Update #5: Match challenge complete! Thanks to Lucia H and yet another donation from the wonderful Anonymous, we have met Hellebor’s $500 donation match challenge!
I am waiting to hear from Vetwife how today’s hearing went. I am really hoping that the delay in news is simply because she and the family are exhausted, not because the news is bad… Fingers crossed and think good thoughts, everybody!
Update #4: MATCH CHALLENGE!!! DK member Hellebor has generously offered a $500 match challenge! If we can raise $500 in donations, Hellebor will donate another $500!
***We are now down to $270 $230 $185 $60 $40 to go, thanks to Mary Brown, Lillian G, anonymous, DannyB, Donna B, Colleen S, anonymous, liza73, jodem, Ann R, Casandra L, anonymous, anonymous, anonymous, and anonymous!***
Please donate here via GoFundMe or here via PayPal (use friends&family) — and please help keep this diary visible by tipping, reccing, and adding your comments!
Update #3: Good morning! Thank you to everyone who tipped, recced, donated and participated overnight while I was sleeping :-) Let’s see if we can keep this diary “alive” a little longer. The biggest thing you can do to help make that happen is to tip, rec, and add some comments!
HUGE thanks go (so far) to Clio2, Portlaw, ILoveBats, twingrace, HaikuzaKos, FloridaSNMOM, Robert Norman, silverfoxcruiser, J Graham, elenacarlena, bleeding blue, LiberalsLoveAmerica, cminus, PJ the WB Lefty, Southern White Boy, rlcornelius, vslee1974, TrueBlueMajority, BeadLady, wilderness voice, RainJustRain, Madame Lizzard, greenharper, MistyRT, Angela Marx, StarMalachite, fieldspeedwell, and of course, the amazing Anonymous!
(If I missed anyone, I deeply apologize)
You guys all deserve kitty kisses!!!! Here ya go :-)
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Please donate here via GoFundMe or here via PayPal (use friends&family).
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Update #2: Wow. Just wow! You guys amaze me.
With everything Vetwife’s family is going through right now, I really want legal fees to be the last thing on their worry list. And the truth is this is going to be ex-pen-sive! I’m hoping that if we can put together another $10,000, that will be enough to cover the remainder of this battle.
OMG, I know, right?
But you know what? It is now just shy of midnight on the west coast, and you guys have already raised nearly a quarter of that goal! (Seriously, right now we are like $120 short of having raised $2500 tonight!)
It would be so amazing to reach that 10k by the end of this weekend — but to do that, I’m going to need your help. So please, if you can, republish this diary to your DK groups, share it to your friends, email it to family… If you’re in a position to do a “match challenge” donation, that would be amazing and please let me know! Every little but helps and, once this diary falls off the front page, it’ll become much, much harder to get people’s attention.
So please help me publicize it any way you can!
Update #1: Anonymous, you are AMAZING! So far tonight, Anonymous has donated $10, $20, $25, $40, $50, $100, $101, $200, and $500! Thank you, Anonymous!!!
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Please donate here via GoFundMe or here via PayPal (use friends&family).
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(***Hereunder beginneth the actual diary***)
Saying “I told you so” should be fun, right? There ought to be some satisfaction to it, at least. In this case, though, there truly isn’t.
A quick recap for those who aren’t familiar with what Vetwife’s family has been going through: her grand-daughter, Brandy, passed away in April of this year. Shortly thereafter, Brandy’s estranged husband was released from prison and, despite the fact that he is not the father of Brandy’s daughter, she was forcibly taken from the grandparents who had been raising her for years, and put into his custody.
Having just paid for Brandy’s funeral, the family was badly tapped out — and the one thing I knew was that fighting this kind of custody battle can be way expensive. So I posted a diary to help raise funds for Vetwife, and DKos members stepped up in droves. This community raised nearly $10,000 in little more than a week to hire a lawyer and begin the custody process. (Update on exactly what those funds have paid for so far after the fold!)
Which still blows me away — and totally blew Vetwife away, too :-) She hates to ask for help to begin with, and kept wanting to wait on doing any more fund-raising, hoping what had already been raised would be enough. Even though I knew better, I respected that choice — but now those funds are running perilously low, the deadline to replenish them is very short, and I am asking you to help out if you possibly can.
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Please donate to help Vetwife via GoFundMe HERE!!!
If you prefer paypal, donate here! (use the “family & friends” option)
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To say that Brandy’s daughter has been taken from a stable, loving home and put into a situation which is potentially dangerous is putting it mildly. As I said in the first diary, it’s not my story to tell so I’m trying not to share too many details, but Vetwife sent me this plea to post, and I know she will add more info in the comments:
“Our 10 year old great granddaughter has been cut off from all of her maternal family and we have not heard from her. How it even got to court is beyond me. The man is a felon. He is not the biological father. He was in prison when she was conceived and our granddaughter was [at that time] unwed...
This man who has her is into drugs, guns, domestic abuse, white supremacy, and his whole family supports Trump and is in Marjorie Taylor Green’s neck of the woods. Where they are getting money for this custody fight is beyond me.
Please hit the Go Fund Me link in User Exist’s diary to help for the second round of this insane battle. User Exists said I would never ask for myself but now I am begging to get this child out of this environment in rural Ga. She will not be masked if she starts school there and I am so upset after cremation, funerals and now this ongoing mess.
We and the bio grandparents are fighting his having her tooth and nail. Please send us your prayers, thoughts, well wishes and any amount you can afford to help us get this child to safety.
PLEASE...PLEASE HELP ME. I am about to lose my mind sitting in Florida in the middle of a pandemic, helping get my great granddaughter to a safe environment with her biological grandparents and grieving over Brandy.”
— Vetwife
Please donate to help Vetwife via GoFundMe HERE!!!
If you prefer paypal, donate here! (use the “family & friends” option)
“How much justice can you afford?”
In an iconic cartoon by J.B. Handlesman that’s totally worth clicking this link to see, a lawyer asks his prospective client, “You have a pretty good case, Mr. Pitkin. How much justice can you afford?”
And yeah, as much as it sucks, it’s absolutely true — justice, or even a rough approximation of it in our legal system, is hideously expensive.
To hire a good, aggressive lawyer, Vetwife and her family had to pony up a starting retainer of $3,000 plus filing fees. Then, at the first court hearing, the judge appointed a guardian ad litem whose job it is to provide independent recommendations to the court about the client’s best interest (the “client” in this case being Vetwife’s ten year old great grand-daughter).
This is a very positive step, but as the litigants bringing the suit, Vetwife’s family is required to pay the guardian ad litem’s costs — another $3,000 upfront, now completely consumed by her $250 an hour fees and travel costs. So the long and short of it is that for over six weeks now, they’ve been paying for two very high-priced lawyers.
My original guesstimate of what a custody battle like this would cost in full was approximately $20,000. And no, I am taking no pleasure whatever in having proved to be, it’s looking like, pretty much right on the nose.
The next court hearing is this coming Monday, and the family is expecting to have to shell out another $3-4k in fees literally that day. They’re down to under $1800 in the legal fund and yeah, it’s really crunch time. Can you please help?
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Please donate to help Vetwife via GoFundMe HERE!!!
If you prefer paypal, donate here! (use the “family & friends” option)
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What’s most appalling to me is that this child has been deprived of all communication with her family at the very time that she is suffering through the loss, just last April, of her mother. I cannot imagine how terrifying and damaging this has been for her, to be ripped from everyone she knows and trusts and thrust into the custody of a near-complete stranger.
Please, please help get her back home.
Bless you and thankyou.
— UserExists