“Your Honor, my wife made me do it.”

Unprincipled enabler blows his integrity on whims of half-wit wife

or

Spiteful, shortsighted, lady-child steers husband right to jail

In 2010, weirdly-named Kent Wycliff Easter and his just-as-oddly-titled wife, Jill Bjorkholm Easter, sought vengeance upon Kelli Peters, a volunteer at Plaza Vista Elementary School in waspy Irvine, California. Among their many complaints was that Peters hadn’t escorted the Easters’ son (what his name is, I can’t imagine) from school to his mother’s waiting Range Rover car fast enough. Apparently there was a lot about Peters’s care-taking that the Easters didn’t like, so the bumbling A-holes went to town.

First, the two lawyers tried to get Peters fired from the school: FAIL. Then they harassed her: FAIL. They actually filed a restraining order to prevent her from going near their son: FAIL. Twice they tried to sue Peters; both lawsuits were dismissed. Frivolous much? Talk about diminished credibility as attorneys: FAIL.

And Kent. Our man Kent had been a Newport Beach law firm’s “rising star” until the couple’s campaign against the school volunteer culminated in a hysterically catty attempt to have her arrested. This, after the Easters had located her home and planted drugs in her car in the middle of the night. Jill Easter has since pled guilty and separated from her husband, leaving him to fend for himself.

Quality of life spiraling downward due to lack of character? FAIL.

Now on trial, Kent Easter is facing charges related to planting drugs, conspiring to procure a false arrest, and calling in a phony police report under a fake name. From the beginning, he’d helped engineer the couple’s targeting of Peters, so it’s ridiculous to believe Kent didn’t enjoy what the two thought would be a takedown. Yet with his defense portraying the estranged Jill Easter as a malicious cougar and placing blame squarely on her, it’s clear the sort of squirming, throat clearing, low blows, cheap shots, and excuses these guys are willing to trot out.

Efforts to throw the cosmetically oafish she-lion under the bus include (yawn) accusations of affairs – hardly surprising from a cabal of male lawyers, who can be counted on to hedge their narrow bets by whipping out their whore cards. Make no mistake, the Easter woman is as discombobulated as petty criminals get, but the relevance of her alleged infidelity serves only to make her husband and his defense sound that much more pathetic.

Get character or become one.

The Easters claimed Kelli Peters ignored their son while he was under her supervision. Whether that’s true or not is irrelevant: what matters is that their coping skills apparently jumped out from a funhouse mirror. Both Easters dealt with reality in a very unreal and small minded way, one that has framed them as an embarrassment, first and foremost I’m sure, to their son. And to Kent Easter’s former law firm. And to the community in general.

Kent’s courtroom excuse that his wife made him go into a hotel and call the cops on Peters is absurd. He claims he didn’t know about the drugs Jill had planted, even if, up to that point, he’d been party to her witches’ brew of entitled mommy tantrums.

The whole thing is a case study in hateful yet self-congratulatory values.

I hope Junior gets to see his parents squirm through all of this, by which I mean I hope they both figure out they’ve got a lot of reason to squirm. I also hope that, if they’re ever made to serve time, the son visits, ’cause these are two individuals who absolutely need to speak with their son through visiting booth glass.

Trust me, this specific consequence can be an all-powerful way to force someone to recognize his or her lack of character. I know we see it all the time in movies and it sounds cliché, but in person it’s a profoundly difficult psychological and emotional ordeal for most people. You’re a different human being altogether when you a watch a loved one hold his or her hand up to jailhouse glass.

So as for these two weak-willed and overly pampered Easter fools, maybe the visiting booth will be where their excuses go to die.