An American Man's Struggle to Gain Custody of His Son After He Was Abducted to Brazil
BALDWIN: Who can forget the pictures? Look at this with me, a nine- year-old boy shepherded through this gauntlet of property reporters and photographs are to be reunited with his American father five years after kidnapped from his mother. And this picture, the thumbs up as father and son boarded a plane heading home to the U.S. David Goldman is the father who never gave up fighting the system to get his son back. He's written a book called "A Father's Love" about this whole ordeal. David, wow, quickly, let me just summing up your story initially, your wife, son, go to Brazil, several years ago on a scheduled vacation, suddenly on father's day, your wife calls you up, tells you, quoting from your book, "Our love affair is over. I've decided to stay in Brazil. I'm keeping Sean with me." In that instance, David, what went through your mind?</s>DAVID GOLDMAN, AUTHOR, "A FATHER'S LOVE": I was floored. I couldn't believe that what I had just heard was really happening. I was completely shocked. And basically I just put my face, my hands in my face and dropped to the floor. I peeled myself up and said, OK, is this a dream or a nightmare? But no, it turned out to on five and a half years of a father's hell.</s>BALDWIN: Points in the book early where you talk about you asked questions, did I miss signs when she and your then-in laws were packing four suitcases or maybe at the time cleaning out a classroom, signs that you feel like you missed?</s>GOLDMAN: Well, you know, again we had the suitcases. They said they were going to be in the mountains for a week for a wedding, and it was cold there and they had to go to a place where it was warmer, they were traveling with my son, one of the suitcase I was assuming for my son, so she would pack a lot of clothes so there was one more suitcase. But that was really it. Not until she left and I got the phone call I realized there was a key missing for her parents' condo that we maintained and were responsible for. Her clothes were missing in her closet. My son's clothes were all there untouched, left exactly as they were. So, yes, and then as it unfolded we find out she had been with a lawyer who actually, the one she ended up marrying in Brazil who specializes in international child abduction law.</s>BALDWIN: Tell me about him. Not only, I guess, is it insult to injury, your wife and your son don't come back, but you find out later she's divorced you under Brazilian law and marries a guy who ends up raising your son.</s>GOLDMAN: Yes, one blow after another. I mean, for over four years, I was going down there, trying to be reunited and bring him home under the rules of American law, international law, god's law, to be with my child. And I just kept getting sent home, kicked in the teeth. And then we find out that she's remarried and having a baby with a man in Brazil while we were still married in America. And this man comes from a family of very well, prominent, politically connected, socialite sorts in the Brazilian legal community specializing in family case law, specifically international child abduction.</s>BALDWIN: Of all people you'd be dealing with in this fight, that's the last you'd want to deal with. Then you talk later, and when you finally were able to get down there, the visitation with your son, you write, "With a twisted face, he," being Sean, "he asked one of the most horrific questions I've ever heard, "Where have you been all of this time?" How did that make you feel?</s>GOLDMAN: That just broke my heart, over and over, as if it couldn't have been broken anymore. Well you have your little boy you'd been so desperately trying be reconnected with for over four years, and that's the question. Obviously, it wasn't him, it wasn't his fault. Of course he wants to know, where's my dad been? But he's been told for this number of years that he'd been abandoned by me and the rest of his family. In fact, when his mom passed away, this man who became the second abductor in the eyes of Brazil and the rest of the world and the law went to the state court in Rio, the family court, and filed that Sean's mother passed away and he's been abandoned by his father, we have no idea how to get to him, essentially think boy's an orphan. The man came with a Brazilian birth certificate somehow when my son was born in New Jersey, and he says, "I want my name on there, and this real paternal lineage should be taken away from the child." And they gave him that custody. At the same time he went to the Supreme Court in Brazilia to get an expeditious ruling on the Hague Convention application that we were in with his -- with my wife, never disclosing to them that she had passed away.</s>BALDWIN: All these different chapters, David, all of these different hurdles. You write about it all, all details come out in your book. Here what happens I want to know, how in the world, David, you resisted temptation -- how's he doing now? How you resisted temptation, to pack a suitcase, go to Brazil, and snatch him back? Hold on to that answer. We'll talk on the other side of the break.