Piauí Magazine
November 2008

Family Matters
A Father in a Foreign Land
Dorrit Harazim

A week in which the personal dramas and court trials of three families collided in Rio de Janeiro once again. At the heart of the matter, an eight year-old boy.

n theory, the violation of a court order is a crime, even more so when dealing with a court-ordered visitation. But the times of knight commander Breves are gone and the child’s stepfather most certainly used a legal loophole to prevent Sean from seeing his father. After all, the era of Commander Breves is over. For Goldman felt that, again, that “they” could act as they pleased, at least with respect to his son. Still, he waited another week in his hotel room, not to run the risk of being absent during the next scheduled visitation date. As predicted, the visitation never happened. The only difference this time was that his lawyer was able to inform him of the denial three days ahead of time. This time, the court demanded a psychological evaluation of the boy before any visitation could take place.

In return, Goldman received two visits from court officers. When they wanted to serve him an order at 9pm, he thought it better to decline the invitation, asking that they come back the next day. One of the documents was a notification from the Third Prosecutor’s Office for Children and Adolescents, requesting he provide information about Sean in court. The other was a citation order and a summons, from the authority of Paulo Lins e Silva and João Paulo Lins e Silva, to respond to a supposed defamation and moral lynching campaign that was tarnishing the forty-year reputation of the plaintiffs. They also demanded that Goldman request, within 48 hours, that all of the media that had written offensive content about the plaintiffs, even on websites, immediately cease to do so. What’s more: the American must ask the press guilty of the infraction to rescind their stories, clarifying the inexistence of Sean’s kidnapping and the existence of a legal Brazilian decision regarding the temporary custody of the minor.

Two days later, accompanied by another lawyer, Goldman presented himself to the Public Ministry on Rodrigo Silva Street, next to the Carioca subway station. “When they read that I was being accused of renting a helicopter to fly over my son’s residence, even the court officials in the room laughed because it was so absurd,” he recounted later.

David Goldman still doesn’t have a helicopter, nor a job with a contract or fixed hours. He runs a fishing company for tourists that charges US$600 for a six hour fishing trip. “Despite the crisis, there are still a lot of Wall Street investors who lost money but not enough to give up everything,” he explained. He still pays mortage on his house in Tinton Falls, located in one of the wealthiest areas in New Jersey. During his married life with Bruna, she was the one who had a more regular professional routine—she taught Italian at St. John Vianney High School—and had a better family medical plan than her husband.

Goldman doesn’t hide the fact that he wasn’t financially prepared for four years of legal fees. He is a middle-class American. In the first twelve months alone, since he entered the plea to recover his son, he spent US$94,387.62 in legal fees to pay his American lawyer—she charges US$400 per hour. With the exception of the last trip to Rio, which was paid for by the NBC news program Dateline, which is preparing a special one hour report on Sean’s case, Goldman’s journeys to Brazil are weighing heavy on his wallet. Under different circumstances, perhaps he would have avoided a financial agreement in the New Jersey Court (FD-13-395-05c), in which he received the sum of US$150,000 from his former father and mother-in-law, the Bianchis, in exchange for removing their names from the case against Bruna as co-defendants.

A few hours before leaving Rio on flight CO 92 with a layover in Sao Paulo, Goldman explained that the night before, he was sitting at the hotel bar. He was approached by a talkative and eager Texan who told him a thousand and one stories. He tried to leave as soon as he could, fearing the Texan would ask him what he was doing in Rio.

“How do I explain my trip to Brazil in a single sentence?” he said. “It’s an entire life that’s in this trip. I even accept the fact that Bruna’s new husband has come to love Sean, but he’s my son, and he’s trying to take him away from me. Now that the stepfather has become the father of a baby girl himself, he should better understand the horror of it all.”

Previous   1 |  2 |  3 | 4

Copyright © 2008 Piauí Magazine - Brazil, Reprinted with permission

Top of page