Danieles’ kidnapping

In 2017, talking to one of my best friends, she tells me about Maria’s trouble. Her child was abducted from a private kindergarten with the complicity of his paternal grandmother and taken to Russia, to the father who occupied at that time the second position in one of the largest multinationals with a global visibility.

I knew her from a party and how it happens that we often don’t know what is hidden behind a smile. Maria calls me in November 2017, a few months later, and tells me that despite the fact that the first court ordered the father to bring the child back to Romania, he refuses, and the same court, granted them joint custody, despite the fact that her child is abducted, and she did not see him for more than 1 year.

At the same time, winning for the second time in appeal in Russia, the father still refuses to hand over the little boy. We are starting the proceedings before the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Interpol and the Prosecutor’s Office, for the refusal to execute a court decision.

After I personally go with Maria to file the complaint, in February 2018, the prosecutor takes three weeks off, without handing over the file, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announces the mother that her son is no longer in Russia. The transaction I drafted to be signed by the father in order to establish the child’s fate is broken in two in front of the Italian Ambassador of Russia and the Romanian Ambassador of Russia.

After seeing all the efforts taken on Saturday, I participate with Maria in a personal development course and in two days she tells me that for the first time she has been able to sleep in the last two years. How strong you have to be as a mother to get through it all.

A personal confrontation between parents takes place in August and in November 2018 we start the custody appeal. At the first appearance before the Court , we are surprised how the other party contracted a law firm with several lawyers and another senior lawyer with her assistant, against a single 35-year-old woman.

I knew she would be attacked for proving that she was not worthy to raise her child, and I just asked her not to react, no matter what she heard, not to fight back, even though her ears heard how her own mother, the child’s grandmother, was attacked and other untruths just to achieve the goal, namely the sole custody of the father.

In January 2019, a day before the final appearance before the Court , a friend called me and when she wished me success, I told her it’s not about me, it’s not my success there, it’s not about the parents, only  about child and his long-term fate.

I found out the result on Valentine’s Day, on February 14, 2019. Maria calls me in the morning crying that we have permanent custody and it is the biggest gift she has ever received.

We spoke recently spoke and she told me they moved to another country, how happy they are there and without the definitive custody this was impossible.

But the most important is her son, who grows up in a new family where there is harmony, understanding, and although at the age of 4-5 he had to go through traumas, which would be a lot to take for even an adult, maybe after he grows up will appreciate how much her mother did, and how she took several legal systems into her chest at the same time to have him by her side.