In this month’s Atlantic magazine, investigative reporter Nadya Labi rides along with a man who kidnaps children for a living. Gus Zamora specializes in the “snatchback” – recovering children who have been spirited away to a foreign country by one parent (the “taking parent”) against the wishes of the other parent (the “left-behind parent”). He asks his clients three questions: “Do they have custodial rights? Do they have an idea where their kids are? And can they afford his fee?”
It’s not cheap. The left-behind parent she chooses to follow, Todd Hopson, a Florida lawyer, pays $25,000 for Zamora to retrieve his nine-year-old son, Andres, from Costa Rica. (And that rate is the recession special!) The ethical issues of responding to an alleged kidnapping with another kidnapping are murky enough. But in her reporting, Labi adds yet another layer of complexity:
Hopson is not Andres’ biological father; Jason Alvarado, a Costa Rican dentist, is. And it’s Alvarado who is the target of the snatchback.
Labi’s piece (and please read it) has all the elements of an international thriller. There’s no question that by the time parents are engaged in abductions and counter-abductions, both have probably lost sight of the best interests of the child. But in choosing to profile a non-biological custodial father, she also raises additional questions about how we define the people who matter most in a child’s life: When two parties disagree, who counts more? The person who sired a child or the person who raised him?
All parties seem to agree that Todd Hopson acted as Andres’ parent, perhaps even his primary parent. His mother, Helen Zapata, spent two years with his father, Alvarado, in their native Costa Rica. By the time she became pregnant, at 19, the two had broken up. (Zapata claims Alvarado asked her to have an abortion; he denies it). She met Hopson while she was pregnant and was living with him in Florida by the time Andres was born. Hopson was the first to hold Andres in the hospital, cared for him by himself during his first week of life, and paid his mother’s $25,000 hospital bill. Alvarado took a blood test and acknowledged paternity, but didn’t pursue custody, preferring to leave the child with his mother. His mother, unfortunately, later developed a drug habit, leaving the bulk of the child-care to Hopson. “I’ve been 100 percent the father, and, over the last year, maybe 80 percent of the mother,” Hopson tells Labi. Zapata adds, “Andres trusts Todd more than he trusts me.”
In June 2008, Zapata went to Costa Rica to kick her cocaine habit. She asked Alvarado to take their son for a few days while she was in rehab, though she admits she “lied to him” and said she was job-hunting instead. When Alvarado learned about her drug use, he decided to keep Andres, and won custody from a court in Costa Rica. He called Hopson to thank him for caring for his kid for nine years. Naturally, Hopson flipped out. “If you’re going to be the father, you don’t let someone else carry the freight,” he tells Labi.
Shortly thereafter, believing he had exhausted his legal remedies, Hopson gets on a plane to Costa Rica, accompanied by Gus Zamora, his kidnapper-for-hire. They snatch the kid at the bus stop, careen through the streets of Costa Rica in a high-speed chase and make it back to Florida, where Andres goes back to private school and Little League. Mission accomplished.
One can muster a certain amount of sympathy for a parent who has the very reasonable fear to believe that he will never see his son again. In the particular case Labi writes about (she cites many others in her full piece), one can certainly understand why both men would figure Andres would be better off with living with them than with their mother (Zapata collaborated with both, in a way; she first dropped off Andres with Alvarado, then became Hopson’s accomplice in the snatchback). But what kid wants to be snatched from a bus stop? How likely is it that all the parents who claim to love this child will be able to sit across from each other and engage in civilized discussion when family disputes are being mediated by Rambo? From a purely pragmatic standpoint, kidnapping your own kid may actually be an effective solution, if the problem is being forced to share that child with others who love him (only about 51 percent of left-behind parents get their kids back by filing an application under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of Child Abduction). And if someone else has kidnapped your kid, hiring a private goon to get him back might work pretty well, too. While a spokesperson for the U.S. state department told Labi that the department frowns upon such things, the woman handling Hopson’s Hague application expressed relief at Andres’ return and told Hopson she wasn’t sure he would have got his son back by legal means. But once parents start treating their children as the spoils of war, you know for damn sure there will be some pretty hefty casualties.
It's been a banner year for high-profile men to cat around on their wives, hasn't it? Come to think of it, last year was quite the barn burner as well.
We might, at such a moment in history, be ruefully wondering why smart, successful men bother pledging their troth to one woman, and doubting whether they're even capable of honoring such a vow. Well, despair not, romantics, because a new book from French psychologist Maryse Vaillant titled ""Les Hommes, l'amour, la fidélité" ("Men, Love, Fidelity") offers some encouraging perspective on males and their relationships.
Oh, they'll cheat all right. But don't get bent out of shape about it.
The divorced Vaillant, whose book is not yet available in English, made a splash earlier today when news of her broad-minded campaign to "rehabilitate infidelity" hit the decidedly more staid British papers. Today's Daily Mail quotes her explanation of straying thusly, "Most don't do it because they no longer love their wives. On the contrary they simply need breathing space. For such men, who are in fact profoundly monogamous, infidelity is almost unavoidable." In fact, it's the husbands who don't step out who are a little bent in the head. She continues, "These are often men whose father was physically or morally absent. These men have a completely idealized view of their father and the paternal function. They lack suppleness and are prisoners to an idealized image of a man of duty." Alors, if your mate is among the estimated 40 percent of Gallic men who cheat, congratulations!
Yet nowhere in any of the discussion of Vaillant's book — and damn near absent from the wider dialogue on men and their extracurricular activities in general — is the fact that adultery is not a male-only province. This year, both Sandra Tsing Loh and Julie Powell released memoirs that detailed, among other things, their dalliances. And though statistics are tough to come by — people don't love to cop to cheating — in her 2007 book "Lust in Translation," Patricia Druckerman claimed that while 20 percent of American men said they'd ever committed adultery and only 10 percent of women did, the percentage of married men and women who admitted to extramarital sex within the past year was near identical. (3.9 percent of the gents to 3.1 percent of the ladies)
So before we trot out the old chestnuts that boys will be boys and spread the seed and something involving cavemen and hunters, consider Vaillant's assertion that "the pact of fidelity is not natural but cultural." If there's to be any plea for a laissez-faire acceptance of wandering, remember then that what's good for the goose (Hint: It's sex — hot, dirty sex) may be likewise for the gander.
We can choose for ourselves whether we believe in monogamy or not; there's certainly persuasive anecdotal evidence on both sides. We can also, one hopes, differentiate between a contract that includes honest communication and mutual consent and one that does not. But maybe it's time that pop psychologists and pundits alike to consider the possibility that promises made by both sexes are not exclusively, inevitably broken by only one.
Have you always wanted to run a background check on everyone you've ever met, but been too put off by the thought of paying up to $19.95 per check? BeenVerified.com can solve that problem for you! Their new Background Check iPhone app will allow you to snoop on unsuspecting acquaintances -- gathering "basic information like name, age, address history and relatives," a "comprehensive state and nationwide criminal records search," a "social networking scan," and the value of any property they own -- three times a week for free, and if that's not enough, more extensive plans start at $8 a month. According to 9to5mac.com, "In just three days since its release, the application already sits on #12 on the iTunes list of free utilities and continues to climb."
Supposedly, this is meant to appeal to small business owners, average citizens looking to make sure their professional contacts aren't shady, and online daters hoping to reduce their chances of meeting criminals for coffee. But Been Verified's national TV spot (below) is right up there with the Broadview Security ads Sarah Haskins ably skewered in terms of reminding women that we are never safe. Sure, there's a guy in there who's going to check out his accountant, mortgage broker and electrician -- it's not like women would be hiring those people anyway! -- but the commercial is anchored by a single woman who wants peace of mind before the first date and a pregnant woman who declares, "No stranger comes around my growing family without a background check!" (That must make running errands difficult, but perhaps she has background-checked help?) The latter also asks the question at the heart of this particular pitch: "How can I know who to trust?" Silly lady, didn't you see the Broadview ads? The answer is no one! You're a victim waiting to happen! Unless, of course, you run a criminal records check on anyone who gets within a 10-foot radius of your fetus.
Like all safety precautions, there's surely a time and a place for something like this. Businesses already running checks on potential employees can do it less expensively. Investigating an accountant beyond Yelp reviews could be a good idea before you hand over sensitive financial information. People hiring caregivers for family members would probably find it useful. And sure, if you've got a hinky feeling about a guy you just started dating, it would be nice to find out for sure if he's already married or wanted for fraud or something. But what individual actually needs to run a check on three people a week? If you're as puzzled by that question as I am, the application offers a helpful suggestion: "Not sure who to check? Run background checks on everyone in your address book!" Of course! Why didn't I think of that? After all, how can I know who to trust?
In a week when airport security theater is increasing yet again for no good reason other than calming a public that prefers the illusion of safety to rational thought about risk, this idea that hypervigilance is necessary to survive everyday life is working my last fucking nerve. How can I know who to trust? Well, let's see, there's gut instinct cultivated over 35 years of interacting with other human beings. There's real fear, as opposed to diffuse anxiety. There are recommendations from friends I've come to trust over time. There's the Better Business Bureau and umpteen websites where I can find complaints about someone I'm considering dealing with. There's making a realistic assessment of the likelihood that any given person means to do me harm -- which is perhaps never zero with strangers, but only rarely much higher, in my experience. There are patterns of behavior that should raise red flags if I'm paying attention. There's, you know, common sense.
Meanwhile, you know who's really going to love this one? Stalkers. Control freaks, manipulative jerks and garden variety nosy parkers. Maybe even identity thieves. Basically, half the people you would want technology like this to help you avoid. Sure, you can check out that guy you just met online -- and he can do the same. If it so happens that he is the kind of person you'd be better off without, now he doesn't even have to fork over $20 to get piles of your personal information -- but hey, at least this way you don't have to feel like a chump for being the one who gave him that info, since you learned in advance not to trust him. Don't you feel safer already?
It's that time of year. Pants are a little tighter, jowls are little droopier, and there's a high concentration of your mom's famous tollhouse cookies in your bloodstream. Time to start making some new fitness resolutions.
Or did we say frescolutions?
In today's installment of "things for which we blame Jared Fogle" a woman named Christine Dougherty has become the face – and body – of Taco Bell's "Drive Through Diet" campaign.
Right off the bat, let's just say that we're skeptical of a "diet" that involves eating burritos in your car. We further have our doubts when there's a disclosure that "Drive-Thru Diet is a not a weight-loss program." And were I Taco Bell, I wouldn't go bragging about having a whole seven items on the menu that contain fewer than nine grams of fat. (Which, by the way, does not qualify any of them as low fat.)
But we credit Christine, whoever she is, for losing 54 pounds over a sensible two-year period instead going all gimmicky and "Biggest Loser" on us. And we admire her for working within her weaknesses. "I didn’t want to cut out my fast food," she says in the online ad, "so I started choosing Fresco items from the Drive-Thru Diet menu and making other sensible choices."
Good on you, Christine, and thanks for the caveats, because it's a safe bet that nobody's going to get into a bikini like the one you sport on the Taco Bell page simply by switching to the lower-calorie options on a fast food menu. A far likelier scenario is that those "other sensible choices," along with, dare we say, exercise and an efficient metabolism had a bigger role in the transformation.
We're all for taking those little steps that can lead to big changes. And we applaud fast food chains for offering fresher, lower-fat options. But we call bullshit on rounding up seven menu items and calling it a "diet," and we'd like to know a little more about this Christine lady before we trust her lifestyle advice. Want to get healthier in 2010? Think outside the bun – and then think some more.
It's notoriously difficult for actresses of a certain age to get work in Hollywood, but CNN's Breeanna Hare notes that if you're an older white woman who looks suitably patrician, opportunities abound in the "boozy grandma" role that seems to be featured in every other TV show these days. Veteran actresses Kelly Bishop, Holland Taylor, Caroline Lagerfelt and Jessica Walter have all recently played such three-martini matriarchs — I'd add Susan Sullivan, currently working out her elbow on "Castle," to that list — and now Susan Sarandon has brought the type to the big screen in "The Lovely Bones."
And at this point, it is a type. Says Hare, "It's a role that's virtually paint-by-numbers — drunk grandmothers are nearly always wealthy, white and cruelly witty, with poor parenting skills," but in the hands of such talented performers, the outspoken, cocktail-fueled older woman is still extremely watchable — which really ought to make us wonder what they could do with other roles. For all the talk of Meryl Streep rocking Hollywood's socks off this year (and believe me, I'm as thrilled about that as any other female moviegoer who's not invested in Edward vs. Jacob), let us not forget that she's Meryl Freakin' Streep. Is her recent wave of success really going to help other women her age to open movies and land the cover of Vanity Fair? TVGuide.com senior editor Mickey O'Connor provides the reality check: "Maybe it's become, play a drunk grandmother and you get to work past the age of 60." Even if you're Susan Sarandon, let alone an award-winning actress (Bishop has a Tony, and Taylor an Emmy, for instance) who's spent decades stuck in "Hey, it's that guy!" territory.
I suppose the boozy grandma is better than the dotty — or nonexistent — older woman character, in that she at least has a discernible personality, opinions and enough brains to produce just the right clever, cutting remark on the spot. But does she have to be a functional alcoholic for the audience to accept those things? Does a woman over 60 — or 50, even — have to be snobby and self-absorbed to be interesting? As cookie-cutter types go, "wealthy, white, witty and wasted" does at least offer an actress something to do, but given the talent and résumés of some of these performers, "wasted" is exactly the right word.
The early morning call was for a "domestic abuse" situation. "My husband had me with a knife," the woman said. "I'm scared for my life, and he threatened me." And when the 911 operator asked for her husband's name, she broke into sobs and said, "Charlie Sheen."
The early Christmas morning call that Sheen's wife, Brooke Mueller, placed to Aspen authorities has been released, and it is as sad and scary a few minutes of audio as you'll likely hear today.
On the tape, Mueller, who tested with a blood alcohol level of 0.13 when she met with police, sounds disoriented and repeatedly says, "I need to file this." The statement the couple gave the police sheds even more depressing light on the events, which seem to have erupted when Mueller threatened to divorce Sheen and take their 9-month-old twin sons. In their statements, both parties admitted yelling and slapping each other on the arms. But Sheen, who said that he had been having marital problems lately and that his wife "abuses alcohol," denied pulling a folding knife on her, though he did produce one for the police from his bag. It was, oddly, open and locked. Mueller, meanwhile, claimed he told her, "You better be in fear. If you tell anybody, I'll kill you. I have ex-police I can hire who know how to get the job done, and they won't leave any trace." Police also noted the appearance of red marks on her neck, which she said occurred while Sheen was holding her down with the knife to her throat.
Mueller's statements are remarkably consistent with Sheen's ex-wife Denise Richards' accounts of the actor's behavior, including an incident where he told her "I hope you fucking die, bitch. You are fucking with the wrong guy," and threatened to have her killed. Sheen also served two years' probation for a 1996 assault on then-girlfriend Brittany Ashland. In 1995, he settled a case out of court with a woman who claimed he'd hit her when she refused to have sex with him. And in 1990, in an incident deemed an accident, he shot his fiance Kelly Preston in the arm.
Child Protective Services is now apparently investigating the case, and for now, Sheen is remaining conspicuously mum to the press. That's fine, because we don't lack for punditry on the subject of Sheen's and Mueller's behavior and possible poor judgment.
But the surprising element in all of this is how relatively unscathed Sheen seems to be so far. A CNN report this morning put it best: "Scandals Don't Faze Charlie Sheen's Career."
Which raises the question, Why the hell not? CBS aired his sitcom "Two and a Half Men" — for which he earns a reported $825,000 an episode — last night as usual and has issued no statement on the events of Christmas. Hanes, with whom he has an endorsement deal, has likewise not distanced itself from its client.
Sheen's certainly not the first actor with a historic fondness for controlled substances and ladies of the town. So grudging props that he's managed to parlay that very public bad-boy reputation into a lucrative on-screen career. Oh, that Charlie! He's the philandering rake from that sitcom! And hey, the scandalous publicity just sent the ratings through the roof.
Here's the thing, though: Are you fucking kidding me?
There's naughty and there's shoving women around, hitting them, verbally abusing them, and threatening to kill them. Repeatedly. Over years and years and years. It doesn't matter if you've had an on-and-off relationship with sobriety. It doesn't matter if the women in question are hookers or porn stars or sexy actresses or college students. It doesn’t even matter if they're drunk. For what it's worth, you don't go pulling any of that on men either, though that doesn't seem to be an issue for Sheen.
So while you can get fired from a hit TV show shortly after making a homophobic remark, and you can lose your beauty pageant crown after posing topless, you can also, apparently, make a career of abusing women and be the highest-paid actor on television.
Air a public service announcement in which a woman speaks soberly about the grave risk of breast cancer and male viewers are all: Zzzzzzzzz. But have a male celebrity winkingly pretend to be a gynecologist, lecture his "bromigos" on the importance of breast cancer screenings and perform a mammogram on his own man-boob, and men just might perk up and wipe the slobber from their chins. At least, such is the wisdom of the Men for Women Now campaign, which produced that very spot starring stoner-dude comedian Jack Black — and, as Danielle Friedman points out today in the Daily Beast, it's just one of a handful of recent PSAs about women's health issues to feature and target men. But while she celebrates them for successfully getting out the message, I think they've failed miserably.
In the run-up to the holidays, CBS produced spots starring actors Chris Beetem and Josh Pais urging men to give the gift "even Santa can't deliver" to the special woman in their life: a Pap smear. The message wasn't for men to talk to the women in their life about how Pap smears can save lives, but to just go ahead and call up her gynecologist and make the appointment for her. The takeaway: "Save her life by getting her in stirrups, stat!" The timing of these PSAs was awfully poor, considering the guidelines for Pap smears were recently revised to suggest that women have them less frequently than previously advised in order to avoid unnecessary harm. More importantly, can you imagine the reaction to a PSA urging women to go ahead and secretly schedule a much-feared prostate exam for their husband as a "gift"? It would be seen as a controlling gesture, not a considerate one. Of course, the caring thing to do is spread the word about disease detection and prevention, to help inform personal medical decisions, which is kind of the point of PSAs, right? But, again: Zzzzzzzzz.
At least the Pap smear spots clearly had women's health in mind — as opposed to say, their breasts. Broadsheet readers might recall Canada's Rethink Breast Cancer ad, which featured a pair of bouncing bikini-clad breasts and beseeched viewers to "save the boobs." It was a fun and sexy approach, but also one that assumes the plight of nice knockers will stir men into action faster than the living, breathing, thinking and feeling human being carrying them. Gents, there is equal opportunity for offense here.
On a similarly fratty note, Men for Women Now — which almost sounds caveman-like, right? — has enlisted all manner of male stars to talk about boobs in online videos. The thinking behind these spots seems to be that saying "boobs" enough just might make men give a shit about breast cancer. Again, here's an assumption that is offensive not only to women but perhaps especially to men. Kevin Connolly of "Entourage" delivers the following sales pitch for the group's Facebook application: "Really, what is Facebook all about — faces? Ha-ha! I don't think so. It's about boobs. Ladies go there to show 'em off. Guys go there to check 'em out. I mean, really, when you think about it, it should be called 'Boob-book.'"
Another spot features Bob Saget, who has turned his squeaky-clean image as the dad on "Full House" into a comedy routine in which he acts as filthy and unfatherly as possible. "I save breasts," he tells the camera with a straight face. "I keep them in a chest, which is kinda redundant, at the end of my bed, and sometimes I'll spray Pledge on them to keep them lemony fresh." He continues on with his particularly desperate brand of creep-out humor: "I give Pap smears door-to-door. It's just me, you can let me in. I'm a dad on TV — there's nothing to worry about."
The creator of Men for Women Now, Noreen Fraser, tells the Daily Beast that "men are kind of marginalized when it come to women’s cancers." She asks: "Why shouldn’t men stand up for women's cancers?" I absolutely agree. By all means, men should be encouraged to learn more about diseases that threaten women and share what they know with the ladies in their life. I just don't see salivating over boobs and telling jokes about breast-collecting psychos as very effective consciousness raising. That isn't to say there aren't men out there who can only be persuaded to care or even think about women's health by a pair of jiggling jugs or sexual innuendo. But, frankly, I think I'm better off without those guys thinking about the state of my breasts or cervix.
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