Over the last two weeks, my family has been sucked willy-nilly into the jaws of the American media scandal machine, into the world of Oprah and Montel, of Dateline and "20/20," of CBS, ABC, Fox, CNN, People, "Inside Edition," the Globe, the Examiner, the Enquirer, the Star and -- most unnerving of all -- into the sights of Hollywood movie producers dangling dollars in front of our eyes. The speed with which all this has happened has taken our collective breath away. We are not celebrities. Monica Lewinsky doesn't live at this address, though we're deeply sympathetic all of a sudden to her plight.
The story as it broke around the country last month was no surprise to us. In 1979, after their divorce in Massachusetts, my sister Barbara's ex-husband, Stephen H. Fagan, had abducted their two small daughters and vanished without a trace. We had known since September that Fagan had finally been located in Florida and was about to be arrested on kidnapping charges. Over the months, we've had plenty of time to compose ourselves, to think and to wait. My sister, in particular, has become an expert at waiting -- it's been 18 years since she last saw her children.
She did not watch them on television last week when they gave a press conference in Boston or the next day when they appeared with Katie Couric on the "Today" show, declaring their unswerving love for the father who raised them. She knows what they said, and she is not surprised. Rachael, now 23, and Wendy (renamed "Lisa" by her father), 21, have been raised on the lie that their mother was dead. They have known no other parent but Fagan since they were 2 and 5 years old. They know nothing of Barbara's story or the years of suffering and recuperation that followed their abduction. They do not know how strong she is, how honest she is or how hard she has worked to rebuild her life.
Certainly, they could not have learned about this from the media. Instead of talking to us about Barbara's plight or Fagan's innumerable crimes, reporters have been grilling us nonstop about my sister's character and fitness as a mother. Another deficient mother is squarely in their sights, it seems.
Since my sister has not spoken to reporters so far, apart from reading a short statement at a press conference on April 21, "her side" of the story needs some filling in. After their divorce, Fagan had accused her of a number of parental crimes -- among them alcoholism, drug abuse and neglect -- in an effort to win custody of the girls. His allegations were investigated and dismissed by both the courts and the Massachusetts state welfare authorities, but you have to dig deep in the back pages of most newspapers to find this out. In 1971, Barbara had been diagnosed with narcolepsy, a sleep disorder that can cause its victims to pass out suddenly and at other times leaves them drowsy and incoherent. Her condition was well known to Fagan and to us. Nor did Fagan ever complain about her fitness as a mother until she left the Boston area after the divorce and moved with the children to North Adams, Mass., hoping to get as far away from Fagan as possible while keeping the girls within state borders, as she was required to do while permanent custody was being decided.
Only then, when he felt that she had thwarted him, did Fagan claim that Barbara was an "unfit mother" and a danger to the children. His attorneys gathered testimony from three women who were Barbara's neighbors in the public housing project where she lived (largely because Fagan was withholding child support). One of them claimed that Rachael and Wendy had been left outside for hours at a time, "wandering the streets, naked and hungry." Another maintained that the girls were seen eating "raw meat out of a toaster" while Barbara lay passed out drunk in her living room. Because of the seriousness of the charges, a guardian ad litem was appointed. He and the Department of Social Services both recommended that the girls remain with their mother, but a final decision was still pending on Oct. 25, 1979, when Fagan arrived for a routine visitation, took the girls and never returned.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I lived with Barbara and her children for six months in 1978, when she was getting her divorce, and saw the children frequently after that in the months before their disappearance. I can affirm without reservation that she was neither abusive nor neglectful in her care of them. I can also report that when she came home to us in Vermont in 1980, still reeling from the effects of the abduction, she went to work in a day-care center and stayed there for more than a year without anyone complaining about her "fitness."
My sister was robbed not only of her children, but of her role and identity as a mother. For years she spoke of the girls as if they had only gone away on vacation. She spoke of them always in the present tense, kept their clothes and toys until she couldn't stand it anymore, observed their birthdays and pursued every avenue available to her to assist in their recovery. She hired private investigators; she contacted the courts, the police and the FBI; she wrote to senators in Washington, all without success. She dragged Fagan's parents, among others, into her lawyer's office to depose them under oath; three months later, they also disappeared.
This was in 1980, before any real awareness of parental kidnapping had entered the public consciousness and when the police considered the problem to be a "family matter," outside their jurisdiction. A warrant for Fagan's arrest was issued in Massachusetts but never pursued. In 1982, Barbara sent investigators and my father to the home of Fagan's sister, Sheryl Klein, who lived near Palm Beach and who we understood was accepting Fagan's mail. Klein refused to help and, in fact, slammed the door in my father's face. When he went to the police, he was told that the Florida authorities could not intervene. No crime had been committed in Florida, they said; even if Barbara could locate her children, and provided that Fagan wasn't tipped off in advance, she would have no recourse but to kidnap the girls all over again.
"I won't allow their lives to be ruined a second time," Barbara told the family when she heard this. She refused to turn her daughters' lives into a permanent battleground. She continued searching, when she could afford it, until around 1987, but finally gave up in the knowledge that the girls were growing up with new identities and new selves and that they probably wouldn't know her if they saw her again. Resigned to her loss, but still keeping a room in her house dedicated to their memory, she went back to school, married again, earned a doctorate in cell biology and is now a highly respected member of the faculty at the University of Virginia.
When the case broke open again last fall, we urged Barbara to move quickly, to call out the cavalry, alert the media and make her presence known to her daughters in advance of their father's arrest. But she was hesitant, for reasons we did not fully understand until she told us plainly, "I'm not ready for the fact that they may not want to have anything to do with me." At the request of investigators, too, she kept silent.
What none of us knew before Fagan's arrest in Palm Beach were the elaborate details of his life in hiding -- the false identity; the outlandish claims to nonexistent jobs, connections and college degrees; the $1.6 million oceanfront mansion and the buckets of money that apparently propelled him into Florida Gold Coast high society, where he hobnobbed with socialites, served on the board of the Palm Beach Opera and dazzled a lot of ladies with tales of his adventures and utterly bogus accomplishments.
Calling himself Dr. William Martin -- he stole the name and identity of a 6-year-old boy who had died -- Fagan has claimed variously to friends in Palm Beach that he is a psychiatrist, a chemist, a student of philosophy, a CIA agent, a professor at Harvard Law, a think-tank consultant and a former advisor to President Nixon. His own daughters apparently never knew what he did for a living. When interviewed by a newspaper in 1993 for a story about her achievements as an Olympic track athlete, "Lisa" answered, "Ummm, I don't know. Well, he's retired. So I guess you could say he's a retired, uh, lawyer. Well, he was a doctor and a lawyer. And I guess he had his law degree first, and then he became a psychiatrist."
Fagan does, indeed, have a law degree from Suffolk University in Boston, though it took him five tries to pass the Massachusetts bar and he never had a legal practice to speak of. All the rest is as false as the hairpiece he was sporting on the day of his arrest. For what it's worth, we think the press -- and the FBI and the IRS -- ought to be investigating where he gets his money, how he's been walking around since 1979 with multiple driver's licenses and a phony passport, how he's managed to use three different Social Security numbers in the last 18 years -- none of them his -- without reporting income on any of them. (This is a man, we now find out, who used to arrive at my nieces' swim meets in a $250,000 Ferrari.)
All this has been widely reported in the press, yet Fagan has been treated as a sympathetic single dad, if not a hero. In the meantime, my family has been forced to defend my sister against charges of drunkenness and abuse, and suggestions that she made no real effort to find her children over the years. In news reports, when she isn't being smeared as a drunk, Barbara is described as a former "coat check girl," since that was the job she had when she first met Fagan at a Boston nightclub at the age of 19. Common decency does require some acknowledgment of her amazing transformation from a bereft and shattered mother into a dedicated research scientist, but even so she comes across in most accounts as a "medical worker," giving the impression that she's some kind of bedpan changer. A public relations campaign is already under way in preparation for Fagan's defense, using the girls as pawns and designed to blacken my sister's reputation. On the one hand, Fagan's attorneys are claiming that he had to disappear, cover his tracks, change his name and invent a completely false identity for himself in order to "protect" his daughters and keep them safe from a mother who had put their lives in danger. On the other, in a fabulous non sequitur, they're saying that my sister must not have cared about her daughters very much because they were -- honest! -- easy to find. According to Rachael and Wendy's own comments on the "Today" show, all Barbara had to do was look up Fagan's parents in the phone book. (They are misinformed about this. As the Boston Herald reported last week, Palm Beach phone books and area directories show no trace of Fagan's parents before 1996, by which time Barbara had given up any active search.)
"Well, I don't know," strangers interviewed on the evening news remark. "She couldn't have loved them or she would have found them." Or: "Look how well they turned out! Why does she want to ruin their lives after all this time?" My nieces are also blaming their mother for the mess their father has caused, decrying her for creating a "media circus," lambasting her for having made a single statement to the press and emotionally blackmailing her, if indirectly, with the suggestion that they will not even consider seeing her if their father goes to jail. If she reaches out to her daughters now, she will be blocked by Fagan and his attorneys, as she was blocked by Fagan's family, all of them apparently complicit in the abduction, when she demanded information from them years ago. If she does not reach out, she will be accused of not caring.
Lost in all of this is any consideration of the turmoil Barbara is in, the doubts and confusion she herself has experienced at the prospect of seeing her daughters again, the just and well-founded fear she has had that when they heard of her existence they would reject her out of hand. People have seen too many TV movies. In a case like this, they don't want to see a quiet, cautious parent carefully considering the right thing to do. They want an orgy, an explosion of sentiment, some visible proof of what they imagine to be a mother's love. They want Sally Field snatching her child back from menacing Iranians. They do not know, they cannot know, the depths and shades of emotion involved or the precarious peace my sister had finally made with this tragedy over long years of waiting -- a peace that is now torn apart not by her, but by a Florida phony's highfalutin tales.
The wisdom of Solomon insists that in disputes over children, the "true" mother will make all the sacrifices. In this case, the old king was right on the mark. "At least they have each other," Barbara said after she saw her daughters fleetingly on television at Fagan's arraignment. "If they have nothing else, they have each other." This thought sustains her in the face of their rejection, and she has one advantage that her girls do not: She has known their father longer than they have. She can wait for them, if she has to. She can wait, and she will.
