The Mail Order Bride Warehouse

As you may already know, over the
past few years, the Tahirih
JusticeCenter

has been waging a battle against the
international marriage broker (IMB)

industry in an effort to prevent
immigrant women from falling prey to

predatory abusers who use the
agencies to find their next victims.  We have

been working on legislation that
would provide women who use IMBs with

information about their legal rights
and information about the criminal

pasts of their potential
spouses.  We also brought a civil lawsuit against
a

Maryland-based IMB for, among other
things, lying to our client about her

legal rights in order to keep her in
an abusive relationship.  After a two

week trial, the jury found
unanimously in our favor and awarded over

$400,000 in punitive damages!
Newsweek has just published an
article about

the case  (attached it
below).  We are so excited about what this
will

mean for the 8,000 to 12,000 women
per year who enter the United
States

through IMBs and hope that it will
send a message to the industry that they

cannot continue to serve as a
conduit for abusers to find their next victims

and keep them in abusive
relationships with impunity.  But, this is just
the

beginning; we have much more to
do!

 

if you would like more information
about our efforts.  

 

Thank you for all that you are doing
to support our efforts!

 http://www.tahirih.org/

Mail-Order Misery Charging abuse, imported brides are fighting back. Mismatched: Nataliya Fox fought back

By
Daren Briscoe

Newsweek

Feb. 7 issue – Nataliya Derkach just wanted a husband.
In 1998, she was a 26-year-old college student in Kiev, divorced and disenchanted with the
Ukrainian dating scene. Then she met Natasha Spivack, a Russian-American who
runs Encounters International, an Internet matchmaking service that caters to
American men seeking Russian and Ukrainian brides. Spivack had just the catch
for Derkach: a handsome, successful businessman named James Fox. Derkach married
him two months after they met in the United
States, moving to Virginia and taking his last name. But James
soon began beating her, says Fox. And when she turned to Spivack for help, Fox
says Spivack told her that all American men were “crazy,” and to deal with it or
risk being sent back to Ukraine. Fox did as she was told,
until one night in the summer of 2000, when Fox says her husband beat her as she
breast-fed the couple’s infant daughter. Fox wound up in the emergency room with
her face bruised and swollen and a human bite mark on her
hand.

Fox escaped to a women’s shelter, then got radical: she
sued Spivack and Encounters International, becoming the first to win a case
against an Internet bride service. In December, a jury awarded her $433,500. The
verdict rattled the murky, often un-regulated world of international
matchmaking, shining a spotlight on some of its practices. The case “puts
companies on notice,” says Fox’s lawyer, Randall Miller. “They can’t operate in
the shadows anymore.” The court found that Spivack failed to tell Fox about a
provision in the immigration law that protects foreign women from deportation if
they leave abusive husbands. The jury also held Spivack liable for assuring
Nataliya Fox that her husband had been carefully screened. Spivack denies
wrongdoing. Her lawyer argues that any responsibility she might have had ended
when the Foxes wed.

Each year, hundreds of Internet bride services recruit
thousands of women—mostly from Eastern Europe, Southeast
Asia and other economically depressed parts of the globe—to marry
their American clients. Matchmaking Web sites feature glowing testimonials and
pictures of smiling couples. The sites play off old stereotypes of foreign women
as subservient, “traditional” wives. For $1,850, Spivack, still in business,
promises to connect clients with women who will “follow their husband’s lead,
and stick with the marriage even when times get tough and things stop being
‘fun’.” Many Internet brides settle into happy relationships; Encounters
International claims a success rate of 86 percent, just 35 divorces out of 257
marriages. But Layli Miller-Muro, a lawyer who runs the Tahirih
Justice Center, an international
women’s rights group based in Virginia, has tracked problems in the
foreign-matchmaking industry for years. When she surveyed 175 legal-aid groups
in the United
States, more than half reported clients who’d
been abused by men they’d met through marriage brokers. In 2001, Miller-Muro was
looking for a test case when she met Fox. Miller-Muro turned to Randall Miller,
a lawyer at Arnold & Porter,
the powerful Washington law firm, who agreed to represent
Fox free of charge.

Spivack and her company weren’t Fox’s only targets. She
also sued her ex-husband, who settled the case for $115,000. During Spivack’s
trial, James testified that Nataliya had attacked him. He had earlier been
charged with attempted murder in the beating that sent Nataliya Fox to the
emergency room, but that charge was later dropped. An assault charge was
expunged from James’s record after he completed an anger-management class. His
lawyer, Thomas Peter Mann, told NEWSWEEK that his client had done nothing wrong
and acted only in self-defense.

Miller-Muro predicts more lawsuits. “Our work on this
issue has really just begun,” she says. But Nataliya Fox hopes to put it all
behind her. James Fox divorced her in 2001, then married another (Russian)
Internet bride. Nataliya now lives in Virginia with her daughter, and works as a
civil engineer. She also has a new boyfriend. She met him the old-fashioned
way—in person.

© 2005 Newsweek,
Inc.

 

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