Hello, I haven't posted here in awhile, but thought this would be a good place to start and I am seriously considering this because it seems like it is not ending.

I have five children that I currently take care of. All are legally considered my children although I have three biological and two that I adopted. (I had legal custody of them for 3 years until the bio mom overdosed and then we moved for adoption).

Going through that adoption was very rough. When you go through an adoption they do a home study, you have to take a physical, and they call and interview all children that have lived in your home, including step-daughters.

At the time of the adoption I had 8 children in my care which included 3 of 4 of my step-daughters. My oldest stepdaughter was called and I had not seen her in 3 years. She accused my wife and I of being alcoholics and abusive. 

So we then had to go through a full investigation and all my children were interviewed, including at the time my two year old (which was just silly) and of course they found nothing. My oldest stepdaughter was not done. She found out that some of my wife's family was angry because we were changing their names so they became angry with us and then plotted to do something to us during the adoption. During this time my job transferred me to a different state and of course we were then accused of "taking them and running away from the family." 

My oldest stepdaughter and members of my wife's family wouldn't stop and after our adoption was finalized they ontacted the dad who didn't pay child support and was in and out of jail for contempt of court to contest it. They told him a bunch of lies and ramped up the accusations and accused us of every abuse, specifically me, of every abuse including sexual. I hadn't seen my oldest stepdaughter for over 3 years at that point, but she got the bio dad all riled up and next thing I know he contested the adoption and got it overturned. Stupidest thing he ever did. My lawyers kept trying to tell his counsel to not do this or they would have to be very hard on him. He did it anyways which would end up costing me over 50K over 3 years. When he knocked out the adoption it just went back to legal custody for one of the children, the other stayed adopted because she had a different dad who had already died of a drug overdose. Long story short I finalized the adoption in December of 2021 and just moved on. I live in a different state so who cares about them...that is until last month.

My wife's father passed away and we had to travel back to our home state for the celebration of life. Of course I have to be around people that have literally tried to destroy me. I did not allow my children to go. They stayed with my parents during that time.

I now have 3/4 stepdaughters who have accused me of the same stuff. So I have had to stay lawyered up to handle these accusations. These stepdaughters stay with their father now. Once they started living with him, these accusations started coming out. I have only been accused of the sexual crap once from my oldest, but my other 2 have accused me of other things.

Long story short, I was threatened by multiple members of my wife's family that they will just wait until the kids turn 18 and then they will start spreading false accusations on me again to make them hate my wife and me.

There is an established pattern, and I am quite frankly just tired of it. I contacted my attorney, who has all my documentation and has been waiting for another accusation from them, and is going to put a Civil Protection Order on these people and my three stepdaughters. I honestly don't care if I lose at this point. I want to force them to pay money and come here to fight me. My attorney believes we won't have an issue winning.

I'm curious if anyone else has had to do this, and does it get these people to back off? I don't know what to do with these people. I honestly wish I had never met my stepdaughters, despite having one that I love and who is very good to me. It is hard to raise a family when, once or twice a year, I am accused of nonsense and have to spend money fighting it. I have a business online and do well, and my reputation doesn't have an effect on it. However, my volunteer work would be a target. I don't put anything on social media, I don't even talk about it to anyone in her family. I am so tired of living in a freaking cocoon. I have nothing to do with my stepdaughters, and my wife struggled at first, but has now seen how dangerous her family and those girls are.

It is a last resort, but I think I am going to finally go through with it. I can't believe people can just keep accusing you of stuff without repercussions. I have passed every accusation they put on me legally, but we all know the court of public opinion doesn't care about truth, and people believe what they want to.