‘Foretold’ podcast Episode 6: ‘Your Laws vs. Our Laws’

Now that Paulina has left her family, she has a choice to make: Does she take her custody case through the Romani judicial system? Or does she turn to the American courts, trusting the system she has always been taught to fear?

Listen to the episode and read the transcript below.

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Faith E. Pinho: Paulina had left. Just after midnight on July 19, 2018, Paulina had grabbed her kids without warning and ran away from the Train Station, with her father-in-law asleep on the couch. Paulina’s friend and former client, Amber, picked her up and they drove off into the night.

Paulina Stevens: I just was like, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” And she was like, “Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it.”

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina went to Amber’s house. She settled into the guest room, and Amber put on a movie for the kids.

Paulina Stevens: And the house, I remember it was so peaceful. Everything was super clean and it smelled so good and it felt like even though it was an hour, it was an hour of temporary peace.

Faith E. Pinho: Just an hour at Amber’s. Because Paulina was afraid Bobby and his family might try to track her down. Pretty soon, Paulina said, her phone started going off.

Paulina Stevens: My phone is ringing off the hook. Everybody is calling me. They were texting me and they were like, “You kidnapped the kids. You kidnapped the kids.”

Faith E. Pinho: It all felt so chaotic.

Paulina Stevens: Bobby’s like, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to say all that stuff. Please just come back with the kids.” And his mom is calling off the hook.

Faith E. Pinho: As you know, Bobby and his family wouldn’t speak to me, so I don’t know how they felt when Paulina left with the girls. I also didn’t get to see any text messages from this day. But Paulina said she got a bunch of them and then shut off her phone.

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Paulina Stevens: I literally feel like I was in such a shock.

Faith E. Pinho: In the wee hours of the night, Amber got Paulina a room at a nearby hotel.

Paulina Stevens: And I went to sleep that night with the kids and it was just insane.

Faith E. Pinho: This meant it was real. She had done it.

Paulina Stevens: That was the night, the first night, that I had officially left.

Faith E. Pinho: There was no turning back now.

Paulina Stevens: But it was nothing compared to what was coming up next.

Faith E. Pinho: This is “Foretold.”

The next morning, when Paulina woke up in the hotel room, her future was a completely blank page. She had no idea where to go from here. But one thing was certain: She was just so happy to be with her girls.

Paulina Stevens: I was in this love world with my children and I just wanted to spend time with them, and we were reading books.

Faith E. Pinho: They just holed up in this hotel for a while, enjoying their time together, kind of blissed out. Eventually they moved to Paulina’s mom’s apartment.

Paulina Stevens: I was in a complete high. Everything was blocked out. I was literally in love.

Faith E. Pinho: But Paulina still had to face reality. She had taken the children without telling their father where they were. She couldn’t keep the girls away forever. She knew that.

Paulina Stevens: I texted him, I think daily, and I was just like, “Just so you know, we’re OK and we’re safe,” ’cause I know that’s what I would want.

Faith E. Pinho: But the texts weren’t enough. Bobby wanted them to come back. Paulina showed me screenshots of these messages. In them, Bobby wrote, “Things are only going to get worst if you don’t come back Nina,” adding that he loved and missed her. And then he wrote, “There’s no way you can be this selfish.”

Paulina Stevens: But I told him he’d have to come to some kind of agreement.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina knew she wasn’t going to ever get back together with Bobby. Their marriage had passed the point of no return. The only thing she cared about now was figuring out how to share the kids.

Paulina Stevens: I wanted the kids to have both of their parents in their life. That was my goal.

Faith E. Pinho: But Paulina’s non-Romani friends, Amber and Matt, advised her to take things to court. That’s what they would have done.

Paulina Stevens: They were the ones who were telling me, “This does need to be handled in court, in custody.” And I was like, “We don’t do that in our culture, you guys.”

Faith E. Pinho: As much as possible, people in Paulina’s community do not deal with American courts. Because there’s a Romani justice system. And the Romani justice system is made up of elders.

Nick Wildwood: Elders, like now I’m an elder.

Faith E. Pinho: Elders like Nick Wildwood of Wildwood, N.J. And this consortium of elders — usually all men — gather together to deliberate on a matter.

Nick Wildwood: We have our own court system, not American court.

Faith E. Pinho: OK, even though Nick and other Romani people call it a court, the U.S. doesn’t recognize it as such. In the eyes of the American justice system, it’s not an official court. So I’ll just use the Romani word for it: a kris.

Nick Wildwood: Yeah, that’s part of the tradition.

Faith E. Pinho: A kris is held in many Romani communities when there’s a dispute that can’t be resolved between two parties. This might be a disagreement over territories, or an argument about money or a dowry, or even a separation.

Nick Wildwood: When a marriage breaks up, they’ll gather some elders that do Romani culture law.

Faith E. Pinho: And when it comes to most Romani divorce cases, the perspective of the kris is pretty predictable.

Nick Wildwood: First thing we’ll try to do is see if we can get them to go back together.

Faith E. Pinho: So the kris will hear the arguments for a separation. The two sides will each present their case.

Nick Wildwood: We’ll figure out what is your problem. Somebody argues, somebody treated you bad? We’ll start talking to them.

Faith E. Pinho: A kris is usually made up of men who don’t necessarily know the couple. Someone like Nick might participate in a kris for a situation like Paulina’s. These days, it’s usually held over a conference call. But back in the day, I heard, men might come from another part of the country for a kris so they’re not biased to the local community.

Despite the differences in region or subgroup, though, Nick says the men in the kris usually still agree the couples should stay together.

Nick Wildwood: Most of the time, we’ll say, “Try one more time.” It happened to me. I left my wife one time.

Faith E. Pinho: Years ago, Nick said, he and his wife had a bad argument, and he left.

Nick Wildwood: She was crying, “I want my children back.”

Faith E. Pinho: So then the Romani elders got involved and encouraged Nick and his wife to talk it out.

Nick Wildwood: So the one guy was very good and he said, “Go outside and have a cup of coffee with your wife.”

Faith E. Pinho: The kris helped Nick mend his marriage back together.

Nick Wildwood: We stayed together 30-some years.

Faith E. Pinho: OK, so they did eventually break up. But it was after their kids were already grown. And Nick says this timing was for the better. If Nick’s marriage had ended while the kids were still young, the mother would have had to leave their three little girls. And Nick would have had sole custody.

Nick Wildwood: Because in our culture, the father gets the kids.

Faith E. Pinho: The man keeps the kids. Most of the time. At least the oldest kid.

Nick Wildwood: The first child goes to the father no matter what, especially if it’s a son. And then if there’s another child, they’ll split them up. One will go to the mom. Then the dad gets to keep — always the dad gets to keep the firstborn.

Faith E. Pinho: So you pretty much already know the outcome. The main objective is to keep the couple together, and if a couple breaks up, the kris will give the kids to the dad or split them up. Like Nick says, the answer is generally predetermined in Romani custody disputes.

Nick Wildwood: So if it’s in our hands, we know the outcome.

Faith E. Pinho: Not so with the American courts.

Nick Wildwood: Once you put your hands under a judge, you don’t know what could be the outcome.

Faith E. Pinho: This is exactly why some Romani women are turning away from the Romani kris. Because there, the results are so predictably the same: Stay and make it work, leave and give up the firstborn or leave and lose everything. But in the American court, theoretically, everyone gets a shot at custody, much to Nick’s dismay.

Nick Wildwood: These younger women who are now becoming brides — when they’re not happy with their marriage, instead of trying to let the people try to put them together, right away they come home and they file court papers, which makes it impossible to put them back together.

Because now we’ve got to deal with your laws versus our laws. And, of course, the American court doesn’t understand what we’re talking about. So it’s like oil and water. And that’s why we are having an epidemic of divorces.

Faith E. Pinho: I’ve heard this from other folks, too: that more and more Romani women are turning to the American court system.

But in Paulina’s mind, there was no epidemic of Romani women turning to the courts. Growing up, Paulina said, she knew only two women who had gone to the American courts for custody — and she said they settled the cases quickly because their families were afraid of blowback. But for Nick, even two is too many.

Nick Wildwood: It hurts my heart because I see our people are losing it. There’s so many cases right now. There’s one almost every day of a girl who left her husband, took the kids, went to court. You do this for the next hundred years, goodbye, Romani. Goodbye. We once was a culture like the Mayans and the Incas. See? That’s why it makes me upset.

Faith E. Pinho: This is obviously the point of view of someone who has sat on the kris, an elder in the community. But there are plenty of other people who feel the same as Nick. And they did not hesitate to tell Paulina exactly what they thought.

Paulina Stevens: All the men were very very firm on the fact that if I choose to leave Bobby, then I do not deserve my kids.

Faith E. Pinho: As predicted, all the men told Paulina she should just let her kids go or make peace with keeping only one.

Paulina Stevens: They were basically saying, “Why don’t you give him the oldest and you take the youngest?” Or “Why don’t you just give them to him and you can see them once a month?” Or “Why don’t you just sign over sole custody because we don’t want to get blackballed. We don’t want to get in trouble.”

Faith E. Pinho: In the Romani community, getting blackballed is traditionally one of the worst things that can happen to you.

Ian Hancock: It’s a sign of disgrace.

Faith E. Pinho: Professor Hancock says that if you’re blackballed, if your name gets disgraced, then you’re pretty much unacceptable. You can no longer attend any functions — and you know how important gatherings are in Paulina’s world. No weddings, no funerals, no birthdays. If you try to get into a party while you’re blackballed, you might be ushered out. People stop answering your calls.

Ian Hancock: If you were blackballed, nobody would visit you. And if you went to somebody’s house, they may not let you in at all.

Faith E. Pinho: It’s totally isolating. It’s embarrassing. And in many cases, blackballing can last a long time.

Ian Hancock: Years and years and years.

Faith E. Pinho: So long, it can affect multiple generations. Like if a parent is blackballed, their kids may have trouble finding someone to marry within the community. Because blackballing is community imposed and community regulated. It only works if — and because — everyone follows it.

Ian Hancock: In the Romani world, there’s really no room for an individual. You’re part of a family. So if you do something bad, pretty much the whole family goes with you.

Faith E. Pinho: Since Romani culture is so deeply rooted in family, being turned off from family is like being turned off from everything — from all friends, all neighbors, all society. It’s like being untethered. Friendless. Cultureless. But Paulina couldn’t even think about all those risks now. All she could think about was her girls.

Paulina Stevens: I was so unsure of the future. All I knew was that I wanted to have the kids in my life and I felt like I was such a good mother and I felt like they wouldn’t thrive without me. So that’s where I wouldn’t take less than 50-50.

Faith E. Pinho: 50-50 custody — of both kids.

Paulina Stevens: And I knew at the time it wasn’t realistic, but I felt like maybe if I fight enough, it could be.

Faith E. Pinho: What if, Paulina thought, she just tried to make it work? If she asked for an American custody outcome without going to the American courts?

Paulina Stevens: So I gave it a shot. I gave Bobby and his family a shot.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina said she and Bobby eventually came to a conclusion. A compromise unlike any that Paulina had ever heard of in her family before. The girls would stay with Paulina for 10 days; then they’d go to Bobby for 10 days: 50-50 custody. A novel solution.

Paulina Stevens: And this is agreed upon by the men. So that means that the men, my grandfather, uncles, his dad, his uncles, had agreed to this.

Faith E. Pinho: My producers and I verified this timeline of the period after Paulina left, based on text messages, court documents, police records and interviews. But it’s unclear whether Paulina and Bobby successfully handed off the girls during the next couple of weeks.

What we do know is this custody arrangement was something entirely new for both families, and it was bound by trust from both sides. Bobby had to trust that Paulina wasn’t going to run off with the kids again. And Paulina wanted to believe that Bobby would stick to their agreement too.

Paulina Stevens: I was scared, but I felt like, again, it’s their dad. I just had to give him the benefit of the doubt and trust him.

Faith E. Pinho: But given recent events, Paulina and Bobby didn’t have a lot of trust between them. And when the time came for one of the first handoffs, for Paulina to let go of their daughters, she was putting that trust to the test.

Paulina Stevens: So Bobby had come to the house to pick them up and, yeah, my heart was in my stomach. And it’s not that at the time I felt so bad. It’s that thinking back on it, I feel so stupid.

Faith E. Pinho: I mean, you could have never known at the time what was going on. You were like just a kid yourself, you know?

Paulina Stevens: I hear what you’re saying, but I also feel like I gambled. I gambled with my children, basically.

Faith E. Pinho: I don’t think they would think that.

Paulina Stevens: It doesn’t really matter because it’s what I did.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina gambled on that trust. And as far as she could tell, she lost.

Hanukkah concert: Shalom! We’re in Boyle Heights, we can do a little better than that. Shalom! That’s more like it. Thank you so very much.

Faith E. Pinho: In late November 2021, I found myself celebrating the first night of Hanukkah at Congregation Talmud Torah in L.A.’s Boyle Heights neighborhood.

Barry Fisher: Nowhere else in the city of L.A. can we have a combination of klezmer music and mariachi.

Hanukkah concert: If you know, please sing along.

Faith E. Pinho: That fusion of klezmer-mariachi is called Klex/Mex. There was a violinist. A clarinetist. A tuba player. And among them, playing accordion with gusto, was a man named Barry Fisher.

Barry is one of the bandleaders of this Klex/Mex band, which plays songs in Spanish, Yiddish and, on occasion, in Ladino, a rare and endangered language that blends Hebrew, Aramaic and Old Spanish.

But this isn’t what Barry does for his day job. Barry told me how his love for music led him into a career as a lawyer for human rights.

Barry Fisher: I’m interested in people, their music, their belief systems, their rituals, practices. So being a lawyer is a kind of an entry to intimacy that people don’t ordinarily engage in.

Faith E. Pinho: Barry works on behalf of ethnic, racial and religious minorities. He legally represents many of the communities that he enjoys playing music with.

Barry Fisher: And that included Romani people and Romani music.

Faith E. Pinho: In some Romani circles, Barry is the go-to lawyer. He is there to guide them through the American courts. Because Barry has stood up for the Romani community before. Especially in one landmark case back in 1985, right here in Southern California. In the city of Azusa.

Barry Fisher: Absolutely, the genesis of the law in Azusa, like the laws in many places, were to keep Roma people from living in their communities.

Faith E. Pinho: The city of Azusa had prohibited the business of fortunetelling. Reading palms, tea leaves, tarot cards — Azusa banned all of it. The argument was that that kind of work was inherently deceptive. And Barry says this was targeted.

Barry Fisher: I have no doubt about that.

Faith E. Pinho: Barry says that fortunetelling was singled out from the many different types of businesses that are about predicting the future.

Barry Fisher: Stockbrokers talk about economic futures, and weather forecasters talk about weather predictors. But you couldn’t talk about the future of people that might go to a so-called psychic or fortuneteller.

Faith E. Pinho: And one fortuneteller in Azusa took issue with this ban. It all started in 1979, when she placed an ad in the paper and the city revoked her business license.

Barry Fisher: I mean, it was a pure 1st Amendment issue. And so it was a landmark case that made its way to the California Supreme Court, which I argued.

Faith E. Pinho: And he won.

Barry Fisher: And so the court decided that it’s 1st Amendment protected.

Faith E. Pinho: Since the California Supreme Court case, a lot of other places across the country have also classified fortune telling as free speech, like in parts of Maryland and Virginia.

But there are still plenty of laws prohibiting fortunetelling. In states like Oklahoma and North Carolina, the business practice is outright banned. And even in places where it’s not banned, a lot of cities have ordinances that seriously curtail where, when and how psychic shops can operate.

So you can start to understand why Romani communities don’t like to take their problems to American courts. But fortunetelling is the tip of the iceberg.

American laws and law enforcement have a lot of anti-Romani dog whistles, most of them rooted in this truly racist idea of inherent Romani criminality, which you can trace back to 500 years of Romani enslavement.

Margareta Matache: Roma who escaped their enslavers, they would be called criminals. So resistance was this synonym for criminality.

Faith E. Pinho: This is Dr. Margareta Matache, director of Harvard University’s Roma Program. We heard from her a few episodes ago.

Margareta Matache: Predominantly this idea of Roma criminality is so true in the eyes of non-Roma, more so in the eyes of white people, that this belief becomes stronger than data.

Faith E. Pinho: This idea of inherent Romani criminality goes all the way up through the 20th century. It was Hitler’s justification for genociding hundreds of thousands of Romani people.

I read in Professor Hancock’s book, “We Are the Romani People,” that the Nazis even created a so-called Gypsy Information Agency in Munich, which compiled a massive register of all known Romani people, including their family histories and photographs.

And this idea of “Romani criminality” still persists. Even today, here in the U.S.

Margareta Matache: Essentially, some American police departments openly accept the racist ideology of inborn criminality of Romani people.

Faith E. Pinho: In Dr. Matache’s 2020 Harvard study, she found that 4 out of 10 Romani people interviewed said they had experienced racial profiling by the police.

Margareta Matache: Some Americans may think that this is incidental or accidental. It is not.

Faith E. Pinho: That’s because many police departments are literally taught how to profile Romani people.

Margareta Matache: American police departments also pay people to organize courses that teach police officers how to racially profile Romani and Traveler people.

Faith E. Pinho: And some of these courses are run by an organization called the National Assn. of Bunco Investigators, or NABI.

NABI is an organization of cops, detectives, private investigators, all people who make a living out of finding and prosecuting so-called swindlers. And they specialize in targeting and profiling Romani people. By the way, NABI did not respond to my requests for comment.

But I did talk to someone who went to NABI’s annual conference about 17 years ago.

Hector Becerra: The whole idea of detectives that are focused on essentially crimes committed allegedly by one group.... Many years after, I still can’t believe that I even got into the conference, let alone walked out with a story.

Faith E. Pinho: This is Hector Becerra, who is now a deputy managing editor of the Los Angeles Times. But for a long time, Hector reported on law enforcement. And he covered what went on inside the NABI conference.

Hector Becerra: I was curious what detectives talked about behind closed doors.

Faith E. Pinho: It is worth noting: Hector’s story got some criticism from Romani activists for centering the cops and detailing their narrative rather than hearing more from Romani people. But Hector said that focusing on what law enforcement said was exactly the point. He was shocked by what was said in that hotel ballroom, from the minute the very first presenter took the stage.

Hector Becerra: He says, “Before I begin: Not all Gypsies or Rom are criminals.” And someone in the audience yelled out, “Bulls—.” And everybody just started laughing. All the cops started laughing.

The laughs died down. And he says, “When speaking about crimes committed by the Gypsy or the Rom, of course I’m only referring to the criminal element within that community.” And once again, I believe the same person yelled out “bulls—,” and people laughed again.

Faith E. Pinho: All day in the hotel ballroom, the detectives at NABI traded tactics on how to successfully track Romani suspects. How to follow them by lurking outside of funerals and jotting down license plate numbers. How to target them through their customs.

Hector Becerra: What they’re doing is clearly profiling. I mean, there’s no question about it.

Faith E. Pinho: NABI leaders even created a database of 4,000 Romani people and other ethnic minorities who they suspect might be criminals — complete with names and more than 4,000 photos — and passed it around to police departments across the U.S.

Hector Becerra: Many of them came to a place where they believe that all Romani people were criminals, were involved in some criminal enterprise.

Faith E. Pinho: A Romani man from New Jersey, Clark Demetro, sued NABI over being included in the database a few years ago. The case ended up settling, but along the way, the judge cited Hector’s article and wrote, “Citizens have a right to expect better from the police.”

Faith E. Pinho: Kansas City, Mo., police posted something on their calendar about hosting a training event called Criminal Gypsies/Travelers and Their Crimes.

Faith E. Pinho: This is me with a cold recording a quick audio diary back in early 2022. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing on Twitter.

Faith E. Pinho: And it was to alert a training program that’s going to be happening in May in Kansas City, and training law enforcement.

Faith E. Pinho: One of NABI’s past presidents spun off his own organization. He called it Gryphon Training Group. It teaches police departments how to identify different Romani groups and target them for crimes. And it was behind this training in Kansas City.

The event did get canceled after backlash from local activists. And when I reached out to Gryphon for comment, the only response I got was an automated email, saying, “The Gryphon Training Group will be suspending operations until further notice.”

And yet, just last month, I saw that Gryphon held another police training workshop, in St. Louis.

So with law and order so stacked against them it’s no wonder Romani people want to keep their disputes among themselves, outside the American justice system.

Paulina had grown up being taught to avoid police at all costs, so she knew what was at risk by engaging with the system. And yet the minute she handed over her kids to Bobby and got a sinking feeling in her stomach, she began to wonder what the American justice system might offer her.

Suddenly it dawned on her that she could use this option. She could walk right into the fire and drag Bobby’s family to the place that has always been so dangerous for Romani people to go: to court.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina was torn about what she should do to keep her kids. On one hand, she came from a family and a community that had learned to keep the American justice system at arm’s length. And on the other hand, she wondered what the law could do for her.

Paulina Stevens: And so I was like, “Let me Google.”

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina started researching her rights as a mother.

Paulina Stevens: I was looking at different attorney websites and different laws and this state and that state.

Faith E. Pinho: And her friends Matt and Amber encouraged her to get a lawyer.

Paulina Stevens: So during that time I was confiding in them and asking for advice and they both were pushing me to go to court.

Faith E. Pinho: So after scouring Yelp and calling a few people, she hired a lawyer. And the first thing Paulina’s lawyer told her to do was open a case in court. Just open it. That doesn’t mean that you’ve actually filed anything yet. It’s just like making a folder so that if you do decide to file, the paperwork has somewhere to go.

Paulina Stevens: I was so afraid of losing the girls that it was really starting to look like an option.

Faith E. Pinho: So Paulina just opened a case. Just to have, only if she needed to file for custody. And soon Bobby found out.

Paulina Stevens: How did he know? Because I never mentioned it to him. I have no f—ing idea.

Faith E. Pinho: I can’t say for certain when Bobby found out that Paulina opened a case or what he made of it. But I can imagine Bobby must have been hurt. Even aside from this history of distrusting the American courts, he and Paulina were still sorting through their separation arrangement. They were sharing custody. And then Paulina just turned around and went straight to court?

Paulina said she tried to explain to him that she hadn’t officially filed for custody. She had just opened a case as a possibility to file, as a failsafe.

Paulina Stevens: I was like, “I really didn’t file anything.”

Paulina assured him she was still going along with the 50-50 agreement that they would each get 10 days with the girls. But it didn’t matter. Paulina had broken the trust. And she said Bobby was livid.

On the day that Paulina was supposed to get her kids back, her nightmare became reality.

Paulina Stevens: And he never showed up. He turned his phone off, and his dad called my grandfather that day and said that we’re not going to share the kids. “You guys are going to be blackballed because your granddaughter filed a court paperwork and we want her to drop the paperwork.”

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina was stuck. She didn’t have her girls back because she wouldn’t drop the paperwork. But if she dropped the paperwork, she worried she might lose her girls altogether. But as far as Bobby’s family was concerned, Paulina had gone to the American courts. It was over.

Paulina Stevens: And then all of a sudden it was just radio silence. Complete silence.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina said that when Bobby didn’t show up to drop off the girls, she tried contacting him. But she said he didn’t pick up, wouldn’t return her calls or texts.

So Paulina drove from her mom’s house to the Train Station, ready to confront Bobby and his family, to demand that they return her daughters. But when she got there, no one was home.

Paulina Stevens: The doors are locked. The “Open” sign is off. All the lights are off. I’m like, “What the hell?” That was weird because it’s always on.

Faith E. Pinho: So Paulina went around the back.

Paulina Stevens: Then I pull up in the back and I’m like, “Nobody’s there.” The gate is locked, so I can’t get in. So I’m knocking on the door and I’m like, “Nobody’s there.”

Faith E. Pinho: She drove around, all over, to all the other family’s houses in the area.

Paulina Stevens: And I was driving my mom’s Jeep. And so I was just going everywhere. I was like, everybody’s house, knocking at the doors, looking in the windows. The cars were gone.

Faith E. Pinho: She circled around to all the psychic shops. They were all empty and closed.

Paulina Stevens: They disappeared. And when I say they disappeared, like, you know he has a huge family.

Faith E. Pinho: It was like the whole family had been raptured up.

Paulina Stevens: The whole family disappeared. The whole f—ing family. Everybody. Like they all got together and were like running away from me, hiding my children from me.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina called and called. And still, she said, not a single member of Bobby’s family answered the phone.

Paulina Stevens: I don’t know how they would all be in on this, because these are people that I eat and drink with and party with and that are there for me when I’m in the hospital and were there when I gave birth. These are friends. And they’re gone.

Faith E. Pinho: I wish I could have heard Bobby’s perspective and his family’s perspective. As you know, his family wouldn’t talk to me, so I couldn’t confirm Paulina’s claim that Bobby’s family was intentionally hiding the kids.

But when I hear Paulina describing how she felt in this moment, I wonder if this is how Bobby’s family felt when Paulina first took the girls from the Train Station the night she left. Afraid. Desperate. Scared on behalf of the kids, and anxious they might never see them again.

Paulina Stevens: I felt like I was in a total trance.

Faith E. Pinho: When Paulina ran out of places to search, she went back to her mom’s house and fell apart.

Paulina Stevens: I was completely out of my mind.

Faith E. Pinho: She spent all her time Googling ways to get her kids back and then sleeping fitfully throughout the day. And a couple of days turned into a week. She still had no idea where her kids were.

Paulina Stevens: I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I started smoking cigarettes.

Faith E. Pinho: Her mom did her best to take care of her.

Paulina Stevens: She was trying to force-feed me chicken stew one day. She’s like, “You need to eat.”

Faith E. Pinho: Matt remembers watching Paulina spiral into depression.

Matt Verminski: So I wanted to let her know that I was there. But with what she was going through, there wasn’t a whole lot I could really do.

Paulina Stevens: And just weeks go by. One week goes by and then another week goes by.

Faith E. Pinho: Soon, it had been nearly three weeks since Paulina had handed over the girls to Bobby. It was the longest she had ever been without them.

Paulina Stevens: A million things are going through my mind. What didn’t go through my mind? I’m thinking, “What if I never see my kids again?” “Maybe they went to Mexico.” “Should I drive to the border?” “Did they get fake passports?”

At that point I’m just spiraling. One minute I’d be crying hysterically, and then the next minute, I’d feel completely numb and I’d be like, “Maybe I’m just never going to see them again.”

Faith E. Pinho: Finally, Paulina decided she had run out of options. So she decided to go nuclear.

Paulina Stevens: And that is when I went full force with the court. And I ran it by my family. I was like, “Guys, I’m really filing this paperwork now. I’m going to custody.”

Faith E. Pinho: Officially turning to the American courts was above and beyond what Paulina’s loved ones could possibly accept. Paulina filed for temporary emergency sole custody, and the judge granted it. It was an order that any police officer could enforce — if they could find the kids.

Paulina Stevens: And I temporarily had sole custody, but it didn’t mean anything because I did not have the kids in my possession.

Faith E. Pinho: So Paulina doubled down on the search for her children. She hired a private investigator. She repeated her rounds of searching for them. She asked everyone she could think of for help. And within a couple days of getting the court order: a breakthrough. Someone Paulina knew — she won’t say who — accessed information from the GPS of Bobby’s car.

Paulina Stevens: Like hacked into it. And I was like, “Holy f—.”

Faith E. Pinho: The GPS showed the car had been driven from Las Vegas to a hotel in Palm Desert, a couple hours outside L.A. Finally, this was a hint at where her children might be. For the first time in weeks, Paulina felt relief.

Paulina Stevens: And I just had this overwhelming feeling of, “Ahh.” Like just taking a breath. I think I ate that night. I really stuffed my face.

Faith E. Pinho: And then the next day she hit the road.

Paulina Stevens: I’m just running on this adrenaline. My eyes hurted just from crying so much, and my headache, and just all that stuff — completely like a zombie.

Faith E. Pinho: A couple hours later, Paulina pulled into the parking lot of the Marriott Shadow Ridge hotel, a resort compound nestled against the desert mountains.

She drove through the parking lot until she spotted a row of familiar vehicles. Aha. But then, before she knew it —

Paulina Stevens: Everyone comes out.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina was alone in her car, facing all the family members she had just left.

Paulina Stevens: I’m alone in my car and everyone comes out, the whole family. Cousins. Brothers. Girls. Boys. It was crazy. Imagine they’re just surrounding me. They come out and they start recording me and talking bad about me.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina called the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department.

Paulina Stevens: I was like, “Let me just find them and then call the police and then get my kids.”

Faith E. Pinho: She had brought along the court order, the one that said any police officer could enforce her custody.

Paulina Stevens: So I’m freaking out.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina was doing the unthinkable: calling the police on her own family and community.

Paulina Stevens: And I was not getting out of my car. I rolled up the windows.

Faith E. Pinho: Several members of the family were there, but Bobby and the kids were nowhere in sight. Paulina knew they had to be there. She said she saw the girls’ car seats. Surely they were there inside the hotel. But Paulina was frozen in the driver’s seat of her car, panicking.

Paulina Stevens: And I was like, just, completely insane.

Faith E. Pinho: And then the sheriff’s deputy arrived.

Paulina Stevens: This female sheriff who’s shorter than me.

Faith E. Pinho: The deputy started talking to Bobby’s dad, John Paul.

Paulina Stevens: He’s this tall, big guy, right? And he’s getting close to her.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina pulled out her phone and captured a shaky video.

Paulina Stevens: Look, they’re all recording me. Look it. There’s the truck. Showing him the paperwork.

Faith E. Pinho: In the video, you can see John Paul and two other men about 20 feet away, talking to the deputy, who flips through some papers. John Paul takes a drag from a cigarette.

Paulina Stevens: I guess he’s finding out that I have 100% custody.

Faith E. Pinho: While the men are talking to the deputy, Paulina’s video captures Ruby standing next to Paulina’s car, recording her back.

Paulina Stevens: Recording me just now, and so I just now brought out my phone. I think it’s unbelievable.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina remembers herself freaking out in the moment. But, watching the video, I’m struck by how low key the interaction is.

Ruby is just standing there, pointing her phone at Paulina in the car, not saying anything. The little cluster of men talking to the deputy seem pretty calm. If there weren’t a police car in the parking lot, you might never know why it’s such a big deal. And the whole thing ends pretty anticlimactically. Paulina said John Paul simply turned around.

Paulina Stevens: And he looks over at Ruby and he says, “Come here now.”

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina said John Paul gathered everyone up and retreated into the hotel. Still sitting inside the car, Paulina felt a sliver of relief. But the sheriff’s deputy hadn’t served Bobby with the papers. The cops couldn’t enforce the order without Bobby having the order. Paulina was hoping a brigade would come and bust down the door or storm the hotel. Something. Anything.

Paulina Stevens: I just wanted to go in there and to get the kids and to figure out where they were, and now we can’t do that.

Faith E. Pinho: But pretty soon after everyone went into the hotel, the dot that represented Bobby’s car moved. They were on the move again. Paulina followed it. But when she got close enough, she said, she found a cousin had taken the car, not Bobby and the kids. Once again, Paulina had no idea where her daughters were. She left the desert and drove back to her mom’s house, dejected.

Paulina Stevens: Now my mind is back to, “I’m screwed over,” not eating, throwing up. I’m right back there.

Faith E. Pinho: After nearly a month without her kids, Paulina’s last hope, the American justice system, was also failing her. She had run out of possibilities.

The dust barely settled on the desert showdown when Paulina gets some surprising news from Bobby’s family.

Paulina Stevens: So they call my grandfather and say, “We are going to surrender the kids, but we don’t want cops here and we don’t want the paperwork in front of my son.” So my grandfather calls me and says, “Bobby does not want to be served. Go and get your kids.”

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina is shocked. She races over to the Train Station.

Paulina Stevens: I park in the back. There’s like 20 cars back there, no exaggeration.

Faith E. Pinho: But something’s up.

Paulina Stevens: We’re walking in through the back gate, and already there’s a few men standing outside, smoking, talking and laughing.

Faith E. Pinho: The Train Station always has a lot of people around. But this feels different.

Paulina Stevens: And on their back deck there’s about 30 men. All different vitsas, so not just our clan, but different clans. And they’re sitting there. People I haven’t seen in years. People that I see at weddings. There’s men everywhere.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina walks in on a kris.

Paulina Stevens: I didn’t even know there was a kris going on. I had no idea all these guys were going to be there.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina was blindsided. Because this kris was meant to determine the fate of her kids.

Paulina Stevens: So I’m just like, “I need to see my kids. I need to see my kids.”

Faith E. Pinho: But they were nowhere in sight.

Paulina Stevens: They’re not there. They’re not there.

Faith E. Pinho: And then, Paulina said, Bobby’s dad comes up to her.

Paulina Stevens: John Paul walks up to me and hugs me. And in front of all these men — he had to make sure that he was in front of all these men. And he hugs me and he’s like, “This is my bori,” which means “This is my daughter-in-law. This is like my daughter.” He says that in front of everyone.

I just remember I was just standing still. I was like, “Where are the kids?” And he’s like, “They’re not here.” He’s like, “Bobby’s bringing them.” So then he turns to the men and he looks at all the men. He says, “Listen.” In front of all these men, he’s like, “I just want everyone here to see that I am giving my bori her kids, because things need to change nowadays and women need to see their kids.”

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina said she’s the only woman in a houseful of men, and she wasn’t able to speak in the kris. Her grandfather was enlisted to argue Paulina’s side of the case. She tries to keep calm as the kris starts up around her.

Paulina Stevens: And you know, normally I’m supposed to be serving coffee and doing things that I’m just like, I don’t give a f—. I’m just completely still, and I’m sitting on the couch and I’m leaning back and my legs are crossed, and Bobby walks in. And then I see my kids.

Faith E. Pinho: She could see them through the window, the two girls walking up to the house beside their dad. The oldest wearing an oversized tie-dye shirt and the little one in a teal outfit speckled with snowflakes.

They saw their mother.

Paulina Stevens: They ran so fast. And I was like, “This is what I was missing.”

Faith E. Pinho: Almost a month after handing the girls off to Bobby, Paulina was reunited with her daughters.

Paulina Stevens: So there it was. There was my beautiful little babies.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina said the kris made a decision — a really unusual decision. Paulina could leave the Train Station with the kids. And, she said, she and Bobby would share 50-50 custody.

But for Paulina, that was just back to what it was before.

Paulina Stevens: And I just agreed to whatever they were saying. I was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, 50-50 custody. I don’t give a f—. Let me have my kids, and then let’s go.”

Faith E. Pinho: She gathered the girls and, with all the men still talking, she left. Even though this ruling was pretty progressive for a kris, for Paulina, this was two steps back. Back to that original plan. The plan that was built on mutual trust. It’s just that now, whatever trust or faith she might have had in the elders or in Bobby’s family was completely gone.

Paulina Stevens: After my kids were taken away for a month, I knew 100% that I was so completely done with this culture and their dynamics. Not my whole culture, but with this specific clan and their laws and the Gypsy laws. I was 100% done. I said and did whatever I had to do to get my kids at that moment, but I knew that I was not going to take their word unless I had something in court.

Faith E. Pinho: This time, something permanent in court. That last court order had only been temporary. Paulina wanted to take this back to American court. Which made no sense to Paulina’s family now that she had her kids back.

Paulina Stevens: Going against my family members, I was like, “Sorry. I need to do what I need to do.”

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina’s immediate family had been sympathetic in the past. She’d been staying with her mom and sisters for so much of this time. But now, the fact that Paulina was still taking her case to court, that was going too far.

Paulina Stevens: All my family was like, “You filed for something and now we’re all going to get blackballed.”

Faith E. Pinho: Pretty much all of the remaining friends or allies that Paulina had left among her relatives, they cut ties. They didn’t want to be blackballed.

Paulina Stevens: When it was just affecting me, they had sympathy. When it affected them, then I was being ostracized.

Faith E. Pinho: Because blackballing is community imposed and community regulated. It only works if and because everyone follows it. And everyone knew. Cousins. Friends. Even strangers like Nick Wildwood from Wildwood, N.J.

Nick Wildwood: She’s no longer Romani by going into the American court system.

Faith E. Pinho: And Paulina’s cousin Brenda Lee out in Wisconsin.

Brenda Lee: She went out of the culture, you know, they would talk bad about her. Call her words. I don’t want to say them.

Faith E. Pinho: Nasta said rumors were flying.

Nasta Lee: There was rumors going on that she was dating an American guy then at that time. But we didn’t know if it was true or not.

Faith E. Pinho: And so Paulina found herself unmoored. Everything had burned down around her. In just a matter of weeks, she had left her husband. Moved out of her home. Now she was blackballed, and her custody battle was about to really heat up.

She needed leverage. Needed someone on her side. And so she ended up turning to a journalist from a local newspaper.

And she still doesn’t know if that was a good idea.

That’s next week on “Foretold.”