Why Won’t Anyone Believe Me?

Marcelle Guimaraes, a Houston mother, took her son (age 4) Nico, to Brazil in 2013, and never returned. She’s a fugitive, wanted by the FBI, and charged with international parental kidnapping. Why am I writing about this? The mother claimed that she fled a domestic violence situation. There is some email evidence that she was, indeed, a victim. But now here parents are being jailed for helping their daughter kidnap their grandson son five years ago.

How did this go so wrong? If you are in this mother’s shoes you should consider contacting experienced family law attorneys to go through this process the proper way instead of kidnapping. One of the ways to show the court that a mother is the victim of domestic violence is to have an expert review the case, the facts, the episodes, the behavior, the remarks, the emails, the texts messages and determine if there is a pattern of control and coercion that fits the pattern of domestic violence. And sometimes we need to spend this time to help educate the judge about this particular family and whether there really was domestic violence. This is now a terrible tragedy for everyone involved, mostly the child.