I have nothing against the great Republic of Brazil. I’ve never been there, but I understand they are world leaders in hairless crotches and bearded presidents. But the recent resolution of David Goldman’s five-year fight to get his 9-year-old boy Sean back to the States (the boy’s mother absconded to Brazil with the boy in 2004 and died there in childbirth in 2008) tempts me to offer some enlightened commentary, something like: Suck it, Brazil.
But I’ll resist. After all, this wasn’t about the people of Brazil. Brazilian courts ultimately ruled in the father’s favor. And, as DadWagon friend Seth Kugel pointed out, Brazilian opinion was heavily divided about the case (one Brazilian went to the trouble of recording an earnest, accented rock ballad in favor of Sean’s return to the U.S.).
So how about this:
Suck it, João Paulo Lins e Silva.
He’s the stepfather who fought for custody of Sean. He undeniably suffered from the death of his wife (Sean’s mother). And he’s not the worst stepfather in Brazil (that prize goes to the guy recently caught sewing needles into his 2-year-old stepson). But Lins e Silva had some less endearing traits. He was, as his bio page at his daddy’s firm shows, a well-heeled divorce lawyer with a James Spader hairdo. He reportedly had 70 lawyers working at one point on his novel claims as to why he, and not the boy’s father, was the right one to raise him.
Worst of all, he tried to make it a case about Brazil vs. the Superpower. In his rather stunning open letter published in Brazilian newspapers, he drove his point home by referring to David Goldman as “The American” 18 times. And he closed his argument thusly:
However, there’s a real fear in the family that due to North American political pressures, through the Consulate, that the minor’s interests will be put on the back burner… It doesn’t matter that he is BRAZILIAN. We are essentially running the risk of seeing our highest law that we respect, before everything, the child’s best interest, being violated, torn up, thrown away by North American political interests. They want to use the boy as an example. Example of what? It’s not enough that he was orphaned at age 8, and now, about to be taken from his house, his home, the people he lived with and who cared for him for five years, from daily living with the sister he loves, from his grandparents, his uncles and aunts, and friends?? Where is the best interest of the child??? Or does it deal with the best interest of the U.S., the American ambassador, of Hillary Clinton?
Of course, there are plenty of Americans equally willing to turn any disagreement into a pistol-shooting distance-piss between the U-S-of-A and foreigners. There have been calls for boycotts (which would be tough, since Brazil does a heckuva job making American cars, for starters).
But that stage of the fight is over. What comes next is perhaps the harder part. Given the slurs thrown at Goldman père in public, one can only imagine what Sean has been told about his father in private over the last five years. Deprogramming him will be arduous work. In 2006, after Natascha Kampusch was freed from her Viennese dungeon and pined for her dead captor, I wrote an article for TIME about the niche therapies that are available to children who have been poisoned against their parents:
Increasingly, family courts are ordering a treatment called reconciliation therapy. One technique is to have the child look through an album of photos of the alienated parent to humanize that person again. Another is to show studies about how easily the mind is tricked, to let children know it’s not their fault that they have come to believe falsehoods about their parent. But those first steps toward rebuilding the parent-child relationship can be wobbly.
All I can say is… boa sorte/good luck.