Grandma Stopped from Seeing Boy Sent by Brazil Court to Be with Dad in U.S.

RIO DE JANEIRO – The maternal grandmother of Sean Goldman said Saturday that a U.S. court stopped her from visiting her grandson, the 9-year-old boy that a Brazilian court sent to that country last December to put an end to the litigation between the American father and the Brazilian family of the boy’s late mother.

Brazilian grandma Silvana Bianchi, who traveled two weeks ago to the United States to arrange a meeting with her grandson, said through her attorneys in Brazil that a New Jersey judge denied her the right to visit the minor at the request of the boy’s father, David Goldman.

“The United States court accepted Goldman’s argument that, at this time, the visit would be damaging and could affect the boy’s relationship with his father,” the attorney for the boy’s Brazilian relatives, Sergio Tostes, said in a statement cited Saturday by the state news service Agencia Brasil.

The child, the center of a dispute that lasted five years and in which both U.S. President Barack Obama and his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, intervened, was sent to New Jersey last December under a ruling by a Brazilian court.

Brazil’s highest court accepted the American father’s argument in his case against the Brazilian family and ruled that the minor should live with his father in the United States.

Custody of the boy has been disputed since 2004, when his mother, the Brazilian ex-model Bruna Bianchi, took him to Rio de Janeiro, supposedly on vacation, but never returned to New Jersey where they lived.

Bianchi, who got a divorce in Brazil and married an attorney, a member of an influential Rio family, died two years ago in childbirth.

In his statement to Agencia Brasil, the attorney of the boy’s Brazilian relatives said that he will enter an appeal so that the grandmother can visit the boy, and will also ask that the Hague’s Convention on International Child Abduction be respected.

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