A Father's Love (15 page)

After explaining that Bruna had died, I closed the letter with a plaintive plea for help:

I e-mailed the letter from Brazil on September 20, 2008.

Although I got no response from my elected officials at that time, I did hear from Jeff Pegues, a reporter with WABC News in New York City. Mark DeAngelis had talked to a friend who knew Jeff and was willing to contact him about the story. Jeff was interested. “Can you come up to New York?” he asked Mark. “I want to film an interview at our studios and get this on the news tonight.”

Mark met with Jeff that day, and together they got me on the phone from Brazil. Jeff did a brief feature on WABC-TV, including some still shots of Sean and me and audio clips from the phone interview, on the eleven o'clock news on September 22; he was the first major media person to pick up the story. He clearly saw the gross miscarriage of justice and pressed his superiors for permission to get more involved in the case, but they were willing to invest only limited resources. Jeff was really passionate about covering the story, and presented any new developments as his station allowed. I was grateful for his diligent efforts. At last I was not alone.

Shortly after we began to get some media attention in the United States, I received an invitation from
Domingo Espetacular
, a
60 Minutes
–style investigative news show in Brazil. Since Mom and I were still there in the country, I agreed to appear on the program, along with her and my Brazilian attorney. We met the journalist and crew at Ricardo's office and taped for a couple of hours. But before the interview was aired, Sean's abductors managed to get an injunction from a judge putting the kibosh on all media coverage. No one was allowed to talk about the case in the Brazilian media.

The Lins e Silva family continued to pressure the media to suppress the story. They correctly assumed that the Brazilian public would not support their actions if they knew the truth. They dug up an obscure code, known as the “Secrecy of Justice,” in Brazil's civil law. The code guaranteed that because the case involved a minor, the details could not be divulged to the public. The code was sporadically enforced at best, but the Lins e Silvas clutched that code and used it as a club in their efforts to suppress the story. Not only did they attempt to shut down coverage of the story in Brazil, they also complained that I was violating the law by going public with the story in the United States.

Attempting to elicit sympathy, João Lins e Silva claimed that keeping a lid on the story was in Sean's best interests. His father, Paulo Lins e Silva, wrote a telling letter to the American ambassador to Brazil complaining that television networks were giving me time to tell my story. Lins e Silva feigned a position of claiming the upper ground, saying in essence, “It's so unfair, because we in Brazil obey the law, and we cannot speak to the press because of the Secrecy of Justice Code. We are bound to silence on the case.”

I couldn't believe my ears when I heard this nonsense. Just when I thought I had seen the most outlandish misinterpretation of justice by them yet, the Lins e Silvas astonished me with their audacity once again. And in Brazil, when this family spoke—or didn't speak—the media, the courts, the government, and the many people under their influence usually bowed to their wishes.

 

 

FOR THE FIRST four years following Bruna's abduction of Sean, from 2004 to 2008, I struggled like a lone swimmer floundering against one powerful, irrepressible wave after another as round after round of legal machinations continually knocked me off my feet, picked me up, tossed me around, and pounded me back to the surf. I had worked day and night for several long years now trying to bring Sean home. Looking back, I see that in some ways it was good that I didn't really know the full extent of the powerful forces against me.

Bruna's new father-in-law, Paulo Lins e Silva, was an expert in international parental child abduction. In one of his scholarly lectures, he had described how a clever lawyer could work the Brazilian legal system to have endless delays in the courts to keep a child in Brazil indefinitely. He had also warned of the psychological abuse the abducting parent inflicts upon an abducted child, a process known as “parental alienation.” In one of his conference speeches, Paulo Lins e Silva described for his audience how the abducting parent “will use the child as an attack missile against the left-behind parent.” The senior Lins e Silva was presenting the plan that he and his son had put in place against me, and even at the time of that lecture they were practicing his thesis of parental alienation on my son.

Mark contacted a Brazilian attorney whom he had come to know through my case. The attorney was not working for me, but he was disgusted at the way we were being bullied by the Brazilian legal system. “I want to help,” he told Mark. “Let me check and see what can be done.”

A few weeks later, he called Mark back. “I don't think it looks good,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Mark asked.

“Mark, you have no idea what you are up against. You have no idea of the extent of the conspiracy to keep that kid in Brazil. These people are vicious. They are well connected in high places, and they have enough money to drag this case out for years.”

I was a “nobody” with exhausted resources fighting against a rich, powerful, influential family. I felt as though I were David against Goliath. Occasionally, I'd meet people who cared and wanted to help, but there was no way to marshal their efforts. The opposition was overwhelming; what could one person do?

As I had already been doing for several years, Mark DeAngelis and I called and sent messages to our representatives in the U.S. House and Senate. They indicated that they felt sorry for what was happening, but the most they could do was refer the letter to the Office of Children's Issues at the U.S. Department of State, which would in turn write back and say that they were doing all they could. Indeed, we later learned that sixty-six American children had been abducted to Brazil and none had ever been returned to the United States. The people in the government offices weren't being rude or indifferent; it appeared that they simply had no tools with which to help; they had no answers and no clout to find the answers.

Representatives from the U.S. embassy in Brazil continued to write letters to Brazilian authorities after General Henshaw was reassigned, asking them to recognize my paternal rights and return Sean according to the stipulations of the international agreement to which Brazil was a signatory. All to no avail. For the first time in my life, I understood what people meant when they said many foreign governments regard the United States as a “paper tiger.” We will make pronouncements, write letters, pass resolutions, and have all sorts of meetings, but there are no teeth in the words. Despite the power of the United States, we could not or would not force Brazil to be accountable; consequently, we could not force the people who kidnapped Sean to comply with the court orders and return him.
We're supposed to be a superpower, and yet we can't get a helpless abducted child out of Brazil, a country that is supposed to be a friend of the United States.

During the first four years after Sean's abduction, I had made five separate trips to Brazil, hoping the rule of law would be followed and I would be able to see my son and bring him home. In every instance, my efforts proved futile. Again and again, I returned home feeling as if somebody had kicked me in the teeth.

Every day was another day of separation between us as father and son. Sean was growing older, he spoke mostly Portuguese now, and the indoctrination he was receiving at the hands of his captors was bound to have had an effect on him. If only there were some way to get the public's attention, maybe we could put some pressure on the Brazilian government to do what was right. But time was not on our side.

 

 

LIVING CLOSE TO New York proved advantageous in the never-ending effort to secure media coverage for our story. Being a private person, I was hesitant to reveal my life to the media and the public. However, I soon saw the power the media possessed, and realized it might be the only way to get the assistance I so desperately needed. I knew I was taking a chance, but I had nothing to hide, and truth was on my side.

Bruna's death, and my four years of frustration combined with my futile efforts to get Sean back within a few weeks of her funeral, did what nothing else could do—it piqued the interest of the media. Her untimely death caused the story to become more poignant to the producers, editors, and other media gatekeepers who decide what the public will be offered each day on television or in the newspapers.

Mark and I had a friend who knew a producer for the CBS show
60 Minutes
. The producer was intrigued by my story. “Fascinating story. I'd love to do it,” she said, “but as you know,
60 Minutes
takes months and months of research before bringing a story to air, and David needs an outlet where he can get the story out to the public now.” To her great credit, the CBS producer said, “NBC's
Today
show would be perfect for this story.” She even placed a phone call to a friend who worked at
Today
. The NBC producers had also picked up on the story as a result of Jeff Pegues's piece on WABC, and were already looking into it.

Through that friend, we forged a connection to NBC. They offered to have me on the
Today
show for a six-minute segment on September 24, 2008. Mark and I believed that NBC would do a good job covering the story, so we quickly said yes. My mom and I had flown home a few days before the interview. Tony Rizzuto sent NBC some photos I had on my computer, for some background images of Sean and me. Mark researched the ratings during the early morning broadcast and discovered that the show regularly reached more than five million viewers. Surely somebody in an audience that large might be able to help us.

Mark brooded over the potentially enormous audience, wondering how we could interact with them once they heard my story. The obvious answer, besides people responding directly to the network, was a Web site. There was only one problem: we didn't have a Web site.

The night before I was to appear on
Today
, Mark called our friend Bob D'Amico. Bob possessed the skills to put together a Web site, but could he actually create one literally overnight? “Do you think we could get a bare-bones Web site up and running in time for David's interview on the
Today
show?” Mark asked.

“When is he going to be on?” Bob asked.

“Tomorrow morning.”

“You're kidding, right?”

“We don't need anything fancy, but we do need a page that tells people how they can help.”

Bob offered to try. He worked all night long, putting together the content for the Web site. We called it “Bring Sean Home.” Bob provided a short summary explaining the Hague Convention policy on parental child abduction and telling the story of how Bruna had retained Sean in Brazil, where he was now being held by his grandparents and Lins e Silva, while I was being treated with disdain by them. Bob also included information about how visitors to the site could reach their congressperson, and templates for letters requesting that our government and the government of Brazil become more involved in getting Sean back home. Bob was amazing; he put in links to various sources of information on parental child abduction, and specific ways people could put pressure on the Brazilian government and our own. He created the entire Web site,
www.bringseanhome.org
—not greatly different from the one that exists today—and got it online and ready to go by the time I pulled up to NBC's offices and studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York.

We asked the producers at NBC if they would be willing to mention our Web site during or after the interview, and they readily agreed. That was about all that NBC consented to at that point. Whether the network was concerned about potential lawsuits or something else, I'll never know. I do know that the producers warned me ahead of time regarding what I could and couldn't say during the interview. For instance, I was “advised” not to refer to Bruna's family as kidnappers. What else should I call them? They were holding my son in a foreign country and thumbing their noses at court orders from our country and at an international agreement signed by eighty countries. Was I supposed simply to refer to them as estranged or disgruntled former family members?

Nor would NBC allow me to say Lins e Silva's name, or imply that he or his family was involved in the abduction of my son. “Why am I even doing this interview?” I asked. Did the long tentacles of the Lins e Silvas stretch all the way to New York?

I was not pleased with all the stipulations regarding the interview, but I reminded myself that it was an opportunity to reach millions of people, and that nothing we had tried so far had netted any results. I did my best to remain calm and focused, and decided to work around all the barriers.