. It is a strategic tool. A litigant who is provoked into an intemperate response gives the judge grounds for adverse rulings, contempt findings, or removal orders that appear procedurally justified from the outside. Combined with Kengis’s documented record of ex parte coordination with the prosecution, preferential treatment across multiple cases, and the use of Haverdink as an enforcement arm, the antagonism pattern describes a judge who used every lever available to him, formal and informal, to control outcomes and punish people who pushed back.
Clutch Justice has reported that Haverdink’s role as Kengis’s enforcement mechanism extended to showing up at people’s homes, including at night, in connection with cases pending before Kengis. This conduct is documented across multiple individuals. In one reported instance, Haverdink admitted in his own police report that he knew who a subject was because he had been monitoring that person’s social media activity, raising Fourth Amendment surveillance concerns that compound the warrantless arrest conduct. Haverdink was not operating as a routine patrol officer responding to calls. He was functioning as a targeted enforcement arm in matters tied directly to Kengis’s docket, appearing at residences in connection with people who had active cases before the judge who was directing him. Neither the Allegan County Sheriff’s Department nor Prosecutor Koch responded to requests for comment on that conduct when Clutch Justice reported on it in September 2024. That silence is part of the record too.
Kengis initiated the prosecution. Haverdink executed the arrests. He locked the courtroom when people showed up to watch. He antagonized Talonen in proceedings before him. Crowe, the disgraced attorney whose conduct sparked Talonen’s original emails, was later suspended by the Michigan Attorney Discipline Board. The COA reversed Kengis. Bakker kept the case alive anyway. Talonen went to prison. Every actor in that chain has moved on. Kengis is a mediator. Bakker is still on the bench. Haverdink is retired. Crowe served a 90-day suspension. Talonen is the only one whose freedom was taken.
The Bar Journal Piece: Reputation Laundering in Plain Sight
In February 2026, while Donald Talonen was incarcerated and his appeal was pending, Roberts Kengis published an article in the Michigan Bar Journal. The title: “The Judicial Protection Act and the Confessions of a ‘Retired’ Judge.” The subject: legislation to protect judges’ personal safety and private information. The framing: a thoughtful retired jurist reflecting on the vulnerability of those who serve on the bench.
Read that sequence carefully. The man who used a Sheriff’s deputy as personal muscle to arrest people, who wrongfully imprisoned a man for protected speech, who was compelled off the bench before completing a single full term, published a piece in the state bar’s own journal about protecting judges. He published it while the person he targeted sat in a Michigan prison with an appeal pending.
The article puts “retired” in quotation marks in its own title, as if Kengis himself is acknowledging the word’s awkwardness. What it does not disclose is why the word is awkward. It does not mention the JTC. It does not mention Chris Haverdink. It does not mention In re DMT. It does not mention Donald Talonen. It does not mention the Watson Township brief sitting in the Michigan Supreme Court record with his ex parte emails attached as exhibits.
It presents Roberts Kengis as a credible institutional voice. The Michigan Bar Journal published it without any of that context attached.
The same institutional ecosystem that processed Kengis’s exit without a formal public finding, that allowed Bakker to keep a constitutionally reversed prosecution alive, and that handed Haverdink a quiet retirement also provided Kengis a platform in the state bar’s publication to rehabilitate his professional reputation while his most visible target remained incarcerated. That is not an oversight. That is the network at work. It does not just protect its members while they hold power. It protects their reputations after they leave.
What Clutch Justice Has Already Documented
This is not the first time Clutch Justice has reported on Roberts Kengis. The record is substantial and it tracks a consistent pattern.
In February 2025, the Michigan Court of Appeals issued its opinion in In re DMT, finding that Kengis wrongfully incarcerated a man for five days after ruling that emails containing expletives directed at the man’s own attorney constituted fighting words and a true threat. The court found the communications were protected speech, delivered by email, far removed from any potential for immediate violence. Kengis had used the Allegan County probation system as the enforcement mechanism.
That ruling opened the door to civil rights litigation. The COA’s reasoning raised the explicit question of how many other cases in Kengis’s tenure involved the same constitutional overreach.
Clutch Justice has also reported on Kengis’s coordination with former Allegan County Sheriff’s Deputy Chris Haverdink, who sources describe as an enforcer acting on Kengis’s vague directives to detain individuals without warrants or probable cause. That reporting formed part of the accountability record reviewed when Christopher Burnett, who allegedly had knowledge of those practices while serving as a public defender, was appointed to the 57th District Court by Governor Whitmer in July 2025.
In the Allegan County Disgrace series, Clutch Justice documented Kengis signing an ex parte removal order that took children from their father and family based on a sheriff’s deputy report that did not interview the child involved. That case originated in Allegan, passed through Kengis, and the family’s ordeal continued across county lines and court systems.
And the JTC data piece published by Clutch Justice in September 2025 noted explicitly that Kengis’s departure from the bench fits the profile of a negotiated exit, the kind of departure that gets coded differently in JTC metrics than a formal removal proceeding, muddying the accountability record while allowing the judge to walk into private practice without a formal public finding against them.
A Family’s JTC Complaint: Five Allegations, On the Record
The pattern documented in court records, COA opinions, and the Watson Township brief is not limited to criminal cases. A family that appeared before Kengis in Allegan County domestic proceedings has provided Clutch Justice with a formal JTC complaint filed against him, granting explicit permission to publish. The complaint sets out five allegations with specific dates, named referees, and documented procedural failures. It is reproduced here in relevant part because it is a matter of public record and because the family has asked that it be.
The complainant is Jeff Arnson. The allegations concern proceedings before Kengis in his 48th Circuit Court family law docket.
Kengis signed an ex parte motion to suspend father Jeff Arnson’s parenting time on May 29, 2020. Arnson submitted a legally required objection. An evidentiary hearing was not scheduled until October 26, 2020, before Referee Jolene Clearwater. On that date, Kengis adjourned the evidentiary hearing until further order of the court. As of January 25, 2022, no evidentiary hearing had been held. Two children were left living in circumstances the father alleged constituted abuse, with no due process hearing on the merits of the original ex parte order.
Kengis ordered both parties to share costs of the marital home during the pending divorce. When the wife made no payments and the home approached foreclosure, Kengis did not order the wife to meet her court-ordered obligation. Instead he scolded Arnson for failing to cover the full cost and ordered the home sold over Arnson’s objection. When Arnson objected, the complaint states Kengis acknowledged it in a condescending manner and moved on. The asymmetric enforcement of a shared financial order, holding one party responsible for the other’s non-compliance, is the preferential treatment pattern documented across multiple Kengis cases in precise, dated form.
Kengis ordered Arnson’s private therapy notes reviewed by the court to determine whether Arnson said negative things about the mother, framing this as relevant to the best interest factors governing how a parent speaks about the other in front of children. The treating therapist stated directly that how a person speaks in therapy is not an indicator of how they would speak to their children. Kengis ordered the privacy violation anyway. Simultaneously, the complaint documents multiple instances of the mother telling the children that their father does drugs, does bad things, and that she felt he should be in jail. Kengis took no action on those reports. The asymmetry is documented and dated: therapy notes invaded on one side, documented parental alienation ignored on the other.
The complaint alleges Kengis used custody and parenting time as punishment against Arnson despite the absence of any finding that Arnson was unsafe with the children. Arnson was never given the opportunity to rebut the defamatory statements made about him in proceedings before Kengis. The complaint states that a father and his children have suffered as a direct result of Kengis’s partial conduct.
The complaint alleges Kengis ignored multiple reports of abuse perpetrated against the children by a grandmother and two uncles, with one child still living with her alleged abusers at the time of filing. A second child was reported to be in mental health crisis as a result of treatment by the mother and the mother’s family. The complaint states that any report or claim against the mother was instantly dismissed while abusive litigation against the father was not only supported but promoted by Kengis from the bench.
Taken together, the five allegations in the Arnson complaint describe a judge who systematically applied procedural tools, ex parte orders, delayed hearings, selective enforcement of financial obligations, privacy invasions, and custody modifications, in one direction only. Every tool cut against the father. Every report against the mother was ignored. That is not a pattern of judicial error. That is a pattern of judicial choice.
Referee Jolene Clearwater, who presided over the October 2020 hearing before Kengis adjourned it, is believed to still be serving in Allegan County. Clutch Justice has not independently confirmed her current status. If she remains in that role, she was a firsthand participant in the procedural sequence the complaint describes.
An ex parte order removing a parent’s access to their children, followed by an objection, followed by a hearing that is adjourned indefinitely with no rescheduling and no evidentiary proceeding held for nearly two years, is not a scheduling problem. It is a due process violation with a paper trail. The parent who filed the objection followed the law exactly as designed. The law was not followed back.
Donald Talonen’s JTC Complaint: The Record He Filed While Still Under Kengis’s Thumb
The Arnson complaint is not the only formal JTC filing against Kengis in Clutch Justice’s possession. On January 17, 2023, while Kengis was still on the bench and five months before his compelled exit, Donald Talonen filed his own JTC complaint. It is reproduced here in relevant part with Talonen’s explicit permission. He is currently incarcerated. His appeal is pending. He swore to these facts before a notary. The complaint speaks for itself.
Talonen’s complaint opens with a direct statement of what he was experiencing: attempted intimidation, abuse of power, and complete disregard of his rights. It documents three specific incidents within the preceding six weeks alone.
On January 13, 2023, four days before the complaint was filed, Kengis signed an extension of a PPO against Talonen. Talonen’s complaint characterizes this directly: he believed Kengis abused the PPO to place him under an unconstitutional gag order to prevent him from speaking publicly about the failure of the Allegan County 48th Circuit Court. This allegation was filed under oath. The COA would vindicate Talonen’s First Amendment position two years later in In re DMT. The gag order mechanism preceded that vindication by more than two years.
On January 1, 2023, Talonen was arrested. His complaint characterizes the arrest as based on false claims of intimidation, claims he believed the court allowed to be made against him for the purpose of character assassination. He states he was not allowed to face his accusers, some of whom he alleges should not have been protected by a PPO he describes as without merit. Video of the arrest was available at the time of filing. The arrest occurred while Talonen was representing himself in the divorce matter before Kengis, without counsel, in proceedings where Kengis had already threatened him with incarceration.
On December 12, 2022, while representing himself in the divorce matter, Talonen sought clarification from Kengis about next steps in the proceedings. Kengis responded by threatening him with incarceration. Talonen’s complaint states: “I believe that Roberts Kengis literally hates me and is using financial resources and Parent Time as methods of coercion.” He describes making agreements with the understanding that parenting time would resume, only for that promise to go unfulfilled. At the time of filing the complaint, he had been denied an evidentiary hearing for 521 days.
521 days without an evidentiary hearing. Counting back from January 17, 2023, that places the original denial in August 2021, the same period in which community members organized the pack the courthouse event that Kengis responded to by locking down the courtroom.
Read the two complaints together and what emerges is not a coincidence of grievances. It is a documented institutional pattern across two separate family law matters, two separate complainants, filed independently, describing the same judge using the same tools in the same direction. Parenting time as coercion. Evidentiary hearings denied or indefinitely delayed. Financial pressure applied asymmetrically. PPOs extended. Arrests made. Threats from the bench. Both men swore to these facts before a notary.
Donald Talonen filed a sworn JTC complaint against Roberts Kengis on January 17, 2023, documenting that Kengis had used a PPO as a gag order, facilitated a New Year’s Day arrest on what Talonen characterized as false claims, threatened him with incarceration when he sought clarification on his own case, and denied him an evidentiary hearing for 521 days. Five months later Kengis was gone from the bench. Two years later the COA vindicated Talonen’s First Amendment position. Three years later Talonen is in prison after Bakker kept the case alive despite that vindication. And Roberts Kengis is offering to mediate divorce cases in Allegan County as a neutral.
Parties being approached by Kengis for mediation services on Bakker’s docket are not being told about the documented relationship between the two. Michigan’s mediation ethics framework requires mediators to disclose any relationship with parties or decision-makers that could affect impartiality. A years-long documented relationship with the sitting judge, including ex parte communications about pending cases, falls squarely within what that disclosure obligation is designed to address.
What Parties on Bakker’s Docket Should Do
If you have been contacted by Roberts Kengis offering mediation services in connection with a case before Judge Bakker, you have the right to ask the following before agreeing to anything. What is your relationship with Judge Bakker? Have you communicated with her about any active cases? Have you disclosed this relationship in writing to all parties in this matter? What is your process for ensuring impartiality when the mediator and the adjudicating judge share a documented professional history?
Those questions should be asked in writing and the responses preserved.
Attorneys representing parties in this situation should also consider whether the undisclosed relationship warrants a formal complaint to the Michigan Mediator Credentialing Association or review under MCR 2.411, which governs mediation procedures in Michigan circuit courts, including the obligation to disclose conflicts.
Bluebook: Rita Williams, The Mediator and the Judge: How Roberts Kengis Is Working Both Sides of Allegan County’s Family Court, Clutch Justice (June 16, 2026), https://clutchjustice.com/kengis-bakker-mediator-pipeline/.
APA 7: Williams, R. (2026, June 16). The mediator and the judge: How Roberts Kengis is working both sides of Allegan County’s family court. Clutch Justice. https://clutchjustice.com/kengis-bakker-mediator-pipeline/
MLA 9: Williams, Rita. “The Mediator and the Judge: How Roberts Kengis Is Working Both Sides of Allegan County’s Family Court.” Clutch Justice, 16 June 2026, clutchjustice.com/kengis-bakker-mediator-pipeline/.
Chicago: Williams, Rita. “The Mediator and the Judge: How Roberts Kengis Is Working Both Sides of Allegan County’s Family Court.” Clutch Justice, June 16, 2026. https://clutchjustice.com/kengis-bakker-mediator-pipeline/.
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