A Father's Love (24 page)

“And until the political pressure and the diplomatic levers were pulled, this case, which should have—as Patricia said—should have been a slam-dunk, easily adjudicated case. Clear violation of the Hague Convention on Child Abduction. Sean should have been back with his [father] four years ago or more.

“Unfortunately, it has taken raising it to the political level to get the attention of the president. I think we have gotten that attention. I have a resolution pending that has over fifty cosponsors. We expect it to be on the floor next week. We're not going to let this go. The State Department is not going to let this go.

“And when you hear the uncle talking the way he was, slandering David, I think most Americans are going to be outraged by that attitude of impunity that we have seen.”

In closing the interview, Larry looked at me and asked, “Are you confident, David?”

“I'm hopeful,” I responded.

As frustrating as the King interview was, at least we were getting out the message that Sean was being wrongfully held in Brazil. For more than four years, I had been begging for someone to listen to me, anyone who might be able to help my son. Some people listened, but they didn't really hear, or they couldn't understand what they could do to help in the face of such gross injustice.

Now, suddenly, people seemed fascinated by my plight. Indeed, to many people the whole idea of Sean's abduction to Brazil possessed an aura of intrigue, power, corruption, money, and conflicts between governments. Some people touted me as a modern-day David fighting against a huge Goliath, and although the odds seemed stacked against me, they recognized that I was unwilling to give up. Men sometimes told me that they wished they'd had a father who was more accessible as they were growing up, or who gave them a higher priority during their formative childhood years. Women expressed their hope that they could find a husband for themselves or for their daughters who would be there for them as I was for Bruna and Sean, and now was for my son; someone more loving, caring, and nurturing, and who had similar levels of commitment as mine. I was humbled and honored by all of these kind words.

So I continued sharing an intensely private pain on an excruciatingly public stage. Every time I told the story of Sean's abduction, the pain hurt just as much. It was like scraping a knife over a wound that had not yet had time to heal. Whatever it takes, I figured. For the first time, people seemed to be hearing what I'd been saying for more than four years. We were making great strides. But I couldn't help wondering,
Is this enough? Will our efforts be in time?

Worse yet, every day when I woke up, Sean was not tucked in his bed down the hallway. That's all I cared about, all I ever cared about.

 

 

THROUGHOUT MARCH 2009, events were happening fast. After the blitz of publicity we received, pressure increased on the Brazilian government to honor the Hague Convention agreement. Lawmakers in New Jersey joined the U.S. Congress in condemning Brazil's actions and seeking the return of Sean. On March 16, I attended the announcement and passing of the resolution in the New Jersey State Senate in their chambers in the statehouse in Trenton. After the reading of the resolution, I was asked to say a few words, and I thanked the legislators for their support. The members of the Senate spontaneously rose and applauded me. It was another of those humbling experiences for which I will always be grateful. But Sean remained in Brazil.

Even after Secretary of State Clinton brought up our case with her counterpart, the Brazilian foreign minister, Brazil did not budge. When President Obama mentioned Sean during his meeting with Brazil's president Lula on March 14, 2009, suddenly we were front-page news all around the world—including Brazil. Yet Sean's abductors still refused to release him. In fact, on March 15, Bruna's family engineered a protest in the streets of Rio, with people carrying banners and placards reading, “
Sean é brasiliero
,” Sean is Brazilian
.

 

 

IRONICALLY, WHEN THE media eventually cooled on the story, many people assumed that Sean had been returned. After all, who could imagine the Brazilian courts thumbing their noses at such international attention? Hadn't the president of the United States weighed in on this issue? Hadn't the secretary of state and both houses of the U.S. Congress agreed that Sean should be home with me?

Yet he wasn't.

Often I'd meet people in New York, or at the marina in New Jersey, who honestly believed that Sean was home. One day I went into a tackle shop in Atlantic Highlands and a man there recognized me. “Hey, David,” he called enthusiastically. “How does Sean like being home?”

Another person stopped me on the street and asked, “Is Sean having any trouble adjusting to being back home in New Jersey?”

As well intentioned as those misguided queries were, they nonetheless hit me like a prizefighter's punch. I did my best to let people know the truth. “Well, Sean isn't home yet. We have to keep the pressure on the people in Brazil to let him go. Thank you for your concern.”

Our case was like a whitewater rafting trip, in which you must stay in a constant state of preparedness, wearing your helmet and life jacket while keeping your oar nearby, ready for action. There would be periods of boring calm, with relatively no action, and then suddenly, almost without notice, the current would increase, and we'd find ourselves bouncing over rocks and being tossed every which way as we attempted to negotiate the rapids, working our bodies to exhaustion simply to stay afloat, and then coming out of the turmoil into another long period of inactivity. I felt such a sense of frustration during those long lags, when months slipped by with no apparent movement on the case.

 

 

THE BRAZILIAN PRESS, which had long been forbidden from pursuing the story, and had defied the court order only on occasion, now covered the story more vigorously. Some people said the gag order had been lifted; I knew that it hadn't. Nevertheless, the story kept oozing into the public.

Apparently, at some point, the Lins e Silva camp recognized this and changed their strategy to a full-court press, attempting to damage my reputation in any way possible. They unilaterally lifted their own media ban, and suddenly a flow of vitriol designed to discredit me with the public began to spew forth. At various times, their smear campaign included anti-Semitic slurs and painted me as everything from poor, handicapped, lazy, and gay to a shack dweller and a gold digger. Essentially, in Sean's captors' estimation, if they didn't approve of a person's religion or sexual orientation, or if an individual was handicapped or not wealthy, he or she should not be allowed to have children. Though I recognized that the abductors were attempting to tag me with any label they deemed derogatory in the public's mind, their bigoted aspersions still disgusted me. I never responded to or reacted publicly to any of their demeaning comments.

All the while, they tried to make Sean's abduction into an issue of nationalism, as though it were a battle between Brazil and the United States. Initially, their tactic succeeded, and public opinion tilted in their favor.

Both Ricardo and Tricia cautioned me against engaging in this war of words. Even the Brazilian media shied away from and refused to give credence to them. Although we did receive information that a public relations agency was leaking such statements to the Brazilian media in the hope that the public's opinion could be swayed against me.

The message the abductors were presenting to the people of Brazil was: “Bruna was the mother, and this David Goldman is a worthless bum. He was not a good husband; he was not a good father. He is the ugly American coming to steal a child of a Brazilian woman.” After all, who would ever think that a mother could be so cruel and heartless, evil and spoiled, as to rip her child away from a doting father who loved both her and the child?

Furthermore, the Brazilian family said, “David never even tried to see Sean; he didn't even care about getting Sean back until Bruna died, because he wants Sean's inheritance.”

That was more than I could take. That they would accuse me of wanting my son back only because of the pittance he might inherit because his mother had died was despicable. From the moment I learned that Bruna had abducted our son and was not coming home, I had done everything possible to get Sean home, and had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars doing so.

Even if I were all the things the Lins e Silva camp accused me of being, that would not alter for a moment the fact that I was Sean's father and he was my son. I'd heard all their accusations before, and I believed that the truth would eventually prevail. I had nothing to hide, and I knew their rantings were nothing but lies. All I could do was to keep going, leading with the truth.

The one thing that the Ribeiros and the Lins e Silvas either underestimated or possibly never considered was the enormous power of the Internet. Once the story got out, and people began discussing it online, the pressure to return Sean built exponentially.

In the United States, Mark DeAngelis and Bob D'Amico found themselves working almost around the clock as volunteers with the Bring Sean Home Web site, as requests for more information poured in, along with heartrending stories of other abducted children. We were beginning to realize that there were more victims of international child abduction than we ever imagined. Mark and Bob constantly kept our growing Internet audience informed about what was going on with Sean, and began exploring ways we could help bring home other abducted children. Like Sean's and my lives, Mark's and Bob's would never be the same.

O
N MAY 25, 2009, SEAN'S NINTH BIRTHDAY, I RECEIVED WORD from Ricardo that the federal prosecutor in Rio had recommended to the court that Sean be returned to me! The prosecutor stated, “This was a wrongful retention, and the boy should be under the custody of the biological parent.” He cited the findings of the three court-appointed psychologists, who agreed that Sean had incurred “serious psychological damage” while in Brazil.

The news regarding the prosecutor's recommendations lifted my spirits, of course, but I had been down this road too many times to start celebrating. “I'll celebrate after Sean is home,” I kept telling myself. “In the meantime, stay calm and even-keeled.” I had realized by now that nothing could be depended upon, that when it came to international abduction cases, nothing was easy in Brazil. I learned that every decision, no matter how competent, sound, or seemingly final, was subject to endless, often exasperatingly inane appeals. The pattern seemed to be: get a judgment, then find some insignificant aspect of it and appeal on that basis.

The prosecutor's recommendation was certainly a step in the right direction, and hopefully a concrete development, but how could we be sure? The court would have to decide and issue a return order, commanding the Ribeiros and Lins e Silvas to return Sean to the United States and to me, and so far, we had won precious few victories in the courtroom. After so many dashed hopes, I was slow to embrace news of any kind, positive or negative. Certainly I was thrilled that the Brazilian federal prosecutor and the three court-appointed psychologists were siding with me, but I dared not get on that emotional roller coaster again. I had to stand off to the side, one step removed, and watch and wait.

All the while, the Ribeiros and the Lins e Silvas continued their massive disinformation campaign. João Paulo Lins e Silva had even gone so far as to foster the notion that Sean was Brazilian-born, based on his highly suspect contention that Bruna had registered Sean “in the Brazilian Consulate and by the First Civil Registry of Naturalized Persons of Rio de Janeiro . . . three months after Sean's birth, making him a Brazilian citizen like all of us, with all of the rights and obligations of a citizen born in Brazil, and when he becomes a legal adult, he can opt to be Brazilian or American.” Clearly, Lins e Silva's rationalization was rubbish; referring to Sean as a Brazilian-born citizen was only an attempt to stir up his countrymen's nationalistic fervor, inciting the people of Brazil to stand against the “bullies from North America.” The kidnappers' actions were preposterous, but there was no way I could counter them except with the truth: “Sean Goldman is my son. He was born in Riverview Hospital in Red Bank, New Jersey.”

 

 

THEN, ON JUNE 1, 2009, we received the best news I'd heard in nearly five years. In an eighty-two-page written decision, Rafael Pinto, a federal judge in Rio de Janeiro, ruled that Sean was to be handed over to me on Friday, June 3, 2009! Moreover, Judge Pinto's order implied that it was urgent that Sean be returned to me, because he was being subjected to “a pernicious process of parental alienation.” The judge based his ruling on the Hague Convention, but also relied heavily on the psychological reports of the three court-appointed psychologists, concluding that the longer Sean was separated from me, the more damage would be done.

While the people around me were celebrating victory and envisioning Sean's and my final and permanent reunion, I wouldn't allow myself to go there—not yet.

I dropped everything and rushed to Rio. The decision specified that to make the transition to the United States smoother for Sean, for the first month, although I was Sean's sole legal custodian, he would split the time between living with me and living with Bruna's parents. After that, I was to have full custody of him, and he would live full-time with me. These were added changes to the return order, but like so many of the arrangements involving the Ribeiros, this was not my preference, especially after witnessing their behavior during my brief visits with Sean. But if it got Sean back home, I could live with it for a month.