[B]URLINGTON — A complaint about an alleged international kidnapping that stretches from Mexico City to Vermont will begin playing out in federal court in Burlington this week.
Two preschool-age boys and their mother are hiding in a Vermont safe house in an undisclosed town and are fighting attempts to be returned to Mexico, according to court records.
The father of the two boys, Hector Guillermo Smith Mac Donald Gonzalez, of Mexico City, has filed a lawsuit under the International Child Abduction Remedies Act against the mother, Whitney Merlynn Peterson, in Vermont.
The mother and children have been in the United States since Feb. 21, and got to the Vermont home in early March, court papers say.
Peterson, 28, maintains her husband, Gonzalez, has more than one job and she believes he “is employed as a clandestine political operative for the political party of the current Mexican President and works for the President through other clandestine operatives,” according to court papers filed on her behalf.
Gonzalez, 41, also owns a music studio and other businesses that are a combination of “both legitimate business and covers for his clandestine political operative job,” Peterson said in court papers.
Gonzalez is seeking an expedited consideration of his petition that he filed in U.S. District Court in Burlington to return the children to Mexico, more than 2,300 miles away.
A court hearing is planned for Thursday on the father’s request to have contact with his children through phone, Skype and/or Facetime pending a full hearing on the case.
Senior Judge William K. Sessions also has set aside Jan. 30-31 for a bench trial on the merits of the lawsuit.
Peterson, through her lawyers, responded to the lawsuit by claiming she fled Mexico with the children “following years of appalling abuse by the father.” She said she and the children “have lived in a domestic violence safe house in Vermont since early March 2017 after they fled Mexico.”
Peterson claims she was subject to “the most extreme physical abuse, psychological abuse, sexual abuse, rape, false imprisonment, torture and financial controls at the hands of the Father all throughout the course of the parties’ relationship.” The court papers go into graphic detail at times.
She and the children are unable to seek protection in Mexico because of her husband’s political connections, court papers maintain.
Peterson denies any removal of the children was wrongful or illegal.
One of the primary lawyers for Gonzalez rejects all those claims.
“They are false,” attorney Ari H. Gourvitz, of Springfield, New Jersey, said in an interview. “(Gonzalez) unequivocally denies the allegations.”
Gourvitz said the litany of claims made by Peterson in her 63-page response are baseless.
Attempts to reach lawyers for Peterson were unsuccessful Friday.
The boys are 4 and 5 years old and left Mexico City about Feb. 21, court papers show.
Both sides agree the couple were married April 13, 2013, in Olympia, Washington, but don’t agree on many of the other material facts.
Peterson claims she has never seen what her husband maintains is a marriage license from Mexico. He said the marriage was “certified in Mexico City” on Sept. 9, 2016, court papers said.
Peterson said she has no knowledge of the certification and never saw the Mexican certificate until her husband attached it to the lawsuit as an exhibit.
The defendant said she went to Mexico City on a long-term church mission trip in May 2011. Peterson was 21 and said Gonzalez, then 35, preyed on her as a “young, naïve church mission trip participant in a foreign country.”
She said Gonzalez claimed he had terminal cancer and could not have children. He proposed in August 2011 before they knew she was pregnant with their first child.
Peterson said it was his plan to get her pregnant without her consent. She said he later admitted he lied about his cancer and his inability to have children.
By December 2011, Gonzalez said he was a clandestine political operative for the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s presidential candidate, Enrique Pena Nieto.
Peterson claims she was not allowed to return to the United States to have the first child as planned. Peterson goes on at length in court papers to outline various controls she says Gonzalez used to restrict her movements and actions.
Gonzalez, through his lawsuit, is relying on the Hague Convention. He has requested the return of the children, and that formal request also was filed with the U.S. State Department.
He first filed a similar petition in Montana, where Peterson’s parents live. It was in response to that case that Peterson disclosed the family had fled to Vermont and that Montana had no authority in the dispute. That petition has been dismissed in the federal court in Montana.
