Vet benefits and child support

Posting for a friend:

My best friend is in a relationship with an emotionally/financially abusive partner. He threatens to take the kids from her if they get divorced. She has been trying to leave for over a year now and finally got him out of her apartment in February. He refuses to get a job so he’s been house hopping for months. He keeps threatening to take the kids from her if she has other relationships, does anything without his permission and will refuse to watch the kids for her to work. He’s involved with their two kids when he feels like it, not paying child support or helping with childcare but still collecting VA benefits and disability for himself, 3 kids and her (she has another child from another marriage that she has full custody of) she keeps asking him to either watch the kids so she can work to support her kids and herself or pay her so she can get childcare. They don’t have family to watch to kids so she cannot work and pay everything. Not to mention her middle child has severe autism so his care is going to be extreme expensive. He won’t even take them overnight because “he needs to sleep”.

Needless to say, she wants to know if she can even take him for child support because he doesn’t have an income? Even though he is collecting $2,500 in benefits from the government MEANT FOR HER AND 3 KIDS, then using it on pot and gambling. He doesn’t even pay rent because he keeps house hopping and mooching off his friends food/housing/electric/etc… she doesn’t get any of it. The a-hole even had the balls to demand some of the child tax credit she is getting because “they are his kids too.”

I keep telling her what he’s doing is fraud anyway and if they go to court, they might demand he pay back payments and he would lose his benefits for at least her and her oldest son (because he’s not his) but I don’t know. I’ve never dealt with this situation. Has anyone else?