Wednesday Weirdness: Maine UPDATED

Welcome to Wednesday Weirdness, a recurring theme where we post something truly weird and wacky in adoption or child welfare.

Today’s installment is a bizarre case from Maine that involves uber-rich adoptive parents who lost their parental rights in 2007 after the father’s arrestsand mother’s mental illness. They are now fighting DHHS and possibly may file a lawsuit.

Soap opera writers couldn’t make up something this wacky. The former adoptive parents have now launched at least three websites trying to track this poor child down. They claim that they just want him to get inheritance. A major newspaper refused to publish a full-page ad about themselves recently.

What about the right for this child to live a normal life? Again, it is all about the adoptive parents and the argument is basically that he was in their care for so long and the mother was discriminated against due to her mental illness and that his adoptive grandmother should have been able to kinship adopt. We have posted links to many articles at the end, but it is important to understand the chaos that this child went through and the demeanor of his family as stated in this second article in a three-part series describes the issues that led to the parental rights termination. FINDING DAVID: ‘Delusional world’ led to son taken away [Morning Sentinel 10/1/11 by Beth Staples]

“In August 2005, Russell Handler was accused of choking his wife, Eleanor, and ordering her to climb naked into a Dumpster outside their Northport home.

“Russell was reportedly furious that Eleanor had thrown away toiletries without his permission and he demanded that she shower and leave the house before David, their 6-year-old son, awoke.

Eleanor at the time described to police how Russell had throttled her, banged her head on the floor, broke her glasses and ordered her to get into the Dumpster to retrieve the toiletries. A third party reportedly helped Eleanor climb out.

It was Russell’s third arrest since he and Eleanor adopted David in 1999.

In July 2002, Russell, then 53, struck a parked car in Belfast and left the scene. A police officer responding to the accident said he saw Russell continue to drive, strike a pedestrian and keep going.

Russell pleaded no contest to failing to make an accident report in 2003 and paid a $250 fine. Russell’s attorney at the time said the 2002 incident involved his medical condition — Russell was fighting tonsil cancer.

In early 2005, Russell faced a felony charge alleging he wrote a bad $8,000 check to a building supply store in Belfast. Eleanor said the check bounced because she had just drained the couple’s accounts after a mental breakdown.

After the Dumpster incident in 2005, Eleanor filed for a protection order against Russell on her behalf and David’s. According to the filing, Eleanor said she was scared of Russell because he had hit her numerous times in front of their son.

Some 84 firearms — including handguns, rifles and shotguns — were removed from the Handler home because of the protective order.

On Oct. 3, 2005, DHHS filed a child protection order alleging David was in jeopardy because of “the father’s abusive behavior and the mother’s failure to protect the child from abuse.”

Five months later, Russell was arrested in New York for violating terms of the order.

The arrest came after Eleanor drove with David from Maine to Long Island to visit David’s paternal grandmother at Russell’s family’s estate; Russell was also staying there.

During that visit, Russell and Eleanor decided to enroll David in the John F. Kennedy Elementary School in Kings Point, N.Y.

A DHHS caseworker was alerted the Handlers were together and reported the protection order violation to law enforcement.

Bryant White, then a detective with the Waldo County Sheriff’s Office, issued a warrant for Russell’s arrest. White wrote that on Feb. 28, 2006, Russell picked up David from the school and “photographed all the exits.”

A few days later, March 2, 2006, the Kings Point Police Department took custody of David at the school for DHHS.

David would eventually be returned to Eleanor, while Russell was jailed for violating the order; he remained there until his trial for assault.

Today, Eleanor said she and Russell were trying to do what was best for David by enrolling him in an outstanding school.

Russell echoed that. “(Eleanor) comes to me and says, ‘Let’s put him in school.’ They made it out that we were trying to steal the child,” he said. “I thought the protection order was only in Maine. I had no idea we were doing anything wrong.”

Witness to assault

In August 2006, Russell went on trial for assaulting Eleanor.

During the proceedings, Eleanor’s former therapist, Sandra Flewelling, testified that she witnessed Russell strangling his wife in 2004. She said Eleanor, bleeding from the mouth, had arrived late for an appointment and Russell arrived a short time later.

The therapist testified that Eleanor cornered her husband; then he squeezed her throat. Flewelling said she screamed at Russell to stop, which he did, then seconds later throttled her again. Flewelling testified she told him if he didn’t stop, she would call police.

When Flewelling asked Russell why his wife was bleeding, according to published reports, she testified that Russell told her he had “only hit her lightly, and if she was bleeding it was because she bit her lip and did it to her herself.”

Russell’s defense attorney, Roger Katz of Augusta, argued that Eleanor was the abusive spouse. Russell is not a criminal, said Katz, who added the couple’s marriage “should have ended a long time ago.”

The jury was told a divorce was imminent. The Handlers divorced in 2007 and remarried in 2008 in New York.

After two days of the trial, Russell pleaded no contest to one charge of assault with regard to the incident in the therapist’s office. Other charges involving the Dumpster and check bouncing incidents were dismissed.

A defendant pleading no contest accepts punishment for the crime without admitting or denying guilt. Leane M. Zainea, deputy district attorney at the time, said Handler was offered the same deal before the trial began but he declined to accept it.

Russell was sentenced to five months, which was the amount of time he had served in New York, and left court a free man. Eleanor’s protection order that prohibited Russell from contacting her and David, however, remained in effect.

In spite of the order, Eleanor allowed Russell to have ongoing, unsupervised contact with David, according to Maine Supreme Judicial Court documents. DHHS then sought a preliminary child protection hearing in January 2007.

The court found David was in immediate risk of harm and ordered him into the department’s custody.


Neither parent, according to court documents, contested either fact. In February, DHHS sought to end their parental rights permanently, according to court records. A hearing was set for August 2007.

The hearings to terminate the Handler’s parental rights lasted four days during August and September 2007.

Russell and Eleanor had separate attorneys, court records state. She argued she was competent to care for David, then 8.

The court disagreed and ruled for DHHS.

In October 2007, a judge terminated the Handlers’ rights to David who, according to court records, was placed in a pre-adoptive foster home.

Russell and Eleanor have since been fighting almost nonstop to get him back.

Russell’s attorneys question why his parental rights were terminated since Eleanor had recanted her previous allegations of abuse.

Eleanor said recently that she doesn’t recall how many protection orders she filed over the years against Russell. He joked that it was about one a week.

Eleanor said that because of her mental illness between 2002 and 2008, she was easily swayed and that she filed protection from abuse orders and filed for divorce because lawyers and people in the system told her that was how she could keep custody of David.

She said the delusions and 47 different medications she was taking for colorectal cancer and mental illness had compounded her disorientation, psychosis and delirium. The combination helped fuel her allegations of abuse against her husband, allegations she has since vigorously recanted.

Eric Mehnert, one of the Handlers’ attorneys, said apart from the therapist’s testimony at the 2006 trial, there’s no corroboration Russell ever assaulted his wife.

Russell recently said he has never assaulted Eleanor and Eleanor said she has never assaulted Russell.
“The truth is the truth,” she said.

Physician heal thyself

In a recent interview, Eleanor said that she has heard voices in her head since she was a child.

Yet until her 40s, “no one that I trained with, worked with or worked for ever had an inkling of how near the edge I lived,” she wrote.

By August 2008, according to court documents, Eleanor was admitted to the psychiatric unit at Penobscot Bay Medical Center in Rockport.

An evaluation at the hospital rated her social, occupational and psychological functioning as a 20 on a scale from 0 to 100. A person within the 11-20 range score has some danger of hurting oneself or others, occasionally fails to maintain minimal personal hygiene, or has gross impairment in communication, according to a widely used text on mental disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV.

Examples of behavior include suicide attempts without clear expectation of death, frequently violent, manic excitement and being largely incoherent or mute, according to the manual.

In an email to Ben Carey, author of the recent New York Times article “Learning to Cope With a Mind’s Taunting Voices,” Eleanor wrote that while Maine is a nice to place to live, it is a “truly horrific place to be mentally ill.”

She said medical professionals in Maine misdiagnosed and mistreated her mental illness, which “fueled her paranoia, delusions and auditory hallucinations.”

Eleanor also described her experience with DHHS as “Dickenesque” and said the agency has an “18th-century perspective” on people with mental health issues.

“I might as well have been a witch to be burned at the stake,” she wrote.

At the crux of the Handlers’ lawsuit against DHHS is the assertion that Eleanor was not mentally competent to participate in the process that terminated her parental rights.

Court records indicate that in January 2009 David was adopted by a foster family.

The Handlers, though, sought to re-open the custody case due to new evidence; a hearing was held Feb. 4, 2009.

The Handlers pointed to that Feb. 4 proceeding as proof the court did not take her mental illness seriously.

When the topic of Eleanor’s borderline personality order was brought up, according to a court transcript, Justice Joseph Field said, “Three-quarters of the people I see in front of me, including half the Bar, have borderline personality disorders. That doesn’t tell me anything. What I need to know from you (Eleanor’s attorney) is does this lady have — at the time of the hearing, was she incapable of knowing the — the nature and the consequences of the proceedings and the — and the role of the adversaries involved therein?”

The case was not reopened.

Eleanor is no longer a practicing physician — she said she intentionally let her license lapse — and says she’s wracked by guilt that David is no longer part of their lives.

“In my delusional world I created a situation where they took David away,” Eleanor cried. “That’s what I live with.”

She and Russell are in New York while Eleanor participates in a program at New York Presbyterian Hospital Westchester Bloomingdale campus to hone her reality testing skills and continue to improve the quality of her life.

“The subject of mental illness should not carry a stigma any longer and should be discussed and written about as openly and with as much candor as heart disease or cancer,” she wrote in a recent email.

In a telephone interview with Eleanor while she was at New York Presbyterian, she said she has been fortunate that Russell has been at her side during her mental illness, the false accusations she lodged against him, and her bout with colorectal cancer.

“I am blessed to have a spouse who has stuck with me and who will just not give up,” she said.”

Other stories: Couple fights to regain custody of adopted son
[Kennebec Journal 9/30/11 by Beth Staples]

No kinship care for David
[Morning Sentinel 10/3/11 by Beth Staples]

Maine’s DHHS needs balanced transparency in child protective cases
[Maine Insights 9/22/11 by Ramona Du Houx]

Family moments shared: An interview with Russ and Ellie Handler
[Maine Insights 9/22/11 by Ramona Du Houx]

Ellie lost a counterclaim to a lawsuit by her former colleague in 2007 and had to pay $30,000. See the pdf here.

From the Medical Board minutes of April 2010, it appeared that she wanted to get her medical license back but it was marked “investigate further”. This differs from her interview above that states that she wanted her license to lapse.  See pdf page 17 here.

The bizarre case of Russell’s brother’s death was the feature in a 2008 New York Times article here.

Update: The Handlers do follow through with filing a “15-count lawsuit in federal court alleging state and county officials violated their civil rights, took part in life-threatening harassment and manufactured false evidence.”

“In September, Russ Handler, who formerly worked at MBNA in Belfast, vowed, “It’s not going to be your average complaint (lawsuit). It’s going to blow the doors off the building in Augusta.”

Bangor attorneys Joseph Baldacci and Eric Mehnert represent the Handlers. Maureen Flatley, a lobbyist and child advocate also working on the case, said Wednesday that the state agency’s treatment of the Handlers “is an absolute case study in how not to do things.”

Flatley said she has not seen a case where a family was more maliciously targeted.

Defendants named in the suit are Department of Health and Human Services Commissioner Mary Mayhew, who succeeded former Commissioner Brenda Harvey; Debra Potter, Claudia Kjer, Martin Smith and Christine Theriault, all department employees; and Bryant White and Bob Tiner, employees of the Waldo County sheriff’s office.

The Handlers adopted David in 1999 after Elizabeth R. Spiess of the Maine Adoption Placement Service conducted a home study.

In 2005, Russ Handler was arrested on a charge of assault that alleged he choked Ellie Handler and forced her to climb nude into a Dumpster. In 2006, the charge was dismissed. The Handlers have said while they were not perfect parents, they love the child and that the department unjustly removed their son.

They allege the department didn’t adequately follow its procedures during a time when they, as a couple, faced significant medical difficulties — the couple both battled cancer, and Ellie Handler experienced a period of documented mental incapacity from 2002 to 2008. She said her accusations of abuse against her husband stemmed from delusions.

The Handlers assert state employees systematically violated Ellie Handler’s civil rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act because they failed to acknowledge and address her mental-health issues.

The suit also alleges that state officials manufactured false evidence to cast Russ Handler as a danger to his wife and child.

The Handlers’ parental rights were terminated in 2007 amid concerns their marriage was, according to court documents, “severely afflicted by domestic violence perpetrated by the father against the mother” and that David Handler was both a witness to and victim of domestic violence.

Court documents released by the Handlers show the state accused Russ Handler of putting his son in a “cold shower with his clothes on after the child had wet his pants.”

The Handler’s lawsuit also asserts Russ Handler faced life-threatening harassment while he was incarcerated at Waldo County Jail in Belfast. Flatley said a side-by-side comparison is being done of treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison that became well known after photos surfaced of U.S. soldiers abusing detainees there, and of Handler at the jail.

When Russ Handler battled cancer, he recieved his nourishment from a feeding tube. In one month at the jail, he lost 40 pounds because of unsanitary conditions, Flatley said. On weekends, Flatley said Handler was placed in the “drunk tank” with offenders and was subjected to brutal treatment.

The suit also alleges a possible breach of fiduciary duty on the part of the state. The Handlers claim the state has accepted payment of Social Security benefits for David Handler totaling more than $80,000 but, despite repeated requests of the attorney general, no proof has been provided that he has received the money.

Flatley said the Handlers’ prime reason for the lawsuit is to see that David Handler is alive, well cared for and receiving money due him. The Handlers also want to revisit the termination of their parental rights.

If the Handlers were to win a monetary settlement, Flatley said they do not need the money but could choose to use it to help reform the child welfare system.”
Couple who lost parental rights file lawsuit
[Kennebec Journal 12/8/11]