Over the past five years, judges and attorneys working in Pierce County Superior Court learned to trust Kate Lee.

Now they’re not so sure — and Lee, who leaned on that trust, faces the loss of of her livelihood and the redemption she craved.

Lee, 41, works a sensitive job. She’s a visitation supervisor: a legal babysitter assigned to oversee visits between parents and children mired in contentious divorce cases. She estimates that she’s handled more than 200 of them over the years.

Recently, one such case, bitter even by family court standards, uncovered the secret of Lee’s past — a secret she hadn’t disclosed, in part because she didn’t have to, in part because no one asked her, in part because she wasn’t inclined to explain that she’s a convicted felon.

Her crimes: identity theft, forgery and perjury. The convictions from Snohomish and King counties date to 2002, 2003 and 2005, according to court records. She obtained a fake driver’s license and a fake Social Security number (the source of the perjury charge) and spent other people’s money. She went to jail, then prison.

“I was young,” Lee said in a recent interview. “I made some really bad decisions. I was not thinking clearly and I did some things that I should not have done. But I’ve moved on. I’ve taken responsibility for it.”

Her old convictions resurfaced recently, destroying her career in a matter of days.

The story of Lee’s past, dismissed at first as a false allegation from an angry spouse, rocked the tiny world of the courthouse last week following inquiries by The News Tribune. On Jan. 17, presiding Judge Elizabeth Martin sent a directive to judges and court commissioners, telling them that Lee shouldn’t be approved as a visitation supervisor in future family-court cases.

“I don’t believe we will be approving her in any case going forward,” Martin told The News Tribune on Friday. “My concern is that she’s impeachable as a witness.”

The circumstances surrounding Lee’s outing stem from Bell v. DiLorenzo, a divorce case spanning two coasts, first filed in November 2016. Patricia Bell and Carlo Dilorenzo, both 29, were married in 2014 in New York. They have two children. They moved to Gig Harbor and separated in 2016.

Their split has been anything but amicable. Fights over money, accusations of indifferent parenting and divergent accounts of the same events spread across the court file. Legal fees crossed the six-figure threshold months ago, according to records.

The file also includes a restraining order against DiLorenzo obtained by Bell, who accused her husband of domestic violence. DiLorenzo denied it, but the order remains in force.

The last item brought Lee into the fray. She was chosen by agreement between attorneys for both sides, who were familiar with her work.

The supervised visits with the couple’s two boys began in March, according to records. At some point after that, Bell, unhappy with Lee’s reports, hired a private investigator to research her background. The research uncovered evidence of her prior convictions.

According to Lee, the investigator called her in October and asked her questions about her past. Unsettled, she immediately withdrew from the divorce case, and stopped handling the child visits.

“I withdrew not because of my background and qualifications,” Lee wrote in a declaration filed with the court. “I withdrew because I felt personally violated.”

Bell continued to press the point in court filings, demanding that the court require “felon Kate Lee” to account for her past and state plainly whether she had a criminal record.

In those filings, Bell incorrectly describes Lee as a guardian ad litem, a term with a particular meaning.

GALs are appointed by courts to represent the interests of children or incapacitated people involved in court proceeding. Sometimes they’re also attorneys, though not always. Regardless, they must go through criminal background checks before they can act in a professional capacity.

Lee is not a GAL. She’s a visitation supervisor, lower on the legal food chain. She’s not chosen or vetted by the courts. She has attended GAL training in a three-day course with the King County Bar Association, but nothing else.

After Lee finished her prison stint in the mid-2000s, she went back to school. She completed an associate’s degree at Tacoma Community College in 2010 and graduated with honors, obtaining her paralegal certification. She was co-president of the campus law club.

She interned at a local law office. She networked in the local legal community, and learned the ropes of procedure in bankruptcy and personal injury cases. Eventually, she started working for a local guardian ad litem, and started down a path toward her own business as a family visitation supervisor.

She works out of an office in downtown Tacoma, and a room where children and parents can visit in a quiet setting. She redecorates it all the time, with kid-friendly furniture and art. A ninja turtle statue stood at attention near her as she discussed her past and the case that has ruined her career.

Prior convictions don’t bar her from being a visitation supervisor. The job doesn’t require a criminal background check, nor do the courts have any authority to require one.

“We don’t appoint them,” said Judge Martin. “All we order is that parents get supervised visitation. Who they choose to use is up to them.”

The story generated further complications in December when Judge Kitty-Ann Van Doorninck, who was presiding over the divorce case, filed a restraining order against Bell, and admonished her for digging into Lee’s past.

“The behavior with Ms. Lee is appalling to me,” Van Doorninck said in open court. “Ms. Lee has been a respected professional person in the community for a long time.”

The trouble was, Bell was right. Lee did have a criminal past. In a vague declaration filed with the court at the time, she didn’t directly deny it, but she didn’t admit it, either.

Instead, she said her own identity had been stolen years earlier, and that she had worked through multiple courts to clear her name.

Records show that Lee was an identity theft victim in the late 1990s, but the incident is unrelated to her own convictions a few years later.

Van Doorninck took the statement at face value, and assumed the allegations about Lee weren’t true.

“I relied on the declaration,” she told The News Tribune.

To Bell and attorney James Egan, who is advising her, the court’s failure to vet Lee is a scandal, and the criticism of Bell for looking into Lee’s past compounds the error. Bell filed a motion in the case on Jan. 9 seeking Van Doorninck’s recusal, and raised the prospect of a judicial ethics complaint against her.

“I find it frustrating and unfair that the court rejects the information I’ve provided,” she wrote. “The Court is relying on statements in my case where I (and every party) should be able to raise serious questions of that person’s history and felony background.”

Lee admits she could have disclosed the story of her past before she started her new career — but she didn’t, and she can’t undo that decision.

The trouble is the truth. Lee’s past crimes fall into the category of dishonesty. Judge Martin pointed to Lee’s vulnerability as a witness in cases where decisions might be based on her word.

Off and on the record, local lawyers praise Lee’s work. Stacy Swenhaugen, who represents DiLorenzo in the divorce case, has hired her in the past. She told The News Tribune she’d do it again.

“I still would refer my clients to Kate Lee,” she said. “And that’s not just because I’m involved in this case. I haven’t had any reason to believe her reports are inaccurate or anything.”

Martin, who sent the directive telling colleagues not to approve Lee for future cases, offered a similar assessment.

“She has been a visitation supervisor for a fair length of time,” Martin said. “No one’s ever had any basis to question the quality of her work. We’re all just trying the best we can for children. I have no reason to think Ms. Lee was doing anything other than that. It’s a really sad situation.”

What about the idea of visitation supervisors more generally? Should the profession as a whole require more regulation, licensing and background vetting?

Martin said that’s a question for state lawmakers.

“Whether there should be a statewide licensure or regulation process, I think is a bigger issue than this one court. Judges are not in the position to be investigators.”

How the divorce case will play out is unclear, but one thing is certain: for all practical purposes, Lee just lost a livelihood she spent the past five years building.

She’s already referred her clients to other visitation supervisors. She knows about the order from Judge Martin, which effectively cuts her out of future work.

“I do understand, and I accept that,” she said in a recent interview. “I think more about the children that are gonna be affected. I love kids. I love being able to provide a quality service to families in crisis.”

What will she do next?

“I don’t know,” she said. “I want to do something that helps people. I want to do something that makes a difference.”