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ELSA NEWMAN: Please Remember This Name

The Elsa Newman Story—

Did this mother’s devotion to her children and her attempt to protect them from sexual abuse actually play a role in her being sentenced to prison for 20 years?

I think so…and so do many others.

 

PART II: A LETTER FROM MICHELLE ETLIN

Having spent many years trying to help mothers who were being deprived of their children as punishment for believing their children’s outcries against incest, I thought I was in retirement.  A friend, however, asked me to speak with Elsa Newman, another woman in a long line of women who were trying to deal with this impossible situation in their own and their children’s lives. 

 

Elsa had lawyers, so she wasn’t trying to get advice about how to deal with the courts.  She had financial support from her family, so she wasn’t trying to get loans or frank financial assistance.  She had been organizing groups of people to raise consciousness and to put pressure on the courts and social services to try to make them respond to this crisis properly, both in her own case and in others.  She was a lawyer and had worked for years as a government lawyer, so she had resources.

 

Yet she was in the same position as other mothers whose credibility was counted as zero as soon as they stepped into the system that chose to ignore the problem and blame it on the victims, rather than diligently and honestly trying to solve it.  Old story, the story I had written a book to describe.  (And the book didn’t solve it, only described it.)

 

I learned about Elsa’s case in the first few days of 2002.  I did not want to deal with any problems just then, so I asked my friend to give my number to Elsa Newman with the request that she call me on or after January 7, 2002.  I was taking a weekend off thinking about distressing things.

 

In the early morning hours of January 7, 2002, while Elsa was in New Jersey at her niece’s wedding, her friend Marjorie Landry crept through the basement window of the house owned by the children’s father (who was accused of molesting them) and after one thing and another, she ended up in a physical struggle with him in his bedroom, and the handgun she was carrying discharged and he was shot in the thigh.  She fled and was later arrested.  Elsa learned about these events from her divorce attorney’s secretary later in the day.  I learned of them at about 9 p.m. that night, when Elsa Newman called me for the first time.  Then, we hung up at around 10 p.m. and the story flashed onto the television nightly news.

 

As if it were written for a novel.  A dark novel.

 

When I was on the phone with Elsa that night, as she was telling me what had taken place in court, unbelievably, counter-intuitively, unreasonably, unconstitutionally, irrationally (custody of the children handed over to the man they said molested them, mother’s visitation strictly curtailed and supervised by hostile visitation supervisors, mother’s rights chipped away steadily until she was on the defense in an undeclared war), I said to her what I remembered saying to more than two hundred other astounded mothers: “I believe what you are telling me; I believe every word you are telling me.”

 

Every word she was telling me was absolutely believable to someone who had seen this insane situation play out over and over and over in every county courthouse in every state of the union . . .

 

Someone should have a card and “read their rights” to all mothers approaching social services agencies for help.  They don’t help.  They pretend they are set up to protect children.  And the big lie is often believed.  It is a lie; we know that from history.

 

Two or three days after first speaking with me, Elsa was arrested and charged with conspiracy.  Although it is assumed that when divorcing mothers make allegations against divorcing fathers, those allegations are motivated by malice and hatred, the same assumption does not hold when divorcing fathers make allegations against divorcing mothers.  When the father of Elsa’s children told the 911-emergency operator that the home invasion was the result of a conspiracy by his wife (which, if it were, he could not have known!), they acted on that allegation as if it was evidence, not the ravings of an angry, wounded man.  They didn’t decrease his credibility by pointing out that he had incentive to get his wife arrested and charged with a crime.  What was his incentive?  If his wife was in jail, of course, he was going to win custody, and furthermore, her charges against him for molesting the children could be neutralized. 

 

I won’t go into the whole story here.  I’m going to skip to the first time I met Elsa’s children, which was the first time they were allowed to visit her in the Montgomery County Detention Center on Seven Locks Road in Potomac. 

 

Aitch and Arsakey* were 9 and 6, I believe, when they visited, brought to the county jail by their “guardian ad litem” Alan Town.  [All right, I called him the “guardian ad nauseam,” for those of you who like a little Latin joke from time to time.  He has died since that time, a relatively young man.  I couldn’t find an obituary in the newspapers.  It was strange; a public figure, well known lawyer, foster father (upon information and belief), yet he died young and nothing was said.  He seemed to be known when he was appointed by the court to represent these two boys; he seemed to be unknown when he died.  Up until the very day of his death, he was working to punish Elsa and her mother for trying to help these boys he “represented.”  I heard him tell Elsa’s sister and brother-in-law that he had made a telephone call to Elsa’s lawyer to tell HIM to mistrust Elsa’s friend Marjorie.  I found that quite revealing and absolutely astounding.  It was certainly outside proper activity for a child’s guardian ad litem to interfere like that in the attorney-client relationship of a parent’s divorce lawyer!  Yet this man seemed to have no boundaries; he did what he chose to do and he knew that he was protected by the social services and court systems.]

 

Back to the visit itself.  In came the boys and sat with their “keeper” — their “guardian ad litem” — who was so obviously hostile to their mother that they looked, to me, visibly afraid of him.  I was there for about a half dozen of their visits with their mom, and both of them used to gravitate toward me, try to touch me, talk to me, lean on me, hover around me, while waiting for their mother to enter the room.  They seemed to want to put me between them and Alan Town, to increase their distance from that man who allegedly represented their best interests.  It was so transparent that he was there to keep them under control — to “tell on them” if they made any move to appeal to their mother for help and support in their sorrow.

 

When their mother was allowed to enter the visiting room, both little boys leaped off their hard chairs and flung themselves onto the plate glass, so eager were they for contact with their mother, so cruelly separated from her.  In confusion, they grabbed the telephones that would let them hear her voice, and they both spoke at once, trying to get closer, be heard, make contact.  She was beyond joyful to be in their presence, touched the glass, as they touched the other surface of that glass, rigid silicone border of the imposed separation.

 

I thought,

 

“THE STATE BLOCKS YOU FROM TOUCHING YOUR CHILDREN

BECAUSE YOU HAVE TRIED TO PROTECT THEM

BECAUSE YOU HAVE BELIEVED THEM

BECAUSE YOU LOVE THEM”

 

*To protect the children, I have substituted an initial for one and a little-boy nickname for the other, rather than use their real names.”