Lawsuit: Russian Adoptee Masha Allen Files Federal Lawsuit Against Mancuso and 13 Other Men
PoundPup Legacy has the extensive history of Masha’s case here. Her original name was Mariya Nikolaevna Yashenkova. She has changed her name from Masha Allen since the series of failures in her case and is Jane Doe in the federal lawsuit. The homestudy agency was Family Adoption Center (Adagio Health INC.) and placing agencies involved were Reaching Out Through International Adoption (ROTIA) and Families Through International Adoption (FTIA).
“Masha Allen suffered years of horrifying sexual abuse at the hands of her wealthy adoptive father and is now suing him and 13 other pedophiles who include doctors and lawyers in a $20,000,000 lawsuit filed on Friday.
Originally from Russia, Allen was adopted at the age of five in 1998 by an unmarried Pittsburgh businessman, Matthew Mancuso who proceeded to rape and post sickening images of her online for five years.
Rescued in 2003 after a national police investigation into internet pedophiles, Allen decided to go public with her story and Congress eventually passed ‘Masha’s Law’ to give victims the right to sue anyone caught with their images associated with child pornography.”
Allen, who is now 20-years old intends to do that and in a federal suit filed in Philadelphia on Friday, the victim names Mancuso and 13 other men all convicted of possessing or transmitting her images online.
According to the federal law in her name, Allen is entitled to a minimum payout of $150,000 from each man.
‘It sort of brings things full circle in that sense, for her to get the justice that she went out there and helped other people get,’ said her lawyer, Leighton Moore, to The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Indeed, Allen could be looking at a total payout in the region of $100 million as the lawsuits against the almost 2,000 men caught with her images grow.
Allen and her legal team are able to keep track of who has accessed the despicable images of her online because the U.S. Justice Department sends them a notice every time someone is caught.
However, the issue for Allen and her team is that men convicted of child pornography charges are already in financial ruins by the time their criminal cases are over.
‘These are the types of people who aren’t motivated to settle – or even defend – a lawsuit,’ said Steven J. Kelly, a Baltimore lawyer who filed a Masha’s Law claim earlier this year against more than 80 men for two sisters who were aged seven and nine.
However, Allen’s legal team have chosen their first 14 defendants wisely, they are professionals, such as doctors and lawyers and Mancuso, because they have money.
Mancuso, 55, was divorced and independently wealthy when he traveled to Russia 15 years ago to adopt Allen and then embarked on five years of abuse against her which included taking pictures of her in Disney World and spreading them online.
In an interview with ABC News eight-years-ago, when she first came forward, Allen said she knew there was something strange about Mancuso when he adopted her.
‘I remember asking him if I was gonna get a mother, and he’d say that he wasn’t married, and that he didn’t think I would,’ she said.
Her nightmare began on her first night when he told her to get into his bed and then proceeded to rape her repeatedly.
He then began to take explicit photographs which he placed online for his secret community of internet pedophiles.
‘I’d make myself think of other things when it was happening,’ she said. ‘But it always came back to me — couldn’t stop it.’
Her rescue began when Chicago Police Sergeant Mike Zaglifa, who had been posing as a pedophile online noticed a new batch of child pornography appear – which was Allen.
He struck up an online conversation with a child pedophile with the handle, ‘NkdSister’ and realized as a gut feeling that this individual might be the source of Allen’s graphic imagery.
Sgt. Zaglifa informed the FBI and on May 27th, 2003, two federal agents went to Mancuso’s Pittsburgh home to investigate.
Immediately, the agents knew that Mancuso was not happy to see them and they separated Allen from her adoptive father.
The agents quickly found computer disks with child pornography and then suddenly, 10-year-old Allen asked the agents, ‘Is this about my secret?
Indeed, after Mancuso’s arrest it was discovered that Allen was not his first victim.
That unfortunate title belonged to his 28-year-old daughter, Rachelle.
‘I feel so much guilt for what happened. When I first found out that he adopted a little girl I should have spoke up, I should have said something. I feel somehow responsible,’ Rachelle said to ABC News in 2005.
Mancuso pleaded guilty to producing child pornography and was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison from which he will be freed and then begin serving a state prison term in Pennsylvania for child rape.
The other 13 defendants are also in prison, serving time for child pornography.
For Allen, her rescue allowed her to move to Georgia with a new adoptive mother and to promote her campaign for her eponymous law.
Allen now lives in Pennsylvania under another name.”
[Daily Mail 8/27/13 by James Nye]
“Defendants include Alan Hesketh, Richard Carino, George Eliot Kabacy, Dan W. Joachim, Ranier Gerow, Douglas Michael Stum, Richard Scheiring, Charles Lindauer, Joseph Marcus, William George Gammon, Stephen Jabbour, Albert Noah Abrams and Mayer Finkelstein”
Victim Uses Namesake Law to Sue Exploiters
[Courthouse News 8/27/13 by Anne Youderian]
Synopsis
A synopsis of her case is at Child Law.us here . Excerpts are pasted below:
“Born August 25, 1992[1] in Novoshakhtinsk, Russia
A girl referred to by the media as “Disney World Girl,” “Internet Girl” or “Internet Porn Girl.” Since approximately 1998, she has appeared in hundreds of child sex abuse images distributed on the Internet worldwide.
Other names Mariya Nikolaevna Yashenkova, Masha Mancuso, Maria Mancuso, Masha Ginn, currently unknown
For a long time, police feared she was still being sexually abused and exploited. Canadian authorities mounted an effort to locate Masha by taking the unusual step of digitally removing her from her child sex abuse photos in the hope that someone would be able to identify the setting. Very quickly they learned where some of the images were taken, but the girl’s identity remained unknown until another database match in the United States found that she was removed from her adopted father two years earlier. Police say the case points to the need for better coordination of visual databases of child pornography victims, especially internationally.
Allen became an advocate for stricter penalties for downloading child pornography and appeared on several popular television programs and testified before Congress. There was also a Congressional hearing about her international adoption.”
“The Images
The search began when the Sex Crimes Unit of the Toronto Police Service repeatedly found images of the same girl on the hard drives of many of the child pornography offenders they arrested. They had her digitally removed from some of the images and then released them to the public in early 2005 to see if any of the locations depicted could be identified. This information would be a strong lead in finding the girl, whom authorities feared was still in danger.
Within a short time, the location depicted in the images was identified, chiefly through the fountains in the background of one shot, as having been taken at the Port Orleans Resort at Walt Disney World in Florida. Police went further in May 2005 and released another photo of a small girl playing a handheld video game, who they believed was not a victim but a possible material witness.
Masha Found
Three months later the hunt ended when a search through child pornography photo databases found a match. The girl, only eight years old at the time the photographs were taken, was a Russian orphan, who had been adopted in 1998 by Michigan-born Matthew Mancuso, a 46-year-old retired engineer from Plum, Pennsylvania for the express purpose of molesting her and using her to produce pornographic photos, which he would then share with others.
Once found, she was removed from his custody. Mancuso is serving a 15-year federal prison sentence after being arrested and convicted in 2003 of distributing child pornography online. Allen was placed with a new family headed by a single woman named Faith Elizabeth Allen.
The dark-haired girl in the later photo was found to be a friend of hers, one of the few friends she was allowed to have. Allen herself had photographed the friend when Mancuso let her use the camera. Mancuso never abused the other girl sexually.
Mancuso Sentenced
On August 23, 2003 Mancuso was found guilty of 11 sexual abuse-related charges in a stipulated non-jury trial in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court in which he offered no defense and did not contest the charges, an unusual proceeding known as a “slow guilty plea.” However, in Pennsylvania, by offering no defense, he preserves his right to appeal the prosecution later. His lawyer, Stanley Greenfield, said he planned to do exactly that since it had been more than a year since Mancuso had initially been arrested, violating his right to a speedy trial.
On November 17, 2004 he was sentenced to 35 to 70 years, which will only begin once his federal sentence is completed.
In Florida, Mancuso initially faced eight counts of capital sexual battery which could have made him eligible for the death penalty. Despite the fact that there were pictures of him raping his 10 year old adopted daughter, Mancuso was allowed to plead guilty to attempted sexual battery. According to Florida law, “criminal attempt” means a person who attempts to commit an offense but fails in the perpetration of that offense. Inexplicably, Mancuso was allowed to plead down from a death sentence to just 14 years in prison.[2]
Life Story
Allen was born in 1992 in Novoshakhtinsk, a small town near Rostov-on-Don, Russia. Her biological father left her mother to raise her on her own. The woman was an alcoholic and reportedly stabbed Allen in the neck at the age of three, forcing police to remove her from the house and put her in the local orphanage. Masha’s sister, Oksana, challenged this in an interview in Rostov in 2007.
Her mother visited occasionally, and told Allen she would be able to return home soon, but eventually Allen was told she would instead be among a group of children to be adopted by American families. She was hopeful that her life would improve, although slightly disappointed that she would have only a father (Mancuso was a single man).
However, after going to the United States with him, she learned of his true plans for her. Mancuso made her sleep with him naked on her first night in his house and began regularly raping her shortly afterward, forcing her to share his shower as well and barring her from eating “junk food”, pasta and raw vegetables in favor of peanut butter sandwiches to keep her weight down and delay the onset of puberty. She reported later that he even made her go through a mock wedding with him.
After he had begun sexually abusing her, he began to take pictures of her, she said later. At first they were typical pictures with nothing unusual or explicit, with her fully clothed, but gradually he began to photograph her in her underwear, then completely naked and finally performing sexual acts. At one point, she said, he even chained her to the wall in his basement for some pictures with BDSM overtones.
He kept her from resistance with threats not to talk to anyone, and rewarded her participation in photography sessions with toys and video games, as well as an annual trip to Disney World.
This went on for five years until FBI agents arrested Mancuso at his house in 2003. Mike Zaglifa, a police sergeant in the Chicago suburb of Palos Heights, had given Mancuso’s IP address to them after going undercover and trading pictures with Mancuso online.
They had not expected to find him living with a child, and Allen quickly told the police what he had been doing with her. She was removed and readopted by Faith Allen (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04135/316220.stm) , a single woman named for Allegheny criminal court judge Cheryl Allen, who reportedly experienced similar abuse in her own childhood (Faith changed her name from Lynn Marie Ginn to Faith Elizabeth Allen in 2004. She was born Kimberly Murphy and is currently known as Liz Psalm). She stated that she gave up her job as a foster parent to concentrate on Allen alone. They then moved to the Atlanta area.
How Did It Happen?
Many people wondered how Mancuso was allowed to adopt the girl in the first place. While he did not have a previous criminal record as a sex offender, single men are very rarely allowed to adopt unrelated girls. An American adoption agency completed the adoption in Russia. New-Jersey-based Reaching Out through International Adoption (ROTIA) had limited involvement in providing travel assistance to Mancuso prior to finalization. Pittsburgh-based Family Adoption Council, Inc. completed the home study on Mancuso and issued a letter to Russian officials agreeing to provide post-placement reporting for a minimum of three years.
However, Nancy Simpronio, the Pittsburgh-area social worker who had done the original home study required for the adoption, never did the post-placement reporting, and at the time Russia had no provision for enforcing that regulation (since then, foreign adoption agencies that fail to provide those reports run the risk of losing their accreditation to operate in Russia). A post-placement report would have revealed that Allen had no bedroom of her own at Mancuso’s house and slept with him, among other things. Unfortunately, the law affords limited enforcement powers for agencies, who uniformly have problems gaining compliance from adoptive families after they return to their home country, if the family does not choose to comply with post-placement obligations voluntarily.
Prior to the adoption, Simpronio also failed to contact Mancuso’s ex-wife or his biological daughter, Rachelle, despite being aware of them. Mancuso had sexually abused Rachelle regularly and had had no contact with her since she was 13, and Rachelle says she would have told anyone who had asked about it. Tom Atwood, of the National Council for Adoption, addressed this issue on a December 1, 2005 segment of PrimeTime stating that the home study was “typical” and in accordance with recognized standards of practice. Currently, it is not standard practice when completing a home study to contact ex-spouses or children who will not reside in the adoptive home, due to possible biases which may exist between ex-spouses.
Rachelle told ABC News correspondent John Quinones on a program devoted to Allen that she feels considerable guilt over what happened to her onetime half-sister and her inability to prevent it when she heard her father had adopted a young girl (She was able to apologize to Allen in person later).
Jeannene Smith, founder of (ROTIA) has since cofounded a lobbying group called Focus on Adoption which lobbies on behalf of agencies that primarily do international adoptions. She has not commented on the case publicly, citing confidentiality laws. Authorities in Pennsylvania have promised to review the circumstances surrounding the adoption.”
“Masha’s Law
On January 6, 2006, Allen appeared in Boston with Democratic U.S. Senator and former presidential candidate John Kerry at a news conference to draw attention to “Masha’s Law,” a bill he had introduced after hearing of her case. It would triple the penalties for those who download child pornography from the Internet. Previously, Kerry noted, they had been less severe than the penalties for downloading unlicensed music files. The law would also allow children used in such images to sue those who downloaded them once they reached adulthood.
At this conference her last name, Allen, was revealed for the first time.
January 2006 Media Appearances
Oprah
Allen appeared on the January 17, 2006 Oprah Winfrey Show, beginning a week of media related to her case. She recounted her history again, adding some more details of Mancuso’s abuse. Some of the less graphic pictures Mancuso took were shown for the first time on television.
Rachelle and Masha met in person for the first time on the show. She tearfully apologized to Allen for not having had the courage to speak up (however, she had thought that he was adopting a boy and only learned a few months before his arrest that he had adopted a girl), and the two embraced. Sgt. Zaglifa, too, appeared on the show and accepted Allen’s gratitude for the investigation that led to Mancuso’s arrest.
Nancy Grace
The following day Allen, Faith, several other people associated with the case and Boston Herald reporter Kevin Rothstein appeared on Nancy Grace’s show on CNN Headline News. The hostess reviewed the facts and expressed her outrage to Rothstein that Mancuso serving his federal sentence at Devens Federal Medical Center in Massachusetts, with access to recreation and what she believed to be good food. Georgia Senator Johnny Isakson also appeared to promote the bill he and Kerry had sponsored to increase penalties for downloading child porn.
Human Rights Attorney, James R. Marsh, and adoption-reform lobbyist Maureen Flatley discussed the progress of civil litigation they planned to file against the agency that performed the homestudy and the adoption agencies involved.
Kurt Eichenwald
New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald referred to Masha Allen while defending his reporting on Justin Berry:
“This is an exceedingly dangerous area of reporting. [Judith Nathan] is right, reporters can’t just do all this willy-nilly,” Eichenwald expained.
Viewing images of child porn is not essential when researching the issue, Eichenwald says. He described his research on Masha Allen, who he said at age 8 was adopted from a Russian orphanage by a pedophile, and whose repeated rapes were caught on film for four years. “Now, I haven’t seen any of them because they’re illegal. What I have seen are cropped versions, what I have seen are images where they have the images removed but you can see what’s happened,” he said.[3]
Testimony before Congress
On May 3, 2006, Allen testified, along with Grace, before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations hearings on Internet child porn. She recounted her story and named all the agencies that had made Mancuso’s adoption of her possible. “They never really checked him out”, she said, alleging that the adoption agency showed Mancuso nude pictures of her. She echoed Grace’s complaint that the federal prison system had put Mancuso in a comfortable prison hospital in what she called a futile attempt to rehabilitate him.
“No one cared about rehabilitating me. I just lost my Medicaid and my mom has to work double hard to pay for the things I need while Matthew lays around the hospital playing games.”
Pointing to the continued circulation of the pictures Mancuso took, and adding that she and her lawyer don’t know for certain that he is no longer profiting from them, she called on Congress to pass the bill Kerry had introduced.
Second Congressional Hearing
On September 27, 2006, the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held a second hearing on the adoption and how it was allowed to happen, at which Smith, Wallace and others involved testified. It found that Mancuso had apparently submitted a forged postplacement report, as the committee’s staff was unable to locate the agency or social worker claimed to be responsible.
In preparing for the hearing, Smith “attempted to mislead [them] about her role in Masha’s adoption and withheld documents in an attempt to minimize her role”, said then-chairman Rep. Ed Whitfield.[4]
Other members of the subcommittee were dissatisfied with the answers she gave to their questions at the hearing itself. Smith repeatedly said other employees of her agency handled the routine details of Allen’s adoption and dealt directly with him. When Rep. Mike Ferguson asked her directly if she was responsible for the adoption, she replied “I think we all were”. After Ferguson retorted that some people in the hearing room were more responsible than others, Smith would only concede “I think we had a role in it, yes” (All Mancuso’s checks were made out to ROTIA).[5] Whitfield was incredulous that Smith, the head of the agency, could not even give him a rough estimate of its annual revenues.[6]
Recent History
On March 18, 2008, Wikileaks reporter Christopher Witkowsky and editor Julian Assange reported that Masha was not doing so well.[7] According to Wikileaks, on Jan. 12, 2004, the Allegheny County Office of Children, Youth and Family, the Allegheny County Department of Human Services and the Families United Network, Inc. filed a report that Masha was not completing homework and that her school thought she could do a better on tests if she studied harder. On April 1, 2004, the organizations filed a report that Masha’s mobile therapy had been discontinued and that she was being treated at an uncertified institution.
Faith officially adopted Masha in May, 2004, during which ceremony Pennsylvania Superior Court Judge Cheryl Allen presided. Judge Allen had sheltered Faith after the troubled young woman graduated from a drug and alcohol abuse clinic. Judge Allen said in a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article in 2004 that she was slightly concerned about Faith becoming a foster mother because of her past experiences, but her concerns were reportedly assuaged after she saw Faith with her foster children. “She has a deep capacity to love,” Allen said in a 2004 article with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, written by Barbara White Stack. “If anything, my biggest concern now is that she wants to help everybody.”[8]
In December, 2004, Faith and Masha suddenly moved to Georgia. In March 2006, Masha expressed the desire to commit suicide. She was hospitalized at Summit Ridge Center for Psychiatry and Addiction Medicine in Lawrenceville, Ga. Summit Ridge recommended that Masha undergo extensive therapy, including a home therapeutic plan for Faith to follow. According to a legal claim notice obtained by Wikileaks, Masha received no mental health treatment of any kind between February 2006 and December 2006. Faith and Masha came under the supervision of the Georgia Department of Families and Children on or about Oct. 1, 2006.
Masha’s claim states that she has been subject to physical and mental abuse since she was first placed with Faith. She has received little or no mental health treatment and her basic medical needs have been neglected, despite the traumatic abuse she suffered at the hands of Mancuso. Masha has moved nine times since 2003 and attended five schools during that period.
According to Wikileaks, “It appears that Masha, who was placed by an adoption agency in New Jersey with Mancuso without subsequent follow up, has been failed a second time by the county and state services that are supposed to protect her. Faith was a questionable candidate to be the adoptive mother of an abused young girl. Masha’s leaked notice of claim reveals that at the time of Masha’s placement, the Families United Network had removed two children from Faith’s care because of alleged physical abuse. FUN had instructed its staff to not place any more children with Faith.”[9]
“Also, Faith may or may not have been the victim of physical and sexual abuse as a young girl. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article said Faith had been physically abused by an alcoholic mother and sexually abused by her step-father. But Faith had also allegedly made up tales of membership in a Satanic cult and inflicted pain on herself for attention, according to a short testimonial written by Dr. Marion Spellman, founder, CEO and chairman of Peniel, located in Johnstown, Pa, a drug-and-alcohol treatment center from which Faith had graduated. The testimonial is no longer on Peniel’s website.”[10]
In 2004, Faith accused a member of her church, Potter’s House Ministries, of inappropriately touching her while she was in a hypnotic state. The trial against Charles Brown, a member of Potter’s House, took place after Faith had already adopted Masha. Faith had surreptitiously videotaped one of the hypnosis counseling sessions, during which Brown can be seen allegedly fondling Faith. But the judge presiding over the trial found that Faith appeared not to be in a hypnotic state and was conversing with Brown. Brown’s attorney also brought in witnesses who testified that Faith had shown the videotape to various members of the church, including a minor, before she took it to police. One witness, Marie Johnson, testified that Faith showed her the videotape, laughed while the two viewed it, and told Johnson she wanted to make Brown her boyfriend. Brown was found not guilty of indecent assault.[11]
On September 15, 2008, Philadelphia litigator Robert N. Hunn filed a lawsuit against the adoption agencies who facilitate Masha’s adoption by Matthew Mancuso. Defendants included Families Through International Adoption, Inc.; Reaching out Thru International Adoption, Inc.; and Jeannene Smith.[12]
After a great deal of legal wrangling, the lawsuit was dismissed on June 8, 2010 because the federal court lacked subject matter jurisdiction. During the lawsuit it was revealed that on or about August 18, 2009, Masha’s second adoptive parent, Faith Allen, “freely and voluntarily executed a consent to adoption with respect to Masha, pursuant to 23 Pa.C.S.A. § 2711. Because Faith Allen did not revoke this consent to adoption within the statutorily allowed 30-day revocation period, it became irrevocable subject to narrow exceptions. The Orphan’s Court with jurisdiction over the matter has now terminated Faith Allen’s legal rights as a parent to Masha Allen.” [13] Masha Allen officially became an orphan again.
In 2010, Masha was reportedly “going through the adoption process. There is the goal that she be formally adopted by a family that she has been with for several months, by her 18th birthday. Simply because that is her desire to reach the age of majority while being a child, a legal child of this particular family. . . . The adoptive parents, in general terms, are a foster family of significant standing, that is, they are very well respected and have been adoptive parents on a number of occasions. It is highly likely that Masha will see a name change . . . once the adoption is finalized.” [11]”
REFORM Puzzle Piece
The repeated failures in her case influenced the closure of US to Russia adoptions.
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