Russia Hot Sauce Case-the Lost Russian Interview Brings Up New Questions

The latest article warrants this separate post as it calls into question the whole adoption process of the Beagley twins.

If you thought you knew the gist of the story, then you had better sit down.

The Dr. Phil interview was NOT their first interview. Six months PRIOR to the Dr. Phil interview, the family was interviewed by a Russian reporter.

“Beagley and her husband Gary were in the habit of granting TV interviews even while traveling to Russia to adopt their twin boys. That’s what they told Anna Vernaya, a Russian-born journalist and translator who lives in Alaska, in March 2010, about six months before the Dr. Phil appearance.

Vernaya’s interview was intended for a regional newspaper in Magadan, the capitol city of Magadan Province, the region of the Russian Federation where the twin boys were adopted.”

Large Family Size

In international adoption and sometimes with foster care adoption, countries or regions prohibit prospective parents with large families from adopting.

Magadan area rules differed from other areas of Russia: “Basically it was just Russia where we were looking [to adopt],” Gary Beagley told Vernaya. “The rules in those different places did not allow us to adopt because we already had four kids-but Magadan did, and that’s why we went to Magadan.”

Twins Still Speak Russian

In our Update 15 of the original post it is mentioned that the twins were in a Russian immersion program.

The Russian reporter confirms that the children still speak Russian. “Vernaya provided a tape of her interview to the Press…Children can be heard playing in the background, and Vernaya even interviews the twins in Russian. The interview is almost two hours long. One child interrupts by banging on the keys of a piano. The piano playing doesn’t sound as much like music as it does a young child just trying to get attention from the adults in the room.”

“When their eldest child enrolled in a Russian-language immersion program in the Anchorage School District, they began to focus on from Russia. The older child would later serve as the twins’ interpreter, and the whole family is learning conversational Russian, although English is spoken at home. “We realized that although they wouldn’t be in Russia any more, they would still have some of that culture in their lives,” Jessica Beagley says on the recorded interview.”

We will get to why this may be important below.

High Cost for Sibling Adoption

“On the tape, the couple told the journalist they paid $60,000 to an adoption agency-not including airplane tickets for two trips to the Russian Federation-to adopt a pair of twin boys from a detsky dom, a “children’s home” in the Magadan Province.”

Unprepared to Adopt

She doesn’t seem to grasp child development, the conditions that the kids came from or the needs of the kids despite how the reporter tries to portray her.

“Throughout the interview, Jessica Beagley displays a brand of armchair psychology one might expect from a full time mother and erstwhile educator. She sounds like she’s studied this child-rearing thing.

She also sounds like a person with convictions. To some ears, she might sound judgmental. She might overanalyze people and their actions. She does this whether she’s describing the relationship between the twins, or the detsky dom employees and Russian child welfare workers, or the Alaska child welfare system-even when she describes herself. She readily admits that four-year-old boys sometimes seem alien to a mother.

“I don’t understand when they make noises when they play, when they’re running around and they’re not doing what mama tells them,” she says.

Beagley sounds okay with all this. She doesn’t sound like the mother on that other tape, the one Dr. Phil so expertly exploited. She wonders why a little boy would use his hand to pantomime a rocket ship while imitating jet engine sounds from his throat. She says the detsky dom had a fenced yard. Once in Alaska, the Beagley’s had to enforce a no-playing-in-the-street rule the boys didn’t seem to understand.”

“The things she “knew” about child welfare in Russian seem to have been crafted by the adoption agency personnel and her own observations. The detsky dom was ill-prepared to raise some of the handicapped children she met while visiting. “I know the workers don’t have the education to take care of those special needs kids,” she says, adding, “They are in the business of keeping them alive until they can go to school.”

The “Mission Complex”

Hmmm…interesting choice of words… we call it the “Savior complex.”

“The interview tape also reveals another side of Beagleys, a mission complex that seems rooted within the family psyche, particularly in Jessica. Her attorney would later say at trial the couple looked to overseas adoption because they wanted to help children in need. During Vernaya’s interview, they explained they knew little Russian while traveling back and forth. The couple shopped for fresh fruit and vegetables for detsky domchildren. They packed vitamins, too, explaining they “knew” that the twins and their peers were in an underfunded and ill-prepared orphanage.”

More Diagnoses

“News reports of Jessica Beagley’s trial – the Press did not send a reporter-include coverage of testimony by a psychologist named Stephen Mailloux, who told a jury that the boy who was forced to gargle hot sauce has his own complex psyche. Mailloux said the boy had an attention deficit disorder (people can be born with that), a reactive attachment disorder (from frequently changing caregivers) – and post-traumatic stress, from what Mailloux said was abuse. It’s not clear whether Mailloux learned about the twins’ story solely from the Beagley or had any sources from Magadan.”

Biological Mother Parental Right Termination Reason and “Procedure”?

This was the most shocking part of the article.

“The Beagleys told Vernaya the twins’ father had been in and out of prison, suffered from alcoholism and abused their mother. At one point the mother and children were displaced by an apartment fire after a government-owned building burned. The biological mother, awaiting housing from provincial authorities, turned her twins over to the detsky dom as a temporary placement. Jessica Beagley tells that story on the tape. The twins were two-and-a-half-year-olds when they arrived at the detsky dom, Beagley says, and authorities in Russia extinguished their mother’s parental rights because she visited her sons only three times during the six months after placing them in the detsky dom.

Vernaya, the Russian-Alaskan journalist, says she has met the twins’ biological mother in Magadan. “She was not aware they had taken away her parental rights. She is not alcoholic,” Vernaya says. “No one was looking for her, so she could be informed that they were taking parental rights away.””

Uh…so the biological mother is a domestic abuse survivor who is NOT an alcoholic, put the kids in the orphanage on a TEMPORARY basis, had her rights terminated behind her back and the APs knew this and they spent $60K on the adoption agency fees and now the AP is convicted of child abuse…Does anyone else see some problems with this picture?

What will the Russian Ombudsman Do?

He may do nothing. But in light of this new information: Kids still speak Russian+ biological mother never meant to adopt her kids out + AP convicted of abuse….readers, what do you think should happen to the kids?

Hot Sauce Mom was on a mission
[Anchorage Press 8/24/11 by Scott Christiansen and Anna Vernaya]

Our previous extensive coverage of the Beagley story can be found here .

REFORM Puzzle Piece