A federal judge ruled this week that a mother could take the baby’s son back to her hometown of Italy for six months after she drove the baby’s son out of Italy against her mother’s wishes.
The mother’s plight, Claudia Ciampa, 46, has aroused widespread sympathy in Italy and its anger at her father has caused anger. The news media has introduced the case extensively. In the popular TV news show “Storie Italiane”, it is called il dramamma di claudia.
The origins of the couple’s relationship were detailed in the U.S. District Court hearing this month, and there is no dispute. Ciampa lives in Sorrento, near Naples, and spends most of her life with her extended family. She met Eric Nichols, an American who had lived in Italy for more than 13 years, in an Italian cafe where he promoted the business of English teachers. They became romantic and she was pregnant.
Ciampa said in a recent interview that although “he always complains about Italians and Italians” and expressed his desire to return to the United States, he told her: “Because he loves me, he will stay in Italy for me.”
During the last few weeks of her pregnancy, the couple flew to the United States so she could give birth at a Cincinnati hospital. She said Nichols wanted to guarantee he would be born in the room, which was not given by an Italian hospital.
Attorney David Dworakowski listened to his client Claudia Ziapa
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
After the boy was born in early 2024, they both returned to Italy and within a few months the couple broke up. According to court testimony, Ciampa has custody of the child Ethan and has raised him at her Sorrento home with the other two children and her extended family, although Nichols often visits in the morning.
Ciampa, before U.S. District Judge David O. Carter testified that on August 30, 2024, she handed her son to Nichols for a brief visit and asked him to provide a child’s passport, she said she made it routinely because she did not. She did not make a believer in him.
She testified, “He said, ‘I won’t give it to you.’ “Once he finished the sentence, he drove away. I panic. I was shocked. I was afraid that he was leaving. ”
When she arrived at Nichols by phone, she said he told her that he took Ethan to the beach and the zoo, hiding from her that they were leaving the country, first to London and then to the United States.
He refused to tell her where he brought his son, even though she sent him a series of pleading words: When will you bring him back? We need to meet each other and hug and kiss, and I miss him so much… Ethan needs his mother and I have the right to be with him as well…just tell me where you are.
“It can be seen from the mother’s desperate text messages that the emotional damage caused by his concealment,” Carter wrote in a ruling published on Tuesday.
For months, the Italian media recorded her painful efforts to find her son. She asked for help at the Hague Congress, prompting Orange County District Attorney’s action to kidnap the child department, which found the child. The High Court judge ordered the baby Ethan to be in protective detention, and the Italian consulate reminded Ciampa.
In November, Ciampa was taken away 82 days later and flew to Orange County to meet her son. A group of Italian journalists accompanied her, and the party shots were all over Italy.
Since then, while waiting for the judge to allow the child to be brought back to Sorrento, she and her son traveled through nine locations, from hotels in Orange County to the home of the willing owner, some of whom were in Italy The consulate lined up.
The case depends on determining the child’s “habitual habit”. Ciampa said she spent her whole life in Italy and she never intended to move to the United States, while Nichols believed that the journey back to Italy after the child was born was only as a “temporary stay.”
Nichols claims Ciampa tries to put gas in her apartment in May 2024 to kill herself and her son.
Because Nichols is in Italy, not the United States, he is not facing criminal charges in Orange County when he takes Ethan from his mom. But if he returns to Italy, he does face abduction. He claimed that his former lawyers had impressed him that he could bring the kids to the United States and once he arrived, they advised him not to disclose his whereabouts to Ciampa.
“The legal advice is completely wrong, completely wrong, and completely dangerous,” Nichols’ attorney Brett Berman told the judge.
The judge said in his ruling that the child should return to the “home he deserves” in Italy.
“This case illustrates the acts the Hague Convention attempted to stop – the kidnapping of children by parents seeking more sympathy in courts,” Carter wrote. “The father received a breastfeeding baby on an international border, and he believed his United States Nationality would give him a more favorable forum. Meanwhile, Ms. Ciampa endured a heartbreaking separation from Baby Ethan for 82 days. The court would not be a refuge for such actions.”
Marika Dell’acqua, one of the Italian journalists after the case, said that although it is not uncommon for parents to kidnap children in Italy, it is usually the mother who takes them away from their father.
The story is different because it involves “a child who is only 6 months old, who has not been weaned, cruelly separated from his mother.”
Dell’Acqua said her plan followed the story of “in every demonstration and torch parade” to make the case a focus.
Another Italian journalist, Antonella Delprino, said with Ciampa on the day of reuniting with her children that sympathy for Ciampa is common and that the abnormal image of her father contributed to the public good.
“Eric is a culture, wealthy and American, and therefore the biggest person we define as civilized,” Del Priino said in an email.
